Bright of the Sky (54 page)

But her eyes commanded him to sit, and now he was afraid not to. He sat next to her, trying to stay calm.

“What name did you say?” She still gazed at the boat.

He was sick, his heart beating erratically. “Nothing,” he said.

The bright was growing hot, monstrous.

“Something,” she said. “It is something.”

What could she possibly know? He was rattled for nothing. He would brazen it through, get her mind on something else. “But Small Girl likes the boat?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“But Sydney doesn’t.”

She was not going to leave it. He looked at her, and she returned his gaze, putting the toy aside on the ledge. “You are not the Chalin man.”

He swallowed. She knew.

“I am,” he said.

“You do not go against what we say, though.”

“And what do you say, Small Girl?”

Her black eyes looked into his. “Your small girl is Sydney. We know who you are.” She stood, at eye level to him, as he sat. “Hnnn?” The expression was predatory.

She knew. It was all coming down. The false names, the grand plans.

He shook his head. He looked at the Tarig child. He had to go home. Because they were burning the Rose.

Small Girl put her hand under his chin, and peered at his face. “Titus, then,” she said.

“No,” he whispered.

“Come back. Ah?”

“No,” he said again.

It was all on his shoulders, the terrible plans of the Tarig. If Small Girl betrayed him, everyone would die. All the worlds. All the Earth.

He would knock her out; it had to be done.

Small Girl caught the intention in his eyes, and turned to run. He caught her tunic, dragging her backward. She clawed at him, a hot downstroke that gashed his cheek but missed his eyes. She cried out.

Then he struck her, trying to stun her, so it could be the end of their struggle. But she wouldn’t give up, and she shrieked, her cry reverberating in the garden. He covered her mouth, lest she call to her Tarig parents, and holding her in an iron grasp, he immobilized her. As she thrashed with ferocious strength, his grip began to slip.

Renewing his hold, he cast about for what to do. There must be something. He could take her to an empty room—the mansions were full of empty rooms—and tie her up while he escaped.

An arm came free of his hold and smashed against his temple, knocking him backward for a moment. She bolted from his arms, screeching, “Titus Quinn, Titus Quinn.” Diving for her, he pinned her to the ground; placing his hand on the back of her head, he forced her face into the ground to stop her screams.

Any moment now the Tarig would come.

The Rose. He must go back and tell them. That the Earth would die. They would kill it, and every other Earth. . . . And he knew then, with awful clarity, that Small Girl had to die, before she raised the alarm and prevented him from leaving.

He pulled Small Girl into the pond, keeping his hand over her mouth. Oh God, he prayed. Oh, Johanna, how can there be a God? A good one, a just one? No, it was a Miserable God.

Small Girl twisted in his arms like a steel coil, but he managed to push her down in the waist-high water. He sobbed for this small creature, even as he submerged her head. She came up once, shrieking, “Titus!” But pushing her down again, he held her there. He looked down on himself from some mental vantage point, seeing a monster drowning a child.

Then, to his horror, from deep inside the palace, he thought he heard shouts. He thought he heard someone shout his name.

Small Girl had ceased struggling. He lurched away from her body. She floated, facedown, her tunic turning purple as it became saturated.

He crawled from the pond, backing away. Then he turned and ran from the garden.

On the other side of the gate, he nearly collided with Anzi. She looked like a person from another life. The one where he had not murdered a child.

“Anzi,” he breathed. “Run.”

Anzi looked over his shoulder, toward the pond, where the child floated.

He looked too, hoping that it was some terrible vision, not an irrevocable event. But the Tarig child floated there in the water. “I killed her,” he whispered.

Anzi was dragging him down the narrow path. How had she come here, and where could they go? Quinn pulled her into a side street, deserted for now. They stopped, looking wildly around for pursuit.

Anzi murmured, “I tried to stop you from coming here. Too late.”

“I killed her,” Quinn said. He looked at Anzi, hardly seeing her. “She knew me.” Her voice came back to him:
Titus, then.

“I killed her.”

“Yes,” Anzi said. “You did. And now we’re going to leave.”

“Leave?” He heard the words, but not the sense.

“The pillars,” she said. “Hurry.” She tugged at him, trying to drag him down the pathway.

Instead, he pulled her down the side street. “This way, Anzi.”

Her face was frantic. “To where?”

The pillars were too obvious. He ran for the mansion he knew well: Lady Chiron’s. He knew the way, although his mind was nearly empty with shock. He had murdered Small Girl. Part of his mind kept saying that it couldn’t have happened, couldn’t . . .

They climbed a long, winding staircase higher into the palatine hill.

In the distance, he heard voices. Looking back, he saw, on a high terrace, several Tarig. They ran across, and disappeared.

“Running,” Quinn said, his voice low. Anzi followed his gaze, and became very still. Tarig didn’t run. With their long legs, they were superbly equipped for it, but he had never seen a Tarig run.

The fourth level of the Magisterium was in chaos. Cho heard from every side:
Titus Quinn, Quinn, Quinn. Small Girl, dead in the pond.
Functionaries scattered from their posts, running, as though they had duties of a martial nature. They didn’t, no more than did Cho, who sat at his stone well, bewildered, sweating.

The Chalin man sent by Master Yulin. Oh, by the everlasting bright, it had been Titus Quinn. He had never imagined it. All knew the famous face, but the man must have undergone surgeries.

He bent over his computational well, sick in his gut. His nose hit a nub on the stone well and the screen flashed at him, and it made him sit upright and gather himself with more dignity.

Dai Shen had never claimed to be on the Radiant Path. He had said his goal was worthy. Was that goal to connect the worlds, to convey the knowledge of the Entire to the Rose? Surely, if Titus Quinn had gone home that first time, he had already conveyed that knowledge. Ah, but if he hadn’t, then he was escaping to do so now.

Cho wondered: Was this forbidden converse between worlds forbidden for a good reason? Cho had never questioned the Three Vows.
Which breaking
is to die. . . .

Well, he thought, I have already broken the First Vow, by helping Dai Shen.

Filled with anxiety, he stumbled to his feet and fled the warren of stewards. He made his way upward toward the city, pushing past crowds of frantic clerks, stewards, and legates. He knew that he would help Dai Shen one more time, if he could. But how?

And why? Indeed why? His life would be forfeit if he did. But when he thought of his life, he knew that he had hardly lived at all. Not compared to Dai Shen, nor even compared to Ji Anzi, or any of those beings who lived in the Great Without. Possibly each one of them had lived more fully than any steward of the Great Within.

Today that would change.

He hurried to the nearest pillar, the third pillar. There, a capsule had left a short time ago for the sea. He nubbed the screen to find who had been aboard, and added Dai Shen to the list.

He stood back from his work, startled and a little saddened. He had altered a record, inserting an inaccuracy. The great pandect of the Magis-terium had been defiled. Good.

Backing away, he turned and gazed at the palatine hill, thinking of Small Girl, wondering why such a personage would have killed a child. Surely he hadn’t. There were so few Tarig children, surely they must mourn every lost one.

He put some distance between himself and the pillar. Perhaps he had created enough confusion that Dai Shen might have a chance to leave the city.

It was such a slim chance. About as slim as a steward of ten thousand days suddenly wearing the icon of the golden carp; about as slim as a career steward finally taking a stand on something.

He thought of his new icon, the golden carp. Let me be worthy of such a glorious symbol, he prayed. And may God not look at me.

Cixi gripped the railing of her open porch, her eyes darting over the cityscape.

Behind her, Zai Gan stood, breathing hard, having come to her salon on a dead run.

Titus Quinn, she thought. By the bright, he stood in front of my very face. The perfidious father and betrayer.

She swirled on Zai Gan, spitting at him, “Run to the fourth pillar, that is closest to Inweer’s mansion. Find him. Stop him.”

Zai Gan bowed and dashed for the doors.

“Preconsul,” she barked at him before he could disappear. When he stopped to await her, she said, “If you fail to apprehend him, you will wear the emblem of a beku.”

“Yes, Lady.” He rushed from the room, a great engine of a man. Titus Quinn mustn’t escape to brag that he’d fooled them all. He must not escape to bring back to the withered Rose whatever prize he had snatched from them. She was sure there
was
a prize. If he thought it would be Sydney, he was addled indeed.

Something had gone wrong with his plans. And she meant to complete his ruin.

Quinn continued to haul Anzi up the winding staircase into the heart of the palatine hill. She protested, begging him to run for the pillars. Ignoring her protests, he pulled her up the stairs. “They’ll be looking for us down there,” he said, panting by now. “No one will think we’d go into the mansions.”

“Because it is without merit!”

They came to a widening in the staircase, one that looked out over the city. Below, the plazas and pedestrian ways were still deserted. But something was odd about it. The ground was moving.

As a ripple moved through one of the plazas, Quinn said, “Birds.” He pivoted away, resuming his rush up the stairs.

Anzi allowed herself to be led, complaining, “The longer we delay leaving, the worse our chances.”

“We don’t have a chance anymore. The birds, Anzi. They aren’t birds. They’re drones, used for cleaning.”

It came to him, this knowledge. As though his memories were a deck of cards that up to now had been randomly shuffled, but in his extremity, were dealing him a playable hand. The one he would need to survive.

The flutter of wings thrummed in the distance. “The Tarig have brought them all out at once. Millions of them.”

Anzi looked wild with alarm. She began murmuring a prayer: “Do not look at me, do not see me, do not note my small life. Do not look at me, do not see me . . .”

They had come to a palace where all the side doors and accesses were well known to him. “In here,” he said. They ducked through a carved door tucked under an arching gate.

They stood in a semidark, narrow passageway. On either side were panes of glass bulging out to form curved sides. The floor was translucent, but unlit. It was good that this hall was dark. Since the Tarig hated the dark, it meant the palace was empty just now.

At his side Anzi whispered, “What is this place?”

“Lady Chiron’s dwelling.”

“She will not help you against her own people!”

He started down the passageway, but she grabbed his arm to make him listen. “Do not give up, Dai Shen. There is always a chance. Even when I thought I would take my own life in despair, I thought there was a chance you might survive Tarig captivity. And you did. You must never give up.”

“I haven’t. There’s a way, Anzi—a way out. The brightships. We’ll steal one.” A spike of elation carved through him. He would oppose them in a way they could not have imagined. He told her, “It will be your crowning theft, Anzi.”

She repeated flatly, “A brightship . . .”

At the end of the glass tunnel, they came to a round, open doorway, and stepped into a hall cluttered with statues, tall vases, and elaborate chairs. The bright streamed in from a ceiling peppered with skylights.

He chose a path, snaking through Chiron’s collections of things copied from other worlds. This whole dwelling—and all the others—were tasteless museums, stuffed with other worlds’ cultural and domestic items. The lady was wealthy beyond imagining. But she had no taste. The Tarig, for all their knowledge, created no crafts of their own, no art. Perhaps that is why they had never known what to make of Johanna.

Behind, he heard the outside door open, then shut. Footsteps clicked along the glass floor of the tube. Quinn took Anzi’s arm and sprinted with her toward a door, one of several. They ducked through it, into a small chamber with translucent walls. A moment of disorientation caused him to stagger. It had been a long time since he’d taken this shortcut that would instantly deliver them to the second story of the mansion.

Passing through the elevator chamber door, they ran down a winding corridor, deserted. Quinn tried to get his bearings. Chiron liked to reprogram the layout of her dwelling, and he felt lost now, as the corridor became a ramp heading steeply up. Rooms glimpsed on either side of the corridor seemed oversized, as though they were potential rooms, not all of which could fit in the twisting spaces defined by the hall.

“What is this place?” Anzi whispered.

“They live like this,” he answered.
Experimentally
, he wanted to say. But it was no time for discussions. He led her quickly onward, but thought they had lost their pursuer for the moment.

All he needed were a few unchanged features and he would know his way to the brightship, the back way, where he had played at changes of his own.

Down a side ramp he glimpsed a door he recognized, an elaborate door that once had closed upon his trysts with the lady.

Entering, they found themselves in an expansive room with a ceiling so high it seemed to place them in a well. In the center of the room was a platform gilded by a shaft of light falling from above. Quinn walked over to it, to Chiron’s bed. Putting his hand into the shaft of light, he felt nothing of the high pleasure that the stream of light seemed to bestow on those who embraced here. He pitied the man who had wanted it. Even pleasure was a cage, if there was too much of it.