Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
“There used to be seven bions to the Kalpa, and twelve cities on the Earth,” Pahtun told them, his voice clear in their helmets. He walked ahead on the hard surface, crazed with cracks and crevices, his boots raising puffs from fine dust that had somehow streamed into tiny dunes. The dust lay over the ancient foundation like fine ash—perhaps it was ash. “The reality generators worked for millions of years to protect all the bions. Then—war. The Chaos took the spoils. Now there are only three bions—and soon, perhaps just two, or one. You might find the rest of that story in your books, young breeds. How the Ashurs and Devas and Eidolons fought among themselves, and the cities were sacrificed to their godlike stupidity.”
“What’s a ‘god’?” Khren asked. Nico, Shewel, and Denbord walked on Tiadba’s left, Khren and Macht on her right. Perf, as always, straggled behind with Frinna and Herza. Nobody answered. “Just thought a Tall One might know,” Khren murmured. Tiadba felt no hunger, no pain—hardly felt the exertion of walking for long miles over the ancient, dead surface. She was beginning to feel beyond all real pain or care, all emotions except for curiosity, which never failed her. If Jebrassy were here, she knew he would be as curious as she, and as eager to see what lay beyond the border of the real.
Their only hope for freedom, they had once believed, lay outside the Kalpa, far from the stifle of history and tradition. The books, their trainer, the sky itself, such as it was—all told a different story. They were once again being used. As they had always suspected, they were just tools, means to an end. Still, Pahtun seemed concerned for their welfare. Now that the training was almost over, his gruffness had tempered to patient instruction about last-minute details. He repeated himself often, and this irritated Tiadba, but when she looked at the other breeds, she understood the necessity. Especially for Herza and Frinna, who never asked questions. They needed the stories told over and over for a reason. How could they possibly survive in the Chaos?
“The middle lands are most difficult,” Pahtun said for the hundredth time. “The zone of lies is called that for a reason—intrusions can happen at any moment. You must cross quickly. Should the Chaos launch an assault through the sector you are crossing, the battle between the Kalpa’s generators and the intrusion will create intense whirlpools of fractured time and space, almost invisible and deadly. Get caught in one and you will never reach the border of the real. Your suits will not become fully active in this region. Listen to them—they will tell you when an intrusion and its effects are near, and whether your perceptions, or your decisions, are being clouded.”
Their own spoken words reached each other directly, right in their ears—but the way the armor communicated was difficult to get used to. It only rarely used audible words. Much of the time they simply “knew better.” Tiadba was not sure whether she resented this subtlety. It could certainly prove useful beyond the gates and the border of the real—though Pahtun and the other escorts had warned them that the suits could not know everything.
Pahtun said, “Don’t underestimate your instincts—you are observers, made of ancient matter, and observers are primary even out in the Chaos. The Typhon is envious of your senses. This is the first principle—out there, to look, to perceive, is to be hated. Later, when you’ve acquired direct experience of the Chaos, you will learn to rely more and more on your own judgment, above all things. But at first, and certainly in the zone of lies, rely upon your suits.”
“How can something inside the borders be worse than what’s outside?” Nico asked.
“Not worse—just treacherous,” Khren said. “Like being bitten by a tame pede. You don’t expect it.”
“Oh,” Nico said.
“A meadow pede bit me once, when I stepped on its tail,” Shewel said.
“Pedes are all tail,” Perf said.
“This one was all bite. Nearly lost a toe. Still hurts when I walk a long ways.” Shewel’s skin shone pale behind his golden faceplate.
Pahtun slowed enough that Tiadba could catch up with him, then tuned his voice to her helmet alone.
“Some marchers think they’ve been betrayed,” he said. “They think the Kalpa sends them out into the Chaos to die, or worse—for no reason. Doesn’t matter what trainers tell them. Maybe it’s the books they find back in the Tiers. Bad start, that sort of thinking.”
She didn’t know how to respond, so she stared straight ahead.
“What’s most startling to the trainers is that even when the marchers start off badly, if they make it across the zone of lies, they seem to do well—as far as they can be tracked from the Broken Tower. It’s true, young breed—you were made for the Chaos.”
“But none come back,” she said.
“Maybe they get where they’re going and it’s better there—for breeds. If I could, I would join your march and go see. Do you believe me when I say that?”
He seemed to care about her answer. She did believe him, but did not want to give him the satisfaction of saying so. After all, his kind had let the cities die, let the Chaos advance, let the intrusions in—and had taken Jebrassy from her, and she could not guess why.
More miles passed, and they came to a row of square gray pillars, each about a hundred feet tall and ten feet thick. They stretched off in both directions for as far as she could see—tens of miles. The marchers gathered around one pillar.
Pahtun patted it. “These mark the outer boundary of the old city, before the Mass Wars and the Chaos. Back then the Kalpa was huge—bigger than I can imagine. The middle lands lie two miles beyond these markers. I’ll take you a few hundred yards into the zone, and then we must part company.”
Pahtun stood for a moment, hand against a pillar. Then he straightened and walked on.
“He’s afraid,” Khren said as he drew near Tiadba.
“He can hear you,” she reminded him.
“ I’mafraid,” Khren said, and tipped his finger against his helmet, as if to touch his nose. “But I’m excited, too. What does that mean?”
The others tipped their fingers to their faceplates, and Nico stretched out his arms, folding them like a warden’s wings, and danced over the cracked, dusty plain. His boots—all their boots—were gray with the ashen dust.
“Maybe we’re going aaarp,” Perf said. “That would explain a lot. We’re not even there and already we’re broken.”
Pahtun and the escorts may have been listening, but just kept walking until the low black line they had seen for some while now grew into a glossy black wall, with a narrow gap cut through, barely wide enough for one breed.
“Do all marchers pass through there?” Khren asked.
“No,” Pahtun said. “This gate opened a few minutes ago. The Kalpa has chosen the safest path—for now.”
“Somebody up in the tower is keeping track?” Perf asked.
Tiadba felt the sudden urge to look over her shoulder. She knew—suddenly and completely—where Jebrassy was. He was in the tower—but he wasn’t watching.
No need to turn around. No need to look back at all. She was done with the city. She would never return.
But she was not done with Jebrassy, nor he with her.
He’s coming. But by the time he arrives, you might not care.
“Oh, shut up,” she said under her breath.
“Sorry,” Perf said.
“Not talking to you.”
Pahtun turned sideways and squeezed through the gap. Tiadba went after him. All of the others followed, their armor brushing the exposed inner surface with an eerie, slick hum. When all were through, Pahtun gathered them once again into a tight group, and they stared out at the zone of lies—gray, jagged, broken; indistinct shapes mounded low along the horizon. “You’ll cross quickly. I’ll go as far as I can, but then you’re on your own. The next barrier is another low wall, about as high as your knee—marking the farthest reach of the Kalpa’s generators. These are the border of the real. And just beyond, you’ll see what looks like a great gate welcoming you, but don’t go there. It’s a trap—it rises wherever observers try to cross. A Typhonian welcome—if you pass through it, you’re lost. It takes you straight to the Silent Ones.”
Tiadba saw Khren mouth Silent Ones,his eyes wide.
Tiadba looked up just long enough to see a sharp gray ribbon arc overhead, and realized the Witness was still rotating its searchlight beam across the Kalpa and around the Chaos. With every sweep, the beam intersected the Broken Tower. The Witness was looking for someone—for Jebrassy—had always been searching for him. But why the Witness would care, couldcare, and why Jebrassy might be there, rather than here, her unreliable inner voice could not inform her, and so she did not know, and refused to think about it anymore.
“Now, follow! Run!” Pahtun said, and he loped off to provide an example. The four escorts stayed behind, kneeling with staffs held out in salute.
The breeds did their best to keep up, but soon the trainer was far ahead. Tiadba could barely see him, clambering over broken rubble, then standing and looking back over their heads—raising his arms. He saw something—but Tiadba knew he shouldn’t just stand there.
A warning—
Something dark covered the sky, and a sound like a hideous siren issued from the bions far behind them, pitched high and then low like mournful keening and growling—a noise that raised the fur under her armor and set her teeth on edge. She ran faster and pushed up against Khren and Nico, both dashing for their lives, but not as fast as Herza and Frinna, stumbling up and over blocks of heaved stone and mounds of heaped black foundation and thick drifts of slow, sucking ash. The darkness dropped. For an instant Tiadba wondered if the Kalpa wasn’t giving them cover—blanking the awful sky, distracting whatever might want to find them and tempt them. But then she realized the darkness came from outside, not from within—rolling back toward the bions in slow, oily waves.
An intrusion. Like the one that separated us and scarred the Tiers—like the one that took Jebrassy’s sponsors. We were warned!
They were within a few dozen yards of Pahtun, still standing on a high block of gray stone with his arm outstretched, frantically waving them on.
“What’s wrong with him?” Khren shouted.
“Don’t stop!” Tiadba yelled. “Keep running! Cross the zone!”
The city fought back. A luminosity carved the landscape in simple, ragged patterns of black and white—no grays. The darkness spasmed. They dared not look up, but Tiadba glanced sideways at the block of stone, at Pahtun—and saw him caught in a burning coil of orange and empty black. She saw his armor break apart and blow away in rippling fragments. He shook free of the last scraps, then stood naked on the rock, and she saw—for an instant, but she would never forget—the bare truth of a Tall One, too smooth, too naked, and much too vulnerable.
And then he was gone. A cloud of sparkles rose from the block and flew off. She swallowed a moan and kept running, head down, eyes burning with shame and fear. It seemed just a few hard, thumping steps later they came to the low wall that Pahtun had described—the outer perimeter. The border of the real. They leaped over it with hardly a thought. Looming before them, where nothing had been before, they saw a magnificent, arching gate, covered with monumental figures, all breeds, caught up in some beautiful golden substance, smiling and waving a frozen welcome—the gate stretching up and breaking through the flow of the warring darkness and the defending waves of luminosity from the Kalpa.
All nine marchers slunk around the foot of the arch, squeezing between broken, jagged rocks—rocks everywhere, big and small—and then, exhausted, they slid into a hollow and shoved up against one another, hugging and shivering.
The siren’s keen fell to a grumble, then stopped.
Silence.
Tiadba wept. Herza and Frinna muttered prayers. Shewel and the other males lay still, but their eyes shifted to the broken shadows. The hollow was cramped but seemed a fair refuge—at least, it did not open like a mouth and eat them, which she could easily imagine, given all they had been taught. They had survived the zone of lies. Their armor was hiding them effectively enough, something that Pahtun’s had failed to do. He’d been caught up in the city’s defense against the intrusion, just as he warned them—or so she surmised.
He sacrificed himself. For us.
This suddenly affected her deeply. Now, if they could believe their training—she could almost hear Pahtun’s sonorous voice—they must not stay where they were. Yet they could not move; paralysis gripped them as each tried to sort through what they had been taught, what their armor was saying to their bodies, conveying the depth of their peril. They couldn’t hear a thing except their own breathing and then Tiadba’s soft, trembling words as she encouraged them to get up, to move.
“The Tall One told us to stay low,” Khren said. “Did he go back?”
“He’s gone,” Tiadba said. Now wasn’t the time to tell them what she had seen.
“We should stay here until he comes to get us,” Perf said.
“He won’t come for us anymore. We’re on our own.”
“Where exactly are we?” Nico asked, trying to overcome sudden hiccups. He tugged against his friends’
gripping hands and pushed up, trying to see out of the hollow.
“We made it,” Perf said, astonished. “We’re still alive.”
“We can’t stop,” Tiadba said. “We should travel as far as we can before we rest.”
A pleasant low tone, languid and musical, sounded in their ears.
Herza and Frinna touched their helmets. “The beacon,” Herza said. “We’re on course.”
“Time to go,” Frinna said, transformed, and Macht echoed her, their enthusiasm surging, paralysis broken—too quickly.
“What if something’s looking for us?” Perf asked.
“Something will always be ‘looking for us,’” Khren said, with a buzz of sarcasm. “Let’s move, like she says. We should take a peek first, of course.”
“That’s what I was trying to do,” Nico said.
They could all feel it. They were in the Chaos, in the wild at last, and to Tiadba, the sudden excitement and anticipation were almost as frightening as Pahtun’s destruction. They were much too eager. But they knew that whatever came next, they were where they belonged.
TEN ZEROS
CHAPTER 67
The Green Warehouse
Daniel and Glaucous stood silent and watchful by the warehouse door, too tired to speak. Bidewell had brought the new visitors inside, then left them with Jack and went off, he said, to make preparations.
“Things will be getting worse sooner rather than later.”
Glaucous dropped to the wooden bench beside the door, face swollen with fatigue, piggish eyes bleary, paying neither of the younger men a whit of attention, as if for now they were beneath notice. Daniel lowered his head and bent over, fighting nausea.
“I don’t know you,” Jack said to Daniel. “I doknow you,” he blurted at the squat, gnomish man. “If you try anything, I swear…I’ll killyou.”
Glaucous stared up at Jack. “Well spoken, young master,” he said. “You should know that I killed the pair that hunted the young lady. We all have our mixes of good and bad.”
“How did you get out of the van?” Jack asked. “Where’s the fat woman?”
Glaucous waggled his hand, demonstrating something flying off into the air.
“I wouldn’t worry about him,” Daniel said, pushing up again.
“What about you?” Jack asked.
Glaucous smiled. “So very tuned, so very sharp.”
Jack worked to keep his temper. “I don’t know why the old man let either of you in.”
“You assume Bidewell’s brought you here to protect you—to keep you safe from such as me. He hasn’t told you his story, I take it?” Glaucous asked.
“You shouldn’t talk when he’s not here.”
“Ah, we are in your charge,” Glaucous mused, then dropped his gaze to the floor.
“How many of us are here?” Daniel asked. “Shifters, I mean. I’m thinking three, me included.”
Jack shook his head, unwilling to give up information. “Where did you get that stone?”
Daniel winced. “I don’t remember. Do you?”
Jack glared.
“From your family, right?” Daniel asked. “My family’s gone. Not dead—just gone, forgotten, even before this—what’s happening outside.”
“A bad place,” Glaucous muttered. “And no escape.”
“That’s what happens to us,” Daniel said. “We get wiped out of the histories.”
Ginny had come through the aisles and stood in the shadows, watching them. “You’re not in my dreams,” she said to Daniel. She pointed to Glaucous. “Who’s this?”
“My hunter,” Jack said.
Bidewell returned with Agazutta and Miriam. The two women inspected the newcomers with expectation and dread. Ellen and Farrah joined them, and Ellen took Ginny’s arm. The circle stood in silence—except for Glaucous, whose breath came in labored, grinding snores, though he was not asleep.
“We have work,” Bidewell said. “For the moment, there needs to be a truce. Mr. Glaucous, are you fit?”
Glaucous pushed to his feet with a whistling sigh. He rubbed his nose vigorously. “A dray horse most of my days.”
“I remember you more as a bull terrier, sent down rat holes,” Bidewell said.
“Do you still offer a workman’s reward for a workman’s labor? I remember you were fond of drink.”
Bidewell turned to see that all the ladies had gathered and arranged themselves around Ginny, who stood trembling in their midst.
Jack found it difficult to restrain himself. “Where’s your fat partner?” he asked again. Glaucous smiled obsequiously. “I will miss her.”
Bidewell startled them by clapping his hands. “Enough. The outside will soon become more demanding,”
he said. “We have no choice but to place our strongest defenses where they will do the most good.”
Glaucous tipped open a box flap and fingered the corner of a book. “I do like a good read.”
Bidewell flared, “Caution, Mr. Glaucous. These are not mere children. Tease at your peril.” He motioned to the stacks. “We must move boxes and crates to the outer walls.”
“Your servant, sir,” Glaucous said, and inclined his head.
Jack approached Bidewell as the others headed off through the stacks. Daniel tossed him an enigmatic, measuring glance. Ginny was quickly hustled away by the book club ladies and did not object; they were off to form their own work detail, Ellen explained.
“I don’t like any of this,” Jack said to Bidewell when they were alone.
“Have you noticed, we are not the ones making the arrangements?” Bidewell asked. The cacophony outside—like boulders grinding in a giant mixer—had grown louder. Every few hours, following a sharp crackling and slam like falling masonry, deep bell tones would ring, vibrating curtains of dust from the rafters.
Bidewell walked along the aisles, through the warehouse, saw that his people were sleeping—fitfully. He listened to the low voices of Glaucous and Iremonk in the storage room where they had pitched their cots, set apart for now, and with good reason. Jack could hardly stand the sight of, either. Bidewell mostly held back his own opinions.
In truth, though, he was puzzled. There was something unusual about Glaucous, very different from his experience of other hunters and servants of the Chalk Princess.
The voices of the two refugees softened and finally stopped, and Bidewell returned to his desk and the warmth of the iron stove, wide-awake. He truly slept perhaps once a month, to avoid the wretched things that passed for dreams. For Bidewell, a man who never forgot anything, who never shed his brushed connections with all possible histories, dreams were like sick spells or fits of unproductive coughing. The past, all of his pasts, refused to be expelled.
It was apparent that none of his assembled people—his chosen family—could understand why he had allowed Glaucous into the warehouse. Daniel Patrick Iremonk was more of a conundrum, a fate-shifter, after all, with his own sum-runner; but still unlike Ginny or Jack. Bidewell felt the presence even before he saw the man, if man he still was. The hunter appeared a few steps away, wrapped in convenient shadows. “Getting uglier,” Glaucous said, his voice almost lost in a rumble that rose through the floor. “Out there, I mean. You should get out and see. Quite an experience for such as us. Consequences and conclusions.”
“Make no accusations. You are barely tolerated,” Bidewell said. “I was never a cager of birds.”
“Yet I’ve completed your set, Conan. He might never have come here without my guidance.”
“It seems you need him more than the reverse.”
“No doubt. He has never been caught, never come close to being caught—and until now, never attracted the attention of her hunters. But it seems Mr. Iremonk is made all the more crucial by his exceptions.”
Glaucous found a chair, sat, and somehow managed to cross his short, thick legs. He had insubstantial feet, tiny for a man of such bulk, and the shoes he wore were narrow, with pointed toes abruptly squared. The effect was bitterly comic—grossness combined with delicacy, like a Cruikshank caricature.
“Wish I’d brought my tobacco. You wouldn’t happen to…?”
Bidewell shook his head. One didn’t offer a personage such as Glaucous anything more than was
necessary, and Bidewell hadn’t smoked in more than four hundred years. Jack did not sleep—could not find sleep. Something inside kept trying to connect with something outside. He sat up on the edge of his cot, fists clenching the blankets, and thought of all the people stranded in Bidewell’s insulated fortress—people, cats, and what else?
What was Glaucous, really, or for that matter, Daniel?
What am I?
His muscles ached from moving so many boxes. He was not used to blunt, heavy labor. He stood, brushing down the rumples in his clothes. They all slept in their clothes. Asked himself when was the last time he had dreamed or been visited. A couple of weeks.
Maybe that was done with.
He listened to Ginny’s soft, steady breathing on the opposite side of the wall of books. He peered around the crates, pulled aside the ragged sheet that served as a curtain. She had wrapped herself in one of Bidewell’s old brown woolen blankets—army surplus, probably. But which army, which war?
Knees curled up, back to him, her shoulders quivered. She still dreamed. Then she became still. He stood in that makeshift entry, his expression snagging on successive thorny branches as it fell: pain, exasperation, puzzlement, before it settled into a blank stare. So many expectations, so little understanding of now, next, never. Ginny opened her eyes, turned her head, and blinked. Her lips twitched. Jack backed away, bumping into a wall of boxes, before he realized she was still asleep. Quietly, with great respect, he stooped over her, brought his head closer, turned one ear. Wherever she was, whatever she was experiencing—whatever she was saying, in a language that itched at the back of his head—she was not happy. He was powerless to help, hereor there.
“What’s wrong?” he whispered.
Her eyes looked beyond and through him, and her brows knit in supreme effort. Speaking English seemed difficult. “Following us.”
“Who?”
“Echoes. I think they’re dead. Walked right through him. He’s gone.”
She squeezed her eyes and curled up tighter.
Jack wiped tears from his cheeks. The rumbling had intensified—outside, under, around the warehouse. After a moment, he returned to his own space and took a swig of water from the plastic bottle he kept in his backpack.
Lay down, drew up his legs.
Tried to will himself to sleep, to dream, to cross over—go to where Ginny was. Then, before he could grab hold and control himself, he willed another, very different sort of move—a shift. The effort rebounded from something incredibly hard and knocked him half off his cot. He felt as if he’d been slugged with a hammer. His muscles spasmed and he lay back twitching and sweating. Stupid. Everything squashed, corroded, and trimmed down to at most two or three fates, rammed up against what Bidewell called the Terminus—Jack knew that, but still, his fear and disappointment were intense.
He was trapped along with everybody else.
All the ones I’ve always left behind. Fear leading to jumping leading to being forgotten. How in hell can I believe I deserve any better?
He sat up on one elbow, rubbing his neck and ribs.
At the very least he had confirmed something important.
Out beyond the walls of the warehouse, in the time-shivered, ash-fall gloom, Burke had become a helpless ghost. Needles lay over the soggy floor of their apartment like a pricking lawn of steel, and through the curtainless windows, the city-etched horizon curled up like an old rug, crimped and threadbare.
There were now twocities at the end of time.
Seattle was the second.
“Can’t sleep?” Daniel stood in the opening to Jack’s cubicle, arms folded. Jack turned and stared at the plumpish, pasty-faced man. He had a soft nose and soft green eyes. What looked out of those eyes did not match the face—a feral sharpness out of place in an habitual expression of contented curiosity.
“Feeling guilty that you survived, and they didn’t?”
“No,” Jack said. “Not exactly.”
“Glaucous is talking to Bidewell. The girl’s asleep. She doesn’t look happy.”
“Her name is Virginia.” Jack swallowed his indignation that Daniel had looked into Ginny’s cubicle.
“You don’t dream?”
“It’s just black—maybe I dream of a big, deep nothing. How about you?”
Something seemed very wrong with this man who stared out of another’s eyes, but how could he know that? Jack wondered. Just because Daniel had arrived with Glaucous, more seabirds fleeing a storm…
“Ginny and I dream about the same place,” Jack said. “That’s why we’re here.”
Daniel made an agreeing noise that also indicated he didn’t much care. “We should spy on those two, listen in, I mean, then go up to the roof and see for ourselves. I’ve found a ladder.”
Jack considered, then pushed to his feet. “All right.” He could play along—for now. As they walked through the labyrinth of crates toward the sliding steel door, Minimus fell in behind. Daniel looked down. “Cats are natural Shifters,” he said. “Nine lives, right? I studied them when I was a kid. They move fast, and they don’t care what they leave behind. I don’t think this one likes Glaucous.”
Minimus sat. They paused to wait, but the cat blinked and slunk off through a gap. Daniel brushed his fingers along the boxes. “I hate being surrounded by books. Give me one or two—not thousands.”
They came to the door. Daniel applied his ear to the cold metal. Jack did the same, though he did not like being led.
Two voices sounded faintly through the steel. The deeper voice—Glaucous—was saying, “…combined, might do what two could not.”
Bidewell cleared his throat. “You’ve done me no favor, bringing the bad shepherd here.”
Daniel curled his lip and smiled at Jack.
Glaucous: “Three rooms. Three Shifters. As described long ago, my friend. The role I play is positive.”
A noncommittal noise from Bidewell, some words below their hearing, then Glaucous, louder, setting the hook: “I’ve always asked myself, what and why, what is it that produces these children, sweeps up memory in their wake—and why put them through such torment? We both torment them, Conan. You promise them answers we do not have.”
“And you hook them and reel them in,” Bidewell said.
“And should they escape, on the bounce, they come to you.”
“And if they don’t escape, you deliver them to—”
Daniel pushed back from the door with an expression of disgust. “We can’t trust either of them,” he whispered.
Jack held his finger to his lips, ear against the steel.
“Whitlow once told me about your years on the continent, long before my time,” Glaucous said. “What larks, tramping after mouse-nibbled manuscripts across the Alps and around old Italy—and no doubt seeking lost children.”
“Whitlow hunted, not me.”
“Well, no matter. He’s out there stuttering to his doom in an old shipwreck of a house, beached and hove to. Best forgotten. Still, you rubbed shoulders with famous folk. Petrarch, past his days of young love, became devoted to the sport of resurrecting classics. You and Whitlow were with him when he died, weren’t you?”
“I sought not the lost genius of antiquity, but the marvels of impossibility.”
Glaucous snorted two nose-blows into his kerchief. “Whitlow’s stories fascinated me.” He raised his hand, snot rag draped from his palm, and poked a thick finger into the air. “Boccaccio, spinner of bawdy tales, redeemed himself searching for bits of Tully. A fine pair of noses for tales lost—or perverted.”
“You date yourself. Tully is now properly known as Cicero.”
Glaucous grinned. “I am surprised to find you confined to this box.”
Bidewell got up to tend to the stove.
“Still fond of wine,” Glaucous observed. “Always have been. Mr. Whitlow—”
Bidewell clanged shut the stove’s iron gate.
Glaucous thinned his lips. His hand started tapping one knee and he looked up, pinched his nose, snuffed again, glanced sideways at Bidewell. “Whitlow set his trap for Iremonk. The Moth made an appearance. I have never had such tools at my disposal. Always on the margins, forced to catch the wax dripping from all the sad dim candles of our night, forced to trim their pitiful wicks. My partner…” His expression faded into gloom, and to revive his spirits, he struck his knee with a fist. “Came close to the prize, I did—snagging Mr. Jack Rohmer, fine young Shifter. Painfully close. Ever and always flashers with a net.”
“Was your mistress too frightened to accept your gift?”
Glaucous changed the subject. “How solid is your fortress, Conan?”
“Firm foundations, carefully laid.”
“I suspect you’ve prepared three clean, pure spaces. So much easier to find emptiness in this wilderness than on the old continent, where the very turf is thick with bones. How long vacant?”
“One hundred years,” Bidewell said.
“Is that sufficient? Mr. Whitlow once claimed—”
“Conclusions are upon us, Glaucous. Much depends on your employer. Will she gather courage and return—as a shrieking Harpy, do you think?”
Glaucous scowled.
“Failed you, didn’t she? Eater of eaters, hunter of the hunt. We called her Whirlwind’s Bride, and some named her Whore of the South Wind…”
Glaucous leaped up at another shuddering slap-clap from outside. The walls hummed.
