A World Too Near (13 page)

“Here, you are not a mother.”

She had gone too far, but still, the rebuke galled. “What am I, then?”

“Lady of blue silks. Mistress of the forest. This lord’s companion.”

He had failed to say,
Lord Inweer’s enemy.
Then, too, perhaps he had forgotten that she was Titus Quinn’s wife. If she was. Perhaps, when Titus came back, she would find out.

Of the three prisoners of the Rose, only Titus had escaped. Then, some three hundred days ago he had returned, infiltrated the Ascendancy, and fled after a destructive rampage that deprived the lords of one of the ruling five and all their brightships. She could only hope that he had fled in that manner because of an urgent need to go home; she let herself believe it was because her message had been received. This warm coal of hope, faint as it was, she fanned to brightness. Perhaps the Rose could never overcome the lords, but the only chance they had was to be conscious of the Tarig threat.

She didn’t begrudge that Titus would have gone to his daughter last time, and not to his wife. No doubt he thought Johanna was dead. That was the story given out, so that Titus Quinn would never have reason to come snooping here, at the end of the longest primacy in the lobed universe.

But once Lord Inweer had unwisely told Johanna of the purpose of the engine, Johanna resolved to change all that. Such a stunning error on Inweer’s part. She remembered how they had lain together for hours, the lord being inexhaustible. At last he lay back.

“You withhold from me, Johanna.”

She was astonished that he thought this. “Do I?” She was prepared to prove otherwise, but he rose, donning a long, sleeveless robe.

“You are not completely present when we lie thus. Ah?” He turned to look at her with a quiet, startling intensity.

“My lord, not true . . .”

“Yes, true.” He strode away to the veranda facing the storm wall. When he turned back to her, he stood in the door frame, backlit by the quilted, dark walls of the Entire.

“There can be no going home, Johanna. There can be no Rose.”

Thus he had begun telling her the reason that she would never return to Earth. Because it would not long exist. When he had finished, he left her lying in his bed, feeling like a mote in the eye of a storm.

She never knew if, afterward, he was more satisfied with their intimacy. She hardly cared. Her thoughts were now on leading Titus to Ahnenhoon.

First, she had prevailed upon a friend to bring a redstone message to the Magisterium and hide it in the library there. The scholar Kang had been her original interrogator, first at the Ascendancy, and then at Ahnenhoon. Finally relieved of duties, Kang had been allowed to leave; she did so with Johanna’s redstone. She never knew if Kang succeeded. But, trusting one day Titus would find her warning, Johanna began looking for a vulnerable spot to direct the Rose strike when it came. To this end, she needed an agent who could uncover and comprehend the layout of the containment chamber of the Repel. If Johanna could have found a good excuse to befriend Morhab, or had the mechanical knowledge to profit from that association, she would have pursued the plans herself. But, needing to be removed from suspicion, Johanna waited for an opportunity to bind a suitable spy to her service.

This opportunity came with the arrival in Ahnenhoon of the engineering steward Gao. He was a minor worker, but one with a problem. Assigned to Ahnenhoon, a lifetime posting, Gao had been chosen for his lack of family ties, among other criteria. However, once relocated to the Repel, word reached him that his lover in his home sway had been pregnant when he left, and now he had a son whom he’d never seen, and many regrets for not having married the mother.

Pretending to be touched by a situation so similar to her own, Johanna persuaded Lord Inweer to bring the woman and child to Ahnenhoon, incurring the fierce gratitude of Gao, who now had love in his life, and a son.

Even then, Gao might not have been suitable for her purposes. But their friendship developed, following those pathways that no one can predict. He listened to her story, stricken that she had given him family joys that she would never again have. Reasonable or not, he considered her a queen in bondage. His duty, as he saw it, was to ease her heart, at whatever risk to himself. That she had to send him into such peril made her sick with worry. Even so, it was worth it. After hundreds of days of Gao’s patient investigation, she had learned a great deal about Ahnenhoon, its byways and its heart.

So that when Titus came, she could guide the knife.

From a balcony, Johanna, Pai, and SuMing looked down on the throng below, gathered to welcome a dignitary and—since he was related to a traitor—to observe him. Assembled in such finery as the austere Ahnenhoon had to offer were some two hundred fortress functionaries, visiting military officers, servants, legates, and retainers. It wasn’t a large enough crowd to take command of the assembly hall, suited more for parade muster than a party, with its burnished metallic floor smooth and vast as a glacier. But it was an event no one who could be spared from duties would miss.

Far across the hall, Lord Inweer was just arriving with Lady Enwepe. As the only Tarig in the hall, indeed in Ahnenhoon, they commanded attention, although they wore no formal costume. It would have been gilding the lily to put a gown on Enwepe, certainly. More delicate than Inweer, her bronze features were flawless. Her long skirt, a metal mesh, fell nearly to the floor, straight and without ornament. A simple vest left her well-muscled arms exposed. It was the same garment that Inweer wore. Exquisite and stark, there was nothing about the Tarig
of the fleshy, dissolute, or fading. Johanna had learned to find them beautiful.

“Here is the chief engineer,” Pai said. Pai had been leaning on the railing, surveying the crowd below, while SuMing stood back from the edge of the balcony.

There, cutting through the eddies of guests, was Morhab, bedecked and booming, reclining in a sling borne by four solid Jout attendants, their petaled skin forming a natural armor. When he looked up to see her, Johanna bowed, but he hadn’t forgotten her recent slight, and turned away. It was worrisome to have Morhab against her, but better to have him focus his irritation on her than on one of his engineers. Johanna continued to take stock of the hall. Somewhere among that crowd was Gao, watching for his chance to come near her, to report whether that day in Morhab’s quarters he had at last learned enough to crack the maze.

Preconsul Zai Gan, the guest of this reception, had arrived in the hall, and approached the lord and lady. Even at this distance, Johanna saw how large he was, as squat as Inweer was lean. It intrigued her that this man represented merely two degrees of separation from her husband. Zai Gan was the half brother of Yulin, who was the master who had helped her husband adopt his Chalin disguise. For a moment she felt that relation to Titus, and it shook her.

Yulin had fled, gone somewhere in the realm to evade Tarig justice. In his place, Zai Gan was installed as the new master of the Chalin sway. This call at Ahnenhoon was one of several visits of state that he undertook to express his loyalty, distancing himself from his brother. To most sentients, it was unimaginable why Yulin had betrayed the gracious lords. But Johanna could well imagine. By sheer force of personality Titus could persuade you to enter hell, create a stir, and depart again. So Yulin committed treason, setting himself against the lords, and against his half brother. Changes were coming to the Entire. The first vow, to withhold the knowledge of the Entire from the Rose, was irrevocably broken. Titus had broken it, as had everyone who helped him.

Johanna turned to her ladies, both dressed for the occasion. SuMing wore common red, her hair cut to chin level, just covering the scar in back, where her scalp had separated from her skull. Pai wore soft yellow billowing pants and a quilted jacket. “Now then,” Johanna said, “to the hall.”

She had considered leaving SuMing behind in the apartments this ebb as a penalty for stealing her tally of days. Over time this tally had become a calendar, of the sort unknown in the Entire. By now SuMing had no doubt arranged for Lord Inweer to see it. SuMing hardly dared give it to him directly, but ways could be devised. The calendar only marked the passage of days, but it suggested that Johanna wished not to be with her lord. Of course he knew where she wished to be. But it was no doubt displeasing to see the prisoner’s scratch marks on the wall.

She walked that impossible line.
If I cannot be home, then let me be with you.
Such emotional demarcations hardly mattered now, if Titus came. But the tally of days might put her lord on guard, might suggest that Johanna expected to go home. Then Inweer would watch for Titus. He must not watch.

From behind came a deep voice. Turning, Johanna saw the guest of honor approaching with his aides. Zai Gan was on course for a table laid out with food, but he had detoured to stand before her. In his elaborate padded jacket, he looked like a bear in circus clothes. His amber eyes were shrewd as he studied her.

She bowed, just enough.

“A pleasure, Mistress Johanna,” Zai Gan said. “One heard that you would be on display.” This brought a rustle of amusement from his retainers.

“I fear we are both on display, Master Zai Gan.” She looked around her to emphasize that he, too, was a center of attention, and not in a good way. “The stares of underlings are so vexing, don’t you think?”

A shadow crossed Zai Gan’s face as he realized she was sparring with him. “One must be careful to give no cause for staring, Mistress Johanna.”

She sighed. “Well, one cannot help one’s relatives, of course. And that is vexing, too.”

Zai Gan hissed, “A brother is more easily set aside than a husband of the Rose.”

She must let him win; he was a guest. “Wisely said, Master Zai Gan. I must rely on Lord Inweer’s favor, as always.”

Pai was tugging at her arm. She let herself be led to a refreshment table as Zai Gan—surrounded by his aides, who were not now so jolly as before— watched her retreat.

“Mistress,” Pai scolded. Pai had perfected this scandalized carping, and it had become a game between them.

“Hush, Pai,” Johanna snapped back. “He is a pompous fool.”

“A powerful fool,” SuMing murmured with a hint of reproach.

Johanna set out into the crowd again, vowing to use better judgment. The façade of normalcy was her great asset right now.

She spied Gao at last, sipping from a cup of spirits and looking lost. “Here is Gao,” she said to SuMing. “Shall I ask after his young boy?”

“He is only a servant, mistress.” SuMing was following Johanna, but Pai expertly diverted her, engaging her in gossip while Johanna moved in on Gao. He bowed low.

“Engineer Gao,” Johanna said. “How is your good wife? Does she still spin her tapestries?”

Gao was a poor dissembler, but he recognized their code word for the map of the Repel, and mumbled, “She progresses. The design emerges.”

Johanna laughed. “I fear she will never finish such a painstaking work.”

“Soon, mistress. Perhaps it is good enough even now.”

As SuMing approached, Johanna backed away. “You are a good husband, Gao, to care about women’s hobbies.”

Her spirits lifted.
The design emerges
, he had said.
Perhaps good enough, even
now.
Johanna didn’t wait for him to respond, but swept off through the crowd as though in search of higher conversation.

The guests eyed the woman in blue, always a curiosity. A darkling. A favorite of Lord Inweer.

No one watched more carefully than Morhab. Surreptitiously, he tracked Johanna as she flitted from one courtier to the next, bowing to every petty lordling, smiling at the traitor Zai Gan, even bestowing her charms on the inconsequential Gao. His gut churned, seeing her debase herself for others, but not for him. Until that day in the gathering yard, he had smelled her awe—secretions that flowed from her body, that maddened him. If she had touched him, just once—not that foolish clench of his hands . . . if she had touched his person just once in admiration, he could have cherished it for a thousand days.

At times Morhab had imagined more from the lady in blue: some ecstatic commingling that the gracious lord might even condone, if it brought the lady happiness.

But that day in the darkened hallway of the centrum, he smelled the same churnings as before, and this time he knew them to signify disgust. For his person. As though he were some unwashed clerk or godman. He was fastidious about his grooming, his paints, and his ointments, yet she found him objectionable. It cut him deeply, more each time he laid eyes on her and imagined what she must think of him. Why then, had she come to him that day? He would give very much to know.

For now he was content to have purloined her record of days. Let the gracious lord see her for what she was: a vicious, lying, and stinking wand of flesh, unworthy of the lord’s care. If Inweer cast her out, Morhab would be waiting.

The party formed its knots and whorls of conversation, changing randomly, joined now and then by the major players: Inweer, Enwepe, Zai Gan, and several military officers.

Johanna mixed too, feeling like a foreign bee in the hive, aware that she had set in motion events that would change everything.
The design emerges.
If so, then things would utterly change. Strangely, it wasn’t her own death she most dreaded. It was facing Lord Inweer just before he carried out his justice.

And there her lord stood, a short distance away, in conversation with a Chalin man whom
Johanna didn’t know.

As she approached, Inweer said, “Ah Johanna, you have attended after all.” A high-ranking soldier nodded to her. “Meet our general, among those who serve us.”

“Ci Dehai, mistress,” the general said. His fine brocaded jacket fought with a profoundly mutilated face.

She rose from a deep bow. “My high pleasure, Excellency.” She cut a glance at Inweer. “And why wouldn’t I attend this splendid gathering?”

Inweer looked at her with such a penetrating gaze that she had to force herself to breathe.