“I sought not the lost genius of antiquity, but the marvels of impossibility.”

Glaucous snorted two nose-blows into his kerchief. “Whitlow’s stories fascinated me.” He raised his hand, snot rag draped from his palm, and poked a thick finger into the air. “Boccaccio, spinner of bawdy tales, redeemed himself searching for bits of Tully. A fine pair of noses for tales lost—or perverted.”

“You date yourself. Tully is now properly known as Cicero.”

Glaucous grinned. “I am surprised to find you confined to this box.”

Bidewell got up to tend to the stove.

“Still fond of wine,” Glaucous observed. “Always have been. Mr. Whitlow—”

Bidewell clanged shut the stove’s iron gate.

Glaucous thinned his lips. His hand started tapping one knee and he looked up, pinched his nose, snuffed again, glanced sideways at Bidewell. “Whitlow set his trap for Iremonk. The Moth made an appearance. I have never had such tools at my disposal. Always on the margins, forced to catch the wax dripping from all the sad dim candles of our night, forced to trim their pitiful wicks. My partner…” His expression faded into gloom, and to revive his spirits, he struck his knee with a fist. “Came close to the prize, I did—snagging Mr. Jack Rohmer, fine young Shifter. Painfully close. Ever and always flashers with a net.”

“Was your mistress too frightened to accept your gift?”

Glaucous changed the subject. “How solid is your fortress, Conan?”

“Firm foundations, carefully laid.”

“I suspect you’ve prepared three clean, pure spaces. So much easier to find emptiness in this wilderness than on the old continent, where the very turf is thick with bones. How long vacant?”

“One hundred years,” Bidewell said.

“Is that sufficient? Mr. Whitlow once claimed—”

“Conclusions are upon us, Glaucous. Much depends on your employer. Will she gather courage and return—as a shrieking Harpy, do you think?”

Glaucous scowled.

“Failed you, didn’t she? Eater of eaters, hunter of the hunt. We called her Whirlwind’s Bride, and some named her Whore of the South Wind…”

Glaucous leaped up at another shuddering slap-clap from outside. The walls hummed.

Bidewell poked a chunk of firewood into the stove. “Notice a thickening of motion and thought?”

Glaucous lifted an eyebrow.

“We’ll soon be caught between the adamantine walls of Alpha and Omega. It’s not just Terminus your Mistress was fleeing. There’s little or nothing left between us and the beginning, or the end. All of history, eaten away. Skeins pinched to threads, stripped to fibers—compressed to points. I wonder what thatwill be like.” He slowly squeezed his fingers—down to nothing. “A sudden brightness, I imagine, and great heaviness, as all remaining light and gravity bounce back and forth through a compressed pellicle of time—and the noise!— shattering,old nemesis.”

“Do you suspect, or do you know?” Glaucous asked.

Bidewell nodded at his books. “I’ve absorbed bits and pieces of past and future, sorting and combining until they make an inevitable sense.”

Glaucous flexed his hands and clasped his knees, rocking. “Joints ache,” he said. “Cold, even in here.”

“We’d better go up while there’s still something worth seeing,” Daniel whispered, and walked away. This time Jack followed, his face heating.

The ladder was made of boards hammered onto the close-spaced studs on an outer wall. Jack looked up into the darkness and made out the outline of a hatch below the roof. Daniel was already halfway up. The hatch was not locked. He shoved it open and clambered into a sloped shelter. A warped wooden door opened stiffly to an expanse of tar paper, sealed and repaired by stripes of uneven asphalt, and crisscrossed by walkways of weathered shipping pallets. The roof sloped from a low peaked center, bordered by a knee-high wall cut through at intervals with rectangular drains. Over the wall, outside, all around: what was left of Seattle.

Daniel stood silhouetted by the northern perspective, a lighter shadow against the rippling, ripping curtain. Jack joined him at the edge. Breaks in the curtain revealed a mélange of buildings industrial and domestic—houses, warehouses; to the west a forest of masts, and in the streets, dirt, ballast cobbles, brick, asphalt, wood, and concrete sidewalks. People dressed in dated fashions had been caught mid-stride, where they juddered like broken clockworks—going nowhere with painful slowness. The torn curtain parted to reveal other streets, other buildings, a puzzle thrown together from ill-fitting pieces of time, poured from the box of the sky onto a half-seen landscape that surrounded the warehouse. The thick, chilled air was choked with grit—what sort of grit, Jack didn’t want to know. Daniel coughed and waved his hand. “Everything left behind finds its place,” he said. “Just like you and me. I’ll bet if we had picture books, we’d recognize neighborhoods from before this warehouse was built. People, too.”

“What’s happening?”

“Who knows? But think it through.” Daniel gave Jack a wry grin. “We’re ants clinging to the last gobbets in the stew. Most of the chunks have already been chewed and swallowed—most of our universe is gone. Otherwise…why that?”

He pointed through a luminous rip in the curtain at an immense, flaming arc, rimming a painfully black center. It stretched across almost two-thirds of the sky. “That’s not our sun. And thatis not our city. Not anymore.”

NO ZEROS

Observers are like tiny muses. They process what they see, based on the logics they are given, but also on what they can assemble for themselves, what they think must be real, based on what they live and see and know, the truths they incorporate in their flesh. Every group of observers establishes a kind of local reality. It cannot deviate too far from consensus, from what the muses have ruled must be. But that flexibility allows the cosmos a latitude that makes it more robust than any rigid framework, because it welcomes observers, welcomes their input. And sometimes, very clever observers can influence the muses and the cosmos as a whole, and so, Mnemosyne reconciles on a huge scale, those forward and backward pulses that we’ve already discussed.

We are not so much made by a creator as deduced. In fact, all creation is collaboration between the great and the small, always interconnected and dependent upon each other. There are no lords, no kings, no eternal gods of all, but there are forces that work across time and fate, and finally, outside our conceit, there is justice.

To be alive is to be blind. It is hard work to stay alive. And when our work is done and we are unburdened, we are rewarded with the joy of matter, about which only the wisest and the most foolish can know.

—The Chronicles of the Elders of Lagado

A lost or spurious work of Spinoza

CHAPTER 68

The Chaos

Despite the efforts of their armor, light was a tricky commodity in the Chaos. Distances beyond a few yards tended to foreshorten or lengthen unpredictably. Nico in particular found this unnerving, and lost his balance more often than the others, until finally he lay down in a shallow dip and tried to be sick. The armor would not let him.

Tiadba knelt beside him while Khren and the others circled the depression. All were woozy.

“If I could just throw up, I’d feel better,” Nico said, wretched behind the golden transparency of his faceplate.

“That would be a mess, in your helmet,” Tiadba said.

“I could take off the helmet for a little bit…”

“Too late for that,” Denbord said, kneeling. “I’m not feeling so hot myself.”