“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.”