Bright of the Sky (36 page)

Pedaling furiously, the driver turned to look at them. He was an old Jout sentient, with massive shoulders and almost no neck, making turning around no mean feat. “Taking which road, mistress?” He pointed to an intersection where thousands of pedi cabs converged with people on foot.

“The quickest way, Steward,” she said.

“I’m no steward, by the bright.” The Jout’s skin, rough with the overlapping armors of his hide, tightened in peevishness. Apparently the flattery hadn’t been welcome.

“Then, Factor, pedal us the fastest way, and there’ll be extra for you.” They were in a hurry to be out of this public setting; although Quinn, after five days on the train, was eager for a change.

An hour previously, they had arrived at this axis city, situated at one of the great sky pillars. On the outskirts of the city they had passed endless fields of gleve, the staple plant in this region. Engineered to produce edibles, gleve plants hung heavy with many staples, colorful vegetables and pods of quasi-meats. But by far the most arresting new view was the axis looming over the city. It was a massive and shining rope, connecting ground to sky, falling from a height of perhaps thirty thousand feet. Unlike the bright itself, the axis didn’t buckle and fold like boiling porridge. Instead, it fell straight downward like a laser, where a domed structure accepted the beam into its roof. This pillar was the communication stream. Was the bright limited to sublight speeds? Quinn couldn’t remember. But there was no other way to send messages, with radio impossible.

Now, coming to the end of the long ride through the city, their pedi cab arrived in a region of low hills covered with a fuzz of blue ground cover. There, hovering over the land, was their conveyance, an Adda, a floating being filled with a buoyant gas. Many days ago, when Quinn had been a prisoner in the jar, he’d looked over the plains and seen these beings dotting the sky. The creature was a true symbiont, one that had developed a relationship with travelers in exchange for food. The Adda who took passengers were all female, since the great cavity of the belly was used to transport young, and the males were too small to be useful.

“The Adda is sentient?” Quinn asked. Anzi had said so, but the beast did not look a likely winner in the intelligence race.

“In a way. There are more varieties of sentience here than on Earth. Her sentience is for electromagnetism and vanes of bright radiation.”

This symbiont would be their conveyance, if they could arrange passage. However, the lone Adda floating overhead was in high demand, beset by hundreds of Chalin and other sentients hoping to travel in the direction of the River Nigh, a direction called in the Chalin vernacular
to the Nigh
, as traveling away from the river was
against the Nigh
.

“How many can she carry?” Quinn asked.

“Oh, many, Dai Shen. Twenty or twenty-five individuals, if small.”

“We’ll have a long wait, then.” They were far back in the line for passage.

She motioned him to follow, and they climbed up the slope of the hill where people were gathered. At the top, Quinn found that below them lay a deep crater.

In this depression floated a congregation of many Adda. To stabilize themselves they gripped guy wires in their mouths.

“The Adda assemble here out of the winds,” Anzi explained. “This valley is a subsidence, where an aquifer collapsed long ago, from overuse.” There were ways that a geography of sorts could form, but most uplift, of hills, for example, happened near the storm walls where the land bent from the forces of the dark boundaries. Still, this was a dramatic valley, in Entire terms.

Anzi plunged down the side of the hill, pushing through the crowds where people were climbing ladders and handing up satchels and bags of the fare: the seed food that motivated the Adda to take on passengers.

“That one,” she said, pointing to a smaller-sized behemoth that had lowered a membranous ladder but had not attracted riders thus far. “No one wants that one, so we may be able to journey alone.”

They purchased four bags of seed from a vendor, and Quinn hoisted three of them on his back, Anzi taking one. He followed her as she approached the symbiont. “Passage, grain for passage,” Anzi shouted to the Adda.

The great beast’s side eyes shifted to examine the seed bags. The thick eyelids descended in a ponderous blink. Then the Adda lowered, signaling permission to enter.

Anzi climbed the ladder, then took the bags one by one from Quinn. As the last bag went on board, a flurry of activity drew Quinn’s attention.

A personage was approaching, pushed in a decorated cart by three large Jout. Although the person’s body was obscured by the sides of the cart, its head identified it instantly. A Gond.

The Jout pushed the cart toward Quinn as the Gond looked up at the Adda, shouting, “Passage for the godwoman, Nigh bound!”

The Gond’s great horned head stared up at the Adda, exposing the Gond’s aging neck, deeply hung with flabby flesh. She wore a white vest and sash, marking her as a follower of the Miserable God.

The cart came alongside Quinn, and the Gond, although sitting in the cart, came nearly eye to eye with him. The red gums of her mouth hung down, exposing the roots of her carnivore teeth. In the back of the cart were the sacks of grain that would be the godwoman’s passage.

Quinn put up his hand. “We’re full.”

The godwoman grinned, taking the comment amiss. “Not at all full. Plenty of room.”

“The Chalin woman travels alone.”

“The Chalin woman travels with you, my friend.”

“She likes not godmen.”

“Neither do I.” The Gond waved to her Jout helpers to take the sacks of grain on board. One of the Jout hoisted a sack and headed for the ladder, but Quinn blocked his way.

“Find another berth. You’re not wanted here.”

The Jout stood shorter than Quinn but bigger around, and there were two more where that one came from. The Jout said without expression, “Give way.”

Anzi’s face appeared in the orifice of the symbiont’s belly, but Quinn was already dealing with the Jout, pushing him backward.

As the Jout surged by him and set a foot on the ladder, Quinn brought out his knife and thrust it into one of the sacks. Brown kernels spilled out, raising a cloud of dust. In her bass voice, the Gond barked, “Foul. The grain paid for!”

Several coins sprayed down from above as Anzi threw payment on the ground in front of the godwoman. The Jout paused, looking at Quinn’s knife, still drawn. Then, sourly, he descended. “Foul,” the Jout repeated, but without conviction. He set the sacks down and motioned his cohorts to abandon the cart. They wouldn’t fight for a godder, as the clergy were sometimes called.

In the ensuing quiet, Quinn sprinted up the ladder. When he started to draw it into the pouch, Anzi said, “No, the ladder stays down.”

As Quinn backed away from the opening, he heard the creature growl, “May God bless your journey.”

Hearing this, Anzi thrust her hand into her purse and threw many more coins out of the pouch opening. “Take back the prayer,” she shouted as the Adda let go of the ropes tethering her to the ground.

The godwoman laughed out loud, rumbling, “And may God keep you in His gaze all your days!”

As Anzi fumbled for more coins, Quinn stopped her. “It’s only words.”

She looked doubtful as she crouched at the orifice, but ceased throwing money down.

The Gond sat in her cart with a wide circle of emptiness around her. Her wings glistened, wings that could never hope to raise her off the ground. A fallen angel came to mind, as the creature conjured visions of heaven and hell combined.

“I didn’t know Gond could be priests,” Quinn murmured.

Anzi recited, “No sentient being is beyond hope.” She eyed Quinn. “But you, Dai Shen, should not have drawn a knife.”

He knew he shouldn’t have, but sharing quarters with a godwoman could have been disastrous. Anzi bit her lip, but said nothing.

The Adda had risen into the sky to a height of about a hundred feet. Nearby, other of the blimplike creatures were letting go of their guy wires and starting a slow movement away.

They watched as the gathering in the valley receded.

He looked around him at the Adda’s travel pouch. It was perhaps two-thirds of the creature’s size, and was surrounded by pink, fleshy walls smelling of warm yeast. The balloon in which they rode swayed gently as the prevailing winds pulled it into the great migration path toward the River Nigh. As long as the seeds lasted, the Adda would not be tempted to descend and forage.

From high in the fleshy cavity came a whooshing sound.

“The wind in the Adda’s sinuses,” Anzi said. She opened a bag and propped it against the Adda’s side.

In a few moments, from the roof of the cavity, feeding tubes descended. They plunged into the first bag, producing a snuffling sound that clearly signified a boisterous feeding.

Quinn glanced at the orifice that served as the door of the passenger cavity. Once again he had drawn notice to himself, despite his resolve not to. But it was unthinkable to travel with a godwoman, much less a Gond. Godmen and godwomen were lonely souls, eager for converse and gossip. Some might well be in the employ of the Tarig. He took out the Going Over blade and began cleaning it.

Anzi sat next to him. “It was well done, Shen. To prevent the Gond from boarding. You had no choice.”

“No help for it now.”

“No,” she agreed, looking out through the orifice as though scanning for pursuers.

As the Adda drifted toward the Nigh, they began the longest duration of any leg of their journey.

Even though the primacies were narrow—perhaps four thousand miles wide—it was a slow journey to the Nigh from the populated centers on the other side of the primacy. But once a traveler arrived on the riverbanks the journey was almost over. So the heartland was near in a sense, as was Quinn’s destination: the Ascendancy in the center of the heartland. From this hub radiated all the lobelike primacies, each with its own great river. He would travel another of those rivers to reach the primacy where Sydney lived.

Would she remember him?
How
would she remember him?

Since his meeting with Bei, he knew it was not a settled question.

In the valley of the Adda, the godwoman BeSheb looked around her, noting that her Jouts had fled and no one would approach her now to offer assistance.

She brushed her jacket, wiping away the grain particles that soiled the sacred white of her vestments. Foul, foul. A waste of grain, and now the coins lying where any miscreant could pick them up. She watched as the vile Adda set out on its journey, one that she prayed would be plagued by river spiders.

BeSheb shifted her weight in the conveyance and prayed to calm her spiking emotions. “Oh, Miserable God look at me; oh, counter of sins, observer of sorrows, creator of evil, craftsman of the poxy Chalin! Look at me. I am not afraid, I am not debased to attend thee, I freely give obeisance. . . .”

A passing Hirrin looked with alarm in BeSheb’s direction and ambled away, flattening her ears so as not to hear the prayer. The circle around the Gond grew wider, but no one dared touch the coins that sparkled in the bright like the yellow eyes of a buried god.

BeSheb threw her head back and voiced her prayers, and as she did so, her distress eased, and finally she grew silent and began to count the coins. Twelve of them, two of them primals. Well. That was ten times the price of the grain, and rightly compensated for her humiliation. So then, paying for one more sack plus the muscles of some hapless sentient to carry it, there should be plenty left to—

A shadow bent over one of the primals.

A Tarig crouched to pick it off the ground. He turned to BeSheb. “Your coin, ah?”

The Gond drew her wings around her, to settle her appearance and prepare to deal with the fiend. The Tarig were not believers, and God hated them even more than He hated most. Such was the teaching of the seer Hoptat, who set down the Ways of God the Miserable archons ago, before the days of radiance.

“Yes, Bright Lord, my life in your service,” BeSheb whispered, knowing that her voice was more subservient when gentle.

The lord approached her, holding the primal in his long fingers.

“Someone pays very handsomely for your prayers.”

BeSheb lifted her head to better see the fiend. “As to that, pardon me, it is not the case. The miscreants paid for damage to my sack of grain, which they inflicted by means of a sword, improperly drawn and threatening my Jout helpers.”

“We see no Jout helpers.”

The Gond licked her lips in irritation. “Certainly you do not. They fled.” She was still waiting for the fiend to give her the coin.

The lord fixed her with a most unpleasant gaze as the circle of emptiness around her widened and even the Adda moved off farther.

The Gond added, “One is sorry to contradict the lord, but truth is not always pleasant.” If he wanted to take offense, so he would. But the miscreants had insulted her, BeSheb of Ord, and she’d sooner end her days than keep quiet about it.

The Tarig’s voice came melodious and calm. “Who has a sword and is using such?”

The Gond pointed skyward. “There, the Chalin man goes, riding alone, because he did not wish the Miserable God to accompany him.”

“Hnnn. Wished to be alone.” The Tarig seemed to smile. “Many wish to shun the God of Misery. We give permission to shun God, ah?” He fingered the gold primal, moving it among his four fingers like a filthy conjurer.

BeSheb scowled. “And permission also to wield knives?”

“You are bold, BeSheb, to speak so.”

He knew her name. Not just a lord stumbling upon a situation, then. Perhaps she had let her irritation show improperly.

The lord went on. “We like you. Speaking directly and fearlessly. Not often the case, BeSheb. One welcomes such diversion.”

BeSheb smirked. “They are all groveling toadies. A Gond speaks her thoughts.”

The coin fell, and BeSheb caught it. The Tarig turned, summoning with a gesture a Chalin boy who watched them from a distance. “Pick up the coins for this personage, young Chalin,” the lord commanded. “Then do the god-woman’s bidding until the ebb, not requesting payment. Ah?”