City At The End Of Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

young-looking fellow with a club foot and waxy smooth skin, narrow nose, wispy ghost-blond hair, and deep blue eyes. He wore a tight black suit and gave his name, last name only.
    This was Whitlow.
    Whitlow carried a silver-tipped black lacquered cane and a small gray box with a curious design on the lid. “This is not for you,” he told Glaucous. “I have a meeting with another later this day. Let’s move on.”
    Out of Glaucous’s memories of that meeting—a palette reduced to dim grays and browns—he recalled unsteady nerves and embarrassment at his ill-fitting wool suit. (Shank had insisted he return all his master’s fine clothes. “What monkey owns his livery, I ask you?”)
    Whitlow shared a tot of brandy from a silver flask, then escorted him up the hedgerow drive to the main house, a mouse’s holiday of neglect, one wing caved, rooms filled with roosting pigeons. Whitlow gained entry using a huge old key, then, with quiet humor, pushed Glaucous down a hall littered with broken furniture and the bones of mice and cats, arranged in rings and whorls, toward a special sort of room where, Whitlow said, none had lived or visited for several hundred years. Such rooms—difficult to find these days—best suited the closest servants of their Lady, who—he explained in a whisper, opening an inner door—ultimately paid their bills.
    Whitlow locked the door behind Glaucous.
    After a time of stuffy silence—long enough to feel pangs of hunger—Glaucous was joined, through no door he could detect, by an insubstantial being—a gentleman, judging by his soft voice and odor or lack of same. This nebulous figure, wrapped in a deeper cloak of shadows, never assumed definite form or size. Judging by the tapping of his hands around Glaucous’s face and shoulders—fingers like batting flies—the gentleman might have been blind. “I never go anywhere,” he whispered. “I am here always. Here moves where I need to be. I am called the Moth. I transport and recruit for our Mistress.”
    He spoke for what seemed a long time, his voice suggestive, modulated, indistinct. He spoke of books and words and permutations, and of a great war—greater than any dreary combat between imagined heavens and hells. “ Our hells are real enough,” he said. “And our Mistress controls them all.” This Lady, he said, sought Shifters and dreamers . Chancers, properly instructed, were ideal hunters and collectors. The Moth handed him a crust of bread, dusty with mold, then tapped Glaucous’s temple with a flitting finger. “If you serve well, you will never lack work,” came his muffled words. Apparently, having come this far, no refusal was permitted. “We pay in more than coin. Time no object. Different birds, different cages, Mr. Glaucous. Listen close, and I will pipe you all the songs you need ever sing.”
    After some hours, the door opened, spearing the room with a broken shaft of sun. Glaucous blinked like a mole. Whitlow reappeared to usher him out. Behind, the room keened a wretched, pain-filled sound like none he had ever heard, and reclaimed its emptiness: spent.

    Back on the hedgerow drive, dazed and exhausted, Glaucous asked, “Will I meet ever the Mistress?”
    “Don’t be a fool,” Whitlow admonished. “We never hope for that. The Moth is bad enough, and he’s less than the tip of her pinky.”
    For the next hundred twenty years Glaucous traveled from city to city across the United Kingdom, and then the United States…working as a diversion in carnival pitches, card parlors, side shows…always seeking, keeping a low profile, and wherever he went, posting ads in newspapers, ads that never varied except for an address, or later, a phone number—
    Always asking the same question:
    Do you dream of a City at the end of Time?
    Glaucous kept deathly still. He could feel any vibration along the boards and beams. All was quiet. There would be no visitors for the next few minutes.
    The collector behind the