Bright of the Sky (43 page)

Through the myriad vows, bonds, and clarities, the legates controlled all matters of law and civil function. Those who chose the life of the Magis-terium made themselves indispensable to the Tarig. Through this means they participated in the Tarig’s power—a pale copy of that power, Quinn thought, recalling Anzi’s summation of her people. He missed her at his side, and had become more cautious without her to provide cover for him. But she’d said that he was ready. He thought so, too. He had to be.

As Min Fe inspected his document, Quinn looked around the cell. Despite Min Fe’s minor function, he did have a window office. The shaft leading to the outside edge of the Magisterium was some fifteen hundred feet long, but if one stood in front of it, one had a postage-stamp view of the city, a perpetual scene of a stained cascade of roofs.

The city was the spacious realm of the Tarig, and beneath it clustered the warrens of the bureaucracy: the Magisterium. The Magisterium was shaped like a bowl, one filled with labyrinthine levels and corridors. The center of the bowl was cut away, so that views from the Magisterium could provide glimpses of the great city. Evidently, the Tarig liked their handiwork to be admired. But other views from the Magisterium were just as fine, displaying the circular heartland, the Sea of Arising, and, far in the distance, the storm walls on every side.

Min Fe’s voice broke into his thoughts. “That will do for today.” Min Fe rose to his feet in dismissal.

“Do?” Quinn was being dismissed. “But what progress, sublegate?”

Min Fe answered with clipped precision: “Progress will be made when we discern where in pandect the proposal might fit. If we simply attach it like a bauble on an offering tray, nothing is in order in the body of the law. Progress will be made when we translate your clarity into the language of the law, which is a rhetoric without ambiguity, that flows with the rhythms of systematic referential language.” His voice had risen through this recitation, and his eyes looked large and angry in the watery lenses of his glasses. “I don’t expect that you can grasp this, being a man of weapons.”

Quinn said, “Know that I must account to Master Yulin, and soon.”

Min Fe’s voice grew eerily soft. “Soon? Do you say that I am lagging?”

Quinn knew he should defer, but it went against the grain. “Not lagging. But not hurrying, either.”

A smile poked at one side of the sublegate’s mouth. “It will be necessary to take your suggestion under close consideration. As to
hurrying
.”

Min Fe closed the computational scroll, and he held it like a wand until the redstone budded out at the bottom. Then he placed the redstone on a tray behind him, in one of a thousand tiny dimples. As he turned to do this, Quinn saw, embroidered on the back of the sublegate’s vest, the image of a spinner, the legless spider bred to produce the great silks of the Chalin. From the squat creature’s mouth came a rainbow of metallic threads.

Min Fe turned back to him, saying, “Dismissed, Dai Shen, minor son of Master Yulin.”

Quinn bowed and left, shutting the legate’s door behind him, crumpling his paper summons in his hand. Here was a man who’d made a career out of making sure that little happened at all, much less quickly.

Standing before him in the corridor was the sentient who bunked next door to him. Brahariar was a Jout, and a large one, with a thickset body and stubby legs. The overlapping petals of her hide rippled in pleasure at seeing him. Noting the crumpled summons, the Jout said, “What was the legate’s humor?”

“Poor.”

The Jout sighed. “I have no summons, but I hoped—”

“To drop in on him?”

Brahariar looked deflated. “Futile?”

“Perhaps today. I think I ruined his mood.”

“Ah.”

Quinn needed to walk, to release tension. At his side the Jout shuffled as Quinn paced down the corridor. They turned into a main corridor, their boots thudding on a floor with the look of hammered copper. The ceiling threw a perpetual light on the Magisterium, a pale bronze fire. Sometimes the floors blurred as an unknown process cleaned specks of dirt. Although this edifice was thousands of years old, it appeared newly minted.

“This tertiary level is nicer than the level of our quarters,” the Jout said, referring to the third level where they walked. “The legates have much luxury.” Each level was wider and more gracious than the one under it. Quinn was eager to see the upper levels—to see Cixi and Lord Oventroe. Oventroe hadn’t responded to him yet. Thus, more waiting.

Walking in silence, Quinn and Brahariar finally entered a great hall. Here, tall windows cut the bright into rectangles that fell on the floor like molten ingots. A staircase led to a mezzanine where legates and lesser functionaries talked in clumps or viewed the city. He and Brahariar leaned on the deep reveal of a window, gazing on the bright city. A habitation of bronze and silver, it glinted under the bright. Light and shadow sculpted the Tarig city as spires flushed in the day’s glare and threw down deep shadows at their roots.

They were looking up at the city from its basement, as it were. Most of the views in the Magisterium faced outward into the sky from the bottom of the bowl-like construct. But in some places the Magisterium plucked a better view, where the metropolis’s wells and terraces plunged down in the center, opening views to the city’s interior.

Quinn had found that this view was familiar: the superstructure, the great hill containing the five palaces of the high lords. Clinging like encrusted jewels to the palatine hill were the habitations of lesser Tarig. On wide verandas minor lords could be seen, their skin glinting bronze. Among themselves the Tarig were solitary, not often gathering socially, yet desiring social contact with other sentients. Sentients like Quinn, for example. And had he desired that contact too?

Quinn stretched out his hand, placing it against the invisible barrier that served for window glazing. He wanted to walk in that city, and knew he couldn’t. He had listened to Anzi’s cautions for so long that she seemed with him still.
Do not put yourself in their path.
Except one Tarig whom he would see in secret. He had that hope, as remote as it might be. In pursuit of that hope, he had sat several days in a row at a small pool in a remote outdoor garden of the Magisterium. Into this pool he had placed Bei’s redstone, while he pretended to feed the carp that swam the interconnected canals. After a few days, a silver carp with an orange back took the redstone in its mouth. He’d watched it as it swam away, thrilled to have given the proper signal.
Not
all carp are carp
, Bei had said.

Brahariar turned her luminous green eyes on Quinn. “You have a mission of importance, to see Min Fe so quickly.”

Quinn couldn’t tell whether she was resentful, but the Jout seemed more wistful than anything. “It’s a matter my master thought important. Political things that I hardly understand. And you, Brahariar?”

The Jout’s eyes clouded. “A matter of grief, not politics.” She turned away, stopping the conversation for a long while as she stared at the view of the city. A commotion nearby signaled the approach of a personage. Stewards and legates began bowing as, presently, four large Chalin clerks appeared bearing a sling. Reclining in it was a Gond wearing a bright jacket. Her horns were painted silver.

Brahariar bowed deeply, murmuring to Quinn, “Preconsul GolMard.”

Rising from his own bow, Quinn said, “I never knew Gonds rose so high.” He had the distinct impression that most Chalin, at least, hated Gonds.

Brahariar looked startled, intoning, “No sentient being is beyond hope.”

Ah yes, Quinn thought, the Radiant Path of the colossal meritocracy. But he prayed that his petition would never require approval from a Gond. He had enough trouble from the likes of Min Fe.

“How does one get to the second level?” Quinn asked.

The Jout shot him a sideways glance. “The long way or the quick way?”

“The quick way.”

“I have been here so long I know the back ways. But they are not as nice.”

Nor were they. It seemed that the glories of the Magisterium fell short when the Chalin remodeled the walls for their own purposes. Between walls threaded a passageway just large enough for a Jout to walk through.

“For spying,” the Jout said, as though disappointed that such things went on.

“Tarig spying or legate spying?” Quinn asked as he followed her.

The Jout’s voice came in a whisper as she led the way. “Why would the Tarig need such? No, it is the legates that contend with each other, vying for advantage.”

They climbed a ladder and emerged into a room full of humming machinery of unknown purpose.

“Do the Tarig know of these spy routes?”

Brahariar’s skin fluttered in a manner that Quinn recalled signified amusement. “Certainly. If the legates wish to play this game, the Tarig are pleased to allow it. Chalin are pampered, you see.”
And not Jout
, was left unsaid. “I will go back now. Perhaps my summons will be waiting for me.” She returned by the same route, a being in need of shortcuts, but doomed to follow the rules.

The second level was by far more ornate than below. Quinn passed through arching galleries and narrow wings burning with light on both sides. Eventually, by asking again and again, he came to the domain of the consul Shi Zu. The great door was unlocked.

Entering the empty quarters, he approached the carved desk of the consul. Finding an empty scroll, he activated it and wrote: “Here is a matter Min Fe could not bear for you to see.” Next to the scroll, he placed a redstone, one of several copies of the Inyx clarity.

Just as he turned away, he caught sight of an activated scroll left open on an ornate side table. A face stared out at him, and for a moment he thought it might be Shi Zu. But the face, when he looked again, was his own. He approached the scroll, and as he did so, it began streaming a segment that showed him and Anzi on the pier below. He saw himself bend down to place something in the water. Then Anzi was pulling him away to the line of travelers, where she argued with the gatekeeper. Then the segment began again.

To his dismay, he had already attracted their attention.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Among the gracious lords of the Bright Realm are the high lords
over all, masters of heaven:

    
The Exalted Lord Nehoov.

    
The Sheltering Lord Hadenth.

    
The Supreme Lady Chiron.

    
The Noble Lord Inweer.

    
The Masterful Lord (the Sleeping One) Lord Ghinamid.

—from
The Book of Ascendant Joys

C
IXI ALLOWED HERSELF TO BE TAKEN
to a
place of interest
by the legate Zai Gan. It was an endless source of amusement, watching her legates strive with each other. The high prefect indulged Zai Gan because she wished to give him the impression that she favored him, which she did not.

Interrupting their preparations for an outing into the city, Zai Gan had persuaded her to come on a minor detour. She fought to hide her anxiety, to give no hint to Zai Gan that she would far rather be on her way into the city, where her fate might be decided.

Zai Gan towered over her. Well, most Chalin did, despite her habit of wearing stacked shoes. The legate also possessed an ample circumference, but unlike his brother Yulin, whose girth was all muscle, Zai Gan was soft. She didn’t make the mistake of thinking him soft of purpose. His purpose had ever been to supplant Master Yulin, and Cixi had been playing off this ambition for so many days it began to bore her.

They exited the second level of the Magisterium onto a small deck, where her view of the sea was far and clear. She bowed for a moment, acknowledging the vast empire of the lords. May they fry in the bright, she thought.

She and Zai Gan stood on a balcony, one of hundreds of viewing platforms, ramps, and balconies hugging the city’s underbelly. Since the underside of the city was shaped like a bowl, most sentients thought that when they stood outside on the lower levels, they were not observable from above, but this wasn’t so. At Zai Gan’s command, the floor realigned itself, and Cixi could see through to the level underneath.

Below her stood a well-built Chalin man, looking over the edge. Was he going to jump? She hoped Zai Gan hadn’t brought her here to observe a forbidden suicide.

“It is Dai Shen, Your Brilliance. He comes here, day after day.”

“And?” He should come to the point. There had better be a point.

“It’s not normal to stare at the sea. What is he looking for?”

“That, Legate, would be your job to discover.” Dai Shen, Dai Shen—she was tired of Zai Gan’s entreaties about this messenger. Yes, he had suddenly appeared as Yulin’s long-absent son. Yes, he had suddenly been sent on an important mission to the city. Many things happened suddenly. All that
sudden
meant was that your intelligence outlets had failed you.

Zai Gan said, “He stares. Suspiciously stares.”

“Like one with a head injury?”

Zai Gan puffed out his lower lip. “Then why was he not in the garden when Lord Echnon sought him? And why has my gardener disappeared?”

Cixi snorted. Yulin had had the spy killed, of course. She could accuse the fat master of the sway, but best not to accuse without proof. And she had some sympathy for Yulin’s execution of a member of his very own household who would tell tales. Even so, Cixi would have made an issue of this murder if the tales the gardener had told had been worth hearing. Unfortunately, they weren’t.

Desperately wishing to be on her way, she fixed Zai Gan with a look that said,
One’s invaluable time has been wasted by this stinking beku.
Cixi had made an art form of facial expressions, and her minions had composed treatises on the subject.

But Zai Gan would not be hurried. “Dai Shen’s petition, Your Brilliance. Deny it. If he succeeds with this Inyx matter, it strengthens Yulin and delays my inheritance.” The man was desperate for Dai Shen’s mission to fail. A few days ago he had barred Dai Shen’s companion, Ji Anzi, from ascending.