Bright of the Sky (56 page)

He’d never been sick; and now he remembered why: protecting their travel powers, the Tarig perpetuated the notion that bright made air travelers sick. Slow and difficult travel was one more control they exerted on the Entire’s population. They also protected their monopoly of the ships.

The ship creatures that were always trying to escape.

Chiron had told him that the ships were sentient. In some forms that they took, the ships were sentient. But in the form that the Tarig imposed on them, they were not.

Reaching up to the underbelly of the ship, Quinn thumbed a nub in the hull of the ship. From the smooth sides, a circle of material softened, became a membrane. Anzi gave him a boost up, and he crawled in, pulling her after him. They passed through a membrane as thin as soap film.

As they entered the ship, Quinn’s nostrils detected a complex array of scents: metallic spikes, and the heavy scents of fuels; underneath, a stew of organic chemicals, so subtle that only his Jacobson’s organs could detect them. He hurried to the forward compartment that served as a cockpit. Although there were no conventional viewing ports, a transparent bulkhead curved around the nose of the ship. He checked for movement in the hangar. But all was still. The ships, sleek and low, lay frozen in place like a taxidermist’s handiwork. Remembering how Chiron had activated the ships, Titus placed his hand along the bulkhead. Under his hand, a display grid brightened. The navigation commands could be issued by touch, anywhere.

Anzi stood next to him, her knife in her hand, watching through that clear portion of the bulkhead that provided a forward view. From time to time she glanced down at Quinn’s manipulations of the instrument panel.

“What course?” she asked.

“Bei’s reach.”

They exchanged a glance, no more. He wasn’t going to the Inyx sway, but home.

Working as fast as he could, Quinn hunched over the instrument panel now glowing under his hand, trying to remember how Chiron had navigated. Many times he’d been at her side as she flew the ships, and each time he had been watching carefully. But she hid her movements well. It had been a game of cat and mouse with her. If he had grabbed a ship, she would have grabbed
him
. Her arms could be soft or strong.

He concentrated hard, sweat greasing his skin. Hadenth had prevented Min Fe from killing him. Hadenth wanted him alive. It was a great inducement to haste.

But even as he worked, he knew the limits of his knowledge. The truth was, he had very little idea of how to operate these ships. The systems were alien; a compromise between preferred Tarig interfaces and those possible with the alien beings known as
fragmentals
. Quinn knew how to launch the ships, he hoped. Beyond that . . .
Beyond that
would have to wait, because there was no time to think of anything except the launch sequence.

He could hear Anzi’s breath. It was the only indication that she was afraid. He was glad she didn’t know the rest of it; that she was entrusting herself to a pilot who couldn’t fly.

Finishing there, they ran through the hangar to the next ship. Overhead, above the shield, clouds of birds loomed and receded like an infestation of locusts. Like God taking revenge, sending trials.
Taking notice.
He and Anzi scrambled into the next brightship.

Quinn’s hands sweated as he pressed against the bulkhead, calling up the display, coaxing another ship into a ready state. The colored grids of the display fluoresced his fingertips as he pressed the commands. He could do no more than direct the ships outward. Ultimately, they would fall into the storm walls. His great hope was that, once launched, the Tarig had no mechanism to call them back. Or that, even if the Tarig could, that the ships wouldn’t
want
to come back.

The reality of what he was doing began to catch up with him. He turned to Anzi, to set her choices before her. “I can’t fly these ships very far,” he told her. “I don’t know how to navigate. Or how to land, except here at the hangar.” He let that sink in. Then he said, “You can still hide in the city. Try to get out. They don’t know who you are.”

Anzi took that news in. He could almost see her thinking, analyzing. Then she said, “We go together. Keep moving.”

He wasn’t surprised at her answer, just at how relieved he was.

In the last ship he set the course, and motioned for Anzi to strap in. In the most complex maneuver he had yet done, he remotely activated the other ships. Then he thumbed the grid, releasing the fields that defined the edge of the hangar.

Outside, a motion on the ship’s nose caused him to flinch. A bronze hand swiped at his face. Outside, a long arm swept down from the top of the ship, scraping a hand along the viewing port. Then, a Tarig slid down the pane, holding on somehow, and peering in.

It was Hadenth. The lord was clinging to the front of the ship. He stared into Quinn’s face, a curdled phlegm dripping from his mouth, the eyes large and fixed as though they’d been staring at something too long. Maddened by the darkness of the tunnel, he shrieked at them with short, panting cries, more animal than sentient.

Quinn released the ships from their tethers. They all began a slow, melting movement toward the edge of the platform.

Anzi brought up her foot, slamming the bulkhead with her heavy boot heel. But Hadenth didn’t flinch or release his grip. In fact, he had begun drilling his talon into the viewing port. Meanwhile, the ship crawled toward the perimeter.

Twenty yards away from launch point, the talon popped through and began sawing down the pane. Anzi hacked at the claw with her knife, but the blade bounced off again and again. At last she whipped off her belt and hooked the cloth under the talon, temporarily cushioning its downward slice. The lord frowned at this tactic, a cleft forming in his brow as he squinted at what Anzi had done. Looking behind him, he saw that the edge was almost upon him. Then, too late, he tried to yank his talon free.

The brightship launched from the platform, ripping Hadenth from the ship’s prow. Instantly, the city receded below them. They climbed upward, to the bright, and behind them Hadenth’s fate was to fall, fall like a shadow from the world.

They soared above the heartland, the clear cockpit wall blindingly hot as they pointed to the sky. Anzi stared at the window as though still fighting her adversary. In a few moments she slumped against the bulkhead, closing her eyes, steadying herself.

The other ships sped away on their separate trajectories. They had launched. One ship ran toward the Inyx sway. It might not get far, but Quinn felt the tug of that ship.

He looked around the ship with something like disbelief. They had stolen a brightship from the very grasp of Lord Hadenth. Even if the worst happened, and they didn’t survive, it would be a sweet ending. To take your enemy down with you.

He sat looking out, trying to shield his eyes from the slicing glints of light. When he looked away, confident that at least for now they weren’t on a crash course, he saw Anzi gazing out the window with a strange expression. Well, she had never flown before.

“How’s the view?” he said.

“It is hard to say.”

She was staring at the crack in the window. Looking more closely, Quinn saw that lodged there was a four-inch talon, separated from its socket. The substance comprising the window pooled around it, encapsulating it.

Hadenth. In his mind’s eye, Quinn saw the gracious lord falling onto a bright city plaza—or better yet, falling thirty thousand feet to the sea, with plenty of time to anticipate his landing.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Storm wall, hold up the bright,
Storm wall, dark as Rose night,
Storm wall, where none can pass,
Storm wall, always to last.

—a child’s verse

T
HEY WERE FLYING NEAR THE ROLLING ENERGIES OF THE BRIGHT. Only a few thousand feet above, the sky appeared to boil, like a molten river streaming from some silver-throated volcano. The ship maintained distance from that boil. But they were flying across the Sea of Arising, without a destination.

Behind Quinn lay the littered path of his mistakes: his broken promise to Sydney, and to Johanna, to bring his wife’s body home. And the crime he could never have imagined: the killing of a child. He tried to shove these things away, for now.

The bright stretched on, and everywhere.

Anzi stood by his side, gazing out the viewports. “We cannot land this ship at Bei’s reach,” she said. “It will cause a sensation among the scholars. It would implicate Bei.”

He barely heard her. His mind was dredging for memories, searching for a glimpse of how to pilot the ship. Nothing new came to him. Chiron had guarded her maneuvers, especially when entering the bright.

Anzi’s brow furrowed. “We could land in a nascence, though. No one would see us there. Then you could walk to the reach.”

“Yes.” Thank God she was clearheaded as always. A nascence was dangerous, though. On the way to Bei’s reach, when he and Anzi had been aboard the sky bulb, they’d passed a nascence in the distance. Such a place was a temporary and forbidding root hair, fitfully sparking into and out of existence. If they could get to that nascence, and if it still existed, he could hike up the minoral to the veil. Then Anzi—setting out on foot and then by train—might have time to reach Yulin, to warn him of all that had transpired. They owed Yulin a warning, although the lords might already have seized him, if Wen An, the old woman scholar, had failed to evade the Tarig—and if she had revealed all she knew.

Despite all these complications, they had one great advantage. He and Anzi had a brightship, and the lords didn’t. Although they might create others, it would take time. The lords had only one other choice for crossing the Entire’s galactic-scale distances: they could travel on the Nigh. But they must still cross the primacy, a distance they would have to cover by the slow means they imposed on everyone.

Anzi broke his train of thought. She murmured, “When you come back, I will be in Ahnenhoon. It’s a good place to go unnoticed.”

After a long pause she said, “Or, I could go with you.”

He didn’t know what to say. There were a dozen reasons against it; the greatest being that if he died in the attempted crossing, who would be left except Anzi who knew Johanna’s secret?

He didn’t want to tell her no. He waited for her, watching her, with her stark white hair and alabaster skin—both elegant and inhuman. For all its strangeness, her face was familiar to him. He had come to know her better than he knew even those closest to him, like his own brother, or Lamar Gelde.

“I could come with you,” she said again. “But then, who would warn my uncle?”

They were both silent then. Finally she turned and left, walking back into one of the curved arms of the crescent-shaped ship. He thought she had made her decision, and it oppressed her, as it did him.

Without the sound of engines, the ship was eerily quiet, as though they swam instead of flew. He couldn’t remember how the craft propelled itself.

Perhaps he had never known. The smooth bulkheads glowed like mother-of-pearl, the instrumentation hidden until touch retrieved it. He forced himself to concentrate, touching the bulkhead, bringing the instrumentation into view. It meant little to him, except to activate flight to and from the hangar.

Then the thought bloomed in his mind, like a floodlight in a dark museum: His only chance was to get the ship itself to help him.

Snatches of conversation from his excursions with Chiron came to him. The ships were sentient—not alive here, in this universe, but in another. The Tarig referred to the ship beings as
fragmentals
. He remembered fruitless rummaging in the archives for information on them.

Chiron had told him that the fragmentals lived in higher dimensions, traveling in the bright in the same way that the navitars guided ships on the River Nigh. The Tarig enslaved them in the four-dimensional universe, confining them to a useful form. The beings were compelled through
framing
, a process that shaped their hyper-forms into a lower-dimensional geometry.

This ship was an incomplete manifestation of its true self, caged and shaped by Tarig powers. They were like the navitars in that they were dreadfully altered. For the navitars, however, the alteration was by choice. Quinn didn’t know how to fly such ship-beings, but they knew how to fly themselves.

He possessed only one inducement for this ship to do so: he could free them—this ship and the four others. Could they be persuaded? Could he communicate with them, and did they understand the Lucent tongue? To find out, he might try to unframe the ship. But that meant jeopardizing the stability of its shape. The more frames he removed, the more free will the sentient had, but also the more the ship’s form would decay.

So Quinn sat in the Tarig-sized pilot chair and sweated out the decision, whether or not to attempt communication. If you let a tiger out of its cage, the creature might be grateful—or not. He sat for a time, looking out over the world outside, the Sea of Arising below, the bright above. On all sides they were surrounded by exotic matter, like wayfarers in a transient bubble of air, unable to touch the world.

He spoke to the ship, murmuring, “Help me.” But he knew that a closely framed ship couldn’t speak. The Tarig didn’t want to hear cries of pain.

He touched the cool surface of the wall. A simple navigation display sprang to life.

What choice did he have? He could land the ship—possibly—and then what? No, to return home, to bring home what he’d learned, he had to use this ship to escape quickly to the far reach. Through the bright.

Touching the grid of the display, he called up the framing patterns. Chiron had said,
There are many frames to keep them in bounds.

He canceled one pattern of lines, the outermost frame.

In their true form, the beings would appear in the three dimensions of the Entire as fragments, much like a human standing in a two-dimensional realm might look like two round circles, when viewed at ankle level. Chiron had told him these things, her black eyes lit with a dark fire, anticipating the dive into the bright, where she could taste the other dimension through the sensibilities of the ship. Because even the Tarig, for all their powers, couldn’t directly perceive a higher dimension—and, being curious, they wished to.