“We have work,” Bidewell said. “For the moment, there needs to be a truce. Mr. Glaucous, are you fit?”
Glaucous pushed to his feet with a whistling sigh. He rubbed his nose vigorously. “A dray horse most of my days.”
“I remember you more as a bull terrier, sent down rat holes,” Bidewell said.
“Do you still offer a workman’s reward for a workman’s labor? I remember you were fond of drink.”
Bidewell turned to see that all the ladies had gathered and arranged themselves around Ginny, who stood trembling in their midst.
Jack found it difficult to restrain himself. “Where’s your fat partner?” he asked again. Glaucous smiled obsequiously. “I will miss her.”
Bidewell startled them by clapping his hands. “Enough. The outside will soon become more demanding,”
he said. “We have no choice but to place our strongest defenses where they will do the most good.”
Glaucous tipped open a box flap and fingered the corner of a book. “I do like a good read.”
Bidewell flared, “Caution, Mr. Glaucous. These are not mere children. Tease at your peril.” He motioned to the stacks. “We must move boxes and crates to the outer walls.”
“Your servant, sir,” Glaucous said, and inclined his head.
Jack approached Bidewell as the others headed off through the stacks. Daniel tossed him an enigmatic, measuring glance. Ginny was quickly hustled away by the book club ladies and did not object; they were off to form their own work detail, Ellen explained.
“I don’t like any of this,” Jack said to Bidewell when they were alone.
“Have you noticed, we are not the ones making the arrangements?” Bidewell asked. The cacophony outside—like boulders grinding in a giant mixer—had grown louder. Every few hours, following a sharp crackling and slam like falling masonry, deep bell tones would ring, vibrating curtains of dust from the rafters.
Bidewell walked along the aisles, through the warehouse, saw that his people were sleeping—fitfully. He listened to the low voices of Glaucous and Iremonk in the storage room where they had pitched their cots, set apart for now, and with good reason. Jack could hardly stand the sight of, either. Bidewell mostly held back his own opinions.
In truth, though, he was puzzled. There was something unusual about Glaucous, very different from his experience of other hunters and servants of the Chalk Princess.
The voices of the two refugees softened and finally stopped, and Bidewell returned to his desk and the warmth of the iron stove, wide-awake. He truly slept perhaps once a month, to avoid the wretched things that passed for dreams. For Bidewell, a man who never forgot anything, who never shed his brushed connections with all possible histories, dreams were like sick spells or fits of unproductive coughing. The past, all of his pasts, refused to be expelled.
It was apparent that none of his assembled people—his chosen family—could understand why he had allowed Glaucous into the warehouse. Daniel Patrick Iremonk was more of a conundrum, a fate-shifter, after all, with his own sum-runner; but still unlike Ginny or Jack. Bidewell felt the presence even before he saw the man, if man he still was. The hunter appeared a few steps away, wrapped in convenient shadows. “Getting uglier,” Glaucous said, his voice almost lost in a rumble that rose through the floor. “Out there, I mean. You should get out and see. Quite an experience for such as us. Consequences and conclusions.”
“Make no accusations. You are barely tolerated,” Bidewell said. “I was never a cager of birds.”
“Yet I’ve completed your set, Conan. He might never have come here without my guidance.”
“It seems you need him more than the reverse.”
“No doubt. He has never been caught, never come close to being caught—and until now, never attracted the attention of her hunters. But it seems Mr. Iremonk is made all the more crucial by his exceptions.”
Glaucous found a chair, sat, and somehow managed to cross his short, thick legs. He had insubstantial feet, tiny for a man of such bulk, and the shoes he wore were narrow, with pointed toes abruptly squared. The effect was bitterly comic—grossness combined with delicacy, like a Cruikshank caricature.
“Wish I’d brought my tobacco. You wouldn’t happen to…?”
Bidewell shook his head. One didn’t offer a personage such as Glaucous anything more than was
necessary, and Bidewell hadn’t smoked in more than four hundred years. Jack did not sleep—could not find sleep. Something inside kept trying to connect with something outside. He sat up on the edge of his cot, fists clenching the blankets, and thought of all the people stranded in Bidewell’s insulated fortress—people, cats, and what else?
What was Glaucous, really, or for that matter, Daniel?
What am I?
His muscles ached from moving so many boxes. He was not used to blunt, heavy labor. He stood, brushing down the rumples in his clothes. They all slept in their clothes. Asked himself when was the last time he had dreamed or been visited. A couple of weeks.
Maybe that was done with.
He listened to Ginny’s soft, steady breathing on the opposite side of the wall of books. He peered around the crates, pulled aside the ragged sheet that served as a curtain. She had wrapped herself in one of Bidewell’s old brown woolen blankets—army surplus, probably. But which army, which war?
Knees curled up, back to him, her shoulders quivered. She still dreamed. Then she became still. He stood in that makeshift entry, his expression snagging on successive thorny branches as it felclass="underline" pain, exasperation, puzzlement, before it settled into a blank stare. So many expectations, so little understanding of now, next, never. Ginny opened her eyes, turned her head, and blinked. Her lips twitched. Jack backed away, bumping into a wall of boxes, before he realized she was still asleep. Quietly, with great respect, he stooped over her, brought his head closer, turned one ear. Wherever she was, whatever she was experiencing—whatever she was saying, in a language that itched at the back of his head—she was not happy. He was powerless to help, hereor there.
“What’s wrong?” he whispered.
Her eyes looked beyond and through him, and her brows knit in supreme effort. Speaking English seemed difficult. “Following us.”
“Who?”
“Echoes. I think they’re dead. Walked right through him. He’s gone.”
She squeezed her eyes and curled up tighter.
Jack wiped tears from his cheeks. The rumbling had intensified—outside, under, around the warehouse. After a moment, he returned to his own space and took a swig of water from the plastic bottle he kept in his backpack.
Lay down, drew up his legs.
Tried to will himself to sleep, to dream, to cross over—go to where Ginny was. Then, before he could grab hold and control himself, he willed another, very different sort of move—a shift. The effort rebounded from something incredibly hard and knocked him half off his cot. He felt as if he’d been slugged with a hammer. His muscles spasmed and he lay back twitching and sweating. Stupid. Everything squashed, corroded, and trimmed down to at most two or three fates, rammed up against what Bidewell called the Terminus—Jack knew that, but still, his fear and disappointment were intense.
He was trapped along with everybody else.
All the ones I’ve always left behind. Fear leading to jumping leading to being forgotten. How in hell can I believe I deserve any better?
He sat up on one elbow, rubbing his neck and ribs.
At the very least he had confirmed something important.
Out beyond the walls of the warehouse, in the time-shivered, ash-fall gloom, Burke had become a helpless ghost. Needles lay over the soggy floor of their apartment like a pricking lawn of steel, and through the curtainless windows, the city-etched horizon curled up like an old rug, crimped and threadbare.