over the irregular surface. I could see the striations where individual Insects had added their masticated wood pulp. The bridge’s stringy supports of hardened spit whooshed by on both sides. Looking between them I saw the savanna drop below us as we labored up to the apex.
We crested the summit buffeted by Vista’s breeze that blows across worlds, and for one glorious moment I could see the whole of the sprawling market.
Then it had gone; we were in the world of Vista. The wind howled through the top of the bridge. Below us, it blew the top layer of flaking sand across the wasteland as fine crystal dust, drifting onto high dunes against the base of the sea wall.
Many white tracks converged on Vista Marchan city; from up here they resembled the rays of a star. Its cluster of pale blocky towers appeared suspended in mirages and pooled in bent light across the entire wasteland.
I had not seen any place like this before. We descended past the towers that I realized were higher than the Throne Room spire. I was overawed and shaking as we rolled to a halt on top of Vista’s great sea wall. On either side of us were empty, sand-choked dockyards and piers with long, dry barnacled ladders that stopped short of the ground.
I looked out over the salt flats, to see Epsilon as a translucent illusion, a lush plain and thriving market lying at forty-five degrees through the white wasteland.
Tarragon said, “Aren’t Insects fascinating creatures? That’s the Vista desert. It used to be the ocean floor.” Her car’s wheels pulled the grit into tracks as we drove along the top of the immense wall. The salt-bleached streets were devoid of movement. The only living things in Vista were myself and Tarragon; her fin annoyingly brushed my thigh as she operated the controls. Paper Insect cells meshed between and hung like gray lace around the worn concrete buildings.
“I’m sorry to bring you so far,” she added. “Your trip home will cause you substantial distress.”
Rust stains ran down the dock wall from flaking iron rings bolted into the top. Sea-level markers and fading numerals were stenciled in a script twice my height. We stopped and stared out at the vanished ocean. The white sky and sand stretched away as far as I could see: two parallel planes meeting at the horizon. Occasional patches discolored the dunes’ glaring surface, chemicals and oil seeping up from below. A stagecoach that must have belonged to a recent tourist lay derelict and half-full of sand. The tops of its spoked wheels showed through the surface of a hard-packed ridge.
Behind us was the city, faceless towers and blanched walls abraded with centuries of windblown sand. Spiral steps emerged like spinal columns from their broken shells. Rusted girders jutted out of the fortieth floors-metal thinned to perforated wafers. There was no sound but the breeze skipping salt crystals over the dry ocean floor and concrete promenade. It was completely outside my experience. I said, “It’s not beautiful. It’s…”
“A desert, Jant. Lots of sand.”
“Tarragon,” I said impatiently. “Capharnaum is burning!”
She tutted but moved quickly, taking a gold pocket watch from a box that was part of the car’s fascia. She clicked its glass case open and I saw that it wasn’t a watch at all. Inside was a gold mechanism and a wire gauze that securely held down a fat black fly, twice the size of a bluebottle. It buzzed energetically, sounding as if it was trying to drill through its gold cage. Tarragon said, “It’s amazing what you can purchase from the Tine in Epsilon market if you have enough meat.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a Time Fly. They have a way of avoiding being squashed or eaten. They can jump a split second back in time, up to the point at which they emerged from the pupa. This Time Fly hatched in Vista Marchan and has been imprisoned here ever since. I’m taking you back there; we will turn back time until the tide comes in. Wind it for me, will you?”
I turned the contraption’s little gold key, just like a watch, and the gauze began to put pressure on the trapped insect. It felt threatened and tried its method of escape, but because the mechanism snared it, it carried its threat along. It took us, too, and it went fast. Really fast.
For a few minutes, nothing changed. I twisted around and looked behind at the town. The buildings could be a little less gray, less dilapidated.
There was a blurring at street level around the car, as if I could see colored air swirling. Tarragon said, “They’re city people, in their everyday lives or fighting Insects, moving back in time too fast to see.”
She patted my arm and pointed to the horizon. Prodigious steel ships began to rise from the areas of oily discolored sands. Sand dusted away from them, revealing masts and wheelhouses then unearthed long hulls lying on their sides. The sand’s surface darkened to pale gray and began to glisten. Then shallow blue pools appeared in the lowest linear sand ripples, where I had not noticed hollows before. The long pools swelled and coalesced, turning the summits of the sand ripples into islands and building up around the dunes. Water ran together around them, darker blue as it deepened.
The ripples were all covered, the sea level climbed, the dunes were dispersed islands. Just a few islands left; then the sea covered the final dune. The ocean kept rising, closer to the bottom rungs of the ladders, bearing upright the drab metal ships.
Color poured into the sky. From monochrome it became pale, then bright blue. The automobile’s highly polished gold chassis reflected it. The Time Fly in the watch whined with effort. It was now a young imago, its wings crumpled and damp, as it had been when someone imprisoned it. Its six thin legs scraped against the watch’s shiny inside surface.
Suddenly the Insect bridge vanished. Fresh paper, it disappeared in jerky stages from the foot of the arch to its zenith. Waves hit the harbor wall and climbed its sea-level gauge, higher and higher. The steel ships disappeared instantly; instead the ocean spat out white boats that bobbed at anchor. The rings in the dock wall were glossy; Vista Marchan’s towers were complete and spotless, glass walls reflecting the sun. The buzzing in the watch stopped abruptly, and everything was clear and still. It was a beautiful day. Men and women in orange tabards and yellow helmets went about their business at the docks, blissfully unaware of the annihilation that will happen when the Insects’ bridge crashes through.
Tarragon showed me the watch; it was empty. She said, “In a factory in Vista, the Time Fly’s just been hatched.”
An almighty wave reared from the middle of the ocean and cascaded into harbor, diminishing every second, until it lapped at the wall as a gentle ripple. A vast green-and-blue-striped snake’s head and upper body erupted from the ocean, spattering us with spray and blotting out the sun. Its head was four times bigger than a caravel, the solid muscle trunk of its monstrous body as thick as one of the towers behind me.
The glossy snake lowered its flat, pointed head onto the promenade. The harbor workers seemed annoyed but were too polite to say anything. Tarragon and I climbed out of her car. “God-who-left-us,” I gasped.
“No, it’s just a snake.”
“Shit…How many are there?”
“Sh!” Tarragon chided. “Their population numbers less than a thousand.”
The sea krait’s bulk stretched into the distance. It meandered in colossal hundred-meter curves like the Moren River. A ship steered away from its side, panicking and belching smoke. Around half a kilometer from shore, the krait dipped underwater and the same distance farther away a striped conical island trailed back and forth in the frothing sea-the flattened tip of its tail.
We stood in front of the snake’s slightly domed yellow eye. Its vertical slit pupil was the height and width of my body. Its head was covered in bright scales the size of a table top. Black skin showed between them, looking like stitching around the square scales on its closed lips. A deeply forked black tongue darted out of the tip of its snout and flickered around us. It didn’t touch me but I sensed the motion of the air a centimeter away from my face and I felt its moistness. The snake darted its tongue back into the hole in its top lip, which was big enough for me to have crawled through.
Tarragon said, “Jant, may I introduce you to the king of the sea kraits?” She addressed the beast: “Your Heinouss, this is a messenger from the Emperor of the Fourlands who could soon be your Emperor too, if you agree to his terms…Jant, talk to him; he can hear you with his tongue.”
The snake turned its enormous head on one side like a keeling carrack, and rubbed its closed mouth on the
