City At The End Of Time (72 page)

“Not to be known, young breed,” Polybiblios said. “But the Kalpa should have fallen long ago. It has not.”

“You knew this—yet you allowed me to send out marchers…” Ghentun was greenish-black with anger. He could no longer express himself in words.

Polybiblios looked around the changing landscape. “My daughter carried crucial parts of my creations, took them to Nataraja…Away from the reality generators. There was never any choice. But before she left, she asked both of us—Astyanax and Librarian—to join together and remake the oldest form of human being we could conceive of, in primordial matter. She asked that we assign their upkeep and education to the Menders. Of me alone, she asked that sum-runners be made and entrained—the most sublime of Shen technologies, more subtle even than the reality generators or this armor. And of me alone she asked that I place my fragmented Babels within the sum-runners, as a contingent plan—sending them back to course forward from the beginning of time, whispering to each other, and connecting all who touched them. Ishanaxade was mother to the ancient breeds. And she is mother to all who dream.”

“It
is
the greatest story of all,” Ghentun admitted. “She left her city, she left Sangmer—everything and everyone she loved. And she thought she served even as she betrayed.”

“What about Sangmer?” Jebrassy asked. “How could he possibly understand? Did he ever find her?

What happened to
him
?”

“We live that story, young breed. We echo its flesh and bones, that we may tempt it out of hiding. And then, when it is finished, we move on—or come to our own abrupt conclusion.”

CHAPTER 97

Ginny felt something go out of her as she passed under the frozen gaze of the inner ring of giants. Her bubble of protection seemed to thin and breathing became difficult. The stone no longer tugged in a specific direction, but instead pulled her one way, then back, then another, its insistence growing weaker, until finally she stood as still as one of the statues, within sight of the defile where she had entered the valley.

There was only one conclusion she could draw from the stone’s reluctance to offer guidance. Either she had moved too far or traveled too fast…entering a place where one stone by itself could not protect her. Why lead her on at all, then?

She wiped her eyes and noticed particles of soot floating above and around her, made more obvious by contrast against a rapidly coalescing mountain of ice that hung upside down over the valley. Needles and flows of sapphire blue grew from the floor in complete silence while she watched, her head cocked and neck growing stiff. They formed a ring of columns around the valley’s perimeter, as if to cage the False City, the central jade structure. Mist draped the mountain rims, thickening into clouds like clouds back home—if home was anywhere now. If she had ever grown up, ever lived, if any of her memories could be said to have been real…

Out here, the ice pinnacle and pillars possessed an eerie beauty more terrestrial than Chaotic, like the bottom of an iceberg, maybe, or the Alps inverted. Strange that something impossible would look more convincing, surrounded by things only very unlikely.

Her exhaustion became dark and profound, and she lay down on the uneven softness of the bubble, but her eyes would not close. She could not sleep—had not slept since leaving Bidewell’s warehouse. But if she could sleep—and if she could dream—then she knew that her visitor, her other, was already inside the ghostly green city…and that Tiadba had also come to the wrong place. Both had been misled.

Both had been betrayed.

Ginny thought of the awful, stocky old brute and his insinuations. She had not even spoken with Jack or Bidewell before leaving. Or Daniel. What would either of them have told her?

They might have told her to
wait.
And so, that was what she was going to do now that she had no choice. She would lie here just a bit above the valley floor, surrounded by mountains and paralyzed giants, with an upside-down mountain of ice waiting to fall at any instant—and she would
wait.
She would stay here forever, if necessary, growing more and more tired, until she simply floated off like a bit of weightless ash.

The moment of rest stretched on. She tried to roll over—felt the bubble closing in until she could no longer move. She lay on her back, watching the ice mountain block out the rim of fire. The fire had turned dusky orange, the darkness within faded to grayish purple. The wrinkled sky beyond the ice mountain was slowly obscured by blue mists, clouds edged with glorious gold. The sky itself was shrinking. It was frightening and beautiful.

All she had seen so far was frightening and ugly.

“Something
new
is coming,” she murmured with numbed lips.

By which she meant something
old.

CHAPTER 98

The three—Jebrassy, Ghentun, and the epitome of the Librarian—saw the paleness over the center of the vale.

They had walked many miles, approaching at times the innermost of the so-called Dead Gods that watched each other across the uneven plain. Their faces—if they could be called faces—seemed locked in a quiet, reflective arrogance, shaped by trillions of years of self-determined change, intelligence in control of all evolution; a variety of visages and shapes both handsome and incomprehensible, monstrous and beautiful at once, like so many sea creatures spread out on an immense, eternal reef.

“Will they ever live again?” Ghentun asked. Polybiblios seemed about to answer.

“No more time for lessons and leakings,” Jebrassy said. “Move on.”

The epitome listened with patient humor. “Time is indeed shorter. But time for others will not flow over this vale with the same speed, nor cover the same instants. This is a Turvy. Every pass, every gate, sends its entrants onto a different track to the center.”

“I thought there were only two fates left,” Ghentun said.

“Fates, yes—but in a Turvy, those paths can be swirled until they seem to lie parallel. You can jump from one to another—but they are the same, part of a spiral. In many regions of the Chaos the rules of the very tiny have been writ large. You have to spin twice just to face the same direction. Here, it is even more complicated. We can see behind us—there seems to be a way back, a retreat—but if we reverse course and try to leave, we will fail.”

“We could jump to the other track and get to the center faster, couldn’t we?” Jebrassy asked.

“No,” the epitome said. “We are where we need to be.”

Ahead, the gathering cloud had hardened into an upside-down mountain of ice, its edges like scalloped blades.

“The tracks will merge soon enough,” the epitome said. “The cosmos is in its final moments. The revolt of the very small is about to begin—and I don’t mean
you
, young breed. The pressure on the Typhon is growing. Out here, the former master does not know
how
to change.”

“What pressure?” Ghentun asked.

“This is all that remains. The Chaos has shrunk to two circles. One circle surrounds this vale. The other surrounds what is left of the Kalpa. There may still be a path between them, sprinkled with bits and pieces of the past. I don’t know. Maybe that’s closed, too. Outside lies nothing. That is the Typhon’s legacy. For all its power, it can leave no mark—only void. It tried to be a god, and it failed. There is no nowhere left for it to go. No escape.”

“All the stories left unfinished?” Jebrassy asked, unsure, then disgusted.

“No. If we succeed, what comes after, not even the whole of my self could understand. We will be as children before wonders. There is a greater force, who thus far has paid little heed to most of our trillion centuries.”

“Hmph. The Sleeper?” Jebrassy was tired of being ignorant until taught. He wanted to teach himself—learn on his own. Learn what had happened to Tiadba.

He was almost afraid to know.

“The Turvy will be the Typhon’s last chance,” the epitome said. “It will need to capture us and prevent the sum-runners from being joined. Watch for trods. Gliders, Scouts, Ascendants, Silent Ones…If they have nowhere else to go, they’ll come hunting here.”

They moved on toward the bowl and the green center of the vale. Ahead, blue pillars of ice grew to meet the upside-down mountain’s gleaming edges.

“Something’s coming,” Jebrassy said. “Not trods. Not monsters. Something else—I can feel it.”

“So can I,” the epitome said. “So can they all.”

They could hear a thin, shrieking bellow now—pulsing in from all around, an awful nastiness, like strangling, screaming, and shouts of warning commingled.

The giants lining the mountains were struggling to speak. Some seemed to struggle to move—shivering and stiffly casting off soot and rubble from around their bases.

“They’ve seen this before,” Polybiblios said. “It’s this vision that filled their blood and marrow and turned them fossil. It’s what the Witness has tried to warn us about for half an eternity.

“The Typhon has nowhere left to hide. It is coming here with all its servants—all those it has captured and tormented. Here we will find my daughter.”

CHAPTER 99

The seeing had not gotten any easier. There was an optical perversity that no manner of twisting and squinting could set right. Even within their protective caul, which Jack hoped he would never need to explain—he felt maligned by the views that somehow crept into his eyes. Any living place showed both decay and growth, like the jumble of dead and living trees in a forest, or even a city burned, booted, crushed by war. Here there was only shoddiness, a despondent dullness of wit, will, and enthusiasm—in short, a lazing failure to keep and maintain. This place showed only decay.

Not much comfort to be had from resting his eyes.

Jack was aware that Glaucous had been trying once again to hook his affection and trust, to consign these little fish to one or another basket—his, or failing that, Daniel’s. Daniel was a fake, of course—without actually slinking, he slunk, and without saying anything, he lied. Even the truth from his lips was deceptive, because they were not
his lips.
Glaucous was little better—honest in shape, but that shape worse than lies.

Still, they all had to stay close. Their bodies rejected what lay beyond the bubble. One could fall back just six or seven paces—no one dared more—before all suffered exhaustion, closeness of breath, headaches, sneezing—blood from nose, ears, fingertips. They were filthy with soot and streaks of wiped blood. The bubble did allow something like smell—phantom scents, madness and burning, sour and sick. Nobody was supposed to be here.
Here
did not tolerate intruders. Now they could see almost nothing—a kind of spot of dim glow for some distance, restless darkness on all sides, a tumbled blankness, gray invalidity, the wholesale lack of anything and everything, only slightly less disturbing than the more defined things they had already seen.

Sometimes the tumbles and wrinkles assumed the crooked aspects of a landscape, then just as easily gave it all up—a bad piece of work—and resumed
void
.

Something seemed to surround the void and briefly spin, like being caught inside a wheel or a gyroscope. But then it vanished.

It might never have been.

The design on the box.

Jack had almost given up hope for Ginny. They hadn’t found her or her trail—the surface beneath their shoes mostly felt like old but solid rock—but their sum-runners had pulled them along with precisely the same tug as Ginny’s. Or so he assumed, since Daniel’s two stones behaved just like Jack’s. The dead, empty cities were now behind them—incomprehensible hulks floated ashore from far, severed times, beached and then subjected to perverse inspection, angry dissection, and finally—Jack tried to imagine and reconstruct it—a restless, angry rejection.

Whole cities cast aside like broken cadavers, marked and scattered with hatred and confusion. All that wreckage worked over by a starless, pitchy, unhappy thing, totally powerful, yet completely clueless within and without.

His fancies grew.

Glaucous’s rough voice knocked him out of his fugue. “While you two slept, I kept watch. We’ve come around some things like hills or mountains.”

“How could we sleep?” Daniel objected. “We were walking.”

“You sleep, walking or not.”

Jack wrinkled his nose. “Nightmares without sleep,” he suggested.

“Lies without reason,” Daniel countered, and looked left at Glaucous. Their shoes made an unpleasant sound falling on the bubble and pressing it to the uneven black rock—a squeaking
trunch, trunch
.

“Gentlemen,” Glaucous said, as if urging civility. Then he halted and stared ahead and his eyes grew wide. “Couldn’t be.”

Jack and Daniel moved two paces by reflex before stopping. “Couldn’t be what?” Jack asked.

“I am a sensible fellow,” Glaucous insisted, sleeving sweat from his cheeks. Now it was Jack’s turn to see movement ahead—small, dark shapes, low and sleek, with long curls rising and twitching. Not unfamiliar, certainly not frightening in and of themselves. And yet—here!

“Cats,” Jack said. Daniel turned.

“Amazingly capable, cats,” Glaucous said. “Excellent and powerful Shifters, and some are Chancers. Gods and masters of those who diminish and gnaw.”

The shapes had faded.

Glaucous took a deep breath. “Now, as to those hills and mountains,” he said. “They’ve been described to me. They enclose an unhappy place.” He made as if to dig a furrow in the air with his spaded palm.

“I’ve been told this is where the Moth delivers shepherds and their stones. A long, shallow gouge—like a valley ringed with high peaks, surrounded by unspeakable things taken prisoner in far places. And in the center of it all, a shallow bowl with three fate-braided entrances, confounding to Chancers and Shifters alike.

“This is where the Chalk Princess rules.”

City at the End of Time
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.