Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
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Текущая страница: 30 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
But still alive.
No finality, no mercy, no sense.
How many times the marchers had been pursued by things they could not see…beyond count. Their armor—and the Kalpa’s beacon, still pulsing and singing—guided them through ditches and around chasms filled with sluggish, churning liquid. Things seemed to swim or drown deep in that oily ooze. They walked on the flat margins of lakes of blue fire, casting long shadows against brownish cliffs like puppets backlit on a screen. The enervation that had come over them was not so much physical as mental. They were made of old, ordinary matter. Such matter—configured into a breed—could not absorb too much strangeness without throwing it out of memory, or stopping to rest. But there was no chance to stop.
And so much of what they saw, they promptly forgot. Another mercy.
CHAPTER 88
Glaucous grabbed Jack and Daniel and pulled them back into the red-rimmed shadows. “Stalkers,” he said.
Large, sinuous shapes slid over the cobbles and through the streets. Jack squinted to see, first making out what seemed to be several beetles dragging long, bloated worms. Blinking, he saw something else—snakes wagging spadelike heads, their eyes black and deep, crawling on a cluster of appendages and trailing long, bloated bodies. The bodies looped and coiled until these monsters passed out of sight around an eroded corner, yet still, afterimages danced in his eyes, light being what it was out here. Daniel hugged the wall, fingers rubbed raw against the brick and mortar. “What are those?”
Glaucous shook his head. “I’ve never seen their like.”
“Ugly,” Jack said.
“We didn’t escape after all, Jack,” Daniel said. “The bad places have caught up with us.”
They were about to move on again when from another direction, over the shattered walls, they saw seven large, manlike creatures in procession, heads bowed, dressed in robes that fell behind them in pools of blood-colored fabric—but the shapes that bumped and protruded against the fabric could not have been legs, not two legs, at any rate. Their faces were dark, smooth, with long red vertical slits for eyes and slick ropy hair writhing on their shoulders.
Glaucous gave his companions a curious, almost fey look, as a hungry man might look at a banquet he is sure is poisoned, or as someone about to hang will regard his approaching executioners. “They’ll search the ruins of the old cities, wherever they can,” he said. “These places may still be unfriendly to them—not completely digested.”
Daniel covered a disgusted cough. Jack waited for the streets to clear, then jabbed his hands into his jacket pockets and walked ahead on the cracked, twisted roadbed.
They followed.
“Where do they come from?” he asked Glaucous.
“I’m as ignorant as you. The Mistress employs the Moth, and I presume the Moth employs ghosts and such I’ve never seen—not even in a Gape. If they’re the same things that gathered up the shepherds—the children brought to our Mistress—they never revealed themselves, never came out into the open.”
Daniel asked, “Would they recognize you—take orders from you?”
Glaucous laughed into his fist and shook his head, a very amused no. “I am low, very low. If they hunt, they hunt everything that survives and moves about. I presume they are searching and clearing before our Mistress goes out for another tour.”
CHAPTER 89
The Chaos
Thrusting up hundreds of feet from a cleft that stretched from horizon to horizon, the building was bigger by far than anything the breeds would have thought of as a dwelling, a house: a crystalline heap of shapes and angles, crusted over with what might have been broken pieces of other buildings, and those parts decorated with the petrified remnants of people and animals. The awful whole glowed with a pallid,
putrid light that played tricks even through their faceplates, bending and warping, making their companions seem farther away, or looming close, huge and menacing—and then lulled them into a desire for senselessness, isolation—to run off and be alone, find a trod, just sit and wait. The seductive green emanation seemed to penetrate even their armor’s strongest protections. As they moved in two close groups along the edge of the cleft—avoiding a particularly broad and spongy trod—Macht and Shewel could not help but stare at the ugly, angular pile, as if trying to make sense of its madness.
“Are those peopleall over it?” Shewel asked, squinting, his eyes reflecting the twisted, cluttered image.
“They might be carvings,” Macht offered without conviction. “Too big to be people of any kind we know.”
“Well, what arethey, then?” Shewel asked sharply, as if angry at the armor’s quiet. Pahtun’s voice echoed in all their helmets. “This is the House of Green Sleep. If you must know, they are the shells of victims gathered from long-dead galaxies, swept up on waves of shrinking space and time, then carried heedless and hated to this last place, to be displayed without pattern or thought.”
Macht grumbled, “You had to ask.”
“Oh,” Shewel said. “Well, now I know.”
Nico glanced back from some distance ahead, walking point with Herza and Frinna. “No more stupid questions,” he said.
“Ignorance is bliss,” Frinna agreed.
They found a small, dry pit deep enough to hide them from both the trod and the sickly light of the house, and paused long enough to rest and set up the portable generator. They pulled aside their helmets and huddled close as Tiadba took a book from her leg pouch.
“Read,” Herza insisted. The sisters were the least critical of the marchers, most enthusiastic about the odd, wandering bits of story Tiadba found or deciphered.
“Yes, read,” Macht said. “Take our minds off that thing out there.”
“I’d prefer softer stories,” Khren said. He’d developed an aversion for these difficult tales and all their odd words.
“This is what I can find,” Tiadba said.
“Just read anything,” Nico said, and closed his eyes, lying back on the dark earth within the protection of the generator.
Tiadba opened the book.
We chose our vessel, the Intensity, from the last great fleets parked in huge yards all through the twelve cities. She was reputedly the fastest of transports, faster even than the cosmos-spanning portals of the middle Trillennium, but in poor repair. She had not flown for a hundred thousand years. During the Reduction, all these ships had ferried refugees to Earth and her sister planets, as well as to the orbiting web planes, spiral ribbons, and shells set twisting and spinning around the renewed sun. They had carried back to Earth survivors of the Chaos’s desolation, a pitiful fraction of our cosmos’s former glory.
Dealings in my youth with a diversity of Mender ship clans and the more rooted portal clans had taught me the ways of all transport, some outmoded and even then becoming impossible as the Chaos altered the fine anatomy of the cosmos—the swifting ways by which travelers flew. I found my crew among young rebels, deviant Shapers and Menders. In contests, I tested and winnowed from the thousands who volunteered.
And chose my twenty-five, about to become philosopher-adventurers all. All past science had to be adapted, or abandoned, to get around the Typhonic perversions. Nearly all hyperdetics and means of communication and transport were blocked. Superluminosity, transfate reassembly, dark-mass portals—the technologies of almost a hundred trillion years no longer carried us across the cosmos. Only one reliable engine of spatial motion remained—bosonic threadfold, itself rumored to be Shen in origin.
We converted the Intensityto threadfold. By itself, the method puts tremendous strain on any crew, for you do not arrive what you started out being—whatever your matter. Fates curl back, traits and lives mix—for a time, the crew becomes the ship, and then the journey, and later, it is difficult to rebuild what once you were.
We would become intimate in ways none could foresee. We accepted this. It was better—to our way of thinking, a unanimity among the perversely disagreeable—than becoming noötic. And so we departed the ports of Earth.
Familiar to all is our passage through the realm of the Spectrals, who first learned to recharge, train, and breed galaxies.
Displayed along the inward-closing membrane of the Chaos, the last of the Spectrals had been enslaved by the Typhon, studied—if that is the correct word—and then vitrified: trapped in a slow, constricted bosonic glaze across millions of light-years while their boundaries were dissolved—an awful end for one-time masters, to whom the Trillennium owes its very existence.
Less familiar because less clearly explainable, even by those of us who were there, were our encounters with the enigmachrons, where fifth-dimensional fates lie spread out like thin bones beneath the rotting flesh of space-time. The Intensityfound itself caught in a swirling storm of dead futures, tiny whirlpools of despair and repetition, and four of our crew lived horrible lives in scant hours before our eyes, aged in misery, mercifully died—and could not be revived by any recourse to ship memory. Some of their names remain forgotten—their fates erased even back to the Earth.
The Shen, it seems, had accepted their destiny with maddening calm. As we were welcomed to the sixty green suns—and as we were shriven of our Chaotic taints, cured and reborn in ways that both agonized and refreshed in the old, simple, cold stone rooms of the Final School, we met with Polybiblios, a simple figure, plainly made, unusually small for a Deva.
Among the Shen he had become known as Curiosity embodied.
The Shen exemplified in all their ways and histories the exalting humility of correcting error, and followed in all their days the smoothly prickled course of knowing one’s blind stupidity. Polybiblios had been among them for a million years, had watched them react—or not react—to the harrowing of the Chaos. When presented with our case, he consulted his Shen teachers, and without ceremony they prepared to cast him out, after a brief, enigmatic explanation. “You will create more error and more confusion,” they told him. “We cannot allow you to remain on the necklace-worlds, beneath the Green Suns. All should end soon, but because of you it will not. Cosmos will follow upon cosmos, challenge upon challenge, out of any thinkable sequence, but forever and ever nonetheless—for you will misuse what we have taught you. And so it must be. For we are again in error. Perfection is death. For us, that is good—but you reject our purity.”
Even so, they allowed Polybiblios to keep what he had sought for so long, their last and greatest discovery: the secrets of budding minicosms from the quantum foam, finite but incomprehensibly vast seed-sets of new universes.
“I can leave now,” Polybiblios said, and briefly bowed his head and laughed in Shen-like acknowledgment of his joyful grief.
Our return took us through regions briefly unveiled by the Chaos’s cruel recession, the Typhon proudly pulling back its cloak, leaving nakedly visible and scattered over the withered geodesics those systems and civilizations that had not retreated eons before. Billions of contorted suns—the great human fields of the Trillennium—lay across the darkness like embers of burning lace. Signals from these regions came to the Intensity, difficult to translate, but when Polybiblios—against our experienced recommendation—analyzed them, we saw once more how deep and perverse the Typhon’s ruin could be. To the poor monstrosities surviving in these corrupted regions, the roots and laws of former nature still seemed consistent. They still believed a future lay before them, and reasoned that we were the monsters to be hunted and destroyed.
Perhaps we were.
We doubted everything.
Our threadfold engines faltered—the Chaos gnawed at the last technique we could use to spend less than eternity on our return to Earth. Polybiblios applied all his Shen learning, and we proceeded in a dreaming bubble squeezed out of the necrotic flesh of the cosmos, defying predatory shreds that whipped out, breeding insanity and mutation even within our isolation—and forcing us to kill nine more of our crew.
The twisting corridor of our passage, the last geodetic of the old cosmos, constricted tight.
We gave up whatever hope remained.
I entered my own darkness, defeated, maimed in my soul.
But Polybiblios, with his quiet, steady way, saved us. His unceasing ministrations to the Intensitypulled us through. We awakened cruising through clean space, alive, saner than we had been for long years—surrounded by our ship’s humming regularities.
We neared Earth’s sun.
Our rescued Deva, who had rescued us in return, celebrated the passing of his masters and teachers, the Shen. We stood with him and listened to his words, though they meant little to us at the time, and even seemed to contradict what we had learned before.
“They will not give in to the Typhon,” he explained. “Nor will they commit suicide. They will reverse their genesis, and return themselves to the libraries from which they were patterned—never to be retrieved by any intelligence, in this or any subsequent cosmos.
“For they have made a pact with the handmaiden of creation, who reconciles all.”
Perhaps he referred to himself more than the Shen. Poor Shen!
After this, Polybiblios retreated into contemplation as we entered the last open gate to our legacy system, returning to the ports of ancient Earth—and mourned our dead, those we could remember. Tiadba closed the book and thrust it back into the bag.
“That’s Sangmer talking again, isn’t it?” Frinna asked. “He doesn’t mention the female, the one on the silvery beach.”
“Maybe she’s part of the secret,” Macht said. “Maybe she’s that handmaiden.”
“No, she became his wife,” Herza said.
Shewel pulled his ear and rolled over.
“How many times did he write this story?” Nico asked.
CHAPTER 90
“The Defenders won’t last much longer,” Polybiblios said as the three marched through the pitchy, uneven middle zone. The snaggled line of remaining obelisks diminished into darkness on either side, spinning fitfully. The nearest leaned and groaned and sparked under the long night. The epitome’s armor made halfhearted attempts to fit but had been fashioned for a breed and did not seem in the mood to adapt. Polybiblios walked at first with a jerking, puffing gait, until, in frustration, the suit seemed to take control and march him, and finally he squatted beside a heave of dark reddish stone and looked at his companions through the fogged faceplate with a reasonable simulation of perplexity. “I designed these. I should know how to use them.”
“What else don’t you know?” Ghentun asked, in no mood to pause—or to be generous to a former Eidolon.
“Oh, much, no doubt,” Polybiblios murmured, then concentrated on pushing at the suit’s joints, poking, tugging, muttering some more, and finally requesting their help. “Push this here…and this segment, pull it out, there.”
From both sides, Jebrassy and Ghentun grabbed at his arms and legs, then pushed and tugged until the suit glowed green at the joints and sighed around the epitome’s slight form, fitting as well as it was going to.
“At least now I can walk,” Ploybiblios said, standing and shaking out his arms and legs. “Well, let’s move away from here—this place is dangerous.”
“How much longer?” Jebrassy asked.
“Until we’re in the Chaos—or until the Kalpa dies its inevitable and horrid death?”
“That,” Jebrassy said, swallowing.
“It should have happened already,” Polybiblios said. “The Typhon has failed at building a foundation of rules. It exists only as a foul shadow, a catalog of thefts from the old cosmos. If it absorbs the last bit of our world, it might simply—pop!—cease to exist. Everything will go to nullity. If we fail…well, there is no word for what nullity does or does not do.”
They walked more quickly now, across what seemed like many miles to Jebrassy, following Polybiblios as he cut through the tight-packed clutter of the condensed and amplified Necropolis. Jebrassy struggled to see where his feet were going—the ground seemed to curve up to meet each bootfall. Soon they were within sight of a great poly-form dome of crazed and warped architecture. To Jebrassy it resembled many bridges set on end, spun about, then dropped, smashed, and finally, as an afterthought, hung with long mossy ribbons.
“Does Nataraja look like that?” he asked.
“Unknown. This particular structure has been here since before the tower was broken, carried from some far galaxy, I seem to recall…There are many such scattered here, there.” He stabbed about with a finger. “Meant perhaps to draw curious marchers. The Typhon…” Polybiblios looked down at his trembling hands. “This body reacts with revulsion. How interesting. I had thought myself beyond such feelings.”
Polybiblios guided them along another dark, crusted path winding around the ruins.
“Of course, without the generators, the Eidolons will cease their existence within the Kalpa—or outside, for that matter—but the Ancient Breed and most of the Menders might still survive.”
Ghentun understood the implication of that. “What about other marchers?” he asked.
“Not to be known,” Polybiblios said, shaking his head. This gave Jebrassy a twinge—he had heard that phrase before…
They crossed many more apparent miles. Ghentun inquired as to whether the epitome knew where they were.
“On the outer boundaries of the Necropolis,” Polybiblios said. “Everything istighter, shrunken—drawn in. We’re moving faster than we should. And soon…?” Polybiblios closed in, peering at the breed.
“What will we soon come to?”
“You’re like a teacher,” Jebrassy said. “Always testing.”
“The houses,” Ghentun answered for him. “Ten of them, at last count, cutting across the strongest path of the beacon.”
“And beyond them?”
“The Vale of Dead Gods. Beyond that, all is conjecture.”
“Just because I am with you, do not think you can let down your guard,” Polybiblios said. “Great men and women have been lost out here, with more ancient conviction and experience. So many marchers, but others as well—Menders. Pilgrims. Many have been sacrificed while we waited.”
“You sent things back,” Jebrassy said. “Now they’re returning.”
“Emerging might be a better word, like something rising from the depths of an ocean.”
“I don’t know what an ‘ocean’ is.” Jebrassy lowered his head as if in pain. “Upside-down rocks…ice and mountains in the sky. That’s where the dreamers are going. Is that an ‘ocean’?”
“No,” Polybiblios murmured, but he did not sound completely convinced. “Worlds falling together. All a desperate gamble, and how many times did we fall into that splendid quag of despair only Eidolons can feel?”
Jebrassy clenched his teeth and pushed ahead.
CHAPTER 91
Denbold and Macht tested the trod with their boots. “It’s firm,” Denbold said, returning to Tiadba. Herza and Frinna stepped out on the surface together. “We can cross here.”
“The beacon gets weaker that way,” Khren said. “It’s strongest on this course. That’s the path we should be taking. We should follow the trod.”
“It’s a long, wide one,” Shewel said. “It won’t stay firm. And there’s a peculiar bump ahead—we can see over it, or should, the way the light works here, but there’s only darkness.”
“What he calls a bump looks like a…what’s the word?” Khren asked. Tiadba had been reading other stories from her books. Some described features of land and water that the breeds had never experienced.
“A mountain,” Tiadba said. “Lots of them—a mountain range.”
“Well, whatever—that’s where we’re supposed to go.”
“What’s out there at the end of the trod?” Tiadba asked the armor. Pahtun’s voice responded. “Once there was something called the Vale of Dead Gods. It was a broad-floored rift with ten houses, including the House of Green Sleep, held in a kind of countertwist bowl at its center. Many marchers were lured there and enslaved in a chronic noose. The tower changed the arc of the beacon to avoid the vale. But the last update said there was only shadow—a lack of detail.”
“How long ago came that update?” Nico asked shrewdly.
“Kalpa time, a hundred thousand years,” the armor said. “But out here, in a countertwist, how we approach changes everything. Away from the guidance of the beacon, circling in from another direction, there may still be the vale. The House of Green Sleep is or was a strong lure. If the vale and the house have changed, then there may yet be other traps—or a clear path.”
“Typhon’s lies?” Nico asked, squatting beside the trod and poking at it again with a tripod leg. The surface seemed hard as glass.
“Perhaps,” Pahtun’s voice said. “The trod passes close to the vale. If the beacon guides us along the route of the trod, it might still be safe.”
They all looked to Tiadba. Her weariness had grown. She sensed a cycling sadness in the back of her thoughts, as if she were leading the marchers into a trap even worse than the echoes, worse than the twitching glider dumps and churning graveyard bogs they had already seen. But the beacon was strong. There was nothing else they could do; they had no other guidance.
“We could stay on one side or the other,” Khren said. “But it’s getting rough and there are lots of cracks. Take us much longer.”
They all dreaded the possibility that the Kalpa would fall and the beacon would be silenced—or worse, deceive them, though Pahtun assured them that was not possible.
“We’ll use the trod,” Tiadba said. “Khren, stay as far back as you can and still see the rest of us. Herza and Frinna, go ahead an equal distance. Any sign of softness…”
They spread out and moved toward the “bump” in the land ahead.
They walked on for what seemed a very long time before they were forced to abandon the trod. They then hid in crevices that radiated from the roadway and watched the passage of Silent Ones by the dozens—wave upon wave of gliding monstrosities, moving with even greater speed over the broad milky surface. More time—long, slow, boring time—passed before the surface again became glassy, and they resumed.
The Witness’s beam curved and whipped through the sky. Something was happening again far out in the Chaos—thick scuts of darkness shot up and then fell back like ghostly, smoky heads popping out of the ground.
After another long spell of travel, and another smoky eruption, Khren saw a change in the sky to their left, well off the vector of the beacon’s greatest intensity. None of the others could duplicate his sighting, hard as they tried. “My eyes must be going,” Khren said, downhearted.
“You and me both,” Shewel said.
“What did it look like?” Nico asked, boring in with an angry tone.
“Enough,” Tiadba said. “We’ll force him to make up stuff.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Khren said, indignant.
“We’ll stop here for a while…”
“It’s out there again,” Herza said, and Frinna pointed—they had both seen a blue glow in the dip between two heaves of brownish, crackled ground.
The armor now spoke. “It may be another Pahtun, or this far out, someone else from the Kalpa—older.”
They thought this over skeptically. “A deception?” Nico asked.
No answer. Anything could be a deception—except for the beacon, nothing was certain.
“I’ll sortie,” Macht said. “I’m tired of this monotony. A little climbing and jumping is just the thing.”
CHAPTER 92
“Does he look different to you?” Glaucous asked Daniel. Jack forged ahead through the ruptured and redrawn streets, walls, buildings. His concern was obvious—there was no way to tell what could happen out here, nor how things had changed since Ginny passed.
Or whether they were even following her trail.
“He’s standing straighter,” Daniel said.
“He’s looking older,” Glaucous said. “And bolder. He takes risks, leaving us here. What does the stone tell you?”
“Still tugging,” Daniel said. The urban rearrangement around them muttered and groaned like deep ice settling over a rocky slope. “If the girl feels the tug—and if it’s the same tug…”
“It is,” Glaucous assured him. “Have you seen the like before?” He waved at the dismal scene, apt to change unpredictably, like a show of lantern slides planned by an idiot.
“Once,” Daniel said. “Jack might have seen it, too.”
“Fleeing our Mistress?” Glaucous asked.
“Something like that.”
“ She’s back there. Near the old warehouse. I can feel her.”
“Will she use you to find us?”
“If you ask am I notching branches and overturning rocks…no. But the Mistress is ever and always aware of the disposition of her servants. At least, she was on Earth. Here…maybe our oddness blends in.”
“This isEarth,” Daniel said. “Bits of it. Look. You’re old enough—maybe you recognize these buildings.”
“Asian, I’d say.” Glaucous blew his nose, inspected the rag—more streaks of slick black—and shook his head. “I never journeyed to the East. We left your city miles back.”
“Bidewell said it was all getting cinched in.”
“Did he? I missed that.”
“It’s all burned or corroded. Broken time seems to act like fire or acid.”
Silence between them as they worked around a mound of bricks and stones. With a dour twinkle, the stones became shards of concrete and steel—part of a newer wall, but still a jumbled ruin.
“Like a battlefield,” Glaucous said. “I walked the trenches around Ypres, almost a hundred years ago, looking for a particular gent—a fine, strapping fellow and a poet. He dreamed, so I was led to believe, of a place he called the Last Redoubt. He’d written a book before shipping out, detailing his dreams…But the war had already blown him to bits. Lean years for hunters, during wartime.”
On both sides, streets and buildings ascended steep inclines, as if a city map had been draped over another, rougher country. Some of the structures looked more intact than any they had encountered before, despite leaning at awful angles.
Glaucous saw Jack ahead. He was passing under a precarious arch formed of steel and glass. Daniel shook his head and his eyes darted. “How far does this go on?”
“Don’t know,” Glaucous said. “Just tagging along.”
“You’ve done more than that,” Daniel said. “You scared Ginny. You might as well have pushed her out here.”
“That concerns you?” Glaucous asked.
“I don’t know why you’re with us. Jack knows what you did.”
“Does he?”
Glaucous looked up as they reached the arch, then felt his shoulders draw down and his thick neck stiffen at the thought of thousands of tons choosing to fall at just this moment. “No shame,” he said.
“Shifters may have more charm, more romance than Chancers—but what we do is all the same in the end. We grab at happenstance and care little about stealing luck from those around us.”
“I never claimed to be righteous,” Daniel said.
“Well, then,” Glaucous grumbled.
“Just stop trying to make me happyto be here.”
“Apologies. Old habits.”
For Jack, listening to the voices behind him, the dread sense of approaching conclusions made the shadowy ruins fade to insignificance. He had seen this before—or something like it, less dead. Only now that it was allbroken could he piece together a picture of what his cosmos—his small part of the cosmos—had been like, and how he had managed to skip through it with fewer consequences than most; and fewer advancements, fewer of the milestones of common life.
His inability to feel strong affection—that puzzled him. In the dreams, there had been an almost surreal, childlike passion, but for Ginny, only a liking…and nothing more he could pull to the surface. He was less a man in all this than the figure in his dreams.
Jack never dropped anything, because he never held anything for very long: Ellen, who settled for a few hours with him, had been content with his ghost of affection. But before her…
His mother—a pale outline on a pillow under the bright spot of a hospital lamp. His father, even less defined—big, tried to be funny, tried to love him. How could those who controlled their destinies settle for so little? Ginny was like him in that regard. Fate-shifters did not seem capable of great things. They wandered, but left attachments, love, even memory behind.
How could he find fault with Daniel or Glaucous? They were all alike, selfish in the utmost. Both those who held the stones and who sought the stones were diminished—shriveled to points of darting consciousness, without breadth or depth.
Not even the favor or Mnemosyne had lifted Jack’s gloom. He stalked on through the guttering relics of human history, blackened middens revealed one after another like images sketched in ghostly embers. Where was he going—where could he go?
After Ginny. A dream-sister. Who was chasing what?
And along the way, they would meet with—
Daniel called him back.
“Slow down. We’re leaving the city stuff behind.” All three gathered, and their protection merged with a hollow smooch. Jack looked around and pressed his temples with two fingers.
“Do you remember anything like this?” Daniel asked.
“Do you?” Jack asked, still pressing.
“My fate was chewed to pieces, so I jumped closer to your lines. You probably came up against the corruption before it actually closed in. All different. This is all that’s left now—fallen bits, colliding chunks.”
“Memories of history?”
“Oh, they used to be real enough…” Daniel’s lips worked, as if he were trying to stifle another voice.
“Sorry. I’ve got a frightened, curious landlord to deal with.”
Jack stared at him, not so much shocked as disgusted. “Putting it politely, you’re a hermit crab.”
“Putting it crudely, I’m a tapeworm, a leech,” Daniel shot back.
Glaucous watched both through red-rimmed eyes.
“But I’m not useless, and I’m not so cruel. What did you leave behind for Bidewell and your woman friend?”
Jack shook his head.
“I thought about giving them a stone of their own,” Daniel said. “I have two. Something to protect them when the Chalk Princess comes.”
Glaucous’s eyes grew wide. “That’s impossible,” he said. “No shepherd has evercarried two.”
“No shepherd has ever been as monstrous as me,” Daniel said. He swiveled his head to watch thin blue arcs loop between gray rocks and scattered ruins. Always in pairs—a kind of cosmic handshake.“In the end, I knew Bidewell would turn down the offer. Three is the minimum—four is safety.”
