He shook his head sharply at that unknown word, that difficult memory of a sound. You’re delivered by the umbers—they’re like storks, right? They leave you under a cabbage leaf.
“Shut up.”
His bare feet took him farther down the path.
You’re like an animal in a zoo. But you don’t even know what a zoo is. Why are they keeping you here?
Jebrassy did not dislikehis visitor, and certainly did not fear him, but these residues offered no answers. When Jebrassy strayed—when the visitor took over—typically, nothing happened, as Khren had pointed out.
“I don’t know what you are,” Jebrassy growled under his breath. “But I wish you’d go away.”
He stood by the bridge, looking over the still and covered meadows market and the beginning of the long roads which fanned out to the far limits of fields and walls surrounding the Tiers, their neighborhood—half a day’s brisk journey across, overarched by the ceil, the curtain wall, the moist wall, their vertex at one extremity—and the long round wall opposite—most difficult to reach, but under and through which ran the flood channels.
Sometimes the teachers referred to the round wall as the outer, and the other two as inner. All of them—limits.
Barriers to curiosity.
CHAPTER 17
The wardens had spread mist and black curtains around the site of the intrusion, at the outer perimeter of a field of chafe sprouts in the shadow of the Moist Wall. They now hovered, awaiting Ghentun’s inspection.
Behind the curtains, an irregular section of the chafe field measuring about a third of an acre had been turned into fine snowy crystals, primordial matter converted to something different, deadly or useless: the hallmark of the Typhon, perverse, even malevolent. In the middle of the crystals, a male breed—a farmer, judging from his stiff scraps of clothing—had been carelessly rearranged. The farmer had still been alive when the wardens found him.
“Did you kill this one?” Ghentun asked the lead warden.
“He was suffering, Keeper. We summoned a Bleak Warden and terminated him. No one has touched him since.”
The Bleak Warden itself—slender, with a red thorax and shiny black lift-wings, now lay deactivated beside the farmer. White crystals cluttered its frozen, bent limbs. It would have to be disposed of, along with the body, the soil, and all else that the intrusion had touched. Ghentun glanced toward the straight road that led from the unused inner precincts—the Diurns and the apex bridge—all the way across the meadows and fields to the narrowed, arched haft where the first isle absorbed the Tenebros flood channel. A few breeds were still about in the tweenlight. All of them avoided the fog.
In the seventy-five city years since he requested his interview with the Librarian, Ghentun estimated he had lost over two thousand breeds. These invasions into the lowest levels of the Kalpa were now occurring once or twice every dozen sleep-wakes. Most seemed to target breeds—those who saw, who perceived, in the oldest ways. More often than not, the wardens investigated and drew their conclusions without his presence, but Ghentun was beginning to doubt their accuracy. He could not discount the possibility that the wardens were being manipulated by the city officers, Eidolons loyal to the Astyanax, who in all these thousands of centuries had paid little attention to the Tiers. In the Kalpa’s higher levels and more prosperous urbs, the reality generators seemed better able to protect the vast majority of citizens. Intrusions rarely occurred there, but perhaps it was because the Chaos had no interest in Eidolons. Still, the more intrusions there were in the Tiers, the more danger there might be for the higher urbs—real, metaphysical danger, and political danger for the Astyanax. Once the poor farmer had been removed, the whited soil was scraped and stored in sealed containers by small gray wardens. As before, the containers, the victim, and all the wardens who had touched them—tainted by that contact—would be locked away in the vaults deep below the flood channels. Ghentun had visited those vaults several times during the past century. They had been unspeakable in their fermenting, noxious morphing.
“We will have to exportthis one, Keeper,” the lead warden confided as Ghentun knelt beside the contorted body. “The vaults are nearly full.”
This was almost too much for Ghentun to bear. The tainted evidence of the intrusion would have to be shot out into the Chaos.
CHAPTER 18
The tweenlight had turned tawny gold, ushering in flat wispy clouds and the muddy shades that came before a sleep. The lowering flush of light was so diffuse and universal that Jebrassy cast only a faint hint of shadow. Everything around him—old and abandoned—seemed lost in a smoky dream. The Diurns lay flush against the curtain wall, accessible by a long and sometimes treacherous hike past the end of the abandoned Apex Causeway where it connected the tips of the three isles—the plateaus that supported the stacked Tiers. The curtain wall, in turn, ascended three miles to the overarching ceil, upon which the lights and darks of wake and sleep played out in endless, faded procession, as they had for tens of thousands of lives.
All this fell within one sweep of his eye from where Jebrassy now walked along the causeway. He also glanced from side to side to make sure there were no screeches or wardens waiting in the shadows to nab sleep-hikers. The wardens were particularly vigilant after an intrusion. Behind him, the causeway stretched more than a mile toward the bridges that had once carried the old neighborhood’s traffic over the Tartaros, the larger of the two channels that separated the blocs. Four slender, twisted spires flanked the conclusion of the causeway, five hundred feet tall and needled through with fluted pipes that, it was said, had once produced deep and awesome sounds—music. Whether the spires were original to the Diurns or had been added later was unknown—there were so many tottering, muddled layers of old breed construction here, contributing to the dangers of the entire precinct, which had long ago been condemned and blocked by debris and screech sentinels. Most of these had themselves long since collapsed, failed, or were simply forgotten, and were no longer necessary, since few of the ancient breed felt the urge to come here. There was enough faded grandeur in the inhabited parts of the Tiers to satisfy anybody.
At the apex where the Curtain Wall met the Moist Wall, spread an amphitheater that could once have seated thirty or forty thousand of the ancient breed. As a stripling, Jebrassy had been here twice, demonstrating his bravery or at least his persistence—climbing the debris, evading the few sentinels that were still active, making his way down the dirt-encrusted, sloping aisles between the risers to the gallery, a roofed labyrinth that stretched for several hundred yards to the proscenium. The Diurns were visible from several points in the gallery where the roof had fallen. Jebrassy, working his way once more through the stone maze, speculated as he had before that this might have been the site of old initiation rituals, and was certainly not part of the original construction. Even upon his first visit, the labyrinth had proved simple enough to solve—a left-handed maze with a distal twist, made easy by ages of decay.
Is the glow testing my resolve? Poor test.
Retracing the path he had taken before, still clear in memory—any adventure, however disappointing, was etched deep—he came to a huge gap in the gallery roof. This rewarded him with an unobstructed view of the Sounding Wall, a name that meant nothing to him—a mottled gray expanse hundreds of feet high, blank but for eroded holes and corroded extrusions where large things had once been set or fastened.
A few more minutes of climbing and threading the last of the gallery’s barriers brought him to the base of the amphitheater’s Sounding Wall, and from there it was just a snap until he stood in the immense, glimmering shadow of the curved Wall of Light.