Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
Ellen lifted her glass and swirled its contents. “The four of us really did start out as a book group,” she said. “We still get together twice a month to eat and drink and discuss literature.”
“We’re well-off,” Farrah said. “Leisure becomes an attractive nuisance.”
Ellen resumed. “Anyway, ladies,after Agazutta’s father passed away, she cleaned out his house. The house had been in the family for over a hundred years. In the attic, she saw an old, dusty box pushed far back into a corner. Inside, she found an unusual book. It had probably been there since before her grandfather’s time.”
Bidewell rubbed his hands, then leaned against the edge of the table. For all his apparent age, he seemed flexible—not spry, but flexible. And tough.
Agazutta seemed bored by this recounting. “Blame it all on me,” she said.
“Agazutta brought it to our group. After a bottle of pinot gris and a fine melon salad with pine nuts and prosciutto, we all agreed the book might be rare—though it was not in English, nor in any language we knew. It seemed to be part of a set. So we thought it would be fun to take it to a dealer in such things—a man I know, John Christopher Brown.”
“They dated in college,” Farrah broadcast to the room.
“We did,” Ellen confirmed, with a short stare. “Can I tell this my way?”
Farrah smiled sweetly.
Jack hunched down in the folding chair.
“Mr. Brown owns an antiquarian bookstore on Stone Way. He seems to know everything about books and a little bit about everyone involved in books—old books, odd books. He knew of a local buyer interested in just this sort of item.”
Bidewell listened as attentively as a child.
“Our dear Conan,” Ellen said.
“Ah,” Bidewell said. “I am drawn into the picture.”
“You drew usin. At any rate, you bought our book. At first, Mr. Brown kept you anonymous, but passed along a portion of the sum Conan paid—a suspiciously large sum, enough to make us happy to continue to search through our attics, our basements, even the walls of our houses.”
“Farrah found another,” Agazutta said.
“In my basement, in a shoe box. I had never seen it before. Really—it might have just popped up like a coat hanger in a closet. It wasn’t old—from the 1950s—a paperback, in fact.” She added, eyebrow raised, “With a lurid cover.”
“A lurid cover—and every single word misspelled, except on one page,” Agazutta said, “which it turned out was transliterated Hebrew. Mr. Brown sold that book for an even larger sum.”
“Remarkable ladies,” Bidewell said, “to have located two such curious volumes in their immediate environs. They obviously had a knack. I gave Mr. Brown permission to refer the ladies to me. Such finds do not arrive entirely by chance.”
“How dothey arrive?” Ginny asked.
“Not to be known—” Bidewell began, and without skipping a beat, the entire group—except for Jack—echoed:
“ Not to be known, surely, not to be known!”
Bidewell bore up with patient good humor. “The paperback was intriguing—yet merely a symptom. However, what the lovely Witches of Eastlake had happened upon, with their first discovery, was the thirteenth volume of a remarkable and elusive encyclopedia.”
“Here we go,” Agazutta said.
“One set had apparently been printed in Shanghai in the 1920s, to the specifications of an Argentinian named Borges. There are no records of Señor Borges except his nameplate in the index volume, and his signature on page 412 of volume one. And so our ladies had made one of the most magnificent finds of this century—a volume of the lost Encyclopedia Pseudogeographica. Only one other volume is known, incunabular, recovered in Toledo in 1432 and currently held in the British Library under lock and key—with excellent reason, I might add.”
“It’s a good thing we couldn’t read it,” Farrah said, stretching like a cat. Which reminded Ginny—she had not seen Minimus or any of the other cats for some hours. They likely had found hiding places until events and new guests settled. “We might have gone mad.”
“Madder than we are,” Agazutta added.
“But who would know?” Ellen muttered.
Bidewell’s laugh was light and rich, like a perfectly baked cookie. Despite himself, despite everything Jack had experienced, he was beginning to like the old man.
“Suffice it to say,” said Ellen, “we all found Mr. Bidewell handsome, fascinating—”
“And wealthy!” said Agazutta.
Bidewell peered around the room with satisfaction bordering on smugness, as if, at long last, he had assembled a long-desired family.
“The rest is history,” Ellen said.
“Pied history,” Farrah said with a small, half-concealed yawn.
“Which means?” Ginny asked.
“History comes in two colors. Everyone else lives one color,” Agazutta explained. “After meeting Mr. Bidewell, we now live the other.”
“What does any of this have to do with me? Or with her?” Jack asked, nodding at Ginny.
“I should rekindle our fire. It’s getting cold,” Bidewell said, pushing away from the desk. “Jack, there are logs and old newspapers in the hopper. We shall pour another glass and toast lost memory. Temps perdu,quite literally. For that is the talent we shall speak of soon—order, chance, times lost, and the recovery of objects that never were, yet ever shall be.”
Jack picked pages of newspaper from the curved hopper.
The pages were blank.
CHAPTER 53
Wallingford
Grayness and dusty sweeps of shadow, a glazed, darkling sky, clouds jerking by in spasms like dying animals flopping and kicking across the heavens—
The rough abandoned house at the center of so many of Daniel’s lives, desolate beyond description—
Freezing isolation made worse by the fact that he was not alone—that he had Whitlow to contend with. Whitlow had entered the old house, passing Daniel on the porch, and now faced him with a wry, twitching smile across the short distance between two old chairs on the water-stained and warped floor—where he and Daniel had seated themselves, nowhere else to go, just as clocks everywhere had stopped humming, whirring, ticking.
“Let’s discuss your future, young fate-shifter.” Whitlow’s words blurred across the short distance between them, followed by a dozen variations as all the remaining, cut-up strands of fate tried to sum.
“Let’s discuss what is to come, now that you have a strong new body…before your memories fade again, always a problem for your kind…”
Whitlow had repeated these words so often, Daniel had lost count. There could be no finer punishment for all his sins than this—and yet, he could not just throw aside the stone and end it all. He knew the stones in the boxes offered a circle of protection—and did not want to experience what it would feel like if he, like Whitlow, fell just on the edge of or outside that circle. I’ve survived worse—the worst, I think. But my memories are vaguer than the murk outside. If I could only think clearly!
If I could make a move—any move—
He still had hope.
And so he gripped the boxes. At least there would be no hunger, no real pain. He could sit without moving, going through each train of thought in smeared iterations, the changes so slight no outside observer could ever know the difference—
For now, Whitlow had been stymied—perhaps even defeated—by Terminus. The marionette across from Daniel labored as if strung from the hands of a broken clock. “Let’s discuss…what our Livid Mistress will have in store…for such a fine young betrayer of worlds…”
Daniel leaned back and held the boxes at arm’s length behind him, removing their circle a few feet from Whitlow. The seated marionette slowed and fell silent, until Daniel’s arm tingled and he folded it back. The others—Whitlow’s partners, lost out in the vibrating murk—would never arrive to help their boss. As for the Moth—whatever that was or had been, no sign from that quarter, either. With a suck of breath and a cough, Daniel realized that any certainty, even doom, would be better than this staggered eternity.
Still, his feelers—blunted, singed, traumatized—were sensitive enough that he knew this was not all there was. A refuge existed somewhere. Had Whitlow not found him, he might have made his way to that refuge just in time to elude all this.
Caught—something less than frozen—facing a nemesis something less than toothless…
Fully capable of boring Daniel to screaming insanity with his threats and schemes, like thin acid dripping on acres of exposed skin.
“…before the memories of your past exploits fade and get eaten away by a fresh and resentful new mind. The Chalk Princess has such hopes…”
Something changed.
Daniel felt a thrill in his spine, an unmistakable difference in the room’s atmosphere. Though how he could recognize or even detect this in his present state was not clear. But here it was. A loosening. Something powerful jerking at the damaged strands, shaking them out, squeezing a few last hours of usable chronology that something might be done.
Wouldbe done.
A knock on the door stabbed sharp and painful through Daniel’s ears. He forced himself to stand—amazed that he couldstand.
Whitlow’s eyes followed and his white face twitched, like a corpse jolted by an electric charge—but that was all he could do.
Daniel crossed the damp boards and opened the door. A crash and roar buffeted him—ice calving from glaciers, mountains slamming against mountains, giant knives ripping up the sky. Worlds—histories colliding.
Just outside the door a bulky shadow cringed, then separated itself from the confusion and squeezed inside by main force of will.
“A little help,” said a squat, powerful man, hands outstretched, thick fingers grasping. His gray suit dripped water. “The Queen in White has abandoned us. Pardon me if I say it—I seem to have what you need. And pardon me again if I ask—what in hell areyou?”
CHAPTER 54
The Green Warehouse
The book group ladies retired to a far corner with a few cots and blankets and pillows that Bidewell pulled from an old brass-bound wooden chest. Their lanterns cast long, dancing shadows on the warehouse’s walls and ceiling.
Before he retired to his own quarters, Bidewell pulled down a volume from an otherwise bare shelf. The volume bore on the base of its spine the number—or the year—1298. In view of Jack and Ginny, he winked, put the book under his arm, and bade them good night.
Then he slid shut the steel door.
The warehouse became still.
Ginny gave Jack an uneasy glance and retreated into her space.
The ladies and Ginny had helped Jack clear another space a few yards away and provided him with another cot and blankets. Everyone in their little squares, insulated, protected. Waiting. He sat on the edge of his cot and let his shoulders slump with exhaustion. Ginny’s cot creaked on the opposite side of the stack of boxes and crates. They seemed far enough from the others—if they spoke softly, no one else would hear. “Is it time for stories?” she whispered.
“Sure,” he said. “You first.”
She walked around the crates, pulling along a chair, and sat, knees together, booted feet askew.
“I’m eighteen,” she said. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“People say I’m lucky, but bad things keep happening.”
“Maybe they’d be worse if you weren’t lucky.”
“I answered the ad, just like you. I called the phone number.”
“Jesus,” Jack said.
“Some of it’s hard to remember,” she began. “I came from Minneapolis. I was living in a house full of musicians, musical types—they all played instruments, deejayed raves. We chipped in and did odd jobs. They said I brought them luck because we kept getting better gigs, play dates, black sick jams.”
“That’s good?” Jack asked.
She nodded. “I loved it. We were free and we ate total shack and I felt…” She glanced at Jack.
“You’ve lost me,” he said. “But keep going. I’ll catch up.”
“One day…I knew my friends were forgetting about me. I thought it was the drugs.” Her voice and face hardened. “We would hang out in old houses, talk about music, movies and TV, stuff that passed the time. Every week or so they acted just like I was new. They didn’t remember anything about me. Sometimes it hurt so much I would go off by myself, but I didn’t like being alone. I asked, what would happen if Istopped remembering who I was? I did a lot of drawing.”
Jack winced, her voice had become so flinty.
“They were snuffing up X—Ecstasy. I tried it a few times—they all thought if you didn’t do X, you were a hard case, unable to form true friendships. It made me so happy and loving. I would give anybody everything I had, all the loving little twinkles in my little brain just lining up like pinball hits. Anybody could walk in and I’d feel that love-juice flooding me, I was so grateful…I couldn’t hand out my goodies fast enough. And it didn’t matter. They still forgot me.”
“Wow,” Jack said.
Ginny watched his expression warily. “Yeah. All the time I was with them, I didn’t jump the lines—I didn’t fate-shift. I thought that was over. I thought I had a home. But I was still having the dreams. I’d draw—that was fine, everybody liked weird art. Everything creepy, everything about death, is fine, dying is the ultimate giving. Eternal giggles. And then, everyone would forget. They’d think I was new. They’d tell me their stories all over again.”
Jack sat quiet, letting her get it out.
“I would have died,” she murmured. “But then this…person came to me, the one who did most of the really strange drawings—when I was gone, blanking out. She’s part of my dreams, too—I think. One day she left a note. It was in little block letters—like it was written by a child: ‘Put your skin back on. Get out. We have work to do.’ And I knew just what she meant. This wasn’t love or even friendship, what we were doing in that house, it was turning oneself into a snail between a boot and a sidewalk. I had no defenses left, just raw nerves. So I quit the house and I quit the X and all my friends, and after a few days I was sitting under a bridge, out of the snow, when I read an ad from a newspaper I was using to stay warm.” She drew quotes. “‘Do you dream of a city at the end of time?’ And a phone number.”
Jack winced again.
“I still had some charge on my cell, so I called the number, mostly just to have something to do. Another bad decision, right?”
Jack lifted one corner of his lips.
“That’s what I do. I run away from good decisions, toward bad decisions. This was the worst, I think. A man came to the bridge and picked me up. He looked young, Asian—in his thirties, tall and skinny but fit, with deep black eyes. He drove an old gray Mercedes. There was someone in the backseat—a woman. She wore a veil and never said a word. She smelled like smoke. We left the city behind. Off the highway, the man and I got out and had lunch at a diner, but the woman never left the backseat. She wasn’t dead—I could hear her breathing.
“After we ate, back on the highway, she started a fire. The guy had a fire extinguisher under his seat. He pulled over and opened her door and yelled and sprayed foam all over. She whimpered but never said a word.”
Jack’s fingers knotted in his lap.
“I thought he looked young, but his tiny black eyes were old. Mostly, he was friendly. The front seat was so comfortable—heated, soft but firm. He did tricks with his silver dollar—one-handed, the other hand on the wheel, pretty clever. The coin did everything he wanted it to—like it was alive and he was its master.
“He remembered my story—what I told him as we drove. We might go on forever, tricks and stories and the long, straight road. I was so out of it, so accepting—still just a little fool, I guess.
“We finally came to a big house out in the woods near St. Paul. There were piles of lumber and stuff all around, but I didn’t see any workmen. The guy told me they had found an old vault under the house with thick walls where things could get really quiet. They put me down in the vault and I slept for a couple of days. It wasquiet. I got better, stopped gritting my teeth and biting the insides of my cheeks. I felt so lucky, and thought maybe I was learning how to feel gratitude, real love. He would visit every day, bring me food and clothes, and I knew from the beginning he wasn’t interested in sex—he respected me. I thought this was a good place. He was good to me. My dreams stopped.”
Ginny had started shaking, little tremors at first, but now her teeth were chattering. Jack reached out to touch her arm, but she pulled it away.
“The last time he visited, he told me we were going to take a walk. We climbed the stairs out of the basement, and the wind was whistling outside. It was cold—below freezing. The air smelled like snow. I noticed that they hadn’t put in carpet or wood floors—just plywood. It was really just an old abandoned house that had never been finished. He said we were going to meet the Queen.”
Jack pulled his hands apart so he wouldn’t bruise his fingers.
“He said the Queen paid him to find special people. Somehow, I saw that the guy’s clothes were actually pretty shabby. She couldn’t be paying him much. And now his skin looked old. I thought maybe I’d found myself a realvampire—a poor one.” Ginny’s voice dropped below a whisper. Jack could barely hear her.
The warehouse creaked. Yards off, a cat meowed. The meow echoed around the rafters as if there were dozens of cats.
“He was as afraid of the woods as I was. I knew the Queen wasn’t the woman who started fires, because we passed the car when we walked into the trees—just parked there, on the dirt driveway. Smoke was drifting out of an open rear window. The woman was inside. I saw her veil move. She was looking right at me but I couldn’t see her eyes.”
“You didn’t run?”
“I couldn’t. I couldn’t even think about jumping the lines because I knew the woman in the car would set fires everywhere, and she wouldn’t even need to leave the backseat. I could almost seeher doing it—hundreds of little blazes dropping from the air. She’d burn the woods, the house, any path I tried to take, anywhere I tried to go.”
“Using fires—like wasps.”
Ginny glanced left for a second, chin down, defiant, working hard to get it all out. “I wonder how many of them are out there, hunting us?”
Jack cocked his head. “No idea.”
“We walked between the trees for five or ten minutes. I thought we were walking in a big circle—we kept passing a black lake covered with green duckweed. Everything was getting dark. There was a storm coming in, low black clouds—lightning.”
“Sideways lightning?”
Ginny nodded. “Then he said something about a moth. Maybe it was theMoth. ‘The Moth is coming to introduce you.’ The trees—I noticed that their branches grew down into the dirt. The leaves moved, independently. But they weren’t really moving, they were just changing—getting bigger or smaller, shifting left or right, but without moving—because the trees were black and solid, like stiff tar. I thought, maybe each time a tree seemed to move, it was becoming a different tree—I don’t know how to describe what was wrong with them. The guy with the coin seemed as scared as I was. He said, ‘The Queen in White expects perfection. That’s part of her charm.’ I asked him how old he was, how old the Queen was, and he said, ‘What an odd question.’
“I think I saw another man—but it wasn’t a man. It stretched up and out until I could see right through it—right through him. We came to the center of the woods. I knew it was the center, but we had never left the circle. Maybe the path was a kind of spiral, but special—curving inward, but not in space. There was like a big lake of frozen jade-green water—all carved up, gouged out. I couldn’t see the sky over the lake—it just wasn’t there.”
Jack didn’t want to hear any more. He shifted a few inches to his right, as if she were a package about to explode.
“The clouds dropped and cut off the trees. Leaves fell like little flat rocks, ice cold. They stung when they hit my head and my arms. The light became gray and icy. The shadows had edges sharp as knives—if you walked over one, it could cut you. Everything smelled like lemons and burning gravy and gasoline—I hope I never smell anything like that again.
“‘Don’t say a word,’ the thin man told me. He pocketed his coin, held out his hand, wiggled his long fingers. I couldn’t help it—I showed him the stone, still in its box. He reached out as if to take it, but instead he backed away and said, ‘Don’t move. Don’t look. I’m sorry.’
“He started running. He left the circle we were on, and I heard him crashing through branches. I guessed that the circle was a trap—I had been hypnotized by the spiral. I couldn’t lift my feet.”
Jack covered his mouth.
“The same clouds…in the sky…like the ones that flew in over the city to get you,” Ginny said. “The man wanted to deliver me to something that didn’t belong here, something angry, sad. Disappointed. I stood between the trees. The leaves were spinning around the Queen or whatever it was in the center…I couldn’t see her. But she was tying up everything into one big knot. Her knot was the center of the spiral. I didn’t believe it, but I understood it—everything that couldhappen was goingto happen, and all of it would happen to me, and some of it would even be stuff that couldn’t happen.
“I was about to see everything,all at once. I turned around—completely around—and the trees spun by, but only halfway, and I saw the man in the trees—he lowered his hands and his eyes were like snowballs in his head. I turned around again, completely around, knowing that I would not see the Queen again until I had spun twice. Does that make sense?”
Jack closed his eyes and realized he could see the sense that it did make. “In that place, you have to turn twice to rotate a full circle,” he said.
“I thought you’d understand.”
“It’s got a different logic, like the jumps we make. Did you see her?” Jack asked.
“I don’t call it seeing. But yes, I suppose I did. She was at the center of the jade lake. She wasn’t dressed in white, she didn’t wear anything. At first I didn’t know why the man called her the Queen in White. Maybe he saw her differently, or knew something else about her. She was very tall. If I came from somewhere else, saw with different eyes, I suppose she might have been beautiful. She had limbs or arms or things coming out of her that I didn’t recognize, but they looked right—they fit. Even so, I knew that if I came near her, she would suck my eyes right out of my head. I felt like a piece of bloody ice. She just stood at the center of her knot, watching, infinitely curious, curious like a hunger, curious like fear—she wanted to know everything about me. And so angry, so disappointed. I wanted to tell her what she needed to know, just to end her disappointment, her rage—but I couldn’t explain it in words. Instead, what I had to give her would shoot up out of my skin, all the places I had been and things I had done or would do—past and future, all my selves, just a big, chewed-up mess flowing into her knot. She’d end up wearing me like a dress or a scarf. I didn’t think I was going to die—but I knew that what was about to happen would be worse than dying.”
Jack sat stiff on the cot, hands trembling under his thighs. “Umhmm,” he murmured. She smiled. “But I’m here, right? So relax.”
“That’s not easy,” he said with a nervous grin.
“Well, deal. I had been holding something back—didn’t even know it, lucky for me, because I might have told her. Maybe youknow what I’m talking about.”
“Maybe.”
“Tell me what I did.” Ginny looked straight at him.
Jack made a circular scissors motion with his fingers.
“Yeah. When I was finished—and it took just an instant—I was flat on my face, covered with leaves. Trees had fallen all around and water was everywhere—steaming but cold. Duckweed hung on all the trees. The lake had flung itself up out of the hollow, and I didn’t see the man again—I don’t know where he went. The whole forest was flattened.”
“What about your stone?”
“I dropped it, but then I found it,” Ginny said, nodding. “It was right near the path, still in its box. I picked it up and walked back between the trees. Near the house, I saw that the car was gone. I was alone. You must have done the same thing, Jack. So tell me what I did that made them go away.”
He still couldn’t answer.
“Can we sliceworld-lines?” she asked. “Not just jump between them, but cut them into pieces, killthem?”
He shook his head. “It’s something to do with the stones summing up. They’re part of us. We can’t lose them unless we die.”
“I knew that when I pawned the box. It always comes back to me. Did youcut things loose? In the storm.”
“I don’t remember. I don’t think I had time.”
“Hold my hand,” Ginny said, and held it out.
He didn’t hesitate. Her fingers were hot and her skin seemed to glow a faint cherry-red like the iron stove in the next room. “You’re burning up,” Jack said, but did not let go.
“Sometimes I do that. It’ll pass,” Ginny said. “I survived, didn’t I?”
“You sure did.”
“I know why they want to catch us,” she said. “Whoever they are.”
“Whatever they are,” Jack added.
“They’re afraid of us.”
He squeezed her fingers and the heat subsided. “Makes you wonder about Bidewell. What are we getting ourselves into?”
“Bidewell’s not afraid, not of us,” Ginny said. “That’s why I came here. No knots, no fear—just quiet and lots of books. The books arelike insulation. I still feel safe here. My stone is safe, too—for now.”
Jack let out a low whistle. “Okay,” he said.
“You’re not convinced.”
“It’s quiet—that’s okay. But I’d like for everything just to get back to normal.”
“Was it ever normal—for you?” Ginny asked.
“Before my mother died,” he said. “Well, maybe not normal—but fun. Nice.”
“You loved her?”
“Of course. Together, she and my father were…wherever we ended up, we had a home, even if it was just for a day.”
Ginny looked around the warehouse. “This feels more like home than anyplace I’ve ever been. What about you? What’s your story?”
“My mother was a dancer. My father wanted to be a comedian and a magician. My mother died, then my father. I wasn’t much more than a kid. They didn’t leave me much—just a trunk, some tricks and some books on magic—and the stone. I didn’t starve—I had learned how to play guitar and juggle, do card tricks, that sort of thing. I fell in with a tough crowd for a while, like you, got out of it…learned the streets, started busking. Managed not to get killed. Two years ago I moved in with a guy named Burke. He works as a sous chef in a restaurant. We don’t see much of each other.”
“Lovers?” Ginny asked.
Jack smiled. “No,” he said. “Burke’s as straight as they come. He just doesn’t like living alone.”
“You’ve met those women before?”
“I know Ellen pretty well,” Jack said. “I met the others a few days ago.”
“Did you do those sketches that Miriam found…in your apartment?”
“I’m a lousy artist. The other one did them. My guest.”
“Where’s he from, do you think?”
“‘The city at the end of time,’ of course,” Jack said, trying for sarcasm, but his voice cracked.
“Mine, too,” Ginny said. “But the last time I dreamed about her, she’s not there. She’s outside, lost somewhere awful.”
“The Chaos,” Jack said.
She looked down at the floor. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“All right,” he said.
“Jack, do theyhave stones like ours?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Maybe we’re supposed to bring them.”
“I don’t see how. They’re there—we’re here.” He pushed back, then looked down at a large cardboard box labeledVALDOLID , 1898. “What kind of books does Bidewell collect?”
“All sorts,” Ginny said.
Jack pulled up the interleaved flaps and lifted out a dusty volume. The book’s hinges had cracked and the leather left powder on his fingers. The gold-embossed words on the spine still did not mean anything. He looked up. “Gobbledygook Press,” he said. “I guess the stones aren’t finished.”
“A lot of his books were like that before. Bidewell seems to know the difference.”
“Makes as much sense as everything else.” Jack was about to put the book down, but something tugged in his arm—the faintest pull on a hidden nerve—and he turned to a middle page. There, surrounded by more nonsense, a paragraph poked up that he could (just barely) read: Then Jerem enterd the House and therei found a book all meaningless bu for these words: Hast thou the old rock, Jeremy? In your pocket, wihyou?
Ginny watched him closely as his face flushed, as if he had been prancing around naked. Tongue poking the inside of his cheek, Jack slowly flipped through more of the book. Nothing else made sense.
“What is it?” she asked.
He showed her the page. She read the lines and her jaw fell like a child seeing a ghost. “All the books are different,” she said. “I’m not in any of them.”
“Have you looked?” Jack asked.
She shook her head. “There wasn’t time.”
FOURTEEN ZEROS
CHAPTER 55
Tenebros Flood Channel
Pahtun had grown accustomed to living in the perpetual tweenlight of the outer reaches of the old flood channels. He seldom went up into the Kalpa and was content performing his duties on the wide flats, away from the wakelight glow over the Tiers—he called them by their old name, the rookery. Pahtun had been training marchers for longer than there had been breeds. A lofty, slender man with an experienced brown face, he strode along the channel floor, eyes silver-gray with caution. He knew the city was dying. It had been dying by degrees since before he had been made. Now, it was likely to finish its dying quickly.
Wakelight grew fitfully over the distant ceil. Red rings pulsed and flickered around the cracked and battered patches left by the intrusion that had blown through the lower levels of the first bion, directly over his head, and nearly claimed them all.
He finished his walk of twenty miles from the camp up the Tenebros channel, to the rendezvous between the first and second isles, and waited for the brown wardens to descend with their half-conscious burdens.
This time there were only nine rather than the usual twenty. “Great destruction,” the lead warden explained. “Many lost. These may be the last.”
The young breeds crawled into the shade of the low channel trees, moaning softly. Pahtun examined them one by one as the wardens flew away. He lifted their heads, using his flower-finger to sense their vital levels, and found them fit—the wardens never delivered injured or incapable breeds. As they recovered, he helped them to their feet, soothing with low crèche songs. His three cohorts had walked across the channels to the sandy stretch by then. More obviously jaded, with much less time on the job, these younger Menders still attended to the recruits with patience and skill. They soon had them walking in a single column toward the dark outer wall and the training camp that had waited there for as long as there had been Tiers or marchers—too long to contemplate, as far as Pahtun was concerned. Six males and three females. He watched the dazed breeds and, as always, both envied and pitied them—they were few, they were small, they were confused. He wondered what they would see on their journey.
