City Without End (38 page)

Four Jouts bore Sydney’s litter into the city. At her side was Geng De, tipping the conveyance in his direction.

They sped down the ramp of the crystal bridge, plunging into the Way, strangely deserted at this waning hour of Early Day. A few people peered from behind curtains at windows.

Geng De was nervous, watching the side streets, alert. “The Tarig are overreacting. Now you can show your mercy.”

“What mercy can I give?”

“Whatever comes to you, seize it. But hear me, Sen Ni: Do not provoke any Tarig lord.”

Faintly, voices came to them. Angry shouts, at first muffled, then growing louder. Geng De pointed to the avenue leading to the Quay of Heaven. A wave of citizens was rushing down this side street into the Way.

As they stood milling, a Tarig appeared from a nearby habitation. The sentients turned as one to confront him. He advanced toward them with long strides.

A woman shouted, “No! Our street! Our street!” As she moved forward from the line of the throng, the Tarig slashed at her, ripping open her arm.

She fell. Not pausing, the lord lunged into the crowd. In the confusion of the milling sentients, Sydney couldn’t see the confrontation, but she knew by the sounds that the lord attacked viciously.

Ignoring Geng De’s murmurs of warning, she instructed the bearers to move closer. When they were some fifty feet from the mob, she jumped to the ground and shouted, but her voice was lost in the screams of the melee.

Nearby was the hulk of a leftover float from the Great Procession that had been dragged into the Way by the protesters. She called a Jout attendant to her side, and using his help, scrambled to the top.

Geng De had told her to express outrage and compassion. She needed no coaching. “Stop!” she shouted. No one heard. She ordered her four attendants to shout, and they did so. Sentients on the edge of the crowd turned to her.

“Stop!” she called again. “I am Sen Ni, Mistress of the Sway. You
will
stop. No more killing.”

A pause came to the fight. The crowd parted, revealing the Tarig lord among them. He walked toward her.

At the foot of Sydney’s perch, the lord looked up, his face smeared with blood. Holding out a fully clawed hand, he boomed, “Come to us, small girl.”

Geng De was on the other side of the float, standing amid the Jout attendants whose terrified faces were all turned up toward her. “Do not, Sen Ni,” Geng De pleaded.

The lord was Hadenth, that half-mad, paranoid prince. The lord was not Hadenth. But, again, he
was
. They were a combined swarm, dipping in and out of the Heart, sharing their experiences, mingling themselves in each new body.

“Come and get me,” Sen Ni said. “Come and kill the Mistress of the Sway, then. But I’ll be your last kill. Then it . . . will . . . be . . . enough.”

The lord reached up to climb.

She prepared to die. Geng De screamed, urging the Jouts on the lord, but at that moment, the lord paused in his climb and looked behind him, distracted for a moment.

Approaching them from further down the Way was a massive crowd of sentients: Chalin, Ysli, Jout, Laroo, and Hirrin. They bore lengths of pipe, hammers, and butcher’s knives and whether propelled from behind, or fueled by rage, they advanced on the lord.

With these overwhelming numbers, Sydney knew that another Tarig would die. That must not happen, or the city would suffer.

“Come up to me!” Sydney urged the lord. She hardly knew what she was doing, only that the lord must not die. This war could not be won by hammers and kitchen knives.

The Tarig lord cocked his gore-spattered head to her, and for the first time in her life, she saw a Tarig grin. It was the most awful thing she had ever seen.

Then she knew why he had no fear. From the direction of the quay a line of Tarig advanced. Twenty or thirty lords strode forward, coming into the Way.

They stopped, standing quite still, murmuring among themselves and watching the mob.

Then, as one line, they turned their backs on Sydney, the float, the bleeding lord, and the pile of bodies in the street. They advanced on the larger crowd.

Before she knew quite what she was doing, Sydney had scrambled down from her perch, racing past the bleeding lord, rushing to outflank the Tarig line. She was faster than the advancing lords. She stood now in the middle of the Way, halfway between Tarig and non-Tarig. For some reason, the street had gone quiet. The silence, suffocatingly hot, was pierced by Geng De wailing, “No, no, no, no.”

The line of Tarig stopped, eyeing her.

“I am Sen Ni,” she said, her voice sounding like a butterfly’s wing scraping a leaf. “We are done dying today.”

A hiss came from one of the lords. His stride brought him to her quickly.

From one side, Geng De ran toward her, his caftan hampering him, causing him to stumble. His voice warbled, “She is the Mistress of the Sway; no one must touch her! Mistress of the Sway!”

Geng De fell into her arms, bringing them both onto their knees in the street.

The lord raised an arm, and his fingers pointed to the bright with yellow, extended claws.

Geng De sobbed.

Then, one by one, the claws on the lord’s hand snicked in.

The lord said, “We have finished retributions.” He looked past Sydney and Geng De, toward the hushed crowd of sentients. “Ah?” He turned from one side of the mob to the other. “Ah? One of you wishes to die?”

No one spoke. The bright fell in hot gouts on the Way, the slicks of blood, and the wailing injured. The lords surveyed the scene, finding no further challenges. Then they retreated down the side street where Sydney now saw a brightship waited to take them away.

Geng De urged Sydney to her feet. She staggered on legs gone limp with terror, but he was right, she needed to be here, still needed to assure that the mob would not lose control.

Once upright, she walked toward the crowd. Moving down the edge of the throng, she put a hand on a shoulder, on an arm, on the head of a youngster.

“Enough sorrow,” she murmured to this one; and to that one, “No more dying, let this be enough.” She continued on, tears in her eyes from the exhaustion, from the relief of being alive. “I will help you.” She moved into the depths of the crowd, talking to some, consoling others. She began to see that some wanted useful employment. She nodded at a few. “Bring the wounded help.

You and you, go forward. There are people in need, lying in the street. The rest of you, go home. For now. Enough for now. But we will not forget.”

The crowd began to thin as a few individuals obeyed her, followed by most of the others. Turning back into the intersection of the Way and the side street, she found citizens tending to the injured. She saw Red Throne healers and litters bearing the dead away.

Geng De stood in the midst of it all, watching for her. When she approached him, he bowed deeply. Then a few from the crowd bowed to her.

A healer, hands full of gore, nodded in her direction.

She went to him. “Tell me how to help.”

“Mistress,” he said very kindly, “the helpers need water.”

Sydney sent her attendants for buckets and dippers and clean cloths, which they asked for at doorways along the Way. Once they returned, Sydney brought cups of water to the healers and the wounded.

A Laroo sat propped up against a store wall. He wasn’t bleeding, but only stared out at the Way.

“Drink,” Sydney urged, offering him a cup.

“Their claws,” he said, holding the drink, staring past her. “Terrible claws.”

“Yes,” she whispered, though he wasn’t listening. “I remember.”

When she at last returned to her litter, she looked once again down the side street toward the Heavenly Quay. She saw a small individual standing on a pier jutting into the Sea. It might not have gained Sydney’s attention, but something made her pause. A group of Tarig stood in a knot in front of the pier.

Geng De leaned in to her. “She’s been waiting there for quite a long time.”

Sydney turned back, looking more carefully. “Helice.”

“Yes.”

Sydney noted that none of the Tarig near the dock moved toward Helice.

Then Sydney knew why. A Tarig lady was pushing through her cousins, moving toward Helice.

“Anuve,” Geng De whispered.

Helice stood her ground as the lady approached.

Sydney couldn’t see how Anuve hurt her, but Helice screamed. Then Anuve, nearly twice as tall as her captive, pulled her from the dock, with Helice staggering to keep up with the lady’s long strides.

The group of Tarig parted ranks, and Anuve dragged Helice to a nearby brightship. Sydney was too far away to object, nor could she hope to stop what was happening in any case. But the Tarig finally had what her father feared the most: Helice and her plans to sacrifice the Rose.

The ship leaped forward over the water, rising rapidly into the sky on a steep path.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Drop a child on the ground and he will fear holding. Drop a
child in the Nigh and he will fear nothing.

—A SAYING

Q
UINN DREAMED OF THE PLAINS OF AHNENHOON
. Soldiers lay on the open fields, some sleeping and some dead. The slumberers occasionally woke up and tried to rouse their dead compatriots. Because of the number who had died over thousands of years, the recumbent forms covered the wide and shadowed plain. The wind stirred their hair, clothing, tack, and flags. The wind moaned,
To no purpose, to no purpose
. In his dream-knowledge, Quinn understood that if the Tarig would only give the Paion their home, the war could be over.

He came awake with a start. A noise outside his door. It was Between Ebb, what would have been dawn on Earth. He found his knife in the dark before remembering where he was: in Zhiya’s compound. The sounds here would be her courtesans. Then his visitor announced herself. “Zhiya.”

She came in, bustling past him and throwing open his curtains for the meager ebb-time light. Turning, she said without preamble, “She’s been taken to the Ascendancy. I’m sorry.”

By the distressed look on the godwoman’s face, he knew this was very bad news. “Anzi?”

“No, not Anzi. Worse. Hel Ese gave herself up. She got herself an escort . . . up.” Zhiya raised her eyes to the ceiling.

He swore. “When?”

“Second hour of Prime of Day, so my operatives guess. She went to the

Quay of Heaven, and according to those who saw it, she waited for the Tarig.

They beat her. Then they took her.”

Panic streamed into his veins. Helice had found the Heart. By the Miserable God, she had found it first, she must have. He sat to put on his boots.

Zhiya murmured, “She’s already there, Quinn.”

He swore again, but didn’t slow down. All right, she was there. He’d go after her.

Helice was going to tell the lords that she’d help them burn the Rose.

She was going to tell them that their plan to burn it a little at a time over the next hundred years was a bad one, since the Earth would keep launching assaults. The Tarig wanted to stop assaults; they weren’t used to serious attacks; and they were vulnerable to them. The Entire was fragile.

If the lords wanted to keep it, they had better make their strike once and for all.

Zhiya regarded him. “What do you propose to do? She’s already in the floating city.”

He didn’t respond. She wasn’t going to like his answer.

Zhiya went to the door and ushered in one of her girls. The courtesan Ban entered with a small tray of oba and a few skewers of meat.

Ban opened a small basket filled with steaming dumplings. He nodded to the woman and she left the room flicking a bold glance at him, closing the door behind her.

“I’m going after her, Zhiya. Now, before she has time to establish a relationship with them.”

“Perhaps she already has.”

He shrugged. Then what difference would anything make?

Helice had forced his hand. By the Miserable God, she was in the Ascendancy. The world on this side of the veil was changing. A second Tarig lord had been murdered, and they’d come into Rim City to punish their subjects.

His own daughter had stopped the reprisals. His daughter had stood up to a platoon of Tarig. All this he and Zhiya had heard from her spies who had run back and forth with reports most of the previous day.

The Entire was shifting. Dreams undercut the Tarig. Ahnenhoon had almost come undone, and they had not yet found the man with the lethal cirque. So the Tarig world was tottering. They had maimed it themselves, cutting off the minorals of the Arm of Heaven.

How would they react to Helice’s proposal of a fine, clean end to the Earth?

He put on his jacket. “I’ll let Sydney take credit for my capture. At the bridge.” Zhiya’s compound, in the center of the lower Rim, was within minutes of the crystal bridge.

On his bedside table lay Akay-Wat’s Paion hoop. He picked it up, looking at it for a long moment. “Give this to Anzi. When she comes home.”

Reluctantly, Zhiya took it. “Quinn, think. What good will you do from a Bright City dungeon?”

“They won’t put me away. I’ll be in the middle of it. I always am.” Her droll stare got through to him more than a voiced objection. “I have a contact in high places. Time to call on him.”