Bright of the Sky (38 page)

She also told stories of the Long War, and the warrior traditions of the Chalin. Anzi was an expert fighter because she expected to go as a soldier someday, when Yulin decided she should bolster the ranks of conscripts from his sway. The Entire military traditions were as old as the famous Paion Incursion, happening at a period that Quinn thought of as six thousand years ago, but expressed by Anzi as seven archons ago, each archon a span of three hundred thousand days. A thousand years later the Long War began in earnest.

Except for the Incursion, which occurred in the Long Gaze of Fire, the primacy where the Inyx dwelled, Paion attacked only one primacy, the one they were now in, and in only one place, at Ahnenhoon. If, as Anzi believed, they were not from the Entire, then their accuracy in returning to Ahnen-hoon was worth noting. Here were beings who might know at least something of the correlates. But Anzi thought not.

“They aren’t of the Rose. They’re from elsewhere.”

“Where else is there?” It was a startling question. Where indeed?

“Between,” Anzi said. “Realms between.”

“What lies between?”

But she gave the standard response: “No one ever knows.”

It left him musing about other regions beyond his cosmos and hers. No reason that there should be only two . . .

In the direction of the Nigh, a black tidal wave grew. They were approaching the other side of the Entire, with its storm wall. Here there were no mino-rals or nascences—all chased away, as Anzi put it, by the great river that was not a river. The heartchime throbbed against his chest. Drawing it out, he put it to his ear, wondering at the evolving tone that proclaimed the proximity of the bright city. He prayed to be there only a short while, to pass Cixi’s scrutiny and have her endorsement of his Inyx mission. With this in hand, his disguise would be perfect, only to be shed once Sydney’s escape raised an alarm. He had already planned how they would camouflage themselves then: as godmen. Who would take note of two castaways of the Miserable God?

So he would come home with two prizes of inestimable value: the correlates if he was fortunate, and Sydney.

Wait for me, he sent to her, as if thoughts could journey and arrive intact.

The time came when the bags of seed were depleted and they had arrived on the banks of the Nigh. The Adda went to ground, allowing them to climb down the ladder. The creature was quick to depart, having failed to attract a seed-bearing rider here, and disliking to linger near the perpetual storm of the wall.

The height of the storm wall was sickening. It looked like it couldn’t stand, that it was already falling. It seemed wrong that the Entire was contained and defended by such chaos. In the distance, at the foot of the wall, the River Nigh streamed in a coarse blaze. Between him and the river’s edge was a transitional marsh, with pools of reflective river matter.

The smell of ozone flooded across Quinn’s mouth. The blue-black undulations of the wall were very close, and air turbulence rippled clothes and tents. A small crowd of travelers—some sentients he hadn’t seen before— were scattered at the edge of the marsh waiting for a boat. They kept their gazes averted from the wall, tending cook fires with flames that flowed unnaturally, in greasy slicks. Between tide pools, tendrils spread out like dendrites.

Anzi warned against stepping in the pools. “Suzong told me that a small girl of the court traveling here with her parents fell in the river. She lived, but she never talked again.”

Since Anzi had never traveled on the Nigh, all that she could tell Quinn about the river was what she had been told. She was no physicist, to talk of space-time or temporal and spatial turbulence. Nor was he, for that matter. But one thing Bei had told him: Travel on the Nigh was not faster than light; there would be no time-dilation effects. In creating the Nigh, the Tarig used a technology far beyond what humans knew.

The river made it possible to traverse the primacy from end reach to heartland. Along the lengths of the primacy were the Empty Lands that corresponded, Quinn felt, to interstellar space. These lands were solid ground only in a conceptual sense, and not according to everyday logic. Sometimes everyday logic didn’t apply, as with Einstein’s explanations of gravity and relativity. Long ago a mathematician had said, “In mathematics you don’t understand things, you just get used to them.” Quinn—the new Quinn— was getting used to the Entire.

They had just kindled a fire to cook supper when the crowds stirred. The travelers pointed out toward the Nigh.

A boat was coming. It was no more than a small blot skimming across the marshlands until it stopped some hundred yards off, hovering slightly above the ground. It looked very much like a small ship, except that it had a funnel in front that Anzi said served to collect river matter for fuel. In the center of a surrounding deck was a passenger cabin crowned by a smaller upper deck. Even as he and Anzi hurried in its direction, they saw a person on the prow, standing and waiting.

“The navitar?” Quinn asked Anzi as they hurried.

“No, Dai Shen, that’s an Ysli, the servant of the navitar.”

Quinn hadn’t yet seen this manner of sentient, and watched with interest as the boat approached.

The Ysli was short and apelike, with a bare snout, and eyes peering from shaggy hair. It was difficult to think of it as sentient because it wore no clothes, but in fact the Ysli’s eyes were alight with intelligence as it surveyed the crowd now massing before the ship. The navitars were utterly dependent on the hired servants, since they were incapable of mundane tasks. The individuals that gave themselves over to navigating the Nigh had abandoned extraneous capacities for the sake of a Tarig enhancement: to guide ships by sensing the fundamental forces underlying the Entire.
The navitars do not know
what we know
, Anzi had said.
They know different things.

Suddenly Anzi was pulling on his sleeve. “Don’t take notice,” she warned. “Tarig.”

“Where?” He turned, spying a tall figure in his peripheral vision. And more: he smelled the Tarig. He had been close to a Tarig in the Adda, but the yeasty smells of the sinuses had cloaked other scents. Now, the smell came strongly, like burned sugar; not unpleasant by itself, but overlain with old emotions.

The Tarig was making its way toward the ship. The crowd parted amid bowing and murmurs of
Gracious One
. Anzi tensed and pushed Quinn ahead of her. She was nervous that she had lied to the Tarig earlier, nervous that they were searching for Wen An, that they knew the name of the person who’d first helped Quinn.

Now the Tarig stood next to them looking at the Ysli, who bowed but seemed unimpressed amid his other concerns of who should board and who should not. The Tarig wore a sleeveless tunic that revealed glistening arm muscles. Quinn was acutely aware of the creature, but avoided looking, most of all, into her eyes. It was a her. He could smell this. He could also smell Anzi’s sweat, her fear.

The Tarig turned to Quinn. “We do not know you.”

Quinn turned to her, gazing into her black eyes. “Dai Shen of Master Yulin’s household, Bright One,” he said, in his best unaccented Lucent tongue.

“Ah. Inyx matters,” the rich voice murmured.

It chilled him that the Tarig knew this, although it was their prepared story. That she had called attention to
Inyx
, the very heart of the matter, worried him.

“Yes, Lady.”

At that moment the Ysli screeched to the crowd, “Where bound?”

Shouts of destinations greeted this question, and among them, Anzi’s cry of “The Ascendancy!”

The Tarig looked over Quinn’s head, scanning the crowds, alert. It was unnerving that the creature
could
look over his head. Then she said: “Ascendancy bound, then. Good.” She fixed her gaze on a nearby Chalin man. “And you, going where?”

The Tarig brushed past Quinn, trailing her scent, like sugar gone wrong. Anzi was pulling on Quinn’s arm, dragging him to the ship.

Spying her, the Ysli asked, “Number traveling?”

“Two.”

The Ysli beckoned, releasing a movable stairway that spanned a pool of river matter.

Anzi and Quinn pushed through the remaining crowd and boarded. Anzi murmured at him, “The Tarig dismissed us because the guilty do not travel to the Ascendancy.” Quinn couldn’t resist looking behind him, toward the Tarig. She was watching him. He cursed himself for looking. Then, glancing at the upper deck, Quinn saw a reddish blur where something moved inside darkened windows.

Behind Quinn and Anzi came a Chalin, weighed down by boxes roped to his back. The Ysli directed him and his luggage into the cabin, where, perspiring and panting, he accepted Quinn’s help in lowering them onto the deck.

“Careful!” he said. “Meant for the legate, you oaf.” He waved at the baggage. “It’s all written down, for the eyes of the legate Min Fe and the consul Shi Zu.” He eyed his fellow travelers to reinforce the importance of these names.

Through the window Anzi watched the Tarig as the man went on: “Min Fe must have everything in a hurry so it can sit in piles while he does not read it.” He shook his head, looking at the central cabin that they must all share. “I don’t know where you intend to sleep, but not on my trunks, thank you.”

The Ysli frowned. “Talks too much,” he chittered. Then he went aft, ambling past the companionway that led to the upper deck. He disappeared into the small aft cabin, and soon the vessel was under way, purring as it gathered speed over the marsh.

Despite his concern for his trunks, the man sat on one and wiped his brow with a silken cloth. He was slight of build and of that maddening middle and indeterminate age of the Chalin, who seemed to be thirty for most of their lives. “I am Cho, steward of the high clarities.” He seemed unperturbed by the recent presence of the Tarig, a being he must have grown accustomed to in his duties. “And who might you be?”

Quinn and Anzi introduced themselves.

When Cho heard
Dai Shen of the Long War
and
Master Yulin’s household
, he stood up in alarm. “Of the household of Master Yulin? Of the Long War?” He bowed. “Pardon. You must pardon. Born in a minoral. Inexcusable ignorance.” He bowed again. “You are great personages, then. I am only a steward. You may sleep on my trunks. Pick as you like.” He bowed again.

Quinn said, “Only distantly of the master’s household. A minor soldier of Ahnenhoon. I take no notice.”

Cho shook his head. “I am honored, even so. Allow me to serve you, of course.” He seemed unable to decide to sit down again.

Anzi intervened: “It would be agreeable if you would consider us simply fellow travelers, until we arrive in the Ascendancy. There we must wear our distinctions. Not here.”

Cho nodded gratefully. “Just so. In the bright city you will speak to the legates directly, even to the high prefect herself?” He snaked a look at them. “But fellow travelers, yes. I would be honored, naturally.” He shook his head, murmuring, “A simple steward with great personages.”

From the upper deck, a warbling voice cried out: “Ahh, Ascendancy ways can be opened. Bind the travelers to me. Scatter the lines. Scatter. . . .”

Cho looked at the ceiling. “The navitar. It’s all nonsense, pay no attention.” But he looked nervously at the stairs to the upper deck. “Her name is Ghoris. I have traveled with that one before. Very good pilot, I assure you.”

From the aft cabin, amid slamming of cookware, glorious smells of cooking began filling the cabin. Despite having just seen a Tarig an arm’s length away, Quinn was settling down enough to be hungry. But soon the Ysli climbed up the companionway carrying platters laden with soups and dumplings and baskets of unguessed-at delicacies. Soon the Ysli was cleaning the galley. It seemed that, for the others, supper was not in the offing.

Cho sat back, deflated. “We must feed Ghoris, or she won’t last through the binds.”

They were on the river. Through the windows on one side was sheer dark, where the junction of storm wall and river boiled. On the other side of the boat, the river lay thick and flat like mercury, sucking into eddies here and there, but otherwise smooth and empty of other craft. Quinn felt a heaviness grow in his stomach, and his mind dulled.

At last the Ysli brought down the platters with their remnants and set them out on Cho’s crates, where the Chalin steward tucked in with relish. But Quinn had lost his appetite, as had Anzi.

Finishing his meal, Cho looked at his traveling companions. “Sleep is the only thing now. I have been on the Nigh a dozen times, and each time I am sicker than the last.” He made a bed among his boxes and lay down.

As they sailed closer to the storm wall, a bluish light infused the ship, and the nausea that Quinn had first experienced at the minoral returned. Anzi leaned against the bulkhead, closing her eyes. “Rest, Dai Shen,” she said. Her skin had taken on a bluish cast. “When the navitar goes through the knots, it’s best to sleep.”

He’d already resolved he wouldn’t sleep through this experience.

The ship shuddered. In the Ysli’s galley, implements rattled. Looking down at his hands, Quinn thought they were not occupying just one space, but several. He watched them, intrigued. An undercurrent tried to sweep his thoughts away and pull him under. He fought it.

Beside him, Anzi and Cho were already asleep.

He looked outside. The river came halfway up the cabin windows. They were descending into the binds, an alarming sight. Just outside, he could see a strange creature. Walking along the river, but hanging upside down from the surface, was an animal with a number of legs, almost like a spider. River walker, he thought. But he couldn’t be seeing it, because it was a mythological beast of the Entire. If you followed a river walker, it would lead you to oblivion in the binds. He turned his face away, muddy-headed.

The lights in the cabin blinked out.

Quinn walked, tottering, to the galley, peering in. He was going to ask the Ysli if he could fix the lights. In the corner was a hammock where the creature hung in a lump. From the galley windows Quinn saw that they were now fathoms deep in the Nigh. It was not water out there, but a more vital medium, exuding its own dull light and pierced by icicles of lightning. Turning to the other side of the galley, Quinn saw a similar view. The vessel shook again, rattling the galley wares.