Jack wiped his eyes, stared down at the bead of moisture on his fingers. He did not know what the tears meant. A loss greater than death…the joy of what?

The greatest secret of all, and he would soon forget he had ever heard of it. Daniel sat in the chair until the silence seemed to swallow him, and still he felt nothing, heard nothing. He stood and walked around, rubbing his hands, and for a moment a bit of Fred came to him—a chain of thoughts about mathematics and physics. Sum of all possible paths is the most efficient, the most probable path. Use the entire cosmos to generate all possible strings in a matrix of permutated texts. A universal library will help generate the most probable path. It’s obvious.Daniel smiled grimly. “Good for you. You’re still figuring things out. But none of it makes sense to me. This least of all.”

Fred’s thoughts bleached away.

“I’m Daniel!” he shouted to the high ceiling. “I’ve protected these stones since the beginning of time, across allthe worlds! You must know me!”

Silence.

“I had a family. I had a brother. Lots of brothers. I remember them—some of them. I think one was named John or Sean. I didn’t just jump up out of nowhere. I can tell you about what’s coming—there’s worse coming—if you’re even here. But you’re nothere…are you?”

Falling dust outside, everywhere.

He slumped in the chair. The others would probably lie and say they’d had a nice chat with whomever, whatever. All a sham. Bidewell was pulling a hoax to get control of their stones. Maybe the old man had locked them in and was going to let them starve.

He murmured to the still, cool air, “I know who I am, even if youdon’t.”

But now he wasn’t at all sure.

Something changed in the corners. Daniel stiffened and sat up straight, peering bright-eyed into the shadows.

Remember. Very far—farther than anyone. From the outer reaches, hidden from all searchers, until you were brought to the main cord.

Remember.

His eyelids fluttered, his eyes closed, and he clenched his teeth. He saw a place, a huge construction made of something like stone sitting in a crater on a vast smooth plain, silent—silent for millions of years, if time had any meaning there. He saw himself moving from room to room without actually walking—first as a child, then as an adolescent, feeling so very lonely and empty—his growth not continuous, but accomplished by fading at one age, reappearing elsewhere, older and more complete. And outside the house—lining the far, worn hills—huge beings without face or feature, held captive, never moving. Waiting to be summoned.

The Vale of Dead Gods.

Daniel was being forced to remember the impossible. He had been re-created and then stashed so far from any main sequence of reality that his earliest memories were an agony. He had passed through so much destruction to get here—but it was his origin that pained him the most. Twostones. Why?

The room changed again, and the confrontation he had dreaded—believed impossible—came and went, so quickly he had to reach back with sharp discipline to even recover it. Daniel was freezing. What he did not want to remember—what fogged his will, his intent—rose for an instant into memory and dictated his responses.

You know me.

“Yes,” he said.

But not as I am.

“No.”

I am changing.

“Yes.”

I am lost.

“You’re dying. But we’ll meet again. We meet on the shore of a silver sea. That’s all I remember.”

The cold reached down into his bones.

Daniel sat in the chair, too cold even to shiver.

On the wooden floor before him lay a small round piece of glass. First green, then blue. Foggy with age, as if it had lain on a beach, rounded by an endless surge of sand and water. Maybe it wasn’t glass. He couldn’t tell what it was, really. He reached down and held it for a moment, turning it in his fingers, then slipped it in his pocket beside the puzzle boxes.

Daniel looked around the silent, empty room. “Good-bye,” he said.

Bidewell walked along the high narrow hallway and opened the doors one by one, and out came Ginny first, more at peace than he had seen her before. Next came Jack, thoughtful, but with a new light in his eyes.

Bidewell hesitated before the open middle door, then walked to Daniel’s chair, where he reached out to shake the man’s hunched shoulder. Daniel stirred and opened his eyes. They were sharp as knives—the wrong eyes for that face. “I fell asleep,” he confessed, then stretched. The third shepherd was still an enigma.

“We’ll convene in a while,” Bidewell said.

“Pretty interesting—a question—” Daniel began, but Bidewell raised his hand.

“No need. It’s all private.” Bidewell nodded three times, eyes flicking at three different random points in the high room, before passing through the door.

The moment is over, Bidewell thought, for which I have prepared for a thousand years.

CHAPTER 74

The Chaos

They had no choice. Another wave of dark marchers—dead, dying, or echoing timelessly—swarmed down from the ridge.

“They are too many and too strong,” their armor told them. “The generator will not protect you.”

Tiadba pulled up the device. The field dropped back into the ovoid, which sparked and hissed before falling dark. “Into the trees!” she shouted.

“They’re not trees!” Denbord protested. “They’ll kill us—you heard the armor!”

But there was no choice. Tiadba pushed her group forward. Denbord took the generator, slung it over his shoulder, and booted the cart aside, then pulled his clave from his belt—the first time they had tried to use this weapon. Tiadba did the same. The mottled black notched blades fanned out, spun, and almost vanished. Two walls of force flashed outward, defined by the angles of the blades—translucent one moment, but where they coincided, silvering like a mirror. In the mirror, which curved and whipped, the ground behind seemed to clear and the dark marchers fell back, fell away.

“We can kill them!” Denbord shouted, triumphant. He continued to wave his blade. Its field whipped around upon them. Their suits fluoresced a pale green at the near miss.

“Keep that away from us!” Macht shouted.

The breeds instinctively pushed toward the shimmering trees—there were simply too many echoes rising and spilling over the ridge, thousands of years of lost marchers massing against those still alive. The more the claves cut, the more there were. Tiadba had sudden doubts their weapons were that effective. She saw that the claves fended off the dark marchers only temporarily—they broke apart, vanished, then seemed to rise again from the black ground.

Khren was the first to push between the trees, the pearl-colored balls of light on the branches popping and snapping as he brushed them. Yet the trees did not chew up their armor, in fact wrapped branches and trunks around them, causing great fear—until they saw the branches close up behind, projecting a curtain of glinting drops as delicate as dew. The dark marchers did not follow. This was completely unlike the generator’s bubble shield, but apparently more effective. Tiadba, Khren, and Denbord led the others deeper into the forest, until they reached a clearing. Tiadba tumbled over Khren when he stopped, and Macht over them. As they untangled, the others dropped to their knees, murmuring prayers, weeping, then collapsing on the soft gray surface, while all around the trees rose twice as tall as their heads, slender fronds growing up and over, forming a bower and giving them cover as they caught their breath.

Tiadba rolled on her back, still expecting to die—or worse. All her marcher training and instincts seemed unreliable, blacked out by fear that reached deep into the old matter that made her. What had they gotten themselves into? How many more terrors would they face, much worse than this?