A World Too Near (20 page)

Spittle flew as Benhu rasped, “He’d thank me, that’s what. For getting rid of this creature who’ll get us our grave flags early. And I would have succeeded, if you hadn’t broken my arm.”

“It’s not broken.” Turning to Helice, Quinn said, “There’s a knife around here somewhere. Look for it.” She riffled through the covers until she found his knife, then handed it to him.

“Did you think, Benhu, that with her gone, my troubles would go away?”

“She’s the cause of all this strife, isn’t she?”

Helice blurted out, “What’s he saying?”

“Be quiet,” he warned her. “Talk Lucent or not at all. Half the camp may be awake listening.” Quinn wiped the sweat from his face. “Benhu, I’m going to loosen your bonds. Will you behave?”

“Yes, if I must.”

Quinn untied him. “Listen, now. I don’t like Helice, but I don’t want her murdered. I have a lot of problems; she’s a minor one.” He waited for that to sink in. “You know how the gracious lords punish murder.”

By his expression, Benhu did. “I didn’t want to do it. I had to work myself up to the task, but I’m no murderer.”

Quinn forced himself to pat the man on the shoulder. “I know. You’ve been told not to fail, and you figured she’s in the way. Well, she’s not.” It pained him to say it. Needing some fresh air, he made his way to the door. Pausing at the door he said, “From now on, Benhu, when you get an idea, tell me first.”

“Yes, Excellency.”

Turning to Helice, he murmured low, in English, “He won’t hurt you now. He thought I wanted you dead, that’s all.”

As he left, he heard her mutter, “Not far from the truth, is it?”

In the morning a heavy fog greeted them, a brilliant scrim of air lit up by the bright, but obscuring the view of the march. Globular clouds floated by like mirror images of great dirigibles. Helice and Quinn sat on the driver’s bench, with Benhu in the wagon, nursing his sprained arm. All three of them were quiet after the altercation during the ebb.

At last Helice whispered, “What will you do when we reach the Nigh?” When he ignored her, she went on, “I know what I did was wrong. Not telling everyone ahead of time.”

He stifled a caustic remark, but his face must have been expressive.

“God, you hate me, don’t you?” She pulled her jacket more tightly around her, unhappy not to be able to see the bright and the veldt one of the few times that Quinn allowed her out of the wagon.

“This isn’t about you, Helice. None of it is. Chew on that a while; it’ll do you good.”

The beku stopped to pee, sending a sharp-scented gush of urine onto the ground. Helice liked the beku, and had even begun grooming it. But still, she had to smile at its timing. “I thought you said the Entire was a miracle of technology.”

“If you want fancy, you need to make friends with the Tarig. That’s more or less your plan, isn’t it?” A wild guess. Whatever her ambitions, they wouldn’t be small. “Helice, why didn’t you warn Stefan about the nan, and then pack your bags and offer EoSap what you knew? Or TidalSphere. They’d have fallen all over themselves for you.”

“You think they’d want me, after how I’ve behaved at Minerva?”

She had planned to develop her own going-over capabilities. She had a secret group. It was damning, but still, he didn’t believe her. He was done giving her any credence whatsoever. He had once been a captain of starship crews, carrying colonists and visitors on long-haul transport voyages. He had learned to take the measure of all kinds of people. In Helice Maki he sensed a deep but empty well that she strove to fill at any cost. He was wary of her hunger, yet her arguments against the cirque still chafed at him.

Perhaps there was a way he could resolve this—Lord Oventroe. Although Quinn didn’t relish relying on a Tarig, he had spent years in their presence, and thought them capable of loyalty as they saw it. He had seen divisions among the Tarig, though they disliked to admit them. Lady Chiron, for instance. She had once stood against the others to protect him. Similarly, Oventroe might stand against his kind, for the Rose. Why he might do so remained uncertain, with Benhu’s answers less than enlightening. But there were factions among the Tarig, despite their tendency to be secretive. He thought of Chiron’s secrets: among them, her strong attachment to him. She hid that as well as she could; but it was, at the end, an open secret. He wasn’t proud of what had transpired between the two of them. He had been her prisoner. They had used each other. In any case, Chiron would never help him now. But Oventroe . . .

He made up his mind. If Oventroe was on his side, then here was the test: He should examine the cirque and pronounce it usable—or give Quinn a better device.

Benhu must find a way to contact the lord. And the cirque wasn’t the only reason to do so. Quinn needed a way home. Sydney needed a way home. When he found her—after he was free to find her—he would need the correlates. Let Benhu arrange a meeting with the damn gracious lord, and soon.

Something caught his eye. A hulking form off to the side.

Through a tear in the gauze of fog, the great dirigible sailed into view, so close that it startled Quinn. It hovered near the ground, keeping pace with the wagon. On its huge flank, the face of the woeful god laughed, painted in orange and blue. From an aperture in the passenger cabin a pipe jutted. It moved slowly sideways, aimed at them. Quinn’s pulse raced. Someone was watching them through the device.

Quinn turned to Helice and whispered, “Don’t look around. Just do what I say.”

He hugged her around the shoulders. Close to her ear he said, “They’re spying on us.”

“Who?”

“The godmen in the dirigible. Let’s give them something to watch.” He turned her face toward his and kissed her. She pulled back, but Quinn pulled her to him again. “Just act playful for a moment, can you?”

“God’s beku,” she murmured in Lucent, but threw her arms around him and kissed him with less enthusiasm than a cadaver, despite him muttering that she should make a good show of it. He’d been thinking of a story to explain the fight in the wagon if it came up: that he and Benhu were fighting over her. A good story, but now, to his disgust, he was kissing Helice Maki.

He looked up in time to see the rudder and horizontal stabilizer of the dirigible drive into an obscuring cloud bank.

Quinn’s mind raced, thinking of reasons why the Most Venerable would watch them. Perhaps they were watching everyone, and his wagon happened to be in the path. He prayed that was true.

He flicked the reins at the beku to spur him on, an action that had no effect whatever. “I couldn’t think what else to do, but give them an eyeful. Sorry.”

Helice snarled, “Me too.”

“If this is the worst the Entire does to you, count yourself lucky.”

Ahead of them, now that he was listening for it, the whir of the great dirigible’s motors came to them, near at times, and then far.

Helice sat in the cloud-soaked world, able to see nothing and having to endure the jolting of the wagon and the company of Titus Quinn. She’d rather have walked alongside the beku, getting some exercise and enjoying the quiet company. Beku were amazing. Big, loyal beasts, and patient with their caretakers, even with Benhu, who was bad with animals and smelled worse than they did. For some reason, Helice felt tenderness only toward animals. It proved, though, that she wasn’t a cold-hearted person. She would rip the throat out of anyone who tried to hurt an animal.

She’d had a moment’s panic when Quinn kissed her because he’d put his arms around her for a moment. He didn’t snug up close enough to feel the items sewn into the generous seams and hems of her garments, or she might have had some explaining to do.

He’d let the matter of Lamar drop. Good thing, too. There was really no way Quinn could know anything about her plans, but she had to admit Lamar was a weak point in her group. He had ties to Quinn’s father, and he’d been out of circulation for so long he’d forgotten his office politics. You lost the killing instinct once you were on retirement income. Like a lion at a zoo, trusting in a pail of meat to show up three times a day, you lost your edge.

That business with the dirigible worried her. Someone was spying on them. Godders were superstitious, inbred morons, but it wouldn’t do to get crossways with them. Helice wasn’t ready to hold her own with godman potentates. It was difficult to manage people when you couldn’t speak their language, and when, in addition, they were likely to fear you because you were from a different universe. That was another good reason to go to Sydney Quinn first. She was an uneducated horse-woman—Inyx rider, whatever— but she was also a citizen of the Rose, like Helice. She was sure that she could manage the girl. It would be good practice for the Tarig. Everything was practice for the Tarig. Here were beings of prime intellect who had, apparently, purged their own kind of hangers-on and the feeble minded. Their technologies—the Nigh, for example—showed what could be accomplished when the average no longer dragged down the advanced.

One hole in her strategy: She didn’t know the name of the defector. One lord was a bit of a loose cannon. He might be a key chess piece, but naturally, Quinn held back on the lord’s name.

At her side, Quinn drank from a sack of water, holding the beku’s reins in one hand.

“I’ll drive,” Helice said, gesturing to the reins. He passed them to her, and they plodded onward to the Nigh. Each step brought them closer to Ahnenhoon, because the Nigh brought it close, being a space-folding transport system, if Quinn’s stories were to be believed. Once at the Nigh, Quinn would be in the homestretch. So she would have to get the cirque before then, if she had to take his foot off at the ankle to do it.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A clever general awaits the appearance of disorder among the
enemy. Then he falls like a hammer.

—from Tun Mu’s
Annals of War

I
N DEEP EBB, when decent folk, innocent ones, slept, Johanna made her way through the corridors of the centrum. It should have been dark for her purposes, but the walls, metal-smooth, sparkled with the ever-present light that the Tarig craved.

The basso thrum of the great machine grew louder as Johanna approached the engine chamber. SuMing wasn’t following her this time. Pai would make sure of that, distracting the young fool in one way or another, serving Johanna in all things and never asking to know Johanna’s business. Nevertheless, at every turn in the passageway, she looked for sentients who might be abroad: soldiers, servants, even legates come to Ahnenhoon to confer with Inweer. The centrum was a vast and empty place, however; the Tarig could conceive of no trespassers and desired few courtiers. They had grown complacent. Inweer had. He thought that his gifts bound Johanna to him.

She held in her hand something finer than any present of Inweer’s. Gao’s gift: the key to the maze, gleaned from Morhab’s stone well computers in his den. Other keys and maps that Gao had copied had proven partial or false. Not this time.
The design emerges
, Gao had said. If she truly had a schematic showing the way through the chamber’s maze, then she could lead Titus here when he came. Tonight, she would test Gao’s work.

To provide a cover story for Johanna to be abroad this time of the ebb, Gao’s wife Wei had come to Johanna’s chamber with a tale of domestic trouble and Gao in a rage. Johanna had quickly dressed and hurried away to quell the family dispute. Wei and Johanna had parted company at a stairwell, with the woman unaware of Johanna’s purpose. Perhaps she thought Johanna went to meet a lover. However, she might wonder why Johanna bothered with secrecy. Lord Inweer didn’t demand exclusivity, nor did the Chalin culture, unless children were planned. No, no children planned.

The engine’s churning vibrated in her shoes.
Kill the thing
, she thought.
Titus must kill the thing.
She rushed on. Though the corridors remained empty, she had the unnerving sense that Titus was at her side. She imagined the time—perhaps soon—when he would be, when she would guide him, to bring whatever force the Rose could devise against the engine. Perhaps the Rose would strike with nuclear force, eliminating Ahnenhoon in one stroke. If so, there was no need of a key to the maze. The Repel would be gone, and the Entire, so fragile in its configuration, would be gone as well. But they might choose a more limited weapon. Might. So much of her urgent mission was based on the hope that Titus had received her message. On the hope that he would believe her about the threat.

Oh, Titus, she thought. How have we come to this, so far from each other? Entangled in war instead of each other’s arms? The thought caught her by surprise. Ten years without him. Now came this image of him gathering her in his arms. She pushed the thought away. She would be true to the Earth, but as to Titus, no, it was too late. Do you see, Titus? Tell me that you see. She couldn’t imagine his answer.

Hurrying with all her senses alert, she descended a ramp that, curving, brought her to the ground level of the centrum. The stone on her finger guided her, glowing a soft gold instead of white in the illumination of the corridor.

The diamond stone of her wedding ring was no longer merely a gem; it was an optical computer—a very simple one. Gao had borrowed her diamond for a few days. When he returned it, the stone read the path, guiding her by changes in the spectrum of light. She had to squint to see the variation; but she was good with color. Gao, it turned out, was good with espionage.

Morhab tugged at his burden, unused to heavy lifting. It was difficult for Gond—particularly Gond of a certain heft—to lift things without the leverage of a wall or tree stump for support. With his short arms he finished hauling the sack onto the access platform of his sled. Then, in a convulsive motion, he humped his body forward, pulling himself onto the platform as well. Activating the lift mechanism, the platform came even with the sled’s bench. He pushed the sack into place on the deck of his conveyance and eased
his bulk onto the bench, panting.

Then he maneuvered the sled out of his den and into the halls of the remote wing of the centrum where his family nested.