Jebrassy understood. “What will happen if the Kalpa falls—will travel be meaningless everywhere?

What will happen if we can’t measure—”

“Best not to worry about those problems yet,” Ghentun said. “Just grieve for your dead and enjoy their memories.” He knelt beside the young breed, sad and proud at once. Like a father,he told himself. After a while he escorted Jebrassy to the silver dome and introduced him to the last three suits of armor. There was no longer a Pahtun to train them, but they managed.

Jebrassy chose a blue suit and put it on with only a little assistance. He seemed to be a natural. When Ghentun commented on this, the breed shrugged. “I don’t remember it until it happens…don’t really remember it at all. But maybe my body does. Or…maybe the Librarian is still reading me my story, but skipping ahead.”

That comment unsettled Ghentun. Who would be the leader, and who the led? Distances had changed in more ways than one.

Ghentun tried on one of the trainer’s outfits. It seemed to adapt well enough to his bulkier frame. He left the gloves unsealed for the time being.

“Someone’s coming,” Jebrassy said, and pointed across the channel. Ghentun saw a small, pale figure glowing against the black smear that had cut through the sands and marred the channel floor. The figure moved with an awkward, erratic lope.

“It’s not a breed,” Jebrassy said, beginning to feel alarm. “And it’s not big enough to be a Tall One.”

Ghentun extended his vision as far as a Mender’s ability allowed. The figure was an epitome, part of a Great Eidolon.

They stood their ground and waited.

“I know that one,” Jebrassy said as it drew near. “I recognize the face.”

“It showed a face?” Ghentun asked, astonished.

The figure moved swiftly enough, despite its odd gait.

“I’ve gone through a dreadful ordeal,” the epitome called, and joined them on the sandy floor of the channel. “Made myself primordial. Still not entirely knitted, I think.” It held up a small, pale hand and turned it this way and that, inspecting its fingers as if for the first time. “Limitations have their limitations, that’s becoming more obvious,” it said, then glanced with envy at Ghentun’s flower finger. “Is that actually useful? It looks useful.”

Ghentun grimaced at the memory of his own return to primordial mass—then clenched his hand in embarrassment. Flower fingers were seldom referred to openly in polite company.

“I’ll be annealed in a few hours,” the epitome said. “Out there…I’ll be able to survive for a time. But I’ll need some sort of protection, just like you. How marvelous.”

“How should we address you, Eidolon?” Ghentun asked, confusion bringing out a perverse courtesy. The old forms were definitely being shattered. No Great Eidolon had ever gone primordial, to his knowledge. It seemed an affront—both a sacrilege and an imposition on the privileges of the low.

“Please call me Polybiblios,” the epitome said. “I shall be a male—by tradition—and so I shall be known as ‘him’ and not the more appropriate ‘it.’ Though real sexuality seems lost to us all—with the possible exception of our young breed, here.”

Now it was Jebrassy’s turn to be embarrassed.

“In a way, I am probably the best part of the Librarian—or at least I will suffer that delusion until I am proved wrong. May I join you, young marchers? I promise to be humble, in my way. And possibly even useful—like that wonderful finger.”

Ghentun sealed his gloves and put his hands behind his back.

The epitome sat in the sand and with an expression of delight, lifted a handful of the gray grit, then let it fall through soft fingers to the channel floor.

Jebrassy had grown strangely fond of the fragment of the Librarian that had offered companionship and teaching in the tower. But seeing him solidly incarnate, similar in size, and out here…very confusing.

“How canyou be useful?” he asked.

“I brought this,” Polybiblios said. He held out a gray box. “Without it…nothing will happen. Nothing important, at any rate. Things will just come to an end. And after so much time, that would be a pity.”

CHAPTER 87

The Chaos

They might have been marching for years. Lifetimes.

The marchers were adapting to the Chaos bit by awful bit. Asserting a new sophistication by breaking the rules, they had become expert at crossing and sometimes even following trods. Trods, it seemed, had a kind of predictability. When there were no travelers about—for there were other and even stranger users than the gliding Silent Ones—the trods were hard and slick, like glass. When travelers approached, and long before the marchers could be seen, the trods would go all gummy and start sucking at their boots. There was usually more than enough time to scramble to one side or the other and hide in the broken rubble.

The entire Chaos was like a garbage heap. Wherever they went out here, stuff had been tossed about, disrupted, discarded—and most often, left in a crumbling, blackened state, its vitality sucked away. There were lots of places a breed could hide.

None of them had been lost since Perf—but that only meant they were lucky. They had seen more than enough evidence of the destroyed, the transformed.

During their short periods of rest, if the Chaos was not too badly mangled and some of the old rules still applied—and if the armor advised them it was safe—they would remove their helmets and breathe what was left of the ancient atmosphere of Earth.

It was not pleasant, but it was different enough to relieve the dragging boredom of the ever-changing, the unpredictable, and often enough the indescribable.

Their journeys had taken them around some of the largest monuments to the Typhon’s dementia. The marchers created their own names for what they saw: the Awful Bumbles, Great Burning Pile, Last Chance Ditch, Glider Dumps. That last had been a kind of miles-wide cemetery of worn-out, discarded Silent Ones, their eyes glazed and probably blind.

But still alive.

No finality, no mercy, no sense.

How many times the marchers had been pursued by things they could not see…beyond count. Their armor—and the Kalpa’s beacon, still pulsing and singing—guided them through ditches and around chasms filled with sluggish, churning liquid. Things seemed to swim or drown deep in that oily ooze. They walked on the flat margins of lakes of blue fire, casting long shadows against brownish cliffs like puppets backlit on a screen. The enervation that had come over them was not so much physical as mental. They were made of old, ordinary matter. Such matter—configured into a breed—could not absorb too much strangeness without throwing it out of memory, or stopping to rest. But there was no chance to stop.

And so much of what they saw, they promptly forgot. Another mercy.

CHAPTER 88

Glaucous grabbed Jack and Daniel and pulled them back into the red-rimmed shadows. “Stalkers,” he said.

Large, sinuous shapes slid over the cobbles and through the streets. Jack squinted to see, first making out what seemed to be several beetles dragging long, bloated worms. Blinking, he saw something else—snakes wagging spadelike heads, their eyes black and deep, crawling on a cluster of appendages and trailing long, bloated bodies. The bodies looped and coiled until these monsters passed out of sight around an eroded corner, yet still, afterimages danced in his eyes, light being what it was out here. Daniel hugged the wall, fingers rubbed raw against the brick and mortar. “What are those?”

Glaucous shook his head. “I’ve never seen their like.”

“Ugly,” Jack said.

“We didn’t escape after all, Jack,” Daniel said. “The bad places have caught up with us.”

They were about to move on again when from another direction, over the shattered walls, they saw seven large, manlike creatures in procession, heads bowed, dressed in robes that fell behind them in pools of blood-colored fabric—but the shapes that bumped and protruded against the fabric could not have been legs, not two legs, at any rate. Their faces were dark, smooth, with long red vertical slits for eyes and slick ropy hair writhing on their shoulders.