A World Too Near (19 page)

What he sought was the color of fear.
Find the weakness, then strike
, Mo Ti had advised. If the Tarig had a place where their powers stretched thin, where they feared attack, that was what Sydney wished to know and exploit. Superficially, in their hearts all Tarig looked the same. Slide the knife deeper, and sprays of color came to Riod, nameless colors in far ranges of the spectrum.

They were getting to know this most particular, this most peculiar mind territory: the very psyche of the lords. But nothing could have prepared them for what the herd-gathering had uncovered an arc of days ago.

Riod had led the mounts into the mind of a Tarig child. It was not a pleasant visit.

As all sentients knew, Tarig bore few children. Fewer still were publicly seen. But Riod and his fellow mounts discovered that Tarig offspring were not only small in number, they were rare. The combined intention of the herd had then begun searching for youngsters to investigate. To the astonishment of the Inyx, and despite long hours of looking, the heart probes could identify only two young Tarig. Across the vastness of the Entire, there existed only two.

Curious, Riod led the search into the mind of one of these youngsters, a boy. It was a dark and twisted place, this child’s mind. Immature thoughts of overweening selfishness combined with spikes of paranoia and desire. Returning ebb after ebb to this individual, Riod and his herd-mates became convinced that the creature combined aspects of adult mentation and childish incompetence. Hearing of this, Sydney wondered if the lords had chosen not to correct for birth flaws. Was the youngster mentally damaged?

But in days to come, Riod had touched the mind of the other child, finding the same kind of cognitive patterns. Eventually, the herd came to a startling conclusion: Not even these two were children. Though to outsiders they seemed to be youngsters, they were merely small, imperfect versions of Tarig adults. With the memories of one of their designated parents, they had remnants of selfhood, but were profoundly mentally diminished. They were like half-formed, half-mad Tarig.

The same insight came to the herd all at once, in a moment of consternation and amazement. The Tarig had no children.

How they reproduced could not be determined. If they didn’t die as most creatures did, then they might not need children. But strangely, they spent effort on maintaining the appearance of having them.

Drowsing on Riod’s back, Sydney circled this mystery, letting her thoughts hover near Riod’s, but not intruding. Riod had claimed that Lord Hadenth, whom her father had killed when he stole the brightships, was not truly dead. Were the mantis lords immortal then? Why would they hide this fact with such elaborate deceptions? The dream visits would continue, with increased intensity. The Tarig were hiding things. These were the things Sydney most wished to know.

She stirred, moving closer to Riod’s horned neck to grasp the nearest horn. Riod was her sole comfort these days, her only friend. Even Akay-Wat seemed blameful. The Hirrin sided with Mo Ti, of course, arguing for him until Sydney begged for quiet. Sydney’s heart had cooled toward Mo Ti. His lies stung, that he had been sent by Cixi. So then, no one could be trusted whose mind was not fully open to her. How did sentients form bonds of love, and never know heart-thoughts? Things that you said could be made up on the spot. Only heart-thoughts were the truth. Her hand curled around Riod’s posterior horn.

Riod dimly felt Sydney’s weight on his back. The herd was hunting far away, circling the Ascendancy, where the Tarig clustered most brightly. Lately the herd discerned that the glittering in the center of the world was not just a concentration of individuals compounding their light. Riod was the first to sense that the quality of light was no massing of individuals. Rather, there was one Tarig whose light burned incandescent. Difficult to see or even approach, this individual’s thoughts did not form the maze so typical of Tarig minds. For all their confusion, mazes were supremely organized.

This heart-scape was chaos.

Most interesting of all, the lords hid this individual most carefully. Somewhere in the Ascendancy stirred a being on whom shadows of fear fell in fantastic stains. Here was the place around which Tarig defenses bulked. Therefore an enemy would do well to discover its secrets.

As Sydney stirred on Riod’s back, her blindfold fell loose, bringing the glow of ebb-time to her sight. She noticed that Mo Ti stood in the distance with his mount, his hand resting along Distanir’s flank. She wanted to go to him, to ask him if his devotion was firm. But whatever he answered, it would just be words.

She adjusted the blindfold, lest the fiends see Mo Ti and Distanir. Sydney had become the instrument of her own destruction, a danger to her sway. Blindfold in place, and
darkness resuming, she felt a pang of remorse for what she was becoming. Her hate of the Tarig seemed to be driving out all other feelings. What would happen if someday, nothing but hate remained?

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Snatch a whisker from the dragon, steal air from an Adda,
skimp the profits of a Gond, but never rob God of misery.

—from
The Hundred Harmonies

I
T WAS THE THIRD DAY OF THE JOURNEY. The wagon jounced over the rutted land, bearing Quinn and Helice in the overheated interior. Above them, on the driving platform, Benhu drove the beku forward, his pipe smoke occasionally drifting into the wagon’s interior, adding stench to the suffocating heat and wretched company. Quinn looked at Helice, crouching in the corner like a gargoyle.

She was lying, damn her to hell. Lying, and people would die because of it. Don’t use the weapon, she argued. But if he didn’t use it, the Entire would feed on the Rose. The Tarig were in beta testing mode now, taking one star at a time, but eventually, it would all ignite. The ultimate catastrophe was beyond what he could envision, but it was all too easy to imagine the small deaths of people like his brother, like Emily and Mateo. Like Caitlin.

From the corner, came Helice’s murmur: “Get rid of the chain, Quinn. Get rid of it now.”

“Do you want me give it to you? Is that what you want?”

“I really don’t care. Think I want to blow the place up all by myself? Don’t be stupid.”

“Did Lamar know about the cirque? Is he part of your extracurricular Minerva group?”

“Lamar doesn’t know. Think I’d tell a friend of yours?”

Quinn’s frustration mounted. She was hiding something. Lamar had, in fact, known—Quinn was sure of it.
I’m sorry
, he said.
Remember that I’m an old
man.
He didn’t contradict her about Lamar. Right now he wanted to accumulate a list of her lies, and see if he could trap her into more.

The slats of the wagon let in a spray of light from the sky. Quinn saw Helice sitting like a demon in the corner, dark and intense, hiding behind a façade of woman-trying-to-save-the-world. “You disgust me,” he said.

She jerked to her feet. “I don’t have to listen to this shit anymore.” She went for the wagon door.

In an instant, Quinn was dragging her back, yanking her to the floor. She reached up to claw at his face, drawing up her knee and aiming for his groin. She missed, and he pinned her down, trembling with anger. “You stay here. You belong in the dark. If I have to tie you up, you’re staying inside.”

The door of the wagon flew open, revealing Benhu with his hands on his hips. “By the mucking bright, be quiet! What’s amiss?”

Quinn hadn’t noticed the wagon had stopped. Beyond the door he saw a herd of godmen spread out over the veldt, stirring up boiling clouds of dust. As Helice scrambled back to her perch in the corner, Quinn crawled out of the wagon and shut the doors behind him.

He joined Benhu on the driving platform, and soon they were under way again, with the beku emitting short bleats of protest.

“Excellency,” Benhu said, cutting a worried glance at him. “You should tell me if we’ve got trouble. The lord won’t like there being trouble.”

“Mind your own business, Benhu.”

“The woman is causing an uproar?”

To shut him up, Quinn said, “Yes.”

“Trouble from the beginning.” Benhu snorted. “Perhaps she’ll die of some mishap. The camp is full of thieves and malcontents.”

“These are godmen,” Quinn muttered.

“Yes, so we do well to go armed.” Benhu glanced at the bulge in Quinn’s jacket, where he kept his knife.

Quinn’s adrenaline faded, but in his mind he heard Helice’s arguments, the ones she’d been hammering on for days: In using the nan technology, he would loose a plague of matter that would overwhelm the Entire.
Imagine
, Helice had said,
the ground, the plains, the expanse of the Entire pooling into slag.
Imagine the profound subsidence as the middle collapses, pulling the edges of the world
into a spreading gravitational sink. Even now
, she had asked,
how do the walls
remain standing? How little might it take for them to calve off from their foundations?
No walls, no Entire. Is that what you want?

Quinn watched the miles pass, coming closer to the Nigh and transport to Ahnenhoon. He couldn’t bring himself to trust Helice. Or the cirque.

That ebb, they cooked a meal at their small campfire, having bought meat from the provisioning wagons.

Helice had taken on a more conciliatory demeanor, attempting conversation over the cook fire and even being gracious to Benhu. Afterward, they sat gazing at the fire. Sitting next to Quinn, Helice murmured in halting Lucent, “No pretty colored plants.”

Quinn frowned, not understanding.

“Flowers,” she said under her breath, falling back on the English word. “There aren’t any.” He had told her before; now she was seeing it for herself.

“Don’t use dark languages,” he whispered to Helice, and she frowned at his curt response.

The Entire, for all its beauty, had no flowering plants. Nothing even remotely similar to a rose, for example, which scholars had no doubt seen through the veils. It had often struck Quinn how odd it was that the Rose universe was named for one flower on one world. Was the Earth so unique in that regard, that no flower on any world could rival what they saw? Even so, after all the things that the Tarig had copied from the Rose, the rose was not among them.

Leaving the cleanup to Benhu, Quinn left, walking alone through the camp. The bright fell to shades of gray and lavender, casting a rosy glow onto the white godmen’s robes and the dusty wagons. The sky bulbs swayed at their ropes, including the one at the center, the dirigible of the Most Venerable, the high godman who had arrived in midcourse of the procession. From here, Quinn could just see the tall flank of the great airship looming over the smaller vessels and carts.

The camp teemed with the varied species of the Entire, including the Chalin—in this primacy, the majority—as well as the agile and hairy Ysli, squat Jouts, and four-footed Hirrin. Gonds could be seen as well, borne on litters by their more mobile fellow godmen. Conspicuously absent from the throng were the Inyx. There were different styles of sentience here, ways of knowing that represented the pick of the Rose universe—or at least what the Tarig had chosen to copy. Some, like the Adda, knew direction and magnetism. To these floating gasbags, perhaps non-Adda sentients appeared inept. And to the Inyx, those who spoke audibly might also seem hobbled. Quinn wondered if the chief who had befriended Sydney read her thoughts. Benhu implied that Sydney had some measure of happiness, and Quinn hoped it was true. It would be some time until they were reunited. After Ahnenhoon. He would find a way.

His thoughts circled back to Helice. To his surprise, he found himself certain for the first time. She was fabricating a story about the cirque’s flaws.

If what she claimed were true, Helice would certainly have told Stefan. No one, not Stefan, not Helice, wanted to ruin the Entire. Helice maintained that telling Stefan would expose her schemes at Minerva—her secret effort to penetrate the Entire on her own. She was planning to replace Stefan at the helm of Minerva, and she had her supporters, including, she said, Booth Waller and others. But would she jeopardize the Entire for the sake of that job? She didn’t need Minerva. She could take what she knew about the Entire to any of the giant companies and name her terms.

So why hadn’t she told Stefan about the cirque’s defects?

Although he didn’t know the answer, he was sure she was hiding something. Whatever her goal, he wasn’t going to
help her. The vise that had been gripping his heart since the day before began to loosen. He still didn’t know the course he should take, but he was coming down on the side of the cirque.

He had walked farther than he’d planned, so that by the time he headed back to the wagon, most of the camp slept, some on the ground and some in tents or their wagons. From a distance, he saw his green wagon. With the fire gone out, Benhu stood by it, kicking the ashes. Helice must be asleep inside, perhaps helped by the godman’s potions. Benhu stood before the wagon door, staring at it.

Then he removed something from his jacket. It was a knife. He reached for the wagon’s rear doors.

Quinn’s hand went to his side. The knife was gone. Benhu had it.

He broke into a run, racing to the wagon. By the time he got there, Benhu was inside. Quinn nearly tore off one of the doors as he launched himself inside. In the darkness, he heard a struggle. Helice cried out. He caught a glimpse of Benhu stabbing down at a mound of blankets. Quinn smashed Benhu’s arm against the side of the wagon, drawing a cry from Benhu as he fell on Helice. She swore, struggling to free herself.

Quinn had Benhu’s arms pinned, and the godman ceased struggling.

From the corner Helice said, “You son of a bitch.”

“Shut up,” Quinn hissed. He yanked Benhu’s arms behind the man’s back, telling Helice to find a length of cloth to bind him. She tore at something, and presently they had the attacker bound.

Helice muttered, “Asshole tried to rape me.”

“No, he tried to kill you.” Quinn turned to Benhu, who sat with his mouth hanging open, still gasping for breath. “What would your lord think of you now, Benhu?”