“More monsters?” Frinna asked, drawing close to Herza, and then dragging Denbord toward both of them. He did not struggle.
Macht had turned to walk a few paces away from the group, looking behind at the land they had crossed.
“Everything’s shrinking again!” he called. “I can see the Kalpa. The Witness…there itis, too!”
Tiadba turned and felt herself go dizzy. Light was bending in screw-like loops, and it was certainly possible—even likely—that the Chaos had begun another great deflating, like a toy balloon. If they had all waited…would they have had to walk so far to get where they were now?
Frinna screamed, “We’re on a trod!”
The rocks smoothed and become sticky, trapping their boots with shocking speed. They seemed to plummet with the flat, pale surface to the level of the floor of the vale. All around the vale, gaps were opening in the mountains and trods were flowing down toward the greenish mass in the center. Khren lifted their one remaining clave, but before it could activate, a whip shot out and grabbed it away. No escape.
Already shadows loomed over them, half-blind eyes sweeping and twisted, bruised faces spread flat beneath high, arched bodies…and surrounding them, the slender limbs that glided, pulling and pricking at the surface of the trod.
Tiadba watched, paralyzed, as the others were grabbed and raised one by one in flickering, half-seen talons, then held clutched and squirming in the air.
The strangest and largest Silent One of all—three joined faces, sharing four whited, frosted eyes with black pinprick pupils—moved up to bend over her and leer. An arm with a hand like a thorn bush snatched her.
From the center of the vale—the frosted, uncertain green edifice and the icy mountain now hanging over it—came an awful, squealing trill, like millions of things lost beyond hope of rescue, all forced to demonstrate their joy, their happiness…
Forced to sing.
From the mountains all around, the huge frozen shapes quickened in a way that did not involve life, beyond a breed’s understanding—reluctantly juddering down from the mountains, gathering as if by decree to watch and perhaps participate in the Turvy.
One by one, as Tiadba watched, her companions were stripped of their armor. And then came her turn. First the Silent One with three faces and four eyes exposed her arms and legs, all the while the eyes vibrating and shivering, and then thorn-claws pulled at her helmet, which split and gave way just as the Pahtun voice spoke its final message:
“This is not the destination. The beacon—”
Tiadba felt no pain. Yet a kind of vacuum sucked all hope from her mind—then searched, cut, pushed aside…and found what it was looking for.
Your sister.
Not a voice, not a presence…the emptiest of empties, the quietness of a thing that did not have a voice, but used thousands of other voices to express its message.
You shall not be joined.
Your stories shall not be told.
Her companions were not dead. They were very little changed, in fact still struggled despite the loss of their armor—dangling and squirming, moving their lips without being heard. The Silent Ones swifted these tiny burdens along the new trod toward the center of the vale. Tiadba spun slowly, saw in flashes of spiraling light the giants gather, saw the central greenish mass resolve, take on rough edges and serrated shapes beneath the hovering whiteness…an ancient, shimmering illusion now profaned, and mocked, its translucent jade towers and domes spreading throughout the vale, and she knewit, recognized it for what it had once been and was no longer.
I’ve been journeying here since the beginning.
The marchers were carried into lost and haunted Nataraja—the False City.
CHAPTER 95
This was a dream, Ginny was sure of it—a dream someone else was having—and it was lovely. She was two people in one form, standing under a cloudy sky with patches of brilliant blue, and rolling hills stretched like great swabs of a brush to a definite and pleasant horizon. She was in fact in Thule, the great island just a hundred miles north of Ireland, rich with history: the place she had imagined while being visited by Mnemosyne. The place she had been patiently denied.
It was not quite fully formed, of course. She had to stare hard to make things assume a visual, tactual truth. She could look at the foliage near her feet—a rough kind of bush, heather or gorse or something with purple flowers—and with an effort, the flowers would suddenly popand become real. Her lips said, in vague tones, “This is wonderful. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Behind those lips, Ginny asked, “Who’s dreaming whom?”
“Maybe it’s you. You must know about sky and hills and bushes—I don’t.”
“What I know, you know. But I don’t remember your name.”
“We don’t have names—for now. I’m in a terrible place. But sometimes I can sleep. So we’re together again. Come for me, find me, before it’s too late.”
Ginny shook her head and pushed up from a crouch. She felt refreshed, maybe even encouraged—until now, she’d expected only sadness and grief and pain at the end of her peculiar stroll. She rubbed her cold hands and reached out to test the limit of the bubble.
Thus far and no farther.
More real than the dream, and much less pleasant.
She stood before a great opening in the mountains, guarded by two giant figures she did not want to examine too closely. Made for other places, she guessed, and made of other matter, substances that did special things under special circumstances. Whatever the hell that means.She turned on her heels twice, like a slow top, as she had when faced with the Gape, and felt the dark gritty landscape pirouette. Now she stood before another cleft in the high jagged rocks, guarded by another pair of frozen figures—just as strange, but different. Spinning twice again, she stood before a third opening and a third distinct set of guardians that didn’t seem able to do much in the way of guarding. Like colorful ceramic figures decorating a door— but this time, let’s fire the decorator. Trophies, all of them. Preserved and mounted after something had enjoyed an awful hunt through the galaxies, collecting specimens.
Ginny shivered.
Spinning twice again—a total of six spins—brought her back to the first gap. She recognized the first set of figures, though she still did not want to examine them up close and personal. Personalmight mean something very different here.
Without doing anything more difficult than spinning on her toes, she was making the entire valley revolve like a lazy Susan platter in a Chinese restaurant. Imagine that. Such power. There were three entrances to the Vale of Dead Gods. She could imagine them evenly spaced around the bowl formed by the mountains, points on a weird kind of super-triangle. Typhon space. Or the kind of space a dying universe falls into.Which entrance should she take?
Each, she knew, would lead her on a unique and separate spiral course into the False City where her dream-sister waited. Other people could enter through other gaps and follow other spiral courses, but they would never meet, never see each other, separated by Typhon-time as well as Typhon-space. That thought bothered her. All along, since she had left the green warehouse, she had hoped that Jack and maybe Daniel would come to save her from her persistent foolishness—always deliberately choosing the worst path, leading to disaster. Jack seemed the opposite, shifting toward a pleasant sort of survival, if not genuine fortune.
Daniel…
Daniel she couldn’t figure. Not a whole number. Irrational.
He has an irrational set of decimals.