A World Too Near (14 page)

“There is,” he said, “a Rose custom of counting days to a certain number, and then starting over again, hnn?”

She fixed her smile in place. “Yes, a minor thing. It’s called a calendar.”

Ci Dehai nodded. “A practice of the dark universe.” Whether he was one who tolerated or disapproved such things, his half face made it impossible to read.

Inweer continued, “So today is a day you might have spent alone. Without duties. A day you count as recognizing your birth.”

And so it was. And designated as such on the pilfered calendar.

“A foolish custom, my lord.”

With a dangerous calm, Inweer said, “We never knew you to be foolish.”

She must remember that he despised courtiers’ manners.

Ci Dehai mused, “The same days rotate, coming again and again. A strange concept; but one does not begrudge a sway its particulars.”

Inweer turned to him. “But you are not so tolerant of the Paion, ah?”

The general offered a half grin in response. “Bright Lord, their days come not again if they meet my army.” He cut a glance at Johanna, a gaze that pierced her social façade for a moment. She wondered if it was her fate to draw the interest of ugly men. Morhab, she noticed, hovered nearby, keeping her in view.

Johanna tried to slip away, but Lord Inweer wouldn’t permit it, instead dismissing Ci Dehai and keeping a firm grasp of Johanna’s arm.

“With me,” he said, and walked her through the crowd as sentients bowed along their path. By now Pai and SuMing were left behind, surmising that the lord wanted no audience for what he would say.

For privacy, the lord might have stood anywhere and commanded a wide circle of space, but he led her toward the edge of the room. To her surprise, he took her through a doorway and then down the corridor to a way door, an access portal used only by the lords.

“Your guests, my lord . . . ,” she protested.

“Will wait for us,” he finished.

They entered the small compartment, and Inweer spoke his destination. “The forest.” Standing there for a brief moment, the thrum of the distant lobed engine rumbled faintly in the stone around her. Then the door brightened and dissolved, allowing them to step through to her preserve.

A subdued light fell over them. A wrong light. The grounds and their greenery took on blotches of shade, deepening the colors, cooling them.

What blight had come to her preserve? Johanna was filled with dread.

But then she looked up.

A swath of blue sky spilled across the heavens. It was like a cooling hand on her forehead, as though she had wakened from a feverish dream. Gone was the curdling, silver light of that terrible river of the sky. In its place was translucent blue air. With a star burning overhead.

She fell to her knees, falling into her new shadow. “My lord,” she rasped, words sticking in her throat. She looked up, and the sun was too intense to look at, but it was the perfect golden white of Sol—she could tell by the quality of light on her hands. She closed her eyes, and let the light fall on her lifted face.

Inweer folded his long body and sat in the grass by her side. “If the colors are in error, we will change them.”

She dared a glance at him. “Change nothing.”

He almost smiled. “So you command?”

“No. Please. Change nothing, my lord.”

They sat beside each other, viewing this display of perfect verisimilitude.

“Does the sun move across the sky?” Johanna asked. “And set?”

“It does,” Inweer said. He watched her closely. “You will have your night, ah?”

She closed her eyes, thinking of the glory of sleeping under her trees in the true dark. She resolved to sleep thus, tomorrow night. Tonight, she would come to the lord’s chamber, to give her thanks truly.

At last she asked, “Why, my lord?”

He stood, and took her hands to raise her up with him. “A gift to acknowledge the return of the day of your birth.”

Her birthday. That was the lesson he took from her calendar, not her faithlessness, her truculence. “Thank you,” she whispered. “It pleases me very much.” And it did. Underneath, a bit of rot: the knowledge that she had betrayed him. Today, and every day for so long.

He watched her thoughtfully. “We would see Johanna happy.”

“I am happy.” There was a part of her that was, that he would honor her so. And another part that couldn’t bear it.

Lady Enwepe appeared from a notch in the forest, and stood looking at the odd sky. She joined them on the small green sward where they stood. She noted Johanna’s wet face, but ignored the tears. Enwepe knew what they were, having no doubt seen them in her Chalin subjects. Perhaps she was embarrassed for Johanna, or more likely, indifferent.

“A pretty toy,” the lady said gazing upward. “Let fat Zai Gan behold this, Lord, and know our power.”

Inweer said, sweetening his gift even more, “Only if Johanna wishes. This is her forest.”

CHAPTER TEN

What are the Paion?
No one knows.
Where do they live?
No one goes.
How do they look?
No one sees.
Why do they fight?
Themselves to please!

—a child’s rhyme

R
ACING ALONG THE SPINE OF THE HILL, the Inyx mount sent shards of rock scattering beneath his great hooves. Sydney leaned into Riod’s neck, gripping his rear horns, thinking—and trusting he would step into her mind to hear—
faster, faster, my heart.
As he put on a burst of speed, she turned around, waving in wild joy to Mo Ti. Her Chalin lieutenant hailed her in turn, riding Distanir with grace despite his size.

To one side the storm wall loomed high like a canyon palisade. The wall was far enough away not to perturb the atmosphere in this region of hills nor show more than the largest spikes of lightning, but Sydney thought it the fairest sight she had ever seen. For days she had judged each new sight as the best, changing her mind as new wonders presented themselves: the golden steppe stretching to the ends of the universe; her beloved mount’s face, framed by the double row of curving horns; the bright overhead, with its endless rounds of waxing and ebbing; Mo Ti’s hands that she sometimes held in her own, wondering how someone so large and gnarled could be so gentle.

Blind for four thousand days, she had won her vision back from the hands of a Tarig surgeon. Now, sighted and newly risen in stature, she toured the roamlands absorbing its wonders. Although most of the steppe was uniformly flat, here the land was deeply folded by storm wall shock waves. Buckled rock, chasms, and pinnacles clustered in a tangled distortion of land. A thousand shades of yellow and gold gilded the formations. Some miles behind clustered the massive encampment of the Inyx herds, drawn together now in one conclave. Akay-Wat had come ten days ago with the last of the far-flung herds, bringing the final contingent under the banner of Sydney and Riod.

While great events awaited her in the encampment, Sydney took this day for herself, riding out to the region of the Scar, a thing she had heard of but never seen. Improbable as it seemed, there was a formation on the storm wall, ancient and massive. They learned the location from Akay-Wat, that Hirrin lieutenant of Sydney’s who, traveling widely in recruitment of the herds, had come upon the Scar.

Astride Distanir, Mo Ti rode at Sydney’s side. His rumpled face looked like a misshapen potato sitting on the body of a troll. But she loved this Chalin man, more so because his face and body were like no other. Scarred by the Long War, bulked up by some accident of birth, twisted by his late gelding, Mo Ti’s was the best face she knew, besides Cixi’s.

Sydney asked Riod to set out along the hill crest, and he did so, content as always to bear Sydney and be on the land.

Best rider
, Riod sent, sharing Sydney’s appetite for farther landscapes. She placed her hand on his neck, feeling the warmth of his coat, taking comfort from his solid presence.

Riod glanced now and then at the storm wall, and as he did so, his strong feelings came to her—flickers of memory from his youth when he watched his mother face her death in a last ride. He had been a young foal when his ailing mother took a pledge to end her days in the ceremonial way. He had followed her into the steppe. She must have known that he pursued her, but her mind was almost gone by then, and in any case her thoughts were all on eternal things. The wildness of the storm wall that day stopped the young Inyx farther away than he’d wished. The ground trembled, the air boomed, and the smells frightened him.

He watched his mother run her last race, speeding for the dark wall. As she grew close to the curdling dark, spears of lightning ignited around her, then appeared to sprout from her forehorns, although young Riod couldn’t think why. She plunged into the embrace of those black arms and disappeared, leaving behind not even a dimple. He watched the path left by her hooves until her hoofprints blew away.

Today Riod looked for those hoofprints, although this wasn’t the place.

Yes, my heart
, Sydney sent.
You loved her so.
Not that she knew anything about mothers, or cared for her own. Johanna, Sydney thought, have you walked into the wall by now? If she had any decency, she would have, not live for the fiend, nor pleasure him as the rumor had it.

The day burned away its last hours as they picked their way along the ridge through uplifted rock formations and across tumbled scree slopes. Riod had never seen the Scar, having confined his life to his traditional roamlands; but lately even he had begun to think of wider lands. In the past, the herd was enough, bound together in a keen weaving of minds. The mounts spoke heart to heart. Riders too, in their way: the Inyx read strong rider emotions and shared these thoughts among themselves and the riders. Formerly Sydney had fought this. Now she treasured it, provided that Riod metered out her thoughts only to Mo Ti and Distanir, shielding her from idle probes. Mo Ti had brought her into high schemes; because of this she must hide her intentions for a little while longer.

She looked up to see Mo Ti and his mount where they had climbed to a rock prominence and stood silhouetted against the bright. Mo Ti had dismounted and stood gazing outward.

Sydney joined him. Before them was the Scar.

Here at ebb-time, shadows curled into the boiling porridge of the sky. In turn the walls fell sere, and in this dimmed state, a vast formation hung on the wall. Large enough to swallow the Entire’s largest city, the Scar was a pale rosette burned into the storm wall from the ground to the bright.

The four watchers stared. How could the shifting field of the walls hold a scar? The edges of the scar flickered as though the wall would reclaim its territory, but the oval held. Like a magic cheval glass, Sydney thought, where you might walk through to another place.

This was not far from the truth, according to legend. Here, the Paion had once broken into the Entire. Battering at Ahnenhoon for five thousand years, they infiltrated in small surges, but here, long ago, they had swarmed through in a massive incursion. The assault brought the lords themselves to do battle, where many Tarig died, but far more of the Paion, until the hordes were beaten back and the entry point choked off with Tarig skill.

Sydney, Riod, Mo Ti, and Distanir looked at the Scar and shared the same thought.
The fiends can die like anyone.

“Why did the Paion enter here,” Sydney asked, “so far from great centers?”

Mo Ti answered, “They struck where the Tarig least expected, taking them unprepared. It is a precept of war, my lady.”

“Why don’t the fiends plug Ahnenhoon as they did this place?”

Riod sent:
Ahnenhoon is a thin place; it cannot bear strong defense.

Even the Tarig had limits. So she had come to believe under Mo Ti’s urging. Within a few hours, they would have their first sense, she fervently hoped, of Tarig limits. It would begin this ebb with the great gathering of the Inyx herds.

The Ascendancy was not yet within her grasp; but already she reached toward it. She thought of that city as a spider’s lair, the place where she had lost her family and suffered blinding under the claws of Lord Hadenth; where she had hung in the sky ready to fall to her death. Soon she would sweep the spiders from the castle. The Scar brought her thoughts to the Paion and how they might be allies to bolster her cause; but no one had ever spoken to a Paion, nor even seen one beneath their carapaces of battle.

Mo Ti’s attention swerved up primacy. He turned on Distanir’s back and squinted. A brown curtain hung faintly in the distance, nothing more than a blemish on the horizon.

Distanir caught Mo Ti’s concern, and his nostrils flared, trying to catch the scent on the stiffening breeze.

“Windstorm,” Mo Ti said.

Sydney took stock of the cloud. “Far away.”

“Traveling fast.” He checked their position relative to the ridge and its paths. He had seen dust storms before—great disturbances spawned by the restless storm walls interacting with hot thermals rising off the steppe.

“To the camp now, mistress,” Mo Ti said, and Riod urged compliance, turning to retrace their path.

Riod and Distanir kept a brisk pace along the ridgeline of the hills, where now and again advance curls of wind announced a high wind coming. In the distance, a curtain of dust climbed the sky, throwing a carnelian shadow over the steppe. Even a windstorm could be beautiful to the formerly blind.

Coming at last to the edge of the hills, they descended quickly along a narrow cut in the escarpment, with switchbacks bringing the steppe into view now and then.

On the flats below was the encampment, a herd of ten thousand mounts and their riders. Sydney could just make out the center pavilion where a red tassel blew in the wind, marking it as hers. Surrounding this tent, many smaller ones housed the riders, while the mounts preferred no confinement at all. At Sydney’s instruction, the mounts intermingled without respect to herd and shared their thoughts, mind to mind, in the Inyx way. Some riders were still abroad, but came galloping in before the approaching storm. A team of Laroo raced into camp from the Nigh-ward side, tails tucked in, their fur whipping in the wind. Once, many of these Laroo had opposed her, but now her old Laroo enemy, Takko, was a trusted lieutenant. Mo Ti had coached her well on qualities of leadership and the subversion of enemies, shaping her with a patient hand. The riders, that motley assemblage of castoffs and ruffians, expected more of their leader than of themselves, so Sydney must know how to bind a crowd’s allegiance, and wash her face once in a while.