You are in its heart.
Find me.
Find your sister.
CHAPTER 82
The Green Warehouse
In the small storage room, surrounded by collapsed cardboard boxes and piles of broken-down crates, Glaucous lay back on the narrow cot, thinking over all he had seen and done, all those he had caged and put to an end. Birds sold or tossed to the rats; children delivered by the dozens to the Chalk Princess. In the long run, in the undoubtedly stellar perspective of someone like the Mistress, it came to no difference. He did not feel guilt so much as imbalance. He did not seek understanding—Daniel might understand a little of what was happening outside, but Glaucous worried that he was too old, too much a living fossil. His intellect had been whetted to a dedicated edge more than a century ago, and then blunted by hard use. He could manufacture a semblance of cleverness, summon a pattern of behaviors in response to a more or less familiar challenge—
But not to this. This was a young person’s game. He could only contribute what he had added to the mix so often before: the fog of promise, the taint of lies.
When the three had been isolated in Bidewell’s back rooms, he had feltsomething moving through the building like a subtle breeze—Mnemosyne herself, he supposed. For a moment his memory had sharpened, put itself in order. Quite the opposite sensation of being around the Devil’s whirlwind, the Queen in White.
His lips moved. In the lowest, softest voice, he tried to remember his story differently, to speak of a young boy treated well—not showered with riches, but trained to fulfillment and not servitude, his potential shaped by firm, gentle, if not expert hands—fine propensities nurtured, bad tendencies discouraged…
Maturing into a normal life. A homely but honorable woman might have taken him to be her husband. Children might have come that he—they—would protect and never, ever deliver up to her. He could not imagine love, not after all these years, but he could summon a vague picture of mutual respect and understanding.
He clenched his teeth, got up from the old cot, and put on his jacket. The door opened.
Daniel and Jack stood in the gray light.
“The girl’s gone,” Daniel said. Behind them, ice grew over the boxes and crates, up the walls and ceiling. Near the concrete floor the ice was slowly staining black.
“Ah,” Glaucous said, head inclined, eyes mere cracks. He rubbed his hands against the cold. He was used to moving in the dark.
“We can’t find her,” Jack said. Glaucous searched the boy’s face and found only nervous excitement. A fog of promise. He would unite these two. They would become like brothers. His last contribution to the game—perversely, the creation of a bond of trust.
“I heard three of the women leave,” Glaucous said. “Where’s the fourth?” She stayed here for you, Jack. Do you care?
“She’s with Bidewell in the office,” Jack said.
“If we are here,” Glaucous said, “and we do seem to be here, and moving about and speaking, then I assume Terminus has…I’m at a loss for words, young masters. Has Bidewell navigated us through that impassable barrier?”
Neither Daniel nor Jack answered.
Glaucous pushed past them. “ Shewill come soon,” he said. “The Chalk Princess hates bookish sanctuaries.”
“Doesn’t matter what the Chalk Princess does now,” Jack said. “We’re where we’re supposed to be.”
“Ah, did Bidewell tell you that?” Glaucous asked.
“Jack dreams, remember?” Daniel said with a sharpness that made Glaucous uneasy. “He might know more about what’s going to happen than we do.”
“Then by all means, we should go after the girl, and Jack will guide us,” Glaucous said. They will take their stones with them—all will be gone from the warehouse. Our Livid Mistress will come to claim Bidewell—his books alone cannot protect him here. And then, what has always been promised toher servants…
That promise had been revealed to him just once, over a century before. He could hardly remember the details, only the lingering aura of a glorious triumph, control, wealth—unimaginable victory over all adversity. A complete absence of guilt. And what would he be, then? Perhaps not even Max Glaucous anymore.
For the first time in decades a note of a conscience played somewhere in his chest, sharp and painful despite its tiny size. He peered at Jack, then at Daniel, and felt the muscles in his face turn waxy, freezing his expression into an amateur parody of a smile.
How ugly I am,he thought. How old and cruel and full of lies.
CHAPTER 83
The Kalpa
In the tower, waiting…
The fusillade of intrusions had scorched deep into the Kalpa, high and low, practically destroying the two outer bions and leaving the first bion—and the Broken Tower—in a highly unstable condition. A third of the Defenders had dissolved into fiery clouds. It was apparent that the conclusion of the Typhon’s vendetta would not long be delayed.
Ghentun had put his affairs in order, surveyed the damage in the Tiers, and determined what could be done for those ancient breeds that still lived, who did not require the ministry of the Bleak Warden—a small remainder cowering in their niches, moaning songs and prayers, watched over by the few samas brave enough to walk the hallways.
Nothing more could be done.
He had left the Tiers for the last time and returned to the Broken Tower, not at the bidding of the Librarian, but for the sake of his own conscience. Even then he was well aware that any course he chose was likely already embedded in the scheme of one or another Great Eidolon, and he was filled with loathing for them all.
Enslavement.How could you enslave a dying cosmos? What could any of these Eidolonic schemes mean to a being like himself, no longer capable of the evanescent noötic shimmer, much less of passing signal and sense from epitome to epitome, incapable of even approaching what passed for thought among those powers who still claimed to be human?
Waiting to be noticed by the servants of the Librarian.
Ghentun looked down from a high window cracked and smoking, blackened at the edges, rimed inside and out with crystalline densities that crawled and rearranged, trying to heal the crack on this inward side, while on the outer, black otherness crept and sought a point through which to pry entry. The angelins finally appeared and filed into the wide, once empty chamber—not one this time, but thousands of many different shapes and sizes, all blue, all cold, settling themselves in concentric curves with Ghentun and the high window at their focus.
He glanced back at them, unmoved, then returned to his contemplation of what now lay beyond the border of the real. Few in the bions below would ever witness what he was seeing; Eidolons and Menders and Shaper alike preferred ignorance to the certainty of this swiftly approaching doom. The Chaos had fundamentally changed, no doubt about it. Nothing like what surrounded the Kalpa had ever been seen before.
How the ancient emotion of curiosity had declined to a deathly, classic superiority—the triumph of blind satisfaction! This must have been what it was like for so many across the five hundred living galaxies during the last of the Mass Wars…awaiting transformation or destruction by the Eidolons. Not so very long after, many of those same Eidolons were now giving way to the Chaos. The Chaos had even less mercy for Eidolons, so it was said. Ghentun took grim satisfaction in having this history lesson pressed home so vividly. It stung him deeply that he had once abandoned his primordial mass, given up his Mender heritage for a few thousand years of hopeful integration into the upper urbs…A betrayal of high degree, he thought.