Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
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Текущая страница: 29 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
Neither Daniel nor Jack answered.
Glaucous pushed past them. “ Shewill come soon,” he said. “The Chalk Princess hates bookish sanctuaries.”
“Doesn’t matter what the Chalk Princess does now,” Jack said. “We’re where we’re supposed to be.”
“Ah, did Bidewell tell you that?” Glaucous asked.
“Jack dreams, remember?” Daniel said with a sharpness that made Glaucous uneasy. “He might know more about what’s going to happen than we do.”
“Then by all means, we should go after the girl, and Jack will guide us,” Glaucous said. They will take their stones with them—all will be gone from the warehouse. Our Livid Mistress will come to claim Bidewell—his books alone cannot protect him here. And then, what has always been promised toher servants…
That promise had been revealed to him just once, over a century before. He could hardly remember the details, only the lingering aura of a glorious triumph, control, wealth—unimaginable victory over all adversity. A complete absence of guilt. And what would he be, then? Perhaps not even Max Glaucous anymore.
For the first time in decades a note of a conscience played somewhere in his chest, sharp and painful despite its tiny size. He peered at Jack, then at Daniel, and felt the muscles in his face turn waxy, freezing his expression into an amateur parody of a smile.
How ugly I am,he thought. How old and cruel and full of lies.
CHAPTER 83
The Kalpa
In the tower, waiting…
The fusillade of intrusions had scorched deep into the Kalpa, high and low, practically destroying the two outer bions and leaving the first bion—and the Broken Tower—in a highly unstable condition. A third of the Defenders had dissolved into fiery clouds. It was apparent that the conclusion of the Typhon’s vendetta would not long be delayed.
Ghentun had put his affairs in order, surveyed the damage in the Tiers, and determined what could be done for those ancient breeds that still lived, who did not require the ministry of the Bleak Warden—a small remainder cowering in their niches, moaning songs and prayers, watched over by the few samas brave enough to walk the hallways.
Nothing more could be done.
He had left the Tiers for the last time and returned to the Broken Tower, not at the bidding of the Librarian, but for the sake of his own conscience. Even then he was well aware that any course he chose was likely already embedded in the scheme of one or another Great Eidolon, and he was filled with loathing for them all.
Enslavement.How could you enslave a dying cosmos? What could any of these Eidolonic schemes mean to a being like himself, no longer capable of the evanescent noötic shimmer, much less of passing signal and sense from epitome to epitome, incapable of even approaching what passed for thought among those powers who still claimed to be human?
Waiting to be noticed by the servants of the Librarian.
Ghentun looked down from a high window cracked and smoking, blackened at the edges, rimed inside and out with crystalline densities that crawled and rearranged, trying to heal the crack on this inward side, while on the outer, black otherness crept and sought a point through which to pry entry. The angelins finally appeared and filed into the wide, once empty chamber—not one this time, but thousands of many different shapes and sizes, all blue, all cold, settling themselves in concentric curves with Ghentun and the high window at their focus.
He glanced back at them, unmoved, then returned to his contemplation of what now lay beyond the border of the real. Few in the bions below would ever witness what he was seeing; Eidolons and Menders and Shaper alike preferred ignorance to the certainty of this swiftly approaching doom. The Chaos had fundamentally changed, no doubt about it. Nothing like what surrounded the Kalpa had ever been seen before.
How the ancient emotion of curiosity had declined to a deathly, classic superiority—the triumph of blind satisfaction! This must have been what it was like for so many across the five hundred living galaxies during the last of the Mass Wars…awaiting transformation or destruction by the Eidolons. Not so very long after, many of those same Eidolons were now giving way to the Chaos. The Chaos had even less mercy for Eidolons, so it was said. Ghentun took grim satisfaction in having this history lesson pressed home so vividly. It stung him deeply that he had once abandoned his primordial mass, given up his Mender heritage for a few thousand years of hopeful integration into the upper urbs…A betrayal of high degree, he thought.
The only higher betrayal—
He contemplated the still vague outlines of the deep knowledge given to him by the City Prince. Not to be trusted, of course. And when that knowledge did emerge, would it transform him into the Kalpa’s avenging agent?
The angelins did not move—did not disturb his thoughts. Perhaps the Librarian was preparing for his final moments as well.
The Keeper wondered what had become of the young breed male he had delivered. Analyzed, partitioned, dissected by a crazed Eidolon with an intense and pointless lust for telling detail? Or kept in seclusion, a prize lost among all the other failed and cataloged experiments?
What Ghentun was seeing, outside the border of the real, visible through the broken, leaning sentinels that still tried to surround and protect—
The Chaos had burned through almost all of Earth’s old reality, twisting time and fate into blackened cinders, but along the way, choice bits had been perversely encapsulated, preserved, and now trophies were being arranged as if in a bizarre museum. The shattered artifacts of ancient times and ancient cities terrestrial and otherwise had been collected, somehow transported, and laid out around the last bions of the Kalpa, closer than ever before, as if for the horrified awareness of the next victims—soon to be melted and disfigured and distributed in their own turn across the dark lands of the Chaos. Who could doubt that the Typhon hated all that lay within this huge broken circle of protection? Who could ever doubt that the Typhon’s entire existence had consisted of dismantling and rearranging—but always failing to understand—the secrets of creation?
The Witness lay sprawled like a gray, ghastly mountain in the midst of this heap of murdered history, its gigantic battered head and slumped features still pushing forward the prominent, slowly rotating eye that swung a gray beam across the heights of the tower.
Ghentun could only acknowledge at his core a vacancy of emotion. To learn the nature of one’s lifelong enemy—the enemy of all the scattered galaxies, all those who had once called themselves human—the enemy that had shaped and distorted his life, and yet had provoked the creation of the creatures he so dearly loved, yet now had to abandon…
Vacancy.
Only vacancy.
Ghentun looked for the channels that had always wormed through the Chaos’s reactive scablands, spread around the Kalpa: the trods, along which, it was said—if you watched closely from the city’s sheltering heights—you might see Silent Ones skimming and darting, huge and swift, no doubt seeking breeds, marchers; dispatching or delivering all they caught to those awful repositories: the Necropolis, the House of Sounds, the House of Green Sleep, the Fortress of Fingers, the Vale of Dead Gods, the Wounding River, the Plain of Pits…or any of the other stations of mutation and doom that had been gouged, erected, morphed from the landscape beyond the border of the real over the times since the tower had been shattered.
How do I know these names, these identifications?
Ghentun looked back again at the angelins and realized he was being played with. Was this the City Prince’s gift? Or were the Librarian’s servants sharing some of their knowledge? Either way, the Keeper was being given a lesson in Chaography—what he needed to survive in a land without law. A single angelin broke from the ranks and drifted forward. It extended a slender, tiny blue hand to caress Ghentun’s cloak. Jewels of singing snow fell before his face. The runners have summed. They are all here.
The dreamer is ready.
The angelins parted and a white epitome escorted the young male breed into Ghentun’s presence. The breed approached the high window and stared out, eyes bright with fear and longing. He knew what Ghentun knew, saw what he saw.
Jebrassy looked up at the Keeper, then turned back to the Chaos. “You sent her out there. I have to go find her.”
“Not alone,” Ghentun said.
CHAPTER 84
The Green Warehouse
Another kind of slowness and darkness was approaching. Bidewell peered up at the skylight as he pulled on his gloves and walked between the aisles to his library and the fitful heat of the stove, the last bottle of wine. Ellen was waiting there, his final companion in this cosmos, he presumed. And bearing down upon them both—something he could only sense, not explain.
Another part of the broken chain—as usual, out of sequence.
Or something worse. Perhaps the wall of Alpha, come to squeeze them against Omega. If that was the way of it, then they had not failed. There had never been any way to succeed. Dark thoughts indeed. Ellen sat and stared at the dim orange glow within the stove’s isinglass window.
“Perhaps you should have gone with them,” Bidewell said. “The women, I mean.”
“I thought Ginny would want company,” she said.
Bidewell made a sound at once dubious and sympathetic and sat across from her.
“Are we done? I mean, there’s nothing more we can do?”
“Not at all,” Bidewell said. “Assuming there is still a move to be made in this endgame, we are making such a move now.”
“Care to explain that to me?”
“Of course. The Chalk Princess will come to collect a former servant, now a turncoat. That desire for vengeance might delay her in the pursuit of our young shepherds.”
Ellen peered at him, beyond fear—almost beyond curiosity. “What would it be like, to be collected?”
She looked deep into the isinglass. “What is the Queen in White?”
“An awful force. A multidimensioned storm of pain and fear, carrying a retrograde wave of hatred.”
“What is it that hates us so much?”
Bidewell shook his head.
“Satan?”
“Ah.”
“What’s that mean?”
“How often have we asked ourselves that question?” Bidewell said.
“Is there an answer?”
“Worse than Satan, is my guess. Worse than anything we’ve ever imagined. A malign embryo that will never be born, much less achieve any sort of maturity. A failed god.”
“And this female…is she that failed god?”
“No. She serves, but I believe her servitude is forced. Sometimes I almost recognize her…I’ve dreamed and guessed and thought about it for long centuries now. Perhaps when she arrives, I’ll know what questions to ask.”
“Something’s coming,” Ellen said. A new intensity of darkness and cold was closing in, and something else was in the air—something that made her want to weep. A loss far beyond the loss of a world—the loss of all history.
“Do you have your book?” Bidewell asked, getting to his feet.
“I thought the books were spent.”
“Not these. They still tell our stories.”
“What do we do—read them aloud?” Ellen removed her book from the bag. Something moved through the fallen, frozen crates and boxes—not a cloud, not a figure—swirling around corners that did not exist, turning in directions no eye could follow, radiating a dark spectrum of emotions.
Bidewell gestured—a quick jerk of his fingers—and they opened the books, pushed them to their breasts, leaning toward each other, heads and hands touching.
A sound came in soft gusts, like a cry out of deep caverns—Rachel, weeping throughout eternity for her lost children.
“She’s blind,” Ellen said. “She’s blinded by grief.”
“Do not feel sorrow for her, not yet,” Bidewell said. “Everything about her is obverse. Grief is joy, and even her blindness is a kind of seeing.”
“Is that her?” Ellen asked as the shadows fell and the room seemed suspended over an abyss. Bidewell opened his mouth but could not take a breath. There was no need for an answer. The Queen in White was upon them, and in her way, tried to love them as they deserved.
CHAPTER 85
Ginny
Ginny settled into a hollow in the crusted ground and pulled up the hood of her parka, then drew the strings tight, hiding most of her face. That weird sun was in the sky again. When it burned overhead, she could feel her small bubble of protection shrink, could almost feel it wither—just as when the deathly gray beam passed over. No doubt about it—this sky and what lay beneath did not like her. The stone in her pocket had turned cold, but she didn’t dare let go. It protected her, of that she was certain, and it didn’t matter how it did so—not yet.
Then she had a thought: What if leaving the warehouse had put Bidewell and the others in deeper danger? There wasn’t anything she could do about that now. She had made her choice, half hoping someone would follow her, argue with her; and then, reasoning it through, she understood that it would have to be someone carrying his own stone, Jack or Daniel, perhaps both—but would they bring Glaucous, too? That seemed bitterly incongruous—a strange team indeed. After a few minutes of rest—at least, it felt like a few minutes—she peered over the edge of the hollow and experienced another connection to Tiadba, this time while awake. They were closer. She had known that for some time now but could not understand what it meant; closerin what way? Their worlds had merged. She had guessed that much—doubted it, but could find no other explanation. Not that it was any sort of explanation.
Despite all her foolishness and “bad” decisions, she had always primly asserted her rationality—and now pondered for the ten thousandth time the reasons none of this could possibly happen. Her doubt was like tonguing a jagged, painful tooth. All the rules had been broken. What remained? Magic? Strength of will?
Some effect of whatever science or knowledge had created the sum-runners?
Ultimately, she knew there could be no explanation, only survival and completion. Results. In most ways, she had lived her short life—perhaps shorter than she was happy to consider—in clueless ignorance, wrapped in the baby blankets of culture and surrounded by the poor theories of fellow travelers—all of that amounting to another kind of protective atmosphere, off which the smaller, plunging impossibilities bounced or burned away before reaching her. Consensus reality.
Another kind of bubble, equally inexplicable.
Well, out here that was gone, too. She was alone.
She ducked back into the hole. Something huge swung past nearby—a glimpse of sparking shadow accompanied by a thin, strident howling or weeping, penetrating the bubble and hurting her ears. Ginny slowly gathered enough courage to look out again and saw that the shallow dip in the land lay beside a kind of road, colorless, neither bright nor dark—like something half seen by moonlight. The road stretched to a sawtooth horizon.
“Stay away from the trods,” she murmured. “Whatever rides them might be strong enough to break your little bubble. Or seeyou—and collect you.”
She understood that inner voice. Tiadba again. So close!
Despite this warning, Ginny walked alongside the trod, a dozen paces away—such as her paces were, difficult to judge—and descended a grade onto a broad, grayish-tan plain. The mountainous walls to either side were lined with a dim audience of monuments, strange, seemingly dead and still. Twice she had to hide behind rocks or in dips as huge, flat, elevated shapes glided past on the trod. These made no sound and gave no warning. She did not want to know what they were—her glimpses, from a distance, might have shown heads big as buses, twitching, sweeping eyes pointed down, searching. But they did not see her.
Ginny realized that she needed to think less and act more. Going mad out here would be less than pointless—like lighting a match inside a supernova.
She kept walking. The wrinkled, purple-black sky, devoid of stars, did not bother her so long as she did not look up. Strange, that feeling of silent resentment, like a fly flicked from the hindquarters of a sleeping horse. Whether or not she made any real impression, this place tried to repel her and negate every assumption she brought with her.
Still, she could not ignore a deep curiosity about the nature of the valley. Wherever she looked, the horizon was always curved. Perhaps light behaved differently here.
“I don’t know what that means. Stop thinking.”
The plain between the mountains…the monuments or statues—part of her had seen it all before. Tiadba had been here, was here now.
Or would be here.
Maybe they would meet.
“I’m not sure I’d like that,” she whispered, still walking. “I’m already stretched thin.” She dropped again as something on the trod skimmed by, like a huge dinner plate or a squashed crab with a human face. After it passed, when she got to her feet, she noticed a curved, shining green blade stuck in the black ground directly in front of her. A small handle on one side made it look like a baker’s dough-cutter. A weapon, I think. Why was it left here? Who dropped it?
She decided against touching the blade, much less picking it up. Could be a trap. Then the hair on her arms pricked—something was watchingher—and she swung around, dizzied as the entire horizon seemed to careen this way and that—
And faced her first ancient breed. There wasn’t time to look away. A male, she guessed. Not alive. Not dead.
And not alone. There were hundreds just like him, crawling or walking over the ridge into the valley, a river of figures, each smaller than her—this one barely up to her shoulder—and festooned with scraps of what might have once been thick clothing—armor? Red, orange, green, and blue, now faded, ripped and hanging like tissue.
They were marchers. She was sure of it. Their faces drooped like soft wax, their eyes—
She could not look into their eyes. Failed, lost, changed. Like ants they flowed into the valley, trying to reach something in the center, a structure hidden by a trick of the light, unless—as she did, frightened—you spun around twice, flinching and leaping between each spin to evade those who trudged past.
And after the second rotation—she saw.
Like a huge house or castle, it rose from a shallow crater in the center of the valley—could it actually be that many miles wide, that many miles high?—shining and cold, like hoar-frosted green glass. Every bend of her head or twist of her gaze made it almost impossible to simply seethe structure again. Still, with effort and focus, its detail grew—and its true immensity became more apparent. It had to be a city.
The line of failed marchers were indeed like ants, flowing toward the bowl and the city at the center—where they would slide in and be pinched up by a predator, like an ant lion, while all around the arena the silent sculptures formed a nightmare audience, caught in mid-hope, mid-stride, frozen into something like stone.
A history lesson, she thought.
She moved along with the marchers. It was time.
Time to go down there.
Into the False City.
CHAPTER 86
The Kalpa
Ghentun’s relief at leaving the Broken Tower was clear even to his young companion. They said very little on their descent to the upper urbs, and Ghentun made no attempt to hide the city’s dismal realities—such as they were—from Jebrassy’s bright, curious eyes. If the Librarian could educate them in his selective way, then the Keeper could supplement that education from a more grounded perspective—by taking the long way down, and showing how dire the city’s situation had become. Jebrassy said little as they moved through the highest urbs and levels of the first bion, carried along and between and around the sinuous tracks and channels that formed a silvery three-dimensional web. The web was cut through with complicated surfaces studded with spheres and extrusions that moved slowly like great boats on a fluid sea, though many stuck out sideways or hung upside down from the curves. He cringed at what must have once seemed supernatural power and arrogance—now fallen victim to extraordinary failure and disaster.
The intrusions had broken through to all levels of the Kalpa. Many of the tracks and channels had been sliced away, whipping around to snap and cut across other tracks, shedding their miles-wide neighborhoods—now tangled, blocked, and studded with embedded, flickering debris.
“I don’t understand” was all Jebrassy managed as they descended below the Eidolon urbs and approached the ruins of the crèche.
“Welcome to all our lost worlds, high and low, young breed,” Ghentun murmured. “I’m more at home down here.”
They walked through the Shaper’s domain, now a shambles—barriers broken, machines collapsed in blackened piles of molten slag, but fortunately, no evidence remained of the lost young themselves. The many-armed Shaper had made an attempt at cleaning up after the most devastating intrusions. Clearly, however, there was no longer a crèche, and the umbers would never again deliver young breeds to the Tiers to be raised in the old way.
They stood silent before the Shaper, who gave Jebrassy a brief caress with one long, warm finger. The breed drew back in shock and embarrassment. But he could feel new knowledge filling his insides like a rich and energizing meal. It spread a cool, speedy lubrication throughout his being. He liked that sensation—but he did not enjoy the following awareness of how badly wrong things had gone, nor how ignorant he had been of the foundations of his existence.
He felt small, but not diminished. So much to tell Tiadba when they finally met again. Of that eventuality he was absolutely convinced, despite the gloomy presence of the Tall One—which puzzled him. He
would almost have rather made the attempt alone.
Could a breed and a Tall One—a Mender—ever act like equals? Jebrassy felt up to the task. But he wasn’t so sure the Keeper could actually keep up once they were in the Chaos. Ghentun issued his final instructions to the Shaper—using words Jebrassy could not understand, though he suspected they were not so much elevated or inaccessible as simply specialized.
“The last generation,” Ghentun said as they departed the crèche. “It saddens. But it’s long since time this was done with.”
“Why?” Jebrassy asked. “Weren’t the breeds worthy of being made?”
Ghentun looked down with puzzled respect. Perhaps the Librarian had been liberal with his information, or at least his allowance of sophistication. Either that or they had all underestimated the facility of their smaller charges—in much the same way Eidolons dismissed the abilities of Menders. The worst part of this start to their journey came when they passed through the Tiers. The Keeper had given Jebrassy his gift of invisibility.
A few breeds had survived. They wandered among the smoky ruins, dismayed at the destruction of their blocs and their meadows, yet still trying to put their lives back in order—but clearly that would no longer be possible.
While Jebrassy could hardly have understood the destruction wrought upon the upper levels, this hit him hard. This threw a dark pall over his sense of challenge and adventure. There would be no coming home—that had been clear to him from the beginning. But now, very likely, there would be no home to come back to.
“I feel sad,” he told Ghentun as they descended to the flood channels by way of a hidden lift. “How can sadness make you free?”
The hike along the black-streaked channels past the outer ends of the three isles—in the final, flickering glow of the partially collapsed ceil—seemed to take no time at all. But the long walk to the camp where the marchers had once been trained and equipped gave Jebrassy too much time to think, and his confidence plunged, until they came upon the huts, the tents, the scattered footsteps in the sand and dust. He crouched. Someone had knelt and then sat in the fine sand. He bent to sniff. “She was here,” he said.
“No doubt,” Ghentun said.
“How far?”
“We’ve come thirty miles. We have forty more to go before we pass between the inner generators, then exit the Kalpa into the middle lands. This is the last time we’ll actually know how far we are from anything. The last time distance makes any sense.”
Jebrassy understood. “What will happen if the Kalpa falls—will travel be meaningless everywhere?
What will happen if we can’t measure—”
“Best not to worry about those problems yet,” Ghentun said. “Just grieve for your dead and enjoy their memories.” He knelt beside the young breed, sad and proud at once. Like a father,he told himself. After a while he escorted Jebrassy to the silver dome and introduced him to the last three suits of armor. There was no longer a Pahtun to train them, but they managed.
Jebrassy chose a blue suit and put it on with only a little assistance. He seemed to be a natural. When Ghentun commented on this, the breed shrugged. “I don’t remember it until it happens…don’t really remember it at all. But maybe my body does. Or…maybe the Librarian is still reading me my story, but skipping ahead.”
That comment unsettled Ghentun. Who would be the leader, and who the led? Distances had changed in more ways than one.
Ghentun tried on one of the trainer’s outfits. It seemed to adapt well enough to his bulkier frame. He left the gloves unsealed for the time being.
“Someone’s coming,” Jebrassy said, and pointed across the channel. Ghentun saw a small, pale figure glowing against the black smear that had cut through the sands and marred the channel floor. The figure moved with an awkward, erratic lope.
“It’s not a breed,” Jebrassy said, beginning to feel alarm. “And it’s not big enough to be a Tall One.”
Ghentun extended his vision as far as a Mender’s ability allowed. The figure was an epitome, part of a Great Eidolon.
They stood their ground and waited.
“I know that one,” Jebrassy said as it drew near. “I recognize the face.”
“It showed a face?” Ghentun asked, astonished.
The figure moved swiftly enough, despite its odd gait.
“I’ve gone through a dreadful ordeal,” the epitome called, and joined them on the sandy floor of the channel. “Made myself primordial. Still not entirely knitted, I think.” It held up a small, pale hand and turned it this way and that, inspecting its fingers as if for the first time. “Limitations have their limitations, that’s becoming more obvious,” it said, then glanced with envy at Ghentun’s flower finger. “Is that actually useful? It looks useful.”
Ghentun grimaced at the memory of his own return to primordial mass—then clenched his hand in embarrassment. Flower fingers were seldom referred to openly in polite company.
“I’ll be annealed in a few hours,” the epitome said. “Out there…I’ll be able to survive for a time. But I’ll need some sort of protection, just like you. How marvelous.”
“How should we address you, Eidolon?” Ghentun asked, confusion bringing out a perverse courtesy. The old forms were definitely being shattered. No Great Eidolon had ever gone primordial, to his knowledge. It seemed an affront—both a sacrilege and an imposition on the privileges of the low.
“Please call me Polybiblios,” the epitome said. “I shall be a male—by tradition—and so I shall be known as ‘him’ and not the more appropriate ‘it.’ Though real sexuality seems lost to us all—with the possible exception of our young breed, here.”
Now it was Jebrassy’s turn to be embarrassed.
“In a way, I am probably the best part of the Librarian—or at least I will suffer that delusion until I am proved wrong. May I join you, young marchers? I promise to be humble, in my way. And possibly even useful—like that wonderful finger.”
Ghentun sealed his gloves and put his hands behind his back.
The epitome sat in the sand and with an expression of delight, lifted a handful of the gray grit, then let it fall through soft fingers to the channel floor.
Jebrassy had grown strangely fond of the fragment of the Librarian that had offered companionship and teaching in the tower. But seeing him solidly incarnate, similar in size, and out here…very confusing.
“How canyou be useful?” he asked.
“I brought this,” Polybiblios said. He held out a gray box. “Without it…nothing will happen. Nothing important, at any rate. Things will just come to an end. And after so much time, that would be a pity.”
CHAPTER 87
The Chaos
They might have been marching for years. Lifetimes.
The marchers were adapting to the Chaos bit by awful bit. Asserting a new sophistication by breaking the rules, they had become expert at crossing and sometimes even following trods. Trods, it seemed, had a kind of predictability. When there were no travelers about—for there were other and even stranger users than the gliding Silent Ones—the trods were hard and slick, like glass. When travelers approached, and long before the marchers could be seen, the trods would go all gummy and start sucking at their boots. There was usually more than enough time to scramble to one side or the other and hide in the broken rubble.
The entire Chaos was like a garbage heap. Wherever they went out here, stuff had been tossed about, disrupted, discarded—and most often, left in a crumbling, blackened state, its vitality sucked away. There were lots of places a breed could hide.
None of them had been lost since Perf—but that only meant they were lucky. They had seen more than enough evidence of the destroyed, the transformed.
During their short periods of rest, if the Chaos was not too badly mangled and some of the old rules still applied—and if the armor advised them it was safe—they would remove their helmets and breathe what was left of the ancient atmosphere of Earth.
It was not pleasant, but it was different enough to relieve the dragging boredom of the ever-changing, the unpredictable, and often enough the indescribable.
Their journeys had taken them around some of the largest monuments to the Typhon’s dementia. The marchers created their own names for what they saw: the Awful Bumbles, Great Burning Pile, Last Chance Ditch, Glider Dumps. That last had been a kind of miles-wide cemetery of worn-out, discarded Silent Ones, their eyes glazed and probably blind.
