Bright of the Sky (57 page)

As he sat waiting, it seemed that the air around him had thickened. He watched it turn cloudy, become tangible. “Help me,” he repeated. The breath behind the words created vacuoles in the thick air.

He spoke again. His voice had become deeper, unrecognizable. “The brightships can go home.”

He waited. Sweating, his face was slick inside the jellied air.

Anzi had come to his side. “What’s wrong?”

“I have to ask for the ship’s help, Anzi. I can’t do it alone. I told you this.”

She looked like she was standing in a league of water—like the interpreter who had died in Yulin’s lake.

“I’m sorry,” he said to her. “For everything.”

“No, I’m sorry.” She knelt at his side. Her arms were around his legs, as though she needed to hold on or she would float away.

He reached out his hand and erased the next frame.

Instantly, the navigational display moved into the air in front of him, in a heads-up display, freed from the bulkhead. Brilliant hues flashed, representing the frames. They flashed on, off, clamoring for his attention.

The ship was telling him which frames to remove.

“Take me to the minoral at Su Bei’s reach,” he said. Through the clotted air, bubbles issued from his nose. “Then I’ll release the frames. And all the other ship frames.”

The navigation display stopped flashing. Then one frame appeared as a hot, red line.

One more frame
, was the implication.

Quinn thought hard. If this was a poker game, he had no idea what cards the ship held. Or even if the ship was in the game.

He touched the display, releasing the next frame.

Deep in his skull, a needle probe of light found a path. He heard a garbled sound of condensed words, unintelligible.

Another pattern in the display began flashing. The ship was treating him like a child: pick the pretty colored lines, it was telling him. He hesitated, as his mind filled with static, the cries of a muzzled ship.

His hand hovered over the lines. Then he released the next frame.

The ship walls blurred, and pustules appeared there, swelling convex then sinking, as though in rhythm with blood or breath. The chair melted into the floor, and Quinn sprawled down beside Anzi. Beneath him the deck undulated, but whether it was real or a visual disorientation, he couldn’t tell. Anzi’s face twisted in impossible contortions. They clung together in the middle of the cabin.

He heard a voice.
Daishenquinntitus
, it said.

Quinn looked at Anzi. She nodded. Yes, she could hear it, too.

His pulse pounded into the thick air; his sweat streamed into the gel, making rivulets. “We help each other,” he said out loud.

Free of boundaries, Daishenquinntitus. Free us.

His heart caught on a snag. Those beings, caged all these years. He wanted to open the gate for them. But not yet.

“Without the frames, you’ll kill us.”

Frames kill us. Free of lords. Pain of the form. We die of the pain of this form.

It sent him a sample. A spike of pain slanted into his head, and he thrashed forward.

“Quinn!” Anzi whispered.

The pain had vanished, but the brightship had made its point. If it could send pain like that into him, it wouldn’t be long before the ship had all it wanted.

Now the display showed a searing blue pattern. Before the ship could compel him, he said, “I want to go home, like you do. I am in pain here, also.”

Daishenquinntitus in pain.

“Yes. Help me. Take me to the nascence.” He pictured in his mind where it was, although he had only the vaguest idea. He turned to Anzi. “Think of the geography, Anzi. Think of where Bei’s reach is.”

Meanwhile, the ship was clamoring for freedom. The blue frame flashed on, flashed off.

“The nascence,” Quinn insisted.

Daishenquinntitus free in the nascence.

“Yes,” he told it. Had they agreed?

He thought so. A different display came up, a dizzyingly complex pattern. But the pattern was clear to him, as the ship-being spoke to him. It was a schematic for the other ships, four of them. A fifth schematic remained off to one side, representing the ship he and Anzi were on.

“Anzi,” he said. “Hold on.” He couldn’t think of what else to say. They were gambling everything.

Quinn touched the pattern, moving his fingertips along the paths. He canceled each frame in turn.

Soon the ship icons began melting away. No longer framed, no longer coerced.

He thought he felt a sigh move through the ship. The other ships were free. Now they would choose their own destination, and that would be toward home.
God not looking at you
, Quinn thought, wishing them well, wishing them the blessings of obscurity.

The floor tilted. The ship had begun to climb.

Anzi murmured, “No one can live in the bright.”

“They lied,” he said, and then wished it were not the last thing he had said to her.

A leaping white foam reached down and swallowed them as the ship plunged into the bright.

He awoke to utter silence. The ship was down. He’d passed out, but how long had he been here, blacked out in the ship? Anzi was gone. The odor of powerful biologicals nearly overwhelmed his senses.

A wan light spilled from deeper in the ship. Even in the semidark, he saw that the former ship cabin was wobbling between forms. He was no longer in a brightship, but in the deformation of the fragmental. Half submerged in the walls were tubes pulsing with a flow of bright matter, humming like a struck tuning fork.

He went in search of Anzi, making his way down the former cabin, now a ribbed tunnel that thrashed to and fro, each twist evoking a muffled twang.

Ahead, he saw her walking toward him, but half in, half out of the tunnel walls.

He hurried to her and grasped her outstretched hand, then pulled. Stepping into his tunnel, she looked disheveled but unhurt, her white clerk’s tunic stained yellow-brown, and her hair askew.

“The ship . . . ,” she began.

“Reshaping,” he said.

The rear of the cavity was thin enough to see through it, as though that portion of the ship was already abandoned. Through the thin walls they could see a blue-black storm raging. They were close to the storm wall. In the distance, lightning stabbed laterally, almost lacing the two storm walls together, where they converged at the end of the nascence.

He spoke aloud to the ship. “Is this the right place?”

There was no answer. He put his hand on the tunnel side, attempting to call up the navigational display, but the tunnel wall contracted from his touch.

“Brightship,” he said. “Where are we?” When no answer came, he wondered if the ship, in deforming, had now lost the ability to communicate.

With a sucking sound, a tiny hole appeared in the floor nearby.

It grew. Below the hole, a short drop away, was solid ground, darkened to gray by the storm walls.

If this wasn’t the right nascence near the right minoral, they wouldn’t have another chance. It was time to go.

Quinn put his hand on Anzi’s arm. “Are you ready?” And more to the point, “Are you sure, Anzi?”

Her clear, amber eyes were steady, looking into his. “Yes.”

He took a deep breath and told her something she wasn’t going to like. “I’m staying on board. This is how I’m going home. On the ship.”

The look on her face was incredulous as she surveyed the chaotic surroundings.

The ship had put the idea into his mind. As Quinn had lain unconscious on the deck, the being had said,
You will pass through to the home place in this
conveyance, this unframed.

It was a risk. He didn’t know how long the being would cohere as a vehicle. As well, he didn’t know if the ship-being could survive the passage, or live in the Rose, in space. But this idea appealed far more than waiting at Bei’s reach for a safe moment to cross over. The Tarig might easily arrive long before that moment.

Anzi’s gaze hardened into amber stone. “This ship will unravel. It could kill you.”

“At least it’ll be quick.” He said it lightly, but she didn’t smile.

Stubbornly, she held his gaze. The ship shuddered, and a moan came needling in from some unseen throat.

The hole in the floor was now a yard wide, rippling at the edges. Ozone-charged air flooded in, refreshing the stench of the interior.

It was becoming unpredictably hard to say good-bye. They had awoken suddenly, and now she must simply jump down, and leave.

Again the moan from far away.

Into his mind came the clear voice:
Kill the Tarig.

It was an odd piece of advice at such a time, but Quinn thought that were he the ship, revenge on the lords might well be his first free thought. And it was a relief that the being could still communicate. They would need to, once in the Rose.

“Anzi,” he said.

Her expression softened as she gave up on argument. “Look for me at Ahnenhoon,” she said, barely audible.

Then she crouched beside the hole. And jumped down.

The ship was propped up on its jointed struts, allowing her to exit through the underbelly. There was something he’d meant to do or say, when the time came. He’d forgotten what. It was all happening too fast, and he was half-stupid from the transit of the bright.

Outside the ship he glimpsed a motion as Anzi jumped. It was the glinting view of a long bronze leg.

“Anzi!” he shouted. She was looking up at him instead of protecting herself. He scrambled out of the egress hole, dropping to the ground and drawing his knife.

They stood on a splintered plain, between glowering storm walls that tossed lances of light back and forth. A tall, segmented bronze body stood fifteen yards away. The clothes and some of the skin had ripped from his body. The Tarig’s blood was red. It didn’t seem right.

Hadenth, it must be he. But how?

Although his lips were gone, Hadenth opened his mouth. Out came a sound of a body gone mad. A low moan, issuing from what was left of his throat.

Knife drawn, Anzi was moving off to one side, to spread their attack.

Quinn moved away from the ship to avoid becoming trapped there. As he did so, Hadenth lifted his arm. Out came a talon, clicking into place.

The storm walls leaned in toward each other, squeezing the sky into a lightning-filled crack. The air was crushed into a stillness.

He tried to judge Hadenth’s strength. One human and one Chalin against a Tarig—that was no contest. But a Tarig who had ridden outside the ship through the bright? If the creature was half-dead, they had a chance.

Hadenth watched him impassively with one eye, the other eye tracking Anzi. But he hadn’t moved yet. Perhaps he couldn’t move.

It was in that frozen moment that Quinn noticed a strange formation on top of the ship. It looked like Lord Ghinamid, sleeping on his bier. But that made no sense.

Quinn edged in a circular pattern around Hadenth, goading him to move. As he did so, he looked once more at the ship. Extruding from the hull was a mold in the shape of a Tarig. The side was split, where Hadenth had emerged. The ship had encapsulated the lord.
Kill the Tarig
, the ship had said. Yet the ship itself may have been incapable of such an act.

Again, the awful sound trickled from Hadenth’s lips. The creature stepped forward, his long legs jerking him toward Quinn, his hand still outstretched. His reach was long.

“Come to us,” Hadenth said, as blood welled up with each word. “No death. You will stay now. Alive, ah?”

As assurance, the talon snapped back in, but the hand remained out.

“Yes, I stay alive. You die, though.” Quinn came at him, lunging with the Going Over blade. Hadenth stepped into his path, making no attempt to evade. His arm swept out, thrusting into Quinn’s shoulder. The jolting blow sent Quinn to his knees.

That clarified the issue of Hadenth’s strength.

Anzi was moving in even as Quinn was falling, bringing her blade up into Hadenth’s back, where it stuck, thrust upward toward whatever organ lay where his heart should be. At the impact, Hadenth leaped high, turning to strike Anzi in the chest with his foot.

She fell, blood flying from her neck; then she lay on the sand. Red soaked into the white of her tunic. Quinn fought with his emotions to focus, focus, on Hadenth.

The lord crouched next to Anzi. The burnished bronze of his skin was blistered black, especially on his arms, where he might have tried to cover his face when the bright scalded him. But there were huge scabs where his skin had already begun healing. Hadenth was growing in strength with every moment. But now he crouched, panting.

Seizing the moment, Quinn came at Hadenth, howling, forgetting strategies, lessons, and warnings. Hadenth was rising up to meet him, but too slowly, as Quinn slashed his knife in a lightning motion across Hadenth’s eyes. It wasn’t a firm cut, but it creased the lord’s nose and cheek with red. The Tarig rose to his full seven feet, pivoting toward his assailant, sending out a circle of blood as he did so. Snapping his foot into Quinn’s path, Hadenth knocked Quinn’s feet out from under him, sending him sprawling.

Even with his mouth full of dust, Quinn managed to keep the grip on his knife. But now he felt Hadenth approach, felt his footfalls on the sand, next to his ear.

Quinn rolled over, yanking his knees toward his chest, and, seeing an opening in the creature’s defenses, sent his feet crashing into Hadenth’s groin, where his phallus had curled into a tight spiral. The blow buckled Hadenth, bringing his upper body forward so that he lost his balance and crashed heavily.

That was when Quinn realized that Hadenth didn’t know how to fight. Why should he? When had anyone but Titus Quinn ever assaulted a Tarig?

He collected his thoughts.
When overmatched
, Ci Dehai had said,
be content
with small harms. Small adds up to large.

He began circling Hadenth, forcing him to turn and turn. The creature was off balance, pivoting on one foot. Quinn lunged, striking for the hands. Swift as a sparrow, he darted his arm out, and back, and before Hadenth understood that he was wounded, his left hand suffered a deep cut. Turning as he swept by, Quinn slid his knife along Hadenth’s back.