City Without End (20 page)

“Where the lords came from.”

He smirked. “Yes. And where is that?”

“Well, if you know, Su Bei, kindly tell me.”

“I didn’t know, until now. But the only reason Titus needs the correlates to find the
doors
, is if the doors lead to another cosmos.” Bei saw her questioning look. “The correlates can tell us how two places in different universes match up. And
when
they match up. But in the process, we also learn where each of the matching places
is
. You see?”

Bei stared out the viewport, the prospect of an adventure with Titus not yet galvanizing him. Anzi could understand. This minoral had been his home for tens of thousands of days.

“I could look for the doors,” Bei said, “but not here. For that I must have access from other reaches, other primacies.”

Lightning cracked the air nearby, sending the sky bulb careening. Anzi held her seat and grabbed Bei to steady him. The storm wasn’t tiring; if anything, it was getting worse. “Master,” she said. “I took something of yours.”

Bei pursed his lips, watching her.

“I took the correlates to copy them so I could find Titus a way home.”

She had to look away. “I’m sorry.”

Bei nodded. “I know you did.” He gazed out the viewport, and his voice went soft. “Keep your copies, Anzi. It’s always a good idea to have more than one set of valuable data. I presume you have them in a safe place?”

She patted her waistband.

“Well, then.” They traveled in silence for a time, with the only sounds the thumping of wind against the sky bulb and the frequent thunder. Bei had already forgotten her theft, looking instead to what came next. “By the time I’ve looked for Titus’s
doors
in each minoral in each primacy, I’ll be too old for scholarship.”

“I can come with you. I’ll help you.”

The minoral dragged by, sand and rock and storm walls squeezing in from each side. It seemed improbable they would ever get out of there, but they talked as though it would happen.

“I might need an assistant,” Bei murmured.

“You’ll need someone to secure a few stone wells.”

“Yes. Someone good at
bargaining
.” He looked around him. “This conveyance we might need to keep.”

“I’m sure Jaq would have wanted us to have it.”

“Are you, now?”

She shrugged. “Ownership is a fragile concept.”

He pointed ahead. There, an unmistakable glow pierced the gloom.

“What is it?” Anzi breathed, leaning closer to the sight.

“Primacy.”

They were coming to the end of the minoral.

It took another hour, but eventually the sky bulb motored into the flat basin of the colossal Arm of Heaven Primacy. There they were set free of the buffeting winds and Anzi brought the dirigible into one of a series of mooring masts staged at the entrance to the minoral. She shinnied down the rope and made the craft secure.

Once Bei clambered down, they used what means they had to make a shallow grave and laid the ship keeper into it, imploring the Miserable God to take no notice. They wrote a small paper grave flag: “His greatest voyage, up a minoral.”

They slept for a time in the shadow of the sky bulb. When the minoral finally collapsed, the noise woke them. With the howling sound of wind through a pipe, the minoral seemed to stretch longer and thinner. As they watched, they couldn’t know if the world was ending or preserving itself.

Then the storm walls of the minoral fell away like evaporating foam. Anzi thought for a moment that she saw the void beyond the Entire. But in the next moment the primacy’s great storm walls swept together like a curtain closing.

CHAPTER TWELVE

There are only three barriers to reconciliation: The past, the
present, and pride.

—Si Rong the Wise

A
S AN ENORMOUS HORN BRAYED
, the longest parade in the history of the universe surged into the never-ending Way. Out into the fog-drenched streets came the citizens of Rim City, costumed in festive satins, masks, and headdresses. They were dressed for a mixture of veneration and revelry and for most there was no difference. With them came banners, kites, ropes of beads, jars of wine, cymbals, flutes, gongs, and bells, all pressing, banging, blowing, and ringing in general mayhem and the occasional impromptu riff. From more organized enclaves emerged painted floats, carts loaded with children, and caparisoned bekus ridden by as many revelers as could hold on. The massive fog banks that had nested over the lower Rim for so many days dampened few spirits; the bright gnawed at it, tattering it, throwing random scenes into spot-lit dioramas.

Everywhere around the shore, the dwellers of Rim City flooded into the Way. At the third hour of the third phase of day—a time all sentients knew by birthright, there being no clocks in the Entire—the Great Procession formed a complete circle around the sea. To anyone marching in the lower Rim today, it did seem that the line of revelers was never-ending, stretching to the limit of sight in both directions. At the bridges over the Rivers Nigh, the parade crossed over and streamed into the next primacy, with the marchers charged to walk and ride as long as the spirit moved them, with all homes open to those who might require rest before returning home.

One person was missing from the celebrants, but she had the best view of all. On a private balcony of the Ascendancy, the high prefect of the dragon court looked down on the Rim Sway. Cixi couldn’t hear the braying of the processional horn, or even see the procession, except for the silent eruption of fireworks thirty thousand feet below.

It had been on a balcony like this one that, four thousand days ago, a young girl of the Rose had threatened to throw herself over the side. The girl didn’t know what the Entire was; she couldn’t conceive of what the Ascendancy was, much less the floating city or the great sea below. Sydney had looked at these sights, eyes wild. Cixi had coaxed her back, and the girl had come into her arms, clutching her with a ferocity that shocked the high prefect. No one had held Cixi for one hundred thousand days, and it loosened her, showing her that her heart was not dead. The girl and the high prefect began by sharing a secret hatred of the lords; soon they shared a bond very like a mother and daughter. And now Sydney was mistress of a sway. Incredibly, Rim City was celebrating the girl from the Rose grown to womanhood among the Inyx. As Cixi gazed at that portion of the city she could see from the under side of the Magisterium, she felt tears moving through her, though she was far too old to have any water left in her. Thank goodness they didn’t spurt from her eyes. It was destructive of the makeup that took two hours to apply and would astound the functionaries of the Great Within, with its myriad clerks, factors, stewards, sublegates, legates, and preconsuls.

My dear girl
, she mouthed through tiny, painted lips, and ordered the tears back down her throat.

In the Way itself, the processional chain was now formed, comprised of billions of inhabitants and their conveyances. No one would be indoors today. For one thing, the lords had decreed that the dwellers celebrate. For another, it was an event no wanted to miss, since becoming a sway was a great event in the history of the city. How anyone could hope to organize or govern such a place was a problem for another day. Rim Sway was an idea that caught on, gave sentients pride—so long as the girl of the Rose changed nothing, raised no new taxes, and got in no one’s way, Rim City was happy to celebrate and drink to her health.

And the lords were watching to make sure they did.

Tarig were about, their tall forms glimpsed here or there, some of them wearing diamond nets on their skulls. Eddies of sentients gave way around them. Merchants and vendors here were used to Tarig presence, living as they did within sight of the Ascendancy, that brilliant mountain hanging above the sea. No event was too strange for Rim City, settled by people who had seen it all. Navitars did the city’s bidding, giving passage to points on the great circumference. There was little that could impress a sentient who lived in this place at this time under the bright.

Nevertheless it was a hell of a party.

And Titus Quinn was in its midst, glad that the parade gave him an excuse to be where he was, glad for the obscuring fog. Joining the crowd of citizens going counterclockwise, as he thought of it, he made his way toward the mansion on the nearest bridge. In the press of revelers, it would take some time to get there. No one would remark that he carried a pack on his back, nor that his face was masked in paint. The Tarig were using the parade to flush him out, of course. And he was using the festivities for cover. So as to who was deceiving whom, it might be argued either way.

He cinched the pack straps more tightly around his shoulders and plunged into the crowd. Just off the square he was passing through stood the God’s Needle he could see from his balcony. It looked like a lighthouse in a New England fogbank. At towers of worship like this sentients sometimes dared ask for the Miserable God’s notice. No one ascended those holy stairs today. Far behind him the flotilla of Adda was mustering for a stately pass over the shoreline. The flock was led by an old behemoth so outsized she barely cleared the ground. Ahead of him, invisible in the fog, the crystal bridge.

The Sea of Arising, the center of the radial universe, was the mother sea of all the Nighs. Five rivers flowed out from the sea, down one side of each of the primacies. By its five arms the Nigh held the Entire into a coherent society. One could journey from the nesting forests of the Gond to the Reach at Ahnenhoon; the expanses of the impassible Empty Lands were no impediment; one need only a ship, a navitar, and an adventuresome spirit.

In his stall in the mansion on the bridge, this thought comforted Riod. By merely boarding a vessel he could be in the roamlands in but a few intervals. From his stall next to Sydney’s quarters, he looked down at the disturbing sea. To be suspended over exotic waters made him uneasy and irritable. His hope to lead the great herd into the dream world of the Tarig was slipping from him. The herd circled near each night but could not find him. He had felt diminished from the moment he boarded the navitar’s vessel and worse each day he spent next to the sea. Thus Riod had learned that an Inyx must never be separated from other Inyx. It was not enough to have his beloved rider nearby and his heart connection over distance with his herd mates. It was not nearly enough.