Darwinia

Chapter Thirty-Two

There were hundreds of men like him working the trans-Alpine rail line.

They held Railworkers Union cards. They carved mountains with TNT, they bridged gorges, they spiked track. Or they were engineers, porters, oilers, machinists, stevedores.

When work was thin, they vanished into the wilderness for months at a time. Or they vanished, almost as easily, into the smoky urban slums of Tilson and New Pittsburgh along the Rhine.

They were solitary, silent. They had no friends, no family. They didn’t look especially old (their age was hard to place), but age surrounded them like an aura. Their carriage suggested an economy of motion, a terrible and sullen patience.

Karen Wilder knew the type. She’d seen plenty of them. Just lately, she’d seen more than ever.

Karen tended bar at the Schaffhausen Grill in the town of Randall, New Inland Territories. She’d been here five years now, wandered in from a mine town in the Pyrenees, broke and looking for work. She was good at her job and had a no-nonsense arrangement with the owner. The cook kept his hands off her and she didn’t have to go upstairs with the customers. (Though that was less of a problem since she turned forty last year. The offers hadn’t stopped, but they had slowed down some.)

Randall was a whistlestop on the Rhine-Ruhr line. The big freight cars came through every day, heavy with coal for Tilson, Carver, and New Dresden. Below the falls, the Inland Highway crossed the tracks. The railhead had grown enormously in the last few years. Respectable families had moved in. But Randall was still a frontier town, the Homestead and Emigration Laws still funneling in a steady stream of drifters from the cities. The new hands were troublesome, Karen had found; argumentative, quick with their fists. She preferred the company of longtimers, even (or especially) the nontalkative ones, like Guilford Law.

She had known him the day he first walked in — not his name, but his kind.

He was a longtimer of the purest ray serene. Lean, almost skinny. Big hands. Ancient eyes. Karen found herself to tempted to ask what those eyes had seen.

But he wasn’t much of a talker. He’d been a regular for a year, year and a half now. He came in evenings, ate sparingly, drank a little. Karen thought maybe he liked her — he always offered a word or two about the weather or the news. When he talked to her he inclined his body toward her like a shade plant leaning toward the sun.

But he always went upstairs with the whores.

Tonight was a little different.

Mid-September, the Schaffhausen tended to attract strictly locals. The summer crowd, loggers and snake-herders, low-rent tourists riding the rails, found warmer places to go. The owner had hired a Tilson-based jazz band in an effort to attract customers, but the musicians were expensive and hard on the female talent, and the trumpeter liked to play drunken scales in the town square at dawn. So that hadn’t lasted. Come September the Schaffhausen was restored to its usual calm.

Then the longtimers had begun showing up. (The Old Men, some people called them.) It didn’t seem unusual at first. People like that drifted through Randall all the time, renting some dusty old room for a while, moving on. They paid their bills, no questions asked, no questions answered. They were a fact of life, like the wild snakes that roamed the southern hills.

But lately some of these men had stayed longer than usual, and more had arrived, and they sat in clusters in the Schaffhausen arguing about god-knows-what in hushed tones, and Karen’s curiosity was aroused despite her best intentions.

So when Guilford Law sat at the bar and ordered a drink she put it in front of him and said, “Is there a convention in town or what?”

He thanked her politely. Then he said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“The hell you don’t.”

He gave her a long look. “Karen, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh.” Yes, Mr. Been-here-every-night-for-a-year, that’s my name.

“Karen, it’s an awkward question.”

“None of my business, in other words. But something’s up.”

“Is it?”

“Only if you have eyes. Every rail-rat and wood-louse in the Territories must be here tonight. You folks have a look about you, you know.”

Like something starved and beaten that refuses to die. But she wouldn’t tell him that.

For a split second she thought he was going to confide in her. The look that crossed his face was of such purified human loneliness that Karen felt her lower lip begin to tremble.

What he said was, “You’re a very pretty girl.”

“That’s the first time in fifteen years anybody’s called me a girl, Mr. Law.”

“It’s going to be a hard autumn.”

“Is it?”

“You might not see me for a while. Tell you what. If I’m back by spring, I might look you up. If that’s all right, I mean.”

“Okay with me, I suppose. Spring’s a long time off.”

“And if I don’t make it back—”

Back from where? She waited for him to finish.

But he swallowed his drink and shook his head.

Pretty girl, he had said.

She got a dozen spurious compliments a day from men who were drunk or indifferently particular. Compliments meant nothing. But what Guilford Law had said stayed with her through the evening. So simple, she thought. And sad, and curious.

Maybe he would look her up… and maybe that would be all right with her.

But tonight he finished his drink and went home alone, moving like a wounded animal. She challenged him with her eyes. He looked away.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Lily left work at four-thirty and rode a bus to the National Museum.

The day was cool, clear, brisk. The bus was crowded with grim wage earners, middle-aged men in worsted suits and crumpled hats. None of them understood the imminence of celestial war. What they wanted, in her experience, was a cocktail, dinner, an after-dinner cocktail, the kids asleep, television tuned to one of the two national networks, and maybe a nightcap before bed.

She envied them.

There was a theme exhibit at the Museum, advertised on immense banners like baronial flags suspended above the doors.

“Miracle,” she supposed, to appease the religious lobbies. She still preferred to think of the continent as Darwinia, the old Hearst nickname. The irony was lost now; most people acknowledged that Europe had a fossil history of its own, whatever that might mean, and she could well imagine the young Charles Darwin collecting beetles in the Rhine marshes, puzzling out the continent’s mystery. Though perhaps not its central mystery.

Off the bus, through cool air into the fluorescent inner chambers of the museum.

The exhibit was immense. Abby ignored the majority of it and walked directly to the glass case devoted to the Finch Expedition of 1920 and the brief Anglo-American conflict. Here were examples of old-time compasses, plant-presses, theodolites, a crude memorial retrieved years after the event from the Rhinelands below the Bodensee: In Memory of Dr. Thomas Markland Gillvany. Photographs of the members of the expedition: Preston Finch, ridiculously stiff in a solar topee; gaunt Avery Keck; luckless Gillvany; poor martyred John Watts Sullivan… Diggs, the cook, wasn’t represented, nor was Tom Compton, but here was her father, Guilford Law, with a day’s beard and a flannel shirt, from his earlier Gallatin River expedition, a frowning young man with a box camera and dirty fingernails.

She touched the glass case with the tip of a finger. She hadn’t seen her father for twenty years, not since that dreadful morning in Fayetteville, the sun rising, it had seemed to her, on an ocean of blood.

He hadn’t died. Grave as his wounds were, they healed rapidly. He had been held in the Oro Delta County Hospital under surveillance: the Territorial Police wanted him to explain the gunshot deaths of Abby, Nicholas, three anonymous out-of-towners, and Sheriff Carlyle. But he was ambulatory long before the doctors anticipated; he left the hospital during the midnight shift after overpowering a guard. A warrant was issued, but that was hardly more than a gesture. The continent swallowed fugitives whole.

He was still out there.

She knew he was. The Old Men contacted her from time to time. Periodically, she told them what she learned from her secretarial job in the office of Matthew Crane — a demon-ridden Department of Defense functionary — and they reassured her that her father was still alive.

Still out there, unmaking the Apocalypse.

The time, they insisted, was close at hand.

Lily paused before an illuminated diorama.

Here was a Darwinian fossil biped — she couldn’t remember or pronounce its Latin name — a two-legged and four-armed monster that had hunted the European plains as recently as the Ice Age, and a formidable beast it was. The skeleton in the diorama stood eight feet tall, with a massive ventral spine to which dense bands of muscle had once been attached, a domed skull, a jaw full of flint-sharp teeth. And here beside it a reconstruction, complete with chitinous skin, glass eyes, serrated claws long as kitchen knives, tearing the throat of a fur snake.

A museum exhibit, like the photograph of Guilford Law; but Lily knew neither her father nor the beast was truly extinct.

“We’re closing down shortly, Ma’am.”

It was the night guard, a short man with a slack paunch, nasal voice, and eyes far more ancient than his face. She didn’t know his name, though they had met often before, always like this. He was her contact.

As before, she pressed a book into his hand. She had bought the book yesterday at a chain store in Arlington. It was a popular science book, The Martian Canals Reconsidered, with the latest photographs from Palomar, but Lily had only glanced at it. Interleaved between its pages were documents she had photocopied from work.

“Someone must have left this,” she said.

The guard accepted the book into his beefy hands. “I’ll see it gets to the Lost and Found.”

He had exchanged this pleasantry with her often enough that she had begun to think of it as another name for the Old Men, the Veterans, the Immortals: the Lost and Found.

“Thank you.” She was brave enough to smile before she walked away.

Growing old, Matthew Crane thought, is like justice. It must not only happen, it must be seen to happen.

He had devised a number of techniques to ensure that he didn’t appear conspicuously young.

Once a year — every autumn — he retired to the privacy of his marbled bathroom, showered, toweled himself dry, and sat before the mirror with a pair of tweezers, plucking hairs from his head to create the effect of a receding hairline. The gods were not kind enough to anesthetize him during this procedure, but he had grown accustomed to the pain.

When that was finished, he etched few new lines into his face with the edge of a straight razor.

The technique was delicate. It was a question of cutting deeply (but not too deeply) and often. This area at the corner of the eye, for instance. He took care not the slice the eye itself, drawing the blade firmly outward along the cheek. Blood welled up, briefly. Dab and repeat. After the third or fourth cut, the stubbornly immortal flesh yielded a permanent scar.

Artistry.

He knew, of course, how all this would look to an untutored individual, i.e., quite ghastly. Slice, daub, slice again, like a doctor practicing cranial surgery on a corpse, and beware the nerves that ran beneath the skin. He had once given himself a droopy lip that lasted three days and prompted one of his aides to inquire whether he might have had a stroke. It was delicate work that required patience and a steady hand.

He kept the gear in a leather bag in the medicine cabinet, the Immortal’s Makeup Kit: fresh razors, a whetting stone, cotton balls, tweezers.

To approximate the roughness of aged skin, he found sandpaper handy.

He preferred a number ten grit, applied until the pores grew bloody.

Obviously, the illusion couldn’t be maintained indefinitely. But it wouldn’t have to be. Soon the war would take another, different turn; disguises would be shed; in six months, a year… well, everything would be different. He had been promised as much.

He finished with the razor, cleaned it, rinsed droplets of blood from the sink, flushed bloody wads of cotton down the toilet. He was satisfied with his work and about to leave the bathroom when he noticed something peculiar about himself. The nail of his left index finger was missing. The space where it should have been was blank — a moist, pink indentation.

That was odd. He didn’t remember losing the nail. There had been no pain.

He held both hands in front of him and inspected them with a deep uneasiness.

He discovered two more loose nails, right thumb and right pinky. Experimentally, he teased the thumbnail up. It parted from the flesh with a gluey, nauseating smack and dropped into the basin of the sink, where it glistened like a beetle’s wing on the steamy porcelain.

Well, he thought. This is new.

Some kind of skin disease? But surely it would pass. The nails would grow back. That was how things worked, after all. He was immortal.

But the gods were silent on the subject.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Elias Vale’s last client was a Caribbean woman dying of cancer.

Her name was Felicity, and she had come through the autumn rain on her stick-legs to Vale’s shabby suite in the Coaltown district of New Dresden. She wore a flower-print shift that hung on her hollow body like a collapsed tent. The tumors — as his god perceived them — had already invaded her lungs and bowel.

He closed the shutters on a view of wet streets, dark faces, industrial stacks, sour air. Felicity, seventy years old, sighed at the dimming of the light. She had been shocked, at first, by the broken contours of Vale’s face. That was all right, Vale thought. Fear and awe were comfortable neighbors.

Felicity asked, in a faint voice still ripe with Spanish Town inflections, “Will I die?”

She didn’t need a psychic for that diagnosis. Any honest layman would know at once she was dying. The wonder was that she had been able to climb the flight of stairs to Vale’s consulting room. But of course she hadn’t come to hear the truth.

He sat across from her at a small wooden table, its short leg propped on a book of astrological charts. Felicity’s yellow eyes glistened in the watery light. Vale offered his hand. His hand was soft, plump. Hers was gaunt, parchment skin framing a pale palm. “Your hand is warm,” he said.

“Yours is cold.”

“Warm hands are a good sign. That’s life, Felicity. Feel it. That’s all the days you lived, all running through your body like electricity. Spanish Town, Kingston, the boat to Darwinia… your husband, your babies, they’re there, all your days together under the skin.”

She said sternly, “How many more?”

Vale’s god had no interest in this woman. She was important only for the fifteen-dollar consultation fee. She existed to top off his purse before he hopped a train to Armageddon.

Ready or not.

But he felt sorry for her.

“Do you feel that river, Felicity? That river of blood? River of iron and air running from high mountain heart down to the delta of fingers and toes?”

She closed her eyes, wincing slightly at the pressure of his hand on her wrist. “Yes,” she whispered.

“That’s a strong old river, Felicity. That’s a river as wide as the Rhine.”

“Where does it go to — in the end?”

“The sea,” Vale said, gently. “Every river runs into the sea.”

“But… not yet?”

“No, not yet. That river hasn’t run dry.”

“I feel very poorly. Some mornings I hardly can drag myself from bed.”

“You’re not a young woman, Felicity; Think of the children you raised. Michael, building bridges in the mountains, and Constance, with her own young ones almost grown.”

“And Carlotta,” Felicity murmured, her sad eyes closed.

“And little Carlotta, round and beautiful as the day she died. She’s waiting for you, Felicity, but she’s patient. She knows the time is not yet.”

“How long?”

“All the time in the world,” Vale said. Which wasn’t much.

“How long?”

The urgency in her voice was chastening. There was still a strong woman in this sack of bone and rotten tissue.

“Two years,” he said. “Maybe three. Long enough to see Constance’s little ones out on their own. Long enough to do the things you have to do.”

She sighed, a long exhalation of relief and gratitude. Her breath smelled like the butcher shop on Hoover Lane, the one with goat carcasses strung in the window like Christmas decorations. “Thank you. Thank you, Doctor.”

She would be dead by the end of the month.

He folded the money into his pocket and helped her down the stairs.

New Dresden’s rail yard was a vast, sooty wasteland illuminated by harsh industrial lights on steel poles. The city’s towers rose up behind the longhouses like tombstones, steamy with rain.

Vale wore dark clothing. He carried a cloth bag with a few possessions in it. His money was on a belt cinched around his waist. He carried a pistol in the folds of his trousers.

He crawled under a torn section of chain-link fence, drenching his knees on the muddy ground. The soil of compressed dirt and cinders and coal fragments harbored pools of rainwater on which oil floated in rainbow slicks. He had been shivering for most of an hour, waiting while an inland train was shunted onto the nearest track. Now the diesel engine began to speed up, its headlight beaming through the rain-streaked darkness.

Go, Vale thought. Run.

He felt his god’s sense of urgency coursing through him, and it wasn’t about catching this particular train. Human history was spiraling down to the zero point, perhaps even faster than the gods had anticipated. Vale had work to do. He had come to this desolate place for a reason.

He tossed his bag through the open door of a flatcar and hurled himself after it. He landed rolling, bending back the fingers of his left hand. “Shit,” he whispered. He sat up against the wooden slats of the far wall. The car was dark and stank of ancient cargo: moldy hay, snakes and cattle bound for slaughter. Rail-yard lights strobed past the open door.

He was not alone. There was another man huddled in the far corner of the car, visible in flashes. Vale’s hand went instinctively to his pistol. But he saw in a flicker of hard light that the man was old, shabby, hollow-eyed, and probably drunk on aftershave or antiseptic. A nuisance, perhaps, but not a threat.

“Hey, stranger,” the old man said.

“Leave me alone,” Vale said crisply.

He felt the burden of his days. He had passed many anonymous years since Washington, had led a marginal life in the marginal districts of too many towns. New Orleans, Miami, Jeffersonville, New Pittsburgh, New Dresden. He had learned a few things useful to the gods and he had never lacked for food or accommodation, though he was sometimes poor. He had been, he suspected, held in reserve, waiting for the final summons, the last trumpet, the ascension of the gods over mankind.

And always there had been the fear: What if that battle never came? What if he was condemned to an endless round of cheap rooms, the confessions of impotent men and dying women and grieving husbands, the shallow consolations of discount liquor and Turkish heroin?

Soon, his god whispered. Or perhaps it was his own secret voice. Lately, the distinction escaped him.

Soon. Soon.

The train rattled deep into the countryside, past dripping mosque trees and sage-pine forests, across steel bridges slick with autumn mist, toward the wild East, toward Armageddon.

He woke in a wash of sunlight with the hobo looming over him. He scooted away from the evil-smelling old man and reached for his pistol.

The hobo backed off, holding up his grimy hands in an appeasing gesture. “No harm done! No harm done!”

The train clacked through daylight forest. Beyond the open door, a ridge declined toward a mossy river.

“Just keep the fuck away from me,” Vale said.

“You hurt your hand, my friend,” the hobo said.

“That’s my problem.”

“Looks bad.”

“It’ll heal.” He had twisted it coming into the train last night. It didn’t hurt. But it did look a little odd.

Four of the five nails were missing. The flesh beneath was pale and strange.

Chapter Thirty-Five

They came from the coast and the hinterland, from Tilson and Jeffersonville and New Pittsburgh and a hundred smaller towns; from the Alps, the Pyrenees, the compass points of the Territories. They came together, a secret army, where roads met rail lines, in a dozen villages and nameless crossroad inns. They carried their own weapons: pistols, rifles, shotguns. Ammunition arrived in crates at the railhead towns of Randall and Perseverance, where it was unloaded into trucks and wagons and distributed to tent armories deep in the forest. Artillerymen arrived disguised as farmers, field artillery packed under hay bales.

Guilford Law had spent the last year as an advance scout. He knew these hills and valleys intimately. He followed his own path toward the City of Demons, watching the forest for signs of the enemy.

The weather was clear, cool, stable. The mosque trees didn’t shed their angular foliage, only turned gray as the season passed. The forest floor, a mulch of plant tissue dotted with varicolored mold, disguised his tracks. He moved through cinnamon-scented shadow, among slim fingers of sunlight. His knee-length jacket was of cured wormhide, and underneath it he carried an automatic rifle.

The City of Demons wasn’t marked on any map. Public roads came nowhere near. Topological maps and aerial surveys ignored it, and neither the land nor the climate tempted homesteaders or loggers. Private aircraft, especially the little Winchester float planes popular in the Territories, occasionally passed overhead, but the pilots saw nothing unusual. The wooded valley had been edited out of human perception in the years since it was nearly exposed by the Finch expedition. It was invisible to human eyes.

But not to Guilford’s.

Go carefully now, he told himself. The land rose in a series of semi-wooded ridges. It would be too easy to make himself conspicuous, crossing these spines of ancient rock.

He approached the City, perhaps not coincidentally, from the same hillside where he had first seen it almost fifty years ago.

But no: he had seen it before that… he had seen it in its prime, more than ten thousand years earlier, its granite blocks freshly carved from the meat of the mountain, its avenues crowded with powerful armored bipeds, avatars of the psions. They were the product of an evolution in which invertebrates had taken a longer path toward the invention of the spine, a history that would have obliterated the old earth entirely if not for the intervention of galactic Mind. Battles half lost, Guilford thought, battles half won. In the midst of this new Europe the psions had left a hole in the mantle of the planet, a Well, a machine that communicated directly with the enabling codes of the Archive itself and from which, in due time — soon — the psions would re-emerge, to inhabit the earth even as they devoured it.

Here, and on a million Archival planets.

Now, and in the past, and in the future.

The memories were Guilford’s, in a sense, but vague, transient, incomplete. He was aware of his own limitations. He was a frail vessel. He wondered if he could contain what the god-Guilford was preparing to pour into him.

He lay prone at the top of the ridge and saw the City through a screen of nettle grass. He heard wind gusting among the stalks, felt billyflies settle among the hairs of his arms. He listened to the sound of his own breathing.

The City of Demons was being renewed.

The psions had not yet emerged from their Well, but the streets were inhabited once more, this time by demon-ridden men. More old war buddies, Guilford thought. Like the Old Men gathering in the forest, these men had died at Ypres or the Marne or at sea — died in one world, lived in another. They were conduits for the transit between the Archive and its ontosphere. Lacking conscience, they were perfect vehicles for the psions. They were the Defenders of the City of Demons and they carried their own weapons. They had been arriving singly or in pairs for many months.

Guilford counted their tents and tried to spot their entrenchments and artillery positions. Clear, delicate sunlight cast cloud-shadows over the City. The Dome of the Well had been cleared of extraneous rubble. It stood distinctly visible now, a plume of moist air rising from its broken shell into the autumn afternoon.

Guilford sketched the entrenchments in a pocket notebook, marking points of vulnerability, possible avenues of attack from the wooded hillside. Their clock is running fast, he reminded himself. The Turning packets had done their work. They’re not as prepared as they should be.

But the defenders had dug in solidly, in concentric layers of entrenchments and barbed wire ranging from the City’s crumbled perimeter to the Dome of the Well.

It wouldn’t be an easy fight.

He watched the City as the afternoon waned but saw nothing more… only those sundial streets, counting hours against the earth.

He returned as cautiously as he had come. Shadows pooled like water among the trees. He found himself thinking of Karen, the barmaid at the Schaffhausen Grill back in Randall. What could she possibly see in him? I am as old as leather, Guilford thought. Dear God, I’m barely human anymore.

Still, it attracted him, the familiar fantasy of human warmth… it attracted him; but it reeked of nostalgia and pain.

Daylight had faded by the time he arrived at camp. Dinner was tinned rations, probably misappropriated from some freighter bound for the China Sea. Ancient men milled among the darktrees. Ghost Soldiers, some of them called themselves. This was an infantry unit, and the unit commander was Tom Compton, who sat pipe in hand by the bank of a stony creek contemplating the last blue of the evening sky.

Guilford could not look at Tom without a sensation of double exposure, of layered memory, because Tom had been with him at Belleau Wood, their battalion marching slow cadence into enemy fire, two fresh American soldiers determined to rout the Boche the way their grandfathers had routed Jeff Davis’s armies, not quite believing in the bullets even as the bullets decimated their lines like the blade of an invisible scythe.

Other memories, other enemies: Tom and Lily and Abby and Nick…

No innocence left between us, Guilford thought, only the stink of blood.

He reported what he had seen at the City.

“The weather should hold fair,” the frontiersman said, “at least for another day. I doubt that favors us.”

“We move out tonight?”

“Caissons are already rolling. Don’t count on getting much sleep.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

In her fifteen years at the Department of Defense, Lily thought she had taken the measure of Matthew Crane.

He was a civilian “consultant” who spent most of his time lunching with congressional overseers and signing his name to duplicate copies of appropriations paperwork. He was tall, gaunt, personable, and well-connected. His staff of three secretaries and a half dozen aides was not overtaxed. His salary was generous.

He was, of course, demon-ridden, and for the last fifteen years Lily’s real work had consisted of observing Mr. Matthew Crane and occasionally passing her observations to the Old Men. She didn’t know how useful or important any of this was. Possibly she would never know. Her most private fear was that she had wasted years performing trivial espionage in aid of a final Battle that might not happen in her lifetime and would probably not be resolved for ages — eons.

She was fifty years old, and she had never married, seldom even come close. She had learned to live with her solitude. It had its consolations.

The irony, perhaps, was that she had come to feel a kind of fondness for Matthew Crane. He was polite, reserved, and punctual. He wore tailored suits and was meticulous, even vain, about his clothing. She detected a vestige of human uncertainty buried under that glaze of absolute emotional control.

He was also, at least in part, a creature calculating, ruthless, and not at all human.

This morning he came into the office disheveled, clutching his left arm against his body, and brushed past the secretarial staff wordlessly. Lily exchanged a concerned look with Barb and Carol, the younger secretaries, but said nothing.

She tried never to ask herself the ultimate question: What if he finds out who I am? It was an old, abiding fear. Crane could be a charming man. But she knew he would never be merciful.

Alone in his office, Matthew Crane took off his jacket, stretched his arm across the lacquered desk top, and rolled up the sleeve of his shirt. He put a blotter under his elbow to soak up the blood that continued to flow.

He had stumbled against the water fountain in the lobby and somehow lacerated the skin of his left forearm. The arm was bleeding. That was an unwelcome novelty. It had been a long time since Crane had seen more than a dram of his own blood.

If this was his own blood. It seemed not quite right. It was the wrong shade of red, for one thing. A muddy brick red, almost brown. Something in it sparkled like flecks of mica. And the blood was viscous, like honey; and it smelled faintly (perhaps more than faintly) of ammonia.

Blood, Matthew Crane thought feverishly, should not do these things.

The wound itself was minor, more an abrasion than a cut, quite superficial, really, except that it didn’t rush to heal itself, and the underflesh revealed by the wound was peculiarly structured, not like honest human meat, more like the hemorrhaging honeycomb of a wasp’s nest.

He buzzed Lily on the interoffice line and asked her to have some cotton and a bandage sent up from the infirmary. “And please don’t make a crisis of it — I’ve only scratched myself.”

A moment’s silence. “Yes, sir,” she said.

Crane replaced the phone. A drop of blood dribbled onto his pants. The smell was stronger now. Like something the janitor might use to clean a toilet.

He took several calming breaths and examined his hands. His fingers looked like an infant’s fingers, pink and unformed. The last of the nails had come off during the night. He had searched for them, childishly, petulantly, but hadn’t been able to find them among the pink-stained bedclothes.

He still had his toenails, however. They were trapped in his shoes. He could feel them, loose and tangled in the webbing of his Argyll socks.

Lily arrived a few moments later with cotton pads and a bottle of disinfectant. He had neglected to cover his arm, and she gaped at the wound. She would be hysterical, Crane thought, if she got a closer look. He thanked her and told her to get out.

He poured iodine over the cut and mopped up the excess with a copy of the Congressional Proceedings. Then he tied loose cotton around his arm with a shoelace and rolled his tattered and blood-brown sleeve down over the mess.

He would need a new jacket, but what was he supposed to do? Send Lily out to a men’s shop?

Something had gone wrong, and it was more than the loss of his nails, more than the wound, more than the unnerving silence of his indwelling god. Crane felt the wrongness in his bones, literally. He ached all over. He imagined he could feel an upheaval in the mantle of the Earth, a clashing of the gears that operated the material world.

Battle is at hand, he thought, the moment of ascendancy, the dawning of a new age; the gods would erupt from their hidden valley in Europe, would build their palaces with the bones of the truculent masses, and Crane would live forever, would rule forever his barony of the conquered Earth…

His god had told him so.

What had gone wrong?

Maybe nothing. But he was falling apart.

He held up his nailless fingers, ten pudgy pink sausages.

He saw from the litter on the desk that his hair had begun to fall out, too.

Matthew Crane didn’t leave his office during the morning, and he canceled the day’s appointments. For all Lily knew he might had died of exsanguination, except that he rang periodically with demands for more bandages, a mop and bucket, a bag of surgical cotton. (“Quickly,” on this last request. “And for Christ’s sake be discreet.”)

Hard to be discreet, Lily thought, when you’re begging bottles of Pine-Sol from the building’s janitor.

Crane accepted these offerings through a door barely ajar; Lily was forbidden to come in.

But even through this chary aperture she could smell the bitter tang of ammonia, bleach, and something more pungent, sharp as nail polish remover. Barb and Carol wrinkled their noses, stared at their typewriters, said nothing.

They left promptly at four-thirty. The interoffice line buzzed just as Lily was tidying her own desk. She was alone in the spacious outer office, echoes muted by carpeting, the tiled ceiling, the banks of recessed lighting. Outside the office’s single window, daylight was already waning. Her ficus, she observed, had begun to wilt.

Don’t pick up the phone, Lily thought. Just take your purse and leave.

But the person she had so painstakingly created, this dutiful secretarial drone, the unloved middle-aged woman married to her work — that person wouldn’t ignore the summons.

She thought briefly of what Guilford had told her about her grandfather during their brief time in Fayetteville. Her grandfather had been a Boston printer so firmly attached to his sense of duty that he had been killed while attempting to reach his print shop — which hadn’t seen a paying customer for a month — in the midst of that city’s food riots.

Hey, grandfather, Lily thought. Is this what it felt like, fighting the crowd?

The receiver was already in her hand. “Yes?”

“Please come in,” Matthew Crane said.

His voice was hoarse and inarticulate. Lily looked with deep foreboding at the closed inner door.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Elias Vale approached the sacred city, leaving bloody tracks in the loam beneath the sage-pine trees.

He wasn’t accustomed to this raw Darwinian wilderness. His god guided his steps, had steered him from the train yard at Perseverance past primitive mine heads, down dirt and gravel roads, at last into the unfenced forest. His god warned him away from the white-bone coral of the insect middens, found him fresh water to drink, sheltered him from the chill of the clear autumn nights. And it was his god, Vale supposed, who infused in him this sense of purpose, of wholeness, of clarity.

His god, to date, had not explained the rapid loss of his hair and nails, nor the way his immortal skin lacerated and sloughed away after any minor injury. His arms were a patchwork of weeping sores; his shoulders throbbed with pain; his face — which he had last seen reflected in a pool of icy water — seemed to be coming apart along its fractured seams. His clothes were stiff with dried fluids. He stank, a piercing chemical reek.

Vale climbed a wooden ridge, leaving his pink worm-trail in the dry soil, his excitement flaring to a crescendo. Close now, his god whispered, and as he crested the hill he saw the city of redemption, the sacred city glittering darkly in its hidden valley, vast and imperial and ancient, long uninhabited but alive now with god-ridden men. The city’s heart, the Well of Creation, still beat beneath a fractured dome. Even at this distance Vale could smell the city, a mineral fragrance of steam and sunlight on cold granite, and he wanted to weep with gratitude, humility, exaltation. I am home, he thought, home after too many years in too many lightless slums and dark alleys, home at last.

He ran gladly down the wooded slope, breathless but agile, until he reached the barbed-wire perimeter where men like himself, half gods seeping pink-stained plasma, greeted him wordlessly.

Wordlessly because there was no need to speak, and because some of these men might not have been able to speak even if they had wanted to, considering the way their skin drooled from the faces like rotten papier-mâché. But they were his brothers and Vale was immensely pleased to see them.

They gave him an automatic rifle and a box of ammunition, showed him how to sling these things over his blistered shoulder and how to arm and fire the rifle, and when the sun began to set they took him to a ruin where a dormitory had been installed. There was a thin mattress for Vale to sleep on, deep in the stony darkness, wrapped in the organic stench of dying flesh and acetone and ammonia and the subtler odor of the city itself. Somewhere, water dripped from stone to stone. The music of erosion.

Sleep was elusive, and, when he did sleep, he dreamed. The dreams were nightmares of powerlessness, of being trapped and slowly suffocated in his own body, smothered and submerged in the effluvia of his flesh. In his dreams Vale longed for a different home, not the sacred city but some abandoned home that had slipped from his grasp long ago.

He woke to find his body covered in delicate green pustules, like pebbled leather.

He spent a day on a makeshift firing range with those among his mute companions who could still hold and operate a rifle.

Those who could not — whose hands had become ragged claws, whose bodies were racked with convulsions, who had budded new appendages from their enlarged spines — made their war plans elsewhere.

And Vale understood, by way of his god’s silent communication, some of the truth of the situation. These changes were natural but had come too soon, had been provoked by sabotage in the realm of the gods.

His gods were powerful, but not all-powerful; knowing, but not all-knowing.

That was why they needed his help.

And it was a pleasure to serve, even if some fraction of himself cried out against his captivity, even if he felt, from time to time, a painful nostalgia for the part of him that was merely human.

No one spoke in the sacred city, though a few men still cried out in their sleep. It was as if they had left language in the forests behind the barbed-wire barricades. All of these men were god-ridden and all of the gods were ultimately one god, so what need was there for conversation?

But the part of Elias Vale that longed for his lost humanity similarly longed for the sound of human speech. The stutter of gunfire and the slap of footsteps echoed down these stone avenues into melancholy silence, and even the soundless voice of his own thoughts began to grow faint and incoherent.

He woke, a day later, with a new skin, green as the forest and bright as shellac, though it still leaked a pale whitish fluid at the joints.

He discarded the last of his reeking clothes. There was no need for modesty in the sacred city.

Hunger, too, became a thing of the past.

He would need to eat, eventually to eat a great deal, to compensate for the lean times. But not right away.

He did need to drink copious amounts of water. Pipe had been laid from the river, and a steady flow emerged from the crude pipe end at the perimeter of the sacred city, to trickle away down the broken streets into the alpine soil. This water was cold and tasted of stone and copper. Vale drank buckets of it, and so did the other men.

If he should call them men. They were becoming, quite obviously, something else. Their bodies were changing radically. Some of them had grown a second set of arms, stubby nodules emerging from the altered musculature of their ribs, with tiny fingers that grasped blindly at the air.

He drank but didn’t feel the need to urinate. His new body used liquid more efficiently, which was just as well; he had lost his penis sometime during the night. It lay on his mattress like a gangrenous thumb.

But Vale preferred not to think too hard about that. It interfered with his euphoria.

The autumn air was fine and cool.

Elias Vale had foreseen many futures, true and false. He had looked into human souls as if through sparkling glass and seen the things that swim and hover there. The gods had found that capacity quite useful. But the future he could not foresee was his own.

Did that matter?

Once his god had promised him riches, eternal life, the dominion of the Earth. All that seemed terribly intangible to him now, blandishments offered to a child.

We serve because we serve, Vale thought, a logic both circular and true.

He felt the Well of Creation beating like a heart at the heart of the sacred city.

The skin of his face had peeled away like the rind of an orange. Vale could only guess what he looked like now. There were no mirrors here.

His god took him deeper into the city, made him a part of the trusted circle of guardians arrayed around the dome of the well.

Elias Vale was honored to assume the duty.

He slept in the chill shadow of the dome that night, his head cradled on a pillow of stone. He woke to the sound of mortar fire.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Guilford Law moved up the ridge under the concussion of artillery.

The sound reminded him of tunnel-blasting on the Alpine railway line. All it lacked was the concussion of falling rock. Unlike tunnel-blasting, it didn’t stop. It went on with a maddening irregularity, like the pulse of a panicked heart.

It reminded him of Belleau Wood and the German cannon.

“They must have known we were coming.”

“They did,” Tom Compton said. The two men crouched behind a rockfall. “Just not how many of us.” He buttoned the collar of his ragged brown overcoat. “The devil’s an optimist.”

“They might bring in reinforcements.”

“Doubt it. We have people at every rail station and airstrip east of Tilson.”

“How much time does that buy us?”

The frontiersman shrugged.

Did it matter? No, of course it didn’t matter. Everything was in motion now; nothing could be stopped or withheld.

A muted daylight touched the ridge tops. Cresting the hill, Guilford beheld chaos. The valley was still in shadow, the streets white with trails of fog. A body of men including the venerable Erasmus had managed to set up trench emplacements within artillery range of at least the nearest buildings, and a predawn bombardment from their motley collection of heavy guns, howitzers and mortars had taken the demon encampment by surprise.

Now, however, the enemy had rallied; the western flank was taking vicious punishment.

Simultaneously, Guilford and a couple of hundred other longtimers began to move downslope from the north. There was pathetically little cover among the clinging reed grass and tumbled rock of the steep valley wall. Their sole advantage was that this terrain had also made difficult the emplacement of fortifications and barbed wire.

Still hopelessly far away was the real objective: the Dome of the Well, where Sentience had imprisoned thousands of half-incarnate demons, and Guilford remembered that war, too…

Because I’m with you, the picket reminded him.

Guilford carried his ghost inside him now. If he could carry that ghost as far as the Well — if any of the old men fighting with him could — the demons might be bound again.

But he had hardly framed the thought when a hidden sniper opened fire from the scrubby mosque trees clinging to the steep decline. Automatic rifle rounds tore into the men on each side of him…

Into him.

He felt the bullets pierce him. He felt their momentum throw him into the dirt. He scrambled for cover behind a wedge of stunted trees.

The advance stalled while a mortarman tried to take out the sniper. Guilford found himself staring at Tom Compton’s wounds. The frontiersman’s right shoulder was notched in a flaring V, and there V’as a gaping hole directly under his lowest left rib.

What occupied these damaged spaces was not ruined flesh but something more vaporous and grotesque, a luminous outline, the frontiersman’s own body configured as petrified flame.

Lose flesh, Guilford thought, and your ghost shows through.

He looked reluctantly at his own wounds. Took the inventory.

He had been hit hard. Chest and belly flayed, clothing charred. His torso glimmered like a mad party lantern. He ought to be dead. Was dead, perhaps. He seemed to possess no blood, no viscera, no meat, only this hot and pulsing light.

Deep numbers, he found himself thinking. Strange, deep numbers.

He didn’t bleed, but he could feel his heart hammering madly in his damaged chest. Or was that an illusion too? Maybe he had been dead for twenty years… it had felt that way, often enough. Breathe in, breathe out, lift a hammer or twist a wrench; shun love, shun friendship, endure…

Bullets rattled into pebbled soil inches from his ear.

You knew this day would come. Too long postponed.

“They’re killing us,” he murmured.

“No,” Tom said. “Maybe that’s what that sniper thinks. You know better. They’re not killing us, Guilford. They can only kill what’s mortal.” He winced as he turned. “They’re hatching the gods out of us.”

“It hurts,” Guilford said.

“That it does.”

He remembered too much, too vividly, all that long morning.

He rolled over a brambled hedge of barbed wire, caught his foot in a snakeroot runner, fell another several yards and landed with his rifle sprawled at arm’s length. Raw stone abraded his cheek. He had reached the outskirts of the City.

It was me, he thought, at Belleau Wood, I do remember. Ah, Christ: the wheat field overgrown with poppies and the men falling on every side, leaving the wounded behind for the medics, if the medics weren’t cut down, too, and men calling out over the roar of gunfire and sour smoke in rolling waves… Look at us, Guilford thought. Nearly two hundred half-human old men followed behind him, in snakeskin longcoats, dungarees, slouch hats for helmets, wearing holes the size of apples where the bullets had passed them through. Yet not immortal after all. The vessel of the body could bear only a certain degree of pain and magic. Some wounds could kill, some men had been left lifeless on the ridge, dead as the men at Belleau Wood.

Stripped of much of his flesh, loping now between eroded columns of stone, Guilford remembered.

He’s ridden me like a horse all these years.

But we’re the same.

But we’re not.

Memory boiled out of the City of Demons like steam.

Once these structures had stood white and blank as marble, filled with provender and home to a blindly virulent and immensely powerful species groomed as instruments for the penetration of psilife into Archival time. They had lived like insects, brainless builders. Immersed at adulthood into the Well of Creation, they emerged as mortal gods.

It was one pathway into the ontosphere of the Archive. There were, of course, thousands of such points of entry. Psilife was both relentless and ingenious.

I have seen them before, and they frightened me: Lord, what frightens a man who walks between stars?

I remember Caroline, he thought grimly. I remember Lily. I remember Abby and Nicholas.

I remember the way blood looks when it mixes with rain and earth.

I remember blue skies under a sun that died a billion years ago.

I remember too many skies.

Too many worlds.

He remembered, unwillingly, the thousand Byzantiums of the ancient galaxy.

He moved deeper into these rubbled alleys, places where the noon sun couldn’t reach, where shadow’s rivered into oceans of darkness.

He thought, Am I dying?

What did dying mean, when the world was made of numbers?

Tom Compton joined him, the two men walking side by side for several paces. “Look sharp,” the frontiersman said. “They’re close.”

Guilford closed his eyes on stars, opened them on carved and eroded stone.

The smell, he thought. Acrid. Like solvent. Like something gone terribly bad. Ahead of him, where the mist lifted, he saw the bright body and razor claws of the enemy.

“Don’t show yourself,” Tom Compton whispered. “We’re too close to the dome to risk a fight.”

Ten thousand years ago, as the ontosphere measured time, the demons had been bound in their Well.

Their earthly avatars were animals. Psilife had written dangerous code into their DNA, but they posed no direct threat to the Archive unless they were god-ridden. Guilford had fought them as a god, invisible and powerful as the wind.

They would emerge from the well wearing the same powerful bodies, and the demon-ridden men defending the well were subject to the same monistic logic, their human bodies surrendering to alien genetic programs.

Sooner than the demons had expected. Fresh Turing packets had disrupted their timing. The enemy was hindered by its own clumsy metamorphosis.

But it would all be for nothing unless one of these seed-sentiences carried his ancient ghost into the deeps of the well.

Guilford Law felt the mortal Guilford’s fear — after all, it was his own. He pitied this small replica of himself, this unwitting axis on which the world turned.

Courage, little brother. the thought echoed between Guilford and Guilford like a beam of light between flawed mirrors.

The demon-ridden men — even those so utterly transformed that they could no longer handle a rifle — were still lethally dangerous. Even now, hurt as he was, Guilford felt the enormous energy that was being expended to keep him alive.

The sound of artillery had faded to the west. Running out of ammunition, Guilford thought. More hand-to-hand fighting now.

The city had been different in winter, with Tom and Sullivan trudging beside him, the sound of human voices and the mournful baying of the fur snakes and the softening curvature of the snow, back when we were ignorant enough to believe in a sane and ordered world.

He thought unhappily of Sullivan struggling to make sense of the miracle of Darwinia… which was, after all, not a miracle, only a technology so monstrously advanced that no single human being could make sense of it or recognize its signature. But Sullivan wouldn’t have liked this haunted world, Guilford thought, any more than Preston Finch did; this world wasn’t kind to skeptics or zealots.

Small-arms fire rattled nearby. Up ahead, Tom Compton waved Guilford forward along a dark stone wall scabbed with moss. The morning’s clear skies had given way to tumbled, leaden cloud and fits of rain. The frontiersman’s ravaged body gloved faintly — about a candle’s worth — in the shadow’s. Tough for night-fighting. Might as well hang out a sign, Guilford thought. Kill me quick, I’m only half-dead.

But the enemy were easy to see, too.

A dozen of them moved along the silent avenue a few yards away. He crouched behind tumbled stone and watched them after they passed, their knobby backs shining like hammered metal and their long heads swiveling querulously. They were grotesquely bipedal, almost a deliberate parody of the human beings they had recently, been. Some of them wore tattered remnants of clothing over their bony hips and shoulders.

The mortal fraction of Guilford Law was frightened to the point of panic.

But the mortal fraction of Guilford Law swallowed his fear.

He moved among fractured stone walls toward the center of the City, the way he had come that dreadful winter almost half a century ago, toward the Dome of the Well, the absolute edge of the phenomenal world.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Matthew Crane had turned off his overhead light. He sat in a darkened corner of the office. He had left his desk light on.

The desk itself had been cleared. In the illuminated circle of the lamp resided a single object: a pistol, an old-fashioned revolver, polished and clean.

Lily stared at it.

“It’s loaded,” Matthew Crane said.

His voice was gelatinous and imprecise. He gurgled when he spoke. Lily found herself calculating the distance to the desk. Could she beat him to it? Was the risk worth taking? What did he want from her?

“Don’t worry, Little Flea,” Crane said.

Lily said, “Little Flea?”

“Thinking of the poem. Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, and little fleas have littler fleas, and so ad infinitum. Because you were my Little Flea, weren’t you, Lily?”

She groped for the light switch. Crane said sharply, “Don’t.”

Lily lowered her hand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Too late. Too late for both of us, I’m afraid. I have my spies too, you know. Little Flea had a Littler Flea on her back when she visited the museum yesterday.”

I could run, Lily thought. But then, would he shoot me? Hard to think. The chemical stench was making her dizzy.

“We know what we are,” Crane said. “That makes this easier.”

“Makes what easier?”

“Think of us,” Crane said wetly. He coughed, bent double for a moment, straightened before Lily could take advantage of his weakness. “Think of us together all these years, Big Flea and Little Flea, and to what end? What have I accomplished, Lily? Diverted a few weapons shipments, shared state secrets, did my small part to keep the civilian government preoccupied with wars or doctrinal disputes, and now the battle is being waged…” He made a gesture that might, in the darkness, have been a shrug. “Far from here. My god, why hast thou forsaken me?”

“That’s not funny.”

“I agree. I’m changing, Little Flea, and I don’t know why.”

He stood up and came a little closer to the lamp — to the pistol. He let his long overcoat fall away. The stench intensified. Lily was able to see the pebbled skin beneath the tattered shirt, the pustulant eruptions, the skin of his face separating like torn tissue paper. His skull had begun to take on a new outline, the jaw thrusting forward, the braincase writhing beneath islands of blood and hair and thick yellow plasm.

Lily gasped.

“As bad as that, Little Flea? I don’t have a mirror. But yes, I suppose it is that bad.”

Her hand groped for the door.

“Run,” he said, “and I’ll shoot you. I really will. Point of honor. So let’s make it a game instead.”

She was as frightened as she had ever been — as frightened as she had been that dreadful night in Fayetteville. Then, the enemy had at least appeared human. Crane didn’t, not anymore, not even in this dim light.

She breathed, “A game?”

“Forget how I look, Little Flea. That wasn’t supposed to happen, I think, at least not yet. I have no control over it. Oddly, neither does my god.”

“What god?”

“My absent god. Absent. That’s the problem. That still, small voice falls silent. Busy elsewhere, I suspect. Unscheduled emergencies. Your people’s work. But this… process…” He held out his blistered hands. “It hurts, Little Flea. And as much as I pray for a little relief… those prayers aren’t answered.”

He paused to cough, a long liquid spasm. Drops of something pink and watery landed on the desk, the carpet, her blouse.

Now, Lily thought, but her legs felt paralyzed.

“Before long,” Crane said, “I won’t be myself anymore. I should have known. The gods, whatever else they may be, are hungry. Above all else. They don’t want Matthew Crane to survive any more than they want you to live, Little Flea. So you see the position I’m in.”

He took another shambling step forward. His legs bent in the wrong places. Flesh cracked with each step; yellow bile leaked out of his cuffs.

“A contest. The pistol is loaded and ready to fire. Ugly as these fingers of mine are, they can still pull a trigger. And so can yours, of course. I’m not as agile as I might have been, but you’re not young, either, Little Flea. I reckon you’ve entered the support-hose and orthopedic-shoe stage of a woman’s life, correct? Maybe you’re even a little arthritic on damp nights. You don’t care to run for a bus these days.”

All true.

“A game. Called ‘grab the pistol.’ I think the odds are more or less fair. Just don’t wait for me to say go.”

She didn’t. Lily moved at once, one furious step after another, but it was like running in a dream; her limbs were dead weight; she was under water.

She saw the pistol in its circle of light, gloss black on buffed mahogany, lamplight catching the notches and angles of the weapon in bright constellations.

The stench of Crane’s transformation was thick in the air. He made a sound Lily barely heard, a shrill animal screech.

Her right hand touched the grip of the pistol. It slid away from her a precious inch. She felt Crane’s proximity now, a sulphurous heat.

But suddenly the pistol was hers. She closed her fingers on the grip. She took a step backward from the desk, tripped on a heel, found herself sitting on the blood-stained carpet with the pistol in both shaking hands, holding it in front of her like a dime-store crucifix.

Matthew Crane — the thing that had once been Matthew Crane — reared up before her. The desk lamp fell sideways, raking harsh light across his blistered face. His eyes were cherry red, the pupils narrow black slits. “Little Flea!” he cried. “Good work!”

She fired the pistol. Her aim was low. The bullet clipped a rib, spraying a gout of bloody substance against the far wall. Crane reeled backward, supporting himself on a rack of congressional reports. He looked down at his wound, then back at Lily.

She stood up cautiously.

He smiled — if that was meant to be a smile — past the stumps of his teeth.

“Don’t stop now, Little Flea,” he whispered. “For god’s sake don’t stop now.”

She didn’t. She didn’t stop until the pistol was empty, not until what remained of Matthew Crane was motionless on the floor.

Chapter Forty

A spasm of mortar fire collapsed what remained of the Dome of the Well. Vast intact slabs of shaped rock fell and shattered, lofting pillars of dust into the autumn air. Guilford advanced through the rubble, rifle in hand. His wounds were grave and his breathing was ragged and painful. But all his limbs worked and his mind was as clear as could be expected under the circumstances.

A reef of cloud had drifted in from the mountains, turning the day cold and wet. Drizzle chilled the City and painted the ruins a drab, slick black. Guilford darkened his face with a handful of mud and imagined himself blending into these tortured angles of broken stone. The enemy had abandoned order and were stalking the human intruders almost at random — an effective strategy, since there was no guessing which corner might conceal a demon. Only their stench betrayed them.

Guilford put his head around an intact foundation stone and saw one of the monsters less than a dozen yards away.

This one had left its human origins far behind. The transformation was nearly complete: it stood over seven feet tall, its rounded skull and razor jaws similar to the specimen Sullivan had shown him in the Museum of Monstrosities. It was systematically dismembering a man who had stumbled into its clutches — no one Guilford knew personally, small consolation though that was. It razored the body apart, inspecting and discarding the pieces methodically while Guilford choked back nausea and took careful aim. When the monster reared back with some fresh nugget of human flesh, he fired.

A clean shot to the pale and vulnerable belly. The monster staggered and fell — wounded, not dead, but it didn’t seem able to do more than lie on its back and flex its claws in the air. Guilford sprinted across a field of granite dust toward the collapsed Dome, anxious to find fresh cover before the sound attracted more of the creatures.

He discovered Tom Compton crouched behind a half wall, hand clutched to his throat.

“Bastards almost took my head off,” the frontiersman said. He spat a red globule into the dust.

So we can still bleed, Guilford thought. Bleed the way we did at Belleau Wood. Bleed the way we did when we were human.

He took Tom’s arm. “Can you walk?”

“I hope so. Too fuckin’ soon to give up the ghost.”

Guilford helped him up. The throat wound was vicious, and the frontiersman’s other injuries were just as grave. Faint light flickered from his ruined body. Fragile magic.

“Quiet now,” Tom warned.

They topped a hill of rubble, all that remained of the Dome that had stood for ten thousand years in the silence of this empty continent. Rifle fire popped frantically to the north and west.

“Head down,” Tom cautioned. They inched forward, breathing dust until their mouths were sandpaper and their throats rusted pipes.

I remember you, Guilford thought: Tom Compton, the First Sergeant who had dragged him through the wheat field toward Château-Thierry, pointlessly, because he was dying… Over these knives of granite until they saw the Well itself, brighter than Guilford remembered it, radiant with light, its crumbling perimeter guarded by a pair of vigilant monsters, their eyes swiveling with a fierce intelligence.

Elias Vale was still able to hold and fire an automatic rifle, though his fingers had grown clumsy and strange. He was changing in ways he preferred not to think about, changing like the men around him, some of whom were no longer even remotely human. But that was all right. He was close to the Well of the Ascension, doing sacred and urgent work. He felt the close proximity of the gods.

His eyesight had been subtly altered. He found he could detect faint motion in dim light. His other senses, too. He could smell the salt-pork smell of the attackers. The rain falling on his pebbled skin was both cold and pleasing. The sound of rifle fire was acutely loud, even the rattle of pebbles a symphony of discrete tones.

More acute, too, was the sense that had attracted the gods to him in the first place, his ability to peer at least a small distance into a human soul. The beings attacking the Sacred City were only partly human — partly something much older and larger — but he felt the shape of their lives, every poignancy and tension and secret vulnerability. That skill might still be useful.

His rifle was not his only weapon.

He huddled behind a granite block while two of the more thoroughly transformed men patrolled the rim of the Well. He felt — but it was indescribable! — the immense living energy of this place, the gods imprisoned in the nonspace deep in the earth, straining at physical incarnation.

An army of them.

And he felt the presence of two half-mortal men approaching from the north.

He picked their names from the glowing air: Tom Compton. Guilford Law.

Ancient souls.

Vale clutched his rifle to his pustulant chest and smiled emptily.

Tom said, “I’ll circle left, draw them off with a couple of shots. You do what you can.”

Guilford nodded, watching his wounded friend scrabble away.

The Well was a pocket of algorithms embedded in the ontosphere, a pinprick opening in to the deeper architecture of the Archive. The god-Guilford’s only way in was through physical incarnation: he had needed Guilford to carry him here, but the battle inside the Well, the Binding, that was gods’ work. But I’m tired, Guilford thought. I hurt. And with the pain and the fatigue came a crippling nostalgia; he found himself thinking of Caroline, her long black hair and wounded eyes; of Lily, five years old, spellbound under the influence of Dorothy Gale and Tik-Tok; of Abby’s patience and strength; of Nicholas gazing at him with a trust he hadn’t earned or deserved, a trust soon breached… he wanted to bring it back, bring it all back, and he wondered if that was why the gods had built their Archive in the first place: this mortal unwillingness to surrender the past, lose love to crumbling atoms.

He closed his eyes and rested his cheek on a jut of wet stone. The light inside him flickered. Blood welled up from his wounds.

The sound of Tom’s rifle roused him.

At the eroded rim of the Well the two monsters swiveled their heads toward the sound of the gun. Tom fired again and one of the beasts screamed, a shriek nearly human in its pain and rage. Bile-green fluid spurted from the monster’s ruptured gut.

Guilford took advantage of the distraction to move another several yards closer to the Well, dodging between man-high columns of granite.

Now both creatures were moving, approaching the source of the gunshots at an oblique angle, offering their dorsal armor against the rifle fire. They were extraordinarily large, maybe specially-appointed guardians. Their walk — bipedal, fluidly balanced — was slow, but Guilford had learned to respect their speed. Claws and forearm mandibles were exposed, bone-white, glistening with rain. Their smaller lower arms, less arms than auxiliary knives, clattered restlessly.

The rain deepened from drizzle to downpour, sheets of it streaming off ancient stone, raising plumes of vapor from the Well.

The monsters weren’t affected by the rain. They paused and rocked their heads, a querulous birdlike gesture. The water gave their skins or shells a polished gleam, raising hidden colors, a rainbow iridescence that made Guilford think of his childhood, of washing pebbles in a brook to see their luster emerge from the dross of dust and air.

Closer now. He felt the heat of the Well, the burned-insulation reek of it.

Tom stepped into the open and fired another shot, maybe the last of his hoarded ammunition. Guilford used the opportunity the frontiersman created and ran for the rim of the Well, glancing backward. Get away while you can, he wanted to shout, but he saw Tom’s left leg buckle under him. The frontiersman dropped to one knee, managed to raise his rifle, but the nearest creature, the one he had wounded, was suddenly on him.

Guilford moaned involuntarily as the monster deftly nipped Tom’s head from his body.

The sheeting rain concealed all else. The air smelled of ozone and lightning.

He shouldn’t have stopped. The second monster had spotted him and was moving now at terrifying speed toward the Well, long legs pumping as efficiently as a leopard’s. Running, it made no sound audible over the hiss of the rain; but when it stopped it released a cloud of stinging solvent vapors, waste products of some unimaginable body chemistry. Its eyes, expressionless and strange, focused tightly on him.

He lifted his rifle and fired two rapid shots at the creature.

The bullets chipped its gleaming armor, perhaps cracked an exposed rib, caused it to stumble back a step. Guilford fired again, fired until his clip was empty and the monster lay motionless on the ground.

Tom, he thought.

But the frontiersman was beyond repair.

Guilford turned back to the Well.

The rim was close. The spiral of stone steps was intact, though perilously littered with fresh debris. That didn’t matter. He wasn’t planning to take the stairs. Jump and let gravity carry him. There was no bottom to this rabbit hole, only the end of the world. He began to run.

He stopped when a human figure stood up not ten paces in front of him.

No, he realized, not human, only some poor soul less advanced in its destruction. The face in particular looked as if it had been broken long ago, bones shifting along the fault lines like volcanic plates.

This creature struggled to raise its own rifle, its arms shaking with the palsy of transformation.

Guilford took another clip of ammunition from his belt.

“You don’t want to shoot me,” the monster said.

The words cut through the rush of the rain and the distant crack of artillery.

Ignore him, the god-Guilford said.

“There’s someone with me, Guilford. Someone you know.”

He ejected the spent clip. “Who would that be?” Watching the monster struggle with its own rifle. Bad case of the shakes. Keep him talking.

No, the picket insisted.

The monster closed its eyes and said, “Dad?”

Guilford froze.

No.

“Is that you? I can’t see—”

Guilford froze, though he felt the picket’s urgent pleading.

“Dad, it’s me! It’s Nick!”

No, it isn’t Nick, because Nick—

“Nick?”

“Dad, don’t shoot! I’m inside here! I don’t want to die, not again!”

The monster still struggling against its own convulsions to raise the rifle. He saw it but couldn’t make sense of it. He remembered the bright, awful roses of his son’s blood.

The picket was suddenly beside him, faint as mist.

Time slowed to a crawl. He felt his hammering heart beat at half speed, slow timpani notes.

The monster flailed its gun with a glacial imprecision.

The picket said, “Listen to me. Quickly, now. That isn’t Nick.”

“What happens to the dead? Do the demons get them?”

“Not always. And that isn’t Nick.”

“How do I know?”

“Guilford. Do you think I would let them take him?”

“Didn’t you?”

“No. I didn’t. Nick is with me, Guilford. He’s with us.”

The picket held out his hands in a cradling motion, and for a moment — a sweet and terrible moment — Nick was there, eyes closed, asleep, twelve years old and at peace.

“That’s what this is all about,” the picket said. “These lives.”

Guilford said, “I’m so tired… Nick?”

But Nick had vanished again.

“Fire your gun,” the picket said sternly.

He did.

So did the monster.

Guilford felt the bullets pierce him. The pain, this time, was brutal. But that didn’t matter. Close now. He fired and fired again, until the man with the broken face lay shattered on the ground.

Guilford dragged his own broken body to the rim of the Well.

He closed his eyes and fell. Pain ebbed into mist. Free as a raindrop now. Hey, Nick, look at me. And he felt Nick’s somnolent presence. The picket had been telling the truth. Nick was wrapped in timelessness, sleeping until the end of the ontosphere, falling into the luminous waters of the Archive, numbers deeper than any ocean, warm as summer air.

He blinked and saw the god burst out of him. This luminous thing had once been Guilford Law, dead on a battlefield in France, nurtured by Sentience, equipotent with the gods and one of them, inseparable from them, a being Guilford could not begin to comprehend, all fierce light and color and vengeful as an angry angel, binding the demons who howled their frustration across the far and fading borders of the world.

Interlude

They stood a while on the high ground above the ruined City of Demons. The day was uniformly bright, but the sky was full of stars.

“What now?” Guilford asked.

“We wait,” the picket said, infinitely patient.

Guilford saw more men climbing the hillside. The City was silent now, empty once more. Guilford recognized the Old Men, Tom and Erasmus among them, whole and smiling. He was surprised he could see their faces so clearly across this distance.

“Wait for what?”

“The end of all battles,” the picket said.

Guilford shook his head sternly. “No.”

“No?”

“No. That’s not what I want. I want what I wasn’t allowed to have.” He looked hard at the picket. “I want a life.”

“All the life you want — eventually.”

“I mean a human life. I want to walk like a whole man, grow old before I die. Just… human life.”

The picket was silent for a long stretch.

I surprised a god, Guilford thought.

Finally the picket said, “It may be within my power. Are you certain this is what you want?”

“It’s all I ever wanted.”

The ancient Guilford nodded. He understood — the oldest part of him, at least, understood. He said, “But the pain—”

“Yes,” Guilford said flatly. “The pain. That, too.”