Entanglement. They shared a little matter; they were made of some of the same stuff. But not much of it. Ginny looked away, blinking back tears, and concentrated on the broken, stony path. There was nothing she could do and they frightened her. She did not want to end up like them, but she knew Tiadba would suffer a worse fate.
“You!”
The female muttered to those around her, and they suddenly stopped and formed a ring, blocking Ginny. She could not pass—she tried and was pushed back. She could not leap or close her eyes and move ahead or do any of the things that might have seemed possible earlier; they had confined her within their circle.
“What is it? I can barely see it.”
“It’s a Tall One.”
“Another Pahtun?”
“No—don’t break the circle! Keep it here until we know what it is.”
“We should move on.”
“Doesn’t anyone remember?” the female cried. “We keep trying to get across the valley and into the city. We keep being sent back and starting over.”
“That’s not what Iremember. We’re almost there. It’s beautiful and bright and close—look! We’ve crossed the Chaos. We’re going to make it…”
Ginny hugged herself and studied the wan, peeling faces. Some of the figures were little more than wisps floating above the jagged, crusted surface. Who was more or less real here, and what did it matter?
She finally tried her voice. “I understand you. I know what you’re saying.” Those words startled them—drove them back and widened the circle. Even now she could not be sure what language she used.
She looked up to the green structure—the city. It seemed closer and much larger, but something about its outline, its margins…it might have been a high mountain viewed through a living, smoky haze, deliberately closing and then revealing. Endlessly teasing, jealous, disappointed, angry. Tormenting.
“It speaks. I hear it,” several figures murmured, and they all closed in, reaching out to touch the bubble. Several more elliptical arcs of blue pulsed between them, wreathed their hands and arms, pulled away in slips and curls, and vanished.
The marchers withdrew, paler and less defined, as if the interaction had weakened their very existence.
“What are you?” the female asked. “Where are you from?” Her weary, filmed eyes glanced one way, then another. She could not see Ginny—couldn’t see anything clearly. “Tell us we’re on the right path. Tell us we know where we’re going.”
Before Ginny could answer, a wave of grainy darkness surged outward from the base of the city. The marchers flinched, hunched their shoulders…then dropped and tried to hug the rugged ground, as if this had happened many times before. So familiar, like a delivery of fresh fire to the damned. The wave spread and lifted all, seemed to haul up the very earth. Ginny closed her eyes and rode within her bubble through the wave.
It shook—spun the sky, then moved on.
Fell back onto a dark, syrupy foam.
The foam soaked down into the black surface, hissing.
After a sickening wait, the ground seemed stable again. Ginny got to her feet and looked around. The marchers were gone. On the threshold of what they seemed to think was their salvation, within sight of the place they had been created and trained to reach, they were snatched, shoved back. Tricked. The valley was a place of endless temptation and disappointment.
“For them, a trap, the wrong city,” Ginny said, shading her eyes against the rising arc of fire. But the green edifice was where she needed to be. The stone tugged her in that direction. This deceptive jumble of walls and shapes, watched over by legions of frozen giants—
If Tiadba was not already within, then perhaps she soon would be. And what can I do to help? This can’t be real. My nightmare has sucked me in.
Ginny’s hand had never left the surface of the sum-runner. And the stone’s strong pull had never lessened or wavered—until now. It tugged her sideways, on a different course than the marchers—into the valley, perhaps to circle around and approach the bowl from a different angle. She did not dare look behind her. The marchers would be lining up on the crest of the rise, memories spun back in a barbed circle. They would look down into the valley, filled with relief, sure of their victory, then run forward once more in a ghostly, decrepit horde.
There was nothing she could do for them. Not here, and not yet. If she was too afraid to move, the same female might repeat their scene and dialogue all over again.
Ginny walked on alone, drawing closer to the stony giants that looked down from the peaks of the surrounding mountains, locked in perpetual silence—always watching but never seeing.
CHAPTER 94
An awful suspicion grew within Tiadba. They had come so far, lost only one of their company—Perf, near the beginning of their journey—and yet she felt no closer to Nataraja and could not escape a terrible sense that disaster was looming. Worse, she was coming to distrust the beacon—the musical note that pulsed out of the Kalpa and sang in their helmets when they were on the true path, and faded when they deviated from that path. Some shade of knowledge pestered the back of her weary thoughts—a phantom of foreboding.
The marchers rested now in the protection of the portable generator, on the top of another inverse ridge—a hill from one side, a valley from the other, light sweeping in devious curves from whatever direction they chose to look; mirages everywhere, only slightly corrected and straightened by the faceplates of their armor. From the inverted valley side, they looked out over a wide, lightly traveled trod that led straight into an enormous, sandy plain ringed by high, jagged mountains. A few travelers, swift and low to the ground—a variety of the Silent Ones—swooped along the trod and vanished behind outcrops. None could be seen to travel all the way out onto the plain. On all sides, nestled among the mountains like carelessly dropped toys, great frozen things towered, facing inward toward a greenish architectural mass—if such could be said to have faces. The Pahtun voice suggested this might be the Vale of Dead Gods—occasionally seen from the Broken Tower. No Pahtun had ever explored this far. The mountains surrounded the House of Green Sleep—though that had likely changed, compressed into an illusion or disguise wrapped around the ancient rebel city of Nataraja. They might be near their destination after all, if Nataraja was still worth finding.
Once, while they rested—or dragged their feet, more truthfully—Khren said he saw motion on the far side of the vale, at an unknown distance, like a horde of insects swarming over the rim of the vale—perhaps more echoing marchers, lost and pitiful. And when Tiadba stared in that direction—trying to see through the tricks and deceptions of the light—she caught a brief glimpse of something pinpoint brilliant, blue—almost hurting the eyes, even through the filter of her faceplate. Sometime later Khren saw it again—exactly the same—and Macht, Nico, and Denbord all agreed it must be more echoes, captured and distorted marchers repeating their frustration by the tens of thousands. It was a sobering prospect that even now, having come this far, breeds just like themselves had somehow become imprisoned in an illusion of triumph; or so Nico speculated. “They might even think they’ve succeeded. Over and over again. A twisty prison.”
Herza and Frinna listened without comment. They had said little for some time now—many cycles of the flaming arc. Yet even those cycles were slowing. No way to calculate how long they were gone, how much distance they’d covered—not even Pahtun’s voice knew.
“We’ve walked halfway to nowhere,” Nico said, slumping in a split of black rock, holding his gloved hands to the sides of his helmet. There had been no chance to breathe outside air for many cycles.