Sunlight temple. Panzjrah’s shots below were less frequent, and voices muffled by distance followed Shay’s steady steps across the beams. Rising steam gushed with spidery legs out of the window ahead of her, and yet the visibility did not improve. Another quake shocked through and the walls swayed. She quickened her pace, trying to ignore the pain digging up into her foot with each step; more than ever she dreaded having the heavy yet empty medicine strapped to her, pulling her heel into the narrow steel.

∞

Finally she reached the wall and thankfully it was brickwork, making easier her climb up to the window. If she had not seen the arachnids open this window in their fleeting panic, she would believe madly that light itself had swung the gleaming pane open. Vast glorious sunlight arose beyond searching for the darkness inside. The oval sun met her eyes and she paused confused or afraid: ‘why is it not a sphere?’

∞

The roof old with sunbathing moss sloped down from there, and hanging there on the precipice with confused tenses, Shay allowed her wonder a moment of control. Standing on the sill, her feet more inside the factory and head more outside, both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ began flickering indecisively through lineages Past, Present or Further-Than. As might pages skimmed and skipped.

∞

Some lineages - where only flames remained; she saw to the very beginnings or endings of the world, where octomni’s made navigable the soot-soaked air. Imirka rose and fell, floating up or falling down. Struck. Supported. Watching change the towers of Courtdom’s Imirka, in not one version of this land did clocks have again their ticking hands or solid numbers. Certainty was lost. The clocktowers stared headless and severed. Whatever or whoever had befallen Time, had torn irrevocably throughout all ages. Was Time convoluted or stagnant? Or altogether gone? What rules were these reigning over her?

∞

No before. No after.

∞

There seemed no rhyme nor pattern to the flickering epochs that her logic could discern, long as she lingered and risked being found from inside the factory. The Killer might also blow the whole place down. As Shay thought this, a different explosion and more of a bang went off in the deep fog of the factory, as Panzjrah must have thrown a grenade. Shay leaned back as the factory wall tilted forward and a nearby window shattered from the shear. Shortly after The Killer below began a rapid fire of rounds and insane laughter, and Shay climbed down to the old sloping roof to greet whatever wounded Future or Past awaited her. The flickering went away and her crouching shadow shared back at her, distorted by the clean tiles.

∞

Immediately she could not hear the firing, but birds whooshed above in murmuration through azure skies, for a moment stealing her breath and senses. There was no window above her despite that she had just jumped through it; a patterned mural instead across the bricks where a window once was, or could later be. Other, closer birds were mid-song, in sprawl-trees high over the factory pipes and walls, their leaves making sparkles with the day. Making their nests on the slanted and the dormant.

∞

The old moss was gone and clay tiles slotted neatly into and abreast one another, new as Now could see. Shay checked every brick and tile she could, hoping there an answer in red would be already scratched by Lay'd Payn. Her life in Imirka and she had no idea what factory had she just climbed through, or how she would get back to her shop from here. Laughter swirled up from an unheard joke or gesture, as Shay shuffled herself painfully along and down to the edge of the roof.

“Do you hear that, Gargarensyr?” she heard an abrupt uncertainty in the laughter, apparently not being so quiet as she had hoped.

∞

“Is somesoul up there?” another voice quickly called playfully to her. “Do you need help?”

Shay peered over the roof's edge while leaning back again as not to fall, and her eyes widened. His voice was very different in whatever ‘now’ this was, but Heir Scholar Gargarensyr was down there, robed in welcoming colours with a group of tourists and travellers. Out of all of them, the monk looked the most pathetic and harmless, the cyclops stared up at her with his almost gormless eye. Shay focused on his bloodless hands and spotless sleeves. He called:

“There are no exhibitions up there!”

∞

Rolling with complete bewilderment, Shay called back down after a stutter:

“I’m wounded.”

“I daresay. Travellers and seekers of Courtdom’s glory!” the group reacted to Gargarensyr with a strange pose, as though for a picture. “See here as I have said, that not only our minds are trained. Swarltie! You were the biggest doubter…” he cast a finger at one of them.

Barely bending down for it, Gargarensyr leapt with ease as though spring-heeled higher and higher and higher and Shay did not believe, even as he landed gracefully by her side on the sloping roof. The travellers all let out a gasp and took their pictures of the moment, they tried, alas their devices did not work. The rush of air he brought jumping towards Shay was fresh as clean fabric, his robes crisp as a new season:

“Your foot…” he reached forward.

Shay tried not to shrink or shrug away from him as he neared.

“It’s all well, allow me. Erm…” he addressed the tourists: “Would you go back to the start and tell one of my creed? They’ll see to you a replacement. Thank you! Except you, Swarltie!”

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Some laugh was had at that, for some reason, and the travellers trotted off. Shay breathed heavily as Gargarensyr unravelled her makeshift bandage.

“Lovely fabric.” He admired it with his one studious eye, holding the bloody thing against the fine sunshine. “I would say a shoddy knife did this to you.” He eyed up and down the cut with a grimace.

“A broken sword.” Shay told him, testing, wondering if now that the tourists were gone he would give up whatever game he was playing.

∞

“What sort of conflict could you possibly be in that warrants this?” He said instead. “One of the heart, surely? A Wanton of Want if ever there were, now that Need is no more…”

“Definitely is.” Shay kept her trust to herself, hoping her answer would suffice in this lineage.

“I daresaid.” Gargarensyr replied, her hope not in vain.

“This may seem an odd question…” She tested again.

“Ask away! You’ve been odd from start to so-far.”

“When are we?” Shay asked. “Do you know The Dorns and the arena?”

∞

Gargarensyr then leaned in, checking over Shay’s head, such as it was under her disguise.

“When?” He repeated and felt for a longer while around the back of her head and she worried he would spot the wig, though he ceased and started:

“Just checking for where you’ve hit yourself senseless! The Vinoillo and Vilifrado wing is under much renovation, given Greed’s takeover of their arena. You understand.”

Shay had to play along and nod:

“Allowing human death matches again.” She tutted, assuming a monk would not approve. “A friend of mine is fond of gambling there.” Deliberately planning and prattling simultaneously, she hoped neither Woid or Serib were sending the other insane at The Club.

“I did not know they had started those already.” The monk replied, and Shay held her breath as Gargarensyr pondered this.

She relaxed as he began again with a shrug: “I daresay. I suppose there is something to be said for the redistributive quality to it. Not few of my brethren-creed stray from their studies for such released vices, from commoner to royalty and loyalty those dens are popular. We all have ours, don’t we, I daresay? No need for shy nor shame, when Truth it is that shines.”

∞

“Not your cuppa, I gather?” Shay asked.

“Oh, wouldn’t a tea be lovely…” Gargarensyr placed the bloody bandage aside. “But yes, you’re right. What more could a scholar want, than to be part of the greatest culmination of the civilisations? To have a tradition and history so well chronicled?” he looked up to the oval sun again reverently, and Shay began tending to her wound, taking the last of her sweets.

Her shoulder felt looser, stronger. The monk continued:

“To not only theorise how well humanity would fare without Falsehood but live in such ages when Truthdom reigns, I think, is divulging vice enough! Showing visitors the why of statues, fountains and other fine works truly is fine enough? Would you daresay so?”

He looked down from his distractions with his big eye and saw Shay was holding from nowhere a thin tube of herby mixture. She shook it heartily and tapped it rhythmically, then another shake and tap, and the colours bubbled into one another a hearty, rich brown. She did not appear happy with the colour, finding difficulty hitting the right rhythm, Timelessness being as it is.

“Ah, a herbloreian!” Gargarensyr exclaimed.

“Is that a word?” Shay raised a fake eyebrow.

∞

“Erm, scholars often will try to coin anew words, hoping they’ll catch the yon and step up somewhat in renown. To move swiftly on from that… what a strange way for you to start our conversation! Asking ‘when’ are we.”

“I’ve been running a while, and wasn’t sure which part of town I was in, or if I was even till in Imirka.” Shay offered as an explanation.

“I’d fathom you live near the markets, hmm?” he pattered on her sleeve with his paper-cut and calloused fingers.

Shay shrunk stiffly from him, remembering in her lineage his blood-drenched sleeves, and The Shadows laying dead with broken holes punched through them. He said:

“The oiliness in the air can creep through an open window into the furniture. We scholars can never read too carefully.”

Having pattered, he showed her the slightest thing. A fatty oil on her clothes was shining in the daylight barely on his palm and finger-tips. A mere trace. A deplorable miscalculation on Shay’s part, that perhaps all her disguises could share this one characteristic. Pulling her wounded foot towards her, she poured the bubbly mixture onto it and into the wound best she could.

∞

“Interesting! Much like marinating and stuffing, really - you must be from near the markets. More pressingly, might I help with your cut?”

Shay let out a smile intentionally:

“Do you go there often, to the market?” She flexed her gammy toes. “A new bandage. I’m fine otherwise - I’ve just been unable to sort it until now.”

“Busy being chased, hmm? What sort of soul are you?” he noticed the foot was more or less ready for an oven, and handed her a reel of silky fabric of many colours from his sleeve. “We use these for dusting off the books, but this has not been used.” He bowed down, presenting it to her as an offered blade. “Superstition upholds that if you are destined to recover from your harm, this will help, and may even be written on the fabrics, were we small enough to see. A tatter left over from the tapestries of The Old Royalty the arachnids are restoring. I could show you?”

Shay wrapped the silk around her foot and moved her toes painfully around. She wondered what was so destined about any of it. Gargarensyr meanwhile was glancing at the wall behind, regaining his focus:

“Who could have possibly been chasing you through here?” He looked all over, knocking on the mural as though it were a door. “From where? I did not see you enter with the early admissions this morn…” he struggled with the word, the headless once-clock towers staring at him across the distances, and he did not question their weirdness. “Mmm… mor…” he tried and tried to say the word. “Do you have a ticket?”

∞

“I don’t… my foot could do with a walk. The herbs need encouraging.” Shay did not want to cause complications in this lineage by rushing off, herself still unsure of how all this Timelessness worked or did not work.

Gargarensyr offered to help Shay up. She accepted and he remarked:

“My, you’re stronger than any visitors we receive. They get soft on their journeys here and this is often one of their last stops; it really should be one of their first!”

“Do you often help them off of roofs?”

“Ha! They do often fall towards the end of the tours, tired from walking through all the exhibits.”

Around this moment, another monk that had been made aware by Gargarensyr’s previous tour group, brought a ladder for Shay to make her way down. She could have umbra-stepped but thought it would be best not to. Curiously it was the same monk that died blissfully a traitor in the tunnels under Imirka, paying here no particular attention to Shay whatsoever. Just a solemn, expected smile and bow as Shay climbed carefully down the ladder. Tourists going through their come-go naturally started forming a line near the ladder, assuming it led to a new exhibit.

∞

Once they both were down, Shay limped slowly off with Gargarensyr, his eye soaking in the sun and robes flowing full as sails. He told her:

“No bother about the ticket, I’ll sort it. The only price I ask is your attention.”