What one thought one remembered was not a reliable guide to what had actually occurred—not anymore.
History truly was bunk.
CHAPTER 100
The False City
Tiadba had been wrapped in a cocoon of dust and fiber, like sweepings neglected in a corner. Her eyes stung and pricked but she did not dare lift her fingers to wipe them—hands and skin were both crusted with sharp grit.
Often enough, over hours like beads strung on endless necklaces, she had felt the grit crawl on her skin as if alive…Could not imagine what it might be.
Living, consuming decay.
Did not much care.
Here, beyond exhaustion, trapped—one bead of the necklace cold, the next neither cold nor warm—drained and burned to a crisp yet still capable of pain, not caring whether there was pain, only now and then could she rouse memory of her companions—her fellow marchers—and when she did, the grit jabbed all the more sharply. Memories and regrets had become tiny shards, sharp and glassy, caked on her skin and jabbing into her eyes.
Tiadba had seen her marchers carried along the glowing, fluid trod through a hole like spreading lips rimmed with sores, into a great dingy hollowness…had seen bloated, slavering things, long and malevolent, hurry from far walls to dangle from squirming legs and stab with scimitar jaws. Jaws that smoked and sparked.
Grabbing, piercing, and burning, then scurrying back into the hollowness. Tiadba curled. If she curled tight enough, perhaps she would simply fold into herself and vanish. Anything could happen here.
She opened her eyes long enough to lift her hand, crusted over by dried blood. Bits of glove—shreds of dead armor that no longer protected or spoke—tried to glimmer on her fingers. But memory and betrayal pushed the shreds apart, finished the task of peeling them away, leaving her totally naked. All were naked.
She could not tell how long it had been before she was lifted and her eyes were brushed clear. She blinked at the immensity of gloom and shadow and dust.
She stood or had been propped stiffly on what might have been the side of a hill under a great canopy. The limits of the canopy seemed to waver, to rise and fall, uncertain not just in color or brightness, but also in distance and dimension. Still, something was arriving, something coming near promised to give what she was seeing proportion and perspective.
Something—or someone.
“Hello, crèche-born.”
Drops of cool, soothing liquid fell into her eyes and then froze them in place—to stare unblinking at a triangle of unformed whiteness.
A cool, crystalline voice of immense beauty and sadness whirled up and lay on the porches of her ears, then introduced itself word by word, languid, stroking. The words filled her ears and caused a dull, stretching pain.
“I compelled Shapers and Menders to make you. Do you know me?”
The shape within the triangular cloud coalesced. Above the middle arrived a face—well-shaped, eyes large and deep—beautiful and sad and commanding. An emotion rose, swelling within Tiadba: deeprecognition, built into her at birth, ordained for all her kind ages before. She suddenly wanted to feel glad. This was reunion, what should have been a time of joy. “I know you,” she said.
“And I know you. I am proud, young breed. You are rich with dream. You have brought time forward…as you were designed to do. But now your connection with what has gone before is a curse. There is only turmoil and torment to come. But in this, our last moment of peace, I am allowed to ask one question of all who are brought here. That is mytorture—an instant of anticipation and hope.”
Tiadba tried to see more clearly the dazzling white face like softly mobile stone, malleable outlines surrounded by other pieces whirling up and falling back again on chill, dust-laden wafts. The face drew close.
Tiadba tried to pull back—shrink away.
“Do you know what has become of Sangmer, called the Pilgrim?”
The voice, so close to Tiadba’s face, carried no hint of breath or moving air—but a strange sweetness surrounded her all the same in that sensual desolation.
Tiadba felt a stinging shock. She thought of lying beside Jebrassy on the bed, making love and trying to riddle the ancient stories…of moments in the Chaos, reading from the ever-changing books to soothe and inform the marchers—but there had never been a conclusion to those stories, and the words were often obscure.
However, before this cold, frightening beauty, Tiadba could not help but offer hope. “I might have seen him. Maybe I wouldn’t know,” she said, lips numbing even as she spoke. “Tell me what he looks like.”
“I don’t remember.” Sadness and zeroing cold fogged between them. “No time remains, no time at all…” Words like falling and dying insects. “You have brought me nothing.”
“I’m sorry…” Tiadba searched for a word, found it in the memory of her other. “I am so sorry, Mother.
”
“I am sorry, as well, crèche-born. You cannot know my sorrow. It would be a mercy if we both could die.”
CHAPTER 101
“We’re never going to find her,” Daniel said. “We’re crazy to even be out here.”
“Where would you have us go, young master?” Glaucous asked.
“Everything’s different,” Jack said. “It’ll keep getting more different. Maybe it will get better.”
The gap between the monstrous statues—the gap that opened into the bowl where stood the most unlikely city of all—had closed behind them as if it had never been.
“Three choices,” Glaucous said. “This is the best.”
“You said the Chalk Princess is just around the corner, right?” Daniel said. “Why doesn’t she swoop down and take us?”
Glaucous stopped. His breath pumped and hissed like a steam engine losing its push. “She’s here,” he said.
“What do you think will happen?” Daniel asked.
“She’ll release me,” Glaucous said. “No reward, no punishment. Just put me to an end. I deserve no more—and no less.”
He resumed walking like a long-suffering beast.
Daniel could hardly breathe. A feeling of heaviness, and compression, like bricks on his chest…he tried to understand what was going on in terms of physics but only made a bad job of it. “Vacuum energy heading back up toward zero,” he muttered. “Higgs field collapsing. Too small.”
“What?” Jack asked.
“Nothing. We’re lost.”
It did look as if they were out of options.
The land had never made sense. Now it was little more than a succession of silhouettes, trains and trails of pointless shadow. They had long since passed out of the neighborhoods of compressed and crunched history, through mad playgrounds of whatever passed for time outside their bubble—and now they were simply nowhere.
Fortunately, that nowhere was becoming smaller.
Daniel faced them. “The stones still tug. There’s still direction.”
Jack shook his head and took the lead.
They still had up and down, forward but not back, a kind of sideways…the limited movement a blessing in territory otherwise devoid of any particular quality. There was no going back and starting over. Something would not allow it.
“Whole numbers,” Daniel said.
Jack walked into deeper shadow. For a moment Glaucous and Daniel almost lost sight of him, just two or three steps ahead.
“Jack!” Daniel called.
They caught up. Glaucous chuffed and staggered.
“You’re a whole number,” Daniel said. “An integer.”