Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
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Текущая страница: 31 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
Jack turned away. He had no idea what this information meant. “This islike where we go in our dreams,” he said. “Where Jebrassy goes after he leaves the city.”
“Who’s Jebrassy?”
“I think we’re going to find out soon enough. We’re supposed to meet.”
“Past and future self? How’s that going to work?”
Jack shook his head.
“I’m not going to meet anyone,” Daniel said. “More or less of a puzzle…can’t say.”
“We’re living in text-time,” Jack said.
“Something Bidewell talked about before we arrived, presumably,” Glaucous grumbled.
“Maybe,” Jack said. “Can’t you feel it? We’re just shells filled with explosive. When we land—we’re done with. This text is finished. Close the book.”
“And open another,” Daniel said.
CHAPTER 93
Ginny walked with the waves of haunted marchers into the valley, observing them with pity and wonder; they hardly seemed solid, much less alive, their armor in strips, feet worn and bloody, the blood long dried—like walking corpses, yet they spoke to each other in high, sapped, tinny tones of triumph and enthusiasm, though harsh with fatigue.
To them, she might have been a wisp, a vapor. Yet one or two stopped to watch her pass, their pale eyes weak and blinking. She could barely make out their words, but some of Tiadba returned to her, and she began to recognize the breed speech of her dreams. What little she could understand told her they were happy, that they thought they were arriving at the conclusion of a long-destined journey, and for a while, surrounded by their shambling, rushing forms, she wondered if they were right; perhaps the dark green edifice rising from the bowl in the middle of the valley waswhere they all needed to be. The journey had been hard, the marchers were simply worn down; but in the dreams, Tiadba had never heard of thousandsjoining in a march. How could they all arrive on the edge of the valley at once, all together?
One of the marchers, a female breed—not Tiadba; Ginny would have known the connection—tried to watch her more closely. She had a broad face, large eyes, and a blunt, simian nose bearing a scut of fine fur, now crusted and patchy.
“Something’s there. Is it a monster?” another asked.
“I’m not sure,” the female answered. “The armor’s silent.”
“The armor’s dead. We’redead.”
“Hush with that! It’s as big as a Tall One. If it’s really there.”
“It’s a monster. Stay clear.”
The female tried to reach out and touch this apparition. “ Areyou a monster?” she asked. Ginny did not trust herself to answer. What would her voice sound like to such as these? As if she could be any more real than everything else between the statue-lined mountains. And why couldn’t she seeand comprehend those statues? Gigantic, twisted, motionless…might as well be dead…That much she could be sure of.
A substantial number of marchers—dozens—had slowed and matched their pace with the one that seemed able to keep her in view. “Is it still there?” several asked.
“You!” the female shouted, rushing in again to touch her—but the bruised, broken hand was gently repelled by Ginny’s bubble. Something bright arced out of Ginny and formed a ring of pale blue between them, then winked out.
Entanglement. They shared a little matter; they were made of some of the same stuff. But not much of it. Ginny looked away, blinking back tears, and concentrated on the broken, stony path. There was nothing she could do and they frightened her. She did not want to end up like them, but she knew Tiadba would suffer a worse fate.
“You!”
The female muttered to those around her, and they suddenly stopped and formed a ring, blocking Ginny. She could not pass—she tried and was pushed back. She could not leap or close her eyes and move ahead or do any of the things that might have seemed possible earlier; they had confined her within their circle.
“What is it? I can barely see it.”
“It’s a Tall One.”
“Another Pahtun?”
“No—don’t break the circle! Keep it here until we know what it is.”
“We should move on.”
“Doesn’t anyone remember?” the female cried. “We keep trying to get across the valley and into the city. We keep being sent back and starting over.”
“That’s not what Iremember. We’re almost there. It’s beautiful and bright and close—look! We’ve crossed the Chaos. We’re going to make it…”
Ginny hugged herself and studied the wan, peeling faces. Some of the figures were little more than wisps floating above the jagged, crusted surface. Who was more or less real here, and what did it matter?
She finally tried her voice. “I understand you. I know what you’re saying.” Those words startled them—drove them back and widened the circle. Even now she could not be sure what language she used.
She looked up to the green structure—the city. It seemed closer and much larger, but something about its outline, its margins…it might have been a high mountain viewed through a living, smoky haze, deliberately closing and then revealing. Endlessly teasing, jealous, disappointed, angry. Tormenting.
“It speaks. I hear it,” several figures murmured, and they all closed in, reaching out to touch the bubble. Several more elliptical arcs of blue pulsed between them, wreathed their hands and arms, pulled away in slips and curls, and vanished.
The marchers withdrew, paler and less defined, as if the interaction had weakened their very existence.
“What are you?” the female asked. “Where are you from?” Her weary, filmed eyes glanced one way, then another. She could not see Ginny—couldn’t see anything clearly. “Tell us we’re on the right path. Tell us we know where we’re going.”
Before Ginny could answer, a wave of grainy darkness surged outward from the base of the city. The marchers flinched, hunched their shoulders…then dropped and tried to hug the rugged ground, as if this had happened many times before. So familiar, like a delivery of fresh fire to the damned. The wave spread and lifted all, seemed to haul up the very earth. Ginny closed her eyes and rode within her bubble through the wave.
It shook—spun the sky, then moved on.
Fell back onto a dark, syrupy foam.
The foam soaked down into the black surface, hissing.
After a sickening wait, the ground seemed stable again. Ginny got to her feet and looked around. The marchers were gone. On the threshold of what they seemed to think was their salvation, within sight of the place they had been created and trained to reach, they were snatched, shoved back. Tricked. The valley was a place of endless temptation and disappointment.
“For them, a trap, the wrong city,” Ginny said, shading her eyes against the rising arc of fire. But the green edifice was where she needed to be. The stone tugged her in that direction. This deceptive jumble of walls and shapes, watched over by legions of frozen giants—
If Tiadba was not already within, then perhaps she soon would be. And what can I do to help? This can’t be real. My nightmare has sucked me in.
Ginny’s hand had never left the surface of the sum-runner. And the stone’s strong pull had never lessened or wavered—until now. It tugged her sideways, on a different course than the marchers—into the valley, perhaps to circle around and approach the bowl from a different angle. She did not dare look behind her. The marchers would be lining up on the crest of the rise, memories spun back in a barbed circle. They would look down into the valley, filled with relief, sure of their victory, then run forward once more in a ghostly, decrepit horde.
There was nothing she could do for them. Not here, and not yet. If she was too afraid to move, the same female might repeat their scene and dialogue all over again.
Ginny walked on alone, drawing closer to the stony giants that looked down from the peaks of the surrounding mountains, locked in perpetual silence—always watching but never seeing.
CHAPTER 94
An awful suspicion grew within Tiadba. They had come so far, lost only one of their company—Perf, near the beginning of their journey—and yet she felt no closer to Nataraja and could not escape a terrible sense that disaster was looming. Worse, she was coming to distrust the beacon—the musical note that pulsed out of the Kalpa and sang in their helmets when they were on the true path, and faded when they deviated from that path. Some shade of knowledge pestered the back of her weary thoughts—a phantom of foreboding.
The marchers rested now in the protection of the portable generator, on the top of another inverse ridge—a hill from one side, a valley from the other, light sweeping in devious curves from whatever direction they chose to look; mirages everywhere, only slightly corrected and straightened by the faceplates of their armor. From the inverted valley side, they looked out over a wide, lightly traveled trod that led straight into an enormous, sandy plain ringed by high, jagged mountains. A few travelers, swift and low to the ground—a variety of the Silent Ones—swooped along the trod and vanished behind outcrops. None could be seen to travel all the way out onto the plain. On all sides, nestled among the mountains like carelessly dropped toys, great frozen things towered, facing inward toward a greenish architectural mass—if such could be said to have faces. The Pahtun voice suggested this might be the Vale of Dead Gods—occasionally seen from the Broken Tower. No Pahtun had ever explored this far. The mountains surrounded the House of Green Sleep—though that had likely changed, compressed into an illusion or disguise wrapped around the ancient rebel city of Nataraja. They might be near their destination after all, if Nataraja was still worth finding.
Once, while they rested—or dragged their feet, more truthfully—Khren said he saw motion on the far side of the vale, at an unknown distance, like a horde of insects swarming over the rim of the vale—perhaps more echoing marchers, lost and pitiful. And when Tiadba stared in that direction—trying to see through the tricks and deceptions of the light—she caught a brief glimpse of something pinpoint brilliant, blue—almost hurting the eyes, even through the filter of her faceplate. Sometime later Khren saw it again—exactly the same—and Macht, Nico, and Denbord all agreed it must be more echoes, captured and distorted marchers repeating their frustration by the tens of thousands. It was a sobering prospect that even now, having come this far, breeds just like themselves had somehow become imprisoned in an illusion of triumph; or so Nico speculated. “They might even think they’ve succeeded. Over and over again. A twisty prison.”
Herza and Frinna listened without comment. They had said little for some time now—many cycles of the flaming arc. Yet even those cycles were slowing. No way to calculate how long they were gone, how much distance they’d covered—not even Pahtun’s voice knew.
“We’ve walked halfway to nowhere,” Nico said, slumping in a split of black rock, holding his gloved hands to the sides of his helmet. There had been no chance to breathe outside air for many cycles.
“What are those things in those mountains?” Shewel asked.
“Nightmares,” Denbord said. “Perf was lucky. He wouldn’t have liked any of this.”
Tiadba sat between Denbord and Nico, who had a thoughtful expression, as near as she could tell through the dusty golden glow of the faceplate. The armor was not offering much more in the way of explanation. “I think I understand,” Nico said cautiously. “It’s like a shelf of prizes—trophies from a little war. Only much bigger.”
“How’s that?” Khren asked.
“Who’s collecting?” Macht asked simultaneously.
“We’ve seen a lot since we left the Tiers,” Nico said. “We’ve met Tall Ones, and things out in the Chaos that might or might not be breeds…We know that people don’t always look like us, not now and certainly not long ago. So…the world outside the Tiers was once bigger than we can imagine. If we just stretch out and think about all the people…so many peoples, all different, all strange but somehow us, like in the stories in Tiadba’s books, if the stories are real…”
“They seem real,” Khren said.
“They contradict each other,” Shewel said.
“True,” Nico said. “But imagine…for once, do more than a breed can do and think outside.Think of all the time and all the people, how different they must have been, and think of the Typhon burning and shrinking everything, playing and destroying at the same time—filled with hatred…”
“Or filled with nothing,” Khren said.
Nico nodded. “The emptiest of empties. Think of all the times past and all the stories we haven’t heard, and all the people who lived those stories and didn’t look anything like us, big and small—giants bigger than the Tall Ones, smaller than anyone we know, and stranger than anything in the Kalpa, wakes and sleeps beyond count between them, but still us…” He let out a sad, soughing breath. “Maybe some of them werelike gods. But all were defeated. Their stories were stripped away, mangled, burned, but their images and maybe even their bodies might have been collected and carried here, put out on the mountains as prizes, or maybe just to scare us. But if we think of it this way,” he concluded, “they’re not dead gods. They’re just people. They’re us.”
“We might be stuck out there right beside them,” Khren said. “More trophies.”
“We’d be with family,” Nico said.
Tiadba felt her chest fill and her breath catch.
“They’re still scary,” Herza said softly.
“If they get up and scoot around, they might not remember we’re kin,” Frinna added. “Do we have to get close?”
Tiadba sat up and tuned her faceplate to define something she saw gathering over the vale—a cloud that blurred the arc of fire, a mist that dropped from the ruckled sky. “Do you all see that?” she asked. They gathered in the harsh, high rocks, and their helmets took multiple points of view and worked to discern a pattern, an image, above the greenish mass at the center of the vale.
“It’s like an upside-down mountain, just hanging there,” Khren said.
“A mountain made of ice,” Denbord said.
“A Turvy,” the Pahtun voice said. “This can be dangerous.”
“What’s a Turvy?” Tiadba asked.
“No one in the Kalpa knows much about them. They jumble positions in the Chaos. Turvies are dangerous because all the forces in the Chaos will concentrate around them—new trods will form, the Typhon’s servants will gather, and prisoners will awaken to a new level of slavery. It will bring rapid change and great unknowns.”
“More monsters?” Frinna asked, drawing close to Herza, and then dragging Denbord toward both of them. He did not struggle.
Macht had turned to walk a few paces away from the group, looking behind at the land they had crossed.
“Everything’s shrinking again!” he called. “I can see the Kalpa. The Witness…there itis, too!”
Tiadba turned and felt herself go dizzy. Light was bending in screw-like loops, and it was certainly possible—even likely—that the Chaos had begun another great deflating, like a toy balloon. If they had all waited…would they have had to walk so far to get where they were now?
Frinna screamed, “We’re on a trod!”
The rocks smoothed and become sticky, trapping their boots with shocking speed. They seemed to plummet with the flat, pale surface to the level of the floor of the vale. All around the vale, gaps were opening in the mountains and trods were flowing down toward the greenish mass in the center. Khren lifted their one remaining clave, but before it could activate, a whip shot out and grabbed it away. No escape.
Already shadows loomed over them, half-blind eyes sweeping and twisted, bruised faces spread flat beneath high, arched bodies…and surrounding them, the slender limbs that glided, pulling and pricking at the surface of the trod.
Tiadba watched, paralyzed, as the others were grabbed and raised one by one in flickering, half-seen talons, then held clutched and squirming in the air.
The strangest and largest Silent One of all—three joined faces, sharing four whited, frosted eyes with black pinprick pupils—moved up to bend over her and leer. An arm with a hand like a thorn bush snatched her.
From the center of the vale—the frosted, uncertain green edifice and the icy mountain now hanging over it—came an awful, squealing trill, like millions of things lost beyond hope of rescue, all forced to demonstrate their joy, their happiness…
Forced to sing.
From the mountains all around, the huge frozen shapes quickened in a way that did not involve life, beyond a breed’s understanding—reluctantly juddering down from the mountains, gathering as if by decree to watch and perhaps participate in the Turvy.
One by one, as Tiadba watched, her companions were stripped of their armor. And then came her turn. First the Silent One with three faces and four eyes exposed her arms and legs, all the while the eyes vibrating and shivering, and then thorn-claws pulled at her helmet, which split and gave way just as the Pahtun voice spoke its final message:
“This is not the destination. The beacon—”
Tiadba felt no pain. Yet a kind of vacuum sucked all hope from her mind—then searched, cut, pushed aside…and found what it was looking for.
Your sister.
Not a voice, not a presence…the emptiest of empties, the quietness of a thing that did not have a voice, but used thousands of other voices to express its message.
You shall not be joined.
Your stories shall not be told.
Her companions were not dead. They were very little changed, in fact still struggled despite the loss of their armor—dangling and squirming, moving their lips without being heard. The Silent Ones swifted these tiny burdens along the new trod toward the center of the vale. Tiadba spun slowly, saw in flashes of spiraling light the giants gather, saw the central greenish mass resolve, take on rough edges and serrated shapes beneath the hovering whiteness…an ancient, shimmering illusion now profaned, and mocked, its translucent jade towers and domes spreading throughout the vale, and she knewit, recognized it for what it had once been and was no longer.
I’ve been journeying here since the beginning.
The marchers were carried into lost and haunted Nataraja—the False City.
CHAPTER 95
This was a dream, Ginny was sure of it—a dream someone else was having—and it was lovely. She was two people in one form, standing under a cloudy sky with patches of brilliant blue, and rolling hills stretched like great swabs of a brush to a definite and pleasant horizon. She was in fact in Thule, the great island just a hundred miles north of Ireland, rich with history: the place she had imagined while being visited by Mnemosyne. The place she had been patiently denied.
It was not quite fully formed, of course. She had to stare hard to make things assume a visual, tactual truth. She could look at the foliage near her feet—a rough kind of bush, heather or gorse or something with purple flowers—and with an effort, the flowers would suddenly popand become real. Her lips said, in vague tones, “This is wonderful. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Behind those lips, Ginny asked, “Who’s dreaming whom?”
“Maybe it’s you. You must know about sky and hills and bushes—I don’t.”
“What I know, you know. But I don’t remember your name.”
“We don’t have names—for now. I’m in a terrible place. But sometimes I can sleep. So we’re together again. Come for me, find me, before it’s too late.”
Ginny shook her head and pushed up from a crouch. She felt refreshed, maybe even encouraged—until now, she’d expected only sadness and grief and pain at the end of her peculiar stroll. She rubbed her cold hands and reached out to test the limit of the bubble.
Thus far and no farther.
More real than the dream, and much less pleasant.
She stood before a great opening in the mountains, guarded by two giant figures she did not want to examine too closely. Made for other places, she guessed, and made of other matter, substances that did special things under special circumstances. Whatever the hell that means.She turned on her heels twice, like a slow top, as she had when faced with the Gape, and felt the dark gritty landscape pirouette. Now she stood before another cleft in the high jagged rocks, guarded by another pair of frozen figures—just as strange, but different. Spinning twice again, she stood before a third opening and a third distinct set of guardians that didn’t seem able to do much in the way of guarding. Like colorful ceramic figures decorating a door– but this time, let’s fire the decorator. Trophies, all of them. Preserved and mounted after something had enjoyed an awful hunt through the galaxies, collecting specimens.
Ginny shivered.
Spinning twice again—a total of six spins—brought her back to the first gap. She recognized the first set of figures, though she still did not want to examine them up close and personal. Personalmight mean something very different here.
Without doing anything more difficult than spinning on her toes, she was making the entire valley revolve like a lazy Susan platter in a Chinese restaurant. Imagine that. Such power. There were three entrances to the Vale of Dead Gods. She could imagine them evenly spaced around the bowl formed by the mountains, points on a weird kind of super-triangle. Typhon space. Or the kind of space a dying universe falls into.Which entrance should she take?
Each, she knew, would lead her on a unique and separate spiral course into the False City where her dream-sister waited. Other people could enter through other gaps and follow other spiral courses, but they would never meet, never see each other, separated by Typhon-time as well as Typhon-space. That thought bothered her. All along, since she had left the green warehouse, she had hoped that Jack and maybe Daniel would come to save her from her persistent foolishness—always deliberately choosing the worst path, leading to disaster. Jack seemed the opposite, shifting toward a pleasant sort of survival, if not genuine fortune.
Daniel…
Daniel she couldn’t figure. Not a whole number. Irrational.
He has an irrational set of decimals.
Ah. What’s that mean when it’s lying down?
But they would no doubt enter the False City through other gaps, and that meant they’d never find her. Ginny squinted at the guardians, forcing herself to see them for what they were—a matched pair, each with a circlet of ten or more eyes wrapped around otherwise human faces, lips and cheeks skewed in some strange emotion—the head set without a neck above powerful, many-limbed bodies, each limb configured to do something that she could not begin to understand.
She gave up her inspection. No sense adding confusion to madness. She decided that she would call this set of guardians the Welcome Wagon Committee to Hellgate One. She spun around again and named the second pair: WWC to Hellgate Two.
The experience could be repeated. Very scientific. Bidewell would be proud of her. Spinning again, she found the WWC to Hellgate Three.
Shouldn’t just do this all day, however long a day is. Make your choice, Ginny. Even if it’s the wrong one.
That was her inner voice, nobody else’s. The other had fallen silent. She was alone. Alone, Ginny knew she could always be relied upon to take the wrong path—except when she decided to go to the green warehouse. And even then, she tried to undo her good decision by venturing out. But now it wasn’t just herchoosing. The sum-runners drew each other together. So where were the others? Were they out searching for her in the mash-up, their stones tugging them along like eager terriers out for a run?
CHAPTER 96
The longer Jebrassy marched with Ghentun and Polybiblios, the more he realized what it was like to live around a Great Eidolon—even a fragment of one.
Polybiblios seemed to radiate knowledge. Some new and significant collection of facts or visions flowed into Jebrassy’s awareness every hour, filling him with history and science until his old self felt misplaced and overlooked.
Ghentun knew the epitome’s influence as well—and spoke his concern. “You’re leaking,” he told Polybiblios as they paused, helmets off, to rest and assess a new disposition in the Chaos around them. The epitome squatted beside them. His movements had grown more certain and less awkward, far from the support of the Broken Tower and all the Librarian’s servants and selves. He was acquiring his own kind of agility, a grace that reminded Ghentun of an angelin—no surprise. “I apologize. I will try to be less generous.”
“I don’t mind much,” Jebrassy said quietly, staring at the changing ripples of stone. “I just need some time to catch up. I have to think about things and make them my own.”
“Of course,” Polybiblios said. “Long ago, philosophers would have played a game of questions with their students—or their servants. Each question, so the philosophers claimed, would coax out prior knowledge, natural instincts born into them. What you feel may not be just my ‘leaking.’ It may be your own quality, emerging right on schedule.”
Ghentun looked aside and shook his head. “You’ve taken us away from the path of the beacon. Why?”
“We will find the beacon again,” Polybiblios said. “It was perverted long ago, you know—shortly after my daughter vanished, and Sangmer disappeared in search of her.”
Jebrassy’s face crinkled in dismay. “Why?” His innermost voice still told him the beacon must be inviolate—the only thing that could guide them to Nataraja, their ultimate goal—their reason for being made in the first place. “That’s impossible. Who would do that?”
Polybiblios met their obvious anger with resigned sadness—an easy enough expression in an offshoot of one so old. He did not give them an answer right away. “I hardly remember my own child,” he said. “As much as she wasmy child, so many had a part in her making.”
“We know the story,” Jebrassy said.
“There are so many versions of the story,” Polybiblios continued. “The truth may lie frozen and buried in the rubble that shores up the foundations of the Kalpa. So many versions to compare with the fragments of memory that I’ve managed to retrieve.”
Jebrassy lowered his voice and his head and circled the epitome, his anger burrowing deep. Polybiblios followed the breed with calm yet not precisely fearless eyes. “My people are out here, dying or worse—
for no reason?” the breed growled. “Because an Eidolonhas forgotten, and others have been careless?”
“Not at all,” Polybiblios said. “Between Eidolons, all things have a purpose, sometimes more than one. My greater self knew the lineaments of change the Chaos would undergo over time—its gradual reduction. The beacon now points us to where we need to be. It is finally correct. Sit here.” He patted the ground with his gloved hand.
Jebrassy looked between the epitome and Ghentun, his fury undiminished—but controlled. Did this mean all the previous marchers had never had a chance? That they had been sacrificed to distract, provide cover, and prepare for a future time when only a select few would succeed?
With a supreme effort, Jebrassy sat and stared down at the black dust and sharp, ancient stones.
“The path we are taking fits the best version I’ve pulled from all the stories,” Polybiblios said. “Draw from your emerging qualities—think of Ishanaxade, making this same journey. Think of her long sacrifice, that things will come right again.”
“You had us search for the stories, then take them with us. You wanted us to find the real story by testing them all. Because you had lost the truth. You were careless.”
“I don’t deny carelessness,” Polybiblios said. “But putting the past—even could it have been perfectly recorded and stored for tens of trillions of years—packing all that into a microcosm, would have taken far more time and energy than creating and searching a Babel, practically speaking. And had we made that choice, preserving one history—or an ambiguous few—would not be enough to quicken a new cosmos. Not enough to seduce and distract Mnemosyne and awaken the Sleeper.”
“Sleeper?” Ghentun sat across from the epitome and the breed. “That’s an ancient idea. The Sleeper is supposed to have died at the end of the first creation.”
“The Father of Muses,” Polybiblios said. “Brahma, some called him very long ago. Not dead. But bored—and so, sleeping.”
“That sounds like nonsense,” Jebrassy said, fighting his own growing comprehension. He did not want to knowanything that would blunt his anger.
Tiadba was out there. They might never find her—
But Polybiblios was still overflowing, and this time they were brushed by the emotion of a Great Eidolon. Ishanaxade.
Jebrassy and Ghentun looked at each other and felt a kind of sadness they had never known before—not the sadness a breed or a Mender could ever feel, but loss and betrayal that could only spread and age and mellow and sharpen all at once, among thousands of millions of epitomes and angelins, through the heights and inner recesses of the Broken Tower…across half a million years.
“The City Princes. They reset the beacon. They betrayed you,” Ghentun said.
“They betrayed my daughter,” Polybiblios said, looking away from them, as if he could not bear any kind of mirror. “We may have all betrayed her. What she must feel, after all this time—hiding out there, waiting. Or worse—captured.”
“If you know all the stories, then you know all the endings,” Jebrassy said. “Which one is true?”
“There are far more endings to a story than there are beginnings,” Polybiblios said. “The best stories start in the middle, then return to the beginning, then come to a conclusion that nobody can foresee. Sometimes, when you return to the middle, the story will change again. At least, they did when I was young.”
His voice seemed to hypnotize them. They saw a whirling lattice of fates surrounding a tiny and indistinct shape, barely remembered after so many ages.
“The City Princes,” the Keeper said, making it a kind of curse.
“They agreed to send Ishanaxade on a secret journey, without your knowing,” Jebrassy said. “But why?”
Ghentun placed his hands together as if in prayer. “Ishanaxade offered herself up to save the Librarian. She carried away the key to the most complete Babel the Librarian had created in the Broken Tower.”
