Bright of the Sky (28 page)

He called it a dirigible, and the princess, named Dolwa-Pan, called it a sky bulb. Dolwa-Pan was traveling to Bei’s reach for scholarship, and thought nothing of the expense of a sky bulb for her sole use.

Now, the Hirrin princess stood next to Quinn gazing out the window of the dirigible, her small, round head perched like a flower on the long stalk of her neck. She had apologized a dozen times for reporting them to the train magister, and still she wasn’t done. “I should never have thought you were a danger. So foolish, Dolwa-Pan.” Her floral perfumes spiked into his senses almost painfully.

“One took no notice,” he said, in the idiom.

A trip of ten days by beku was shortened to one day on this small airship that skimmed over the minoral valley at a height of two hundred feet. Nothing except the brightships soared higher here or anywhere that he had seen. No birds, no airplanes. The bright commanded the vertical space, and to approach it was to sicken. Flickers of memory suggested that Quinn had indeed flown there, and for a moment he was shaken by a keen sense of pleasure in that ride.

He was eager to ask Su Bei. Bei would know the truth, perhaps unlocking once and for all the memories that half intrigued, half haunted Quinn. So much depended on this scholar whom he had once known. Would Su Bei help him? Most immediately he needed the facial alterations— according to Anzi, not a difficult task or one, fortunately, that involved cutting. If Bei was willing to tell Quinn his past and alter his identity, then surely he would go the next step, of telling him where to find the correlates, since, Quinn reasoned, one treason led to another.

Su Bei was said to be in disgrace, partially blamed for Titus Quinn’s escape so long ago. That could be both good and bad for Quinn. Bad, if Bei blamed him. Good, if he blamed the Tarig.

And who did Titus Quinn blame? Always, the Tarig. But they had intermediaries, and one of these had been Su Bei, his interrogator.

It wasn’t at all clear that Bei would welcome him or even tolerate him. And if this gamble failed, he had only himself to blame, for insisting on Su Bei rather than on Anzi’s choice for a surgeon. As well, there was the danger that Bei would see a chance to redeem himself, and betray Quinn to the lords.

He put his hand on the lump under his jacket, on the Going Over blade. He was no murderer. But if Bei tried to call Lord Hadenth down on him, he would kill Bei without hesitation.

Dolwa-Pan noted his absent gaze as he stared out the window. “What do you look for, Dai Shen?”

“Peace,” he murmured. Stefan and Helice would never believe his goal to be so simple. But in the end, after Sydney, after
his own sway
, he wanted just that.

Dolwa-Pan said to him, “Surely all creatures may be at peace on the Radiant Path?” Her prehensile lip adjusted her necklace, a medallion on a blue cord.

Anzi was making her way toward them, putting a stop to his ill-advised conversation. She interrupted, exchanging bows with Dolwa-Pan. “A lovely ride, Princess. Allow me to reimburse you for your trouble.”

Dolwa-Pan flattened her ears in a no, and they began a polite argument over sharing the cost of the sky bulb, with Dolwa-Pan finally persuading Anzi not to pay. Thus Anzi managed to deflect the conversation to safe topics. Quinn felt her reins on him, and chafed. Anzi had already assured him that Hirrin sentients could not be spies. They were afflicted—or blessed—with a profound inability to lie. If they expressed something they knew was untrue, they quite simply passed out. After learning this, he began to see in them a naïve sweetness. He was still on his guard though, Anzi should realize.

Through the window, Quinn watched the storm wall as it hovered blackly, a mere handspan tall at this distance. Along the top, it rippled where it conjoined the bright. It looked like a tidal wave of water, and had since the first time he’d spied it. That image was hard to shake since hour by hour the wall grew. The minoral narrowed toward its tip, where eventually the walls would converge.

Dolwa-Pan lipped at her medallion, bringing it up closer to one ear, as he had seen her do several times. This time he was close enough to hear a very faint chime.

Noting Quinn’s gaze, the Hirrin said, “The tonals of regression. It is only a toy, a bauble.” She gazed out the window and seemed to grow wistful. “It was my choice to journey to this sway, to pursue scholarship. But even in this far minoral, I know where the gracious lords dwell, in the heartland. The tonals sing very low. We are far away.”

Anzi murmured, “Yet the vows keep us ever close.”

The pious remark served as a reminder to Quinn that they were speaking to one devoted to the Tarig. Anzi had earlier noted the Hirrin’s heartchime, and warned him to be wary. To some in the Entire, the Tarig were little less than gods, and not only because of their powers. The Radiant Path was the structure of justice and well-being.

Well-being for some, he thought. Not for a man of the Rose, or a human child.

Outside, a sight caught Dolwa-Pan’s attention. The distant storm wall was pierced by a crack of blinding light, like a door through the wall, filled with fire.

“A nascence,” Dolwa-Pan said. “It sputters from life to oblivion. Like us all, yes?” She gave a puff of air through her lips, a thing that passed for a sigh among her kind.

Quinn smiled. “You are a philosopher.”

Her ears flattened. “I have no need for philosophy, as the bright guides me.” With this lofty sentiment, she departed to tend to her Hirrin child, a tiny replica of his mother, who slept in the stern, lulled by the thrumming of the deck.

The wind blew the sky bulb, buffeting it, whipping its mooring lines as people ran to catch them.

The pilot worked his instruments as, outside, the world frowned gray with streaks of lightning. It was a storm, the perpetual storm here at the boundary of the Entire.

The young Hirrin screamed in terror, saying, “We will fall, we will fall down.” Answering him, Dolwa-Pan clutched him under her body, saying, “No, sweet one, we will not fall.” Then with a heavy thump she collapsed on the deck, her legs splayed out. Anzi went to her, and Quinn helped pull the princess off the terrified child.

“Fainted,” Anzi said.

The sky bulb pitched and spun in the gusts. From outside, shouts came from those helping the sky bulb to dock. The pilot cursed and shouted instructions, although outside no one could hear him. Quinn felt a pang of contempt for a pilot who botched a landing. But at last, with a hard jolt, the craft was down.

“Now we are safe,” Anzi told the small Hirrin, patting it on the front legs.

The pilot stood in the small opening to the control room. He scowled at the unconscious Hirrin lying on his deck. “Lied, did she?”

Anzi nodded. “She believed that she lied about falling. But because of your fine skills, we are safe.”

He snorted and went to the egress door, throwing it wide and filling the ship with a sour wind.

A gaggle of scholars stood waiting to help. The pilot called for a litter to carry the Hirrin, and urged Quinn and Anzi to debark, anxious to be gone from this place.

Clutching his pack, Quinn stepped out, Anzi following, their hair whipping in the wind. On three sides towered the world walls, blue-black and undulating. The storm walls were stitched into deep folds, quilting space to time in a plaid of grooved lines. It was impossible to gauge how close the walls were. Sometimes they appeared to surge forward, and sometimes to recede, and then to do both at once. Craning his neck, Quinn could see the bright only as a narrow wedge, bravely holding a sliver of sky. The bright was irrelevant here, where the walls rose close and high, undulating and sparking with filaments of light. Ozone stained the air, along with an indefinable smell that made Quinn slightly nauseous.

It was easy to think of this gray and lightning-streaked sky as a storm, a weather front like those at home. But there was no rain or thunder, so the illusion wore thin. He knew very well it was an illusion. The reality was that surrounding him here in the minoral were the Entire’s boundaries, the power-drenched skin of the world beyond which lay his own cosmos, a conjunction that might well be the branes of two universes, touching.

Not far away, perhaps a thousand yards, the storm walls converged to a vertical black scar, a seam that might rip apart at any moment.

The reach. The place scholars converged to view the Rose, and one of the places where exchanges between worlds occurred. A game of chance, with all the odds against you. Unless you knew your way.

A group of Chalin scholars herded Anzi and him away from the dirigible. Grit blew in Quinn’s face. He let himself be led until he could just make out a low structure highlighted by an impressive streak of yellow lightning that ribboned through the air.

Once at the building, they ducked under an archway and through creaking doors. Out of the wind and chaos, they paused and faced their hosts. There were five ancient Chalin, black-haired and shrunken. Hearing Anzi’s request to speak with Bei, they bowed, saying they must determine whether Master Bei could be disturbed. They disappeared through a door set in the far wall.

Alone now, Quinn and Anzi took in the unfurnished hall, its floor littered with sand oozing through chinks. The nearby tumult caused the air inside the hall to thrum. Then the doors flew open, announcing the arrival of Dolwa-Pan, carried on the litter. The young Hirrin cowered next to his mother, and the party disappeared behind the inner doors.

The building rattled in the wind. He noted its disrepair: the cracks along the foundation and a slump of stone in the corner.

Anzi pointed to the high, carved door where the assistants had gone. “That’s the To and From the Veil Door. There’s one such door in every reach where scholars work. It will take us down below.”

Underground. He had wondered how scholars approached the tips of their world. He drew close, seeing that the door was etched with designs, now deeply pitted. He ran his fingers over the worn carvings. It was Lucent calligraphy, almost obliterated with time. He made out a portion:
withhold
the knowledge . . . the reach of the Entire.

Anzi came up next to him. “The Three Vows,” she said. And it was: the Three Vows repeated over and over around the door.

“Anzi, does every minoral have a reach like this?” If so, there were potentially thousands of access points to the Entire.

She paused. “Like this? No. Every minoral has a tip, but not all are valued and occupied.”

“Why not?”

“Not all are useful. Some yield nothing but darkness. But those that are productive, in those places the lords have provided the veils.”

“But even these are sometimes unreliable.”

She frowned. “Unreliable? They are all unreliable.” Shrugging, she added, “Some more than others.” She watched him closely, perhaps worried that she would be accused again of withholding information. “Scholars have great patience to wait at places like this.”

“The Tarig don’t wait, I’m sure.” At her look of inquiry, he explained, “They’d know where to look, and when. Having the correlates.”

She shook her head. “But the lords seldom come to the reaches.”

“Maybe they want to hide the fact that correlates exist.”

Anzi grew thoughtful. “Yes, they do deny it. But if they have such correlates, it makes a mockery of all the studies, all the years of waiting.”

“Not very gracious of them.”

She glanced sharply at him, noting his smile.

“No,” she agreed. “It isn’t.”

A noise came from the inner door. Anzi murmured, “Now we’ll see if Su Bei is a friend or not.”

The door opened, and an assistant stood there. He had only a few strands of hair left, but these were carefully pulled up into a topknot. They followed him through the To and From the Veil Door and across a small anteroom into a box that, with much creaking and grinding, began to descend. And kept descending.

How deep was this world? And how could it be contained as it was? As the ozone-laden air infused his mouth and mind, it collected a memory: that he had once been captivated by that question, and that the answer had eluded him. Chalin legends said that the Entire was a natural place, enlivened eventually by the Tarig. Descending into this subterranean place, he felt a frisson of both awe and dread at this world’s scale. It was said to be smaller than the Rose, but still profoundly vast, with land distances that normally could only occur in space. Nor was the Entire an extended ribbon of land: it was miles deep, perhaps infinitely deep. It came home to him once more that the bronze lords ruled more than the peoples of the Entire; they ruled nature.

With a small bump the elevator door opened. The assistant led them into a cavernous hall, where a domed ceiling arched over a center mound of instruments. Amid an impressive rack of stone well computing devices, only one was active, lighting the face of a lone scholar, an old woman bent over her screen. She craned her head to see who had interrupted her, then went back to her task.

They followed their guide into a corridor where the end was lost in darkness.

Without turning around the old man said, “If we had received warning of your visit, we could have enlivened a car. Now we must walk.” He led the way down a smooth tube, rounded on top and sides but shattered here and there by intrusions of soil and rock. Light nodes budded from the walls, waxing and waning with a throbbing of the ground. Quinn heard the drumming and felt it in his boots, his skin. After a few minutes, Quinn noticed a harmonic underneath the general vibration. It was a repeated refrain of four notes, simple and annoying. As they continued walking, a deep hum surged and faded, like a bass string plucked once. Whatever the rock and soil was composed of, it sang under the vibrations of the storm walls.

They came to the end of the tunnel and found a small chamber, rounded and domed like the first. Instrumentation crowded the walls, sharing space with long roping ridges like buried cables.

A man waited for them. Standing in the chamber was a man whose face was as lined as a crumpled map. A heavy rope of redstones hung around his neck. His white hair was shot through with streaks of black and was gathered in a clasp behind his neck. He stood nearly Quinn’s height, and erect, with the form of one who had been robust in youth. Instantly, Quinn recognized him. Su Bei. He dug for shreds of memory. None came.