A World Too Near (40 page)

Soon he would come face-to-face with Titus Quinn. It remained to be seen how the man would handle death. Afterward, Mo Ti would strike off his foot and take the chain that held the plague. He would save the land. Equally important, he would earn back Sydney’s trust.

Kill him, Mo Ti. Kill my father.

And so he would.

In the deserted marshlands at the edge of the Nigh, Anzi and Quinn sprawled in a fitful sleep. Anzi woke several times in the ebb, roused by Quinn’s sweat-drenched moans. He was recovering from the poison that his fellow Rose personage had given him, but the navitar’s headlong charge through the binds had also taken its toll. She wiped his forehead with her jacket sleeve. When Titus woke, they would set out on foot for Ahnenhoon, while Lord Oventroe would make his way up primacy to a place where he could find a vessel to command.

As Titus bent his knee in his sleep, his pant leg rode up enough to expose the chain around his ankle, drawing her eye. Why had the navitar tried to steal it? Did Jesid believe it spelled the ruin of the world?
Give it to the river
, the navitar had said, so Titus reported. Did the navitar know something about the river and the chain that others didn’t? Of course, though navitars
thought
they knew more than normal sentients, they couldn’t even dress themselves, or keep themselves clean.

Unable
to sleep, Anzi sat up, wrapping her arms around her knees. She and Titus were alone. Earlier, the lord had hiked out of view, abstaining from sleep. She looked at the forever river, thinking ahead, thinking of what lay after the engine at Ahnenhoon. She imagined riding on the Nigh with Titus, traveling to strange sways far away. He might always be a fugitive, but if one wished to hide, the Nigh was very deep.

Earlier in the ebb, before she had lain down, she had seen a navitar’s vessel far up the river. She had hunkered down behind the pillow of mud that masked their presence from anyone watching from the river. This section of the Nigh bore heavy traffic, as vessels disgorged heavy shipments of conscripts for the war. Levies from different sways took up camp in lodgment areas, awaiting orders, completion of their military divisions, and arrival of officers. Some of the camps were so old they had become permanent squatter settlements, military staging grounds dotting the banks of the Nigh for thousands of miles. No sense to bring green troops into range of the Paion zeppelins, nor was there a rush to battle, with the war always with them. A million days of war. And yet the lords claimed the All was peaceful. True, the sways didn’t fight each other. But soldiers still died.

The plains behind the unstable marshes sometimes thundered with maneuvers and war games. Anzi could hear them now, far in the distance, and under the boom of the storm wall that hovered perpetually at their side. The sooner we are gone, the better, she thought.

She hadn’t noticed that Lord Oventroe stood next to her. She rose, bowing.

The lord carried a dead steppe vole by the tail, its blood darkening the ground by his boots. So, he had been hunting. Oventroe gave her the carcass to skin and gut. She made short work of it, using Quinn’s knife, the Going Over blade once given to him by General Ci Dehai. They could cook the vole on the trail.

“Now you will go to the engine, ah?” the lord said, or rather commanded.

“Yes, Bright Lord.”

“Make certain he gets there. At any price to yourself.”

She didn’t trust him. But he was right in one thing: The Rose must not be fuel. Even if, to accomplish this, she and Titus did not survive.

“Wake him,” Oventroe said.

She managed to rouse Titus. He sat up, coughing, and accepted a sip of water from the lord, who had found an aquifer last ebb, bringing back a pouch of it in a revised section of his great coat.

Crouching next to Titus and Anzi, the lord said, “We must leave here, each to our singular tasks.”

“Not yet.”

“The Rose is giving up its suns already,” Oventroe said. “You do not wish to delay. Or have we misjudged you?”

Titus looked up at the storm wall, as though remembering for the first time where he was. His eyes traced the line of the dark barrier where it sloped into infinity. Setting his mouth in concentration, he said, “The ship and its crew went down. From a fragment of nan. Benhu went down, who helped me. That was a bad death, my lord.” Oventroe didn’t dispute this, remaining silent. “The nan looks wildly out of control. Is it?”

Titus should learn caution when speaking to a lord, Anzi thought. Oventroe watched him with hard, black eyes. Anzi knew how Titus wished to protect the Entire. To avoid bringing a bad war to a fragile land. He had promised Su Bei that he would protect the Entire. Su Bei, who had first brought Oventroe and Titus together. She didn’t want the land to die. But surely the lords could devise a way to sustain the All without killing the Rose. If the Rose died, so much would be lost. The civilizations of Earth. Under the scholar Vingde, she had once studied these humans, following the lives of people for as long as the veil allowed, watching strings of days, observing the passions of the Rose.

The sentients of the Entire were copies of those beings. Pale copies, she had always thought. How could the Entire’s one culture, the Radiant Path, compare with the evolved majesty of the Chinese dynasties? The Roman? The reign of the pharaohs? Even the American hegemony was a glory of striving, despite failures. She couldn’t put into words the attraction she felt to Earth; she had been born with it, perhaps.

“We have told you,” the lord was saying. “The assemblage will do harm, but not too much harm. When the human woman told you that it cannot be contained, she lied.”

Titus glanced at the river, and Anzi knew he was thinking of the vessel, of Benhu’s death. “How can you know?”

The lord murmured, “It would be difficult to explain all that we know, and how we know. You do not have time to assimilate this knowledge.”

“Try me.”

“You have not the vocabulary.” As Titus remained silent, the lord went on, “We looked into the instructions imprinted on the molecular structures; they cannot feed on the bright. They have not the instructions to use exotic matter. The phage sentinels will disarm the activity within one hundred intervals. Redundancy designs, although crude, will ensure this.” The lord stood up. “You fear what you saw on the Nigh. But we did not say the weapon was poor. Only that it could be contained. We have no proof to offer you. Decide whether we stand together or do not.”

Anzi watched as Titus got to his feet. He looked haggard. “Yes, then.” He looked at her as though asking whether he had done right. She grasped his hand in answer.

“Leave now,” Oventroe said. “We cannot be seen together. Ahnenhoon is close—a few days away. When Jesid abandoned control of the ship, we made sure the river vessel arrived close to Ahnenhoon. Still, you must set out immediately.”

They prepared to leave, with the lord providing a small pack that he devised from a section of his great coat. While Oventroe was thus occupied, Titus asked, “How much time is one hundred intervals?”

Oventroe glanced up. “Once you free the nan you will have a few minutes to flee. Be quick when you do.”

“How much time, as I measure time?”

“Nineteen minutes.”

“I thought I had an hour. My people told me—”

“They were wrong.”

Anzi had seen the nan race over the ship. It would spread as fast as a plains fire.

“One thing more,” the lord said. “Was there a happenstance in which you immersed the chain in river matter?”

Titus looked startled by the question. “I walked into the river once.”

“That was not wise.”

Then Anzi remembered Titus telling her of the Inyx mount who killed himself, who sent a message to Sydney.

“I walked in just a little way.”

“It weakened the architecture. The structure is eroded.”

A quiet fell on Quinn. “Eroded?”

“The tube is thinner than it was. The nan begins to assault from inside, feeding on the weakened reservoirs.” The lord went on, “My judgment is that you have only a few days. Then, no matter what you do, the nan will come forth.”

“How many days?”

“Five. Perhaps six. Enough time, if you travel swiftly and sleep little.” Oventroe looked at the crumpled hills in the distance through which they would have to pass. “Best to leave now. You are recovered enough.”

Quinn didn’t need to be told.

Even though it was Deep Ebb, they took their leave of Oventroe. When they looked back, the lord was striding up the riverbank, toward the nearest military staging ground.

As they set out in the opposite direction, Quinn let Anzi shoulder their one pack and their makeshift canteen of water. He was unsteady, still, on his feet. They wound into the crumpled hill country. Sometimes they went over the crests of hills, and other times around them, frustrated that they couldn’t shoot straight as an arrow to their destination.

As Quinn walked, he felt the cirque’s weight against his ankle. It seemed to hug him more tightly than before.

They had been walking ever closer to the noises of a military exercise. From just over a rise came shouts and clanging metal mixed with the pounding of Inyx hooves.

Climbing to the crest, and lying flat to hide, Quinn and Anzi looked down into a basin milling with Inyx. Stomping feet, tossing heads, braying throats—the Inyx formed into battle groups and re-formed, then formed again. Their precision was their strongest talent. That and coordination at a distance. The riders seemed appendages to the great beasts, whose horns sported the colors of their divisions.

“Why do they practice in the ebb?” Quinn wondered out loud.

“It is cooler then,” Anzi said. “And the Paion strike as often by ebb as by day.”

Quinn delayed moving on, watching the maneuvers. “I want to say good-bye.”

“Do not. These mounts may feel loyalty to the Tarig. A common enemy makes foes friends, Titus. These mounts could easily report you.”

“They hate the Tarig.”

She held his gaze. “Now you are an expert on the Entire?”

He barely heard her. This might be the last chance he had to contact his daughter. He might never leave Ahnenhoon. Nineteen minutes to escape. Perhaps Stefan Polich hadn’t gauged the time precisely; or perhaps he had lied. In any case, Quinn was going to say the thing that he had meant to say to Sydney the first time he sent a message by Inyx: I love you. I have always loved you. He picked his way down the rocky slope. After some time of lying in wait for a stray mount, he found one who would send a message to Sydney. He didn’t ask for, or expect, an answer from her, but turned and rejoined Anzi to resume their trek.

Five or six days to Ahnenhoon. Once there, he would press the sequence into the chain. Then time would collapse into nineteen minutes.

How far could you get in nineteen minutes?

Remembering Benhu, Quinn hoped he could summon the godman’s dignity when his turn came to face the nan.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Deceive, deceive. This is the first principle of battle.

—from Tun Mu’s
Annals of War

S
UMING TOOK A SHORTCUT OVER THE ROOF OF THE CENTRUM, hurrying to make a last visit to Morhab’s den. At this hour of the ebb she had hope that few sentients would be afoot to delay her progress. Trying to curb an unseemly haste, SuMing moved toward a staircase and descended, entering a level that gave access to the storm wall side wing.

At a bend in the corridor she encountered a delegation of Hirrin who had come to the centrum to consult with the lord and were abroad early. She bowed, walking more slowly past them. Once out of sight, she rushed on. Johanna had her portrait—only useful if used quickly. As SuMing hurried, she was aware of the pounding of the nearby engine. They said it generated a defensive shield around the fortress, but it was no such thing, no foil against the Paion. Instead, it drilled into the Rose, marshaling a great collapse that would occur, not today or tomorrow, but soon. Indeed, Johanna said, Lord Inweer had told her that the Entire was already burning some parts of the Rose for practice. SuMing loved her world, but what the lords were doing was wrong. Let them suffer a defeat for their arrogance. What had the Tarig lords ever done for her but bring her to this wasteland and then hang her from a railing? She lived not a single interval without jarring pain in her neck. And Lord Inweer had done all this with a casual gesture. When she had asked for healing, the lord responded,
Serve your mistress.
Now, she
would
serve her.

She entered a wing where the stench announced her proximity to the Gond’s apartments. Her footsteps slowed, and her skin cooled in the drafts from the arches up ahead.

At the mouth of the den she stood for a moment, looking into the tangle of ghostly trees. Morhab’s lair contained no furniture or embellishments, but only the stunted trees, sprouting, so it appeared, from the litter and offal of the floor.

“Engineer,” she called. She waded in deeper, calling Morhab’s name. She prayed that Morhab hadn’t already gone to Inweer to expose her mistress.

Then she heard him, his rumbling voice deadened by the mass of trees. “Who comes? By the vows, who?”

Following his voice, SuMing burst into the clearing to find the Gond sprawled on a fat tree limb. “My mistress,” she blurted. “Engineer, hurry.” She managed a sob.

He tucked his iridescent wings closer to his body in irritation. “Tell, and stop shrieking. Do not wake the nest.”

SuMing drew closer to him, wringing her hands and giving vent to the panic she truly felt. “Mistress Johanna is distraught. She will do a terrible thing.”

“Tell,” he thundered.

Gesturing wildly toward the corridor, SuMing said, “She is going to kill herself, so she vows. Is there aught you can do? Tell her that you regret any insult, or whatever is between you, please, Engineer. She said you knew why she wanted to die.”

In another moment she saw with relief that he had called his sled to him, not his Jout attendants. The sled was necessary.

Morhab half slithered, half fell down from the limb and began moving toward the sled, then lurched his heavy form onto the platform and swung his hindquarters in behind him. He coiled his upper body and thrashed once more, hoisting himself onto the driver’s platform.