City At The End Of Time (45 page)

The young breeds crawled into the shade of the low channel trees, moaning softly. Pahtun examined them one by one as the wardens flew away. He lifted their heads, using his flower-finger to sense their vital levels, and found them fit—the wardens never delivered injured or incapable breeds. As they recovered, he helped them to their feet, soothing with low crèche songs. His three cohorts had walked across the channels to the sandy stretch by then. More obviously jaded, with much less time on the job, these younger Menders still attended to the recruits with patience and skill. They soon had them walking in a single column toward the dark outer wall and the training camp that had waited there for as long as there had been Tiers or marchers—too long to contemplate, as far as Pahtun was concerned. Six males and three females. He watched the dazed breeds and, as always, both envied and pitied them—they were few, they were small, they were confused. He wondered what they would see on their journey.

Only young breeds were ever sent on the marches—grown of primordial mass, cultured in the Tiers, and afforded the best instincts, some of which would truly awaken only in the Chaos. Personally, this version of Pahtun had never ventured beyond the middle lands. If these nine made up the last march to be delivered to his expert care, he might never learn the whole truth about the Chaos and the Typhon. He showed the breeds to their tents and made sure they were comfortable. Soon, they were sound asleep.

The cohorts made their own camp nearby, away from the breeds and away from Pahtun’s solitary tent. They held the trainer in some awe—but considered him old and peculiar. After all, what was the point of all of this?

Perhaps there was no point. None of the other Pahtuns, sent into the Chaos in violation of the rulings of the Astyanax, had ever reported their discoveries. And none of the marchers he’d trained had ever returned.

CHAPTER 56

The Broken Tower

As requested, a living breed, crèche-born of primordial matter, for whatever purpose the Librarian might devise.

Ghentun stood on one side of the high, empty chamber, a dozen yards from the nearest soaring window, surrounded by a slow, enveloping shimmer. At his waist floated the young male, curled in anesthetic oblivion, injured but already healing—treated and protected by Ghentun’s cloak. The Keeper of the Tiers could only feel numb. He could not conceive of any action that would make any difference now.

Delay, decadence, conspiracies beyond counting or comprehension—the inevitable sapping of the city’s vitality in the face of millions of years of warding off the unthinkable—had brought the end closer than even he had imagined.

Upon arrival, Ghentun had circled the chamber to look down through the high windows at the Kalpa’s three remaining bions. The intrusion had severely damaged the lowest levels of the first bion, whose foundations enveloped the Tiers and from whose rounded crown rose the Broken Tower. It also wreaked tremendous destruction on the southern and the tertian bions. Both sent up dismal, spiraling plumes of silvery smoke to the limits of the inner pressure barrier. Outside the border of the real, the monstrosities drew closer, as if warming themselves on the Kalpa’s fires of destruction. The Witness’s eternally spinning beam had accelerated, and its huge mountain of solidified flesh—once human, now ageless and beyond pity—pushed in toward the Defenders, anticipating another sacrifice.

The Tiers had always attracted the strongest, most destructive intrusions. Now Ghentun wondered if one reason for this attention was floating beside him. He comprehended that since the creation of the Tiers, the Typhon had been probing the city as if with special knowledge—if such a thing could know or make plans.

He looked to the east, away from the Witness, for the last party of marchers, hoping they might leave before the final collapse, before the Typhon’s triumph.

The Librarian had dallied for millions of years. Mind beyond measure—how could Ghentun criticize or

even understand? But there had never been a plan that he could discern—certainly not one that could be explained to a Mender or a breed. He was really no better than his charges, no better than this brash, crèche-born youngster, who had persisted despite all the deceptions and intellectual barricades set in his path.

Like Menders—like Ghentun—breeds understood shame, as if their primordial stuff preserved a heritage of that ancient emotion lost to the Great Eidolons.

An angelin approached, appearing at first as a tiny speck silvering outward from the center of the chamber, then suddenly nearby—a few feet away. As before, it was female in form, pale blue, and no taller than Ghentun’s knee—but this time it seemed to prefer the appearance of walking rather than drifting about or flying.

It might be the same angelin he had spoken with before—and it might not. Identity was of little importance to this class of servants.

Ghentun nudged the breed. Jebrassy raised his head and blinked, looked around, but remained curled, as if savoring a few last moments of warmth and sanity.

“All honor to the Librarian,” the angelin sang, its voice like trickling water. “Is the experiment concluded?”

“Yes,” Ghentun replied.

“You’ve brought the requested specimen from the Tiers?”

“I have. Does the Librarian request my presence?” Ghentun asked doubtfully.

“You will accompany the young breed.”

Jebrassy pushed out his legs and slowly dropped to the bottom of the cloak, where he stood on his own, beneath the gaze of the Tall One. He turned to stare in awe at the blue form a few feet beyond, radiating deep cold despite the cloak’s protection.

Jebrassy had moved well beyond confusion or fear. Anything could happen. He almost hoped it would—all of it, just to get it over with.

Then he thought of Tiadba. He shuddered at the realization that he had just emerged from a dark sleep. But for how long? Where was she? Had she been sucked into the intrusion? Was she even alive?

Jebrassy growled and shoved his hands against the shimmer.

A small voice spoke in his ear like the high chirrup of a letterbug. “Don’t do that. It’s cold out here, and the Librarian wishes you comfort and health. Both of you will follow this silly blue form. It is my pleasure to escort you to the most wonderful place in all the Kalpa. Possibly the most wonderful place left to humans in all the cosmos.”

Jebrassy looked up at the Tall One, then back to the small blue figure, puzzled—they thought they were
all
humans, despite appearances, was that the secret? He began to move his feet in a shuffle and discovered that the shimmer followed him—and so walked at a normal pace, keeping up with the naked blue image. Ghentun stayed beside him.

Not even the sweep of a knife-edged beam of gray light across the smooth roof of the chamber—like a threat of instant blindness—slowed their progress, though it made Jebrassy cringe. When they came to the center—a walk of what seemed only minutes—he looked back and studied the far curved rank of high windows and suddenly understood where they were—remembering the stories in the books.

“We’re in Malregard, aren’t we?” he asked Ghentun.

“Some once called it that,” Ghentun said. “We’re both of us far above our neighborhoods and rank, young breed. In the region of the Great Eidolons. They neither think nor act as we do.”

“But we’re
all
humans,” Jebrassy said.

The Keeper touched his nose with amusement—a breed gesture.

“Watch your step,” the angelin warned. “You should close your eyes. We’re vectoring to the top of the tower—what’s left of it, of course.”

“What broke the tower?” Jebrassy asked.

Ghentun made a small, ambiguous sound. “You needn’t concern yourself with the past. There’s far too much of it. You should only look ahead. For once, the future is scaled to fit you.”

Jebrassy did not know whether to be insulted.

Silvery curves danced around them, as if they were moving, yet he saw no change. And then—they stood beneath a terrible sky, filled with hoops of flame and spinning worlds. Something looked down upon them, impossible to actually see or measure—and Jebrassy thrust his clenched fists to his eyes. He thought he was falling—that he was back with Tiadba flying over the Tiers, and the warden had let him go—

Voices sounded all around, saying nothing he could understand, and a deep booming buffeted his body. Jebrassy could not stand the thought of falling without seeing where he was going to hit. He had to know. He lowered his arms, but for a moment his eyes refused to open. He had seen too much already—something bright and multicolored, and from it great sweeps of silver rising high into an arched grayness, grasping and moving brilliant red shapes, like farmers using tongs to swing bales of chafe…

Above—below—he couldn’t tell which—thousands of white figures were arrayed in positions of restful waiting, hands clasped behind their backs. Each had two arms, two legs, and a round white head. They had no faces, no features, nothing but smooth whiteness.

He wasn’t falling. He was floating—upside down, it seemed—over an immense tangle of causeways, along which the many white figures stood in rows or moved about in astonishingly different ways. Some of the figures walked, many drifted close to the roads, a few zipped up and over the whole expanse with dizzying speed, swooping soundlessly and shedding more of those beautiful silvery curves. Still others simply vanished, and the rest, tens of thousands—in long rows that stretched off into obscurity—awaited instructions, like an enormous army of blanks.

The angelin came into view and gave Jebrassy a nudge. Even through the shimmer its touch nearly iced his toes, but he came right again with a slow rotation to face the rainbow brilliance and the tongs that reached up and out, grasping flame-colored luminosities and pulling them down.

“The Keeper has delivered a breed,” the angelin announced, its voice so sweet it made Jebrassy’s ears hurt. And then, another message—not from the Tall One nor from the blue form, and not so much a voice as a beam of words half seen in the shimmer that protected him.
Let the primordial find a place where he can heal
.
We will meet when he is whole again and
calmer. I would not wish to dismay him. He is, after all, the most important citizen in the Kalpa.
Jebrassy looked up at the Tall One who stood by his side.

“So be it,” Ghentun said. “After five hundred thousand years, I have fulfilled my duty to the Eidolons.”

CHAPTER 57

Tiadba stood on the outskirts of the training camp, along the broad, flat outer reach of the channel, lost in melancholy. She could barely make out the distant shapes of the three tablelike isles where she had spent her entire life. Blocs were stacked high on each table like jumbled cards, softened and shaded by the mist that puffed from the channel floor.

As the light over the blocs dimmed, drawing those far Tiers into sleep, she turned toward the overarched blackness beyond which lay—so they had been told—the outer works of the Kalpa and the reality generators that protected them from the Chaos. Her body felt like a coiled whip about to be snapped. She was ready. Time was flowing too quickly—not quickly enough.

They were being trained. The march was on…

Just when she thought she might be able to go on without Jebrassy, might be able to stop obsessing over the paths they would never follow together…she remembered the last sight of her young breed male, dangling from the grip of the brown warden, and grief flooded back. There had been an awful noise, breath-snatching flight, painted swirls of darkness—a terrifying, inchoate presence. Tiadba had withstood all of that. The wardens had dropped nine breeds in the flood channel—so she assumed. She remembered nothing of those early moments. She did remember that they had crossed a wide plain under a darker portion of the ceil, featureless but for drifts of rock-dust. The short channel trees that clumped in the old mud had soon given way to an immense flatness, vanishing into shadow on each side. They were all close to panic, terror replacing bravado even as they neared the end of this first stage of their journey and saw the huge arches that marked the outer channel bounds.