“I thought there were only two fates left,” Ghentun said.
“Fates, yes—but in a Turvy, those paths can be swirled until they seem to lie parallel. You can jump from one to another—but they are the same, part of a spiral. In many regions of the Chaos the rules of the very tiny have been writ large. You have to spin twice just to face the same direction. Here, it is even more complicated. We can see behind us—there seems to be a way back, a retreat—but if we reverse course and try to leave, we will fail.”
“We could jump to the other track and get to the center faster, couldn’t we?” Jebrassy asked.
“No,” the epitome said. “We are where we need to be.”
Ahead, the gathering cloud had hardened into an upside-down mountain of ice, its edges like scalloped blades.
“The tracks will merge soon enough,” the epitome said. “The cosmos is in its final moments. The revolt of the very small is about to begin—and I don’t mean you, young breed. The pressure on the Typhon is growing. Out here, the former master does not know howto change.”
“What pressure?” Ghentun asked.
“This is all that remains. The Chaos has shrunk to two circles. One circle surrounds this vale. The other surrounds what is left of the Kalpa. There may still be a path between them, sprinkled with bits and pieces of the past. I don’t know. Maybe that’s closed, too. Outside lies nothing. That is the Typhon’s legacy. For all its power, it can leave no mark—only void. It tried to be a god, and it failed. There is no nowhere left for it to go. No escape.”
“All the stories left unfinished?” Jebrassy asked, unsure, then disgusted.
“No. If we succeed, what comes after, not even the whole of my self could understand. We will be as children before wonders. There is a greater force, who thus far has paid little heed to most of our trillion centuries.”
“Hmph. The Sleeper?” Jebrassy was tired of being ignorant until taught. He wanted to teach himself—learn on his own. Learn what had happened to Tiadba.
He was almost afraid to know.
“The Turvy will be the Typhon’s last chance,” the epitome said. “It will need to capture us and prevent the sum-runners from being joined. Watch for trods. Gliders, Scouts, Ascendants, Silent Ones…If they have nowhere else to go, they’ll come hunting here.”
They moved on toward the bowl and the green center of the vale. Ahead, blue pillars of ice grew to meet the upside-down mountain’s gleaming edges.
“Something’s coming,” Jebrassy said. “Not trods. Not monsters. Something else—I can feel it.”
“So can I,” the epitome said. “So can they all.”
They could hear a thin, shrieking bellow now—pulsing in from all around, an awful nastiness, like strangling, screaming, and shouts of warning commingled.
The giants lining the mountains were struggling to speak. Some seemed to struggle to move—shivering and stiffly casting off soot and rubble from around their bases.
“They’ve seen this before,” Polybiblios said. “It’s this vision that filled their blood and marrow and turned them fossil. It’s what the Witness has tried to warn us about for half an eternity.
“The Typhon has nowhere left to hide. It is coming here with all its servants—all those it has captured and tormented. Here we will find my daughter.”
CHAPTER 99
The seeing had not gotten any easier. There was an optical perversity that no manner of twisting and squinting could set right. Even within their protective caul, which Jack hoped he would never need to explain—he felt maligned by the views that somehow crept into his eyes. Any living place showed both decay and growth, like the jumble of dead and living trees in a forest, or even a city burned, booted, crushed by war. Here there was only shoddiness, a despondent dullness of wit, will, and enthusiasm—in short, a lazing failure to keep and maintain. This place showed only decay.
Not much comfort to be had from resting his eyes.
Jack was aware that Glaucous had been trying once again to hook his affection and trust, to consign these little fish to one or another basket—his, or failing that, Daniel’s. Daniel was a fake, of course—without actually slinking, he slunk, and without saying anything, he lied. Even the truth from his lips was deceptive, because they were not his lips.Glaucous was little better—honest in shape, but that shape worse than lies.
Still, they all had to stay close. Their bodies rejected what lay beyond the bubble. One could fall back just six or seven paces—no one dared more—before all suffered exhaustion, closeness of breath, headaches, sneezing—blood from nose, ears, fingertips. They were filthy with soot and streaks of wiped blood. The bubble did allow something like smell—phantom scents, madness and burning, sour and sick. Nobody was supposed to be here. Heredid not tolerate intruders. Now they could see almost nothing—a kind of spot of dim glow for some distance, restless darkness on all sides, a tumbled blankness, gray invalidity, the wholesale lack of anything and everything, only slightly less disturbing than the more defined things they had already seen.
Sometimes the tumbles and wrinkles assumed the crooked aspects of a landscape, then just as easily gave it all up—a bad piece of work—and resumed void.
Something seemed to surround the void and briefly spin, like being caught inside a wheel or a gyroscope. But then it vanished.
It might never have been.
The design on the box.
Jack had almost given up hope for Ginny. They hadn’t found her or her trail—the surface beneath their shoes mostly felt like old but solid rock—but their sum-runners had pulled them along with precisely the same tug as Ginny’s. Or so he assumed, since Daniel’s two stones behaved just like Jack’s. The dead, empty cities were now behind them—incomprehensible hulks floated ashore from far, severed times, beached and then subjected to perverse inspection, angry dissection, and finally—Jack tried to imagine and reconstruct it—a restless, angry rejection.
Whole cities cast aside like broken cadavers, marked and scattered with hatred and confusion. All that wreckage worked over by a starless, pitchy, unhappy thing, totally powerful, yet completely clueless within and without.
His fancies grew.
Glaucous’s rough voice knocked him out of his fugue. “While you two slept, I kept watch. We’ve come around some things like hills or mountains.”
“How could we sleep?” Daniel objected. “We were walking.”
“You sleep, walking or not.”
Jack wrinkled his nose. “Nightmares without sleep,” he suggested.
“Lies without reason,” Daniel countered, and looked left at Glaucous. Their shoes made an unpleasant sound falling on the bubble and pressing it to the uneven black rock—a squeaking trunch, trunch.
“Gentlemen,” Glaucous said, as if urging civility. Then he halted and stared ahead and his eyes grew wide. “Couldn’t be.”
Jack and Daniel moved two paces by reflex before stopping. “Couldn’t be what?” Jack asked.
“I am a sensible fellow,” Glaucous insisted, sleeving sweat from his cheeks. Now it was Jack’s turn to see movement ahead—small, dark shapes, low and sleek, with long curls rising and twitching. Not unfamiliar, certainly not frightening in and of themselves. And yet—here!
“Cats,” Jack said. Daniel turned.
“Amazingly capable, cats,” Glaucous said. “Excellent and powerful Shifters, and some are Chancers. Gods and masters of those who diminish and gnaw.”
The shapes had faded.
Glaucous took a deep breath. “Now, as to those hills and mountains,” he said. “They’ve been described to me. They enclose an unhappy place.” He made as if to dig a furrow in the air with his spaded palm.
“I’ve been told this is where the Moth delivers shepherds and their stones. A long, shallow gouge—like a valley ringed with high peaks, surrounded by unspeakable things taken prisoner in far places. And in the center of it all, a shallow bowl with three fate-braided entrances, confounding to Chancers and Shifters alike.