City At The End Of Time (15 page)

Of course it had been a marvel. He could see it. The picture was sharp. After all, coming to Nataraja had made a tremendous impression…

As he climbed, he (and a bit of Fred, still curious) tried to imagine the awesome power of something that could discard the rules of reality—and what that would do to a human construct, relying as it did on engineering, gravity, the basic balances of matter and energy. He did not have to imagine much. The results seemed to pop into his head, more vivid than any recent memory. The city had died like an animal set upon by much larger beasts: smashed down, torn open, shooting out gouts of itself—and then collapsing, squished out around its edges as if stomped by huge boots. A hole big enough to push a small mountain through now let in a shaft of gray light from outside. The shaft moved with a will of its own, touching on great heaps of wreckage, merging with other stray shafts, cutting through thin screens of glow falling through huge rents in the crushed outer skin. The angle and intensity of these cheerless lambencies were never the same.

His own mind—what was left of it—had been scrupulously separated into thick, fluid layers, hot and cold—and now, from depths almost frozen with age, upwelling contents seemed ready to help him reconstruct what he could never have actually experienced.

“I don’t dream. I don’t dream of this city or any other.”

Still, recollections of a multitude of historical cities came forward—linked by what circumstance, he did not yet know. Lost to siege or plague, burned to the ground, reduced to rubble, the rubble raked over and sown with salt: moving from fate to fate, and even from life to life and body to body, he might have actually experienced those things—who could deny that possibility?

But not the end of this place, not the doom of Nataraja. That made no sense at all. But he knew. He felt. In its own way, Nataraja had been the greatest city of its age, greater even than the Kalpa…wherever and whatever that was.

“Tell me who I am!” Daniel shouted as he climbed the fallen curtain. “I don’t dream. I never have. When I sleep, there’s just blackness.”

The Chaos had washed across the surface of the Earth in a wave of many dimensions, surrounding the last enclaves of humanity from above, below, and to all sides, cutting off their lines of fate as well as access in space and time. That was how the Chaos transformed, took control—and reduced its conquests to a misery of confusion and lies.

It burned through most of the threads of causality.

And then, as if exhausted—or uncertain what to do with its new domains—it withdrew, concentrating its efforts on the probing wave front, that membrane which intruded and cut across and around the chords, and which Daniel had experienced so often.

What the Chaos had left behind was the hulk of a city charred not by flames, reduced not by physical destruction—but crisped by lost history and eaten through by paradox. Those who lived here had suffered most. The structures that once supported them in security and comfort had struggled to rebuild, or at least to maintain some part of an upright pile, yet were punished over and over again—dying, rotting, resurrecting in awful new ways—and finally the city had given up. The legacy of everything the Chaos touched.

Daniel climbed to the massive edge of the curtain-wall. The pain and exhaustion this body felt did not matter. The upper portion of the curtain—several miles of it—had bent over and broken off and now lay sprawled across and through other structures, the bottom lost in shadow, all the way to the foundations. Where his hands and feet touched, a few faint blue sparks sizzled from skin, bones, and muscle. Atoms, particles—matter astonished, recognizing itself and attempting to correct a perverse bilocation. But this was not the great recognition his new/old memories, his new instructions, told him to expect. He had come very far, over a very long period of time.

A greater moment of reunion was out there in the ruins.

Daniel sat on the edge, ignoring the small blue lances and sparks, and took his two stones from their boxes. As always, they would not fit together. One looking older than the other, if that was possible. Similar in shape, but destined for other combinations. One of the stones tugged strongly to the left and then down. Simultaneously, he heard a savage, nasty sound, like a beast in pain, echo from all around, and then—perversely—swoop up with a Doppler howl to echo again.

The ruins seemed to enjoy this. They played with that sound, tossed it back and forth. Hanging structures shuddered and sifted corrosion down the slope of the curtain-wall, and then made an attempt to move, as if in response to that unknown command. They managed to shift a few dozen yards along their silvery connecting rails—and then ground to a halt, dropping chunks the size of the old houses in Wallingford.

He suspected this was not the first time Nataraja had echoed with that pain. Daniel replaced the dormant stone and put the box back into his pocket. The other he kept in his hand, where it grew warm and then hot. He hung his head. Everything hurt. The wail…not a beast. A woman.

The stone tugged again. For now, it was the only part of him that showed decision and direction. He had killed and pushed aside so many to come this far. A meeting was coming—a meeting that would resolve nothing.

Never would.

Never had.

CHAPTER 111

The tangle of old Nataraja quivered above them, and the dreaded, all-too-familiar sound of collisions—mountains falling, caverns collapsing, dust swirling and sifting—announced another compression.

Glaucous felt his body cramp inward, as if he were being pinched between a huge finger and thumb. Whitlow continued to lurch ahead, feeling his way through the city’s deadfall like a cockroach through a festering forest—with the occasional guiding touch of the Moth, a presence of gray authority but no real substance or location. Glaucous finally followed him again, breath stacked upon breath, eyes stinging at the way light and shadow torqued through the high, snarled skeleton of the corpse city. Whitlow stopped and touched finger to chin, scratching stubble. He examined Glaucous critically, as if blaming him. “Smaller still,” he said. “Less of everything. Distances change, and directions. Do you feel it?”

“Yes,” Glaucous said, hunching his shoulders as he imagined miners might in a cave-in, their candles fading, air turning to poison.

“Not done yet,” Whitlow added, shaking his head. “Might squeeze us to the size of a pea. What then?”

It was obvious to Glaucous that all they had to do—Whitlow and the Moth—was lose him in this tangle, and none of his skills would save him. That might be their intent—yet he had no choice but to follow.

“I bear no resentment for being left behind,” Whitlow said, watching his face with darting eyes. “New circumstances, new codes, not to say new honor. Indeed, not to say
that.
I might have left
you
behind, had it been the other way.”

“The Mistress brought you here before?” Glaucous asked.

“Such a question!” Whitlow said. “She might have done so, and I might have forgotten. You might as easily forget that we are here now.”

“I recognize some things,” Glaucous said quietly. “Narrow escapes. Seeing what lay beyond.”

“When I was younger, I imagined this was a sort of afterlife. Didn’t you?”

“Never thought on it much,” Glaucous said, and that was mostly true.

“I had some feeble excuse that our prey might find a satisfactory existence here—render their own extended service, no worse than what we endure, or what the Moth endures, perhaps. Mistakes also deposit themselves. Hunters clumsy enough to fall into a Gape. Many such, over the ages. No going back when that happens. You’ve lost partners—would you like to reacquaint with a few?”

“No thank you, all the same,” Glaucous murmured.

“We may pass them on our way to the Crux. We are the only survivors. Of all the thousands—tens of thousands, I imagine…” Whitlow looked around. There had not been a touch, a guiding blink of gray authority, for some time. He whistled low and steady, as if summoning an invisible dog. “Where is that creature?”

“Does
she
reside in the Crux?” Glaucous asked.

Whitlow slowly turned, larger booted foot thumping, looked up, and lifted his hands, fingers feeling through the dark spaces as if he might grab a line and haul them up into daylight. “Not hers. Moth found it. Bigger game, now smaller and weaker, everything coming to its minimum. The small will loom large, Mr. Glaucous. Our last chance.”

“I do not know what you mean, Mr. Whitlow,” Glaucous said wearily. “Bad riddles always.”

“You wouldn’t say that had not all this brought me low. You would listen and smile, obsequious, and I would know there was an understanding. But the chain of command, broken…chain of authority, knotted and clanking. The Moth…”

“I don’t feel him,” Glaucous said, drawing closer to Whitlow. “Where has he gone?”

Whitlow regarded him with momentary apprehension—and then a mask of wry humor. “Tell me about your friend, the bad shepherd, before you decide to take your revenge, Mr. Glaucous.”

“You found him. I followed you.”

Glaucous drew back at another round of creaking and settling. Whitlow held up his fingers, separated by the distance of a pea, and shook them in Glaucous’s face, grinning his threat. “It was rumored ages ago that some shepherds, tormented by the hunt, might acquire certain understandings, certain efficiencies. Threatened, they might leave their personal silken cords and attach to others. Become those others for a while. A desperate ploy. This would disrupt the track of their dreams—and so they would forget. Yet they would still carry sum-runners, still be guided by them…”

Glaucous felt the breezy touch of a huge, soft hand on his back, accompanied by a scent of dry, sweetly irritating powder. The Moth had returned.

Whitlow resumed his off-kilter step. “Better. Shouldn’t wander off like that. What we have found is puzzling,” he said to Glaucous. “Curtains have been pulled aside. Powers have shifted. We suspect the Chalk Princess is no longer actively engaged. We have need of another opinion.”

Glaucous dropped his head.

“She may not know as much yet. More has been reduced than walking distance,” Whitlow said, and pulled Glaucous close, then whispered in his ear, “This does not bode well for the Moth, of course.” He winked and held his finger to his lips.

The Moth moved them again—a wrenching passage, swift but no more brutal than was strictly essential. Glaucous felt the change as a burning, as if his skin were crisping away. That subsided—and then he felt as if he were merely being tattooed all over his body. The pricking sting of predatory fates was something with which he had no previous experience. One normally lived one’s fate; these lived
him.
Their examination was swift, impersonal, basic. Glaucous had never before been so close to the basement layers of his being, and he found it both terrible and exhilarating. He had also never been so close to an explanation for his life, his existence, and to a last moment of hope—the hope that perhaps there might still be room for correction.

An impersonal offering of grace—a remote and pure shriving.

The pricking passed. Now he was his own powdery thing, still standing, but falling apart and being put back together each split second.

The Moth protected them as best as he could.

“Welcome to the center of the universe,” he heard Whitlow say or think. Their eyes—they no longer seemed to have bodies—saw in some manner a deep black pool in which two large needles churned a thick liquid. The needles met beneath the surface of the pool and spun like the shaft of a gear in a jeweled movement.

“The Crux has no center and no radius,” Whitlow said. “Brace for a nasty residue—a powerful thing once focused its heart of frustration and misery here. It ate our world and spat it out in nasty chunks. You’ll feel it.”

“The Typhon?” Glaucous asked.

Whitlow shrugged. “These steel threads are the last two fates. In one, the Typhon fails and we all pass into nothingness. In the other…there is a kind of success. Who can say which would be better? Now—

“Tell us where we are—draw up the proper thread, and tell us what remains for us to do. That is your talent, is it not?”

Glaucous could not shut his eyes, could not find any private place in which to make his decision—but that did not matter. He had decided long ago.

Fifty years and more had passed since he had decided.

Somehow, in this abstract heart with no center, and without the Moth’s help, he chose the best fate—the last remaining good fate—and drew it down like a fortunate hand of cards, the one lucky flip of a coin. And—always deferent to his employers—he made sure both the Moth and Whitlow approved. Far away, an awful sound echoes again throughout the False City.

And the Dead Gods begin to move.

CHAPTER 112

The False City is quivering, snapping, shrinking. Jebrassy does not know why he is still walking, still seeing.

He looks down on Polybiblios, who has inexplicably collapsed, and then kneels beside him. Some steps away, Ghentun has also fallen. Both are wavering in substance and outline.