“How many breeds have survived?” Denbord asked.

Nico lifted his hands in a counting prayer.

“I’m not sure. A hundred…fewer.” Pahtun touched the ground and a box rose up, about the size of a clothes box. Walking around it, he scratched his palms, spoke a few soft words, jerked his head. The box responded and its sides fell open. Within, thin branches spun and grew with dizzying speed, throwing sharp little sparks. They were miniature versions of the trees that surrounded and covered them.

“Take off your suits. Lay them out on the ground. Once they air out, we’ll throw them in here.” He pointed at the spinning mass in the box. “Your armor will be remade and improved—new knowledge, better guidance. And then you’ll go. I’ll be breaking this camp and fleeing myself. The trod is close, and I don’t want to be caught by a Silent One. Besides, we’re all much too near the Witness.”

“How is that possible?” Tiadba asked. “We were let out into the Chaos far from there.”

“Distance, angle, the metric—all changing, I’m afraid. And it isn’t getting any easier to plan and prepare for.”

He gestured with his hands, flower finger prominent, and one by one, reluctantly, they peeled off their suits—all but Macht—and laid them on the ground. Herza and Frinna stayed close to the box, as if comforted by its apparently benign mystery. Shewel joined them.

Pahtun gathered the suits and flung them into the spinning branches, where they sizzled and vanished. He

waited for Macht to make up his mind.

“Tall magic,” Denbord said, with a wink and a nod, and then touched his nose. He still did not believe, but what else could they do? The protection was obvious—if temporary.

“Just do it,” Tiadba instructed Macht. He glared at her but finally handed his suit to this Pahtun, who dropped it into the silvery tangle.

The breeds lay mostly naked around the box and took turns telling of the last large intrusion, the damage to the Kalpa, their training, the end of the first Pahtun, the starboats in the valley that went away, the shattered ghosts of cities, the strange way light moved out here.

And the echoes.

“No doubt Perf is with them now,” Macht said, and Nico knelt and tented his hands, a prayer of supplication—though to what, out here, no one could say.

Pahtun listened intently, though Tiadba suspected he had heard such tales before. “You’ve done well against all odds, young breeds,” he said. “Good to know we can still shape such as you. But the city is ignorant about much of the Chaos—always has been. I can’t go back, nor can I communicate what I know, because the city must not take such a chance. We might be products of the Typhon, after all, made to misinform.”

“That’s what the trainer told us,” Macht said, and looked miserable.

“ Mightbe,” Pahtun emphasized. “Use your instincts—they are so much better tuned than those of any Mender or Eidolon. Closer to the primordial Earth, closer to the truth. Am I of the Chaos?”

“No,” Denbord finally said, and Tiadba agreed. The others kept silent.

“Well, some believe, some are suspicious; all good. None of you can be right all the time. Here is what I can tell you. The trods shift and grow. There are any number of them out there, pulling in tighter—most of them pointing to a great crater, cut through by a vale that extends almost halfway around what remains of the Earth. I’ve seen a few strange things gather and grow out there—I don’t know what they are, or what they might do. The Chaos lets them accumulate, for now. I’ve heard Eidolons call them

‘Turvies’—singular, ‘Turvy.’ The angelins in the Broken Tower can sometimes see that far, tricks of Chaos light being in their favor. They surround your goal, Nataraja.”

“Does it still exist?” Nico asked.

“Let’s hope,” Pahtun said. “If it doesn’t, then all our efforts have been wasted. The Great Eidolons, in their wisdom, exiled important persons to that rebel city—and with them, I hear, they carried important tools.”

“What?” Nico asked, eyes bright.

“Only they would know. The Librarian’s tale—have you been told that one, young breeds?”

“No,” they said.

“Not all of it,” Nico added.

Tiadba lifted the books, which she had kept strapped within the leg pouch of her armor. “Maybe we don’t need to know,” she said.

Several times, Pahtun had glanced at the books with something like hunger. “I doubt that your ignorance would help anyone,” he said. “It’s part of the great story, the greatest story of all. But you, young breed—your name is Tiadba, is it not?”

She had not told him. Perhaps he’d learned it from her armor. “Yes,” she said.

“Read for us, why don’t you? We have time, and I haven’t heard a marcher’s story in ever so long.”

She opened her book and found a passage by Sangmer that described his crew, and their journey in the starboat across the last winding reaches of space and time.

THE FIRST OF ISHANAXADE

Even surrounded by the beauty of the Shen necklace-worlds and the clever arts gathered in past times from all the living galaxies, my crew could only feel pity at what we had seen—and dread at the thought of traveling back through those ruined spaces. Whatever we brought back with us—whomever we transported—the return journey would be even more difficult.

While Polybiblios made his preparations—shedding his Shen selves and returning to Deva unity—I walked along the grainy margins of the basin wherein the Shen had stored their discoveries. Here, glistening like a soft jade ocean beneath the banded glow of the greatest ringstar, lay the pooled fate-logs of Shen travels during the Brightness, before the end of creation, their information long since scrambled and irretrievable—but still beautiful.

I sought quiet, a lonely kind of peace, but better than contemplating our almost certain oblivion in the Chaos.

My crew was amusing itself by visiting the shrines of Shen accomplishment—erected by human students from worlds long since eaten by the Chaos. The Shen acknowledged no gifts, accepted no reverence; not even to the extent of refusing or demolishing these tributes. Abandoned in scenic disrepair, the monuments rose or fell at the shivery whim of this huge pseudo-planet. The Shen had been the first to map the five hundred living galaxies, the first to link the ancient barren whorls of dying suns into ringstars, the first to do so many things. And here was that dead, glistening sea of exploration and knowledge, lapping on a beach of whispering grains, a mockery of all who have ever sought glory.

With only my dark thoughts as company, I stripped my garments and walked out onto the vectors, feeling them coil like jelly-crystal, cool and silver around my ankles, seeking the glow of my order—but unable to share or partake. They fell back with lost whispers, a muddle just on the edge of sense, as if they might still be capable of retelling lost tales. Melancholy to match my own—and no one else’s, I thought, until I saw what at first I took to be a small young female, walking toward me from a mile or so farther along the strand.

This was an impossibility: a human-seeming figure on a world where only my crew claimed humanity; my crew, humble Menders all, and of course the Deva Polybiblios.

The girl could have been a young Mender, but none of my kind had been born and raised in such a way, through incarnate infancy and youth, for tens of trillions of years. As she grew close, I waded to the shore, then knelt on the margin to caress the tiny, rounded bits washed up there, glowing with a soft green radiance. I watched this girl-child from the corner of my eye, helpless—feeling that a truly irreversible moment approached.

But there could be no retreat.

“Are you the Pilgrim?” the child asked when her voice could be heard above the whispers.