Typhon’s triumph. The Ashurs and the few noötics disappeared almost immediately. Records and texts throughout the city faded. People began to misremember their lives, then to lose them—distortion of the fate-lines, forgetting, then falling away into gritty black dust, a final kind of mercy for a blessed few.
Until the last instants of freedom, Nataraja’s philosophers tried to comprehend the new order, but there was nothing to comprehend, only a boil of ceaseless disorder. Change without purpose. Human senses seemed to cause the Typhon both puzzlement and pain.
The Typhon probed the remaining minds, the memory stores, the souls of all living things, posing questions that in themselves tilted some into madness. To see was pain. To remember was a new kind of forgetting.
To the Typhon, this was simple curiosity. Even after trillions of years of effort, it had not found its recipe for cosmos. This made it redouble its efforts—and quicken its failures. The Chaos was a piecework, poorly conceived and poorly assembled—failing everywhere except along its vast membrane of change, the many-dimensional front along which the old cosmos was being gnawed and absorbed. Ishanaxade alone—as her father had anticipated from the beginning, from his time among the Shen—was spared to remember all.
CHAPTER 107
Ginny thought it might have been a gigantic flower. Much taller than her, it rose from a cracked, rolling pavement in the shadow of the dangling, treacherous remains of the heart of this city, hanging like gigantic, moldy Christmas trees left behind by a receding flood, tossed into an awful heap, somehow still wearing their ornaments. But these ornaments seemed wider than entire towns on Earth. And no lights, of course.
The power had long since gone out for these ruins.
The flower—or was it a mushroom?—asserted a ghastly kind of independence below the architectural deadfall. As she walked around it, she noticed that it was made of elongated arms, legs, bodies, with an occasional head poking out. The anatomies within the stalk shivered and the heads opened their eyes, not to see—the eyes were blank, blind—but to express discomfort.
These were not marchers—not like Tiadba. They were more like Ginny. Contemporary to her. And there were many more flower-mushrooms, she saw, sprouting up beneath the hanging ruins. Something had gone about gathering the people, the survivors who had been so unfortunate as to find themselves delivered along with a cross section of endtime.
That’s why all the old parts of the city had seemed deserted when she left the warehouse. There had already been a sweeping, a mopping up. And something—perhaps the servants that moved along the trods—had brought a few or all of them here, where they had been arranged to form awful warnings. Scarecrows.
This gave Ginny both a frightening chill and an odd sensation of encouragement. You didn’t set up scarecrows unless you were afraid something could come and take what you had. She glanced at the towering base of the mushroom, looking for faces she might recognize, anybody she’d known: friends, the witches.
Miriam Sangloss.
Conan Bidewell.
She recognized nobody. But there were so many. Maybe the ones she’d come in contact with had been reserved for a particularly painful punishment.
“ I hate you, ” Ginny said, eyes narrowed, growling her contempt at whatever might be listening. “I am not afraid, and I HATE YOU!”
She leaped aside with a small shriek as a velvet softness rubbed against her ankle. When she had gathered enough courage to come out of her crouch and actually look, she saw a small shadow…watched it approach her again in a low, cautious slink.
The shadow resolved into bright and dark splotches against the uniform murk. It made a soft grumbling sound.
Ginny felt her eyes fill and tears spill down her cheeks, slipping salt into the corners of her mouth. She reached down and scooped up the blotchy shadow, rubbed its
Until the last instants of freedom, Nataraja’s philosophers tried to comprehend the new order, but there was nothing to comprehend, only a boil of ceaseless disorder. Change without purpose. Human senses seemed to cause the Typhon both puzzlement and pain.
The Typhon probed the remaining minds, the memory stores, the souls of all living things, posing questions that in themselves tilted some into madness. To see was pain. To remember was a new kind of forgetting.
To the Typhon, this was simple curiosity. Even after trillions of years of effort, it had not found its recipe for cosmos. This made it redouble its efforts—and quicken its failures. The Chaos was a piecework, poorly conceived and poorly assembled—failing everywhere except along its vast membrane of change, the many-dimensional front along which the old cosmos was being gnawed and absorbed. Ishanaxade alone—as her father had anticipated from the beginning, from his time among the Shen—was spared to remember all.
CHAPTER 107
Ginny thought it might have been a gigantic flower. Much taller than her, it rose from a cracked, rolling pavement in the shadow of the dangling, treacherous remains of the heart of this city, hanging like gigantic, moldy Christmas trees left behind by a receding flood, tossed into an awful heap, somehow still wearing their ornaments. But these ornaments seemed wider than entire towns on Earth. And no lights, of course.
The power had long since gone out for these ruins.
The flower—or was it a mushroom?—asserted a ghastly kind of independence below the architectural deadfall. As she walked around it, she noticed that it was made of elongated arms, legs, bodies, with an occasional head poking out. The anatomies within the stalk shivered and the heads opened their eyes, not to see—the eyes were blank, blind—but to express discomfort.
These were not marchers—not like Tiadba. They were more like Ginny. Contemporary to her. And there were many more flower-mushrooms, she saw, sprouting up beneath the hanging ruins. Something had gone about gathering the people, the survivors who had been so unfortunate as to find themselves delivered along with a cross section of endtime.
That’s why all the old parts of the city had seemed deserted when she left the warehouse. There had already been a sweeping, a mopping up. And something—perhaps the servants that moved along the trods—had brought a few or all of them here, where they had been arranged to form awful warnings. Scarecrows.
This gave Ginny both a frightening chill and an odd sensation of encouragement. You didn’t set up scarecrows unless you were afraid something could come and take what you had. She glanced at the towering base of the mushroom, looking for faces she might recognize, anybody she’d known: friends, the witches.
Miriam Sangloss.
Conan Bidewell.
She recognized nobody. But there were so many. Maybe the ones she’d come in contact with had been reserved for a particularly painful punishment.
“ I hate you, ” Ginny said, eyes narrowed, growling her contempt at whatever might be listening. “I am not afraid, and I HATE YOU!”
She leaped aside with a small shriek as a velvet softness rubbed against her ankle. When she had gathered enough courage to come out of her crouch and actually look, she saw a small shadow…watched it approach her again in a low, cautious slink.
The shadow resolved into bright and dark splotches against the uniform murk. It made a soft grumbling sound.
Ginny felt her eyes fill and tears spill down her cheeks, slipping salt into the corners of her mouth. She reached down and scooped up the blotchy shadow, rubbed its
Similar Books
