I could feel the ancient forces like a fire heating my eyes and skin. What had once been abstruse history and theory—a lost muse, condensed and scattered at the end of the Brightness—stood before me, real and vivid, though transparent.
“You’re still a kind of ghost,” I said. “You probably won’t take up much space, or consume many units of support.”
“I don’t eat at all—yet. But I will. I might eat you, Pilgrim.” She seemed very mature now, with eyes bold and deep and golden. “Perhaps I will learn my true name on your ship. Perhaps you will help my father find it for me.”
I was already more than half in love.
Exhausted, mind spinning with things she could not possibly understand, Tiadba glanced around the circle of marchers. All looked puzzled, struggling with mysteries and words far beyond their experience. The Pahtun made a low grumbling noise, then shook his great head. “It’s a very old tale,” he said. “Not sure I believe any of it.”
“That’s the way it reads,” Tiadba said, defensive.
“Oh, I don’t doubt that,” the Pahtun said. “So many marchers, so many tales. I’ve often wondered how the Eidolons came to be the way they are, and how Ishanaxade came to be what sheis…but those are other stories, and maybe I still don’t know the truth of it.”
“It makes a sort of sense,” Nico said valiantly. “We’ll have to read the books later. See if the stories change.”
“I don’t know that the stories change,” Tiadba said, not for the first time. “Maybe my understanding changes.”
“Time to teach us all to read the old letters,” Denbord insisted.
“We’d like that,” Herza and Frinna said, to Tiadba’s surprise.
“Fat chance,” Macht said, and yawned.
“If there’s time,” the Pahtun said. “The armor will be ready soon.”
Something like a drowse—but far from sleep—came over Tiadba for the first time since they had left the training camp to cross the border of the real. She could not be certain she was having a dream, or finding a strange kind of memory. She thought she was in a large room surrounded by shelves of books, two or three times taller than the shelves in the upper Tiers. She saw four women—large women by her standards, but how was she to judge? She was small—they were large. They moved around her, talking among themselves—deeply concerned.
She broke her trance with a gasp and looked up to see the Pahtun pulling pieces of armor from the spinning branches at the center of the bower and assembling their new suits. He placed them in standing positions, knitting limbs to trunks using a small sphere gripped by his flower finger. He was blowing air through his lips with a musical succession of notes, not what Tiadba would call a tune. Observed, he finished what he was doing and winked at her, then touched his nose. But he looked worried—if she was any judge of the expressions assumed by Tall Ones.
As the others gathered beside the reassembled suits, Pahtun—so like his namesake, she decided she could not detect any difference, other than the smudges and ragged apparel—walked around the circle and passed his hands up and down, making each suit glow.
“They’re finished,” he announced. “Fresher, more informed, as promised. Now, put them on quickly. There’s no time. The trod is shifting, and we will soon find ourselves right in the middle.”
The marchers quickly donned their new suits, moving about to try the fit. They felt little difference at first; Tiadba’s seemed slightly stiffer, that was all.
The Pahtun confined the spinning branches. The box reduced itself until he could pick it up, and he slung it in a piece of fabric that hung from his shoulder.
“You don’t wear a suit,” Tiadba said.
He waved one hand. “The bower is my armor. Watch yourselves—it’s about to collapse, and I will vanish with it. Stand aside. We will not encounter each other again, I hope. If we do, we will all have failed. Your armor will be more responsive and informative and even stronger, but remember, there is worse to come. Above all, believe I am real. Don’t think I was never here.”
The bower burned away, exposing the rucked-up sky and the long red-purple arc of fire. Tiadba’s helmet rose around her head and the faceplate colored, tinting the scene orange as all about them the branches broke into violet flame, too bright to look upon.
They stood on rolling black ground, and she heard the others stifle cries of dismay. They were back in the Chaos. For a moment Tiadba thought she saw a tall, slender figure move rapidly away, a flash of white limbs—a nimbus of glowing, spinning branches surrounding a Tall One—a lone Mender.
“Marchers on alert,” their armor warned. “Listen for your beacon.”
She heard it now—a steady musical pulse, stronger as she faced in one direction, weaker in all the others. And she recognized the armor’s new voice.
It was Pahtun’s.
Denbord and Khren approached her, and then the others. They formed a circle, facing outward, and realized each could see what the others were seeing, allowing better judgment of their surroundings—many eyes combined at once, a strange sensation.
“Did the Tall One squeeze himself into all our suits, or did he just pick up and leave?” Macht asked.
“Let’s hope he was real,” Nico said, “and we’re not laid out on this black stuff, naked, dinner for monsters.”
“Follow your beacons,” the armor insisted. “Much distance to cover, and quickly. All this region is uneasy. Silent Ones always seek what defies the Typhon.”
“March!” Tiadba said, and with greater confidence and greater alertness, they followed the pulsing tones, forming a wavering line that soon drew straight, Tiadba in front, Khren taking up the rear. All of them could see what she saw ahead, around: a low green light that flickered and rose in spikes, as if to touch the sky.
Their steps slowed and they felt oddly heavy. From their right, something loomed and passed too quickly to see—something huge, broad, and flat, flying past on high, slender pillars that pulled up the ground ahead and behind—and then it was gone.
“It had a face,” Khren said. “A human face. Bigger than a meadow…”
“Move quickly,” the armor instructed. “Distance will close in, light will move in unfamiliar ways, and things will seem to burn. Above all, follow the beacon.”
Off to the left, Tiadba saw a swinging gray sword of light, brighter than before: the glowing beam sent out from the Witness.
“We’re right under it,” Nico said. “How did we get so close? Wasn’t it on the other side?”
“We should set up our generator and wait for it to go away,” Macht said.
“No!” the armor insisted. “You are being hunted. There is no shelter here. There is only escape.”
CHAPTER 77
The Green Warehouse
Jack knelt beside Ginny’s bed and put his hand on her arm. She had been sleeping for hours, even after the pewter light of whatever passed for dawn touched the windows beneath the warehouse roof. At his touch, she shifted on the cot, then opened her eyes and looked beyond him. The peace after her time in the room had passed. The gnawing worry and fear were back—especially in sleep. She was sleeping so much now. Jack, on the other hand, was mostly wide-awake. His dreams since being in the empty room had been brief and uneventful.
“They’re huge,” she murmured. “They’re like stingrays, but they have faces on one side. Arms and legs make dimples in the road as they skim along, like water striders on a pond. They shoot by too fast to see, unless they see you first—and if they catch you, it’s over.”
Jack wiped a tear from his cheeks, feeling emotions that were not his own, not yet. “Where are you?” he asked.
“We’re miles from the city—I don’t know how far. It’s always night out here, always dark. The sun doesn’t cast any light—it’s just a glimmer on the edge. We don’t even have real shadows. The armor says the Chaos here is thin—some of the old rules still survive. We can even take off our helmets and breathe the air. But it freezes your lungs if you suck it in. Fur on the nose—good thing.” She looked around, as if trying to locate his face, seeing neither the warehouse nor Jack. “Is anything coming?”