Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
“They become a second skin,” Pahtun said, “only more subtle and talented. Your armor protects you from endless misery; it is an ancient crafting still wonderful to my eyes—and yet, it has limits. It senses any slip or slide of the rules, such as they are out there. Your armor will transform or translate sensora in the Chaos, so that you may see light and shadow, color and shape. It helps you stay rooted to something like a surface, or travel over something like a landscape—reliably enough to make progress in your journey, presumably to a destination where the Chaos is held at bay.
“The Chaos is not entirely without form or character. There is a kind of weather—some places are more transformed than others, some almost untouched. While there may seem to be, for ages at a time, a thin coating of consistency in what we observe, in truth, the rules are ever-changing. Failure to learn and adapt quickly will have terrible consequences. And so, your armor will adapt and learn, and so will you.”
Two of the escorts carried out a flat egg mounted on a slim black tripod—a portable reality generator, able to place a suspension around their entire group for several wakes.
“Within the Kalpa, the semblance of ancient reality is maintained by our generators. If your armor should weaken or fail, these smaller units may protect you for a time.”
However, surrounded by such protection, they could not make progress toward their goal. Next he introduced their weapons—never to be used recklessly or aggressively, which might attract unwanted attention. They consisted of curved, glowing blades called claves. The blades did not so much cut as accelerate change, Pahtun said. “Claves goad the Chaos—accelerate its own tendencies. The effects are unpredictable—what they strike may or may not disintegrate or cease to function.
“There are no other weapons—except your wits.”
Flight and hiding were always better choices. And so most of their training consisted of being taught how to be elusive—without any real clues, as yet, about what they would be eluding.
“Why do we not send you with vehicles—flying machines, spacecraft, transports through and over the
ground?” Pahtun asked. “There’s a law of size applicable to our generators—a scaling law. To protect more than a small group of breeds, our generators must become unwieldy. And for any generator of reasonable size, an object in the Chaos may not move much faster than you can run—for that would exceed its ability to remap. As well, moving too quickly, in too great a force, attracts vortices of contradiction and failure that we call ‘twistfolds’ and ‘enigmachrons.’ These can be awful traps. They devour and incorporate whatever they capture, armored or not, bonding it with the Chaos. You will no doubt encounter victims of such—recent, and ancient. The victims of the Typhon fade slowly. Some of the monstrosities that once were human have been studied by angelins—Chaos watchers—in the Broken Tower since before I was made.
“And they’re still out there.
“Your armor is particularly vulnerable in the zone of lies, just within the border of the real. These are the middle lands, where the Defenders, the last rank of generators protecting the Kalpa, gradually ease their protection, and then give way to the Chaos. Crossing the middle lands must be done cautiously. Your armor must not become fully active—competing fields generate unpredictable results. I will accompany you into the zone to monitor your progress. I have not lost a marcher yet, not at that stage. But many other trainers have seen their marchers snatched prematurely, caught up in an intrusion or a twistfold.
“There are regions in the Chaos which seem to possess a constancy even across long ages. One of these is the Necropolis—the remains of the Kalpa’s nine lost bions. The Typhon has drawn up these ruins and combined them with the perverted remains of other cities. Here, the Typhon presents its warning of things to come—a cruel mockery of Earth’s greatest citadels, which once spanned the globe. Now, their remains, or their essences—their imagos—have been gathered and rearranged within sight of the tower. Some of these ruins still seem inhabited—if that is the word—by hopeless phantoms. Those who once lived, do not, yet persist and act, and that which never lived takes on unexpected life.
“Let me now describe areas of great danger and opportunity. One is a kind of road or highway across the Chaos, known as a ‘trod.’ Trods appear and disappear, forming serpentine pathways or lanes through all regions.”
“What are they?” Tiadba asked.
“The trods serve as paths of conveyance. Even in the Chaos there are hierarchies of rule or misrule, power or weakness, grandeur or pity. The highest and most powerful figures or shapes—we dare not call them knowing or intelligent—use the trods to move about. Among them are the Silent Ones that have caused so much damage to our marchers, and which even in Sangmer’s day were active and powerful.”
“What do they look like?” Nico asked.
Pahtun shook his head. “Many shapes,” he said. “Some in the tower monitor their comings and goings. Unfortunately, they tell us little down here.”
The marchers stood beside the dome shed, grimacing and stretching and still getting used to their armor.
“The old matter that makes you and fills the bulk of the Earth was once sustained by the suspension that kept the Typhon at bay—but when that pulled tight around the Kalpa and the reality generators became necessary, we had to abandon everything outside. Primordial mass in the Chaos ages unpredictably,
forming pockets of geological change and destruction, no longer limited by the simple rules of gravity, physics, nor even old space and time. The Typhon seems to relish that instability—whatever amuses the Typhon stirs the Chaos and torments old Earth.”
“You keeping talking about the Typhon as if it were alive,” Nico said. “Is it really someone bigger and more powerful than the Eidolons—whatever they are?”
“I am as ignorant as you,” Pahtun answered after a short pause. “Some humans once regarded the unknown forces of nature as magnificent enemies or implacable gods. To me, the Typhon is not part of our nature—neither magnificent nor an enemy whom one might respect. It is a scourge and a disease. But you’ll soon live it for yourselves, and whatever theory keeps you alive, that’s the one you should hold and cherish.”
Macht and Khren seemed intrigued, but this didn’t satisfy Nico, the philosopher. Perf, Shewel, and the other females looked lost or bored. Denbord and Tiadba just listened and tried not to voice their opinions.
Seeming to sense Tiadba’s quiet skepticism, Pahtun knelt beside her on the sandy floor of the channel. His head still rose over her, even as she stood tall in her armor.
“You have a question,” he said.
“We’re going where we have to go,” Tiadba said. “But who made us that way?”
“Shapers, I suppose, following the orders of an Eidolon. I’d like to meet the old twitch someday and give him my opinion.” Pahtun wriggled his fingers and then touched his nose, breed-style. “Ages ago, when I was younger, to salve my own guilt, I snubbed the laws of the City Prince and sent outposters to study the Chaos.” He stopped for a moment, his face crinkling, and Tiadba thought this was the first time she had seen such an expression on a Tall One. She didn’t know what it meant—sadness, wonder, loss?
“They will not report back. Whoever leaves the Kalpa must never return, for reasons good enough and simple.”
“But you keep sending usout there,” Tiadba said.
“Higher minds than mine made these plans, and I suppose we’re all committed, whatever the consequences. You feel your instincts, I do my duty.” He stood. “If any of my outposters are still out there, and still free, they might help—they might not. You have to exercise the same caution you would with anything else in the Chaos.”
Perf looked back at the Tiers, lost in mist beyond the edge of the camp. Macht put his hands together, murmuring a song of calming.
Pahtun’s face smoothed and took on a distant look. “I do believe this, because I must: if any of you succeed, a greatness will be accomplished, something that may make all the long sacrifices of your kind worthwhile.”
“The old pede-kicker is resting.”
Khren, stocky and quiet-footed, approached Tiadba. She turned and looked him over critically. She had been feeling miserable again. Not his fault, of course, but Khren and his friends were no substitute for her warrior, foolish as he might have been at times.
“We have a moment,” he said gently, aware of her mood. Macht and Perf joined him.
“Please read some more from the books,” Perf said. “Teach us.”
Grayne’s shake cloth and the old letterbugs could not guide her now. She had to riddle the words on her own, but she had become better at that. What she read, she tried to convey and explain to the others. She was sure this was what Grayne had intended. Strange that she could no longer remember Grayne’s face or the music of her gentle, insistent voice. Jebrassy she remembered clearly. Others gathered: Denbord, Nico, and Shewel, carrying their mats. They had come to prefer sleeping in the open, under the dark arches, rather than inside the flimsy tents, which flapped in the tweenlight breezes and worried them.
Tiadba sat and opened one of the books. The breeds’ favorite passages tended to be about Sangmer the Pilgrim and Ishanaxade, the Librarian’s daughter, but the stories were seldom the same, a peculiarity that didn’t matter much to her audience.
Of necessity, she skipped or paraphrased parts with which she had difficulty, and many of the words were still obscure, but reading them over and over again was like seeing them with more experienced eyes, and she took away more meaning each time.
Other passages, spread throughout the text like chafe-seeds in a cake, still stumped them. Some were lists of instructions, go here and dothis, thenthat—word-maps, Tiadba called them—and sometimes she read these for their calming effect just before the Tall Ones extinguished the lamps for sleep. This time she chose a more familiar text while the breeds curled at her feet, staring out into the shadows.
“‘The story I tell is simple,’” Tiadba began, and her eyes filled, remembering the times with Jebrassy, just a few wakes past.
Once, half an eternity ago, the glorious new sun—so-named, despite its having burned for ten trillion years—was almost surrounded by the Typhon Chaos. Five worlds remained, and on Earth, twelve cities, homes to those gathered from around the cosmos after a long and wretched decline. Greatest and most ancient of these cities was the Kalpa, and wisest, for this city constantly made preparations against the time when the Chaos would swallow even the new sun. Defeat was imminent, many thought.
The greatest human of the age was a Deva called Polybiblios. He had traveled to the final far end of the aging cosmos, to live and study in the glow of the sixty suns of the Shen, a great civilization about to be absorbed by the Chaos.
The City Princes of Earth promised a rich prize if someone would go to those last far places and persuade Polybiblios to return. For as absorbed as he was in his learning, and almost walled in by regions filled with traps and snares, he could not by himself make the journey back to Earth. The first to volunteer was the young Mender called Sangmer, already renowned and beloved for his many exploits and rare courage.
Sangmer gathered a crew and revived the Earth’s last great galaxy ship. With his crew—selected for strength, courage, and wit—he journeyed along the single open course to that final far corner of the universe.
In all their adventures—and many they were, strange and difficult—only ten survived, including Sangmer, to return with Polybiblios. The Chaos raged and consumed and did its deadly dazzle, and many times nearly took their vessel—for none is so persistent and perverse as the Typhon, some say, and others, none so unlikely and difficult to plan against.
Sangmer also brought to Earth Polybiblios’s mysterious adopted daughter, who most agree was less human than the Shen—though her form was very pleasing.
She had taken the name Ishanaxade—born of all stories—and espoused the Deva gens of her father. Back on Earth, they were welcomed by the City Princes and there was great rejoicing, yet funeral rites occupied many families, who mourned their lost youths.
Polybiblios began his work in the high tower over the First Bion of the Kalpa, and using his Shen knowledge, soon helped design and forge the Suspension that protected the new sun, and kept the Chaos at bay for a time.
Sangmer did not sit idly, but continued with his restless ways, making other voyages and studying, measuring, and defying the Chaos, all of which heightened his fame—though these journeys consumed many more sons and daughters of fine families.
So many youths perished that Sangmer the Pilgrim also became known as Killer of Dreams, a title he did not bear proudly, and so, he promised to go into deep exile within the Sessiles, and not to return until he had studied Silence for an age.
Ishanaxade emerged from among the curious that lined the ribbon road to witness his penitent journey, and stood before him where he bore up under the discs of memory of his thousand lost comrades, which nearly bent him double.
None was so wonderfully fashioned as Ishanaxade, but that is not why to this day her images are forbidden or erased; none so beautiful in her father’s eyes, nor in the eyes of the curious who watched her partake of Sangmer’s burden, and help carry the discs to the door of the Sessiles, where Silence is peace.
Some say that it was in the Sessiles that their lines first twined and grew together. Others say their love began on the journey back from the realm of the Shen. No one objected that a Mender should take to wife Ishanaxade, for few dared displease Polybiblios, who had saved the last of humanity, and who sanctioned this union.
Upon their emerging from Silence, Polybiblios assigned them many great works to do, together and apart.
So it was, so it will be.
Tiadba closed the book and the young breeds curled up tighter. Somehow, the story had changed since the last time she read it—details were different, or their ears had become more sophisticated.
“It’s not a happy story, is it?” Khren said.
“We’re all going to die out there,” Nico asserted gloomily. “I don’t understand, but I still want to go. That’s total frass.”
Suddenly, through her exhaustion, Tiadba felt a sudden urge to speak of Jebrassy, to shout at them—that he was notdead, and would somehow be joining them, and that his presence would make this march different from all the others…But she turned her eyes to one side and fell back a little, doubting her companions would believe or take comfort.
“Let’s sleep,” she suggested.
The young breeds blew out their cheeks and pulled up their sleep mats under the high dark arches.
CHAPTER 60
Wallingford
At first the squat, hard-packed old man in the tweed suit refused to tell Daniel his name. He could act aloof, then turn gruffly assertive, as if he had always lived alone but was used to being in charge. His accent was difficult to place: English, like cockney, but Daniel was no expert. Together, they had built up their courage and abandoned the house, leaving Whitlow on his chair, locked in jerky rigor—and now something like sunrise was spreading all around, a burning pewter light painted over the streets. The neighborhood to the north resembled a pasted-up collage, bands of light and shadow lying over dark, forbidding houses. The people left on the streets seemed intent on getting somewhere but were being given a very brief time to do it—and worse, they were doing it over and over. A few seemed to vaguely recognize their plight—like insects caught in congealing resin, all except Daniel and the squat brute, and how long could their freedom last?
“A Shifter who doesn’t dream,” the brute mused between rasping huffs. He struggled to keep up as they turned east on what had once been Forty-fifth Street, toward the freeway. The air was gritty. “I’d never have found you. Mr. Whitlow was primed, however. Even without the dreams, he could sense your stone. That was his specialty. Ironic he couldn’t find shelter—when sheabandoned us.” The brute seemed pleased with himself. “Me, alone,” he wheezed. “Riding the last threads. Pulling them down and sweeping along. And you, of course.”
“Terminus,”Daniel said.
The brute nodded—understood this word well enough. “Mr. Whitlow called it that,” he said. “Never knew what it meant. Where the railway stops? End of the line? Don’t know now. But whatever, I don’t like it. It’s sticky. It catches.”
Daniel wrapped his fingers around the two boxes in his pocket and blessed the little freedom the stones gave him—them. The brute was also contributing, Daniel could not say how. Both seemed aware that without the benefit of the other’s presence, they would be as frustrated—as obviously doomed as the mired, wild-eyed figures they passed on the sidewalks and in the streets.
“Who’s the Chalk Princess?”
“The highest of high, in my line of work. But truthfully—don’t know. Never met her. Dangerous, you know.”
“The Moth?”
“Ah, the Moth—so he washere. So many tiny thrones for the Queen’s servants. Nunc dimittis, I say. I doubt he would have killed you, such a curiosity. He probably wanted to rip you about, like a sheepdog.”
Daniel grunted and turned his head forward. He didn’t like looking back—the street behind was not the street they had just traveled. Time, he supposed, was bunching up like an accordion smashed into a wall. They came upon a rise overlooking where the freeway had once been. Now there was just a long muddy ditch flanked on both sides by empty houses. In this part of the neighborhood, the bunched accordion had brought along material things—houses and funny old cars. But nothing living.
“No more people,” the brute observed.
“What’s that mean?”
“You tell me, young master.”
The freeway was obviously not available—and that meant they would have to take surface streets, such as they were. It would be a long, difficult walk. They looked into a car but machinery was hopeless. It all seemed made of fused cinders.
“What are you, my sidekick?” Daniel shot over his shoulder, flippancy hiding real fear. “My butler?”
“Your guide, young master—taking you back to where I’ve been already. It’s south of here—a green warehouse. I walked around the building, knew theywere inside, yet had nothing to offer and could not hope to enter. After the storm, after the wreck—after the Queen fumbled like a frightened lover and dropped our prey, I knew I wouldn’t be allowed inside, however desperate my situation. They’ll welcome you, however. It’s where you belong—not that you’re grateful.” The brute’s thick fingers clenched. “It’s getting worse. I don’t mind saying—”
Daniel held up his hand and looked out across a long dark ditch at where the University of Washington had once been; and still was, after a fashion, its shrunken structures black and shiny, like anthracite. Only a few buildings seemed relatively unaffected.
The brute went on. “Libraries,” he muttered. “Queen can’t touch them—not yet. But the books are scrambling. Soon they’ll be wiped clean. No protection after that.”
The nearest houses were taking on a dull glimmer of translucence, as if carved from sand-blasted crystal. Others had been cut in half, showing jumbled interiors—but no occupants. Daniel said, “I think we’re passing out of the zone where people can even exist.”
“I doubt I understand any of that, Professor.”
Just hearing each other’s voices had suddenly become an odd comfort.
“What can I offer, what do I dofor us, you ask?” the brute said. “I’m a Chancer. There are Shifters such as yourself, with their stones and all, and Chancers. Chancers have a muse—Tyche. A modest sort of muse, but she’s ours. Right now I’m dragging every bit of good fortune I can into our immediate vicinity. Bit of a knee-wobbler, actually.” He grinned like a hoary old chimp. “Even with your stone, if you get too far ahead of me, I guarantee nothing. We need each other, Professor.”
Daniel started moving south—if there were any points left on a compass now. “I’m not a professor,” he said.
“You were—once,” the squat man said. “Part of my work was being a detective.”
“What’ll I call you, then—Pinkerton?”
The brute chuckled. “Max will do, while we work out whether I want to stick here with you or just chuck it.” He laughed at this unaccustomed freedom.
Daniel pointed southwest, into the muddle where the black sky lay heavy over land and city. “Do you see what I see, over there?” The greasy darkness was less intense, and if he focused, he could make out an actinic paleness, less than half the width of his thumb.
“I was there earlier,” the brute said. “That same blue glamour is how I found you.”
“What causes it?”
“The stones, I’d say. The warehouse has two of them, inside.”
“Who’s there?”
“Some women. Two Shifters. And a collector of sorts, though no longer a servant of our Livid Mistress. They are getting along better than us, certainly better than the other poor souls out here. Still…I wouldn’t dare approach them—not without you.”
“Why not?”
“I collected one of them—reeled him in like a trout, fair sport and square. Not welcome. Oh, Mr. Whitlow was yourman—I feel no guilt about you,” Max said. “But the game doesn’t matter. We’re abandoned.” He puffed his cheeks in amazement. “Didn’t think I’d ever escape. Thought that at the end of my service, the Queen’d just flick me off like cigar ash, right into the gutter.” He drew his face into a bereaved scowl. “More lives in my bindle than I imagined. Still…Over there—the warehouse—last chance. They couldbe yourfriends, if you introduce yourself proper. They might even accept me in the
bargain.”
“What’ll you do if we get there?”
“Make myself useful. As always.”
“You’ll tell them about me?”
“Oh, they needyou, Professor. Sum-runners attract. Tough to keep them apart when their time is come—that’s what Mr. Whitlow used to say. Don’t walk so! Have pity on an old man.”
Daniel slowed. The pace was more than exhausting. He could feel something leak away when he pushed too hard—opportunity, fate, perhaps his proximity to Max’s hard-gathered luck. It seemed possible they didneed each other. Of course, it was also possible that Max was making him think that.
“Such a sad town,” Max observed. “Never thought I’d see such a thing. All trapped, doomed, ropes growing shorter!” He clucked his tongue, face flushed, short scraggly hair on end in the dryness, like an ugly Christmas gnome jolly with cold-blooded humor. Then, “Can we get there from here? Such a distance, bad air, hard to—” He fell back in a fit of coughing.
Cold sweat on his brow, Daniel looked along the direction where the freeway had once been. They could not just walk south—things were even more jumbled that way, like blocks of ice backed up in a freezing river. “This way,” he said.
They headed west, retracing their steps.
The pewter glow came and disappeared again.
What was left of their part of the big world—their small portion of space and time—was rapidly shaking itself to pieces.
They came to a large, long bridge, still intact but wavering and ghostly in the gloom. They started to cross. Daniel looked over the side. Below, water had turned to rippling mist, gray-green and ominous.
“This isn’t the one with the troll underneath, is it?” Max asked.
“It is,” Daniel said. “The Fremont Troll. Made of concrete.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Max warned. “I hate trolls. Always have.”
CHAPTER 61
I am informed, our two rivals have lately made an offer to enter into the lists with united forces, and challenge us to a comparison of books, both as to weight and number…Where can they find scales of capacity enough for the first; or an arithmetician of capacity enough for the second?
–Jonathan Swift, Tale of a Tub
“What are these things, really?” Miriam asked. Her hand hovered over the two gray boxes on the table.
“Everything seems to point to them, everyone seems to want them, but I have no idea what they are or what they do.”
“It is not so much what they do as what they willdo, given the opportunity,” Bidewell said. “Possibly the best story is how they come down to us, yet even with that, there is no simple explanation.”
“Of course not,” Agazutta said.
Bidewell uncorked the second bottle of wine from Miriam’s handbag. He did seem to enjoy wine. He poured the ladies glasses, but Jack and Ginny demurred. Jack had never liked alcohol. Bidewell lifted a toast and the ladies did the same. “To survival, against all odds.”
“To survival,” Jack murmured, and raised his empty hand.
“We’d appreciate some certainty, Conan,” Miriam said.
Bidewell spun his glass, eyes on the swirling red liquid. For a moment Ginny’s vision seemed to blur—she saw the glass and the red wine as a swoosh.
“Every little thing makes its trace,” Bidewell said. “That much is intuitive. We can visualize everything leaving a trail. Sometimes we call them world-lines. But world-lines flow into other world-lines, and some join to create an observer line, or fate. The fate of an observer spins together many lines that might otherwise never touch, and that creates difficulties—entanglements.
“More perplexing, not all world-lines or even fates link back to the beginning. For creation does not always begin at the beginning. Creation is—or was—ongoing, and new things appear all the time, some of them implying long, ornate histories. These new creations and their histories need to be reconciled with what has come before. And so it is that Mnemosyne becomes necessary. As soon as she came to be—a most remarkable event, but perhaps only an afterthought, who can say?—she began her work. She found lost lines, entangled contradictions, and began reweaving them—reconciling them back to the beginning. She swept up and cataloged and put things back on the shelf, so to speak, a monumental task which she no doubt has yet to finish, poor thing.
“The creation of new things always implies the destruction of the old. Not all things that are created remain in creation. Some are erased. And so, I believe that Mnemosyne must be supplemented by another, sister force, let us call her Kali, though I’ve never met her, thank goodness. Kali disposes of things that have been left loose or cut away, and which Mnemosyne cannot reconcile—objects, people, fates.”
“My head spins just thinking about it,” Miriam said.
“Is Kali white as chalk?” Ginny asked abruptly. Jack looked at her.
“Kali is often depicted as a shriveled old woman, her skin the color of plagues and death—black,”
Bidewell said, watching the pair closely. “But in this role, she might be pale, white as chalk. After all, she removes excess detail and color. She bleaches.”
“I don’t believe a word of it,” Farrah said.
Bidewell found this amusing. “I wish I had that luxury. But long ago I discovered I had a knack—I could slip free, for a while, of all the backward-sliding fates and world-lines that were being reconciled. I could see with a peculiar clarity things that no longer were. When I was young, I learned to watch for the signs—learned to watch doomed people, places, and things as they faded, about to become inconsequential—and yet remember them in detail. I have sharp eyes and an ironclad memory.”
“Mind filled with useless junk,” Agazutta murmured, but her eyes were languid. She was enjoying the frisson of so many strange possibilities.
“At first, in my youth, I was confrontational. I tried to trace lost and fading things back to the moment when they began to be erased—or forward, to the moment of their creation. An impossible task, I discovered—though I came dangerously close once or twice.
“Soon, I realized that the last remnants of things lost might be found in records—in the Earth, in geological layers, for example, but also in lost animals, stray children—and scrolls. Books. Texts of all sorts.
“Mnemosyne values texts above all things, and saves their editing and reconciliation for the last, perhaps to be savored. And so—I began to find the books she or her dark sister had missed.”
CHAPTER 62
Daniel had to rest. The walk through murk and confusion left him with no energy, no sense of purpose or progress, and no clear view of where they might be in the city’s jumbled geography. He had the horrible feeling they were retracing steps they had already taken.
He paused before a half-wrecked and leaning house, then pushed through a splintered gate to sit on a stone garden bench, in a place that could no longer properly be called a garden. The plants had become sad, brown-edged things, but before dying, the last flowers had run riot, growing into cancerous clumps of wilted blossoms.
Daniel’s body was filled with a dull fire, which he could only guess might be chemistry struggling against shifts in physical constants. Soon enough he would simply cease to be—as a living human being, at any rate. He could almost see himself clumping and growing out of any sensible pattern, multiplying beyond any possibility of life, like the flowers…
They crumbled into powder in his hand.
He had lost track of the faraway glow. Pewter brightness returned, replacing the bleak umber darkness. Jagged upheavals carved serrated shapes against the southern grayness—not mountains. He did not know what they might be.
But worse than all that—
He felt a chill and looked up. Max seemed to squeeze into his vicinity, more sound and shadow than material being. He, too, looked up—at a certain cool sensation on their skulls and the backs of their necks.
The gnomish man’s thin voice pushed through the freezing air. “Something’s eating the moon.”
Whatever had smeared out the pallid stars and rucked up the voids between had left the moon untouched. Now, the high ivory crescent was turning bloody red, like a half plug stamped in heaven’s flesh. And rising in the east—or rather, blooming and bloating, since there was no apparent motion in that direction—a ring of fire arced almost from one quarter to the other. Within the ring swam a diseased, turbid blackness.
