Bright of the Sky (32 page)

Bei had to look away so as not to be snared by his passion, his intentions. “Who’ll put Mateo in a jar?”

“My employers. Minerva.” The venom in his voice was hard to mistake.

So, they had Titus Quinn in a harness. They were compelling him.

Titus went on. “They’ll ruin the boy’s future. That’s why I want the correlates. Unless I have some power over them, they’ll run me. I’ll be their puppet, and so will my family.”

Bei watched his altered friend. So Chalin-like, physically. So human. The man was still in a cage. Now Bei understood some of this passion that drove Titus. It wasn’t all about love. Some of it was about hate. They compelled Titus, threatening him. It was untenable. And even if Bei withheld what he knew, Titus would pursue it. Nothing would stop him.

By the vows, I’m going to tell him, Bei realized with a sinking heart.

“Stand up, Titus.” The man did so, and Anzi with him, both of them looking expectant, trusting.

Don’t trust me, boy. If you ask me which side I’m on, it’s ever the Entire. And why not? It’s my world. Imperfect, regulated by the lords, constrained by vows and laws and the arrogance that comes of immortality. But my world.

He sighed. “Titus. I’ll help you. But with conditions.”

Titus grew wary, and properly so.

“You must swear to me that you’ll do everything in your power to keep humans from conquest. Pardon me if I don’t trust that bunch of murderous, pillaging scoundrels. You may not be able to do much, but what’s in your power, that you’ll do. Swear to me.”

Titus had the grace to think about what he was swearing. He looked down the long rows of gleve, and he came to his resolve. “I swear it, Su Bei.”

“That your people won’t come in numbers, staying. Swear it.”

“I’ll do what I can to prevent it. I swear.”

Bei held up a hand, “Don’t say on God.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

Bei smiled. Titus was no believer. He knew the man well, and thought his plain word good enough.

“What I’ll tell you is a capital offense, to know.” He nodded in the direction of Anzi. “You want her to know?”

Titus raised an eyebrow at Anzi. She answered, “I already know enough to die a hundred times.”

That was true. They all did.

Bei was conscious that his next words were potent. They might be a poison or a medicine, but they could change the Entire forever. “So, then.” He fixed Titus with a gaze. “Here is a name to remember: Oventroe. Mark me, I don’t know if he would reveal knowledge of the correlates.” Titus watched him carefully. “But they’re not all satisfied, you know. Some of them want converse with the Rose, of course. Some of them are against Hadenth and Inweer and the rest. Like Lord Oventroe.”

The expression on Titus’s face, though swollen and disfigured, registered his surprise. “
Lord
Oventroe?”

Heaven give us patience. The man thought the traitor was a Chalin. Or a Hirrin. Or a Gond. Didn’t he know that such traitors would be powerless? The game was the Tarig, of course.

“Yes,
lord
. Lord Oventroe. He hopes to rise to influence as one of the five ruling lords. Perhaps he will see you as a potential ally. Or perhaps not. He has no reason to hurry his timetable in whatever he’s planning to do—but you asked for a name. The next part is on your shoulders.” Bei looked from Titus to Anzi and back again, at their incredulous faces. “Now you’re in a bigger game than you thought, eh?” He closed his eyes. May god not look at me, now I’m in that game, too.

Bei thought of his scholarship and all that might be learned of the Rose, given free interactions between here and there. Free interactions . . . that consummation might be far in the future, and after unguessed-at turmoil. But the notion stirred him. Why not have converse? It was a question many sentients had asked over many thousands of days.

“You will hear,” Bei continued, “when you get to the Ascendancy, that Oventroe is a fanatical enemy of the Rose. In fact, that is a pose. He’s always believed that contact was inevitable. He’s curious about the Rose, curious in a way that most Tarig aren’t. He’d be interested in you, to say the least. But that would mean you’d have to tell him who you are.” Seeing Quinn frown, Bei added, “A colossal risk, yes.”

Quinn said, “But you believe him, that he wants Rose contact?”

“I believe it. Unless he’s lying. In the end you’ll have to make your own judgment.

One thing I can do for you. I have a token from Oventroe. It allowed me to see him from time to time, when I lived there. All at his whim. And we never discussed his plans; why would we? I was a scholar, not a partisan. At the time, because of you, I knew more about the Rose than anyone.”

“Did he know me?”

“No. He kept well away from you, to preserve his disguise. Cixi watched him, always. But she watched everybody, as she’ll watch you. The Magis-terium is full of spies; remember that, and strive to pass unnoticed.”

So, then. He’d uttered the forbidden name, uttered it to the Rose. Lord Oventroe might thank Bei for it, or kill him, but the words were spoken now, and could not be withdrawn. Bei didn’t regret it. It felt like a completion— of what, he could not have said—but long in coming.

“The lord could kill you in an instant,” Bei said, to cover a surge of emotion, “and no one would question him.”

Titus still looked eager enough, or foolish enough, to take the risk. “But if I use the token, Bei, he’ll know you sent me.”

“Probably. But I’m not the only person who has one. Oventroe’s spies are scattered through the Ascendancy and the sways. Don’t trust anyone.”

“Why did you trust
him
?”

That made Bei laugh, and he realized how naïve Titus was at this time, before his memories of the Tarig became complete. “I didn’t, lad. But when a lord takes an interest in you, you submit to him.” Bei rubbed his chin. “Or her.”

Titus averted his eyes, not wanting to dwell on that.

They walked together out of the field, with Titus and Anzi helping to carry baskets of the harvested tubers.

Bei stopped for a moment, looking back over the tended beds. It had been a restful pastime, growing produce and working the soil. He thought that those endless and peaceful days were now at an end. What he had taken for serenity had been a suffocating peace, imposed by the vow of withholding the knowledge of the Entire. The reverse side of that coin had been to withhold knowledge of the Rose.

Well, he thought with resignation, the Rose and the Entire were about to get a rather strong dose of each other.

“Ji Anzi, wake up.”

Bei shook her arm again, and Anzi woke in some alarm, her face wary in the light from the lantern Bei held. “What is it? What’s wrong?” Anzi pulled her blanket around her, though she’d slept fully clothed. The chill in the deep ground affected newcomers that way.

“Nothing’s wrong.” Bei had spent the last hours thinking instead of sleeping. He’d been focused for so many thousands of days on cosmography that he had lost his once-acute sense of politics.

Tonight, it had come back to him: the balance of the Radiant Path was about to shift. Bei had always thought of Tarig hegemony as a monumental presence, as stable and unmovable as one of those stone pyramids erected by the pharaohs of Earth. What had kept sleep at bay this ebb was the notion that the pyramid was not stable if turned upside down. Then, its very breadth and weight could send it crashing with a nudge. A nudge from Titus Quinn.

“Ji Anzi,” he said, keeping his voice low so as not to wake Quinn, sleeping next door. “I’ve been watching you. I think that you’re loyal.”

A woman of few words, she watched him. He looked at the girl, thinking that she was prettier than he’d thought at first. She held herself with dignity. She was what a young man might call fine-looking, although Bei had ceased wondering about such things since his last wife had left him a thousand days ago. A good woman, and one who deserved better than life in a minoral’s reach.

Now Bei looked at Ji Anzi and wondered if she realized that she occupied a position of supreme importance: advisor and confidante of Titus Quinn. Bei had to know what their relationship was. Everything depended on it.

He couldn’t order her to do what he had in mind. She’d have to see the wisdom of it herself. “Ji Anzi,” he said, “the question for you—and for all of us—is, who are we loyal to?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “Well, who do you serve, girl?”

“My uncle Yulin.”

“Ah.” Well, now that was out of the way; she had said what she had to.

“Yes, yes. But beyond family obligations?” She watched him still. “Let me ask this, then: How do you find Dai Shen? Is he worthy—worthy of your efforts?”

“Yes.”

The reserve was seeming less of a virtue. “And are you committed to him, then?”

“Yes.”

“There! That’s just my point. How far will you go for his sake? Surely you’ve thought of that? At some point you’ll have to choose between the interests of the Rose and interests of”—here he spread his hands, indicating the world—“all this.”

“Not if what he wants is his daughter.”

He paused. “And the secret of going to and from?” He looked at her with compassion. She was fully committed to the man, but she had no idea where that might lead.

“As Dai Shen said, the Rose will discover it sometime anyway.”

Ah, so guileless. He wished he could let her stay that way. But no. “Anzi, listen to me. Right now you only see a man on a quest to learn some things and take back something that belongs to him. As he should! But freedom to go to and from . . . that is a lever to move our world off its base. The correlates are the fulcrum.” He sighed. She wasn’t following—and she wasn’t looking ahead.

“I don’t know what the future will bring to the Entire, Anzi, but I know that the door is open now—open for many changes. Titus wants the correlates to bargain with his masters for the safety of his family. But the possibilities go far beyond that. They
could
go far beyond.” He looked toward the wall separating her sleeping chamber from Titus’s, and lowered his voice further. “If he is won to our side.”

She frowned, and he plowed past her questions for the time being. “Listen to me. Titus doesn’t love the Rose. The Rose has exploited him. He could be won over, Anzi, to the Entire.”

“Won over?” She watched him with sober eyes, with that reserve she kept around her like a fence. “What more do you want of him?”

He paused, fingering his redstones. “I’m not sure yet. But it begins with his loyalty.” Seeing the confusion on her face, he went on, “Anzi, pay attention. I’m telling you it matters where his heart lies. Even if we can’t tell right now how it matters, it always matters what a great man thinks.” He fixed her with a gaze. “Win him over. To the Entire. It always pulled on him—what he called
the peace of the Entire
. He was under its spell once. He loved it, Anzi. If he came to love it again, we’d have a chance to become a land beyond anything we’ve been before.”

“Aren’t we enough right now?”

Bei regarded her, wondering if she had a political bone in her body. “Per- haps we are. Or perhaps there’s more that we could be. Who knows, now that we’ll have converse with the Rose?”

“But . . .” She hesitated.

When nothing more came, he supplied: “You don’t even know where
your
loyalties reside, much less his, eh?” He paused. “Because you hero-worship him. Even love him?”

She raised her chin. “No.”

“Well. Even if not. Your duty is to this land, this people, this culture. You’ll know that, eventually. Things aren’t better in the Rose.”

She looked up sharply at him. “That’s what Dai Shen said, also.”

“Well, yes, I’m not surprised.”

They sat side by side, as the silence lengthened. He wished it hadn’t come to this, that he must manipulate Titus. But Titus was the man who wanted everything, wanted power. All for a good cause, no doubt, in his own mind at least. And perhaps he would, in the end, be a boon to the Entire. But because Titus was only a representative of the Rose, and not typical of them, Bei must protect his people, his world.

He disliked this next part, but he had to be certain of Titus, and Anzi could help. “One thing might ensure his loyalty, Anzi. Physical intimacy. The man is robust. You could bind him to you.”

She looked at him with contempt. Not the right timing for that suggestion, but when would he have another chance?

At last she murmured, “What else could the Entire be, Su Bei, than the All?”

He let the irony seep into his voice. “Well, it could be the Chalin All, for one thing, instead of the Tarig All.” He saw that those considerations meant little to her. She was in love, and it blinded her. “Don’t answer me now,” Bei said. “Think about what I’ve said.”

She shook her head. “How can you ask me to betray him twice?”

He paused, chagrined to be chastened by one so young. He found himself saying, in his own defense, “It’s only betrayal if you
don’t
love him.”

Anzi sat there, her face knotted in thought.

He rose, bidding her a peaceful ebb. He’d probably destroyed her sleep, but for himself, he was finally ready for some.

The reach blew cold and dark, sprouting luminous dust devils, as though they carried specks of lightning inside of them. Bei watched as five of his least-feeble students released the ropes of the sky bulb, freeing it to rise from its moorings and bear Dai Shen and Anzi away.

He was both relieved and sad to see them go. Relieved because, since Titus’s facial alterations, Bei had labored to keep Dolwa-Pan from seeing him again, fending off her requests to see Dai Shen, to whom she’d taken a liking. She’d have been surprised to find that he no longer looked familiar. But Bei was saddened too, because he feared that this might be the last time he ever saw Titus. He felt deep affection for him, and always had, even this new version: driven, haunted, and golden-eyed.

Now Bei had sent him into more danger than Titus had planned on getting into in the first place. Now there was Lord Oventroe, and the chance the whole façade would collapse right there.

He sighed, watching the dirigible wend down the minoral, shuddering from side to side in the wind and glowing from reflected auroras.