Barely audible, the armor’s voice says, “You have arrived. Finish the journey naked.”

“Won’t I die?”

No response.

The sandy rush fades to silence.

He squats on the ice, takes a deep breath behind the faceplate, and begins to remove his armor, first the helmet, then the torso, and finally the sleeves and leggings. It comes off easily, like peeling an overripe tork.

As he strips down, a creature unlike anything in the Kalpa walks up to him. It is barely as long as his arm and has four legs and is covered with black and white stuff that looks as soft as the fur on Tiadba’s nose.

“I’ve dreamed about you,” he says. “You’re name is…” His lips and tongue struggle. “ Catth.”

The creature slowly walks around him, inspecting, and then runs off. Not what it was looking for, apparently.

Jebrassy stands up wearing only the clothes he had with him when he left the Kalpa. The ice is cold under his feet. Everything is exceptionally cold. Worse, he feels his weight diminish. This makes him queasy. He hopes everything won’t just drift up and float away.

But he doesn’t know why it shouldn’t. Obviously, the last of the old rules—imitated, remade, and finally ignored and abused—are passing.

CHAPTER 116

Jack can barely hold the stone, it’s become so hot. But he won’t let it go. It can burn his fingers to char for all he cares. Ginny will be holding hers, he knows—and what about Daniel?

Blue veins rise in the green ice, begin to cut and churn.

There are two paths—there have been only two paths for some time now, at least since he rode the bicycle on autopilot and saw the earwig in the warehouse district.

But he doesn’t know which path this is.

He’s working on autopilot again.

Seeing with other eyes.

Staring down at different feet, naked—and watching a cat walk away with its tail held high.

“ Catthh,” he says, his lips numb.

CHAPTER 117

Tiadba feels almost nothing. She can no longer see her companions—they lie at the edge of her vision, black crumples of flesh and abandoned underclothes, not alive, not dead, not even asleep. Best if they were dead.

The female presence spreads like an enveloping cloak. But there are now twopresences. She can feel them both—

One is cold and frightening, crying out in the darkness, seeking her lost children only to destroy them, surrounded by this swirling prison that is more felt than seen.

And the other—ancient, filled with potential.

The prison will keep one and set the other free.

Animals brush by—sniff her naked feet, rub against her arms, then move on. They are hunting something small and weak.

“Catthh,” she says, then tries the word again. “ Cats.”

CHAPTER 118

Ginny is paying so much attention to the other layer of vision and experience—lost Tiadba—that she does not feel the touch on her shoulder until it is too late.

CHAPTER 119

Whitlow comes upon the child, kneeling on the ice as if to catch her breath. She does not turn, does not hear, apparently does not see.

Delight perverse and damp gleams on his pale, wrinkled face. He stumps the last few paces. The Moth is everywhere, a gray mist radiating its own triumph.

“For our Livid Mistress,” Whitlow says matter-of-factly as he lifts the girl high with one hand. “A final delivery. Our greatest triumph.”

Glaucous agrees.

With all of his strength, he holds out his fists and plays this game as no game has ever been played, pulling a single steel thread down even through the whirling of the spheres—and with the greatest of grunts, the grunt of birth and death and voiding, the grunt of victory and defeat and infinite pain, this squat gnome, hunter of birds, gambler’s friend, hunter of children, invertsWhitlow, not just his heart but his insides—liver and lights, blood and ouns.

Through the messy cloud, heedless of the thin wail of the dissipating Moth—Whitlow was always his ground and root—Glaucous reaches out to grasp the girl before she simply flies away. He has pulled down as much of this chosen cord of fate as he can: penance and game, set and match. This is the greatest thing he has ever done, and almost his last—almost. The fate he has grasped and pulled forward is not a good one, not for him. He knew that from the moment he saw it, near the Crux. He sets the girl upon the ice, oblivious—still seeing with other eyes.

“You’re welcome,” he mutters to no one, then crosses himself—an old habit—and kneels beside her. As the avengers approach, Glaucous uses his thick, ugly hand to gently push her aside. The wave of cats breaks over him. He is their first prey. Only right, he thinks—one terror of birds to another. Glaucous curls like a hopeless child and with all his remaining will tries not to add to the screaming. His blood spurts onto the ice. The gray tide moves on before he is finished, but the darkness closes in as his pain is chilled and pinched into a single, drawn-out throb. Something else is about to die.

The cats have found other, more important prey.

CHAPTER 11

First Avenue South

Ginny pushed a handcart stacked high with boxes down aisles formed by more boxes, having caught the knack of steering with the single long handle, like a backward toy wagon—anticipating the turns, working everything in reverse. These boxes arrived two days ago and had been dumped unceremoniously on the warehouse’s cold but dry loading dock, beneath a corrugated tin overhang. So many boxes—where did they all come from? Where did Bidewell get the money to send out all his scouts, buy all these books, have them shipped from around the world?

More mysterious still, why?

She pushed the handcart to the sorting table in the same corner as her sleeping area. She had walled off her bed with crates and boxes. Books do make a room.

The warehouse was heated, fortunately—everything maintained at a steady sixty-five degrees, and dry. Bidewell may have been mad, but he did not collect just to collect, then allow his items to mildew and spoil.

As Ginny unloaded the boxes, Bidewell stepped in through the rolling steel door that led to his library and private rooms. In the same dark brown suit he always wore, his ancient body made a gentle question mark against the door’s dingy whiteness. He paused, then took a shuddering breath, as if lost in weary contemplation, perhaps of a job never to be completed; work beyond anyone’s power to finish. He turned his head slowly and said, “These are all paperbacks?”

Ginny noticed for the first time that this was true; she’d been working on autopilot for the last hour, letting her thoughts go as she repeated the mechanics and motions. “So far,” she said. Bidewell clasped his hands. “Books produced in quantity seem to enjoy mutation, especially in the great piles that modern publishers stack in their vast warehouses. Packed together, compressed, unread—they reach a critical mass and start to change. A symptom of boredom, don’t you think?”

“How can books be bored?” Ginny asked. “They’re not alive.”

“Ah,” Bidewell said.

She spread the books out on the table in stacks five high. All of them had been printed in English; all were less than twenty years old. Many were in sorry condition; others appeared brand-new, except for browned paper and the occasional chipped or dinged corner or spine. They smelled musty. She was coming to hate the smell of books.

Bidewell approached. Ginny never felt threatened or afraid in his presence, but all the same, could not help thinking that he needed watching.

He studied the stacks she had made. Like a dealer of cards, he worked through them, fanning the pages of each book with his thumb, lifting them to his nose to sniff, barely glancing at what was on the aromatic pages. “Once a text is printed, there are no new books, only new readers,” he murmured. “For such a book—for such a text, a long string of symbols—there is no time. Even a new book, freshly printed, stored in a box with its identical compatriots—all the same—even that book can be old.”