“You sent things back,” Jebrassy said. “Now they’re returning.”

“Emerging might be a better word, like something rising from the depths of an ocean.”

“I don’t know what an ‘ocean’ is.” Jebrassy lowered his head as if in pain. “Upside-down rocks…ice and mountains in the sky. That’s where the dreamers are going. Is that an ‘ocean’?”

“No,” Polybiblios murmured, but he did not sound completely convinced. “Worlds falling together. All a desperate gamble, and how many times did we fall into that splendid quag of despair only Eidolons can feel?”

Jebrassy clenched his teeth and pushed ahead.

CHAPTER 91

Denbold and Macht tested the trod with their boots. “It’s firm,” Denbold said, returning to Tiadba. Herza and Frinna stepped out on the surface together. “We can cross here.”

“The beacon gets weaker that way,” Khren said. “It’s strongest on this course. That’s the path we should be taking. We should follow the trod.”

“It’s a long, wide one,” Shewel said. “It won’t stay firm. And there’s a peculiar bump ahead—we can see over it, or should, the way the light works here, but there’s only darkness.”

“What he calls a bump looks like a…what’s the word?” Khren asked. Tiadba had been reading other stories from her books. Some described features of land and water that the breeds had never experienced.

“A mountain,” Tiadba said. “Lots of them—a mountain range.”

“Well, whatever—that’s where we’re supposed to go.”

“What’s out there at the end of the trod?” Tiadba asked the armor. Pahtun’s voice responded. “Once there was something called the Vale of Dead Gods. It was a broad-floored rift with ten houses, including the House of Green Sleep, held in a kind of countertwist bowl at its center. Many marchers were lured there and enslaved in a chronic noose. The tower changed the arc of the beacon to avoid the vale. But the last update said there was only shadow—a lack of detail.”

“How long ago came that update?” Nico asked shrewdly.

“Kalpa time, a hundred thousand years,” the armor said. “But out here, in a countertwist, how we approach changes everything. Away from the guidance of the beacon, circling in from another direction, there may still be the vale. The House of Green Sleep is or was a strong lure. If the vale and the house have changed, then there may yet be other traps—or a clear path.”

“Typhon’s lies?” Nico asked, squatting beside the trod and poking at it again with a tripod leg. The surface seemed hard as glass.

“Perhaps,” Pahtun’s voice said. “The trod passes close to the vale. If the beacon guides us along the route of the trod, it might still be safe.”

They all looked to Tiadba. Her weariness had grown. She sensed a cycling sadness in the back of her thoughts, as if she were leading the marchers into a trap even worse than the echoes, worse than the twitching glider dumps and churning graveyard bogs they had already seen. But the beacon was strong. There was nothing else they could do; they had no other guidance.

“We could stay on one side or the other,” Khren said. “But it’s getting rough and there are lots of cracks. Take us much longer.”

They all dreaded the possibility that the Kalpa would fall and the beacon would be silenced—or worse, deceive them, though Pahtun assured them that was not possible.

“We’ll use the trod,” Tiadba said. “Khren, stay as far back as you can and still see the rest of us. Herza and Frinna, go ahead an equal distance. Any sign of softness…”

They spread out and moved toward the “bump” in the land ahead.

They walked on for what seemed a very long time before they were forced to abandon the trod. They then hid in crevices that radiated from the roadway and watched the passage of Silent Ones by the dozens—wave upon wave of gliding monstrosities, moving with even greater speed over the broad milky surface. More time—long, slow, boring time—passed before the surface again became glassy, and they resumed.

The Witness’s beam curved and whipped through the sky. Something was happening again far out in the Chaos—thick scuts of darkness shot up and then fell back like ghostly, smoky heads popping out of the ground.

After another long spell of travel, and another smoky eruption, Khren saw a change in the sky to their left, well off the vector of the beacon’s greatest intensity. None of the others could duplicate his sighting, hard as they tried. “My eyes must be going,” Khren said, downhearted.

“You and me both,” Shewel said.

“What did it look like?” Nico asked, boring in with an angry tone.

“Enough,” Tiadba said. “We’ll force him to make up stuff.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Khren said, indignant.

“We’ll stop here for a while…”

“It’s out there again,” Herza said, and Frinna pointed—they had both seen a blue glow in the dip between two heaves of brownish, crackled ground.

The armor now spoke. “It may be another Pahtun, or this far out, someone else from the Kalpa—older.”

They thought this over skeptically. “A deception?” Nico asked.

No answer. Anything could be a deception—except for the beacon, nothing was certain.

“I’ll sortie,” Macht said. “I’m tired of this monotony. A little climbing and jumping is just the thing.”

CHAPTER 92

“Does he look different to you?” Glaucous asked Daniel. Jack forged ahead through the ruptured and redrawn streets, walls, buildings. His concern was obvious—there was no way to tell what could happen out here, nor how things had changed since Ginny passed.

Or whether they were even following her trail.

“He’s standing straighter,” Daniel said.

“He’s looking older,” Glaucous said. “And bolder. He takes risks, leaving us here. What does the stone tell you?”

“Still tugging,” Daniel said. The urban rearrangement around them muttered and groaned like deep ice settling over a rocky slope. “If the girl feels the tug—and if it’s the same tug…”

“It is,” Glaucous assured him. “Have you seen the like before?” He waved at the dismal scene, apt to change unpredictably, like a show of lantern slides planned by an idiot.

“Once,” Daniel said. “Jack might have seen it, too.”

“Fleeing our Mistress?” Glaucous asked.

“Something like that.”

“ She’s back there. Near the old warehouse. I can feel her.”

“Will she use you to find us?”

“If you ask am I notching branches and overturning rocks…no. But the Mistress is ever and always aware of the disposition of her servants. At least, she was on Earth. Here…maybe our oddness blends in.”

“This isEarth,” Daniel said. “Bits of it. Look. You’re old enough—maybe you recognize these buildings.”

“Asian, I’d say.” Glaucous blew his nose, inspected the rag—more streaks of slick black—and shook his head. “I never journeyed to the East. We left your city miles back.”

“Bidewell said it was all getting cinched in.”

“Did he? I missed that.”

“It’s all burned or corroded. Broken time seems to act like fire or acid.”

Silence between them as they worked around a mound of bricks and stones. With a dour twinkle, the stones became shards of concrete and steel—part of a newer wall, but still a jumbled ruin.

“Like a battlefield,” Glaucous said. “I walked the trenches around Ypres, almost a hundred years ago, looking for a particular gent—a fine, strapping fellow and a poet. He dreamed, so I was led to believe, of a place he called the Last Redoubt. He’d written a book before shipping out, detailing his dreams…But the war had already blown him to bits. Lean years for hunters, during wartime.”

On both sides, streets and buildings ascended steep inclines, as if a city map had been draped over another, rougher country. Some of the structures looked more intact than any they had encountered before, despite leaning at awful angles.