And it all went screwy for Eliza, somewhere in there. Dream siege, and a failure of psychic mind spikes. Dr. Chaudhary had said he was going to tell her something strange, and even as she swerved into some kind of altered state, she had the clarity to understand that the monster skeletons were the relevant fact here, not the site. But it was there that her mind took her.
To the Patagonian Andes.
As soon as he said it, she saw them: mountains that were pitched and pointed, sharp as teeth honed on bone. Lakes, absurd in their purity of blue. Ice and glacial valleys and forests dense with mist. Wildness that could kill, that did kill, but hadnt killed her, because she was not easily killed and had survived so very much worse already
She had been turned inward somehow, like a dress pulled inside out, and she was still sitting there with Dr. Chaudhary, and she could hear what he was sayingabout the monster skeletons, and how in the days of scorn after Piltdown theyd been nothing but a joke, even though they were a joke that rather defied explanationbut his words were as a rushing of water over a streambed, and the streambed was a thousand polished stones, a thousand -thousand, and they gleamed beneath the surface, beneath her surface, and they were her and more than her. She was more than her, and she didnt know what that meant but she felt it.
She was more than herself, and she could see the place Dr. Chaudhary was talking aboutnot the monster skeletons unearthed there, but the land and, most of all, the sky. She was leaning back and looking up and she saw the sky above her now and the sky above her then What then? When? and it was with the grief of mourning that it came to her that it was denied her.
The sky was denied her, then and now and forever.
She felt the tears on her cheeks
right as Dr. Chaudhary noticed them. He was still talking. The Museum of Paleontology at Berkeley has the remains now, he was saying. As much for curiosity as scientific merit, but I have a feeling that is going to change. Eliza, are you all right?
She swiped at the tears but they kept falling and she couldnt speak.
For a vertiginous moment, staring up at the starsnot gazing, but staringshe felt the scope of the universe around her, so vast and full of secrets, and she sensed the presence of more and greater beyond that and beyond beyond, and then beyond even that, and somehow the unknowable depths within herself corresponded to the unknowable scope without, and there wasnt another universe.
There were many.
Many beyond many, unknowably.
Ive seen them , thought Eliza. Knew Eliza. Tears were streaming down her face now, and she finally understood the nature of the dream, and it was worse, so much worse than shed even feared. It wasnt prophecy. Theyd had that wrong all along. It wasnt the end of the world she was seeing.
At least, not the end of this world.
The dream wasnt future, but past. It was memory, and the question of how Eliza could possibly have such a memory was overshadowed by what it meant. It meant that it couldnt be stopped. It had already happened.
Ive seen other universes. Ive been to them.
And I destroyed them.
39
SCION
Sirithar had drawn her to him like a musk, through passages of wending stone within the mountain fastness of a dead people, and thus had Scarab, queen of the Stelians, found the magus she had come to kill.
She had hunted him halfway around the world and here he was, alone in a close and quiet place. With his back to her, he was stripped to the waist and scooping water from a channel in the cavern wall, cupping it to his face, to his neck and chest. The water was cold and his flesh was hot, so steam rose from him like mist. He dipped his head into the flow, scrubbing his fingers through his hair. His fingers were tattooed, and his hair was dense and black and very short. When he straightened, water sluiced down the back of his neck, and Scarab noticed the scar there.
It made the shape of a closed eye, and though she felt power in the mark, she was unfamiliar with the design. It was not from the lexica . Like the world-wind and the despair, she supposed that this was his own creation, though it had not been wrought of stolen sirithar or she would have felt the tremor of its making. Still, sirithar clung to him, electric. Like ozone, but richer. Heady.
Here stood the unknown magus who plucked at the strings of the world and who, if they didnt stop him, would destroy it. She had assumed that she would feel a corruption on him, and that her soul would cry to the killing like lightning to a rod, but nothing here was as she had expected. Not the mixed company of seraphim and chimaera, and not him.
Will you do it, my lady, or shall I?
Carnassials voice came into her head with the intimacy of a whisper. He was several paces behind herglamoured, as she wasbut his mind brushed hers like the stir of breath against her ear. Tickle and heat and even a trace of his scent. It was deeply real.
And deeply presumptuous.