A World Too Near (52 page)

A woman stood in his path, knife drawn. It was Anzi, whom he had fought before. She was small, and couldn’t hope to stop him. He approached her swiftly, sensing she would feint to the right. She went left instead, ducking under his sword. Pivoting, he swung out his fist and knocked her senseless onto the floor. Barely breaking his stride, he rushed onward to the center of the cavern.

Looking into Johanna’s contorted face, Quinn kept a tight grip on her arm. They were still at the top of the ladder, their goal close, but receding as his mind reeled with Johanna’s pronouncements.

There was no stopping the nan, just as he had feared, just as Helice had said. He recognized what his intuition had been telling him for days, building as it did on small hints and evasions from the Tarig lord. There were things he knew about the Tarig from long experience, things that lay just out of his conscious reach. Such as when they were lying.

Still holding onto Johanna, he whispered, “Oventroe lied to me.”

“Yes! Because he knew you wouldn’t do it! The chain is all we have. For the Rose, for the Earth.” She tried to yank away, nearly falling from the ladder as one of her feet lost its grip. But Quinn held on.

Had Jesid seen the outcome of all this? Had he seen the world collapse? But why did Oventroe insist upon placing the chain at the foot of the engine? Surely it could have been done anywhere . . . except the collapse would take time; even a nan plague would take time to spread. Oventroe was for the Rose, and he meant to destroy the engine first to be sure there would be no time to activate the engine’s full powers. Quinn looked at his former wife. “The Entire,” he hissed. “Everything that’s here. Millions of souls, Johanna. Billions of sentients.” How could one person be asked to destroy so much?

“In God’s hands,” she rasped at him, her face without mercy—an avenging angel, intent upon apocalypse.

It would be for the sake of Earth, its teeming cities and glorious lands. And for the universe embracing it. A land and a cosmos that would otherwise be fuel for these extravagant skies and storm walls. He had to choose now, and he was frozen. By the bright, he prayed.

By the bright, I can’t do this.

When he thought of all that he had seen in the Entire—the vast, enclosed universe of so many miracles—he knew that he couldn’t destroy it. He loved it. Now it was plain: He had always loved it.

“For the Rose!” she pleaded.

The Rose. Yes, the Earth must be freed from the Tarig, from the engine. But not like this.

Johanna’s voice needled at him. “Don’t be afraid of death. It’s not the worst.”

He looked down at her stricken face. She cared so passionately, but that didn’t make her right.

“Let the Entire live, Johanna. It’s not hell. It’s heaven to some people. I can’t kill it. And neither can you.”

“I can!”

Snaking his leg around the ladder rung, he reached down and with his free hand caught the chain dangling from her hand. “Let go, Johanna.” When she refused, he yanked it away.

Johanna moaned, “No . . .” She lunged for his feet, grabbing him around the ankles. The pain of his lacerations shot up his leg, causing him to jerk free of her. As he did so, she lost her footing and fell from the ladder with a sickening crash.

She lay at the bottom of the ladder, unmoving. He began to scramble down after her.

Before he went far, however, he felt a steel grip on his shoulder. Someone had grabbed him from above. An impossibly strong arm hauled him up. In another moment he saw who it was. On the other side of the railing stood his adversary from the hills—the Chalin man, face bloody and bruised, clutching him in a ham-fisted grip.

The giant lifted him bodily over the railing, dumping him on the floor. Quinn scrambled to his feet.

The man looked at the chain in Quinn’s hand. In his oddly quiet voice he said, “The chain is still intact.”

“Yes,” Quinn said. This bear of a man had been after the chain all this time.

“You came to kill us,” the giant said.

“To fight the Entire. Not to kill it.” He saw the man’s hesitation. “If that’s what you’re worried about, it’s over.” He raised the chain, offering it. “I can’t use this.” He was a man of the Entire now. It made him dizzy to think so. Who was he, then? A man seduced by a new land? Johanna lay at the base of the ladder. He had changed allegiance.

“Why?” the big man asked.

It was too much to say why. To say that he had lived in both places and loved them both. He said simply, “For Sydney.” It was the one thing he felt at peace about. Sydney would live.

A bang from across the room jolted their
attention. There, down the pathway to the edge of the chamber, they saw that the doors had burst open. Soldiers ran through.

As the Chalin man turned to note this, Quinn bolted down the corridor, calling for Anzi. Drawing his knife as he ran, he came into a knot of four soldiers, and lunged at the first one.

The fortress was awake.

As the soldiers advanced on Quinn, he heard a commotion behind him, and there was the giant, slicing with terrible accuracy at the soldiers. The big man was fighting at his side. Quinn didn’t have time to wonder why, but parried the thrusts of the Chalin soldier in front of him. In his peripheral vision, he saw Anzi just stirring from the floor where she had fallen.

With a well-aimed strike to the soldier’s temple, Quinn knocked his adversary down, then fell on him with his knife. That done, he turned to the rest, but found that the giant had herded the three remaining soldiers into a side aisle of machinery where the narrow confines split their attack. The giant fought like a madman, crushing the skull of one soldier and fending off the other two. At twice their size, he might prevail. Quinn heard him shout, “Run now. Mo Ti has them.”

Quinn rushed to Anzi, helping her to her feet. She was wobbly, but not bleeding. He hesitated. The man called Mo Ti was beating back the two remaining assailants, but not finishing them. Meanwhile, Anzi swayed against him, struggling to stay upright.

“Leave now,” Mo Ti shouted, “or the Tarig will have you.”

This giant was offering him his freedom. With the alarm raised, it wouldn’t be long before the Tarig would have them both. Mo Ti was offering him a gift, and he would accept it for the sake of all that remained to be done. He bowed to Mo Ti, and the big man grinned, fighting on.

Quinn backed away with Anzi, down the cleared path among the machines. Then, gripping Anzi firmly, he broke into a run. The sounds of clashing blades resounded behind.

Once outside the engine chamber, Quinn ran with Anzi down the path he had taken with Johanna, trusting his memory to follow the path in reverse. The way was charted in his mind, but even as he ran forward, he thought of Johanna lying at the foot of the engine, needing help. It seemed impossible that he was leaving her there, lying in her own blood. Leaving her again. But beyond every other consideration, he had to dispose of the chain. It was disintegrating. The metal tube housing the nan was in the last hours of its useful life. The plague of matter would run free. All Quinn knew to do was to let the river Nigh take it. As Jesid had said:
Give it to the river.
So yes, he was leaving Johanna behind. Mo Ti had given him his chance, and for the sake of the Entire, he took it.

They swept on through the corridors, rushing as fast as Anzi’s weakened state could handle. He walked with his knife in hand, ready to fight. As they hurried, the sounds of shouting came from several directions at once. And grew louder.

Retrieving the wasp case from his pocket, he clenched his hand gently around it while bringing Anzi close to his side. Around his hand, the familiar disruptive spray of light appeared, crawling up his arm and jumping to Anzi.

She flinched. “The nan?”

“No, it’s our protection.” Hearing guards approach, Quinn pulled Anzi against a wall, and they flattened themselves as a unit of soldiers rushed by them, unheeding.

Then, under the shelter of the cloaking light, Quinn broke into a run, supporting Anzi at his side. The chain lay heavy in his pocket, a burden he would gladly have thrown off, but couldn’t. He hoped for enough time to bring the chain to the Nigh; he hoped that Oventroe had been wrong about how long the chain would hold. This was likely to be the last day, and the day was ebbing.

At last he and Anzi came to the outer door of the centrum leading to the gathering yard. He pulled the door open. As he did so, he heard a bellowing far in the distance. Someone was shouting Johanna’s name. They raced across the yard toward the watch.

Soldiers carried Johanna up the ladder, supporting her, not knowing why she was here, but careful for her injuries. Her arm was bursting with pain, a bad break already swelling. The blow to her head had made her dizzy, and she struggled not to faint against the soldiers. They urged her to lie down, but she demurred. It was important to stand upright.

Lord Inweer was striding down the corridor. Behind him came a second Tarig lord.

Around the containment chamber on the high mezzanine, soldiers began massing, flocking to protect the engine. This was unnecessary. The engine endured. Damn it to hell forever. In time she might damn Titus as well, but she hurt too badly.

Inweer approached her, his face unreadable. Ignoring the soldiers who held her upright, his eyes fell on her, terrible and dark, as she had known they would. His voice was calm and low. “Where is your husband?”

Her own voice was also calm. “I don’t know,” she said. “Somewhere here. You can look.”

The second lord came forward, saying, “The traitor Johanna, ah?”

“Yes,” Lord Inweer said. His hand swept back.

The blow sent an astonishing pain through Johanna’s body. The first blow was to her chest, the second, to her head. She blacked out. The next thing she knew, she was being hauled up, and another blow came, electrifying her body with a hideous pain. Oh stop, make it stop. Thrown into the railing, she crumpled, gasping through clots of blood in her throat, fighting for breath.

After a second or an hour she opened her eyes a crack. She saw a lord’s boot close to her face. A knife had extruded from the heel. He would kick her now, slicing off her face. She hoped the blow would kill her.

“Leave her,” a deep voice said, and then there was the sound of booted feet.

The sound faded. The world faded. All so cold. Death is so cold. When does God come? she wondered. Does He wait until all is cold, or swoop down now?

Now.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Hush and sleep, the bright turns blue,
Hush and sleep, the Nigh bears you.
Rest and ebb, the Entire is wide,
Rest and ebb, the lords provide.

—a child’s bedtime song

T
HEY PASSED UNNOTICED ACROSS THE SERE. Later, Quinn surmised that the garrison had rushed to the center of the fortress, weakening the guard in the outer domains. Entering the terminus with Anzi, Quinn freed the wasp to guide them through the tangle of corridors with their silent, bony chambers. As they ran, Anzi leaned heavily on Quinn. He bunched his fist around the chain in his pocket, wondering how fast he’d be aware of nan release.

In fits and starts as they ran, Anzi learned that the engine still stood. Her mood seemed to darken then. It wasn’t the choice that Anzi would have made, but he’d made his own. Meanwhile they had far to go, to reach the Nigh where he would drown the chain.

The race through the terminus brought them out of its coils faster than they had traversed it before. They emerged onto the plains of Ahnenhoon. It was Twilight Ebb. The Paion were active, and armies moved in the distance, accompanied by pulses of light where dirigibles met a fiery end. In the nearby hills, units of soldiers swarmed, so he and Anzi couldn’t head that way. With the wasp scrambling the light around them, they struck out across the middle of the plain, but knowing their camouflage wouldn’t last long.

For some time the light around them had been dimming. Anzi wanted to travel more furtively, hunched down to take full advantage of the cover of the grass. But that would slow their progress, and besides, the grass was thinning, offering less camouflage than before.

At last Quinn saw Anzi clearly, and knew that the wasp had lost its function. He had been clutching the chrysalis so tightly that his hand had almost frozen into a claw. Opening his fingers, he found nothing in his palm but dust.

The fighting was closer now, and the cries of soldiers could be heard less than a mile off. In spots across the plain the airships of the Paion welled out of nowhere, drawing a wave of troops to set up fire-launching defenses.
Quinn and Anzi would need to circle around the skirmishes—a longer, more time-consuming route. They took stock of their situation. Exhausted and hungry, they needed rest. Most critically, they needed water.

“Into the hills, then,” Anzi said. She held Quinn’s hand, sounding lost but at peace.

“The long way . . . ,” Quinn mused.

They looked Nigh-ward to the storm wall in the distance. They could never walk so far, not without rest. They had no time for rest, if Oventroe’s prediction of the chain’s life was correct. The lord might have been lying about that as about so much else, Quinn knew. The thought kept his hopes alive, of reaching the Nigh in time. Whether to trust the lord at all was a constant thought. Why had Lord Oventroe risked so much to save the Rose? Was he just a ruthless ally, determined to keep Quinn on task, and in the end, the best hope the Rose had for succor? Or was he something worse? In time, Quinn meant to find out.

The memory of Johanna slipping from the ladder sickened him. The fall might have killed her; certainly it would have been a terrible injury. If the latter, she would face Tarig justice by herself, and the thought weighed heavily. He knew now that Johanna had never planned to survive the experience, but her willingness to die made her fate at Tarig hands all the more unjust.

Anzi pointed across the plain. There, an airship approached them at a stately pace.

They crouched down in the sparse grass. Perhaps the craft was heading for some point beyond them, Quinn thought. But soon they heard the air- ship’s humming motor, and the dirigible dropped ropes for landing. They had been seen.