Bright of the Sky (26 page)

He circled around her. “Wait for you to miss, then go for the unprotected side.” She was so fixated on teaching him that she couldn’t learn from him, learn that she had to stop withholding information.

She swiped at him. “Don’t focus on the weapon; look at the chest to detect the next move. Find structures to use as weapons. Draw me toward a wall.”

At her next lunge, he chopped down on her forearm, and the knife fell.

He kicked it away. “I need every scrap of intelligence I can get—and you conveniently forget to mention the Gonds’ habit of going over. Everyone knows. Even the godman knows.”

She stopped, letting her hands fall to her sides. “So now I have lied to you?”

“Not lied, but neglected the truth.”

Her face was hard and resentful. “My pattern, then? Neglecting the truth?”

A short distance away, the Hirrin watched from her perch, taking a new interest in their prolonged match.

“You tell me.”

“Yes, I’ll tell you, Dai Shen. I’ll tell you how foolish it was for you to go down in the train cars and talk to godmen and then, even the Gond. Everyone within six train cars knows that you went, and that you sat with a godman. So you are extremely reckless, all for the sake of proving that I don’t tell you all I should, though we have only been studying together for twenty days.”

He took a calming breath. “I need to get information any place I can. And I will.”

“Did you ever think that in taking extreme measures—for no reason— you jeopardize the young girl who is your daughter?”

A silence descended between them as he struggled with his temper.

Anzi went on: “If your death means nothing to you, then think of her.”

He snapped. Lunging at her, he took her by surprise, and was able to yank her arm while delivering a punch to her shoulder. At the last moment he pulled back, so that he missed her, but he drove his fist into the half-wall of their coach. He left a dent the shape of his fist, and thought he might have broken a few fingers, but fortunately the material had given slightly. He cradled his hand for a moment, looking away from her.

He flexed his fingers as the adrenaline subsided. “I’m sorry I almost hurt you.”

She gathered herself up. “You didn’t hurt me.”

“Still.”

“I deserve to be hurt.”

The Hirrin spectator turned away, as though embarrassed for his lapse. “No,” Quinn said. “I don’t think you do.” The fist-dent in the wall was losing definition, flattening out.

He offered her a cup of water, and she drank with him.

“Dai Shen,” she said. “I don’t think you know me yet, though I believe I know you.”

He sat down on the bench, using a towel to wipe down. Drained of tension, he looked at her for a long moment. A scrim of sweat covered her face, and her color was high. The effect was like a very subtle pink marble that now cooled again to white.

“I could tell you,” she said, “that I will defend you with my life. But that’s easy to say, isn’t it? My uncle has told me to defend you, but I would in any case. You depend on me here. If I fail you, I don’t want to live.” She put a hand up to stop his protest. “But you don’t trust me yet.”

In the distance a smudge at the horizon registered the presence of the great storm wall, as they called the edges of the Entire. It would come to dominate the veldt in the days to come, he knew.

She sat next to him, watching the veldt dim. The sky, having lost its high glitter, now fell quickly into Last of Day. A lavender blush colored her face, the roof of the train, and the veldt. In the distance, the storm wall crouched dark and solid-looking, and to one side a wisp of the sky, an axis, fell to the plain like a dust devil. The train carried them onward, swaying and humming. They had been traveling for eight days, and in all that time they had not passed one other inhabited area. The Entire, Anzi had said, was mostly empty. This emptiness, combined with the vast distances, forced a calm on activities, as though there was time enough for all things.

“Tell me about yourself, Anzi,” he said. “I want to know.”

Her story came then, of her parents, who were both soldiers and had died at Ahnenhoon when she was very young. She was one of many nieces, children, and hangers-on in Yulin’s court, where his general benevolence was not enough to fill the gap. Yulin had indulged her wish to be a scholar. He apprenticed her to Vingde, who thought her scholarship sloppy. She was looking at the Rose, but she pursued little more than personal histories. Vingde thought her prospects dim, but gave up trying to restrain her. She was, after all, Yulin’s niece.

“Do you still wish to be a scholar of Earth?” Quinn asked.

“Once I thought so. But scholars pursue their endless facts. I wished to
really
know. The way you live, on the Earth.”

“Why?”

She paused. “I am one of those who thinks the Rose is a lost place. A place lost to the Chalin, that we once had, in the sense that humans are the template for the Chalin people. And being a lost place, or a place denied to us, I feel its pull.”

She went on: “Most sentients say the Tarig improved all Rose templates, and the Entire is superior in every way. But to many—to me—you are the revered ancestors, created from evolving matter. We are only pale copies.”

He looked at her in the fading light. “It isn’t better in the Rose, you know.”

“I think that it is.” She turned to him. “Don’t you sometimes feel that the Entire is better? Because you are denied this place?”

He was stunned by her observation. Yes. He did feel that sometimes.

“I’m hungry to know about the Rose, Dai Shen. I always have been. All the glimpses I’ve ever seen through the veil, when I served Vingde my teacher—each one only increased my hunger.”

The train hummed beneath them, and they were silent for a time. Then she said, “Tell me. About the Rose.”

He had nearly forgotten his own world. It was far away, in all respects.

She prompted him: “Here is a thing we wonder about. The night. What is the night, Dai Shen? In your world, how does it seem?”

Such an obvious thing. But of course, to her, it was a bizarre occurrence. He tried to imagine nighttime from her perspective. “Everything changes,” he said. “The world seems to sleep, and colors drain away. The sky is black except for the small spots that are stars.”

“But still, is it dark half of the time?”

He nodded. And the thought came to him: The Tarig are afraid of the dark. So they created a world without it.

Anzi continued, “Do you stare at the traveling sun? When it disappears, are you amazed?”

“No. It seems as it should be. And the sun is too searing to look at.”

“And do many go blind, doing so?”

“No one goes blind. No one looks.” He thought this odd, but the truth. Looking up at the bright, he realized that here was the most profound difference between their worlds, this river of suns. Johanna could find no rest under its relentless light.

“I would look,” Anzi was saying. “To see a star, it would be worth it. And mountains,” Anzi went on. “You have mountains in a row.”

“Yes, mountain ranges.”

“I once saw this, through the veil. And never forgot such a sight.”

In the next car, the Hirrin princess went down from her roof perch, bowing at them, a courtesy Anzi ignored this time, judging that she was too friendly and even friends could be an unwitting danger.

The train slowed, approaching a village that looked to be little more than a dozen rounded huts. Still, Quinn would have liked to debark and see what was there—as perhaps the Hirrin princess planned to do.

But he would debark in any case, in just a few hours. Tomorrow would bring them to the minoral, where they would leave the train and journey by pack beast to Bei’s reach at the far tip of the minoral.

The minorals were small geographic features compared with the stupendous primacies. Like minor branches, they grew from one side of a primacy only, since the other side of the primacy was bounded by the River Nigh. At the ends of the minorals were the tips, or reaches, where scholars studied the Rose. From the minorals sprang still smaller branches: the nascences, with storm walls so close together they were unstable and could close up without warning. As bizarre and impossible as all this surely was, nevertheless he half remembered it and found it strangely normal.

The day fell into Shadow Ebb, when the sky simmered instead of boiled, and the wellings of the sky rose into brilliance and sank into folds of pewter. Although it was time for sleep, he and Anzi remained seated, neither one eager to end the day.

She asked, looking out, “Tell me what is love in your world, Dai Shen.”

“It’s the same as here, Anzi.”

“No, not the same, I’m sure. Stronger, yes?”

“Doesn’t Yulin have a favorite wife, and love her strongly?”

Anzi smiled. “He isn’t consumed with love for Suzong.” Looking out, she continued: “This strong affection is a thing I remember from my days of study. In your world, I saw people burn with desire for each other, and sacrifice everything.” From somewhere underneath, someone laughed loudly, a jarring sound.

“Hasn’t anyone sought you, Anzi? No one who wished to love you?” He thought that unlikely, despite her faults.

The soft purr of the train filled the silence. “No.”

“You are young yet,” he said.

She shrugged. “Nine thousand days.”

Calculating, he came up with about twenty-five, in Earth years.

She regarded him a moment. “I know there is a price for how you live— with intensity. I think, in the All, we can’t live this way. We’re too long on the Radiant Path, and in the end, we love as much as you, but in our many days, it’s stretched thinner.”

He thought about this remarkable summation, and for a moment he envied her that metered-out life. Stretched more thinly, both the good and evil of it. Perhaps if, like Caiji of a hundred thousand days, he lived long enough, Sydney’s memory—and Johanna’s—would grow more muted. Ci Dehai had urged him to look forward. So had Caitlin.
It’s time.
Her words came back to him.
Time to find someone else.
There were moments when he had almost been ready; times when he desired Caitlin herself, the wife of his brother, mistaking her kindness for something else. Which was one good reason he kept apart from Rob’s family.

Anzi was looking down onto the station platform, where the train had now halted.

Turning to look, Quinn saw four men carrying a burden—a hammock, in which reclined a Gond, just leaving the train. Bending over to speak to the Gond was the plump godman Quinn had met.

Anzi pushed Quinn back out of sight, but the godman had already seen him, and raised his hand in a wave, or in a gesture for the Gond to look up.

Quinn whispered, “What are they doing together?”

“Sharing information,” Anzi whispered, her face frozen in a noncommittal blandness. “Did I not tell you that all godmen are rogues, and sell what they know?”

It was an hour before the Gond’s load of live meat was unloaded from the train—a time during which Quinn and Anzi sat in dread of a knock on their door from the train magister. None came. Perhaps the godman—and the Gond—shared only gossip, not alarms. But when the train finally got under way again, neither he nor Anzi was inclined to sleep.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Saddle an Inyx and it will ride you.

—a saying

T
WO THINGS SYDNEY GUARDED MOST CAREFULLY
. The first was her journal, where she recorded her life; the second was the window in the stable beside which her bunk staked out a berth.

The journal was to record the wrongs that were done, for later reckoning. The window was for the pleasure of the light on her skin. Everyone wanted a window. But only a few, like Sydney, were willing to fight for them.

She sat hunched up by her window, punching the tiny holes in the paper, writing about Glovid’s death and her new mount. Riod was a fine racer, but in accepting him, Sydney’s status had fallen. Riod had a bad reputation. He had long refused war service, along with a few rogue mounts that he led on sorties to harass other Inyx herds, creating ill will and incurring Priov’s displeasure. Making matters worse, he sniffed around Priov’s mares, insulting the old chief. Given this poor match with Riod, she might draw trouble. In the stable, sometimes trouble was bloody.

She called her living quarters a stable, because she liked the irony of the riders living there. The mounts, of course, needed no shelter, preferring openness, always. So their riders slept and lived in a big, drafty barracks, created by the sweat of their own labor and poorly built, often leaking during a heavy dew.

“Click, click, Sydney. I hear you click click with the pin in the paper.” From the next bunk came Akay-Wat’s breathless voice.

Sydney gripped her needle and punched.

“Akay-Wat hears the clicks, yes. You tell your book about Akay-Wat, why don’t you?” She chuckled, that wheezing strangle that seemed to close her windpipe.

“You’re in here,” Sydney said.

Akay-Wat gasped. “Oh yes?” She clapped her four limbs. “Pleased, then.”

The rider wasn’t the worst neighbor in the barracks by any means, though she talked too much. Akay-Wat was a Hirrin sentient, one of the best riders, despite looking like she could be ridden herself. She had a sturdy back and long legs with hoofed feet that could hug an Inyx’s sides, holding fast. The mounts liked Hirrin, because they never wanted saddles. Her face was small compared to her body, a mere knob on the end of a long neck.

Akay-Wat was always trying to curry favor with Sydney, despite how mean Sydney had to be just to make her shut up so she could get some sleep at ebb-time. When Sydney wasn’t around, Akay-Wat protected Sydney’s things: her book, her bed, her blanket. So she was loyal. And stupid as spike grass.

“Click, click,” Akay-Wat crooned.

You couldn’t answer her or she would never shut up. Sydney punched with her needle, forming her ideograms that no one else could read because she had made them up. Particularly the Inyx couldn’t read them, because they couldn’t feel such subtle bumps. The diary was invisible to them, just like their world was to her. That was fair.