City Without End (42 page)

When he came back, he wanted to know his enemies; he wanted to know how he died; she would be a fool to let him know a thing like that.

Still, she could not fathom the enormity of his defection. “You already have worshippers
here
. Is the Rose better?”

He looked past her as his vision failed. “I grew tired of . . .
here
.” He said the last word with clear contempt.

Cixi took her hand from his neck. Still sitting on the lord’s chest, she contemplated a creature who would betray a kingdom out of boredom.

“My cousins . . .” he pleaded.

“But it would be rather hard to explain your body . . . to your
cousins
,” she sneered. With enormous satisfaction, she drove her knife into the side of his eye.

Afterward, there were three bodies: Oventroe’s, a Jout’s, and a Hirrin’s. They were all wrapped in tapestries and taken to the crematory through the secret ways, down five levels, to the catacombs.

The clerks tending there had been excused for the evening.

The three dead found their resting place in the alcoves. They each had a grave flag. Oventroe’s said, at Cixi’s order, “A bad death. Instead.”

Finally, the Tarig lords let Helice sleep. After hours of questions and terrorizing, the tall beings looming over her, bending at the waist to peer at her, threatening her with strangling, at last they abandoned her to her cell.

Fighting for emotional control, she reminded herself that the lords’ great city had been her destination since the first day she’d sat in Minerva’s boardroom and seen a spike of Entire grass. Despite the awful interrogation, she was nearing the end of her quest. She clung to her intention; to renaissance.

She slept intermittently, dreaming of the Tarig and their swarm minds. Sydney and her horse friends thought most sentients would despise this style of consciousness, but to Helice, it made the Tarig more imposing. Each one bore the collected wisdom of thousands of years. The swarm, as Helice imagined it, was like a luscious hive of honey, with the bees constantly bringing home the nectar of experience. The Tarig weren’t disgusting; they were splendid.

After taking her clothes and searching her, they’d given her a long sleeveless shirt to wear, made of the finest soft cloth. So, here in this hellish prison, she wore silk. The room, small but not confining, had a toilet and nothing else. They called it the Dragon’s Eye, they’d told her when they brought her here.

Mustn’t look down.

As she lay on her back, staring at the ceiling, her whole face ached. The putrefaction stank. She wanted to sleep again, but terror kept her awake. Their rumbling voices stuck in her mind, replaying.
Where is Titus Quinn?

I don’t know about him, but I control your going home place
, she’d told them.

They became very quiet. She had time to marvel at their excellent English. Their interrogation had been fluent. At least language was no barrier to her plans.

What place?
they wanted to know.

She couldn’t describe the location; only the mSap and Tai knew that. She had grid coordinates, but they meant nothing to her or to them.

The place where you go home, and where you come back, entering new bodies. That
place. I don’t know the name, only that it’s here and that my machine with artificial intelligence
marked it by the energy signature. A very big one, so we could hardly miss it.

You will die now.

I have said: I
control
it. I’ve planned how to destroy it if you hurt me. But I
don’t want to destroy it. I need you for something. And now you need me.

All this time, she had only looked down once. She was proud of that self-control amid the powerful draw of the sight. Soon she’d have Tarig respect; when they learned to fear her, when Tai set off the demonstration at the junction point between the Ascendancy and the Heart. As soon as the Tarig saw a little destruction, they would come back to her, prepared to talk.

The demonstration would prove she could threaten the Heart door. She’d tell them that the ability to completely destroy it lay with her mSap. That it was preprogrammed to do so unless she intervened. They might stoop to torture; but her frail health should give them pause. And one thing more: she would rather die than give up. After weeks of consideration, there was no doubt in her mind: she was fully prepared to die.

The mSap lay safely hidden. After Tai had left for the Ascendancy, Helice had taken the mSap and gone into the city, finding an old God’s Needle. There, she’d climbed the circular stairs and hidden her machine sapient amid the refuse at the top where devout sentients left offerings. The mSap sitting atop that God’s Needle could bring down the great door of the Tarig, a transfer point requiring so much power that, once destroyed, it might be impossible to rebuild.

However, some aspects of her scheme were pure subterfuge. She had not programmed the mSap to act on its own. That was too important a decision to automate. Sick as she was, she might lose consciousness at any time. The threat of it was enough, she reasoned.

Destroying the door to the Heart depended on actuating a command on the device that Tai held in safekeeping. He thought that the finder was a simple mechanism to help him locate the door. It was not that simple. Finding a way to retrieve it from him would require some ingenuity.

She needed to use the toilet. But that meant getting up. Turning over, she crouched on hands and knees first. Not being able to stop herself, she looked down. Her stomach felt like it was dropping out of her body. She was standing on nothing, high over an ocean. Here, in the bottom-most section of the Magisterium, she stood on a small concave section of the floor, like a giant eye staring down.

Yanking herself away from the view, she crawled to the toilet and vomited. Her face and neck burned from the stomach acid splattering up. She put a hand to her throat, something she usually avoided for fear of breaking the scabs. Her fingers came away sticky. She didn’t know whether to hope for Tarig healing, or mistrust it.

She allowed her thoughts to stray to comforting things: to her stay among the Inyx and her first excitement about being in the Entire. Everything had been before her then: that pure vision of humanity renewed. Earth cleansed of its imbeciles and entitled commoners. Earth cleansed of every ancient burden and unworthy desire for ease. Now came the final steps, no longer abstract, but solidly real, washed clean by fever, pain, and vertigo.

She would hold on. Hugging the little commode, she rested her face on its cool side.

Tai stared as the giant celestial’s face rose over the edge of the city. Those sen-tients in the great plaza of the Ascendancy turned and pointed as the gas bag creature appeared on the horizon, lifting on warm currants from below, blinking at the greatness of the Tarig royal seat.

The Adda hovered for a moment at the edge of the plaza as though reluctant to come near the spires puncturing the city’s sky. Nearby, an astounded Laroo commented to a Ysli steward that Adda could not float so high— because nothing living could rise so near the bright—but the celestial beast moved serenely toward them, oblivious of the Laroo’s declaration. Functionaries rushed out of the Magisterium, pointing at the beast. Tai stared with the rest of them, hoping to see the Adda come to ground in their midst, but it sailed over them toward the mansions of the lords.

“It is Titus Quinn,” Tai heard a legate say. Through the crowd shouldered six large Chalin men carrying a sling bearing a Gond—by his silver-capped horns, a preconsul. Gap-mouthed, the Gond watched with the rest of them. Tai heard him say to a clerk that Titus Quinn had been captured in Rim City, but the sway’s upstart Mistress would have no brightship in the city and commanded an Adda for conveyance, and to the preconsul’s evident disgust, she had been indulged.

But Tai’s only thoughts were,
Titus Quinn, Titus Quinn.

More denizens of the city came streaming across bridges and up from the Magisterium at the fast-spreading rumor that the man of the Rose had been captured. Titus Quinn, the one whose exploits were on the breath of every sentient in the Entire—who had killed Lord Hadenth, who had stolen the fleet of brightships, whose daughter was now queen of the Rim.

Tai wondered what they would do to Titus Quinn now that he had been captured. The lords hated him, but Hel Ese would protect him. They were friends. Though she didn’t tell Tai what her mission was, he felt sure that she and Titus Quinn worked to open converse between the realms.

Tai sat on a low wall next to a canal, watching the Adda disappear behind the slanted roofs of the lords’ palaces. At his side the canal bore its stream of water flashing here and there with mottled carp. He was in a strange city, great and despised. He had done things and hoped for things that had split his life into before Hel Ese and after. The last arc of days traced a new Tai— one he admired but did not know very well. The things he’d seen! The man of the Rose, the clandestine meeting with his daughter climbing into the Adda, a Paion missive, the halls of the Magisterium. And the things he’d done! Hidden a fugitive, defaced the Tower of the Sleeping Lord . . . lied to Sublegate Milinard.
Excellency, I saw her in the undercity, but she slipped away.
She’s probably hiding there.
Milinard, at first excited to have news, soon dismissed Tai as sincere but of little interest. Hel Ese had already been captured. The sublegate bid him stay in the city for a time in case further questions occurred to him.

But Tai’s mission was done. He was glad of that. He could sit here for days, watching carp, watching for Hel Ese. Soon she would be powerful among the Tarig, and when that happened, she would send him to the Rose.

Something moved on the lords’ hill. Squinting against the glare of the bright, Tai saw the narrow avenues moving, filled with some dark material.

He tried to make sense of it. Then he saw what it must be, a surge of Tarig through the streets. Every lane, every pathway, avenue, and even the terraces and overlooks, brimming with Tarig.

Now he noticed that the plaza itself was devoid of the lords. They had withdrawn from the public spaces. It made him uneasy to think that the masses of Tarig crowding outside on the hill might be due to Titus Quinn’s arrival. Perhaps some plan of Hel Ese and Titus had gone astray. He watched the Tarig stream through the streets in the shadows of the mansions, a splash of silver from their garments sometimes catching the light.

Too nervous to sit, he wandered toward the Magisterium, thinking to find news. He closed the door behind him, taking relief from the cool interior, away from the press of the bright. Hoping to learn what was going on, he went down to the precincts of the clerks where he had waited yesterday for a summons from Milinard. He listened to what gossip he could overhear. The clerks, the lowest order of magistrate, were the easiest to talk to. They carried their computational boards with them wherever they went: the broad, backward sloping hats. By this means they could always be productive, and by this means too, they seemed to know the latest gossip.