All hands, all elbows, and shifting, endless eyes.

This uneasy protean lump of flesh has thrashed its way beyond the city walls, beyond all human company. It speaks in every human voice, a graceless, thick-tongued burble of words and unfinished thoughts. Matted and patchy with hair, it has rolled between Cedar and the fields. She finds herself reflected in cow’s eyes, dog’s eyes, human eyes warm and brown, ashen beneath her sunbeaten skin.

She hides among the stalks. It passes by, a wash of sewer heat rattling her against the corn, a brace of hounds trailing after with jaws aslobber. The crossroads and the dogs shred it apart, one for every uneasy limb, and disperse severally, hands and arms and weeping eyes clutched triumphantly in yellow teeth.

She issues forth, Cedar of the roads, and stands in an empty silence. In the dust a million palmprints, each smaller, just slightly, than her own.

An endless wood, gouged with trenches, scarred with mortars, choked with gas. Their uniforms and flags have gone grey with mildew, green with mold, and their faces worn away in the endless cycle of front line-relief-support-and-furlough. They are sodden lumps of wool and iron.

Cedar has been hired as a messenger, but in this trackless tangle she has lost her way. The lines shift daily, hourly; now before her, now behind her, somehow never crossing her position.

Her dispatches must be out of date, must come too late, but she can’t find anyone to take them. She asks directions of the faceless men, but is swamped in their reek of foreign beer. Always elsewhere. The guns are always firing over the next hill, behind the next stand of trees, but she is always too late, a forced witness to an apocalypse already achieved.

Leopard head and leopard head; xie sees in all directions at once, and from one end of the spectrum to the other, and all the universe vibrates in every indivisble atom.

Cedar is drunk again and handsy as hell. “Wait, wait, wait,” she says. “Wait. No, listen–” She leans over to puke into what is, momentarily, a jasmine bush. One of hir mouths waters uncontrollably and begins to speak prophecy; something about famines, something about empires. The future is an endless spool of magnetic tape.

She plays with hir wings, spreads the remiges wide and slides her fingers between them, peeps through. Xie shivers, feels it down to hir pelt. They trip on the sudden cobblestones and collapse laughing in a doorway that had been a phone booth.

“I love you,” says Cedar, “I love this place, I love everything! Hey, no, hey, listen…”

They cling to each other and Daniel folds all four of hir wings in tight. The eighteenth century slides past, but Cedar is snoring, passed out, and misses it.

Jeru has seven times seven hundred faces, and for Cedar it wears them all, shifting streets and alleyways by whim and by chance. She crosses seven leagues at a stride, moves from harbor to desert by rounding a corner, day to night by climbing a stair.

Jeru’s is the tongue of Babel, a shifting cathedral of freighted noise; the only common word Cedar hears among the thronging, maddened crowd is jeru, jeru, by turns a prayer, a curse, a direction, and a time. “Jeru, jeru,” she mutters, one voice among many, an endless sussurrus like wind upon the dunes.

Cedar has a friend, a beast like a leopard with four wings on its back and four heads on its shoulders that she calls Daniel for want of anything better. They take long walks in the afternoon and talk for hours in incomprehensible jargon. They speak of many things, but always of Jeru, of the eternal city, striving mightily after some final, unconquerable description, some single moment of simple comprehension. Cedar weeps and Daniel laughs; Daniel weeps and Cedar laughs, and Jeru changes yet again.

Wheels within wheels within wheels.

There is supposed to be an axle, somewhere, though Cedar’s been climbing for days without so much as a sniff. Everyone swears it’s just a few more layers down, always just another five or ten levels off. She has her doubts.

Ptolemy creaks and groans like a ship at sea; the regular slow spin of its courtyards and bedrooms, gardens and libraries, lampposts and lights. Ptolemy’s rooms are always rising, always falling; for every six vertical meters she gains she covers six hundred or more along the rim. She descends through floors and ceilings at night, when the aquarium light grows murky and indistinct, when the whole vast mobile comes to a stop. Cedar passes through, passes through; meets scientists, lovers, killers, frauds and poets, passes onward and through. Cadges food, beer, weed, swaps traveler’s tales and spit for a place to sleep. They are hungry for new faces.

She has forgotten the sky. She tries to tell them about the stars, about the golden hoop of the sun, but can only make them one more set of wheels. “There’s supposed to be a center, somewhere,” she says, vaguely, and can only picture a vast oily pivot. She, indefatigable traveler, descends and descends, and draws no closer.