A World Too Near (16 page)

She gestured at him. “Stand, Mo Ti. They see all that you do.” She paused. “You must greet Cixi for me, next time you send to her.”

He winced at the sarcasm. “She loves you above all, mistress. As do I.”

The day’s happiness, beginning with Riod’s successes with the ebb’s work, had now utterly vanished. Sydney’s gaze was strangely lit. From shock. From hatred.

“The mantis lords are inside my head, looking out, Mo Ti. How can I bear this?”

He reached into his pocket and drew out a strip of black silk. “A blindfold, lady, if you wish it.”

She reached for it. “If I wear this, the fiends will know their ruse failed.”

Mo Ti said. “Let them know. Will they dare punish us, when they troubled to be sure all this was done in concealment?” She nodded then, and he tied the strip behind her head. She felt calmer once the blindfold was in place.

Mo Ti said, “When you ride, ride free of the blindfold. The herds came to see our success, not our setbacks.”

Her voice was flat. “Yes. Our successes.”

Mo Ti left at Riod’s bidding, and then Riod and Sydney were alone— alone, as they had been in the beginning. The two of them, mount and rider, kept silent company for the rest of that long day. Over and over, she touched the blindfold, making sure it was secure, that the fiends could see nothing. Riod would now transmit glimpses of the world to her. That was how it had been before, and how it was again.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Whom God
would destroy, he first marks well.

—Hoptat the Seer,
Ways of the Miserable God

I
N THE CAMP OF THE GODMEN, Benhu bowed low, so low it brought his nose close to his protruding belly. Quinn and Helice bowed also, acting their roles as followers of the Miserable God.

A wealthy godman, his clean robes evidence he could afford someone to launder them, accepted their obeisance and the gift of their dirigible, which he had commandeered. He also evinced an unwelcome interest in why a poor godman like Benhu and his associates would travel in such luxury, while the thousand servants of the Miserable God traveled by humble means. Around them, the crowd of godmen milled, preparing for their cross-primacy pilgrimage to the Nigh.

“I made pilgrimage to Zu Chang’s grave,” Benhu said. “I needed transport for the sake of my bad leg.” He gestured to clarify which leg prevented him walking up a minoral. “It is your conveyance now, quite rightly, and fitting for your person. No beku for such as you, naturally.”

The wealthy godman, bald but sporting a full beard that was black with age, put his hand on the guy ropes that held the dirigible grounded. He plucked at one of them absently and narrowed his eyes at Quinn. “You’ll minister at Ahnenhoon?”

“It is our plan, Venerable,” Quinn answered. This was the first test of their cover story, that of providing spiritual comfort to the armies.

“Two cripples and yourself?”

Both Benhu and Helice looked decrepit. Benhu had fashioned Helice a walking stick, upon which she leaned, looking every inch a godwoman, deformed, shabby, and long-suffering. A soiled white godwoman’s coat covered the nicer silks she had brought from the Rose, which despite Benhu’s urging she wouldn’t give up.

“No one is without merit,” Quinn responded with a mindless smile. “I come new to service of the Miserable God. A late vocation, for which one might use a tutor.” He glanced at Benhu.

The venerable murmured. “Ascendancy accent.”

“Yes, Excellency. I make no pretenses, though. My mother was a mere steward, though her grave flag is in the bright city.”

The godman sized up the airship. “I will pay the contract on this sky bulb. It will free you from an onerous payment.” As the three bowed in agreement, the godman glanced at Helice.

“Not garroting, was it?”

Quinn hurried to say “No, the vows forbid. My friend, Li the clumsy, tipped over a candle that caught her bedding ablaze.” He shook his head at Helice. “Her throat. A terrible thing.”

He caught Helice’s eye, and she took her cue, bowing deeply. With her yellow eye lenses and bandaged neck, she could well pass for Chalin, but her injuries also drew attention.

Quinn added, “Many days to you, Excellency. Ask the God of Misery to take no notice of one so low, that she may regain her speech.”

The godman nodded, and then turned his attention to his acquisition, sending an attendant up the hanging ladder to the passenger cabin with instruction to prepare the deck for the comfort of the venerable.

As they walked away, Helice’s eyes were alight. “I passed.”

Quinn put his hand on her shoulder in companionable solicitude, but his fingers dug into her shoulder. “Shut up, I told you.” She was giddy from stimulation, gawking at the mass of godmen and their gaudy wagons. Quinn led Helice away, worried more than ever about their disguise. Her wounds looked like an aborted garroting. Only the lords killed that way, and then did it so slowly, restricting the windpipe so suffocation took hours. Why hadn’t he thought of how her wound looked? Now, all the way to Ahnenhoon, she would attract attention.

Hundreds of white-robed servants of the Miserable God clustered on the plain, looking like a swarm of moths drying their wings. Among them, beku crowded, either saddled or hitched to wagons, though a few godders planned to walk for the sake of misery. The wagons sported lurid images of death and mayhem, in the hopes of drawing the notice of the deity and to keep Him from casting His eye on more worthy sentients.

Over the expanse of the veldt flowed the bright, the source of heat and light, varied in its intensity between day and ebb. Helice was seeing this marvel for the first time, and she seemed to be thinking hard about how it could be. However the photons had been generated in the past, it was on the verge of failure now. Helice and the Minerva team had rustled up some theories on how energy could transfer across branes. Her theories were only a shadow of Tarig knowledge, though. She realized that, and it must have grated on her. Quinn was sure that when Helice looked on the sights of the Entire, she saw more than its bizarre beauty. She saw power.

Benhu left to find them a conveyance of some kind. It wouldn’t be an Adda. The place was still far distant where Adda roosted, ready to ply the trans-primacy winds. As Benhu wound into the crowd, Helice’s brow furled. “
Dov jhiqat
,” she said in Lucent.
One feels ill
—their signal that she needed privacy to talk to him.

Quinn shook his head. Not a good time. They were surrounded by Chalin, Jout, Ysli, and other beings, any of whom might be curious and listen too closely.

“Now, God damn it,” she muttered, not in Lucent. She glared at him, and to prevent a scene, he made a show of helping her to a rock outcropping, passing on the way a cook fire where an industrious godman offered them a skewer of meat at a bad price. At the outcropping, Quinn helped Helice to sit in what passed for shade in the Entire.

“Ren Kai,” Helice said, using the name Quinn had assumed.

He put his arm around her shoulder as an excuse to come closer to her, so that she could whisper. “Be quick, then.”

“This isn’t quick.”

“Give me the short version.”

“There’s been a mistake.”

He looked at her, thinking
she
was the mistake.

“Mistake,” she repeated. “Dreadful one.” She glanced at his ankle with its small cold chain.

He waited, an uneasy wariness coiling in his gut.

She went on. “I have my own people. At Minerva. You knew?”

“Of course. Your heart’s set on Stefan’s job, right?”

“Yes. But that’s not the mistake.” She glanced up, checking for Benhu. “You have to take off the cirque.”

“I intend to.”

“No, take it off and bury it. Right here, as soon as you can.” Her eyes pleaded with him. “It’s not what you think.” Her next words came out in a tumble: “Quinn . . .”

“Ren Kai,” he muttered.

“Ren Kai. My people looked at the nan program. It’s not localized in its effects. It will spread, spread everywhere. There’s no stopping it. Those phage agents—they can’t overpower the nan. This land won’t survive, or what will survive won’t be worth having. Stefan never knew. Only my people. And now you.”

“No stopping it? The mortality sequence . . .”

She shook her head. “Ineffective. Stefan admitted they weren’t one hundred percent sure. Turns out, they were one hundred percent wrong.”

He remained silent, staring at her.

“My team studied the Entire. I thought I’d have to go over on my own, and I was going to build my own transfer capabilities. I wasn’t limited by Minerva’s thinking. We spent all our time focused on penetrating the Entire with our probes. We came at it from a fresh angle, and when we did, we were able to calculate the mass and energy of the Entire. Then we set a simulation of the nan program into a modeled Entire. And it just kept going; the nan just blew past the phage constraints, feeding on the bright. It never stopped.”

The
words ignited a vision in his mind that he didn’t want to see, didn’t want to believe. “It doesn’t hold up, Helice. You could have told Stefan. They could have stopped this until they recalibrated things. He’d never endanger the Entire. This place is too valuable, even if he has to share it.”

“I couldn’t tell Stefan.” She snaked a worried look at him. “If he knew I was siphoning off resources to my own effort, I’d be out of there. With nothing. But I wanted to tell him.” She held her fingers a millimeter apart. “I came
this
close
to shit canning the whole mission. Instead, I persuaded him to send me along to be your helper in delivering the cirque. But what I really wanted was to tell you privately, without revealing to Stefan that I’ve been working against him. Don’t curl your lip—it’s just business. And for the sake of business, you better hear me. No one wants to ruin the Entire, and you’re going to.”

His hand rested on the chain around his ankle. Cold. Humming. Unless his imagination conjured the feeling. Four, five, one. The sequence. Press it down. All hell breaks loose. Stefan admitted they weren’t sure of the effects. But
this
. . . He ran his hand through his hair, gathered in a short queue.

“Think about it this way,” her voice wheedled at him. “Why on Earth would I lie?”

“Don’t ever say that word,” he snapped. “Never here, never name our home.”

She snapped back, “Don’t use that tone of voice with me. I’m the only reason you’re not going to fuck up, big-time.”

He didn’t want to believe her claim. But what if she was right? He looked at her, trying to see past her surface to the real Helice. If there
was
a real Helice. On her brow little hairs peeked out: start of eyebrows. Her neck, shriveled and scabbed, looked angry and sore.

“Why did you wait this long to tell me?”

“I didn’t want to tell you in front of Benhu, and we haven’t been alone until now. Maybe he does understand English. I don’t trust him.”

Quinn sat in silence for a moment, trying to gather his thoughts.

“Bury it. Get rid of it,” Helice persisted. “Then go get your daughter, Quinn.”

“You don’t care about her.”

“Frankly? No, I don’t. But you need to get that done, and then maybe we can trust you to help us solve our problems a different way.” As he waited, she said, “A weapon isn’t how we deal with the Tarig. We’ve got to persuade them.”

“This from the woman who likes to torture children?” He couldn’t forget her threats during his first sojourn here—that if he didn’t come back, she’d ruin Mateo’s future.

She rolled her eyes. “From the woman who wants to exploit this universe sensibly. Without destroying the golden goose.”

He hacked away at her arguments. “Minerva should have been running simulations. Where the hell was their modeling work?”

“They
did
model the nan sequence. They just didn’t do it as well as we did. I was personally involved. And I did it right.”

His heart was sinking like a stone into a tar pit. Damn her, anyway. Damn her for keeping this secret, for choosing her own corporate skin before his mission, before their lives. The bright fell on his head, driving out his thoughts, his hopes. Bury the cirque in the ground, she said. Abandon the only weapon they had. How could he do that?

He spotted Benhu approaching, sitting on a beku-hauled wagon that was scarcely bigger than the hauling beast. Benhu had found a wagon, but now what good was it? The image came of sharing a cross-primacy journey with Helice, cooped up in a box the size of a double coffin. He didn’t relish sharing the ride. Even if she wasn’t outright lying about the cirque, she meant to destroy his mission, preferably with his cooperation.

He started to rise, but she gripped his arm. “Where are you going?”

Quinn shook her off. “Damn you to hell.”

She held his gaze, and he saw not the slightest trace of remorse. “I’m not lying. I’ve got no reason to lie.”

He stalked away, disgusted, sickened.

She scrambled after him, saying “Ren Kai, Ren Kai.” She almost bumped into an old Chalin godwoman, who cursed her and pointed to her murmuring, “The garrote.” Helice caught up to Quinn, pulling on his jacket.

He grabbed her shoulders. “You know what you’ve done, don’t you? Have you got any idea? You’ve put yourself ahead of the damn whole world. You remember what we came for? Do you?” He shook her.

“Yes,” she whispered.

He doubted that she did. She hadn’t seen the navitar on the River Nigh. Hadn’t seen the needles poking up and down from the clouds, like the future trying to slash its way in. The navitar had said,
I see the world collapsing, the fire
descending. I see a burning rose.
To save the Rose, he held the cirque. The chain containing just a little too much force . . .

He remembered the navitar saying
One world excludes the other; both cannot
be true. The rose burns, and the All flies apart.

And could the Entire come apart? The Entire was fragile. Those who lived in the embrace of the storm walls knew that their world depended on the walls standing, on the bright flowing. They expected it would always be so. That there would always be peace—or at any rate, no wars that used virulent technology. No wars with the Rose universe.