He caught a smell fetid and pestiferous and knew instantly what it was. In the slaying fields of several Lanes he had smelled it.
He worked his way around it by nose alone. Slow, slow. When he finally looked down into the bowl-like field he could see only sprawled dead. Men lay putrefying, faces puffed and lips bruised. Most were gutted, appearing to give birth to their own entrails.
The time-whorls sometimes did this, disgorging people or matter from times and places no one knew. What the induction ships did by laboring upstream, a flick of space-time could accomplish in an instant. Sometimes carrion like this could still be saved for the Zom business.
But these men all wore the same face.
Toby turned to merge again with the brush and there he was.
The same features—angular, hollow-eyed with fatigue, a familiar cut to the jawline and the downcurved mouth. Toby compared it with his memories, carried now for what seemed like years, taken out and studied every day.
“Who are you?” Toby asked.
The voice was low and edged. “What do you want?”
“Are you real? I mean—”
The eyes gave nothing away. But that was how they had always been. “You know me, son.”
“In this place? Don’t know what I know anymore.”
The face constricted as though wolfdark memories pressed against it from deep inside. “The mechs sent out copies of me. I tried to warn you. Before the mechs hit the portal city, Andro helped me make a general release kind of message—”
“I saw it. A Walmsley character had it at a big library thing, a pyramid—”
“You’ve been there?” He was startled.
“Yeasay. Mechs got it. I had to run.”
“I’ve heard about this Walmsley. The portal people—Andro, remember?—say he comes from ’way far back. Warned me about him.”
“He seemed like a shrunk-up dwarf, that’s all.”
“Sure can’t judge much around here by appearances.”
Toby moved carefully away from the bodies. This Killeen looked pretty nearly right, but then so did the ones with their guts vomiting out.
“What’re they?” Toby gestured at the corpses.
“Copies. The mechs I just shot were making them.”
“Sending them downriver?”
“Must’ve been. They were gatekeepers, I guess.”
“That whorl out there on the river?”
“Yeasay. They know how to open and close it.” The man who looked like Killeen jerked a thumb at the river where the mechs lay. “They figured out how to get in and out of Lanes.”
“I can do it too.”
The man again blinked with surprise. “Where’d you learn?”
“Worked it out.”
“Let’s get out of here then.”
Toby didn’t want to look as though he were stalling and make this man cautious but he was still not sure. “Where’s Besen?”
“I don’t know. I lost track of the whole Family when the mechs busted up the portal city.”
It sounded all too convenient. He could kill this one if he could get it off guard. It was in field gear but without helmet.
The man said, “Look, more mechs for sure will come to replace those.”
Toby didn’t like how this man kept pushing him. And this Killeen was so haggard and washed out. That could come from the copying process, whatever that was. “I’m not so—”
Let me speak to him. Please.
It was Shibo. A fragment rising in him.
Please. In the name of all we have been to each other.
It had an authority he had not felt before. As if it had been waiting for this moment, saving its resources.
