The light is failing. Daniel can hardly see. Inside, Fred is wondering how anything can exist at all. They are inside a diminishing spore of space-time, reality pushing its final push against nothingness—that which cannot be seen, thought of, spoken of.
Not this, not that, not anything.
“We’re here because we willit, and always have,” Daniel says, and that’s that. The unpleasant shrill vibration in his head abruptly stops. The brown, twisted thing has been destroyed—shredded.
If the spore shrinks to nothing, then the death of the Typhon—Daniel is sure that’s what is down there in the tiny blur of a pit, covered with hissing cats—will mean nothing. It will not be recorded. It will not be reconciled.
The Typhon may randomly return, unexpected, illogical, but just as real as before. Cats push away, many with missing paws and limbs, distorted heads, burned fur, empty eyes. This deed has cost them dearly.
Daniel steps back as well. All this is very familiar—though not always with cats. The stone is tugging him away from the pit, the cats, the remains of the failed, would-be god. Seconds tick with each swipe and whoosh of the shrinking armillary. He reaches into his pocket. He always does this. He always passes along what he is given, to save everything that must be saved, and that ends his chances of uniting with the being he loves more than the entire world—the one he has traveled all this way to be with.
Who—or what. That was always our question, no? What could we ever be to each other?
I crossed the Chaos. The rebel city was dying—surrounded by the Typhon, betrayed by the City Prince. Despite everything, I joined her. And I did what I had to do. We agreed. I had to go back to the beginning with a piece of the Babel, the final piece—and at the Librarian’s insistence, a second, a backup against further betrayal, in case another piece was lost—
And so I flew back with the last sum-runners, and found by brute force a path into the earliest intelligences of the young cosmos.
The only shepherd who never dreams.
The bad shepherd.
Jack is there beside him, hand on his shoulder.
“Do you know what this is?” Jack asks. “I sure as hell don’t.”
“It’s a mess, that’s what it is,” Daniel says. “Take these.” And gives him the two stones. “I’m done, this time around.”
CHAPTER 123
Tiadba is in the warm embrace of someone she has never known, never met, and yet about whom she knows a great deal. How she was found in pieces around the dying cosmos, and brought by the Shen to a single place, where a brilliant thinker assembled her into a sentient form, which somehow chose to be female.
She has met the Pilgrim sent to retrieve her would-be father, and has spoken with him—and made a key decision, to become flesh and journey back to Earth. And there—
The fear and bitterness have gone—but the grief remains.
The young breed squirms in this embrace, uncomfortable, restless. Someone she knows is approaching. She only half sees what lies around her. Other eyes see from another position—and then Tiadba’s skin erupts with piercing shafts of brilliant blue.
The entire volume around her becomes a sphere of glorious, blinding blue. Her visitor is very near.
Her visitor sees—
Jebrassy!
CHAPTER 124
The armillary accelerates inward at an astonishing rate. But within instants of the end, of infinite compression, squeezing down to zero and then echoing to less than zero, and vibrating that way until all is pulverized—the metric has suddenly expanded.
Something huge is stirring.
The armillary is now miles wide, spinning much more slowly.
The lake of crushed, turbulent ice rises and cascades out in melting waves to fill this new volume. The Chalk Princess has gone—passed away forever with the Typhon. The armillary is no longer a prison.
It is the shell of an egg.
Within, as if a breath is being held, there is waiting.
Another presence—missing or held down for ages—returns in stunned bewilderment to find herself surrounded by some of the very breeds she ordained to be made, long ago. They have found her, as they were designed to do. They have snared and brought others with them—kindred shapes of primordial matter.
As they were designed to do.
There is reunion. Her father’s goal is almost attained.
One thing remains.
She holds the tiny female breed in her naked lap like a mother and child. The breed writhes in a halo of brilliant blue, some of which leaps out in long arcs to pierce the fog, the mist.
“Have you seen the Pilgrim?” Ishanaxade again asks the breed, who barely hears.
CHAPTER 125
Daniel has never seen anything so beautiful.
He has fought and clawed through countless adversities and fates, and countless bodies, to return to this beginning point. He carries the small rounded piece of green stuff that Mnemosyne left for him in Bidewell’s empty room, an impossible time and distance behind him now. Back then the muse gave him a catalytic remembrance, a trigger of transformation, as if in the future they would meet and know each other again.
What shall he do?
The glowing female pushes through the fog and his knees go weak.
All are here. Who are you?
The face is so lovely—the shape, compelling and impossible, alien and comforting at once; so many shapes, so many limbs, so much power. Something very old, long suppressed, a condensation no more or less mysterious than the time-worn piece in his left hand, rises up in him. Daniel tries to speak.
I am Sangmer.
You?
Then,
Where have you gone, Pilgrim? Husband? And what have you brought with you?
Daniel holds up his right hand, empty.
You have delivered them?
He nods.
Then it is done. A quorum of shepherds has arrived.
That time-tumbled ovoid in his other hand is like a hardened and constricted piece of the lake that churns and quakes beneath them. Like the pieces that the Shen gathered from all the galaxies they visited, after the Brightness and the end of creation.
A lost piece of Mnemosyne. It will quicken Ishanaxade and return her to what she must become. He can withhold it, deny it, and claim the woman he sought across the Chaos. Or he can present it and lose her forever.
CHAPTER 126
Ishanaxade looks down upon his sad, ancient body, surrounded and filled by so much pain, travel-worn, cruel, determined to finish his task and return—whatever the cost.
What have we done?she asks him.
What we always do. What we promise to do. Rebirth.
He holds out his left hand.
Ishanaxade unfolds his fingers and takes the fragment. It is not glass, of course. It is a piece of the mother of all thought, of those who see and think, including Daniel—and Sangmer. It is reconciling, which allows memory, and shapes the creation of the Sleeper, when he chooses not to sleep. If I take this—I will become what I was. What will we be to each other then?
The body of Daniel is pitiful with fear. Already the lake is rising through the base of the glowing triangle, through her blur of feet and glowing legs.
Every few rounds, out of all infinity, we will meet,he tells her. For me, that has to be enough.The armillary expands again. They cannot see its boundaries.