City At The End Of Time (65 page)

For the first time in decades a note of a conscience played somewhere in his chest, sharp and painful despite its tiny size. He peered at Jack, then at Daniel, and felt the muscles in his face turn waxy, freezing his expression into an amateur parody of a smile.

How ugly I am,
he thought.
How old and cruel and full of lies.

CHAPTER 83

The Kalpa

In the tower, waiting…

The fusillade of intrusions had scorched deep into the Kalpa, high and low, practically destroying the two outer bions and leaving the first bion—and the Broken Tower—in a highly unstable condition. A third of the Defenders had dissolved into fiery clouds. It was apparent that the conclusion of the Typhon’s vendetta would not long be delayed.

Ghentun had put his affairs in order, surveyed the damage in the Tiers, and determined what could be done for those ancient breeds that still lived, who did not require the ministry of the Bleak Warden—a small remainder cowering in their niches, moaning songs and prayers, watched over by the few samas brave enough to walk the hallways.

Nothing more could be done.

He had left the Tiers for the last time and returned to the Broken Tower, not at the bidding of the Librarian, but for the sake of his own conscience. Even then he was well aware that any course he chose was likely already embedded in the scheme of one or another Great Eidolon, and he was filled with loathing for them all.

Enslavement.
How could you enslave a dying cosmos? What could any of these Eidolonic schemes mean to a being like himself, no longer capable of the evanescent noötic shimmer, much less of passing signal and sense from epitome to epitome, incapable of even approaching what passed for thought among those powers who still claimed to be human?

Waiting to be noticed by the servants of the Librarian.

Ghentun looked down from a high window cracked and smoking, blackened at the edges, rimed inside and out with crystalline densities that crawled and rearranged, trying to heal the crack on this inward side, while on the outer, black otherness crept and sought a point through which to pry entry. The angelins finally appeared and filed into the wide, once empty chamber—not one this time, but thousands of many different shapes and sizes, all blue, all cold, settling themselves in concentric curves with Ghentun and the high window at their focus.

He glanced back at them, unmoved, then returned to his contemplation of what now lay beyond the border of the real. Few in the bions below would ever witness what he was seeing; Eidolons and Menders and Shaper alike preferred ignorance to the certainty of this swiftly approaching doom. The Chaos had fundamentally changed, no doubt about it. Nothing like what surrounded the Kalpa had ever been seen before.

How the ancient emotion of curiosity had declined to a deathly, classic superiority—the triumph of blind satisfaction! This must have been what it was like for so many across the five hundred living galaxies during the last of the Mass Wars…awaiting transformation or destruction by the Eidolons. Not so very long after, many of those same Eidolons were now giving way to the Chaos. The Chaos had even less mercy for Eidolons, so it was said. Ghentun took grim satisfaction in having this history lesson pressed home so vividly. It stung him deeply that he had once abandoned his primordial mass, given up his Mender heritage for a few thousand years of hopeful integration into the upper urbs…A betrayal of high degree, he thought.

The only higher betrayal—

He contemplated the still vague outlines of the deep knowledge given to him by the City Prince. Not to be trusted, of course. And when that knowledge did emerge, would it transform him into the Kalpa’s avenging agent?

The angelins did not move—did not disturb his thoughts. Perhaps the Librarian was preparing for his final moments as well.

The Keeper wondered what had become of the young breed male he had delivered. Analyzed, partitioned, dissected by a crazed Eidolon with an intense and pointless lust for telling detail? Or kept in seclusion, a prize lost among all the other failed and cataloged experiments?

What Ghentun was seeing, outside the border of the real, visible through the broken, leaning sentinels that still tried to surround and protect—

The Chaos had burned through almost all of Earth’s old reality, twisting time and fate into blackened cinders, but along the way, choice bits had been perversely encapsulated, preserved, and now trophies were being arranged as if in a bizarre museum. The shattered artifacts of ancient times and ancient cities terrestrial and otherwise had been collected, somehow transported, and laid out around the last bions of the Kalpa, closer than ever before, as if for the horrified awareness of the next victims—soon to be melted and disfigured and distributed in their own turn across the dark lands of the Chaos. Who could doubt that the Typhon hated all that lay within this huge broken circle of protection? Who could ever doubt that the Typhon’s entire existence had consisted of dismantling and rearranging—but always failing to understand—the secrets of creation?

The Witness lay sprawled like a gray, ghastly mountain in the midst of this heap of murdered history, its gigantic battered head and slumped features still pushing forward the prominent, slowly rotating eye that swung a gray beam across the heights of the tower.

Ghentun could only acknowledge at his core a vacancy of emotion. To learn the nature of one’s lifelong enemy—the enemy of all the scattered galaxies, all those who had once called themselves human—the enemy that had shaped and distorted his life, and yet had provoked the creation of the creatures he so dearly loved, yet now had to abandon…

Vacancy.

Only vacancy.

Ghentun looked for the channels that had always wormed through the Chaos’s reactive scablands, spread around the Kalpa: the trods, along which, it was said—if you watched closely from the city’s sheltering heights—you might see Silent Ones skimming and darting, huge and swift, no doubt seeking breeds, marchers; dispatching or delivering all they caught to those awful repositories: the Necropolis, the House of Sounds, the House of Green Sleep, the Fortress of Fingers, the Vale of Dead Gods, the Wounding River, the Plain of Pits…or any of the other stations of mutation and doom that had been gouged, erected, morphed from the landscape beyond the border of the real over the times since the tower had been shattered.

How do I know these names, these identifications?

Ghentun looked back again at the angelins and realized he was being played with. Was this the City Prince’s gift? Or were the Librarian’s servants sharing some of their knowledge? Either way, the Keeper was being given a lesson in Chaography—what he needed to survive in a land without law. A single angelin broke from the ranks and drifted forward. It extended a slender, tiny blue hand to caress Ghentun’s cloak. Jewels of singing snow fell before his face.
The runners have summed. They are all here.

The dreamer is ready.

The angelins parted and a white epitome escorted the young male breed into Ghentun’s presence. The breed approached the high window and stared out, eyes bright with fear and longing. He knew what Ghentun knew, saw what he saw.

Jebrassy looked up at the Keeper, then turned back to the Chaos. “You sent her out there. I have to go find her.”

“Not alone,” Ghentun said.

CHAPTER 84

The Green Warehouse

Another kind of slowness and darkness was approaching. Bidewell peered up at the skylight as he pulled on his gloves and walked between the aisles to his library and the fitful heat of the stove, the last bottle of wine. Ellen was waiting there, his final companion in this cosmos, he presumed. And bearing down upon them both—something he could only sense, not explain.

Another part of the broken chain—as usual, out of sequence.

Or something worse. Perhaps the wall of Alpha, come to squeeze them against Omega. If that was the way of it, then they had not failed. There had never been any way to succeed. Dark thoughts indeed. Ellen sat and stared at the dim orange glow within the stove’s isinglass window.

“Perhaps you should have gone with them,” Bidewell said. “The women, I mean.”

“I thought Ginny would want company,” she said.

Bidewell made a sound at once dubious and sympathetic and sat across from her.

“Are we done? I mean, there’s nothing more we can do?”

“Not at all,” Bidewell said. “Assuming there is still a move to be made in this endgame, we are making such a move now.”

“Care to explain that to me?”

“Of course. The Chalk Princess will come to collect a former servant, now a turncoat. That desire for vengeance might delay her in the pursuit of our young shepherds.”

Ellen peered at him, beyond fear—almost beyond curiosity. “What would it be like, to be collected?”

She looked deep into the isinglass. “What is the Queen in White?”

“An awful force. A multidimensioned storm of pain and fear, carrying a retrograde wave of hatred.”

“What is it that hates us so much?”

Bidewell shook his head.

“Satan?”

“Ah.”

“What’s that mean?”

“How often have we asked ourselves that question?” Bidewell said.

“Is there an answer?”

“Worse than Satan, is my guess. Worse than anything we’ve ever imagined. A malign embryo that will never be born, much less achieve any sort of maturity. A failed god.”

“And this female…is she that failed god?”

“No. She serves, but I believe her servitude is forced. Sometimes I almost recognize her…I’ve dreamed and guessed and thought about it for long centuries now. Perhaps when she arrives, I’ll know what questions to ask.”

“Something’s coming,” Ellen said. A new intensity of darkness and cold was closing in, and something else was in the air—something that made her want to weep. A loss far beyond the loss of a world—the loss of all history.

“Do you have your book?” Bidewell asked, getting to his feet.

“I thought the books were spent.”

“Not these. They still tell our stories.”

“What do we do—read them aloud?” Ellen removed her book from the bag. Something moved through the fallen, frozen crates and boxes—not a cloud, not a figure—swirling around corners that did not exist, turning in directions no eye could follow, radiating a dark spectrum of emotions.

Bidewell gestured—a quick jerk of his fingers—and they opened the books, pushed them to their breasts, leaning toward each other, heads and hands touching.

A sound came in soft gusts, like a cry out of deep caverns—Rachel, weeping throughout eternity for her lost children.

“She’s blind,” Ellen said. “She’s blinded by grief.”

“Do not feel sorrow for her, not yet,” Bidewell said. “Everything about her is obverse. Grief is joy, and even her blindness is a kind of seeing.”

“Is that
her
?” Ellen asked as the shadows fell and the room seemed suspended over an abyss. Bidewell opened his mouth but could not take a breath. There was no need for an answer. The Queen in White was upon them, and in her way, tried to love them as they deserved.

CHAPTER 85

Ginny

Ginny settled into a hollow in the crusted ground and pulled up the hood of her parka, then drew the strings tight, hiding most of her face. That weird sun was in the sky again. When it burned overhead, she could feel her small bubble of protection shrink, could almost feel it wither—just as when the deathly gray beam passed over. No doubt about it—this sky and what lay beneath did not like her. The stone in her pocket had turned cold, but she didn’t dare let go. It protected her, of that she was certain, and it didn’t matter how it did so—not yet.

Then she had a thought: What if leaving the warehouse had put Bidewell and the others in deeper danger? There wasn’t anything she could do about that now. She had made her choice, half hoping someone would follow her, argue with her; and then, reasoning it through, she understood that it would have to be someone carrying his own stone, Jack or Daniel, perhaps both—but would they bring Glaucous, too? That seemed bitterly incongruous—a strange team indeed. After a few minutes of rest—at least, it felt like a few minutes—she peered over the edge of the hollow and experienced another connection to Tiadba, this time while awake. They were closer. She had known that for some time now but could not understand what it meant;
closer
in what way? Their worlds had merged. She had guessed that much—doubted it, but could find no other explanation. Not that it was any sort of explanation.

Despite all her foolishness and “bad” decisions, she had always primly asserted her rationality—and now pondered for the ten thousandth time the reasons none of this could possibly happen. Her doubt was like tonguing a jagged, painful tooth. All the rules had been broken. What remained? Magic? Strength of will?

Some effect of whatever science or knowledge had created the sum-runners?

Ultimately, she knew there could be no explanation, only survival and completion. Results. In most ways, she had lived her short life—perhaps shorter than she was happy to consider—in clueless ignorance, wrapped in the baby blankets of culture and surrounded by the poor theories of fellow travelers—all of that amounting to another kind of protective atmosphere, off which the smaller, plunging impossibilities bounced or burned away before reaching her. Consensus reality.

Another kind of bubble, equally inexplicable.

Well, out here that was gone, too. She was alone.

She ducked back into the hole. Something huge swung past nearby—a glimpse of sparking shadow accompanied by a thin, strident howling or weeping, penetrating the bubble and hurting her ears. Ginny slowly gathered enough courage to look out again and saw that the shallow dip in the land lay beside a kind of road, colorless, neither bright nor dark—like something half seen by moonlight. The road stretched to a sawtooth horizon.

“Stay away from the trods,” she murmured. “Whatever rides them might be strong enough to break your little bubble. Or
see
you—and collect you.”