Bright of the Sky (59 page)

“Yes.”

She stood, her arm pinioned in his gentle grip. But when she tried to move, his fingers tightened. They stood like this a while, forged together. She lifted her face to the bright, to gauge the time. Moving into Twilight Ebb. But it was a guess. Of all the Entire’s inhabitants, only she and Johanna had no instinctive sense of bright-time.

Over thousands of days Sydney had come to think of herself as Chalin. Cixi was her mother. The Rose held nothing that Sydney loved anymore. She hardly remembered the Rose. She was of the Entire. But today, standing on this plain, she knew she belonged to neither one place nor the other. This must be why she felt so untethered from the world, and from herself.

Mo Ti handed her the water flask. She refused it. She was starting to get used to not needing water.

She tried freeing her arm again. “Let me go, Mo Ti.”

Surprisingly, he did. But he put something new in her hands. It was a knife.

“Dying of thirst is a hard way to go,” he said. “I recommend the knife. With a nice deep cut, it will all be over quickly. Very efficient. Unless you’re afraid of the knife.”

Ugly words from one she’d thought was a friend. Resentment surged. “Have I ever been afraid of a knife?”

“No. But that was during fights, when your blood is worked up, and you throw away caution. It’s not true courage.”

How could he say such things to her? It was a bitter betrayal, to call her a coward, to push a weapon on her and urge her to use it on herself. Had he been waiting for a moment of weakness to take control of the herd? Was it all a ruse, this friendship?

Stripping off the scabbard, she stood, pointing the knife in his direction. “Do you mean to kill me, Mo Ti?”

“Mo Ti doesn’t care.”

She gripped the knife, trembling with anger. “Don’t care? All your high-sounding plans, and urging me on? To raise the kingdom?” Her fury built, and she advanced on him.

“Mo Ti doesn’t care for a young girl who quits.”

“I’m not quitting!” She was just walking on the steppe, and it was no crime to walk. Why was he against her?

His soft voice came to her, maddeningly smug. “Standing alone here under the bright, no food or water. Yes, quitting.” He added. “Like Akay-Wat, like a gutless Hirrin.”

She hurled herself at him, lunging with the knife, knowing that she would miss, but hoping to shut him up.

Missing him, she spun around, and charged at him again.

This time he caught her, and grabbing her wrist, shook the knife free from her hand. In a fury, Sydney struck him in the chest. His huge arms came around her, leaving little room for her flailing arms, but she attempted to beat on his torso. She twisted back and forth to free herself while pummeling him over and over again. Eventually her hands lost their feeling.

When she was quiet at last, Mo Ti sank to his knees, taking her with him. Then, kneeling in his embrace, she began to cry.

He put his hand on the back of her head and held her close to his chest, and her face grew so hot with crying, she thought it must be swelling up. She grew weak with crying. Mo Ti didn’t move, except to caress the back of her head.

Then, for a long time, she was silent, dazed. By the feel of the bright on her skin, it must have fallen into Deep Ebb.

Her mind shut off, and perhaps she slept.

After a time she became aware that she was lying in Mo Ti’s arms, stretched out on the ground. He dabbed at her face with his kerchief and the remains of the water.

Stirring, she sat up. Mo Ti was there; he would always be there. More loyal than her former family. More important. “I will rejoin the herd, Mo Ti. But first take me, love me.”

He dried her face with his kerchief. “Mo Ti loves you,” he said. “But that is not how he serves you.”

“It’s best for us to be bonded, Mo Ti. After this.”

“My lady. Mo Ti is a eunuch.”

She touched his face. The bulging cheekbones, the heavy brow. Truly life was cruel. Yet wonderful as well. Then she clung to him again.

At last she said, “We will walk back, now.”

“Yes, Lady.”

And they walked back to camp, taking a long time to get there, because, of course, she wasn’t going to enter the barracks yard being carried.

The next day, Akay-Wat left the encampment, riding out on Gevka just as the bright began its waxing phase. Before she left, the Hirrin had knelt by Sydney’s bunk, waking her and whispering, “Someday I am coming home, yes.” It was becoming impossible for Akay-Wat to imagine living without this woman of the Rose. She hoped her assignment of preaching free bond would soon be over.

Stirring, Sydney sat up. “Yes. Then you’ll be my high officer.”

“High officer?” Akay-Wat said, stupefied.

“Who has been braver?”

Akay-Wat never thought she would hear this word applied to herself, much less from Sydney. She felt her long throat tighten with emotion. “This Hirrin is still afraid, mistress.”

“So am I, Akay-Wat. Just don’t tell anyone.”

Akay-Wat thought of her parents, long dead in the war at Ahnenhoon, and thought how she had at last earned the right to be their progeny. She wished that they were alive to see this day.

Now came the next brave thing: leaving. She would miss Sydney, who now had become queen of the sway.
Queen
was perhaps too strong a word. But Sydney was a great personage, and someday, Akay-Wat thought, she would have the whole of the roamlands under her dominion. The key was free bond, of course.

The Hirrin pressed her mobile lips into Sydney’s hand. Then she walked out of barracks, her newly fashioned leg striking the floor and adding a new rhythm to her gait.

Later, when Sydney at last climbed from her bed, she found a skinned vole carcass at her feet. A present from Takko. She’d smelled him nearby, when he deposited his present there. She was willing to use Puss’s real name as long as he behaved.

Taking the carcass to the fire pit, she roasted it to a crackling finish.

Around the fire pit, her barracks-mates prepared their meals, talking of yesterday’s rides and of free bond. A few mounts stood next to their riders, sharing morning thoughts. Their bodies and faces were familiar to Sydney: Mo Ti the Chalin, Adikar the Ysli, Takko the Laroo, and many others, including the mounts themselves. Each one was outrageous of shape and of culture, stinking for lack of bathing, and wary of leadership. But as they talked and shared tidbits of food, it seemed to Sydney that they were linked in a new way, in a shared life—connected by their mounts to each other.

Feng was absent from their midst, having slunk off to another herd. And now Akay-Wat was gone, an emissary to Ulrud’s herd, to tell her story of how she had lost her leg to the old bonds and now rode better and freer.

Late in the ebb, Mo Ti woke Sydney. “A ship,” he said.

She rose, shoving her feet into her boots. Riod’s thoughts came to her from the yard, alarmed. Accompanying Mo Ti outside, she tried to breathe normally, but her chest seemed too small to draw air. Above her the bright stretched over the roamlands, and a trail marked the passage where a ship had cleaved the sky. That trail came from the heartland.

Mo Ti said, “I have talked with this new arrival, my lady. It is your surgeon.”

“Surgeon?” Her surgeon was to arrive by caravan, not brightship.

Riod urged her to mount. His thoughts were chaotic, but his instinct was to have Sydney on his back.

Mo Ti spoke to both of them. “The Tarig have sent one of their own to do the surgery.”

A breeze blew across Sydney’s face, chasing away old hopes. She let it cool her.

Then she murmured, “It was a Tarig who blinded me.” She climbed onto Riod’s back. “We will send this mantis lord away.” Mo Ti had her by the ankle, and Sydney jerked her foot, wrestling to free herself. “I won’t let them touch me.”

“But you must.”

Now Riod turned his displeasure on Mo Ti, and it was a standoff of wills.

Mo Ti said, “Let them think they have your gratitude. Take their gift. You need it to win the herds, to make Riod strong. To raise the kingdom.”

Mo Ti’s hand was still on her foot as she sat astride Riod. He was waiting for her to say what she would do—not just today, this awful moment, but forever.

“What do I want, Mo Ti?” she almost cried to him.

“Sight. Power. Revenge.”

She listened to the summation as Riod stomped beneath her, his hide trembling with agitation.

“You know me, Mo Ti.”

“Yes, Lady.”

She took a breath, drawing it deep. Then: “Yes, if I have to, I’ll take their help.” Riod shook his head in agitation, twisting the horns on his neck back and forth. But at last he moved forward, bearing her through the camp, past the stirring herd, out onto the steppe where the brightship waited—a new kind of ship, it seemed to Sydney, different-looking than the one that had brought her here so long ago. So the Tarig were replenishing their fleet. Mo Ti followed, mounted on Distanir.

If the fiend’s hand falters, I will kill him
, Riod sent.

“Yes, beloved,” she said. “Do so.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

A
PRIL IN PORTLAND WAS COLD THIS YEAR, scoured with wind gusting off the river. Lamar Gelde tucked his face into his neck scarf as much as possible and trudged across the parking lot to Minerva Building 919. His reserved parking place was long gone, of course.

Damn the wind. His face felt like it might fall off. An expensive misfortune if so, since he’d spent liberally on mitochondrial enhancements. For skin tone. For turkey neck, and drooping eyelids, and the other little insults of age. His face hurt as he entered the lobby. The docs said he’d be supersensitive to temperature changes.

Walking into the high-security area, he held up his hand, catching the beam of the tideflow, using the day pass Stefan Polich had stranded to him.

It must have been a top-drawer security pass, because people were practically bowing to him as he went by. He looked around, wishing for a motorized conveyance, but Minerva wasn’t built for the feeble.

Entering the savant warehouse, he silvered his palm for directions to Rob Quinn’s cubicle. It was almost like the old days, when his access to the beam was absolute. But as he passed the workstations of the minor savant-tenders, no one recognized him.

When he finally found Rob, the man was flexing his fingers, using digit commands instead of a keyboard. Fancy. But he looked like a man trying to touch a real life, instead of the one he had.

Lamar coughed. Rob turned around.

“Spare a minute?”

Rob nodded. “Didn’t expect to see
you
,” he said by way of greeting for his father’s old friend. Rob stood and waved for Lamar to follow him out of the warren and then down a corridor.

Lamar’s legs protested. “Jesus, Rob, I’ve already walked my limit.”

Rob stopped dead. “Okay, fine, let’s talk here.” He looked resentful. Well, he’d heard about Stefan’s threats and blackmail. No doubt he didn’t like being a pawn. But truth to tell, Rob
was
a pawn, and always would be. He was a forty-year-old savant tender. Couldn’t get much more marginal than that.

“What’s wrong with your face?” Rob asked, squinting at him.

“Had a little procedure.”
Wrong with my face?
Took twenty years off him, his surgeon said. Pushing away his annoyance, Lamar said, “It’s Titus. He’s back.”

Rob’s mouth compressed, holding in his emotions. “Back?”

“Yes. He’s been through hell, but he’ll live.”

“How much hell?”

Lamar shrugged. “You’ll have to ask him.”

“I mean, how bad is he?”

“He’s weak, dehydrated, disoriented, and bleeding from internal capillaries. He’s in shock, and he might lose a couple of toes from frostbite.”

“Christ.”

“Not quite, but he’ll work that angle, I’m sure.” Lamar smiled, hoping that Rob would join him.

He didn’t. Rob shook his head, trying to track this news. “It’s only been ten days.”

A flock of techs were thumping down the hall, and Lamar waited for them to pass out of earshot. “Time is different in the adjoining region. Remember? And he’s been adrift in space for several days.”

“Where?”

“Look, I need to sit down.” He looked around for a chair, but the corridor was as clear as a twenty-year-old’s arteries.

Rob led him a few steps down the corridor, where they entered a storeroom containing surplus furniture, including a couple of executive chairs.

Lamar sighed as he got off his feet. He fished in a pocket for a PopUp tab, swallowed it, trusting that it would give him enough kick to get through the conversation.

He began: “Two days ago we got a call they’d found him.” Actually, Stefan Polich got the call, and would never have brought Lamar into this if he could have helped it. “Your brother was wrapped in a body capsule like a worm in a cocoon. Orbiting some moon of Uranus—Cressida, if you want the specifics. Cressida’s nothing more than a radio relay station, so it took a while to spot him, even though his capsule was emitting regular pulses of light. Normally, even that would have taken weeks to notice, but the intensity of this light was special. More like supercharged lightning or something.”

His body or the chair creaked as he changed positions. “He was unconscious, and the capsule was losing heat. If they hadn’t found him when they did, he’d be dead. An EoSap mining vessel was extracting methane down on Uranus, and pulled him in. They were afraid to open the capsule, because of how it looked. But thank God they did.”

“What did it look like?”

“That’s just the thing. It wasn’t really like an escape capsule. It was like a transparent sarcophagus, in his exact shape. The material—and they’ve got no idea what material it is—replicated his shape, down to the features on his face. By rights, they should have left it for the experts. But they were a bunch of middies, and they were curious. And one of them said they saw his eyelids flutter, so they opened it. Saved his life.”

“Someone had to,” Rob said with a bite in the tone. “Where is he now?”

“On board a Minerva in-system ship. They picked him up from the mining vessel yesterday. He insists on seeing you before he’ll talk to anyone.” He cut a glance at Rob. “He wants to be sure you’re all right.” The whole blackmail business made him sick. Threatening Rob and then young Mateo. It never would have happened in the old days.