Kaylin, the familiar said. Close your eyes. Now. Before she could—and honestly, closing her own eyes should have been simple—he reached around her face with his wings and covered them.
The wings did not instantly ease the pressure of sight. Around her in a swirl of motion were faces, bodies, crowds; she could not pick out a single person because they moved so quickly that they were a blur. But even as a blur, she could recognize basic shape, basic form. She could see wings, eyes, skin color, limbs—even fur. She could gain a basic sense of height, of age; she could hear a plethora of voices, some raised, some muted.
And she realized that this was what had existed to either side of the strange corridor they had been walking. She had been told not to look. She wondered if looking now would have the same effect as turning would have had then; it would be so easy to be lost here.
But the water was in her hands, the familiar on her shoulder, the sound of an extremely disgruntled Dragon at her back. Something touched her gently—gently enough, carefully enough, that she didn’t react violently.
“Kitling.”
“Teela!” She turned then. Or she tried to turn. The small dragon’s wings were incredibly strong; she couldn’t move her head.
Mandoran cursed. In Leontine. “Grab Tain!” he shouted. Kaylin could hear his voice so clearly that the sound of the moving throng—the continually moving, dizzying crowd—was almost silent. She clung to the sound of his voice.
“I can’t— He can’t hear me!” Annarion’s voice.
Kaylin was suddenly very, very afraid for Bellusdeo and Sanabalis. Because she suddenly understood that they must be here, as well.
Kaylin, close your eyes.
Bellusdeo and Sanabalis were here, among the hundreds. The thousands. The tens of thousands, even. They were here in every second of the whole stretch of their lives, compressed and overlapping. She had the sickening sense that she had to grab them. But she could only grab one of them, one each, and there were too many.
Kaylin. Your eyes.
And she understood, then, that these were the layers of which Gilbert had spoken; that every time, every second of time, was in some fashion its own discrete identity. That she existed in all of them, but that she could not live aware of each and every one. It would destroy her. She couldn’t see past the blur; couldn’t hear past the noise. She couldn’t move without colliding with someone or something.
And she understood, as well, that in this throng, if she concentrated, she had to find one Bellusdeo. One Sanabalis. One Maggaron. And they had to be the ones that belonged where she belonged, in the same when, the same now. But it was worse than that. Because more than just Bellusdeo and Sanabalis and Maggaron were trapped here.
Teela. Tain.
Anyone who had lived or worked on the Winding Path. Most of those people were people she did not know and had never met. Most of those people were not yet aware of where they were or what had happened—but as she watched, as she failed to close her eyes, she realized that they were becoming aware. They didn’t see as she saw—but they saw something. The tide of voices turned to confusion, and from there, to panic.
Panic was never good in a crowd. And this crowd was endless, eternal. It went on forever.
She wasn’t sure when the first death happened.
She wasn’t certain when it spread. But it did spread. She could see blood. Could hear screams. Could only stand, helpless, while the world spun and spun and spun.
*
Kaylin.
Severn. Severn’s voice. And Nightshade’s. They overlapped—but each voice was singular. It was not a crowd of voices. It was not multiple Severns or multiple Nightshades. They were on the outside. They were the people she had known. They were not every possible person she might know or could know at every stage of their lives or her own.
They were the people with whom she had a known history. She wanted to weep.
Can you see it? she asked them. Can you see what I see?
Yes. Again, they answered in concert.
Nightshade said, The disturbance has not spread to the fiefs. I am, however, unable to use the mirror network within the Castle.
She nodded. I think—I think we’ve been walking in the mirror network.
Doubt, from Nightshade.
Cautious, surprised agreement from Severn.
What did Gilbert do?
I—I’m not sure. I think he may have collapsed the network completely. I don’t understand how, or why, but—something was done to the network and its power, and I think... Gilbert could make halls or paths out of it.
The world around her became silent as she spoke.
She opened her eyes. She couldn’t remember closing them; she could remember being nagged to close them. She almost closed them again. She stood in the streets of her city. The street itself, the cobbled stones, had a curious, blurry quality. The bodies did not. They were stacked; they overlapped; they should have been a mountain of corpses. And they were, but they occupied the same space.