Ah. What’s that mean when it’s lying down?
But they would no doubt enter the False City through other gaps, and that meant they’d never find her. Ginny squinted at the guardians, forcing herself to see them for what they were—a matched pair, each with a circlet of ten or more eyes wrapped around otherwise human faces, lips and cheeks skewed in some strange emotion—the head set without a neck above powerful, many-limbed bodies, each limb configured to do something that she could not begin to understand.
She gave up her inspection. No sense adding confusion to madness. She decided that she would call this set of guardians the Welcome Wagon Committee to Hellgate One. She spun around again and named the second pair: WWC to Hellgate Two.
The experience could be repeated. Very scientific. Bidewell would be proud of her. Spinning again, she found the WWC to Hellgate Three.
Shouldn’t just do this all day, however long a day is. Make your choice, Ginny. Even if it’s the wrong one.
That was her inner voice, nobody else’s. The other had fallen silent. She was alone. Alone, Ginny knew she could always be relied upon to take the wrong path—except when she decided to go to the green warehouse. And even then, she tried to undo her good decision by venturing out. But now it wasn’t just herchoosing. The sum-runners drew each other together. So where were the others? Were they out searching for her in the mash-up, their stones tugging them along like eager terriers out for a run?
CHAPTER 96
The longer Jebrassy marched with Ghentun and Polybiblios, the more he realized what it was like to live around a Great Eidolon—even a fragment of one.
Polybiblios seemed to radiate knowledge. Some new and significant collection of facts or visions flowed into Jebrassy’s awareness every hour, filling him with history and science until his old self felt misplaced and overlooked.
Ghentun knew the epitome’s influence as well—and spoke his concern. “You’re leaking,” he told Polybiblios as they paused, helmets off, to rest and assess a new disposition in the Chaos around them. The epitome squatted beside them. His movements had grown more certain and less awkward, far from the support of the Broken Tower and all the Librarian’s servants and selves. He was acquiring his own kind of agility, a grace that reminded Ghentun of an angelin—no surprise. “I apologize. I will try to be less generous.”
“I don’t mind much,” Jebrassy said quietly, staring at the changing ripples of stone. “I just need some time to catch up. I have to think about things and make them my own.”
“Of course,” Polybiblios said. “Long ago, philosophers would have played a game of questions with their students—or their servants. Each question, so the philosophers claimed, would coax out prior knowledge, natural instincts born into them. What you feel may not be just my ‘leaking.’ It may be your own quality, emerging right on schedule.”
Ghentun looked aside and shook his head. “You’ve taken us away from the path of the beacon. Why?”
“We will find the beacon again,” Polybiblios said. “It was perverted long ago, you know—shortly after my daughter vanished, and Sangmer disappeared in search of her.”
Jebrassy’s face crinkled in dismay. “Why?” His innermost voice still told him the beacon must be inviolate—the only thing that could guide them to Nataraja, their ultimate goal—their reason for being made in the first place. “That’s impossible. Who would do that?”
Polybiblios met their obvious anger with resigned sadness—an easy enough expression in an offshoot of one so old. He did not give them an answer right away. “I hardly remember my own child,” he said. “As much as she wasmy child, so many had a part in her making.”
“We know the story,” Jebrassy said.
“There are so many versions of the story,” Polybiblios continued. “The truth may lie frozen and buried in the rubble that shores up the foundations of the Kalpa. So many versions to compare with the fragments of memory that I’ve managed to retrieve.”
Jebrassy lowered his voice and his head and circled the epitome, his anger burrowing deep. Polybiblios followed the breed with calm yet not precisely fearless eyes. “My people are out here, dying or worse—
for no reason?” the breed growled. “Because an Eidolonhas forgotten, and others have been careless?”
“Not at all,” Polybiblios said. “Between Eidolons, all things have a purpose, sometimes more than one. My greater self knew the lineaments of change the Chaos would undergo over time—its gradual reduction. The beacon now points us to where we need to be. It is finally correct. Sit here.” He patted the ground with his gloved hand.
Jebrassy looked between the epitome and Ghentun, his fury undiminished—but controlled. Did this mean all the previous marchers had never had a chance? That they had been sacrificed to distract, provide cover, and prepare for a future time when only a select few would succeed?
With a supreme effort, Jebrassy sat and stared down at the black dust and sharp, ancient stones.
“The path we are taking fits the best version I’ve pulled from all the stories,” Polybiblios said. “Draw from your emerging qualities—think of Ishanaxade, making this same journey. Think of her long sacrifice, that things will come right again.”
“You had us search for the stories, then take them with us. You wanted us to find the real story by testing them all. Because you had lost the truth. You were careless.”
“I don’t deny carelessness,” Polybiblios said. “But putting the past—even could it have been perfectly recorded and stored for tens of trillions of years—packing all that into a microcosm, would have taken far more time and energy than creating and searching a Babel, practically speaking. And had we made that choice, preserving one history—or an ambiguous few—would not be enough to quicken a new cosmos. Not enough to seduce and distract Mnemosyne and awaken the Sleeper.”
“Sleeper?” Ghentun sat across from the epitome and the breed. “That’s an ancient idea. The Sleeper is supposed to have died at the end of the first creation.”
“The Father of Muses,” Polybiblios said. “Brahma, some called him very long ago. Not dead. But bored—and so, sleeping.”
“That sounds like nonsense,” Jebrassy said, fighting his own growing comprehension. He did not want to knowanything that would blunt his anger.
Tiadba was out there. They might never find her—
But Polybiblios was still overflowing, and this time they were brushed by the emotion of a Great Eidolon. Ishanaxade.
Jebrassy and Ghentun looked at each other and felt a kind of sadness they had never known before—not the sadness a breed or a Mender could ever feel, but loss and betrayal that could only spread and age and mellow and sharpen all at once, among thousands of millions of epitomes and angelins, through the heights and inner recesses of the Broken Tower…across half a million years.
“The City Princes. They reset the beacon. They betrayed you,” Ghentun said.
“They betrayed my daughter,” Polybiblios said, looking away from them, as if he could not bear any kind of mirror. “We may have all betrayed her. What she must feel, after all this time—hiding out there, waiting. Or worse—captured.”
“If you know all the stories, then you know all the endings,” Jebrassy said. “Which one is true?”
“There are far more endings to a story than there are beginnings,” Polybiblios said. “The best stories start in the middle, then return to the beginning, then come to a conclusion that nobody can foresee. Sometimes, when you return to the middle, the story will change again. At least, they did when I was young.”
His voice seemed to hypnotize them. They saw a whirling lattice of fates surrounding a tiny and indistinct shape, barely remembered after so many ages.