Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
Glaucous flipped out the London Timeshe had bought at the newsstand on University Way, sucked his cigar with slit-eyed satisfaction, and read through the headlines. A large black leather lounge chair supported his relaxed, chunky torso, one short, thick leg bent at the knee, slippered foot on the floor, the other leg propped on the ottoman—small, precise toes twitching slowly as he read. In over a century and a half, he had acquired an eye for many sorts of patterns—economic, political, philosophical, even scientific. The instincts he had learned as a Chancer and companion to the rich and ambitious still served him; over the decades, he’d laid up riches. One had to be prudent. All employers failed in the end—failed their employees and usually failed in their manifold endeavors, leaving one without means. Unless one was prudent. Unless one recognized patterns and knew what to do with them. Ashes dropped to his silk jacket. He flicked and smeared and brushed them with thick fingers thatched with curly gray hairs to the first knuckle and beyond and around that hair, calluses of varying size, density, and shape, which no doubt Mr. Sherlock Holmes would have enjoyed analyzing. Glaucous had in his long life earned a living in so many different ways—accumulating scars from cock spurs, dog bites, rat bites, the nicks and marks and slams of human teeth. Bites—and strikes. Fighting had also cocked his nose and thickened his ears.
Perhaps most interesting to a consulting detective: layered on the tips and sides of his fingers like tree rings were the calluses of a mortal man’s lifetime of the concealing, switching, rotating, and rolling of coins and cards. And he no longer possessed fingerprints; had lost them before the turn of the previous century.
Decades of waiting in the half-dark had added fat all the way up his pink and pale olive arms, across his rolled back and thickened hips and legs. So many reminders of use and abuse, scars never quite fading. How much longer could it go on? Still wheezing along, his body an engine blessed with incredible fortitude, but his breath shallow, conserved; he might live forever, but he had been smoking for decades and his lungs were not happy, no, quite clogged, in fact.
There might soon come a time of purging and revival—no more vices, long weeks of hiking and exercise, eating little, smoking not at all, clearing his tissues of the dross of the last fifty years—a monkish process which he loathed on general principle.
Might, but he doubted it.
Glaucous’s life had been extended by misdirection and cheat—and of course by the Mistress’s touch. So much history, so much insight, and for what? He saw himself as the ugly main exhibit in a museum of oddities. When would Maxwell Glaucous be cut loose, his fortitude excised, gift withdrawn as a condition of unemployment?
The room was dark but for the light that shined directly on the creamy paper now creased over his lap. The phone had been silent all day, and before that there was nothing but crank calls from the curious and the rude, the drunken, the bored, and the unsound of mind—his usual correspondents. Still, he knew the patterns. There was a reason Maxwell Glaucous had come to the Northwest and settled in Seattle. He could feel all the ripples in the local human ocean, like the passages of tiny, sharp-prowed boats through the general swirl and stir of mismanaged destinies. Seven years of travel across the continent, driving endless miles beside his solitary and unlovely partner…
His eyelids slumped. He was slipping into his morning nap. He would awaken in a few minutes, refreshed and alert…but for now, there was only the drowse, an overwhelming need for a brief swim across Lethe. The buzzing in the bedroom, the silence of his own stuffy room, the soft comfort of a leather chair. He stared vaguely at the black phone on its stand, watery gray eyes turning in toward the bulbous nose, vision blurring…
Both eyes suddenly shot wide and his spine stiffened. Someone had brushed the front door to their apartment.
He could see or imagine knuckles lifted, poised—and then a sharp rap, followed by a quick, deep voice, like gravel rolling at the bottom of a muddy stream, “I know you’re in there, Max Glaucous! Open to me. Old times and old rules.”
Glaucous expected no visitors.
“Coming,” he said, and rose swiftly to his feet. Before answering, he rapped lightly on Penelope’s door. The buzzing stopped.
“Someone’s here, my darling,” he said. “Are we proper?”
CHAPTER 26
University District
“I don’t know you. I don’t know anyone by that name,” Fred Johnson said to the wasted, sick-looking man leaning on his porch.
“I understand,” Daniel said. “I know you, though—or someone a lot like you.” His voice was rough and shallow. He was exhausted after his hike from the university.
The former Charles Granger rose two inches taller than Fred Johnson, who stood about five-ten, including a shock of black hair arching back from a high forehead. Johnson looked up at his unexpected visitor with as much patience as Daniel could have expected from any man, under the circumstances.
“I need a few minutes to explain,” Daniel said. “You probably won’t believe me, so I’ll leave after I’m done, but I thought if anyone might understand, it would be you. I’m glad you’re still here. That’s pretty amazing, actually.”
“You looked me up in the phone book, right?”
“I went by the university,” Daniel said. “Maybe all physicists stay the same, in all possible worlds. Maybe physicists tie up the important threads.” He held out his long arms, pulled back dirty sleeves, and grinned, showing rotten teeth.
Johnson looked him over, trying to hide his disgust, and decided he was not a threat, just peculiar. “I don’t doa lot of physics,” he said. “Tell me what you need. A little money?”
“It’s not about money. It’s about knowledge. I know things you’ll want to know.”
Johnson snapped his fingers. “You’re the guy off the freeway. The beggar.” His expression reverted to contempt. “Don’t tell me you’re shaking us down in our houses.”
“I need someone to listen. Someone who might know what I’m talking about. You can help me figure out whether it’s going to happen—or more likely, when.”
Johnson’s cheeks were pinking. Impatient, irritated, more than a little concerned. Feeling protective of someone else in the house, someone important to him.
“Most people don’t know what the indicators are,” Daniel said. “But things in this strand are definitely going wrong.”
Johnson screwed up his face. “If you don’t want money, we’re done. I don’t have a lot of time.”
“None of us do, Fred.”
Johnson lowered his voice and glanced left, toward the kitchen. “Get off my porch.”
Daniel tried to read this reaction—the words were strong, but Johnson was not a violent man. Daniel knew he couldn’t afford to be punched in the face or hauled in by the cops. He wasn’t at all well. At the very least, he needed a hospital, a good doctor—and at the most—
He needed Fred.
A woman walked up behind Johnson, curious—younger, late twenties, with reddish-blond hair cut short, high cheeks, a long chin, fresh-looking, pretty. “Who’s come calling, honey?” she asked, and put both hands on Fred’s shoulder, sizing up Daniel.
Daniel blinked aside tears and tried desperately to focus. “Mary,” he said. “My God, you marriedhim. That’s different. That’s great.”
Her eyes changed instantly. “How do you know us?” she asked, voice hard. “Close the door, Fred.”
“Mary, it’s me, Daniel.” His knees buckled and he leaned on the doorjamb.
“Jesus,” she said. “He’s going to be sick.”
Sliding slowly, trying to hang on, Daniel said, “Just get me some water, let me rest. I know it’s crazy, I might be out of my head, but I know both of you.”
“I sure as hell don’t know you,” Mary said, but she went to fetch some water while Johnson helped prop Daniel up.
“Why’d you pick our porch, buddy?” Fred asked. “You don’t look good, and you sure as hell don’t smell good. We should just call an ambulance—or the cops.”
“No,” Daniel said, emphatic. “I’ve been walking all day. I’ll go away—after we talk, please.” He reached into his big jacket pocket and brought out the Bandle. He fanned the pages. “Look at this. Cryptids. Lazarids. So many. It won’t be long.”
Mary returned with a glass of water. Daniel drank quickly. She had curled her right hand into a fist and he couldn’t see a ring. “I won’t make a mess. Mary, I’m so happy to see you…are you two married?
Living together?”
“None of your business,” Mary said. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m your brother. I’m Daniel.”
Mary’s face turned red and her brows wrinkled. Her eyes went flat. She was no longer pretty. “Get out of here,” she demanded. “Goddamn it, get off our porch.”
“You better move along, buddy,” Fred said. “What the lady says.”
“Something must have happened,” Daniel said, looking between them, his vision fogging. “What was it?
What happened to me?”
“If you mean my brother, he died when he was nineteen years old,” Mary said. “And good riddance, the bastard. I’m calling the police.”
CHAPTER 27
Mr. Whitlow had changed considerably across the long century. To the young and desperate Max Glaucous, he had once been friendly enough and kind in his stern way. In those faded brown days, Mr. Whitlow (Glaucous never learned his first name) had been a tidy but conservative dresser, slight in stature but with a good, strong voice; physically strong as well, for all his apparent middle years. And of course that club foot, which still didn’t seem to slow him down. Now Mr. Whitlow’s face appeared pinched and pale in the hallway’s yellow light, and his eyes loomed large and black as a moonless night. He wore a tight gray suit with a narrow collar, white cuffs, links studded with large garnets, narrow black shoes. He had cut his glossy black hair straight across, and the white flesh of his neck skinnied above an awkward and hastily knotted bow tie. He carried a fedora now rather than a bowler, and stood at the front door with an air of nervous submission, lips wormed into an angular smile that pushed up his high cheeks but somehow did not pinch his eyes, giving him the look of a ghost-train maniac.
“Do you remember me, Max?” he asked.
“Mr. Whitlow,” Glaucous said. “Please come in.”
His visitor did not enter, even as Glaucous stood back. Instead, his wide eyes slowly surveyed the room beyond.
It was Shank who had referred him to Mr. Whitlow, and Whitlow who introduced him to the Moth—the elusive blind man in the old empty manor in Borehamwood, outside London. The blind man had approved him for service to the Livid Mistress.
“I am here at the behest of Mr. Shank,” Whitlow said. “He informs me you have recently arrived, and already you have flipped the heart of one of our operatives.”
“Ah,” Glaucous said, feeling his body go gelid. The Mistress’s implied disapproval could do that to the strongest of men. “I have never been punished for weeding our fertile ground.”
“Circumstance changes,” Whitlow said. “You have reduced our company in a crucial time.”
“I work my territory alone, Mr. Whitlow,” Glaucous restated with low dignity. Slowly, he was coming to realize the dreamlike impropriety of this meeting, and what that might signal—that his intuition had been correct. A noose was being cinched. Otherwise, why reveal so much? For now he knew that Mr. Shank still lived, still worked, and still found favor with the Chalk Princess—despite his apparent absorption in the most dreadful Gape that Glaucous had ever experienced, that dark day of August 9, 1924, in Rheims.
“There are discreet ways to make inquiries,” Whitlow said.
Glaucous knew he was being toyed with. “I have worked unsupervised for nine decades. I speak with my employer only when there is a delivery. My last delivery was several years ago, and there was no mention of change.”
Penelope watched through the crack of her bedroom door.
Sensing Glaucous’s quiet anger, Whitlow still refused to enter. Hunters always visit with caution, approach with deliberation. His smile had not changed, however. Glaucous wondered if the elder collector had become a marionette—a dandled sacrifice to hostility—not that he had ever witnessed such a thing, or even heard of it. But nothing could be ruled out where their Livid Mistress was concerned.
“How has it been for you, my boy?” Whitlow said, his throat bobbing.
“Fair to middling,” Glaucous said. “And you, sir?”
“Brambles, thorns, and nettles,” Whitlow said. “So many have been recalled, and yet…here we are. Have you visited the home country?”
“Not for years. Built up, I hear.”
“Unbearably. We have lived too long, Max.”
“You’re welcome to come in, if you wish, sir. My partner is under control.”
“Kindly spoken, Max. I will make my report, issue my invitation, and then we will be done for today.”
Whitlow grinned. His teeth were mottled ivory perfection. “It is good to know you are well. Refreshes so many memories.”
“Indeed, sir.”
Whitlow drew himself up and his smile crackled and straightened. “We have all been brought here– all
.”
Glaucous quickly calculated how many that might be—based on years of speculation and observation. Dozens, certainly, perhaps hundreds.
“I am told little beyond that,” Whitlow said, “but I trust we are now clear how important your territory has become—fortunately for you. We have reports, and so do they.”
“They?” Glaucous asked. Penelope cleared her throat from the other room—listening behind the door. Whitlow solemnly shook his head. “We have both kissed our Lady’s hem, and our Lady’s hem sweeps close. How much do you already know, young Mr. Glaucous—sly nimrod that you are?”
Glaucous’s small eyes grew wider, though no match for Whitlow’s. “Is it over?” he asked, his throat dry.
“Terminus is a possibility.”
“Are the sum-runners here?”
“I am told, and feel, that a quorum will soon occupy our time. I beg of you, young shikari: do not remove more colleagues. Your thread is mine, and mine is wound inextricably with the Moth’s, our great conveyer. We are united in one fate.”
Whitlow bowed and backed away, never letting Glaucous out of his sight. “Must hurry on. Many hockshops to visit.”
“Indeed, sir.”
“Close and lock the door, Max,” Whitlow said. “Let me hear the dead bolt shot home.”
“Of course,” Glaucous said. “Apologies.” He closed the door, latched it, and listened for the familiar, off-center punk-thumpof Whitlow’s step as he hastened to the stairs. Even then Max’s fingers twitched to do the old man a mischief.
CHAPTER 28
Wallingford
After four hours of talk in the living room—preceded by a bowl of chicken broth, a glass of milk, and a glass of red wine, all of which Daniel gratefully accepted—Mary pulled her husband aside in the hallway to the kitchen and whispered harshly into his reddening ear, “What in hellare you doing? The man’s sick—he’s been stalking us, he thinks he’s my brother, for God’s sake—my deadbrother.”
Fred was clearly chagrined, but could not contain his enthusiasm. “All true—but you should listen to what he’s been saying. I’m writing it down. He may be the most brilliant man I’ve ever met.”
“What’s so brilliant?”
“Fourier transforms—phi of k and r—maximum deviations from zero-energy states of overlapping discretely variable systems…”
“Crazy talk.”
“Is it?” Fred pulled back, indignant. “He’s feeling better, Mary—your soup is pulling him through. He’s had a hard time since he came here.”
“ Camehere? To our house?”
“Crossed over. He’s relaxed, he’s just getting started explaining to me—this could be something big.”
“He’s talking about alternate worlds, Fred.”
Fred made a wry face. “Nothing new to physics. And that may becrazy, but it’s the math—he’s either read unique stuff or done the work himself, ideas and solutions I’ve never heard of. Some of it’s even more brilliant than Sütõ’s solution for minimum total energy. Consider an infinite lattice of branching and debranching lines, each capable of producing another lattice—you’d think that would be totally intractable, but the secret is, the branches don’t last—they sum to the least energy and greatest probability, the greatest efficiency…He said something so utterly brilliant it was stupid.He said, ‘Dark matter is stuff waiting to happen.’”
Mary observed her husband over tightly folded arms, her lips growing thinner with each passing word.
“He wrote down some equations. Sure, it’s alternate worlds—but it’s also the most efficient states of protein motion and interaction, stacking solutions for sand and salt crystals, perhaps even distributions and probabilities for sparticle production in high-energy accelerators. Mary, if you don’t like it—just please butt out.Go read or bake bread or something. The man’s a gold mine.”
His wife’s eyes went round. “Have you even asked him why he knows so much about us?”
Fred’s nostrils flared. “You won’t like the answer.”
“Try me.”
“He knows what happened before Daniel died—some of the stuff you’ve told me. I didn’t prompt him—he volunteered.”
“That wouldn’t be impossible to learn.”
“Have youtold anyone about how you sprayed silver paint all over your terrier when it bit you?”
Mary glared, and tears came to her eyes.
“Right,” Fred said. “He knows about your older brother. He knows what your father was like.”
Mary’s face took on a yearning pain. Worse than not believing was not wanting to believe. “Does he know how Daniel died?”
“That wouldn’t be logical.”
“ Youmust have told somebody,” she said, working up to anger.
“I never told anyone. Take it to the bank, Mary—he knowsabout you and your family, but not much matches up after he died—after Daniel died, I mean. This Daniel—he didn’t die. And in his world, we never got married. Even if it is a delusion, it’s brilliant. I won’t say I’m convinced—but I do need to listen. Please, Mary.” He gently squeezed her rope-taut forearm. “Maybe he’ll just tie himself in logical knots and we can boot him out, or call the cops and hand him over.”
She seemed to soften, but it might have been exhaustion. “I could ask him some really hard questions. He’d fail, you know that.”
“He gets agitated when you’re around. Sad and energetic. His health isn’t the best.”
Her shoulders sagged. “How much longer?”
“Could go all night. He can sleep on the couch—it would be a luxury compared with what he’s used to. Please, Mary.”
The look she gave him—hurt, puzzled, angry—he mirrored in his own features, but his eyes were fixed, examining. This made it clear to her that Fred was going to be stubborn.
“Find out who he really is,” she murmured. “He’s lying. He’s crazy. And even if he were my brother—you know I wouldn’t talk to him. Daniel was an unbelievable bastard. That’s why John killed him—to save the rest of us. To save me.You remember that, don’t you?”
“Sure,” Fred said too quickly, and patted her shoulder. “But like you keep saying, he can’t be your brother, right? Why don’t you get to bed and let me handle him?”
“I don’t want him under our roof. He scares me, Fred.”
“He’s scaring me too, honey. With how smart he is.”
She climbed the stairs to the upper bedroom, leaving Fred in the hall, staring at the prints he’d made from photographs Mary had taken in Geneva and Brookhaven—where they had lived and where her father had worked, twenty years ago. The remains of a spiderweb draped from one of the prints, shadows of silken lines drifting apart and rejoining in a draft of heater air flowing down the hall. Fred followed those shadows, separating and coming together in rippling cycles, until his eyes blurred. Then he hurried to continue his talk with the stranger sitting in their living room. But first he stopped in the bathroom and dabbed a fingertip of Mentholatum under each nostril.
Daniel or Charles—whoever he might be—stunk to high heaven.
The evening progressed to morning, and to drinking—soda water for Daniel, Scotch for Fred. Fred was enjoying a half-drunken fever of speculation. “How could you end up in someone else’s body? Did you transfer your soul—is there such a thing as a spirit that can be passed on?”
“I don’t know,” Daniel said. “It’s never happened to me before.” Not that I’d remember.
“Something to do with these world-lines?” Fred asked, his face flushed. “Could we develop an equation to describe it?”
Daniel watched him closely. “Perhaps,” he said.
“One world-line is severed—cut free—and flies around, and connects up with the closest similar world-line,” Fred said. “Like splicing DNA, or wires in a cable—I don’t know how, just a metaphor. What do you remember from your past?” he asked, frowning sharply at the sudden importance of this question.
Daniel looked around the room and shrugged. “Less and less,” he said. “Some of it is pretty foggy.”
Fred planted his elbows on his knees and slowly spun the glass of Scotch. “Until now, you’ve relied on the memories of varieties of yourself—but you can’t do that anymore. You can’t take all your physical memories with you. This body—it’s not you. You’re coasting on the bump of memories from the transfer, and they’re fading.”
Daniel agreed.
“Exactly,” Fred said, enthused by his own ingenuity. “If any of it’s true—then it logically follows.”
“I’ve been writing things down,” Daniel said.
“My wife—if you are Daniel, I mean—my wife could supply important memories from your past. Not that such an arrangement would make up for all you’ve lost—but it would be better than nothing.”
Daniel lowered his gaze, suddenly worried that this intelligent man would think his way through to the final solution—what must inevitably happen. Fortunately, Fred seemed more interested in theory, not threat—not actual danger.
“How many people have this talent?” Fred asked.
“I’m not the only one.”
Fred’s eyes gleamed. “If other world-lines are being eaten up, destroyed, or changed—maybe people like you are migrating here. Escaping from other, eaten-up world-lines. You could tell how close your own line is to being destroyed by counting the people like you, when they start arriving. If you could find them. I mean, how many would actually confess to displacing other people and taking over?”
“Makes sense,” Daniel said.
“You look dragged out,” Fred said.
“I am.”
“It’s late. We need to talk more about those Mersauvin solutions. Why not stay here? A couch can’t be worse than an abandoned house.”
“Generous offer,” Daniel said.
“Well, I’m intrigued,” Fred said. “We’ll continue tomorrow—after my classes.”
“Let’s sleep on it,” Daniel said. “We’ll get together later.”
FOURTEEN ZEROS
CHAPTER 29
The Tiers
Their first evening in Tiadba’s niche, the lovemaking was brief, promising—not what Jebrassy had hoped for. They fell back into attitudes of patience—waiting for what, they could not know. The ceil outside the open end of the niche darkened from gray to blue-black. Small lights gleamed in the darkness, beautiful, familiar—unreal.
Eventually, at her gentle prodding, Jebrassy spoke more of his straying—his suspicion that whoever entered him in dreams did not come from the Kalpa, did not stay long, and left little evidence of his nature. “I think he could be from the past.”
She watched him across the pads and coverlets she had arranged for their tryst.
“But I don’t know anything for certain,” Jebrassy said. “He could be from the future—or maybe he’s a messenger from the Chaos.”
“Mine’s from the past,” Tiadba whispered, eyes wide with mystery. “She doesn’t know how we live. But wherever they’re from, I think they know each other.”
Under her direct gaze, Jebrassy burrowed into the coverlets in confusion. In muffled tones he said, “I’ve written a message. If he should take over while I’m here…with you…show it to him.”
Tiadba dug him out and lay next to him, and both looked through the open end of the niche at the velvety black roof of their world.
“How is it possible?” Tiadba asked. “What’s happening out there? Why do they keep us ignorant?”
They left the far tip of the third isle and crossed to the grocery fields. The ceil flushed orange and dimmed to gray at the horizon, signaling the onset of sleep, but the fields were still active with red and black pedes gathering ripe fruit. These pushed along on parallel blurs of dozens of active feet between the tight rows of bushes and low, wide trees. Every few dozen yards pede tenders clucked and whistled, announcing the location of pickup baskets and carts.
A single warden, stubbed glassy vanes thrusting from its smooth gray thorax, hovered between the road and the edge of the closest grove. It hummed to itself and ignored them as they passed—just as Tiadba had predicted.
The pedes climbed arched trellises beside the baskets and dropped their loads with trills and pirrips of satisfaction. The tenders gathered the baskets and rolled the carts to the huts where packers and cooks put them up for the next day’s meals. This way, the ancient breed in the Tiers fed themselves—though the pedes did the sowing and most of the pruning and hauling.
A mile and a half from the distribution center, Jebrassy and Tiadba left the road, now a worn dirt path, and hiked across acres of fallow ruts not yet sowed with a new crop, through the thin forest that surrounded all the farms. A short time later they arrived at an elevated slab piled high with worn farm machines and utensils, broken or outmoded long generations before. (Jebrassy was sure the pedes had not always done the greater share of gathering—these machines, rusted and caked with age, might have once performed such tasks.)
Making sure they weren’t followed, Tiadba gave him a leg up, and he handed her in turn onto the slab. From there, she guided him through crumbling boxes until they came to a bare hole in the middle of the slab—perhaps four miles from the bloc where they both lived. They descended a peculiar ladder way—rungs arranged in a spiral along a deep shaft with an odd bend that, after twenty yards, turned the shaft into a level tunnel, still equipped with rungs but more suited to large pedes than to breeds. It brought them downward and across to a part of the Tiers he had never heard of—a storage area long abandoned, and apparently now used only for such clandestine meetings as these. Tiadba informed him—her face shining with excitement at the conspiracy of it all—that the wardens never came here. “That grove warden ignored us. Don’t you think that’s odd? We were out where we shouldn’t be, near dusk.”
Jebrassy admitted that was odd.
“Some think they’ve been ordered to stay away. Some think we’re supposedto do what we’re doing.”
Jebrassy did not disagree—out loud. But he was full of disagreeing thoughts. He wanted to be defiant—not to fit into anybody’s plan.
And when they actually arrived at the small round room, lit by three ancient, greenish lights that shined on the circled faces of the chosen marchers—he felt like a fool. A fool for love. Tiadba was an utterly marvelous glow—no doubt about it. But her stubbornness was more than a match for his own. She thought little about his feelings, but always about the Goal—that is, herGoal. And her Goal, right now, above all things—including his love—was the march. She had literally roped him into this meeting—tied a rope around his waist before they left the middle Tiers, in case he fell as they descended the ladder way, and even now tugged him forward to sit with the group around the perimeter, waiting for the leader—the elderly sama whose name was Grayne.
The circle focused on the waiting dimness at the center.
“She never disappoints,” a young male confided to Jebrassy as he and Tiadba pushed back and huddled shoulder-to-shoulder with the others. Jebrassy wondered if the breed was referring to Tiadba, and was prepared to take offense—but it soon became apparent he referred to Grayne herself, the old female. They all squatted, then fell back and sat against the wall, and soon Jebrassy felt a cold, ancient oppression—he did not like this place. Whatever his enthusiasm for joining a march, all the mystery and concealment struck him as contrived.
“Strange place,” he whispered to Tiadba. She acted as if she hadn’t heard. “There could be chairs, a table.”
“We never leave signs,” Tiadba said, and the young male beside him nodded agreement.
“If the wardens never come here—why worry?”
“It’s the form,” the male said, giving him an irritated nudge. “It’s the way the march is always done.”
“It wouldn’t be my way,” Jebrassy muttered.
“What would youdo?” the male asked, his face clouding. He leaned forward to catch a glimpse of Tiadba’s reaction, but she was studiously ignoring the whole exchange—and that irritated Jebrassy even more.
“I’d go out there by myself, or with a group of people I know and trust. Well-trained.”
“And who would lead?”
“I would.”
The male chortled. “Where would you get your equipment?” he asked.
“He doesn’t know anything about the equipment,” Tiadba said.
“Then why bring him? We’re almost ready. This is supposed to be an experienced group.”
“Because Grayne requested it.” Only a partial truth.
The male thought this over, then, with a shrug, asked, “What’s his name?”
“Jebrassy.”
“The fighter?” The young male bumped Jebrassy’s arm again, this time with his elbow. “I’ve seen you. My name’s Denbord.” He pointed to two other males. “That’s Perf and Macht. We’re friends. We wanted to fight—but the march is more important.”
The others, not yet introduced, touched their noses and glanced at one another in accord—fighters were to be pitied, however amusing fights might be.
“Quiet,” Tiadba said. “She’s coming.”
The circle had left a gap near the tunnel entrance. The air was sharp and close. Jebrassy began to sweat. A small female entered, nearly a foot shorter than Tiadba, elderly and stooped: it wasthe sama he had met in the market. She moved slowly and carefully, using a staff, and two younger females in gray long-shirts and slippers followed, carrying baskets. Fruit was passed—tropps, not yet ripe but full of
juice, and dried chafe for chewing. The group refreshed itself while the old female squatted in the middle of the chamber, the dark eyes in her worn, plain face searching the circle until they came to Tiadba—her lips softening their hard line—and then to Jebrassy. She gave him a firm nod. One of the younger females brought up a short stool, on which Grayne sat with a sigh and completed the inspection.
