Jebrassy took a moment to catch his breath. The immense screen was streaked and crusted top to bottom with dust and soot—not from smoke, but from the accumulated miasma of thousands of generations of living beings. At the far end, an ornate and partly collapsed partition of stone and masonry—its highest remnant still towering hundreds of feet above the gallery—had left a pile of rubble that spilled onto the proscenium and the lowest sweep of the amphitheater, where all the seats had long since been stripped or rotted away. Clearly, many ancient breeds had tried to solve the mystery of this place—or to use it for their own purposes, adding their own masonry structures. Most of their efforts, like the original, had come to ruin—even greater ruin, since, Jebrassy thought, it wouldn’t take much to scrub the screen, rebuild or replace the seats in the galleries, and restore at least the outward appearance of the original design.
But no one now living could match the endurance and ingenuity of the Wall of Light’s original builders. And who were they? Tall Ones?
“I don’t know,” Jebrassy murmured to the residue’s soft question. “Be quiet.”
High above and beyond the amphitheater, a breeze across the pipes embedded in the four spires blew a low, breathy chuckle, like hundreds of amused voices.
The Diurns themselves were just left of the screen—three merging ellipses, each over a hundred yards across, on which various displays still labored, it was said, to tell the time in ways that no one alive could fathom, even if anyone could have read the moving and broken and scattered lines of symbols within each ellipse.
This was the only theory that had ever made sense—that the Diurns had once been a huge timekeeper, attached to the side of an even larger public and ceremonial display that had ages before fallen into disuse.
To the right of the Diurns, the immensity of the Wall of Light—a thousand feet wide and half that in height—still gleamed with softly passing gleams, haphazard attempts at images, all repeating at hourly intervals, broken by faults that no longer even attempted to flicker, but hung dark and dead. The Diurns had looked thus since the earliest times known to the ancient breeds. Jebrassy leaned back as far as his neck would allow, to take in the whole of the screen, then turned swiftly and stared out over the amphitheater, as if to glimpse forty thousand ghosts—the citizens who had once sat or stood there, transfixed by what must have once been a magnificent gathering place, a crowded exchange of stories.
This theory grew in him as he absorbed the setting through older, presumably more sophisticated eyes: that once information and gossip had been shared communally, thousands attending at once, receiving instructions, warnings, and (possibly) news about events in the Tiers—headlines and banners, visions of the world beyond the Kalpa, now denied.
Just a guess, but it felt right.
The inner voice expressed no opinion.
The ruins, with their grime and patina of age—common in the abandoned precincts behind the Tiers—conveyed their own special message. Along with the flickering quality of time itself, the intrusions, and declining populations—evident from empty niches and long-deserted neighborhoods—the architectural decay proved that whatever the Kalpa might once have been, it was no longer in its prime. The Tall Ones were getting weaker. The long bondage of the ancient breeds might soon come to an end. Then, all who wished could pass under the round wall, through the pumping stations at the outflow of the flood channels, walk beneath the arches and through the gates, cross the border of the real, into the final freedom of the Chaos…
A beautiful dream.
The shuffle of Jebrassy’s feet as he padded back and forth, glancing high at the vague, fragmented words…these small sounds bounced back from the walls with portentous distortions. A loud crack and rumble to the left of the screen announced another fall of masonry. Large stones and pieces of rusted metal rolled and thumped in a dusty sift at the far side of the gallery. The whole prospect angered and frustrated him—lost knowledge, failed communications, pretenses to educating the masses…like all the false books that taunted breeds who searched the deserted hallways of the high levels in the Tiers—endless shelves, their titles fascinating, when he could read them. But none could be pried loose. He had tried thousands of times since childhood. The books were solid, cold, useless. If we’re toys or tools, he thought, nobody much cares anymore what we do or think. Maybe they don’t even care if we live or die…
He did a slow dance, listening for the echoes, and touched his nose at this folly. Better folly than boredom and safety.
“Hello!”
The single word drifted high and leaped back, acquiring a spooky rattle. Jebrassy turned to see a shadowy female perched on the edge of the proscenium.
She stood up in the dim light cast by the screen.
Jebrassy let out his breath in a relieved grunt.
“What did you think I was?” Tiadba asked.
“You’re late.”
“Nice dance. Why did you come here—just because I asked?”
“I’ve been here before,” he said. “It’s no big deal. Do I get to ask questions, too?”
“Certainly.”
“Breed females like sturdy, normal men with sturdy, normal attitudes. What makes you different?”
Tiadba strolled along the base of the screen, skirting the piles of rubble. “Not all of us have slow blood,”
she said. She looked down at something by her feet, stopped, and sucked in her breath. Her shoulders tensed.
Jebrassy joined her. She had found a shriveled body—a young breed, probably male. It lay curled in the rubble, covered with dust and flakes of crusted veneer that had drifted down from the screen. Tiadba knelt to brush the dead breed’s clothing. “Some of us go seeking…a few dozen each generation, troublemakers, disturbers of the peace,” she said. “Not even the Bleak Warden found this one. You and I could end the same way. Does that frighten you?”
Jebrassy twirled two fingers clockwise.
Tiadba did the same, agreeing. “It might frighten us,” she said firmly, “but it wouldn’t stop us.”
“You still haven’t answered my question.”
“Some say we’re toys or pets. I know we’re more important than that. We’re the end of a long experiment. That’s why we stray. The Tall Ones want us to.”
“And how can youknow—how can you be sure?”
“If I show you, you must make three promises.”
“You like things in threes, don’t you?”
“Triangles are stable. Females seek stability—you said so yourself.”
Jebrassy drew his brows together.
“You must promise you will never tell another.”
“And?”
“You must promise you will use what you learn to guide all our explorations—not just your own. You will not seek glory alone.”
This smarted. He had hoped to do just that. “And?”
“You must not go on a march by yourself or with anyone else—not right away. You will consent to be chosen—or you will stay in the Tiers.”
“Nothing is worth that. I’d…” He shuddered. “I’d go mad if I thought I couldn’t leave.”
The desperate slant in Tiadba’s eyes told Jebrassy that he had made a serious mistake. “Go on, then,”
she told him. “I’ll stay here and follow a little later. We shouldn’t be seen together. When I get back, I’ll alert the wardens about this poor explorer.”
Jebrassy turned and sat on the edge of the proscenium. What could she possibly offer that would be worth such sacrifice, such slavery?
“There isgoing to be a youth march,” Tiadba said to his back, her voice carrying an odd quaver. “It’s being assembled very carefully…not quickly enough. We’re all impatient. A lot of preparations have to be made. But soon, it will happen.”
Jebrassy had heard rumors of groups handpicked, trained, sent down the flood channels. Rumors were all he had ever heard.