Bright of the Sky (53 page)

“Yes. But I can keep your secrets.” Now Quinn had revealed that he knew Oventroe to be a traitor. So it was all on the line now, or most of it.

“Converse, ah?” The lord had been staring at him, and now looked back to the carp, which seemed uneasy to be the focus of his attention, and darted away. “An interesting proposition. But breaking the First Vow, and breaking is to die.” They had reverted to Lucent, perhaps not to severely test the lord’s capabilities. And to avoid having a dark language overheard.

Quinn was conscious that his interview could be cut off at any moment, and so he plunged on: “The correlates, Bright Lord. Let’s by God open this door. Allow us to bargain for passage through the All to distant points in the Rose. Once humans come, there’ll be an exchange between our races, between our worlds. If that’s what you want, help me.”

“An open door, ah?” Oventroe’s look became haunted. The lord had a great passion, and its intensity was palpable. Quinn felt it clearly.

Oventroe was saying, “All beings know this lord as one who hates the Rose.”

Quinn nodded. “But it’s not true, is it?”

“You do not question a lord.”

Quinn had thought that they might be beyond the usual deference games. But even in bed with Chiron, he had given her deference. It never changed, never.

Now that it was all out, Quinn felt calmer. They could take him, or kill him. Eventually, there was nothing worse they could do. He saw the carp and the city through jaded eyes. It was just a place. It was just a life. In the end, you did what you had to do. He looked into Oventroe’s face, waiting for an answer.

It came, and struck hard. “No,” Oventroe said. “Why would we give you such powers?”

“Because I am the messenger from the Rose.”

Oventroe looked at him with something like yearning. “Yes. Aren’t you. Their messenger.” He took a step closer, forcing Quinn to look up at him at a steeper angle. The lord’s eyes darted over his face, like a scanner, devouring what he was seeing.

Quinn had time to think whether to plead with the lord about the engine at Ahnenhoon, but if he told that astonishing secret, if Quinn revealed that
he
knew, would he die right now at this lord’s feet? Did Oventroe know this secret himself? Yes, of course he must. Would he fear that Quinn would come with an army to defeat the Tarig? Even a dissenter among the Tarig might well fear that outcome.

“Messenger of the Rose,” Oventroe mused. “But you have nothing to give one such as this lord.” He paused. “The Rose is sweet, but without powers. All power is with the five.”

The five high lords, whose company Oventroe needed to join.

“Thus,” the lord continued, “as to the door, no, it is too much to give. For no advantage.”

The Tarig turned away again, and Quinn rushed to drive home his plea. “But how will the Rose ever touch the Entire? Help me, Lord Oventroe.”

The voice came stabbing at him, removing hope, setting barriers: “They do not touch. The Rose never touches us.”

“Help me to change that.” Quinn waited for the answer on which everything depended.

Then the lord said, “Perhaps, in time. In time we may be moved to help you.”

But I’m leaving
, Quinn wanted to shout. “There isn’t time,” he said. “Decide now.” Oventroe wanted a piece of him, but Quinn couldn’t stay.

“There is always enough time, Titus Quinn. You should have learned that by now.”

“How will I find you? I’ll be in a far primacy—or farther.”

“On the Nigh, seek the navitar Jesid. Petition him to find us.”

“What river?” Each primacy had its river, Quinn knew.

“They are all one,” Oventroe said, and then he walked away.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Heaven gave me three husbands, and
twenty beku. But of names, only one.

—from
The Twelve Wisdoms

V
ERY LATE INTO THE EBB, QUINN STILL HAD NOT SLEPT. He wished that Anzi were here. Her best disguise was to lose herself among the clerks for now, but he would be glad to see her, to mend whatever had come between them, and to tell her of his meeting with Oventroe. There was hope, he wanted to tell her . . . about opening a door between their worlds. Perhaps that door itself might forestall annihilation in some way, if the two cultures could talk to each other. But no, the Entire
must
burn the Rose.

They’re going to feed off the Rose
, Johanna had said.
The energy the storm walls
take is beyond imagining.
But what if Johanna was wrong? She wasn’t wrong; an end in fire had been predicted by the navitar. Johanna was at the center of things, Ghoris had said. Only one world could live. So now Quinn would make sure it was the Rose. Johanna had pleaded,
You have to tell them what this
place is, this terrible world.
And was it terrible? There were Anzi and Bei and Ci Dehai and Cho—people who had helped him and cared what he became.

He remembered his promise to Bei: that humans wouldn’t come to settle. No, first they would come with arms, he thought bitterly. But hadn’t they the right to defend themselves from Tarig aggression?

To delay bringing the warning home was unthinkable, and yet he was thinking of it. Having left Sydney behind once before, how could he do so again? He lay there, forming plans and abandoning them.

A knock at his door startled him. Opening it, he found Brahariar standing before him. She bowed. “Forgive the ebb intrusion, Excellency.”

Glancing at a satchel at her feet, she said, “I am leaving. My mission is complete, thanks to Steward Cho.”

“A worthy man. I hope your petition was successful, then.”

“It was.” Her skin fluttered, the petals closing and opening in pleasure. “The shining consul Shi Zu ruled in my favor.”

“Well done, Brahariar. Your waiting is over.”

“Excellency,” she said, “you took pains on my behalf. I hope it did no harm to your own mission, but I fear that it did.” Looking up and down the corridor and finding it empty, she said, “The great legate Min Fe came looking here, while you were gone.”

“The great legate has disliked me since I met him. Not your fault.”

“I am relieved,” Brahariar said. She picked up her satchel. “I wish to thank you, but have nothing to give you.”

“Nothing is needed. Many days to you, Brahariar.”

As the Jout still made no immediate move to depart, Quinn said, and then wished that he hadn’t: “What was your mission, if it pleases you to say?”

Her mouth elongated in a Jout smile. “Oh, yes it does please me, Excellency. I pleaded for the strangulation death of one who might have saved my father from falling from a God’s Needle.”

Quinn waited, confused.

“He was the last person to see my father alive. He should have prevented it.”

“He pushed your father?”

“No. Still, someone must be responsible. It is good that Shi Zu agreed with me. I will watch the strangulation with satisfaction. Then I can be at peace.” She bowed again, and departed.

Quinn watched her bulky form recede down the corridor. He remembered what he had once known about the Jout: that they carried a grudge longer than a beku could go without water. The conversation left him feeling uneasy and complicit.

He sat on his bed, staring at the opposite wall, his mind skittering from one thought to another. Anzi’s voice echoed:
If you die or are captured . . . who
will bring the warning to the Rose?

Not that it was dangerous for him to enter the Inyx sway. He had his endorsements, his identity. But escaping with her was the difficulty . . . the alarms raised, and the sudden disclosure of who he was—because who else but Titus Quinn would come for Sydney Quinn?

He put his head in his hands and felt a blackness descend. In his whole life he had never come to such despair. Sitting on his bed and staring at the wall, he let go of thinking and gave himself up to dark thoughts. After a long while he slept.

And dreamed.

Ghoris the navitar stood on the dais, her head and torso protruding through the membrane above her chair. She wrestled with the lightning bolts of the binds, grabbing them and throwing them at the storm wall, trying to pierce those dark folds. But the storm wall only absorbed the lightning, growing stronger and darker. Quinn stood on the roof of the navitar’s cabin, watching as Ghoris struggled. But now it was not with lightning that she wrestled, but with Johanna.

Fire, oh fire
, Ghoris thundered, giving Johanna a dreadful blow that took away half her face. Her face is ruined, Quinn thought in deep remorse, and as the two women grappled he thought that Johanna looked like Ci Dehai, and fought as well. Finally, with a strong shove at Johanna, Ghoris cried out,
Choose, choose!
Regaining her footing, Johanna stood very still, saying with reproach, “I already have.” Then Johanna turned to look at Quinn. He’d thought himself invisible, but she saw him. And kept gazing at him, her robes fluttering in the storm of the walls. A knocking sound came from below. Someone trying to tell him to get off the roof.

He jerked awake. Someone was knocking on his door. Stumbling to answer it, he found Shi Zu standing before him, flanked by legates.

“Ah. Here you are,” the consul said. In his finery, Shi Zu looked like a male peacock amid a flock of plain females. He brought out a scroll from his tunic. By its golden spindle, Quinn knew that it was from Cixi.

“Your approvals, and official clarity to be presented to the Inyx,” he said. “By heaven, a fine accomplishment, Dai Shen of Xi.”

Quinn accepted the spindle, holding it in numb silence.

Shi Zu said, “It would have been a suitable undertaking for my retinue and me, but many duties hinder such an indulgence. Do it justice then, soldier of Ahnenhoon.” Nodding at Quinn’s mumbled thanks, the consul left, accompanied by his clerks.

Quinn read the calligraphy, confirming its essence. A redstone rattled inside the spindle cap, a data stone the Inyx didn’t know how to use. He stared at the scroll. But now it was useless to him. He must go home. Without her. It wasn’t about Sydney’s life anymore; it was about everyone’s life.
Everything we love
, Johanna had said,
all to burn.

He would rather have died than chosen. But he chose. He felt his heart cooling into something more steady and basic than before: a logical, mechanical engine. He could keep going; he must—and all the reasons why were clear and stone cold.

A vision of Sydney came to mind—his grown daughter. How long was it, he wondered, before she gave up hoping I would come for her? Probably long ago. And now, in the event, she was right. He wasn’t coming for her. He had to turn away from the look on her face.

Now he and Anzi would leave this place. A few loose ends to wrap up, and then they would leave.

He tucked the scroll into his satchel lying near the bed. Then he took out the toy boat and walked out of the Magisterium into the city.

With few sentients abroad, the Tarig city was eerily quiet as Early Day renewed the cycle of the bright. Looking at the sky, Quinn thought how profligate, how wanton, was that fire. He didn’t know what kind of fire it was, except a devouring one. The beauties that he’d seen in its waxing and waning moods had now grown somber. He couldn’t help but mourn its loss, and the loss of his attraction to it. What was the Entire, but an inverted flower that sucked dry the real world? And, unwilling to think that thought for long, he let himself believe there was yet a way to resolve all problems. He was tired; he knew that. He would sleep soon, and then depart.

A flock of ground birds sped about the plazas, pecking at specks of food. He couldn’t remember if they were real animals or merely vacuums. Crossing a canal, he walked across a nearly deserted plaza, toward the palatine hill. The city stretched out on all sides, this circular city in the heart of a circular ocean, in the center of the great arms of the primacies—the whole of it shaped like a starfish. And he, at its center. The wires holding it all together plunged to their destinies here.

Perhaps, to avoid his awful decision, he should have told Oventroe about the engine at Ahnenhoon. The lord might have been an ally, if he loved the Rose, or was fascinated by it. But if Oventroe already knew, then he was as bad as the rest of them, and no friend to the Rose. And no friend to Titus Quinn, to withhold the correlates—although who would give an enemy the key to such a door? Now that the Rose was an enemy of the Entire.

So finding the correlates was another reason to come back. He would come back, of course. That thought kept him going.

He stood in front of the walled garden, with its arched entrance, and cool interior beckoning. It looked the same as before, but empty of children and toys.

He entered the garden, brushing past the lush climbing vine. No one was in sight. Just as well. At the pond, he set the boat in the water. It rocked in the gentle current of the pond. Not as fine a boat as the child had burned, but his parting gift.

Turning to go, he saw Small Girl standing at the garden entrance.

She showed no surprise at finding him here. “The Chalin man,” she said.

He bowed. She was up early, and dressed formally, as before.

“Fixing,” she pronounced, looking at the pond. She ran to the water’s edge and stretched out her hand for the boat, but it had drifted too far.

Quinn snagged the boat from the water and gave it to her. She smiled, and it lifted his spirits. There remained small pleasures. He was grateful for them.

The bright was warm on his head and hands. Sitting next to Small Girl, he felt exhausted and spent. He could almost have lain down next to the wall and slept. They sat together as she examined the boat, turning it over and over. Finally she said, “Thank you.”

He nodded. “Yes. Of course. A small thing.”

“A fixed thing.”

“Yes, Sydney, fixed.”

She continued to gaze at the boat.

But Quinn’s heart had stopped. What had he said? Dreamlike, he looked around him. He had said his daughter’s name. Slowly, he stood up. Time to leave.

“The Chalin man sits down.”

He was frozen, watching her. She wouldn’t remember the word, that name, to repeat it to her parents.