Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
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Glaucous took a professional interest in some of the dwellers that stood or squatted like dusty dolls on the sidewalks—scammers, jongleurs, sharps, the gypsy draggle of every big city. He paid particular attention to the young ones. Some of these could be Chancers or Shifters, unaware of their low-grade talents—but still of interest, especially if they began to dream.
Unlike London, at a brisk walk one could actually cross downtown Seattle east to west in less than an hour, working the streets—though he preferred to sit in his apartment and wait. The bird-catcher’s patient facade, so deceptively like repose.
He found the gray Mercedes in a dingy pay parking lot, its rear windows golden with smoke, the dash littered with twelve receipts, one for each day. Sharp fingernails had clawed paths through the soot near the door locks. So it was true: the Chandler and his incendiary partner were in town. Turning east, Glaucous paused to stare at building numbers, until he found the entrance to the Gold Rush Residential Hotel. Here he stopped, tapped his cane, and let out his breath in a low, contemplative moan. Beyond the heavy glass door, pinched between an Oriental antiques shop and an abandoned secondhand store, the hotel’s narrow lobby proffered a dusty, coffee-colored hospitality. Thick paint smothered undecorated walls and lay dirty and cracked over plaster moldings. Two square brown couches and an old chair waited vacant and worn around a cigarette-scarred black table. The table carried stacks of The Strangerand The Seattle Weekly, cut bundle-strings dangling. A middle-aged clerk ambled out of his retreat behind the desk and checked out Glaucous, who nodded pleasantly, as if they had met before. “Do you have a Mr. Chandler in residence?” he asked. “I believe he’s expecting me.”
The clerk scowled. “Use the house phone or just go on up,” he said. London—barbed nest for all its poor fledglings—had soon pricked young Max into a burly squint, low, lashed, and ugly. After the death of the bird-catcher, the twelve-year-old, dumped on the streets once again, proved himself a fair hand at penny-toss and cards. Hunger and inexperience led to street fighting, where he acquired scarred knuckles, puffed ears, and three bends in the bridge of his nose. In a music-hall riot, one hard roll down a flight of stone steps dealt the final knock to his bulldog physique,
stunting his growth at five-four. Few would tangle with such a glowering brute, and so within a few months he secured work as a bodyguard for well-heeled gents possessed by hungers that would not be sated: cards, whoring, the Fancy. The things and events he now witnessed and the deeds he was called upon to perform were more awful than any he had seen as a bird-catcher’s boy. Clients, associates, and their enemies came to refer to him by a variety of epithets: dandyshield, bone-smith, batbreak, fistfolly; cane snipe, johnny-brute. In two years he learned to keep his mouth shut and skim what he could while his employers lolled senseless with drink or drug.
During Max’s last stint as a batbreak, his then-master lapsed into the croaking and squeaking of a paretic. Max was instructed by a private nurse how to fit the master’s ruined face with wax and tin parts, to fill fissures and replace lost bits while the syphilitic grotesque whistled his stinking breath through vacant nose holes.
Soon Glaucous found himself once more at liberty, the master’s house boarded, the last drib of wealth wasted on quack nostrums. Nothing left, nothing gained. And yet…
Glaucous was becoming aware that he might possess an unusual talent. He hardly believed in it; rarely used it. Yet within a week of being ousted, on the streets again, freshly charged by hunger, he had no other option. He honed his gift, and in the close-knit world of the Fancy, quickly acquired a reputation—a dangerous one. At the heel of one of the “ton,” an ability such as his was tolerated, but on his own, Glaucous was of no use to anyone but himself, and so, no use whatsoever. A gentleman of noble blood, his ancestry within hailing distance of Westminster, caught Glaucous
“cheating” at cards. The gentleman’s toughs corralled the remorseful, ugly young man. The gentleman ordered him transported to his country estate, caged like a dog.
There, Glaucous was confined to a series of basement rooms, heavily padlocked, each larger and a little brighter than the last. The housekeeper eventually assigned him to a plump, foppish man named Shank, either to punish for the gentleman’s amusement or to discover and refine whatever genuine talent this rough lad might have. And so it was done.
In time, Shank informed the young tough that there was a name for his crude ability. Glaucous was a natural-born Chancer. “Else a pug like you would been crushed in the streets and died ere now,” he explained. “Some call it luck, others fortune. We know it here as Chancing, which is great Will, consistently applied to random circumstance to guide favor—for your gentleman and for him alone, of course.”
Under Shank’s guidance, Glaucous made coins land as desired, reordered cards without touch, directed the plunk of a silver ball on a spinning roulette wheel and the tumble of wooden spheres in a rolling cage. Their handsome and noble master was not himself a gambler, but recognized that many of that persuasion would extend favor and even cash for the company of such a lad in the clubs of the day. And so Maxwell Glaucous’s lot improved, while the company he kept declined in character, if not dress and station.
Glaucous picked up a copy of The Strangerand lucked it open to the classifieds. There it was…the ad, but not hisad. He dropped the paper on the table and took the hotel stairs with silent footsteps.
On the second floor, he sniffed and reached out his hand, searching for retrograde fluxes. Two more flights to go. On the fourth, Glaucous paused by a fire door, tested its hinges for squeaks, then pushed. Beyond lay six rooms, three on each side of the hallway, and at the end a milky window reinforced by steel wire. The light from the window quivered. Light resented Chancers, and now there were two in close proximity.
Glaucous brushed the knob of the first door on his left. Harsh music competed with the grating voices of overgrown children– television. Quiet as a cat, he crossed the hall and felt the opposite door. Room empty but not silent—not to his questing fingers. Someone had allowed himself to be murdered. The knots of bad luck still vibrated with a singing whine.
Glaucous slid down the hall. Behind the next door, he found what he was after: soft, steady breathing, comparative youth—the Chandler was less than a fifth his age—and strength, but profligate and poorly managed.
Again his nostrils quivered—this time at a smell like candle smoke. This had to be the Chandler’s partner—a veiled woman, very dangerous. Glaucous leaned in and heard the flip of a coin—a Morgan silver dollar, judging by the muted ring as it bounced off the room’s thin carpet. The Chandler was practicing. The dollar landed heads. Anyone could do such a trick, but he was not counting the coin’s spins. He was drawing down the coin’s lines. From different heights—including a ricochet from the ceiling and another from a wall—the dollar always landed heads.
Glaucous matched his breath to the man’s. He also matched other rhythms: pump of blood, drip of lymph and bile. He made himself a shadow.
Squatted back to the wall, eyes shut.
Waited.
Shortly after his last visit to Hounslow, at the height of his employment as a gambler’s companion—his fame beginning to spoil prospects—the noble gentleman had informed him it was time to move on. Glaucous’s gambling days were over, in London at any rate, and probably across Europe.
“You should try Macao, young friend,” Shank suggested, but then added, in a low voice and with eyes averted, that a special appointment might be arranged—if he desired, at long last, a secure and permanent position.
Glaucous had long since grown leery of the streets.
As if in a dream, he went where Shank directed—down a pinched and filthy road near the market in Whitechapel—and at the end of a blind alley, met an odd, twisted man, small, pale as death, and musty as a wet mop. The mop-dwarf fumbled him a card embossed with a single word or name: WHITLOW. On the other side, an appointment had been scrawled in pencil—and the warning: This time, forever. Our Livid Mistress expects her due.
Glaucous had heard incomplete and confused reports of this personality in his travels. Reputedly the leader of a small cadre of men with exceptionally dubious reputations, she was whispered about, but seldom if ever witnessed. She had many names: our Livid Mistress, the Chalk Princess, the Queen in White. No one knew her true business, but it seemed a singular ill fortune invariably found the creatures sought by the men and women in her employ—ill fortune, and something referred to as “the Gape,” to be avoided at all cost.
Now at liberty for the first time in a decade, and suffering from a perverse curiosity, Glaucous took the train and then walked to Borehamwood, and there was met by a young-looking fellow with a club foot and waxy smooth skin, narrow nose, wispy ghost-blond hair, and deep blue eyes. He wore a tight black suit and gave his name, last name only.
This was Whitlow.
Whitlow carried a silver-tipped black lacquered cane and a small gray box with a curious design on the lid. “This is not for you,” he told Glaucous. “I have a meeting with another later this day. Let’s move on.”
Out of Glaucous’s memories of that meeting—a palette reduced to dim grays and browns—he recalled unsteady nerves and embarrassment at his ill-fitting wool suit. (Shank had insisted he return all his master’s fine clothes. “What monkey owns his livery, I ask you?”)
Whitlow shared a tot of brandy from a silver flask, then escorted him up the hedgerow drive to the main house, a mouse’s holiday of neglect, one wing caved, rooms filled with roosting pigeons. Whitlow gained entry using a huge old key, then, with quiet humor, pushed Glaucous down a hall littered with broken furniture and the bones of mice and cats, arranged in rings and whorls, toward a special sort of room where, Whitlow said, none had lived or visited for several hundred years. Such rooms—difficult to find these days—best suited the closest servants of their Lady, who—he explained in a whisper, opening an inner door—ultimately paid their bills.
Whitlow locked the door behind Glaucous.
After a time of stuffy silence—long enough to feel pangs of hunger—Glaucous was joined, through no door he could detect, by an insubstantial being—a gentleman, judging by his soft voice and odor or lack of same. This nebulous figure, wrapped in a deeper cloak of shadows, never assumed definite form or size. Judging by the tapping of his hands around Glaucous’s face and shoulders—fingers like batting flies—the gentleman might have been blind. “I never go anywhere,” he whispered. “I am here always. Heremoves where I need to be. I am called the Moth. I transport and recruit for our Mistress.”
He spoke for what seemed a long time, his voice suggestive, modulated, indistinct. He spoke of books and words and permutations, and of a great war—greater than any dreary combat between imagined heavens and hells. “ Ourhells are real enough,” he said. “And our Mistress controls them all.” This Lady, he said, sought Shiftersand dreamers. Chancers, properly instructed, were ideal hunters and collectors. The Moth handed him a crust of bread, dusty with mold, then tapped Glaucous’s temple with a flitting finger. “If you serve well, you will never lack work,” came his muffled words. Apparently, having come this far, no refusal was permitted. “We pay in more than coin. Time no object. Different birds, different cages, Mr. Glaucous. Listen close, and I will pipe you all the songs you need ever sing.”
After some hours, the door opened, spearing the room with a broken shaft of sun. Glaucous blinked like a mole. Whitlow reappeared to usher him out. Behind, the room keened a wretched, pain-filled sound like none he had ever heard, and reclaimed its emptiness: spent.
Back on the hedgerow drive, dazed and exhausted, Glaucous asked, “Will I meet ever the Mistress?”
“Don’t be a fool,” Whitlow admonished. “We never hope for that. The Moth is bad enough, and he’s less than the tip of her pinky.”
For the next hundred twenty years Glaucous traveled from city to city across the United Kingdom, and then the United States…working as a diversion in carnival pitches, card parlors, side shows…always seeking, keeping a low profile, and wherever he went, posting ads in newspapers, ads that never varied except for an address, or later, a phone number—
Always asking the same question:
Do you dream of a City at the end of Time?
Glaucous kept deathly still. He could feel any vibration along the boards and beams. All was quiet. There would be no visitors for the next few minutes.
The collector behind the door—endlessly tossing his silver dollar—had failed in certain courtesies. He had not alerted Glaucous to his presence, nor had he shared information. He was poaching. Glaucous rapped a callused knuckle on the door, then fluted his voice, young and uneasy, the same voice he had used on the phone to answer the Chandler’s ad. “Hello? It’s Howard. Howard Grass.”
The slender man who opened the door held up his silver dollar between thumb and middle finger. His pupils were large, black, and steady. He presented a cold, surprised smile—and then a superior grin.
“Mr. Glaucous. How nice to see you.”
Glaucous knew the signs of a Chancer about to strike. There was no time to lose. In the slender man’s fingers, the head of the crowned silver woman on the Morgan faced north. Glaucous rolled up one eye, drew down a contrary strand, bent it sideways—and the head faced south. The Chandler’s heart also flipped, instantly filling his chest with blood. His fingers twitched and he released the coin. Falling, the stamped ounce of gray metal landed flat on the carpet—eagle side up. His face turned sickly green. Silent, he toppled facedown, stiff as a plank, and covered the coin. Also tails.
In the bathroom, the veiled woman began to shriek. Without the Chandler, her talent and passion flowered unchecked. Fire shot from around and under the bathroom door. Glaucous lent his assistance. She achieved her heart’s desire.
That afternoon, wrapped in melancholy, Glaucous sat in his warm apartment, shades drawn, the only light in the cramped living room focused on a phone sitting on a table next to his chair. Behind the closed door to the bedroom, his own partner, Penelope, sang in a low, childlike voice. Around her song flowed a steady buzz, like an electric bulb about to go dark.
Glaucous’s eyes turned sleepy. An hour before, he had eaten a spare lunch—an apple and a piece of wheat bread with three thin slices of salami. In those first days in London, it would have been a feast. He stared at the phone in its oblong of golden light. Something was stirring. He could feel a strong tug on the triggering thread that announced prey. Always before, his employers had informed him of a new rule, changes in the game. This awareness was arriving without warning. Perhaps there had not been time. Had he made a mistake, eliminating the Chandler?
Reaching out, he could feel as many as three small birds in his vicinity—almost certainly three—though one seemed odd, not what he might have expected. Of the other two, from long experience, he was sure he knew their habits, their concerns and fears, their needs.
A darker air was arriving. Max Glaucous could feel it in his light, lucky fingers. Long dreaded, long awaited—destruction, followed by freedom—an extraordinary conclusion to his troubles. Three sum-runners.
Whitlow will join us. And the Moth. They cannot do this without me. Finally—my reward. And my release.
CHAPTER 5
Wallingford
Trying to contain his churning, liquid misery, Daniel walked spastic. The sidewalk, old and gray and cracked, presented a rolling course of uneven obstacles. He leaned to the right on Sunnyside Avenue, grimly determined to make it home. He was ashamed. Daniel had always been the driver of his own soul, in control on the highways and byways of the fibrous multiverse. Now—he could barely keep from fouling his pants.
The neighborhood had not changed so much that he could spot the differences. In truth, he had never closely observed the houses more than a few doors away from his own. In his present hurry, there was no time to put together a catalog of obvious changes.
The sun slanted. This sick new body wore no watch and carried no keys; despite Daniel’s patting and thrusting, he could not find a key in all those pockets nor in the knapsack—but both he and his new body agreed, as they approached the concrete steps, the peaked porch roof and square tapered pillars, this
was where they lived, thiswas where they hung whatever shingle they owned. Hishouse. The same house. That much was the same, thank the powers that be. Whatever powers care to take credit for any of my madness. And what about the sum-runners?
The lawn stood high and brown and overgrown with weeds. He climbed the steps from the street and jerked himself around the side yard to the rear, glancing back—apparently not used to entering the house by daylight—a furtive peer, then a scarecrow scramble through waist-high jungle to the back. The old rosebushes that had once belonged to his aunt were no longer in evidence, and—he noticed this as he made a horseshoe around the rear porch, trying to decide where he might have hidden a key– there is no key—
The windows had been papered.
The body remembered, so he went down on his knees—oh, how that made the snake twitch!—and pushed at a basement window, then skinnied himself through, stood on a box, and clambered to carpeted concrete floor—splish-splash, carpet soaked, the whole basement stinking of mold and mildew. The power was turned off. In the dark, he shambled up the basement steps, struck his shoulder against a first-floor wall, and fumbled his way by touch into the bathroom.
He pushed down his pants and found the toilet. The pain made him scream. He almost passed out. Daniel slumped against the wall, his elbow cushioned by the toilet paper in its wooden holder. Half an hour later he leaned forward and his hand found a candle stub on the bathroom sink. A match, a matchbox. He struck the match and lit the candle, then stripped down and took a cold shower—letting the body do what it knew how to do.
One foot out of the shower-tub, he fumbled for a filthy towel. Looked at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Eyes sunken and dull. Gaunt, straggling hair, skin sallow beneath a tangled, matted beard. Years of getting most of his calories from alcohol.
He heard a new, rough voice come out of that ruin of a mouth, between those rotten teeth—
“Oh—my… God.”
This was not Daniel Patrick Iremonk—not any sort of Daniel. This time, he had shoved himself into a body not even remotely his own. He had jaunted into an entirely new game—revealing a new and staggering aspect of his peculiar talent.
He was in another man, living another man’s life.
FOURTEEN ZEROS
CHAPTER 6
The Kalpa
Seventy-five years had passed since Ghentun had met the angelin in the Broken Tower—less than a blink for a great Eidolon, but a lengthy span for a mere Mender.
The Keeper walked unseen over the bridges connecting the three isles, the foundation plateaus that rose above the flood channels and supported the stacked Tiers; up the lifts and stair cores of the fifty-floor blocs of niches, as he did almost every wake, studying his charges, the ancient breeds, as they worked, moved about, talked, worried—escorted their wide-eyed children, fresh from the crèche—prepared foods purchased in busy markets, harvested from meadows and fields beyond the two broad flood channels, known as Tartaros and Tenebros.
In all the Kalpa, only the Tiers still had seasons worth observing—births and deaths, children delivered from the crèches on high, aging breeds relieved of their burdens by the Bleak Warden, their primordial mass recycled into new children, and a few—wanderers all, instinctively tuned—selected by the Keeper to be trained, equipped, and sent out into the Chaos to become marchers. A rhythm of interest now only to him, it seemed—but also, he hoped, to the Librarian who had planned it all ages before. Great Eidolons could so easily forget…
The chronological weather had calmed of late, and time was ticking along with such cheer—allowing actual days of sequence, when memory functioned almost as designed—that some in the Kalpa felt the old ways and rules might be returning. That was unlikely. The great reality generators were faltering, usually by tiny increments, but sometimes by leaps and bounds. Terrifying intrusions—streaks and smears of the Typhon’s nightmare void, breaking through to the Kalpa—were more frequent. Dozens of Ghentun’s breeds—most vulnerable, living as they did at the city’s foundation levels—had been destroyed or gone missing.
Something in the Chaos seemed to be hunting.
In the dark before wakelight, within a loud shout of the Tenebros bridge, teams of referees were sleepily clearing and roping off a fallow meadow, preparing for the games the breeds called little wars. Invisible—though not without some effect on the breeds around him—Ghentun made his way through the gathering crowds. He found a good vantage on a hillock, drew up his legs, and sat. Soon enough he would be on the move again.
Another game was in play—grander and much more dangerous, not just to the breeds, but to Ghentun himself—but at the end, they might find the key to defeating the Typhon. In the meantime, the citizens of the Tiers did their best to live as they always had—bravely, foolishly, wisely. They were hardy folk. Whatever the circumstance, they found their amusements.
The skirmish on the meadow was going splendidly, most agreed. The traditional engagement had begun while mist still draped the mounds and grasses. Five hundred breeds—divided equally into four tribes—began their contest at the sound of the judges’ horns, great jagged blats that echoed from the high, bright ceil.
Jebrassy—strong and dashing in armor he had made from purple keel-husks—sallied out with eight pickets in like garb to assess the chances of breaking through on their opponents’ left flank, and there was a lovely, knock-all fray in dense fog as they met other pickets. All along, as he fought—giving many more blows than he received—Jebrassy had the uncomfortable sensation he was being watched. From the corner of his eye, wisps, puffs, interruptions in the fog that hollowed and twisted and vanished—distracted him. He did not fight as well as he wished, and perhaps that was fortunate, considering the damage he was already doing.
Jebrassy and his fellows—Khren and the others—took to their combat with spirit, swinging their stravies with such conviction that few challenged them, and many lodged protests with the judges who glumly wandered in to intercede.
The older warriors squatted with narrow, discouraged eyes. The good days were gone, they said, shaking their heads. Some felt the contests were not violent enough—others, that mercy and honor had been forgotten. They seldom agreed about much.
Through morning and into evening, the war resumed, mounted with shouting and cursing and singing of martial airs, bluster, batting, torn hair, and flying spittle, until the ceil dimmed to brown and welcome tweenlight fell over the breathless, bruised combatants.
The seniors loved to watch fights, as long as not too many were hurt—and Jebrassy’s crew was pushing that tolerance to the edge. Many groaned and limped away—and many more grumbled on the field and off.
Jebrassy, by his own estimation, retired from the din in full glory, head bandaged, arm wrenched. In camp, he was dosed by a stolid medical warden, a drum-shaped machine with stubby lift-wings, now folded. Though almost faceless—just three off-center glowing blue eyes in an oval head—the wardens always seemed saddened by such goings-on, but performed their duties without chide or complaint. Sometimes, it was said, in the broad dark ports high in the walls or in the ceil, overlooking the meadows and fields, the Tall Ones, masters of the Tiers—in the naive conception of the breeds—watched these lovely little engagements and made judgments that would be taken into account when the Bleak Warden came to snip your final hours and fly you to the crèche. Some even claimed—though Jebrassy highly doubted it—that the Tall Ones walked among their favorite fighters, and if they were not doing well, clouded them in mist and flew them away…
But he had fought to his satisfaction, thumping and being thumped, and so be it; he was willing to be profane and think in other directions. That somehow made things better. As the warden finished its patient ministrations, Jebrassy looked up past the gleaming, off-center eyes, squinted at the mellow browns and greenish-golds of the tweenlight ceil, and wondered what the Tall Ones really thought of such idiocy. He had never known anything but the Tiers, of course, and that irritated him. His spirit felt crushed beneath that vast, rounded roof. He was an adventurous fellow, filled with ambition to exceed the sight lines shared by those around him—short, flat lines, mostly, though long enough in the fields to suggest the mysterious Wide Places some whispered about, where one could see forever. Standing beside a makeshift stand displaying sweet chafe and tork—intoxicating juice fermented in heavy jugs—an elderly male breed waited while the warden applied a last twist of bandage. Jebrassy
stiffened. The warden apologized in flat, sympathetic tones, but the ointments and glues were not what caused him pain.
A time of parting had arrived. The elderly male, Chaeto, was his second per—his male sponsor. A stocky fellow with the full spiky beard of a breed soon to make the acquaintance of the Bleak Warden, Chaeto and his partner Neb had taken Jebrassy in after his first sponsors vanished. They treated him well, yet Jebrassy had brought them little but grief.
Chaeto approached and stood by him, eyes gray with inner turmoil. They acknowledged each other with finger-taps to their necks, Jebrassy first, as required. Jebrassy then stroked the old male’s extended palm.
The gesture brought little solace.
“You did well out there,” Chaeto said. “As always. You’re a fighter, that’s sure.” He cleared his throat, then looked aside. “Not many more seasons we’ll have to raise young breeds. Mer and I think you’ll benefit no more from our instructions. Already you pay no heed to our pleas.”
Jebrassy stroked his per’s palm again, apologetic supplication. They had affection, but neither could sidestep what the old breed was about to say. “You’re determined to stick with your toughs, aren’t you?”
“My friends,” Jebrassy murmured.
“You still talk of wandering off to die away from the Tiers, without benefit of the Bleak Warden?”
“No change, Per.”
Chaeto looked up at the last glimmer on the ceil. “We’re taking in a new one. Can’t have you spread…your plans…to a fresh umber-born. Can’t have that in your mer’s niche. We’ve done our best. It’s the winding road you’ve chosen. You’ll go on now without us.” Chaeto withdrew his palm, leaving Jebrassy’s finger suspended. “I moved out your stuff. Mer’s broken up, but new young will mend her.”
The elder touched Jebrassy’s neck one last time, then turned and walked off with the limp he had acquired over the last few years. The wardens, having paused as if to listen, went about their repairs to the rest of the injured. The other breeds turned away—little or no sympathy for Jebrassy’s plight. He had delivered too many thumps and jabs.
Chaeto had likely told the high toller of their home level. The high toller would ban him from the neighborhood—even though there were vacant niches.
He was on his own. He would never see either of his sponsors again, except by accident—perhaps in a market—and even then, they wouldn’t acknowledge him. He was what he thought he had always aspired to be—a free breed. And it hurt far worse than any of his slight wounds. Jebrassy got to his feet and looked around for someone, anyone, with a generous jug. After the field had been cleared—seven injured, none seriously, a disappointment for the more
bruise-happy breeds—the walls of the nauvarchia grew high in the Tenebros, between the inner meadows and the first isle, and water gushed into the sinuous shallows. Brightly decorated boats were hoisted and rowed out, and a different set of breeds fought a rough-foot, sink-all sea battle. Those who had fought earlier—and could still walk—gathered along the wall and ate, drank, cheered, and complained, until hardly any had the strength to move. The wakelight dimmed to gray dark. The walls fell and the waters drained. The battered boats were lifted and rolled away, and the spectators who had drunk too deep and could not move were tented by their friends. The rest limped and strolled back over the meadows and fields—waved off by crop-tenders if the fields contained produce. A robust few danced and sang with their last energy across the bridges to their blocs on the three isles, happily convinced that the little wars were fine things, perfect for keeping the ancient breed amused and healthy. Jebrassy pushed himself from the littered wall, winced at the tug of his bandages, steadied himself—he had consumed a fair volume of tork—and realized only then that he was being watched—and by someone he could actually see.
He turned with what he hoped was dignified grace to meet the sharp, half-critical gaze of a glow—a pretty young female. She wore an open vest and flowing pants whose colors revealed that she resided in the middle bloc of the second isle—as had Jebrassy, until now.
