City At The End Of Time (62 page)

Their steps slowed and they felt oddly heavy. From their right, something loomed and passed too quickly to see—something huge, broad, and flat, flying past on high, slender pillars that pulled up the ground ahead and behind—and then it was gone.

“It had a face,” Khren said. “A human face. Bigger than a meadow…”

“Move quickly,” the armor instructed. “Distance will close in, light will move in unfamiliar ways, and things will seem to burn. Above all, follow the beacon.”

Off to the left, Tiadba saw a swinging gray sword of light, brighter than before: the glowing beam sent out from the Witness.

“We’re right under it,” Nico said. “How did we get so close? Wasn’t it on the other side?”

“We should set up our generator and wait for it to go away,” Macht said.

“No!” the armor insisted. “You are being hunted. There is no shelter here. There is only escape.”

CHAPTER 77

The Green Warehouse

Jack knelt beside Ginny’s bed and put his hand on her arm. She had been sleeping for hours, even after the pewter light of whatever passed for dawn touched the windows beneath the warehouse roof. At his touch, she shifted on the cot, then opened her eyes and looked beyond him. The peace after her time in the room had passed. The gnawing worry and fear were back—especially in sleep. She was sleeping so much now. Jack, on the other hand, was mostly wide-awake. His dreams since being in the empty room had been brief and uneventful.

“They’re huge,” she murmured. “They’re like stingrays, but they have faces on one side. Arms and legs make dimples in the road as they skim along, like water striders on a pond. They shoot by too fast to see, unless they see you first—and if they catch you, it’s over.”

Jack wiped a tear from his cheeks, feeling emotions that were not his own, not yet. “Where are you?” he asked.

“We’re miles from the city—I don’t know how far. It’s always night out here, always dark. The sun doesn’t cast any light—it’s just a glimmer on the edge. We don’t even have real shadows. The armor says the Chaos here is thin—some of the old rules still survive. We can even take off our helmets and breathe the air. But it freezes your lungs if you suck it in. Fur on the nose—good thing.” She looked around, as if trying to locate his face, seeing neither the warehouse nor Jack. “Is anything coming?”

“I don’t know,” he said, his face contorted. “You’re way ahead of me.”

“The beacon still sings in our helmets, so beautiful…that’s the only thing that guides us. Distance is tricky, but we keep walking. I think it knows we’re here, it just doesn’t care. It’s stuffed full. It’s eaten almost everything…but we’re giving it indigestion. It’s won, but it’s keeping an eye on us—a big, big eye. The Witness is always there. God, I hope we don’t get too near it.”

“What’s that?” Jack asked.

“No words for it. The other city isn’t…It isn’t the same. There’s something awful in its place. I know that, but I can’t tell her. Jack…
She doesn’t know
.”

Jack laid his head on Ginny’s chest, put his hand over her eyes. That searching, distant gaze…

“I’ll be there,” he whispered.

“Too late,” she said. “They’ve found us.”

She fell back on the cot. Jack stroked her forehead, then stood. He couldn’t bear watching her suffer

and being so powerless. He bumped the boxes on his way out of the cubicle. Bidewell was sitting in a chair near the stove, reading a slender green book. The old man’s face looked ethereal, as if it might turn to mist or glass. Ellen stepped out of the main warehouse, carrying a knitted bag with the outline of her own small book weighting one corner.

“Where are the others?” Jack asked.

“There’s nothing they can do here,” Bidewell said. “They’re trying to reach their loved ones.”

“I thought they were alone,” Jack said.

“Only you are ever truly alone,” Bidewell said, with a strange twist of envy. “Our time is almost over, for this cycle. Yours is just beginning.”

Ellen looked at Jack, at once hopeful and stricken. He saw that both of them had been crying and felt uncomfortable, so he moved on and found Daniel sitting under the almost bare shelves in the annex room, paging through a large, thick book. Daniel looked as exhausted as Jack felt. Somehow, that made him more sympathetic.

Daniel put the book aside as Jack approached. “I heard the door open,” he said.

“Three of the women took off,” Jack said. He examined Daniel’s expression, looking for any sign of strangeness, but could not find anything to dislike or even be suspicious of. That was Glaucous’s doing, he suspected. He recognized the symptoms, more subtle but still the same. Why would Glaucous protect Daniel?

Shaping him as a new partner, perhaps?

“I don’t hear much outside,” Daniel said. “And there’s certainly nothing new in here. Let’s go topside for another look.”

For the moment, the curtains and wrinkles above the city had parted, leaving an inky blackness and a sky full of stars, but something was very wrong. The stars, like the moon, had smeared, twisted, wrapped themselves in rainbow-colored rings—and were growing dimmer.

One by one they were winking out like spent fireflies.

“They’re being eaten,” Jack said. “The moon, the stars…”

“You got that right,” Daniel said. “But we have to think it through—
what
’s being eaten?
When
is it being eaten? I can believe the moon being sucked up by whatever
that
is, that ugly sun-arc thing—we’d see that almost right away, but the stars are too distant. Unless…” He wiped his forehead. “Unless the past was chewed up first. That would mean everything behind us has already been eaten, space
and
time…Those stars are already gone, the last wave of their light is bouncing off the Terminus—and now
it’s
fading. We’re like the core of an apple, the seeds, being saved for last.”

“Seeds,” Jack said. “That’s what Bidewell calls the stones.”

“None of what he says makes sense, Jack.”

Jack persisted. “Still, things are reaching back from somewhere.”

Daniel thought this through, brow wrinkled, plump cheeks growing pale. He gave Jack a pinched look, part disbelief, part envy. “Okay, magic boy. You know something.”

“It’s obvious. We’re being messed with—someone sent the stones back, like Bidewell says.”

“Like he
hints
,” Daniel corrected.

“And the thing that controls the hunters—the Chalk Princess, Glaucous’s Livid Mistress—that could be from the future, too. But what’s messing with us is no longer
in
the future. We’re being shoved up
against
the future—what’s left of it. Right?”

“With you so far,” Daniel said, intrigued that Jack was suddenly engaging in theory.

“So we’re just getting the last ripples of aftereffect. Whatever’s going to happen,
has
happened—here. Except for the warehouse—and us.”

“Because of the stones, or Bidewell’s weird library?”

They both stared at the fragmented city, beyond shock, even beyond wonder, and then stared at each other, expressing their only remaining surprise: that they were still alive, still thinking, still speaking.

“Maybe both,” Jack said. “We’re saved—for the moment. But that moment is going to be awfully short. And then we’re going to have to do something.”

“What?” Daniel asked.

Jack shook his head.

The cityscape around the warehouse had congealed into a bleakness of broken buildings, sluggish flows of muddy water, torn, ragged clouds barely obscuring the battered sky. The last limb of the hideous arc of fire dropped below the horizon and the clouds glowed blood-red, then dimmed to somber brown, their undersides fitfully illuminated by curling wisps of orange and green.

“The whole city is a grab bag of past and present,” Daniel said. “If you’re right, it could mean this Chalk Princess is still out there—waiting for things to settle before she comes and gets us. Glaucous has a weird confidence.”

“He’s protecting you,” Jack said.

“Is he? How strange. I don’t need protecting.” He poked and rubbed one temple with a thumb. “I don’t see any sign of the women who left. Your friends.”

Glaucous made sure Daniel and Jack were out of the way, then approached Ginny’s cubicle. With batlike acuity, he could hear her moving about from across the warehouse. Ginny blinked and looked confused as he drew back the flimsy curtain. “I don’t want you near me,” she warned, her tongue thickened by the long, hard sleep. “I’ll call for help.”

“Abject apologies for my crude appearance and manners,” Glaucous said. He glanced up. “The young men are on the roof, satisfying curiosity. They seem to be learning to trust each other.”

“Jack knows better,” Ginny said, still blinking—whether from nerves or irritation, she couldn’t tell. Everything felt gritty. Everything seemed to be running down—even her brain.

“Perhaps. At any rate, I am no threat,” Glaucous said softly. “In fact, I eliminated the ones who came here to hunt you. The man with his coin, the woman with her flames and smoke. A dreadful pair. I have my allegiances, of course—and they may not match yours. But with no leadership, I am no more a threat than one of these warehouse cats. You are not
my
mouse. Whom would I deliver you to? And why?”

“Please go away,” Ginny said.

“Not before I salve my conscience. You have misplaced your trust, and now I fear the worst. Bidewell has hidden himself for many decades, but we—my kind, hunters all—knew him long before that. He was legendary among us.”

“He’s been kind to me.”

“We do have that ability, to be charming when we wish, despite all other appearances. Can you feel that between us, even now?” He looked down, raised his hand to his forehead as if ashamed. “Pardon. It’s an instinct, misplaced no doubt. I will withdraw it immediately.” He shut down the treacle ambience. Ginny stepped back, even more confused.

“I will come no closer, and I will leave soon. But I must tell you…in the spirit of an honorable hunt, which must soon resume. Bidewell brought you all here for the same reason I attached myself to the one who calls himself Daniel—a strange fellow, don’t you feel it? Not what he seems. Very ancient. We call his like bad shepherds—but no matter. Whoever possesses a stone exudes an atmosphere of protection, and provides others a pass to the next level of this astonishing endgame. As do you, young Virginia. Here’s the pattern, the picture of our next few blinks of time. I will complete my part in the game, and Bidewell will complete his. He will deliver you to his mistress, and I will deliver Daniel and Jack to mine.”

“I don’t believe anything you say,” Ginny murmured, but her eyes indicated otherwise. She had never been good at trust.

“Pardon me for speaking truth,” Glaucous said. “But even among my kind, there are rules.”

Glaucous backed out and let the curtain fall, then returned to the storage room, his face stony and gray.

CHAPTER 78

The Chaos

Under the Witness’s eternal gaze, the Silent Ones had almost skimmed down upon the breeds when the entire land seemed to erupt with geysers and fountains of sooty darkness. The huge, flattened faces with their darting, ever-searching eyes—reminiscent of Tall Ones, breeds, and other varieties unknown to the marchers—had suddenly pulled away, leaving Tiadba and her companions spilled on the black ground, waiting for doom…doom delayed.

Tiadba withdrew her arm from her faceplate and saw that Khren and Shewel were already up on their knees. Herza and Frinna had risen as well. Still vibrating with shock, Tiadba managed to push into a crouch, and listened to the shrieks and wails shooting skyward from all around. The compressed ruins of a dead city had either risen around the Witness or been pushed into place like a pile broomed up for burning.

“Where are we?” she asked. “Has the Chaos shrunk?”

Khren and Macht crawled beside her. Nico had found another wall with better footholds.

“There has been movement,” the armor’s voice announced to all. “Distances have been reduced.”

By now the marchers had found vantages to all sides, less interested in the city than in what had happened to the Silent Ones and where the Witness was now situated, almost on top of them. Tiadba studied the Witness with a frown. The huge, distorted head—as tall as three or four blocs stacked on top of each other—had been erected on a massive scaffold of old buildings. Its expression seemed frozen in weary despair. Perhaps that half-melted visage revealed its emotions over times longer than the life of a breed. With everything shifting and changing, perhaps the Chaos would accelerate and she could actually
see
the agony come and go across those ruptured brows, accentuating the rotation of that huge, protruding eye, dull green glimmers winking within its dark pit of a pupil. The sweep of the beam had been interrupted, but now the glimmers were focusing, re-forming…and the beam lanced out again over the Chaos, returning to its slow, inevitable rotation. Khren and Shewel pulled Tiadba to her feet. None of them had been hurt—yet. They were left untouched in the very shadow of the Witness, wrapped around by labyrinths of broken walls and toppled structures—spirals, towers, ornamental facades.