City Without End (56 page)

Despite her brush with the Tarig’s sword and his grotesque voice, Anzi was harboring a kernel of relief, if not outright happiness: she hadn’t come too late; she and Titus were back in the right harmony of time. Though she was older than the last time he saw her,
he
, at least, was the same age. She gave thanks to the God of the Rose. Then, as she ran, she put two fingers by her left eye to ward off the usual bad luck of prayer.

Quinn had just left the balcony after taking leave of Lady Demat. Climbing a narrow flight of stairs that curled around the outside of the mansion, he sought out a better viewpoint of the hill itself. Demat had told him to find a hiding place that no Tarig would think of. But he had no intention of doing so. Helice might have done her worst, but he still needed to discover the site of the engine she and her people had created. He still needed to find Helice.

Demat might help him. She had strongly hinted she might. He had promised her his life; and that it would be
true
. Among the many—perhaps endless—differences between Tarig and human, here was the most chilling: that she could accept his promise to love her at some point in the future, although he did not love her now. She obviously believed such a bargain was possible.

Anzi, he thought. Anzi. What will we do?

Noises from the city caught his attention now and then as he climbed higher on the hill of mansions. He heard an occasional closing of a door, a shout of Tarig voices. All other sentients must be cowering in the Magisterium. He thought of the questions he should have asked Demat: Can you send me home quickly? Is there a
way
to go home from here?

If he had ever doubted Helice’s renaissance scheme, the human body lying on the plaza put an end to skepticism. Helice’s people had started to come through. If they crossed over in groups, their intentions could be realized in a few minutes or hours. Then they’d match cycles with the engine at Ahnenhoon and the destruction would proceed. No time remaining now. But he couldn’t just wait and hide. If he glimpsed Helice in the streets of the palatine hill he’d confront her and extract the information from her. Of where the Rose engine was. Then Demat would help him. That was his plan, if an unlikely one.

He wandered upward, choosing paths at random, watching for Ghinamid, who would surely kill any human he found. Did Quinn pass for Chalin? He’d counted on that during his days of hiding in the Entire, but today he felt exposed, as though his true self was obvious to anyone who looked.

Ahead was a dark archway overhung with black vines glistening in reflected lavender sky. It looked familiar. While his head had pondered things to come, had his feet followed a course he’d used before?

He knew this place. The tall facade of the mansion surrounded a garden on three sides. On the ground, bird drones lay scattered like fallen black leaves. Over the corner of the pond in the center of the garden, a plant trailed drooping limbs. The sky was amethyst, darkening quickly into Deep Ebb, but he could see the garden clearly.

He moved inside the archway, staring at the water, empty now of toy boats. Because it was
that
garden, of course. Glancing up at the dense shrub on the far side of the pond, he imagined someone hiding there. It was something a child might do, peeking at a stranger, afraid to come out in the open.

His mouth felt dry. Not wanting to be here, his steps nevertheless led him to the very edge of the pond.

She would not be hiding. This was now, and she had been dead—how long? In his own time frame, about two hundred days. His throat caught. A breeze lifted the leaves of the vines, rattling them and the feathers of the fallen drones. The Tarig had no children, Mo Ti had said. Small Girl was a decoy creation, fashioned to be childish. He had killed that malformed creature to keep her from bringing the lords down upon him when he had the world to save. Anyone would have done the same. He had said this to himself many times, but the thorn still remained in his side. He had tested savvy at thirteen. Didn’t his mind grasp that he had . . . not . . . killed . . . a child?

But that day when he brought Small Girl the toy boat, he had thought her a child. And wasn’t she, in some sense? They had created a being something like a Tarig, but with less developed intelligence. He stood staring at the pond. What, by the Miserable God,
was
a child, what was the very definition, what was the quality of life and years and cognition that made a creature a young sentient?

He had taken her into the pool. She had fought with ferocious power.

Under the water, her screams had been silent.

The darkening bright glowered down on him. Sitting on the lip of wall around the pool, he let his injured right arm hang down, his hand breaking the surface of the water, sending out small carnelian waves.

Despite all that he had told himself of reasons and logic, he wept. He had become a man who could do terrible things. Titus Quinn must have his way; let nothing get in his way, but he would do his job, the thing that fell to him to accomplish. He couldn’t take back what he’d done. Worse, he didn’t want to take back what he had done. He would make the same decision today. It was all mixed together in a poisonous brew. Why was his life always about the child?

Removing his hand from the water, he tested his range of motion. He could raise his arm, if slowly; he could make a fist, but not grip a pen. The Tarig cuts had severed the muscle down to his tendons in his upper arm.

Other slashes might have gone deeper, and as Demat had implied, they had done a sloppy job of mending him.

“She won’t fix this,” he whispered. “I promise, Small Girl. When I come back, Demat will not fix it.” He would keep his body just as it was. He knew how it sounded: like he was crazy. But it gave him some peace to have decided this.

When he stood up, a motion at the garden wall caught his attention. Something gleamed. It was someone walking on the other side of the wall. It was the top of a helm.

Ghinamid.

There was only one way out, through the arch. But Ghinamid was headed straight for it. Quinn rushed to the entrance of the mansion. The door yielded to his push, and he slipped inside. Too bright and empty; no place to hide. He ran through a large, echoing room and into a wide corridor, also empty. The place was abandoned, perhaps had never had occupants. He ran down the corridor, turning into a side hall.

In the distance, the outside door banged open.

He ducked through the nearest doorway, closing the door behind him.

The room was furnished with a few large chairs against the walls. A window gave onto the garden below. Rushing toward it, he looked out to see the garden empty. He grabbed an object from a table nearby, a hand-sized cube of filigreed metal. Then, opening the window casement, he hurled the object through the window, aiming for the archway. It crashed outside. He hoped the noise would attract Ghinamid; hoped the lord’s hearing was keen.

Positioning himself behind the door, Quinn waited. From the hallway he heard footsteps; he guessed they were retreating.

A movement at the windowsill startled him. He half expected to see that Lord Ghinamid had climbed the outside of the mansion in his zeal. But it was a small, dark thing: a bird. It shook its wings in a remarkably accurate display of preening, then turned to the clear glazing of the window and pecked.

It was pointing at him.
Titus Quinn is here, here, here.
If Ghinamid had gone into the garden, he would hear this pecking. He turned to the door, putting his hand on the latch handle. Was the corridor empty? He couldn’t be sure where Ghinamid was.

Turning back, he saw that the window was melting away where the bird pecked. A small aperture had now formed in the midst of the window. The bird hopped through.

It gripped the edge of the melted glass with its feet, head turned to the side, one eye fixed on Quinn. In a voice like the smoothest silk, it said, “Hel Ese is on Magisterium. Fourth level, Titus-een.” It nuzzled its beak under a wing.

Demat had sent the drone, and its message was spectacular: the Magisterium, fourth level. Helice, at last. The talking bird might be helping him, but it was also marking his location. He ducked into the hallway, and seeing it empty, turned down the corridor in a direction away from the garden entrance.

Now he’d have to cross the plaza. And he wasn’t the only one who had been watching it, he was quite sure.

A sound behind him. Quinn whirled. Flapping past, the bird drone sped to the end of the corridor, then waited for him. He followed the creature until it led him into a foyer that had oddly frozen in place in the midst of one of the mansion’s transformations. The ceiling was domed but too large. Walls jutted up to different heights, while doorways sagged. The bird pecked at the floor. As Quinn watched, a hole melted open on the floor. Expanding rapidly, it revealed a passageway beneath. Now it was large enough for Quinn to pass through. The bird fluttered in, and Quinn followed it, jumping down into a cramped passage. The bird worked at knitting the hole back up and then flew ahead, glowing phosphorescent in the darkness.

“Demat?” Quinn asked the bird. He didn’t know if some part of her consciousness might ride in that drone.

The bird flew on, not answering.

The drone left him when they reached the Magisterium. Quinn would apparently have to find Helice on his own. As he stood in a small chamber with a bed and washstand, he considered his chances of passing unnoticed among the stewards in their fourth-level province. Searching through a chest in the
corner, he looked for a uniform, finding nothing.

Soon he was rifling through the rooms and apartments nearby, all de -serted. When at last he emerged into the corridor again, he wore the humble uniform of an understeward, with the backward-sloping hat of the room’s occupant and a jacket bearing the image in back of a white carp. The hall was empty, but he heard voices from a gathering nearby.

Helice could be hiding in any of these rooms. He could begin searching them, but it would take longer than he feared he had. Approaching the source of the voices, he saw a mass of sentients gathered in a large hall. A legate addressed them, urging calm. They remained surprisingly professional. They were of the Magisterium; the lords would protect them. Except the lords were killing many, and some who served the Great Within had already been slain.

Quinn scanned the crowd. He would never find Helice if she was among them. But he doubted she would risk mixing with the stewards outright. As he turned away he remembered the drone’s words. Something odd about what the bird had said, that Helice was on the Magisterium. Not in it. On it.

She was
outside
. That would have been a place that a bird/drone might have seen her, and was a good hiding place. He quickly made his way to the nearest egress door.

A cold breeze confronted him as he stepped outside. He stood on a long balcony overlooking the flat, five-armed world. A ramp connected the balcony here with one above, on the third level. Ignoring the view, he moved to the end of the balcony, looking over to the ramps, viewing platforms, and balconies jutting out from the fourth level. They were all empty. Even if she was on one of them, he’d have to approach her from the inside, guessing which door led to her.

The viewing platform where he stood was littered with the bodies of birds. Who had grounded them? Lord Ghinamid might be one who didn’t want to be tracked. Still, Quinn wished his guide bird would return and make a circuit of the outside walls, looking for a small, Chalin-like woman with a scarred face.

The underside of the city was in the shape of a bowl, making it impossible for him to see levels above, where overhangs obstructed his view. He, could, however, look to the level below by leaning out.

Pressing against the railing, he pushed his upper body past the resistance of the field barrier, which assured a modicum of safety on the outside decks.

Helice was there, below him, on the fifth level.

Huddled into a ball in a recessed alcove of a balcony, she sat with her head on her knees. Oh, sleep, Helice, he thought. Sleep.