It was not quite fully formed, of course. She had to stare hard to make things assume a visual, tactual truth. She could look at the foliage near her feet—a rough kind of bush, heather or gorse or something with purple flowers—and with an effort, the flowers would suddenly popand become real. Her lips said, in vague tones, “This is wonderful. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Behind those lips, Ginny asked, “Who’s dreaming whom?”
“Maybe it’s you. You must know about sky and hills and bushes—I don’t.”
“What I know, you know. But I don’t remember your name.”
“We don’t have names—for now. I’m in a terrible place. But sometimes I can sleep. So we’re together again. Come for me, find me, before it’s too late.”
Ginny shook her head and pushed up from a crouch. She felt refreshed, maybe even encouraged—until now, she’d expected only sadness and grief and pain at the end of her peculiar stroll. She rubbed her cold hands and reached out to test the limit of the bubble.
Thus far and no farther.
More real than the dream, and much less pleasant.
She stood before a great opening in the mountains, guarded by two giant figures she did not want to examine too closely. Made for other places, she guessed, and made of other matter, substances that did special things under special circumstances. Whatever the hell that means.She turned on her heels twice, like a slow top, as she had when faced with the Gape, and felt the dark gritty landscape pirouette. Now she stood before another cleft in the high jagged rocks, guarded by another pair of frozen figures—just as strange, but different. Spinning twice again, she stood before a third opening and a third distinct set of guardians that didn’t seem able to do much in the way of guarding. Like colorful ceramic figures decorating a door— but this time, let’s fire the decorator. Trophies, all of them. Preserved and mounted after something had enjoyed an awful hunt through the galaxies, collecting specimens.
Ginny shivered.
Spinning twice again—a total of six spins—brought her back to the first gap. She recognized the first set of figures, though she still did not want to examine them up close and personal. Personalmight mean something very different here.
Without doing anything more difficult than spinning on her toes, she was making the entire valley revolve like a lazy Susan platter in a Chinese restaurant. Imagine that. Such power. There were three entrances to the Vale of Dead Gods. She could imagine them evenly spaced around the bowl formed by the mountains, points on a weird kind of super-triangle. Typhon space. Or the kind of space a dying universe falls into.Which entrance should she take?
Each, she knew, would lead her on a unique and separate spiral course into the False City where her dream-sister waited. Other people could enter through other gaps and follow other spiral courses, but they would never meet, never see each other, separated by Typhon-time as well as Typhon-space. That thought bothered her. All along, since she had left the green warehouse, she had hoped that Jack and maybe Daniel would come to save her from her persistent foolishness—always deliberately choosing the worst path, leading to disaster. Jack seemed the opposite, shifting toward a pleasant sort of survival, if not genuine fortune.
Daniel…
Daniel she couldn’t figure. Not a whole number. Irrational.
He has an irrational set of decimals.
Ah. What’s that mean when it’s lying down?
But they would no doubt enter the False City through other gaps, and that meant they’d never find her. Ginny squinted at the guardians, forcing herself to see them for what they were—a matched pair, each with a circlet of ten or more eyes wrapped around otherwise human faces, lips and cheeks skewed in some strange emotion—the head set without a neck above powerful, many-limbed bodies, each limb configured to do something that she could not begin to understand.
She gave up her inspection. No sense adding confusion to madness. She decided that she would call this set of guardians the Welcome Wagon Committee to Hellgate One. She spun around again and named the second pair: WWC to Hellgate Two.
The experience could be repeated. Very scientific. Bidewell would be proud of her. Spinning again, she found the WWC to Hellgate Three.
Shouldn’t just do this all day, however long a day is. Make your choice, Ginny. Even if it’s the wrong one.
That was her inner voice, nobody else’s. The other had fallen silent. She was alone. Alone, Ginny knew she could always be relied upon to take the wrong path—except when she decided to go to the green warehouse. And even then, she tried to undo her good decision by venturing out. But now it wasn’t just herchoosing. The sum-runners drew each other together. So where were the others? Were they out searching for her in the mash-up, their stones tugging them along like eager terriers out for a run?
CHAPTER 96
The longer Jebrassy marched with Ghentun and Polybiblios, the more he realized what it was like to live around a Great Eidolon—even a fragment of one.
Polybiblios seemed to radiate knowledge. Some new and significant collection of facts or visions flowed into Jebrassy’s awareness every hour, filling him with history and science until his old self felt misplaced and overlooked.
Ghentun knew the epitome’s influence as well—and spoke his concern. “You’re leaking,” he told Polybiblios as they paused, helmets off, to rest and assess a new disposition in the Chaos around them. The epitome squatted beside them. His movements had grown more certain and less awkward, far from the support of the Broken Tower and all the Librarian’s servants and selves. He was acquiring his own kind of agility, a grace that reminded Ghentun of an angelin—no surprise. “I apologize. I will try to be less generous.”
“I don’t mind much,” Jebrassy said quietly, staring at the changing ripples of stone. “I just need some time to catch up. I have to think about things and make them my own.”
“Of course,” Polybiblios said. “Long ago, philosophers would have played a game of questions with their students—or their servants. Each question, so the philosophers claimed, would coax out prior knowledge, natural instincts born into them. What you feel may not be just my ‘leaking.’ It may be your own quality, emerging right on schedule.”
Ghentun looked aside and shook his head. “You’ve taken us away from the path of the beacon. Why?”
“We will find the beacon again,” Polybiblios said. “It was perverted long ago, you know—shortly after my daughter vanished, and Sangmer disappeared in search of her.”
Jebrassy’s face crinkled in dismay. “Why?” His innermost voice still told him the beacon must be inviolate—the only thing that could guide them to Nataraja, their ultimate goal—their reason for being made in the first place. “That’s impossible. Who would do that?”
Polybiblios met their obvious anger with resigned sadness—an easy enough expression in an offshoot of one so old. He did not give them an answer right away. “I hardly remember my own child,” he said. “As much as she wasmy child, so many had a part in her making.”
“We know the story,” Jebrassy said.
“There are so many versions of the story,” Polybiblios continued. “The truth may lie frozen and buried in the rubble that shores up the foundations of the Kalpa. So many versions to compare with the fragments of memory that I’ve managed to retrieve.”
Jebrassy lowered his voice and his head and circled the epitome, his anger burrowing deep. Polybiblios followed the breed with calm yet not precisely fearless eyes. “My people are out here, dying or worse—
for no reason?” the breed growled. “Because an Eidolonhas forgotten, and others have been careless?”