Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
high cheekbones and large liquid eyes, Jack flaunted his formidable lack of dignity. “What are you reading this month?”
“An Oprah book. You wouldn’t like it.”
He sniffed.
Ellen sniffed back. “Enjoy. There’s canned dog food for the rats in the fridge. I’ll introduce you during dessert.”
Jack pruned up his face. He did not know what she was up to. Some sort of test—or bizarre revenge?
“ Relax,” she whispered, her expression fierce, and pushed through the door into the dining room. The door swung back with a light breeze.
Jack found the dog food, spooned some into a dish, and delivered it with a flourish to the cage. “Fill your bellies, my sweet little rodents. No more flying. And maybe no more food for a long, long time.”
The rats considered the likelihood of game hen and the food actually at paw, then, resigned, fell to nibbling.
He sat at the counter and opened the newspaper he’d filched from the waiting room. He paged through the classifieds, seeking something—he could not remember what. But there it was in the middle of the last page: the message his eyes had read and remembered while the rest of Jack’s mind was elsewhere. Frowning, he touched the short ad—very short.
Then he stopped eating and shifted uncomfortably on the stool. Glanced at the screen door leading to the back porch. Something outside, waiting? No…
When he resumed eating—the food was too good to ignore—he kept glancing at the ad, until he tore it out and stuffed it in his pocket.
The rest of the paper he stuffed into Ellen’s recycle bin, under the sink. The talk through the kitchen door sounded cheerful, raucous in a feminine way, and after several glasses of wine, more directly truthful. The postprandial effects of good warm food had loosened Ellen’s guests. Ellen thought they were ready. She served dessert. Then she pushed Jack through the door and stood beside him, one hand high and bent at the wrist, the other at waist-level, like a couturier showing off her new line.
Across the long oak dining table, the two older women fell silent.
“I’ve told you about Jack,” Ellen said. “He works the streets. He’s a busker.”
Her guests stared, then exchanged veiled glances, as if there was so much to say but no way they would ever be caught saying it—not in front of their hostess. In their forties or early fifties, both looked as if more exercise and sun might do them good. Granny glasses, silk pantsuits—the redhead wore rhinestone-studded denim—fine manicures, and fashionable hairdos. Jack quickly sized them up: wealthy street marks, incomes over a hundred K per annum. One perhaps a lesbian—did she know? Under normal circumstances, he would happily separate them from as much money as he could get away with. For their part, Ellen’s guests regarded Jack with stiff civility—a too-young male of suspicious dark good looks in their female fastness, invited, to be sure, but why?
Jack groaned deep in his throat, then bowed. “Ladies,” he said, “thanks for the wonderful food. I don’t want to interrupt.” He tried to retreat through the kitchen door but Ellen jerked him back by his elbow. The women looked to her for guidance. She lowered her hands and folded them, demure. “Jack’s a friend,” she said.
“What sort of friend?” asked the eldest, older than Ellen by at least ten years.
“What does Ellen mean, ‘work the streets’?” asked the other, the redhead, pleasing enough in her plumpness. “What’s a ‘busker’?”
“It’s from the French, busquer, to seek, like a ship trying to find its course,” said the eldest. To her, Jack was a sand grain, a small sharp point of irritation.
Ellen gestured like a teacher, Tell the girls.For a hot instant he did not like her at all.
“I’m a showman,” Jack said. “I do magic and juggle.”
“Does it pay?” the redhead asked.
“Sometimes,” he said. “I get to keep bankers’ hours.”
They did not return his smile—though the redhead’s lips twitched. And what was heto Ellen, really?
she seemed to ask. Such a skinny young man!
The eldest glanced around the table with wide eyes behind thick glasses. “Can you show us a trick?”
Jack instantly assumed a dancer’s restful pose. Bowed his head as if in prayer. Lifted his hands, fingers to thumbs, as if to snap castanets. The ladies watched for some seconds. Tension built. The (probable) lesbian scraped her chair and coughed.
Jack raised his chin and met Ellen’s eyes.
“I don’t do tricks,” he said. “I invite the world to dance.”
“Tell us how you do that, Jack,” Ellen murmured.
All three women looked around the room with nostrils flared, like lionesses smelling blood. He did not like this kind of attention. His patience reached an end.
“That’s it,” he said. “Thanks again, but I’m done. Here’s my trick.”
For a tenth of a second—no time at all—the dining room fell under a muffled blankness, like stuffing your ears with waxed cotton. The crystals on the chandelier quivered. All six of the flame lights behind the crystals sizzled out.
“I’d like to ask—” the redhead began, but Jack pointed and lifted his eyebrow, and she looked out the window. Simultaneously, on the narrow street in front of Ellen’s house, two cars mated with a grating slam.
The walls shuddered.
All three ladies jumped and exclaimed.
“Was that thunder?” the redhead asked.
Ellen hurried to the front door. For the moment, they had forgotten about Jack. He shoved through the kitchen door, lifted his rats with a swoop—they flattened on their haunches—and fled down the porch. As he pedaled along the back alley, he could feel a familiar stiffness creep up his shoulder blades. Ellen shouldn’t have done that. That went beyond pixie—it was cruel, like introducing Peter Pan to Wendy when she could no longer hope to fly. Worse, he had moved so far off his line of good consequence just to arrange an exit that it might take days to jump back.
And who knew what could happen during that time?
As he coasted down a hill, Jack felt totally exposed.
CHAPTER 15
First Avenue South
That night, Ginny and Bidewell dined on take-out Thai food—what Bidewell insisted on calling
“takeaway.” He rarely cooked. There was no kitchen, only a hot plate and the iron stove where he kept a teakettle. The refrigerator held only white wine, cat food, and milk for tea. Bidewell expertly wielded chopsticks. They had already discussed his years in China, searching for certain Buddhist texts and trying to escape from Japanese soldiers in some war or another; Ginny had not listened closely.
From the main storage room in the warehouse, they heard a bump and cascading thumps—a stack of books falling over. Ginny pointed with her chopsticks. “Your cats?”
“Minimus is the only one who pays attention to my books.”
“Other than me,” Ginny said, then added, “They seem to go wherever they want.”
“All my fine Sminthians stay here,” Bidewell insisted. “Like me. The warehouse is all they need.”
“ Sminthians?”
Bidewell pushed a classical dictionary her way. “Homer. Look it up.”
Bidewell was cleaning away the paper plates and boxes when Ginny asked, “Why do you let the cat—why do you let Minimus—knock things over? He might hurt the books.”
“He doesn’t hurtthem,” Bidewell said. “Some cats are sensitive to the spiders between the lines.” He slid shut the flue on the stove to stifle the fire inside.
“What the hell does that mean?” she asked to Bidewell’s retreating back. He smiled over his shoulder, then vanished into his sleeping quarters, beyond the library and the warm stove. That evening, Ginny found a small, thin brown book on her table. It told a peculiar story. THE SCRIBES’ TALE
Near the end of the eighth century, on the island of Iona in the Western Hebrides, off the coast of Scotland, a monastery protected many of the great manuscripts of antiquity from waves of intemperate history breaking over Europe and Britain.
In the abbey, monks copied and illuminated manuscripts and prepared for the day when the classics would again be spread to other abbeys, castles, and towns—and to the universities which were even then being dreamed of, centers of text and learning that would shine light from the past on a world buried in darkness.
Within these stone walls, copy rooms had been set up, dimly lit by tallow candles and on occasion by oil lamps, where apprentices were taught the craft of faithful reproduction of old manuscripts gathered by monks and collectors from around the ancient world.
Books were being invented to replace the antique scrolls, bound volumes being more easily read and carried, and more durable.
It was claimed that this copy room was the most faithful and accurate of any in Europe, and the apprentices—as they grew older and more expert—were celebrated beyond their station, and thus acquired pride. And this pride took the form, so the legend tells us, of a spider that plagued the copyists one cold winter, as they wielded with gloved hands their pens and brushes. Candles warmed the gelid ink in its tanks, and the monks’ meticulous strokes froze upon the paper before they could dry. (Indeed, to this day, some of these manuscripts bear letters with a special inky sheen—freeze-dried.) There was not fuel enough, neither brush nor wood nor dried seaweed, charcoal from the mainland, nor dung from the island’s cattle, to warm the abbey.
Despite the cold, the spider—so the copyists informed the abbot—became visible first as a moving spot in the corner of ink-weary eyes, a blur that zipped across the pages, leaving delicate, inky trails. Errors began to creep into the copies, as these apparitions distracted the monks. And no sweeping or blessing improved the situation.
The spider soon became bold and lingered upon the vellum, lifting its forelegs and spreading its palps in defense as it was brushed aside or hit with a pounce-bag. It always disappeared without a trace—only to reappear on another page, at another copy-stand.
For weeks this apparition—or natural nuisance, none could say which—haunted and befuddled the monks. Some claimed it was a pagan spirit sent to devil them and increase error in our sin-stricken world. Others, usually skeptical, still found it hard to believe so tiny a creature could survive the chill without infernal assistance, the fires of hell being almost a tempting prospect through early spring. And so it went until the heather lost its sere and budding leaves poked forth green and red from bush and tree. It was February, and the island’s hard winter was passing early with rain and storm into glorious days of golden sun. Monks took a break from their work and gathered seaweed from the white beaches to fertilize their gardens and small farms. Balmy breezes danced through the abbey, coaxing the chill out of old stone and dank earth. Grass pushed high and green, and the making of vellum and fine parchment resumed as the calves and lambs were born.
The winter’s copies were brought out and displayed to the air, to dry away mildew, and the abbot examined them in the brightness of the abbey garden, his weak but loving eyes vigilant for errors, blemishes, anything that might make them unacceptable to clients present or future. (For many books were stored in the abbey’s stone tower library, against the future demand of a world reborn.) And so the abbot was the first to discover that one copy in an entire run of manuscripts bore in its margins a scrawled, clumsy, and unsanctioned poem, thus:
Between the lines
A bogey walks
Eight legs, eight eyes.
Letters will flee
Ink will be smeared
Till it be born
In ash and dread,
Wolf ’s eye red,
Seen by the Three;
Who spare the mite
That words make flesh
Five lost, reborn.
The abbot ordered this abomination pumiced, and yet within hours the ink on the offending page returned, stubborn and bold. The master of copyists stripped the page, carried it to the trash heap outside the stone walls, and burned the offending vellum, intoning prayers of exorcism before spreading its ashes over the bones and offal.
But neither spider nor poem would die. Someone had copied those lines, with subtle variations, on scraps of vellum and wood and even on shards of pottery, no one knew how many times, and pressed them into the chinks between the abbey stones and elsewhere. In old structures and homes across the island the copies would continue to be found, now and again, until the Vikings arrived. But before the Vikings, manuscripts from Iona became less and less trustworthy, until copying was stopped and all newer copies were either burned or stored under lock and key, for none could be sure that allcopies back to the beginning were not tainted, the minds of even expert readers being imperfect to the task of total recall of so many pages.
The abbey was closed and the most valuable and beautiful books transported elsewhere. No one knew what the poem meant, yet for years, scholars claimed the spider and its errors could be removed for good, if that secret were to be discovered. Who were the three, and why did they live in ash and dread, and what apocalypse would resurrect just five corpses from their graves? (For some versions had as the final line, “Raising five dead.”)
And why all the concern, why the whispers and stories and frantic efforts to shrive and cleanse? For it was after all only an eight-legged bogey, tiny though fierce; none had been bitten or in any way injured by its journeys over the copied words. And those manuscripts had likely not passed through antiquity unchanged, having been scribed by so many diverse hands through the centuries, in different languages and different nations; even in Saracen lands, where error must be the rule. Some—heretics no doubt—still insisted that the spider was a servant of God and simply marked with its legs the proper corrections, based on memories of errors it had witnessed long before. But doubtless God would never have assigned such a task to loathsome vermin. Ginny closed the book, frowning deeply. That did it. She’d had enough of Bidewell and his obscurities. Ignoring her fear, she pulled back the steel bars, undid the bolts, and tugged open the door to the loading dock. The night air was cool and damp and smelled faintly of exhaust. Only a few cars traveled this way after six. Rain had passed several hours before and now the evening sky, still bright with dusk, was clear and intensely blue.
Ginny stepped onto the ramp and stared up with hungry, grateful eyes, as if she could fold and stash away the entire sky, keep it beside her always…not a book in sight, anywhere. She examined the shadows in the small, empty parking lot. Nobody watching. Stiff, still not sure what she would do, she walked like a marionette down the ramp to the open gate, jerking her head to look up, look back.
A few more feet, a couple of yards…
Time to regain her strength, her resolve—to do what she was born to do. She had lost all confidence in her ability to walk between raindrops. Why had she ever come here in the first place? The clinic—the doctor—she couldn’t think clearly, her ears were buzzing so, and her heart felt as if it might explode in her chest.
They never give up, you know. Once you make that call, they’re always waiting.She murmured, “I wish I could fly away. They’re keeping me here.”
You’re keeping me here.
“Just walk!”
Down at the corner, beyond the long, dark warehouse wall, a stop-light turned green, yellow, red, then green again. The sky darkened. The street was deserted.
The air smelled fresh and empty.
For the first time in two weeks, she searched for a more fortunate side branch—sent ahead her ethereal feelers for the nearest, safest parallel, a colder, fresher stream. Something interrupted her concentration. She looked down. Minimus wound between her legs, tail like a soft finger against her calves. The cat looked across the road, then butted her ankle. The thin man with the silver dollars, the smoky female. Are they still out there?
“You don’t know anything,” Ginny said. “Don’t you everwant to get out?”
The cat bumped her again. Things weren’t so bad—they were friends. Did they not share mice, did she not have those elegantly marked boxes of books to investigate?
She pushed the gate open and sidled through.
The feelers upriver reported back: no fresh streams left, not for her, not for anyone. She had to stay on this island of peace or face again the horrible thing, the spinning, swallowing, impossibly white, impossibly femalething to which the pair had tried to deliver her. Tears streaming, Ginny turned to go back in. Then she heard music from miles away, flowing gently south on the breeze. Come out and play.
Her fingers let go of the gate. One backward step and she stood in the middle of the sidewalk, arms spread like wings. The gate tapped the lock. The lock snicked shut. Minimus remained behind the wire.
Whoever Ginny was, wherever she was, thiswas the act that had always defined her: getting out, leaving, turning onto a different path, whatever the danger.
The cat watched with round deep eyes.
“I won’t be long,” Ginny said. “Tell Mr. Bidewell…” And then, flushed, laughing at how silly that was, she wiped her eyes and ran north, following the faintest, most enticing music she had ever heard. Bidewell kept an old swayed cot in one corner of his private library. The girl had ignored his advice. There was nothing he could do but wait. She was more important, far more powerful, than he was—in her way, perhaps now the equal of what was left of Mnemosyne.
He closed his eyes.
The closest thing to love he had ever known—this search for evidence of the ineffable, the track of the mother of all muses, the one who reconciled—who kept the universe in trim. Now slowly being strangled, fading, unable to fulfill her functions.
Haunted across the ages by a hideous shadow.
Bidewell moved through his ritual preparations for sleep, stretching as far as his old muscles would allow, popping joints in spine, shoulders, hips, with grim satisfaction, then slowly lying down, waiting for his pains to negotiate and settle into accord.
A furious scrape and scuffle interrupted his meditation. Between meows and hisses came a clacking and flipping and several sharp chirrups. A cat was chasing prey around the boxes—not a bird, surely, unless it had plastic wings.
Minimus appeared atop a high box against the dark outer wall and jumped to snare something the size of one of Bidewell’s pencil cases—something that made an effort at flight, and failed. Both cat and catch tumbled behind the boxes with a thump. Triumph was invariably followed by delivery. With delivery must come congratulations and reward, a snack. This was their compact, cat to man, man to cat. Bidewell rose to retrieve the box of kibble he kept on a high shelf, away from boxes. He had learned that lesson several times, having to clean up after a sick cat. Minimus, whatever his finer qualities, loved to gorge. Yet he never ate anything that he caught. A few minutes passed. Bidewell sat at a small desk reserved for gentle reading on sleepless nights, and turned on the old brass lamp. Here, he kept a compact edition of Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, which, with its acerbic rejection of the mundane, he found suitable. This worn volume, of course, had a pair of concluding chapters not found in any other edition.
Just as Bidewell seated himself, Minimus padded out of the darkness and leaped to the table carrying in his mouth a glistening, jeweled creature. The old man drew in his breath and pushed back his chair. The cat threw him a sidelong look, dropped his catch, and squatted.
The creature—a kind of insect, though ten inches long and with too many legs—had been shocked into immobility. It slowly flexed its long body and shivered a pair of shining wing cases the color of polished dark oak. On the wing cases—part of its natural design—the insect bore a single, ivory-white mark, like a symbol, or a letter in an alphabet Bidewell did not know. It cocked its large head, like a cicada’s, and its compound eyes glinted with brilliant blue highlights.
Minimus had done the insect no visible harm, but its movements were feeble. Docile even in distress, it gathered up enough energy to cross to the edge of the desk, where it paused like a clever toy, cocked its head again, and chirped.
Watched closely by both man and cat, it turned and approached a close-packed row of boxwood pencil cases decorated with large Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Minimus licked his paw.
The insect sidled up to the nearest case, then, with a hiss, dropped into an attitude of conformity, of fulfillment—and was still.
The insect was dead.
The cat lost interest and jumped to the floor.
Astonished, Bidewell traced the white symbol with a bony finger. “Not from any time I know,” he said. His texts, hundreds of thousands of them, were acting as a kind of lens, focusing the improbable and retrieving from not so far away, perhaps, those things that would only become likely across a greater fullness of time. A fullness now deteriorating, coming apart in sections—jamming and mixing histories in alarming ways. If nothing more were done, the future would drip-drop into their present like milk from a cracked bottle.
They could reach the end of their meager supply of time within a few days or weeks, and then: confusion, nightmare, loops of repetition; the final surprising, unpredictable dribbles of false opportunity and hope.
Terminus.
Perhaps he was in such a loop now. But the appearance of the girl—the wayward young woman, keeping him moody company—proved he was not. There was still one opportunity, one chance to forestall the inevitable.
She would return. The stones would gather.
All his life he had been anticipating and preparing for this occasion. He felt fear—of course. And a kind of joy. There was real and immediate work to do—connections to make, teams to assemble, children to protect—blessed children. Surely they would come to him like a new family to replace the old, the ones that had failed or vanished—children pushing up now like spring flowers, and so improbable! Better by far than any volume of deviating text.
And of course the predators were here as well.
FOURTEEN ZEROS
CHAPTER 16
The Tiers
Jebrassy felt little regret as he crossed the bridge over the flood channel to the long roads. Having time to himself, time to think, was like leaving a stuffy, crowded niche.
Beyond the end of the bridge, out in the fallow meadows, two small wardens were hunched over, wings folded, inspecting something in the dirt. Jebrassy scratched the side of his head and glanced sideways. A curtain of pale fog shrouded whatever drew their interest. He seldom saw this style of warden in the Tiers—small, glistening gold bodies—and they certainly never engaged with breeds. But he knew what they were investigating—the remains left by an intrusion. He wanted to turn aside, but instead squinted through the fog—trying to see the half-imagined, shifting figures, invisible masters of the Tiers—the Tall Ones. Jebrassy felt a sting of shame. He was nothing to them—less than a pede to the farmer who loaded it with packages and baskets for market. The teachers taught only what the Tall Ones wanted them to teach—not what any of the breeds actually needed to know. How he hated them all!
There was an old sama in the market—he had visited her once already, just to give voice to his questions: Why did time in the Tiers—the cycles of wakes and sleeps—vary so? What was outside the Tiers, if anything, and why didn’t marchers ever return? Questions the teachers never responded to. Why am I straying?
The sama would not carry tales to others—unlike Khren.
It was growing late, she said; she wouldn’t have much time. She gave no name; samas never gave their names, often moved between isles and levels in the Tiers, their niches unknown, untraceable. Nobody paid them—they performed their work for food left over in the market, telling fortunes, leading prayers, treating minor injuries—the wardens took care of anything more serious. They were generally poorly dressed, often dirty and smelly, and this old female was no exception. She drew up the blankets around her narrow market stall—consultations with samas always took place in an awkward crouch, blankets raised to block the light and prying eyes—then she pushed aside her crusted bowl, squatted before Jebrassy, and thrust a thin bright stick into the dirt between them. The stick lit up her brown face and made her experienced black eyes gleam like broken glass. Her questions, as always, were blunt. “Did your sponsors kick you out because you fancy yourself a warrior, hanging with punks—or because you are straying?”
Jebrassy leaned forward and splayed his fingers on the ground. Samas could ask whatever they wanted—they were outsidenormal expectations. “They aren’t my true sponsors. Mer and Per were taken.”
“Taken, how?”
“A nightmare came.” This was a euphemism; Jebrassy was ashamed to use it. The sama did not show any sign of understanding—it was not her job to understand. Who could understand what happened during an intrusion? “How sad,” she said.
“The new ones sponsored me for a few hundred wakes. Then they got tired of me,” Jebrassy said.
“Why?”
“My rudeness. My curiosity.”
“Where do you sleep?”
“Sometimes, under a bridge. Other times, I hide out in the clusters on the flood channel walls.”
“The old Webla neighborhood? High up among the false books?”
“Nearby. Lots of empty niches. Sometimes I stay with a friend.” He tapped his knee. “I find shelter.”
“Has anyone ever spoken to your visitor, the other?”
Jebrassy lifted one finger, yes. “My friend tells me about him, sometimes.”
“But you don’t remember what was said.”
Two fingers circling, no.
“Do you know others who stray?”
His hairline flexed. “Maybe. A glow I’ve just met once. She…she wants to get together later. I don’t know why.” Jebrassy let that thought hang between them.
“You have no value?”
“I’m a warrior, a vagrant, no family.”
The sama hooted low amusement. “You don’t understand glows, do you?”
He glared.
“You say you’re unworthy. But not because you stray. Why, then?”
“I want to know things. Earlier, if I couldn’t join a march, I thought I would fight the Tall Ones and escape the Tiers.”
“Huh! Do you ever see Tall Ones?”
“No,” he said. “But I know they’re there.”
“You think you’re special, wanting to escape?”
“I don’t care whether I’m special or not.”
“Do you think this glow is dim?” the sama asked. She hadn’t moved since they squatted and started talking, but his own knees hurt.
“She doesn’t look dim.”
“Why do you want to meet with her?” She scratched her arm with a filthy fingertip.
“It would be interesting to find someone—anyone—who thinks like me.”
“You’re a warrior,” she observed. “You take pride in that.”
He looked away and drew back his lips. “War is play. Nothing here is real.”
“We get delivered by the umbers and we learn from our sponsors and teachers. We work, we love, we get taken away when the Bleak Warden comes. More young are made. Isn’t that real enough?”
“There’s more outside. I can feel it.”
She rocked gently on her ankles. “What else do you dream about? When you’re not straying.”
“The intrusion that took Mer and Per. I saw it. I was just out of crèche. After, the wardens made me sleep for a while, and I felt better, but I still dream about it. I thought it had come for me, but it took them…doesn’t make sense.”
“No? Why?”
“Intrusions come and go. The wardens put up shades and fog, clean up, and it’s over. Teachers just keep quiet. Nobody knows where the intrusions come from, what they’re doing here—even why they’re called ‘intrusions.’ Do they come from outside? From the Chaos—whatever that is? I want to know more.”
“What more is there to know?”
Jebrassy got up.
The sama rocked. “I don’t offer comfort. I fix letterbug nips, pede pinches, sometimes I fix bad dreams—but I can’t help these.”
“I don’t want comfort. I want answers.”
“Do you even know the right questions?”
Jebrassy said, too loudly, “Nobody ever taught me what to ask.”
Outside, the noise of the market dwindled. He heard a plaintive whine—a hungry meadow pede tethered in a stall, waiting for its tweenlight supper of stalks and jule. The sama poked out her wide lips and fell back from her squat, then stretched her legs and arms and let out a deep, sighing breath. He thought his visit was over, but she did not draw aside the blankets that curtained the booth.
“I’ll go,” he said.
“Quiet,” she advised. “My legs hurt. I’m wearing down, young breed. Not too long before the Bleak Warden comes. Stay a bit longer—for me.” She patted the ground. “I’m not done trying to riddle you. Why come to a poor old sama?”
Jebrassy sat and gazed uncomfortably at the thatched roof. “This glow, if I get interested in her, and she in me…it won’t be right. She has sponsors. I don’t.”
“Did youapproach her?”
“No.”
The sama pulled a sachet of red jule from her robe, wrapped it, and tied it with chafe cord, making a broothe for steeping in hot water. “Drink this. Relax. After you stray, take notes. Do you have a shake cloth?”
“I can find one.”
“Ah—you mean, steal one. Borrow one from your friend, if he has one, or from the glow, if you see her again. Write it all down and come back to show me.”
“Why?”
“Because we both need to know what questions to ask.” The sama stood, drew back the blankets, and let in the failing gray light from the ceil. The market was closed and almost empty. “Perhaps dreams are like flapping a shake cloth—you erase all the words you didn’t choose. Young warrior, we’re done, for now.”
She pushed him out of her stall.
A very young glow, fresh from the crèche—tiny red bump still prominent on her forehead, swad-boots wrapped around her tiny feet—stood before a shuttered stall, feeding a hungry pede. The pede curled its glossy black segments around her ankles, wriggling its many legs. The young glow squirmed and looked up at Jebrassy with an expression of tickled delight.
He touched his nose, sharing the moment.
To take a partner, inherit or be assigned a niche, live in the Tiers in silent contentment, ignoring things you couldn’t understand…sponsor a young one…
