Bright of the Sky (46 page)

Oh my dear girl, Cixi thought. Her devotion to the child was an always-burning coal, and the girl had a matching ember in her own heart. So Cixi’s messengers had told her.
She loves you still, mistress.
Cixi believed them, because her own heart was that steadfast, and because she had told them that, should they lie, she would pull out their intestines through their navels. Slowly.

Now, kneeling in the alcove, she placed the redstone in the cup, and it disappeared. Nothing, nothing. But these things took time.

There were days in which Cixi felt that Mo Ti was her last hope. Mo Ti was the most intelligent, able, and fearless servant she’d ever had. If he couldn’t succeed, she might never in this life have another chance to bring a mentor to the dear girl’s side. Had Mo Ti escaped blinding? Even if he hadn’t, had he managed to infiltrate Priov’s encampment? And if so, had the girl come to trust him?

And then, miraculously, words formed on the wall, a section of stone that for a moment became a screen. Her answer. She stared at the letters forming:
Always to last.

Always to last . . .
Cixi’s face flushed hot with shock. Mo Ti had arrived.

There was no further message, nor was there need. Had he failed irrevocably, Mo Ti would have sent,
Dark as rose night.
And if he had not yet surmounted barriers,
Hold up the bright.

Without completely absorbing this joyful news, Cixi rushed up the stairs, raising her knees high under her robes, straining against the demands of another hundred stairs. Her legs stung with pain, but she yanked her old body up the risers. Up, up, and may God look upon all fiends. Up, up . . .

At the top she leaned against the stones of the rampart, her chest near exploding, her legs melting. Below, Zai Gan kept guard, ready to create a diversion should someone try to enter before he saw her at the top.

By his demeanor below she knew that he’d seen her. No doubt the fat fool must wonder what she was doing all this while. How astounded he would be to know the truth.

Turning to leave, she found a Tarig standing before her.

“Lord, my life,” she said.

But it was not a fiend. It was the image of a fiend, captured in the stone walls of the tower. His features looked pockmarked and rumpled in the imperfect screen of the rough wall.

“Ah, Cixi,” he said.

By his voice, it was . . . But he must speak again.

“Is that you, Bright Lord? Your likeness in the stone?” She wished she were not barefooted. Perhaps he wouldn’t notice.

“Yes, it is our likeness, not our self. Unless we have become ugly in one day?”

Lord Oventroe. Cixi almost collapsed with relief. It was a disaster if he knew what she’d done. But he was the best fiend to encounter here.

“Lord, my life,” she repeated, skipping the rest of the benediction, as she dared to do as high prefect.

“Yes. Your life.” He watched her with stony eyes, stony face. “Have you ever thought how you would choose to die if a lord uncovered repugnance for you?”

Her heart sank like a stone in a pool. He was going to kill her.

“Yes.”

“Now we shall guess. You would die by poison rather than by the slow death.” He held up a long-fingered hand. “No, not true. We think this would not be your way. Ah, we have it.” He pointed to the rampart, where it was cut low enough to create a viewing port. “Stand near there, Prefect.”

“Shall I climb up?”

“Don’t be dramatic. What if you please us, and you go down again, down the long stairs? Then there would be scandal from the prefect having stood on the lip of the tower as though despondent.” He looked behind him, giving the impression that he was actually there. “Everyone is watching you, ah?”

“Surely they do watch. But cannot see you, Lord.”

“No. We must be secret.” He turned and paced, walking around the circular summit, walking in the walls.

Lord Oventroe was the only lord she knew of who paced. He’d often claimed that it was the only useful thing that humans had ever taught him. It was peculiar in the extreme, that after all they knew of the Rose, he picked this senseless thing to mimic. This minor thought came unbidden into her mind as she considered throwing herself from the tower. She thought of her dear girl, and her throat constricted.

“Secrets,” Lord Oventroe was saying. “We both of us have secrets, Prefect.”

She tried to think which one he knew, besides that she used the bright like a lord.

He went on: “My secret is well kept by you, Cixi of Chendu wielding.”

It was almost a term of endearment, his use of her childhood name. She held her breath.

His face came to rest on a flat piece of stone, bringing his features into better resolution. He was fuller of face than most fiends, and it softened him. The ladies of the city—Tarig ladies, of course—found him handsome. “Yes,” Lord Oventroe went on, “you have known that we have a personal alcove. Other lords know not of it. This is the secret you have kept, Prefect.”

She
had
kept it secret. All secrets were coins to be hoarded, and praise be to Heaven, she had hoarded this one.

A change in Lord Oventroe’s expression signaled pleasure. “We would thank you, but it’s not our style, is it?”

“Unthinkable, Lord.”

“You should have been a Tarig, Cixi of Chendu.” No doubt he meant it as an extraordinary compliment.

“Sometimes I feel that I am.” She cut a glance down the stairs, thinking of the alcove.

He said, “There are legates who know what you know?”

“No.”

“We hope this is true, Cixi. We also hope that your messaging is for minor villainy and doesn’t cross this lord’s interests.”

And what were his interests? Cixi would give much to know. Lord Oven-troe had a fanatical hatred of the Rose, as all sentients knew. Also, and as few sentients knew, he had hopes to replace Hadenth as a high lord, because Hadenth had failed in security in the past. But no high lord ever stepped down, so this was not a reasonable goal. One could assume it was not.

“Dragons are content with their caves and their treasures, my lord.”

His face flickered with amusement. Cixi thought that pacing was not the only thing that Oventroe had copied from the Rose. In all his fanatical observations of the enemy, he had unwittingly become more like them.

“The day you are
content
, Prefect, we will open the doors to the Rose.”

She bowed very low, acknowledging this truth. She was not content. But let him believe that she possessed common ambitions. Let no one guess—and never the lords—that she meant to raise the kingdom. The Chalin kingdom.

When she rose from her bow, Lord Oventroe had disappeared.

A slight breeze wicked sweat from her face. “By my grave flag,” she whispered, shivering.

She was safe, for the time being. But he knew that she partook of forbidden things. How had he discovered her, and who else might know? From now on she was under his scrutiny. Where else did he lurk, and in what guise? Did he really see her today, or was it only an image? It was sickening to think that the lords might spy so easily. . . .

She began descending the three hundred stairs. Why had the lord spared her life? Only one reason: she might have told someone else what she knew. And now he needed her to keep them silent, who otherwise might divulge his secret. Oh, the power of secrets. By their leverage one could topple a high tower, or an empire.

Partway down the stairs she slipped into her shoes again.

At the bottom, Zai Gan met her, noting her distress. “A hard climb, Your Brilliance?”

“No, Preconsul,” she managed to say in a neutral tone. “But sometimes the way down is harder than going up.” And when he looked at her inquiringly, she gave him the face that said,
Shut up and let me think.

Then she concentrated on making it back to her quarters without collapsing.

That night in his cell, Quinn stared at the luminescent ceiling, dimmed for ebb-time. In its cool light he saw Hadenth’s face, heard his shredded voice. The creature had been watching him.
Eight days on the rim . . .

The Chalin rumor wasn’t true, that Quinn’s beating had addled the lord’s mind. Hadenth was the same as he’d always been. Predatory and unpredictable. Why had Hadenth been watching him, or did the Tarig watch everything?

He felt cooped up, and restless. Nine days in the Magisterium, and still no contact with the traitor Tarig. If he was a traitor. And no word from the high prefect. . . . Abandoning sleep, he rose and took his clothes off the pegs on the wall. The cleaning fabbers had done their work, and he dressed in his silk garments, now spotless.

Out in the corridor, he noted that the Jout’s door was open. Brahariar had also given up on sleep, and sat on her bed weeping. He knew that the Jout’s petition, whatever it was, languished. Pitying her, earlier Quinn had asked Cho to help her, if he could.

Quinn walked. Was Hadenth watching him even now? If they thought their city so vulnerable that they spied incessantly, why have the Magis-terium here at all? Why not install it at the base of the pillars instead?

The halls at ebb-time were as active as during the day. The great bureaucracy needed every hour of every long Entire day to govern the universe, the only universe worth having. The All they sometimes called it, their way of assuring themselves that they were superior.

He descended the ramp to the fourth level, which housed the archive, where scholars and functionaries pursued their arcane studies, and where all knowledge gathered by scholars eventually found a home.

There were several subjects he longed to pursue there. But it would draw attention if he pursued Johanna’s records, from the time she was interrogated here. A minor son of Yulin shouldn’t be looking up information about Johanna Quinn and her interrogator, Kang. Even though Kang’s record would only be a fragment of Johanna, fragments might be important, if, as the navitar had said, Johanna was at the center of things.

This level was crowded with clerks. They wore the wide and backward-sloping hats that housed their computational boards, a type of stone well. From the back, the clerks’ hats were alive with readouts as the stones made their way from top to bottom, spitting into a long sock that hung like a kite’s tail down the clerks’ backs. Making his way through twisting corridors, past the cells of factors and stewards, he came at last to the archive, which he wanted to enter, and shouldn’t. He stood at the open door to the great hall. Here, giant pillars held the computational wells, and stairwells corkscrewed around the columns, accessing the wells.

He would have liked to see what information the library held on the Inyx sway, so that he could bolster his plan to free Sydney, the one that Yulin was so sure would fail. Certainly if the Inyx could probe his mind, then he was deprived of his strongest tactic: stealth. As well, he hungered to delve into the question of the correlates, if the lords by some lapse had left clues here.

But none of these paths of inquiry were open to him. He didn’t know how to use the library. He didn’t know how data was stored, how to access it, how to conduct searches. His very ineptness might draw attention.

He stood at the archive door undecided. Once, he had known the ways of the archive. Once, he had come here looking for the correlations between here and there. But he was not that same man. This version of Titus Quinn was stone well illiterate.

He turned away from the archive door. Min Fe was standing in the corridor.

The legate blinked at him, his eyes magnified in his glasses. “A soldier who studies? A wonder.”

“I was curious about the great library. Very impressive.” He tried to pass, but Min Fe blocked him.

“The man of weapons offends us.”

“Was there an offense? If so, my pardon.”

Min Fe hissed, “Pardon, is it? I grant no pardon for your insults.” Two clerks emerged from the archive, bowing deeply as they passed. Min Fe watched them retreat down the corridor.

“Cho’s promotion is an outrage, of course. He is without merit, without distinction. A pedantic, visionless underling who has contributed no new scrolls to the pandect in five thousand days. . . .” Min Fe noted Quinn’s look of surprise. “Certainly you’ve heard that Shi Zu, taking revenge against me for imagined faults, raised the worthless menial to full steward?”

So the consul had promoted Cho at long last.

He went on, “Shi Zu credits Cho with guiding you in your assaults on protocol. Don’t think it a victory, Dai Shen of Yulin’s household. You’ve made an enemy here. A not-inconsiderable one, I assure you.”

Quinn looked the sublegate squarely in the face. “I’m in a hurry, for Master Yulin’s sake. Lest I suffer a beating.” He tried to let Min Fe win, but it was no use. The man hated him.

Min Fe said, “May a beating be the least of your rewards.”

“Many days to you, Sublegate.” Quinn walked away. Min Fe did not follow him as he headed back to his quarters.

Quinn knew what Anzi would have advised: to placate the man, win him over. Well, it was too late for that now, and he didn’t regret it. He wouldn’t yield to Min Fe, as before he had yielded to the Tarig . . . for ten years. He was not the same man.

Before he left, he meant to prove that.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

H
ELICE MAKI, DRESSED AS A VALKYRIE
, adjusted her helmet and breastplate, and looked up at the night sky. Lately, the stars made her uneasy. Only a week ago she’d thought that missing her chance to enter the adjoining region was a crushing setback. Now, it seemed, the threats were on a far larger scale. But she was at a costume party, with party duties, and the stars must wait.

Minerva had chosen the zoo for the site of their annual equinox party. The roars of beasts mixed with the laughter of the guests, and torches lit the darkness among the animal cages. Zoos were dreadful places, filled with suffering, demented animals. She’d spoken against it at the board, to no avail. As the newest member of the company, she couldn’t expect to win every time. But she’d like to win once.

Helice stalked the grounds, on the lookout for board members to chat up, and for staffers to charm. Over there was Lamar Gelde in a ten-gallon hat, conducting an earnest conversation with Marie Antoinette. She’d find him later, when he’d had too much champagne; maybe that would soften him a little. She’d handled Lamar badly so far. Charm. Work on the charm. She’d been born with little, she knew, and hadn’t yet learned to make up the deficit.