“I will come no closer, and I will leave soon. But I must tell you…in the spirit of an honorable hunt, which must soon resume. Bidewell brought you all here for the same reason I attached myself to the one who calls himself Daniel—a strange fellow, don’t you feel it? Not what he seems. Very ancient. We call his like bad shepherds—but no matter. Whoever possesses a stone exudes an atmosphere of protection, and provides others a pass to the next level of this astonishing endgame. As do you, young Virginia. Here’s the pattern, the picture of our next few blinks of time. I will complete my part in the game, and Bidewell will complete his. He will deliver you to his mistress, and I will deliver Daniel and Jack to mine.”
“I don’t believe anything you say,” Ginny murmured, but her eyes indicated otherwise. She had never been good at trust.
“Pardon me for speaking truth,” Glaucous said. “But even among my kind, there are rules.”
Glaucous backed out and let the curtain fall, then returned to the storage room, his face stony and gray.
CHAPTER 78
The Chaos
Under the Witness’s eternal gaze, the Silent Ones had almost skimmed down upon the breeds when the entire land seemed to erupt with geysers and fountains of sooty darkness. The huge, flattened faces with their darting, ever-searching eyes—reminiscent of Tall Ones, breeds, and other varieties unknown to the marchers—had suddenly pulled away, leaving Tiadba and her companions spilled on the black ground, waiting for doom…doom delayed.
Tiadba withdrew her arm from her faceplate and saw that Khren and Shewel were already up on their knees. Herza and Frinna had risen as well. Still vibrating with shock, Tiadba managed to push into a crouch, and listened to the shrieks and wails shooting skyward from all around. The compressed ruins of a dead city had either risen around the Witness or been pushed into place like a pile broomed up for burning.
“Where are we?” she asked. “Has the Chaos shrunk?”
Khren and Macht crawled beside her. Nico had found another wall with better footholds.
“There has been movement,” the armor’s voice announced to all. “Distances have been reduced.”
By now the marchers had found vantages to all sides, less interested in the city than in what had happened to the Silent Ones and where the Witness was now situated, almost on top of them. Tiadba studied the Witness with a frown. The huge, distorted head—as tall as three or four blocs stacked on top of each other—had been erected on a massive scaffold of old buildings. Its expression seemed frozen in weary despair. Perhaps that half-melted visage revealed its emotions over times longer than the life of a breed. With everything shifting and changing, perhaps the Chaos would accelerate and she could actually seethe agony come and go across those ruptured brows, accentuating the rotation of that huge, protruding eye, dull green glimmers winking within its dark pit of a pupil. The sweep of the beam had been interrupted, but now the glimmers were focusing, re-forming…and the beam lanced out again over the Chaos, returning to its slow, inevitable rotation. Khren and Shewel pulled Tiadba to her feet. None of them had been hurt—yet. They were left untouched in the very shadow of the Witness, wrapped around by labyrinths of broken walls and toppled structures—spirals, towers, ornamental facades.
The walls had grown up in no time, while the sky had turned a sickly metallic gray and something like wind had rushed over the Chaos, carrying fanned-out clots of black dust. And now the fountains, shooting into the sky, suddenly joined into spinning funnels, then curved over and swooped toward the distorted horizon.
“Here!” Herza and Frinna called.
Tiadba pushed Khren back and climbed the opposite angled wall to see. They all watched as the Silent Ones maneuvered on their tracks, hunkering, collapsing their stilts to avoid the funnels, now like thick fingers, with the marchers in the middle of a giant palm. A kind of living smoke shot through with gray and silver rose all around, and the Chaos erupted once more—this time bolts of red light rose up and spread against the wrinkled sky.
“More intrusions,” the armor explained.
“I seethat,” Tiadba said, and then reached to make sure she still carried the bag in her pouch, with her books. Theirbooks.
How could Jebrassy ever find them, ever make his way through this?
“Where’s the beacon?” Nico asked. “I don’t hear anything.” If they lost the beacon, then it did not matter whether they were alive or dead.
“It’s stopping,” Khren called.
The fountains fell short, the geysers sputtered, the continuous bedlam of screams and whoops dropped in pitch and intensity to low rumbles.
“We have to move across the trod,” Tiadba said.
“There’s something out there, on the other side,” Nico said, pointing. Their suit faces magnified what he had spotted and showed them a different kind of ruin, blocky cubes and rectangular structures laid out in a grid and topped by a lighter swirl of sky.
Tiadba closed her eyes and tried to remember what her visitor would have called them. Streets. Roads.
“I know a place like this,” she said.
“We’ll have to make it fast,” Nico advised, and Khren agreed.
They pushed over the rubble and ran over the dimpled trod, its pale surface spongy, then mucky, like a fallow swale. Behind them the nearest Silent One began to rise up on its thin legs, the mouth in the flat massive face twisting as if in pain.
“Faster!” the Pahtun-voice commanded, and they pushed, tugged, braced against the suck, and crossed the trod to step out on glazed black crust, dust beneath, and then—
A road made of square red stones, covered with black ice, but hard—they could run! They could flee as the Silent Ones pulled up their stilt-legs and began to reach out with fluorescing grapples. But the marchers were now out of reach.
They walked in silence, moving what might have been miles through the ruins. The small generator had been sucked down into the rubble on the other side of the trod, pinned between collapsing walls. They had only one clave left between them.
And Tiadba had her books.
“Is this place new, or old?” Khren asked.
“Very old, I think,” Tiadba said as they increased their distance from the both the Witness and the trod.
“What kind of place is it?” Herza asked. Usually she was the least curious, less even than Frinna, and never asked questions.
“I think it’s called a ‘town,’” Tiadba said. “Like a bloc, but laid out flat instead of stacked.”
“Some of the buildings look like they might have been taller,” Khren said. “Maybe something mowed them down.”
Twisting curls of feeble blue light arced from the Chaos into the flat cityscape, dancing down the roads and caressing the shattered walls. Nico asked what the loops were.
“Entangled matter,” Pahtun’s voice responded. “These are ring fates, interactions between particles that are the same, once separated by time and fate—but no more.”
Ring fates.Tiadba shuddered. She had not heard that phrase before, not even from her visitor, but it sounded important, even crucial.
“Are they dangerous?” Khren asked.
“Unknown,” the armor replied. “They cannot be avoided. You are made from primordial mass. There may be more entangled recognitions between matter from the past, now joined to itself in the present.”
They tried to focus on the words they almost understood. Tiadba thought that her and Jebrassy’s visitors might have spoken to them out of just such a past. Did that mean they were connected—made in part at least of the same matter?
She told the others that they needed to find something like shelter, and stay alert. The Chaos had been crunched, compressed—that seemed to be the simplest way of expressing what they had experienced—and perhaps that meant this past had caught up with them, colliding and merging with everything around the Kalpa.