City At The End Of Time (64 page)

snipping her world-line like a grim, silent Norn.

Anything could be happening.

And so she had to keep walking.

From the middle of the roof the shelter door creaked and slammed open. Ellen kicked the door again as it swung back, then stepped out onto the wooden pallets. “We weren’t watching her for just a moment…!” she called, and then stopped, sucked in her breath, and lifted her hand to shield her eyes against the aurora glow.

Jack didn’t say a word, just broke into a run over the wooden path to the shelter. His shoulders bounced from the walls, then he swung onto the ladder and scrambled below like a monkey. Daniel followed, more deliberate. Trying to figure an advantage, he thought with the smallest pang. Ellen stared at him as he walked past. She focused on his face—she did not want to see any more of the sky and landscape than she had to.

“The girl took off?” Daniel asked.

Ellen’s face was white with accumulated shock, and now this. She folded her arms tight and nodded.

“We were supposed to protect her.”

“We’ll go find her,” Daniel said. “This place isn’t going to last much longer, anyway.”

CHAPTER 80

Downtown

The witches could not find any street they recognized.

The whole downtown area had been fractured and then tossed into a mishmash chronology. The only structures that seemed familiar were bookstores, some shuttered for decades, yet once again presenting faded signs to empty streets; but their interiors were deserted, empty of both books and readers. Agazutta, Farrah, and Miriam moved on in a tight huddle, exchanging quiet, hollow jokes—the last little encouragements they could muster—but unable to hide their fear at the appalling state of their once beautiful city.

“I never imagined it might be like this. I thought I’d die in bed,” Miriam said.

“Alone and unloved?” Agazutta made a wry face. “Maybe this is better.”

“Speak for yourself,” Miriam said.

“Always have.”

“Girls.” Farrah nudged them around a gray, jagged corner. “This is Fifth Avenue.”

“My God, have we walked that far?” Miriam asked.

“I’m not sure what ‘far’ means now,” Agazutta said.

They stood for a moment, the dusty breeze chilling them like a soft, dead hand.

“That’s north, I think,” Farrah decided. She wiped grit from her eyes and intensified her frown. “What now?”

“I recognize something up the block a ways,” Miriam said. “It’s the central library.”

“Haven’t we had enough of books?” Farrah said.

Miriam said, “I think it’s our little green books that have got us this far. Maybe we can climb to an upper floor and get our bearings.”

“I say we go east, that way,” Farrah said, pointing. “I think that’s still east. The freeway isn’t far, if it’s still there.”

“My house would be north,” Agazutta said.

“I don’t know if we can make it,” Miriam said. “It’s getting much too cold.” She pulled up the collar of her sensible gray wool coat—the sort of coat one wore for many seasons in Seattle. Agazutta turned toward a window crusted into the wall beside her, its frame cracked, pitch-dark behind the dusty glass. Palm-and fingerprints streaked through the dust, as if people had walked by with hands out, touching the walls, the window, anything solid to guide themselves through the murk—before they vanished.

She stared into the glass and realized that the reflection staring back was of another face entirely, not hers—and not a happy one. With a little cry, she backed away, and the face faded. To the southwest, around Bidewell’s warehouse, a pillar of swirling cloud seemed to be gathering, piping out a thin calliope whistle—the voice of a mad mother crooning to her children.

“Let’s get off this street,” Farrah said. “Anyplace will do, even a library.”

They walked through the fragile rubble, crunching like burned meringue beneath their shoes, in the direction that had once been north; toward the big library.

Inside, the library was remarkably intact—deserted, but only loosely touched by the changes beyond its high, staggered glass and aluminum walls. Quiet filled the lobby and stairwells leading to the upper levels—empty quiet.

Agazutta leaned against a desk and coughed into her handkerchief. “We’ll get black lung out there.”

“Dust of ages,” Miriam said, and reached into her cloth bag to pull out her book. She held it up, showed it to her fellow Witches.

They produced their own volumes—the books that Bidewell had given them years ago, when they began working for him.

“Books are special,” Miriam said. “They mean something beyond any value I ever gave them. Not that I don’t love books. I mean, look at this place…it’s hardly been touched.”

Agazutta fumbled with the brass latch on her book, but Farrah reached out and stopped her. With a sigh, Agazutta slipped the book back into her bag.

“Whatever protection books give didn’t seem to mean much to the people who worked here.”

“Maybe they left,” Miriam said doubtfully.

“I’d hate to think that we’re all that special,” Farrah said, and when the others looked her way, puzzled or irritated, she added with uncharacteristic sheepishness, “I don’t want to be the last of anything—especially the last old woman.”

“What’s old mean, here?” Agazutta said.

“I want to be in my clinic,” Miriam said.

“Time’s over, except for us,” Farrah said grimly. She pointed to the high, broad windows. They were frosting, black crystalline rime creeping up like a cold shadow.

Farrah had made her way behind the abandoned information desk and held up a thick volume from the
Cambridge Ancient History
. She opened it and flipped through the pages. A dark silvery fluid spilled out around her feet and gathered into a shining pool. Miriam bent to examine the spill—touched it with her fingers, lifted them. The tips were covered with dark iridescence, alphabet rainbows—hematite words. “Uh-oh,” Agazutta said, and backed away from the nearest flight of stairs. From the elevator doors a thin dark liquid gushed through the crack, while another, more copious flow cascaded down the steps. The women retreated.

The streams joined on the concrete floor.

Behind the desk, Farrah shook a few last drops from the book of history, then held it up. In the dim light its pages were as pristine as untouched snow.

Miriam’s expression turned from astonishment to resignation—almost to understanding—but then held firm at acceptance. “Keep your things close,” she warned. “It’s what Bidewell has been saying all along. Without readers, books do unpredictable things.”

“Waiting for new characters, new stories,” Agazutta said.

“
Us?
” Farrah asked, her voice as frightened and gentle as a child’s.

“No, dear,” Miriam said. “We’ve never been very important.”

But Farrah had laid the book on the counter and, like a librarian, was smoothing her palm over the blank pages to press them open. At her touch, letters returned, apparently random, unreadable—embryonic history waiting to be made. This was what had softened her voice. “Are you sure?”

“Oh dear,” Miriam said.

CHAPTER 81

Ginny

Ginny stumbled as she ascended a low ridge of blackened stone, and then, beyond, saw a thick stream of something iridescent sliding toward her, then curve off to the right—flowing uphill, not down. She would go around that curve to avoid crossing the fluid—whatever it was. She hadn’t brought much real water—just a plastic quart bottle bumping around in her pack. But she wasn’t thirsty and she didn’t feel hungry or tired. Only a few minutes seemed to have passed, and yet she must have walked many miles.

A practical part of her mind now asked a key question, and Ginny wondered why she hadn’t thought of it earlier: What was guiding her?

She reached into her jacket pocket and touched the stone, felt it roll in her fingers—a new freedom. Yet when she tried to pull it back behind her, even in the narrow confines of her pocket, it resisted. It had a tendency, a preference.

It pulled in the same direction she was walking.

“I am the stone, the stone is me,” Ginny sang in a hoarse whisper, and felt a kind of reassurance, a counter to her fear.

The flaming arc passed beyond the horizon again. She looked down from the not-sky to keep her eyes from aching. Then it occurred to her and she let out a small cry. She had left the last place on Earth that was not already part of the awful dream.

I’m walking into Tiadba’s Chaos. Where’s her city?

Where’s the Kalpa?

As she held the stone, words streamed into her head—very familiar, that voice she had never heard yet knew so intimately—awakening what she had been made to know all along.
You are here.

You are in its heart.

Find me.

Find your sister.

CHAPTER 82

The Green Warehouse

In the small storage room, surrounded by collapsed cardboard boxes and piles of broken-down crates, Glaucous lay back on the narrow cot, thinking over all he had seen and done, all those he had caged and put to an end. Birds sold or tossed to the rats; children delivered by the dozens to the Chalk Princess. In the long run, in the undoubtedly stellar perspective of someone like the Mistress, it came to no difference. He did not feel guilt so much as imbalance. He did not seek understanding—Daniel might understand a little of what was happening outside, but Glaucous worried that he was too old, too much a living fossil. His intellect had been whetted to a dedicated edge more than a century ago, and then blunted by hard use. He could manufacture a semblance of cleverness, summon a pattern of behaviors in response to a more or less familiar challenge—

But not to this. This was a young person’s game. He could only contribute what he had added to the mix so often before: the fog of promise, the taint of lies.

When the three had been isolated in Bidewell’s back rooms, he had
felt
something moving through the building like a subtle breeze—Mnemosyne herself, he supposed. For a moment his memory had sharpened, put itself in order. Quite the opposite sensation of being around the Devil’s whirlwind, the Queen in White.

His lips moved. In the lowest, softest voice, he tried to remember his story differently, to speak of a young boy treated well—not showered with riches, but trained to fulfillment and not servitude, his potential shaped by firm, gentle, if not expert hands—fine propensities nurtured, bad tendencies discouraged…

Maturing into a normal life. A homely but honorable woman might have taken him to be her husband. Children might have come that he—they—would protect and never, ever deliver up to
her
. He could not imagine love, not after all these years, but he could summon a vague picture of mutual respect and understanding.

He clenched his teeth, got up from the old cot, and put on his jacket. The door opened.

Daniel and Jack stood in the gray light.

“The girl’s gone,” Daniel said. Behind them, ice grew over the boxes and crates, up the walls and ceiling. Near the concrete floor the ice was slowly staining black.

“Ah,” Glaucous said, head inclined, eyes mere cracks. He rubbed his hands against the cold. He was used to moving in the dark.

“We can’t find her,” Jack said. Glaucous searched the boy’s face and found only nervous excitement. A fog of promise. He would unite these two. They would become like brothers. His last contribution to the game—perversely, the creation of a bond of trust.

“I heard three of the women leave,” Glaucous said. “Where’s the fourth?”
She stayed here for you,
Jack
.
Do you care?

“She’s with Bidewell in the office,” Jack said.

“If we are here,” Glaucous said, “and we do seem to be
here
, and moving about and speaking, then I assume Terminus has…I’m at a loss for words, young masters. Has Bidewell navigated us through that impassable barrier?”

Neither Daniel nor Jack answered.

Glaucous pushed past them. “
She
will come soon,” he said. “The Chalk Princess hates bookish sanctuaries.”

“Doesn’t matter what the Chalk Princess does now,” Jack said. “We’re where we’re supposed to be.”

“Ah, did Bidewell tell you that?” Glaucous asked.

“Jack dreams, remember?” Daniel said with a sharpness that made Glaucous uneasy. “He might know more about what’s going to happen than we do.”

“Then by all means, we should go after the girl, and Jack will guide us,” Glaucous said.
They will take their stones with them—all will be gone from the warehouse. Our Livid Mistress
will come to claim Bidewell—his books alone cannot protect him here.
And then, what has always been promised to
her
servants…

That promise had been revealed to him just once, over a century before. He could hardly remember the details, only the lingering aura of a glorious triumph, control, wealth—unimaginable victory over all adversity. A complete absence of guilt. And what would he be, then? Perhaps not even Max Glaucous anymore.