Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
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Текущая страница: 28 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
Daniel thought this through, brow wrinkled, plump cheeks growing pale. He gave Jack a pinched look, part disbelief, part envy. “Okay, magic boy. You know something.”
“It’s obvious. We’re being messed with—someone sent the stones back, like Bidewell says.”
“Like he hints,” Daniel corrected.
“And the thing that controls the hunters—the Chalk Princess, Glaucous’s Livid Mistress—that could be from the future, too. But what’s messing with us is no longer inthe future. We’re being shoved up againstthe future—what’s left of it. Right?”
“With you so far,” Daniel said, intrigued that Jack was suddenly engaging in theory.
“So we’re just getting the last ripples of aftereffect. Whatever’s going to happen, hashappened—here. Except for the warehouse—and us.”
“Because of the stones, or Bidewell’s weird library?”
They both stared at the fragmented city, beyond shock, even beyond wonder, and then stared at each other, expressing their only remaining surprise: that they were still alive, still thinking, still speaking.
“Maybe both,” Jack said. “We’re saved—for the moment. But that moment is going to be awfully short. And then we’re going to have to do something.”
“What?” Daniel asked.
Jack shook his head.
The cityscape around the warehouse had congealed into a bleakness of broken buildings, sluggish flows of muddy water, torn, ragged clouds barely obscuring the battered sky. The last limb of the hideous arc of fire dropped below the horizon and the clouds glowed blood-red, then dimmed to somber brown, their undersides fitfully illuminated by curling wisps of orange and green.
“The whole city is a grab bag of past and present,” Daniel said. “If you’re right, it could mean this Chalk Princess is still out there—waiting for things to settle before she comes and gets us. Glaucous has a weird confidence.”
“He’s protecting you,” Jack said.
“Is he? How strange. I don’t need protecting.” He poked and rubbed one temple with a thumb. “I don’t see any sign of the women who left. Your friends.”
Glaucous made sure Daniel and Jack were out of the way, then approached Ginny’s cubicle. With batlike acuity, he could hear her moving about from across the warehouse. Ginny blinked and looked confused as he drew back the flimsy curtain. “I don’t want you near me,” she warned, her tongue thickened by the long, hard sleep. “I’ll call for help.”
“Abject apologies for my crude appearance and manners,” Glaucous said. He glanced up. “The young men are on the roof, satisfying curiosity. They seem to be learning to trust each other.”
“Jack knows better,” Ginny said, still blinking—whether from nerves or irritation, she couldn’t tell. Everything felt gritty. Everything seemed to be running down—even her brain.
“Perhaps. At any rate, I am no threat,” Glaucous said softly. “In fact, I eliminated the ones who came here to hunt you. The man with his coin, the woman with her flames and smoke. A dreadful pair. I have my allegiances, of course—and they may not match yours. But with no leadership, I am no more a threat than one of these warehouse cats. You are not mymouse. Whom would I deliver you to? And why?”
“Please go away,” Ginny said.
“Not before I salve my conscience. You have misplaced your trust, and now I fear the worst. Bidewell has hidden himself for many decades, but we—my kind, hunters all—knew him long before that. He was legendary among us.”
“He’s been kind to me.”
“We do have that ability, to be charming when we wish, despite all other appearances. Can you feel that between us, even now?” He looked down, raised his hand to his forehead as if ashamed. “Pardon. It’s an instinct, misplaced no doubt. I will withdraw it immediately.” He shut down the treacle ambience. Ginny stepped back, even more confused.
“I will come no closer, and I will leave soon. But I must tell you…in the spirit of an honorable hunt, which must soon resume. Bidewell brought you all here for the same reason I attached myself to the one who calls himself Daniel—a strange fellow, don’t you feel it? Not what he seems. Very ancient. We call his like bad shepherds—but no matter. Whoever possesses a stone exudes an atmosphere of protection, and provides others a pass to the next level of this astonishing endgame. As do you, young Virginia. Here’s the pattern, the picture of our next few blinks of time. I will complete my part in the game, and Bidewell will complete his. He will deliver you to his mistress, and I will deliver Daniel and Jack to mine.”
“I don’t believe anything you say,” Ginny murmured, but her eyes indicated otherwise. She had never been good at trust.
“Pardon me for speaking truth,” Glaucous said. “But even among my kind, there are rules.”
Glaucous backed out and let the curtain fall, then returned to the storage room, his face stony and gray.
CHAPTER 78
The Chaos
Under the Witness’s eternal gaze, the Silent Ones had almost skimmed down upon the breeds when the entire land seemed to erupt with geysers and fountains of sooty darkness. The huge, flattened faces with their darting, ever-searching eyes—reminiscent of Tall Ones, breeds, and other varieties unknown to the marchers—had suddenly pulled away, leaving Tiadba and her companions spilled on the black ground, waiting for doom…doom delayed.
Tiadba withdrew her arm from her faceplate and saw that Khren and Shewel were already up on their knees. Herza and Frinna had risen as well. Still vibrating with shock, Tiadba managed to push into a crouch, and listened to the shrieks and wails shooting skyward from all around. The compressed ruins of a dead city had either risen around the Witness or been pushed into place like a pile broomed up for burning.
“Where are we?” she asked. “Has the Chaos shrunk?”
Khren and Macht crawled beside her. Nico had found another wall with better footholds.
“There has been movement,” the armor’s voice announced to all. “Distances have been reduced.”
By now the marchers had found vantages to all sides, less interested in the city than in what had happened to the Silent Ones and where the Witness was now situated, almost on top of them. Tiadba studied the Witness with a frown. The huge, distorted head—as tall as three or four blocs stacked on top of each other—had been erected on a massive scaffold of old buildings. Its expression seemed frozen in weary despair. Perhaps that half-melted visage revealed its emotions over times longer than the life of a breed. With everything shifting and changing, perhaps the Chaos would accelerate and she could actually seethe agony come and go across those ruptured brows, accentuating the rotation of that huge, protruding eye, dull green glimmers winking within its dark pit of a pupil. The sweep of the beam had been interrupted, but now the glimmers were focusing, re-forming…and the beam lanced out again over the Chaos, returning to its slow, inevitable rotation. Khren and Shewel pulled Tiadba to her feet. None of them had been hurt—yet. They were left untouched in the very shadow of the Witness, wrapped around by labyrinths of broken walls and toppled structures—spirals, towers, ornamental facades.
The walls had grown up in no time, while the sky had turned a sickly metallic gray and something like wind had rushed over the Chaos, carrying fanned-out clots of black dust. And now the fountains, shooting into the sky, suddenly joined into spinning funnels, then curved over and swooped toward the distorted horizon.
“Here!” Herza and Frinna called.
Tiadba pushed Khren back and climbed the opposite angled wall to see. They all watched as the Silent Ones maneuvered on their tracks, hunkering, collapsing their stilts to avoid the funnels, now like thick fingers, with the marchers in the middle of a giant palm. A kind of living smoke shot through with gray and silver rose all around, and the Chaos erupted once more—this time bolts of red light rose up and spread against the wrinkled sky.
“More intrusions,” the armor explained.
“I seethat,” Tiadba said, and then reached to make sure she still carried the bag in her pouch, with her books. Theirbooks.
How could Jebrassy ever find them, ever make his way through this?
“Where’s the beacon?” Nico asked. “I don’t hear anything.” If they lost the beacon, then it did not matter whether they were alive or dead.
“It’s stopping,” Khren called.
The fountains fell short, the geysers sputtered, the continuous bedlam of screams and whoops dropped in pitch and intensity to low rumbles.
“We have to move across the trod,” Tiadba said.
“There’s something out there, on the other side,” Nico said, pointing. Their suit faces magnified what he had spotted and showed them a different kind of ruin, blocky cubes and rectangular structures laid out in a grid and topped by a lighter swirl of sky.
Tiadba closed her eyes and tried to remember what her visitor would have called them. Streets. Roads.
“I know a place like this,” she said.
“We’ll have to make it fast,” Nico advised, and Khren agreed.
They pushed over the rubble and ran over the dimpled trod, its pale surface spongy, then mucky, like a fallow swale. Behind them the nearest Silent One began to rise up on its thin legs, the mouth in the flat massive face twisting as if in pain.
“Faster!” the Pahtun-voice commanded, and they pushed, tugged, braced against the suck, and crossed the trod to step out on glazed black crust, dust beneath, and then—
A road made of square red stones, covered with black ice, but hard—they could run! They could flee as the Silent Ones pulled up their stilt-legs and began to reach out with fluorescing grapples. But the marchers were now out of reach.
They walked in silence, moving what might have been miles through the ruins. The small generator had been sucked down into the rubble on the other side of the trod, pinned between collapsing walls. They had only one clave left between them.
And Tiadba had her books.
“Is this place new, or old?” Khren asked.
“Very old, I think,” Tiadba said as they increased their distance from the both the Witness and the trod.
“What kind of place is it?” Herza asked. Usually she was the least curious, less even than Frinna, and never asked questions.
“I think it’s called a ‘town,’” Tiadba said. “Like a bloc, but laid out flat instead of stacked.”
“Some of the buildings look like they might have been taller,” Khren said. “Maybe something mowed them down.”
Twisting curls of feeble blue light arced from the Chaos into the flat cityscape, dancing down the roads and caressing the shattered walls. Nico asked what the loops were.
“Entangled matter,” Pahtun’s voice responded. “These are ring fates, interactions between particles that are the same, once separated by time and fate—but no more.”
Ring fates.Tiadba shuddered. She had not heard that phrase before, not even from her visitor, but it sounded important, even crucial.
“Are they dangerous?” Khren asked.
“Unknown,” the armor replied. “They cannot be avoided. You are made from primordial mass. There may be more entangled recognitions between matter from the past, now joined to itself in the present.”
They tried to focus on the words they almost understood. Tiadba thought that her and Jebrassy’s visitors might have spoken to them out of just such a past. Did that mean they were connected—made in part at least of the same matter?
She told the others that they needed to find something like shelter, and stay alert. The Chaos had been crunched, compressed—that seemed to be the simplest way of expressing what they had experienced—and perhaps that meant this past had caught up with them, colliding and merging with everything around the Kalpa.
“What’s next?” Herza asked, her second question of the journey.
CHAPTER 79
The Green Warehouse
Jack leaned over the edge of the roof, looking for people and finding a few still out in the open. But he could not recognize any of the bookgroup witches, and no one else out there moved. They had become obsidian sculptures locked in attitudes of walking, running, or just standing, arms held up as if beseeching someone, something—anything. “Are they all like that?” Jack asked.
Daniel had no answer but felt a twinge…an unwelcome jab of concern. He could see through many of
the buildings, as if their reality had been frozen mid-collision. Some of these were slowly fading, crumbling—turning to more black dust.
He rubbed his temples vigorously, then bent over, fighting off a headache. “I’m not smart anymore, Jack. This has me squeezed flat. Every secret, every bit of knowledge—it’s right before our eyes, and we don’t know what it means,” he said. “I used to be an arrogant bastard—from what I remember, which isn’t much. Maybe I belong with Glaucous, and you should stay away from both of us. I’m sorry I brought him here with me.”
Jack could say nothing in response. Their past was gone—literally gone, deleted, absorbed, powdered away. What could they be responsible for now? What sort of freedom of action or choice could they possibly have?
Ginny took just enough time to pluck her stone out of its box, throw the box between some heavy crates, and pull a bundle of clothes and a can of beans, all she thought they could spare, from under the bed. Enough was more than enough. She couldn’t sit still another second—couldn’t waste any more time waiting for the others to finish their enigmatic preparations.
She had slept through the departure of the three witches. She did not see Ellen in the stacks or near the outer door. She did not want to see Jack or Daniel, and she certainly did not want to encounter Glaucous again.
Or Bidewell.
She was going to do what she always did best: turn left, move on, make the wrong decision. Leaving the security of Bidewell’s warehouse—if it wassecure, which she had always doubted—seemed foolish, but now more than ever she couldn’t stand the thought of falling asleep again and dreaming of her lost other. She worked her way through the stacked boxes, smelling their dry mustiness, feeling the strange new cold that wafted through the lofty old building, winding like an invisible vapor down the aisles and between the rooms, chilling the steel doors like frozen hands, reaching in, searching…
The stone felt warm and heavy in her pocket. All the lightness after her hours in the empty room, the time spent with Mnemosyne, had collapsed under the weight of troubled sleep, and now she felt only leaden desperation.
She pushed open the outer door, cringing at the squeal it made, and pulled the mechanical lever that released the gate lock now that the city’s electricity was gone. The cold on the ramp was stranger and more intense than in the warehouse, and the brown, dusty darkness beyond the gate more forbidding than she had imagined while making her preparations.
But this was the way it had to be. Separation, escape, in the hopes of a new uniting—when they were ready, when they were mature.
Whatever they could have time to grow into.
With damp fingers she rolled the stone in her jacket pocket—the jacket that Bidewell had given her, a heavy woolen British Air Force coat, sixty years old or more—and used her other hand to pull the wire gate inward.
The last scatter of writhing clouds were lit with arcs of pale green and yellow flame that flickered and passed overhead, like the northern lights, she thought, but more intense—and not at all lovely. Above the clouds, the sky had become a vault of nothing. She should not look up, she decided. Yet looking at the streets outside—the shaved, dissected, rearranged buildings, covered with crawling black ice, the few people left behind by Terminus, petrified, contorted, filled with that same waxy, crawling ice—awful! So she kept her eyes on her feet and walked as quickly as the thickening air allowed. She seemed to fill a kind of bubble, an unseen protected volume that pushed ahead and around her. The bubble might be an effect of the stone, but she couldn’t know for sure. It was like a pocket of air dragged below the surface of a pond by a diving beetle. It might give out at any moment, and the waxy dark ice would fill her veins and then something else would peer out through her blind eyes…
She looked back, a bad idea, but she couldn’t help herself. The gray air behind could not completely obscure the sharp bluish glow rising from the warehouse, the only building she could see that had not been destroyed or rearranged like a child’s set of blocks. She wished them well. The warehouse grew smaller too quickly, as if each step she made were a dozen. A new way to walk: tattered running shoes turned into seven-league boots…
Ginny lifted her arms, wondering if she could will herself to fly, but nothing happened. She kept walking. The ground changed from cracked cement and asphalt to soft gray dirt, then to something blacker and harder—a kind of ropy crust like old lava, but thin and crunchy. She hoped the fine gray dust that puffed up from beneath the broken crust would not swallow her feet, or swallow her. Some of her thoughts as she performed this odd journey were taken up with the protests of a rational, practical young woman who told her that leaving the warehouse was worse than suicide—but who also told her that none of this could possibly be real. In the broken, flat, and listless world of Terminus—a thin coat of paint between life and doom—there had to be an answer to the madness, an escape, a door or hatch through which she could crawl and pull herself into real sunlight, real night, walk under real stars, real moon—
Real sleep, normal dreams. And a real city, not this broken-down jumble. But then she looked up from her blur of feet, looked around again. She was no longer in the city. The brown and gray air was reddened by the rise of the flaming arc—all that seemed to be left of the sun, wrapped around a cindery disc. This was accompanied by a deep rumbling and trembling beneath her shoes, the black ground itself rebelling against what now passed for day. And off in the distance she saw the ghostly hint of a sweeping beam, not precisely a searchlight, more like the blade of a huge sword cutting through the sky.
I know that. The Witness.
This made her stop. She found herself actually wringing her hands, a story-time gesture she never would have believed herself capable of. But she took some solace from the repetitive motion and the pressure of her strong, curling fingers.
Her frown deepened, wrinkles and seams growing across her forehead and cheeks until her face felt like an old, old woman’s. The air seemed to be aging her. Terminus might be pulling her up short, abruptly
snipping her world-line like a grim, silent Norn.
Anything could be happening.
And so she had to keep walking.
From the middle of the roof the shelter door creaked and slammed open. Ellen kicked the door again as it swung back, then stepped out onto the wooden pallets. “We weren’t watching her for just a moment…!” she called, and then stopped, sucked in her breath, and lifted her hand to shield her eyes against the aurora glow.
Jack didn’t say a word, just broke into a run over the wooden path to the shelter. His shoulders bounced from the walls, then he swung onto the ladder and scrambled below like a monkey. Daniel followed, more deliberate. Trying to figure an advantage, he thought with the smallest pang. Ellen stared at him as he walked past. She focused on his face—she did not want to see any more of the sky and landscape than she had to.
“The girl took off?” Daniel asked.
Ellen’s face was white with accumulated shock, and now this. She folded her arms tight and nodded.
“We were supposed to protect her.”
“We’ll go find her,” Daniel said. “This place isn’t going to last much longer, anyway.”
CHAPTER 80
Downtown
The witches could not find any street they recognized.
The whole downtown area had been fractured and then tossed into a mishmash chronology. The only structures that seemed familiar were bookstores, some shuttered for decades, yet once again presenting faded signs to empty streets; but their interiors were deserted, empty of both books and readers. Agazutta, Farrah, and Miriam moved on in a tight huddle, exchanging quiet, hollow jokes—the last little encouragements they could muster—but unable to hide their fear at the appalling state of their once beautiful city.
“I never imagined it might be like this. I thought I’d die in bed,” Miriam said.
“Alone and unloved?” Agazutta made a wry face. “Maybe this is better.”
“Speak for yourself,” Miriam said.
“Always have.”
“Girls.” Farrah nudged them around a gray, jagged corner. “This is Fifth Avenue.”
“My God, have we walked that far?” Miriam asked.
“I’m not sure what ‘far’ means now,” Agazutta said.
They stood for a moment, the dusty breeze chilling them like a soft, dead hand.
“That’s north, I think,” Farrah decided. She wiped grit from her eyes and intensified her frown. “What now?”
“I recognize something up the block a ways,” Miriam said. “It’s the central library.”
“Haven’t we had enough of books?” Farrah said.
Miriam said, “I think it’s our little green books that have got us this far. Maybe we can climb to an upper floor and get our bearings.”
“I say we go east, that way,” Farrah said, pointing. “I think that’s still east. The freeway isn’t far, if it’s still there.”
“My house would be north,” Agazutta said.
“I don’t know if we can make it,” Miriam said. “It’s getting much too cold.” She pulled up the collar of her sensible gray wool coat—the sort of coat one wore for many seasons in Seattle. Agazutta turned toward a window crusted into the wall beside her, its frame cracked, pitch-dark behind the dusty glass. Palm-and fingerprints streaked through the dust, as if people had walked by with hands out, touching the walls, the window, anything solid to guide themselves through the murk—before they vanished.
She stared into the glass and realized that the reflection staring back was of another face entirely, not hers—and not a happy one. With a little cry, she backed away, and the face faded. To the southwest, around Bidewell’s warehouse, a pillar of swirling cloud seemed to be gathering, piping out a thin calliope whistle—the voice of a mad mother crooning to her children.
“Let’s get off this street,” Farrah said. “Anyplace will do, even a library.”
They walked through the fragile rubble, crunching like burned meringue beneath their shoes, in the direction that had once been north; toward the big library.
Inside, the library was remarkably intact—deserted, but only loosely touched by the changes beyond its high, staggered glass and aluminum walls. Quiet filled the lobby and stairwells leading to the upper levels—empty quiet.
Agazutta leaned against a desk and coughed into her handkerchief. “We’ll get black lung out there.”
“Dust of ages,” Miriam said, and reached into her cloth bag to pull out her book. She held it up, showed it to her fellow Witches.
They produced their own volumes—the books that Bidewell had given them years ago, when they began working for him.
“Books are special,” Miriam said. “They mean something beyond any value I ever gave them. Not that I don’t love books. I mean, look at this place…it’s hardly been touched.”
Agazutta fumbled with the brass latch on her book, but Farrah reached out and stopped her. With a sigh, Agazutta slipped the book back into her bag.
“Whatever protection books give didn’t seem to mean much to the people who worked here.”
“Maybe they left,” Miriam said doubtfully.
“I’d hate to think that we’re all that special,” Farrah said, and when the others looked her way, puzzled or irritated, she added with uncharacteristic sheepishness, “I don’t want to be the last of anything—especially the last old woman.”
“What’s old mean, here?” Agazutta said.
“I want to be in my clinic,” Miriam said.
“Time’s over, except for us,” Farrah said grimly. She pointed to the high, broad windows. They were frosting, black crystalline rime creeping up like a cold shadow.
Farrah had made her way behind the abandoned information desk and held up a thick volume from the Cambridge Ancient History. She opened it and flipped through the pages. A dark silvery fluid spilled out around her feet and gathered into a shining pool. Miriam bent to examine the spill—touched it with her fingers, lifted them. The tips were covered with dark iridescence, alphabet rainbows—hematite words. “Uh-oh,” Agazutta said, and backed away from the nearest flight of stairs. From the elevator doors a thin dark liquid gushed through the crack, while another, more copious flow cascaded down the steps. The women retreated.
The streams joined on the concrete floor.
Behind the desk, Farrah shook a few last drops from the book of history, then held it up. In the dim light its pages were as pristine as untouched snow.
Miriam’s expression turned from astonishment to resignation—almost to understanding—but then held firm at acceptance. “Keep your things close,” she warned. “It’s what Bidewell has been saying all along. Without readers, books do unpredictable things.”
“Waiting for new characters, new stories,” Agazutta said.
“ Us?” Farrah asked, her voice as frightened and gentle as a child’s.
“No, dear,” Miriam said. “We’ve never been very important.”
But Farrah had laid the book on the counter and, like a librarian, was smoothing her palm over the blank pages to press them open. At her touch, letters returned, apparently random, unreadable—embryonic history waiting to be made. This was what had softened her voice. “Are you sure?”
“Oh dear,” Miriam said.
CHAPTER 81
Ginny
Ginny stumbled as she ascended a low ridge of blackened stone, and then, beyond, saw a thick stream of something iridescent sliding toward her, then curve off to the right—flowing uphill, not down. She would go around that curve to avoid crossing the fluid—whatever it was. She hadn’t brought much real water—just a plastic quart bottle bumping around in her pack. But she wasn’t thirsty and she didn’t feel hungry or tired. Only a few minutes seemed to have passed, and yet she must have walked many miles.
A practical part of her mind now asked a key question, and Ginny wondered why she hadn’t thought of it earlier: What was guiding her?
She reached into her jacket pocket and touched the stone, felt it roll in her fingers—a new freedom. Yet when she tried to pull it back behind her, even in the narrow confines of her pocket, it resisted. It had a tendency, a preference.
It pulled in the same direction she was walking.
“I am the stone, the stone is me,” Ginny sang in a hoarse whisper, and felt a kind of reassurance, a counter to her fear.
The flaming arc passed beyond the horizon again. She looked down from the not-sky to keep her eyes from aching. Then it occurred to her and she let out a small cry. She had left the last place on Earth that was not already part of the awful dream.
I’m walking into Tiadba’s Chaos. Where’s her city?
Where’s the Kalpa?
As she held the stone, words streamed into her head—very familiar, that voice she had never heard yet knew so intimately—awakening what she had been made to know all along. You are here.
You are in its heart.
Find me.
Find your sister.
CHAPTER 82
The Green Warehouse
In the small storage room, surrounded by collapsed cardboard boxes and piles of broken-down crates, Glaucous lay back on the narrow cot, thinking over all he had seen and done, all those he had caged and put to an end. Birds sold or tossed to the rats; children delivered by the dozens to the Chalk Princess. In the long run, in the undoubtedly stellar perspective of someone like the Mistress, it came to no difference. He did not feel guilt so much as imbalance. He did not seek understanding—Daniel might understand a little of what was happening outside, but Glaucous worried that he was too old, too much a living fossil. His intellect had been whetted to a dedicated edge more than a century ago, and then blunted by hard use. He could manufacture a semblance of cleverness, summon a pattern of behaviors in response to a more or less familiar challenge—
But not to this. This was a young person’s game. He could only contribute what he had added to the mix so often before: the fog of promise, the taint of lies.
When the three had been isolated in Bidewell’s back rooms, he had feltsomething moving through the building like a subtle breeze—Mnemosyne herself, he supposed. For a moment his memory had sharpened, put itself in order. Quite the opposite sensation of being around the Devil’s whirlwind, the Queen in White.
His lips moved. In the lowest, softest voice, he tried to remember his story differently, to speak of a young boy treated well—not showered with riches, but trained to fulfillment and not servitude, his potential shaped by firm, gentle, if not expert hands—fine propensities nurtured, bad tendencies discouraged…
Maturing into a normal life. A homely but honorable woman might have taken him to be her husband. Children might have come that he—they—would protect and never, ever deliver up to her. He could not imagine love, not after all these years, but he could summon a vague picture of mutual respect and understanding.
He clenched his teeth, got up from the old cot, and put on his jacket. The door opened.
Daniel and Jack stood in the gray light.
“The girl’s gone,” Daniel said. Behind them, ice grew over the boxes and crates, up the walls and ceiling. Near the concrete floor the ice was slowly staining black.
“Ah,” Glaucous said, head inclined, eyes mere cracks. He rubbed his hands against the cold. He was used to moving in the dark.
“We can’t find her,” Jack said. Glaucous searched the boy’s face and found only nervous excitement. A fog of promise. He would unite these two. They would become like brothers. His last contribution to the game—perversely, the creation of a bond of trust.
“I heard three of the women leave,” Glaucous said. “Where’s the fourth?” She stayed here for you, Jack. Do you care?
“She’s with Bidewell in the office,” Jack said.
“If we are here,” Glaucous said, “and we do seem to be here, and moving about and speaking, then I assume Terminus has…I’m at a loss for words, young masters. Has Bidewell navigated us through that impassable barrier?”
