A World Too Near (12 page)

Helice craned her neck to look at the storm walls, and Quinn remembered his own first reaction to them—that they were tidal waves. Eventually he had conquered the impression that they were moving toward him.

They had a short hike to the dirigible that Benhu had moored near the grave of the godman scholar Zu Cheng—the reason that Benhu would give, if asked, for his presence in this minoral. Glancing at the storm walls, Quinn thought of the child’s verse:
Storm wall, where none can pass; Storm wall, always
to last
. Some nursery rhymes were lies. One could pass, if imperfectly, and the walls could not last. The Entire itself couldn’t last—and the thought disturbed Quinn almost as much as the threat that hung over the Rose.

When they got to the simple grave, Quinn saw that the airship, secured by ropes to a few stunted trees, was not large, perhaps only thirty feet long. How such a small volume of buoyant gas could carry a payload of three passengers and fuel, Quinn wasn’t sure. Even solar-powered, the rigid framework and passenger car would add substantial weight to the craft. Apparently the Tarig perfect technologies trickled down to godmen. What else could the lords do, claiming to be gracious masters?

They found the grave site deserted, with the only sound the flap of Zu Cheng’s flag in the wind.
One Who Served Knowledge and Misery.
No higher compliment for one who tended a scholar’s veil and the Miserable God.

With Benhu at the controls in the passenger car below the main cavity, the dirigible took them in silence down the minoral. They had a long journey to reach the Nigh, where the exotic river would allow travel over the immeasurable distance to Ahnenhoon. But to reach the Nigh, they couldn’t travel by a costly dirigible, lest it draw attention to them. Benhu’s plan was to travel to the great river by more humble means, in the company of godmen.

Seen through the airship’s lone viewing port, the valley soon widened, and the storm walls did not crowd so close. In the distance, the walls appeared like mammoth escarpments. It was more comforting to think of them as solid rather than shifting, but it was no wonder that the population clusters of the sways were built far from boundaries like this.

Out the viewing port a crackle of light revealed a nascence spitting its fires. This was the third tier of the geography of the Entire, the smallest and most ephemeral. The sight of one seemed more ominous to Quinn than it once had.

Quinn glanced at Benhu lounging at the crew station controls, steering the ship with no more piloting skills than a Sunday driver. It made him uneasy to rely on the blustering godman. Once he thought the man spotted the cirque around his ankle—that innocent chain, that might merely be an ornament. For a moment he caught Helice staring, too. He pulled his pant leg down, careful not to touch the cirque.

Though it lay next to his warm skin, it was always cold.

Helice looked out the viewport, nearly giddy with what she was seeing. The storm walls, the bright. In the back of her mind she was parsing a few equations on transference of energy across branes. Because the Tarig
were
transferring energy. Just a guess, but she figured they weren’t creating the bright— not exactly.
They were stealing it. She got lost for a while in the math. It took her mind off the nasty burns.

This venture wasn’t quite as easy as she had expected. In the luck of the draw, Quinn had come across unscathed, while she had gotten fried. Her little team back home better appreciate all that she was sacrificing for the cause. Yes, Quinn still looked like the big hero, and she looked like shit. That had darkened her mood for a while until she had figured out how to use it to her advantage. Look brave and plucky. Yes, men love that.

The little speech about
something fine
hadn’t been just for show, however. Partly for show, but not all. Everyone wanted a worthwhile life. Was that too much to ask for? Some people—Titus Quinn, for one—seemed to get the good things of life on a golden platter, things like his regular family and his luck in finding the Entire, things that she could have appreciated more than he did. Things that she deserved, instead of having to claw her way to the top of the heap of the company that pretended to be in charge of things they had no right to control. Leonard Garvey, who’d had the good sense to kill himself, had been right to say that the universe next door did not belong to Quinn or Minerva. There were larger concerns here than Quinn or Minerva.

That was where she came in.

She glanced at the cirque around Quinn’s ankle. Four, five, one, and then the reverse. A simple little code. The trick was getting Quinn to sit still while she took the chain. On that score, there were a number of possibilities. Then, off to find Sydney Quinn. The girl—or was she a woman now? That was unclear, but in any case, Quinn’s daughter would teach Helice the language. She needed a bolt hole until she had Lucent and the cultural stuff down pat. The girl would befriend her as no one else was likely to, particularly since Helice had a number of inducements to offer. Inyx welcomed all riders, so all she needed to do was find a contingent of them and pledge her loyalty.

She’d have the cirque, and soon she’d know the ropes—all good preparation, but she was far from ready to confront the Tarig. They would merely use her, and that was a bit reversed from what she had in mind.

CHAPTER NINE

Calendar.
Practice of the Rose. An iterative system of reckoning
days with reference to
planetary orbit
around a
star
. Allows
correspondences between sequential phases of 365 days. Often subdivided
into
months
, being divisions of the
solar year
roughly
based on relation of
orbital moon
to a
planet
.

—from
Arcane Nomenclature of the Dark Cosmologies

J
OHANNA COULD REMEMBER EVERY DETAIL of her journey to Ahnenhoon four thousand days ago. Eleven years, it had been, but of course the Entire had no years, no seasons, no star.

She remembered the scorched light that had fallen on her from the sky as her jailor led her across the hangar of the brightships. The impossible light pressed down, drowning out shadows, stealing her breath. Though she hadn’t known at the time, this was what the light of day looked like in her new home. Across the huge expanse of the hangar she saw the lip of the bay jut into empty space. Close by in their docks, the brightships glistened like iridescent, sleeping beetles.

A Tarig ushered her to the nearest ship. His four-fingered hand firmly gripped her upper arm, guiding her along, but not requiring that she match his own huge stride. She would not be hurried, and the creature tolerated her slowness. From the moment she was taken prisoner she had resolved not to act like one. Even knowing nothing, disoriented and terrified, Johanna’s instinct was to act unafraid. In interrogations she had insisted on water to drink. They believed that she required a glass of water by her side to talk. It was a small victory, but it gave her a tiny bit of power. Then, with the cup of water constantly replenished, she told them all the lies she could dream up.

They left her for days at a time in a small, windowless room with awful glowing walls that faded and revived on a regular cycle. When she lay on her pallet she felt a tingling sensation over her whole body. In the mornings, she and her clothes were somehow clean, even her long hair. She would rather have been dirty than to be cleansed like a piece of equipment, but after several days she got used to it. That would be her advice to any newcomer: In time you get used to it.

You will call me
lord
or
bright lord
or
gracious lord, her Tarig captor had said, in her language.

The Tarig who accompanied her that day of her journey to Ahnenhoon had been Lord Inweer, although at the time he was just a ghastly creature—human-looking, but too angular, and many details wrong, in the face, the hands, the skin. The iris of his eye was large and midnight black. The skin, bronze and flawless. The fingers, capable of extruding long claws. She had never seen Lord Inweer display a claw, but could feel them embedded in his hands.

During her detention in the place that she later realized had been the great city of the Tarig, she had waited for the day when she would be in the same cell with her husband and daughter. If she’d known that the time would never come, that she would never see either of them again, she would have gone mad. If, boarding the ship that day, she’d known it signaled her permanent banishment from Titus and Sydney, she would have fought against that rigid grip on her arm. She might have rushed to the lip of the bay. But Johanna hesitated to take her own life. It was the hardest stricture her faith imposed on her. Even harder than forgiving them.

Then Lord Inweer—one of the ruling five, she would later learn—had taken her in a brightship to Ahnenhoon. At the time she could have had no conception of that journey. How far. How vastly far. Even now, she had difficulty grasping that the Entire couldn’t be measured. In the Empty Lands, the firmament knotted and folded so that the Entire couldn’t even be defined by light-years. Similarly, time here wasn’t divided into years. This world traced no path around a sun. They had no anchor in the universe.

These things no longer seemed strange.

Nevertheless, she had the habit of counting the days, dabs of paint on a strip of silk in groups of 365. By this means she registered the arrival of months, sea- sons, and special days like birthdays, which she knew might be wildly unrelated to the true days of the Rose, but to which she stubbornly clung.

Johanna became aware of birdsong. She stood in her forest cell, listening, although there were no birds in the Entire, not ones that flew. The song was an excellent reproduction. She let her eyes rest on the green hills and her trees filled with dappled light.

Down the slope of the hill, she could just make out the pitched roofs of her silking shed, where she kept her prize spinners. Under her direction her overseer bred the insectoid spinners to produce the finest blue filaments. Today she wore the resulting indigo silks, the blue that had become her signature color. It should serve to set her apart from others who would attend the upcoming reception, since blue wasn’t a common color among the Chalin. Her collar was high, the skirt of her gown slit on both sides to the knee. Against custom, she let her hair fall free.

Waiting for Pai to summon her to the event, she sat in a gazebo, its canopy offering shade from the omnipresent bright. It was her habit to always shield herself one way or another from the bright. If it bestowed long life as people claimed, she wanted no part of it. Although her lord had put resources at her disposal to create this park, he couldn’t manage her most important criteria: a discreet source of light. Some days she thought he hadn’t tried very hard. Still, it was a far cry from former days when her quarters had been a stone cell.

In those first days in the lord’s presence, Johanna had proven herself capable of conversation that he found interesting for at least short periods of time. She didn’t cower or fawn, but expressed forthright opinions; this demeanor horrified her guards. Once, in Deep Ebb, two of them had dragged her from her bed and beaten her, so that she would learn to show respect, they said.

When she limped into the Inweer’s audience chamber the next day, and the lord wasn’t pleased, these same guards had fallen in front of her begging for mercy. But Johanna guessed they hated her, and turned away from them.

Inweer gave his first evidence that day that he favored this human woman. He approached the nearest guard
and, bending the unfortunate man backward over his knee and using his steely arms as a vise, broke the man’s spine. The second guard wept in terror, but the lord spared him.

The next day Johanna became the mistress of a suite of rooms.

Soon her confinement relaxed to a wing of the centrum, the innermost circle of the Repel. Then, in time, she went where she pleased, even to the lord’s apartments when the Lady Enwepe wasn’t in residence, and sometimes, even if she was. So long as Johanna showed deference to Enwepe, the lady appeared unconcerned about favorites or the scandal that a Rose woman might have favors, might have what some would call freedom.

The sweetest privilege was her forest. Johanna had designed every acre, every feature to match a temperate Earth forest. On her canvases, she drew scenes with the glorious Tarig paints that could be retracted and altered in color. Using this guide, her overseer of grounds would create the living flora, modifying it under her direction, until they had grasses, beech trees, ponderosa pine, rock outcroppings, streams, and bracken. Sometimes the overseer was able to find records of scholars who had catalogued Earth plants, and by these means he devised more botanically correct specimens.

She painted a portrait of Sydney. When the overseer saw the painting, he lamented,
This I cannot create.
She hadn’t realized it was her subconscious desire that he do so. But only God could fashion a child, and He had decided to take this child from her.

The lord heard about the painting of her daughter. As they shared an evening meal, he asked if it was a custom of the Rose to make a painted likeness of a sentient.

“Yes, my lord. A treasured Earth tradition.”

He gazed at her with his black eyes. For her sake he blinked occasionally, having learned it put her more at ease. It was a small kindness, or perhaps a gesture of vanity. This time, though, his gaze held steady. “For the sake of this girl, do you wish for justice against us?”

A dangerous question, but she dared to say, “Some days I do. But other days I pretend my lord would return her to me if circumstances permitted such a favor.”

He had stopped eating, and now paused before saying, “There is no difference among us, Johanna.” Meaning
among Tarig
.

He had said so before, in that show of unity Tarig affected. She dared to say, “And there is no difference between me and any other mother of the Rose.” She looked at her hands, folded in her lap. She had practically said she did blame him, if he followed the nuances, and the lord always did.