CHAPTER 114
Whitlow is triumphant as they approach the Queen in White in her abode. Above, the magnificent confusion of the armillary makes a humming backdrop.
The Crux lies within the black point around which pivots this stately gyre. Whitlow exults. They were just there—at the center. They are powerful and privileged. They will be rewarded magnificently for their success. All that was promised will finally be attained.
The Moth is above, around, everywhere—guiding them with a silken, dusty enthusiasm. Ahead Glaucous can make out, through a lattice of ever-changing shadows, one of the shepherds—the girl Virginia, walking carefully across the ice. She is attended by a few cats. He and Whitlow will soon be upon her.
Glaucous steels himself.
“A brilliant conclusion,” Whitlow tells him. “We need to present just one shepherd, one sum-runner to the Typhon itself, the master of the Chalk Princess, to gain our passage. Oh, such a prize, at such a time!”
Glaucous moves cautiously. All around, the grooves and cuts yawn in expectation of the clumsy. He is wondering how they can remove the girl and deliver her—before the cats do what the cats must do. The Moth brushes past, alerts them. Other visitors are crossing the circular green lake. Even at this distance Glaucous recognizes his own prey—Jack. The boy is following a much larger contingent of felines, like a fuzzy gray blanket.
Cats, ever the friends of books and stories—ever ready to attend to the reading of stories by sitting in a lap and purring. The death of all stories would not make them happy. The Moth touches his shoulder again. A third is now on the lake. It is Daniel, the bad shepherd. There are no cats with Daniel. He moves alone.
“Consider the depths of time,” Whitlow natters on reverently. “Beyond our understanding. And yet here we are—among the few, the last. It makes me proud. All of our pains, justified. All of our poor deeds.”
Glaucous nods absently, focused on the Crux, the center—still working to draw down the last, best strand of fate.
Beyond the spinning cage, hauntingly familiar from all the puzzle boxes they have captured and tossed with their shepherds into the Gape: an awful audience, giants out of his worst nightmares. That a nightmare like himself should experience nightmares seems only just. The worst nightmare of all, being thrown off the back of the bird-catcher’s cart, rolling across the cobbles in a tangle of feathers…and then hearing the scrabble of rat claws out of the mud-and-sewage-caked gutters.
CHAPTER 115
Across the lake of green ice, from three directions the travelers move toward the center of the armillary fortress.
Jebrassy in his armor steps out carefully on the slick surface. The Kalpa has two final voices—the voice of his armor, and his own. “There are watchers,” the armor tells him, something he already knows—the giants from the vale of Dead Gods. They remind him of point-minders in the little wars, presiding over the endgames but forbidden by certain rules to intervene, possibly because they actually aredead. That doesn’t seem to stop anything else in the Chaos. But he is just as glad they come no closer.
“There are Silent Ones closing in,” the armor warns him. “They may be held back by the armillary. Sum-runners have gathered—the spinning fortress is their birthing shell.”
Jebrassy is not at all sure what he can do about any of that. He is intent on the shimmering dome sketched by the arcs of blue light. That is where Tiadba must be; he is sure of it.
“There are no intact suits of armor in this vicinity. But there are breeds. And others.”
Jebrassy is aware of those others, moving in, like him, on the center. “Who are they?” he asks.
“Pilgrims.”
“Like me?”
“Very like you.”
“My visitor?”
“Unknown.”
He nods and pauses to think that over. He would have said, in any other place, at any other point in his young life, that there were ghosts out there—but now reality travels along a sliding scale. These pilgrims may be less real than himself, but more real than the Silent Ones or the Dead Gods. One came to him in dreams. And is this any more real than a dream? Yet he suspects there are still rules of a sort. Not just anything will happen. Fewer things might be possible here than out in the Chaos. Teamwork. Do your part.
The voice of his other brings him some relief. They are near.
“Where’s Tiadba?” he asks.
“Unknown,” the armor says.
“Is she alive?”
“Unknown.”
“Everything’s closing in.”
“Yes.”
“Am I doing the right thing?”
“There is no going back.”
“Will I just crumble away like the Keeper?”
“Unknown.”
Jebrassy shakes his head. They’ve all come so very far—he can’t begin to understand how far. Yet he does not feel small. For once he feels quite large. Bigger even than the Dead Gods, and certainly more powerful. More powerful than any Eidolon. He tries to imagine the Kalpa—but all that is gone. He tries to imagine what Nataraja was once like—now reduced to the deadfall and, at the last, crushed against the spinning and whirling that wraps and protects a hard, slippery, very cold lake. Not for the first time he tries to imagine what the entire cosmos was once like. “It’s going to end in a few moments, isn’t it?”
“Unknown.”
“Anything else you care to tell me?”
“Yes.”
The armor’s voice becomes a gentle rush in his ears, like sifting sand. He does not want to be completely alone out here. The lake and the whirl change perspective whichever way he turns. So he looks straight ahead at the blue light. He still clutches the small piece of sculpture given to him by Polybiblios.
Barely audible, the armor’s voice says, “You have arrived. Finish the journey naked.”
“Won’t I die?”
No response.
The sandy rush fades to silence.
He squats on the ice, takes a deep breath behind the faceplate, and begins to remove his armor, first the helmet, then the torso, and finally the sleeves and leggings. It comes off easily, like peeling an overripe tork.
As he strips down, a creature unlike anything in the Kalpa walks up to him. It is barely as long as his arm and has four legs and is covered with black and white stuff that looks as soft as the fur on Tiadba’s nose.
“I’ve dreamed about you,” he says. “You’re name is…” His lips and tongue struggle. “ Catth.”
The creature slowly walks around him, inspecting, and then runs off. Not what it was looking for, apparently.
Jebrassy stands up wearing only the clothes he had with him when he left the Kalpa. The ice is cold under his feet. Everything is exceptionally cold. Worse, he feels his weight diminish. This makes him queasy. He hopes everything won’t just drift up and float away.
But he doesn’t know why it shouldn’t. Obviously, the last of the old rules—imitated, remade, and finally ignored and abused—are passing.
CHAPTER 116
Jack can barely hold the stone, it’s become so hot. But he won’t let it go. It can burn his fingers to char for all he cares. Ginny will be holding hers, he knows—and what about Daniel?
Blue veins rise in the green ice, begin to cut and churn.
There are two paths—there have been only two paths for some time now, at least since he rode the bicycle on autopilot and saw the earwig in the warehouse district.
But he doesn’t know which path this is.
He’s working on autopilot again.
Seeing with other eyes.
Staring down at different feet, naked—and watching a cat walk away with its tail held high.
“ Catthh,” he says, his lips numb.
CHAPTER 117
Tiadba feels almost nothing. She can no longer see her companions—they lie at the edge of her vision, black crumples of flesh and abandoned underclothes, not alive, not dead, not even asleep. Best if they were dead.