A World Too Near (15 page)

Soon she would adopt a new name, a Chalin name: Sen Ni, leaving behind her old self for the new. “When?” she had asked Mo Ti. “When shall I have the new name?” He had answered, “When we are stronger, when the day comes that we are ready to act.”

For hundreds of days the encampment grew ever larger, as the far-flung herds came in to her summons. They found her sighted, and promising sight for all. They found her Riod’s equal—no longer a slave. Conforming to her new catechism, they accepted free bond with their riders,
or they left. Few left. The vast encampment of a united Inyx was the proof. Now their combined powers would penetrate the minds of the Tarig leaders—the only beings whose heart-thoughts the Inyx had never glimpsed.

She turned to Mo Ti as he descended behind her. “The windstorm is fierce, Mo Ti. Shall we wait on this ebb’s purpose until it passes?”

Riod heard and sent his assurance that the storm would make little difference.

“Let them gather,” Mo Ti said. “The storm will give an excuse for a close crowd of mounts.”

They weren’t ready to share their purpose with the riders. Too many newcomers had come into camp for trust to be universal. The Inyx would cloak their thoughts this ebb.

As they reached the flats, the approaching curtain of dust rose into the sky, staining the light a bruised orange.

Deep in the ebb, the winds still scoured the plains, sending the riders to ground, keeping them huddled in tents and dozing instead of gaming or carousing.

Sydney hugged her mount fiercely. “Go softly, my Riod.” He’d have to move quietly through the thoughts of the Tarig, leaving no signature of Inyx intrusion behind. He and the ten thousand mounts. Riod left her then, moving between the tents, making for the nearby crowded pastures.

Hair whipping around her face, Sydney watched him go. Mo Ti and Akay-Wat waited by her side. She rested a hand on Akay-Wat’s strong Hirrin back. The three remained wordless, as though their silence might lend force to the herd’s effort. This was the culmination of their long work to unify the sway, the thing Mo Ti had come to her to champion: to use the one power that Tarig lacked—speaking of heart to heart—to penetrate the shrouded world of the Tarig. Who were these beings who dominated the All so completely, and shared so little? What did they fear, that they built their city impossibly far from ordinary reach?
Find the weakness
, Mo Ti had said.
Then
strike.
Sydney had asked,
Strike how? As we are able
, he answered.
As opportunity
presents
.
Discredit them. Undermine them. Crush them.

Sydney wasn’t trained to battle. She hadn’t thought of strategy. But Mo Ti had. That his cunning and insight had come from Cixi was something he hadn’t revealed to his mistress. This was Cixi’s command, for the protection of the most shocking traitor in the Magisterium, the high prefect herself.

As the ebb deepened, Sydney and her two captains went to separate tents so as not to draw attention to their vigil. They sat alone, listening to the wind punch against pavilion walls, drive down the rows of tents.

Sometime later, able to bear the separation no longer, Sydney wrapped herself in her heaviest jacket and wound a cloth around her head, one that could be pulled over her eyes against the dust. Pressing against the wind, she made her way toward the Inyx gathering.

In the shifting light she saw the thousands of mounts. Curtains of sand fell down and parted, giving glimpses of their motionless forms, standing as though asleep, heads down against the storm, nostrils clamped narrow. Not only motionless, but silent in a way that Inyx were seldom silent, they stood without tendrils of thought or emotion. They were closed to her, folded in on themselves. She walked among them, a girl among ghosts. Somewhere Riod stood his post as leader. She thought she could feel him spread thin, a mist of atoms. But his thoughts were invisible to her. Was he already flying far overhead? Or even now moving like a slow wind through the Ascendancy? The herd was to follow his lead, retreating quickly should he raise an alarm, should the fiends recognize that they had visitors.

She took a moment’s refuge from the blowing dust in the lee side of a dun-colored mount. He didn’t notice her pressed against his side. A trickle of anxiety came from the Inyx, piercing her mind like spilled ink on paper. Startled, she moved away. Touching them was a mistake, but she wanted that touch. This was the first time in thousands of days that she had not felt a warm frame of Inyx cognition. She looked around her, feeling separate, abandoned, and exalted. They were flying to the heart of the bright beast. She let her mind go blank, scoured by the grit-studded wind.

Blank was best. But leaving her thoughts behind, she found that she had become larger, vastly larger. If she trusted her sensations, she would say she hovered above the backs of the gathered mounts, looking down. Flying.

A gust of a thought came to her.
Burning hot. Sweet burning fire.

An image of fire swept out of reach, traveling through the Inyx throng. But now there were more gusts: singing thoughts, shouting thoughts. She covered her ears against the volume, though it only pinned the shouts inside her head. On her knees now, not flying, hands over her ears, she bore the load of the sky, the column of air above her filled with a terrible weight of mind. She curled into a ball, her head in her thighs. Inyx thoughts marched over her, relentless.

Oh, there were Tarig here. Or shadows of Tarig. Or shadow thoughts of Tarig. Riod was here. He was in the lair, fearless and stealthy.

She was no match for the herd mind and its combined bravery. Lest her fear dilute their strivings, she staggered to her feet. Dragging herself to the edge of the herd, under fathoms of voices, she forced her steps toward her pavilion. The weight of the herd’s purpose clung to her, though she was out of its footprint. By the time she plunged through her tent door, she had not one step left in her. Sleep was the safest place for her, the best place to remain out of Riod’s way. She dropped onto the pallet. Sank down to oblivion, chased by a last chorus of singing mount voices:
They do not sleep.

Waking, Sydney found the waxing bright streaming in. Her head felt swollen, her muscles lethargic. Somehow she wrenched herself into a sitting position, feet planted on the floor. It was then that she saw Riod in the open drape of one side of the tent. Covered with dust, only his eyes were clear and recognizable. Sydney went to him.

Mo Ti came too, as though he had been watching for Riod’s return.

“Beloved,” Sydney said, pressing her hand against Riod’s massive face.

Two fell
, Riod sent.
It sickened them.

He spoke of the mounts. But Riod’s sending was strong and healthy. He shook his hide, sending dust cascading from his horns and coat. “Did you see them, beloved?”

They are there.

Sydney caught Mo Ti’s eye. He stood like a great stump of a tree, waiting.

Riod continued his sending.
White and thin. No colors among them. You each
are a color, in heart-sight. But they are not. All of them are hot and clear, without
distinction.

He held Sydney’s gaze a long while.
You understand? We found them in the
ebb, pursued them through the primacies. None slept, but none knew us. They do not
sleep. You understand?

“What shall I understand, Riod?” She glanced at Mo Ti, trying to decipher what Riod was telling them, but Mo Ti had no help.

They are not as we are.

Mo Ti spoke for the first time. “How are they, then?”

They are all the same.

Sydney’s thought came unbidden: Hadenth, who clawed my eyes, was the worst of them. He wasn’t the same as the others. She remembered him well, that fallen lord.

Hadenth is not dead
, came Riod’s startling thought.
Not all the way.

Nothing more coherent came from Riod, nothing of Hadenth or how one could be dead but not all the way. Still, it was an hour of sweet victory, and Sydney hugged her mount fiercely, then hugged Mo Ti. They had touched the minds of the fiends and melted away again without detection. In the coming days, they would do so again—and again.

And they did, fine-tuning their approach, pursuing the lords. Formerly, of all sentient creatures, the Tarig had been impenetrable to the Inyx. When a mount probed a Tarig’s thoughts, that mount found a wall. Nor could the Inyx send either thought or feeling to a lord; they seemed insensible to speaking heart to heart—or defended from it. But a united assault had penetrated where individual attempts failed. One more thing Riod
and Sydney learned: a united sending from the massed Inyx could range instantly across the Entire—not just to the Ascendancy, not just in a focused direction. Spying wasn’t the only Inyx advantage now; communication came into their arsenal. The gracious lords controlled communications by allowing it only at light speeds, and only under certain conditions. The lords themselves had the bright to send messages. Bright speed was fast indeed. But the Inyx had heart speed, faster yet. Sydney and Mo Ti celebrated.

It was a short-lived celebration.

Riod reported each day after probing in the ebb. He was learning how to keep the mounts from sickening under the pressure; learning better how to distinguish one Tarig from the next, despite lack of color signatures. It wasn’t all they needed to know. But Riod was patient—as relentless as Sydney in his loathing of the lords.

It was during a morning’s debriefing on the heart-to-heart probes that Sydney and Mo Ti first fell away from each other, when distrust seeped into their friendship—on the back of grim news. The news was bad enough that Mo Ti waited a few hours to tell Sydney, and that delay did not help him.

Riod had been recounting the ebb’s progress, which this time had yielded no strictly new apprehensions of the lords. Mo Ti hardly listened, keeping apart in Sydney’s tent, distracted and quiet.

Riod turned his massive head toward the man, and for a moment the two looked into each other’s faces.
Tell her
, Riod sent.

“Yes,” Mo Ti said. But he remained silent.

“What?” Sydney whispered.

As Sydney watched him with growing unease, Mo Ti began, “I have had a report, mistress. Hard news.” Again he hesitated, while impatience streamed from Riod.

Finally: “The Tarig have deceived us.”

Sydney’s chest constricted. “In our ebb-time work?”

“No, my lady. That work is safe. But as to your person . . .” She nodded for him to continue. “There is a corruption in your sight. They placed it there, when they sent their surgeon to heal you.”

Sydney stood very still.

“They watch through your eyes, mistress.”

Her voice was barely audible. “Watch? How can they watch?”

“I do not know. They do. So my sources say.”

“Sources?” Sydney put a hand to her eyes, pressing her palms into them. Riod nudged her quietly, offering his comfort, but she pushed him away, beseeching Mo Ti. “The fiends see through my eyes?”

Mo Ti watched her with dismay. “Perhaps not perfectly.”

“Why would they want my eyes? Can they have guessed our plans, and mean to keep our progress in view?”

“If they thought us traitors, we would be dead. Here is the reason, so I believe: The Tarig think Titus Quinn might come here, to this sway. Because of you.”

“He is back?”

“He may come back, it is thought. They think he tried and failed to come here last time.”

Her voice was small. “And did he?”

“Mo Ti does not know. It is possible.”

“He didn’t come for me in the brightship. Why should he come now when he doesn’t have a brightship?”

“I do not know. But the Tarig are desperate to find him.”

“Why so much effort for . . . such a man?” She put her hands over her eyes once more. “Why ruin me for him? Why, Mo Ti?”

He had no answer. He would rather have taken out his own eyes than have Sydney suffer this violation. She knew that, but still, wasn’t it Mo Ti himself who had persuaded her to accept the Tarig surgeon?
Take this gift
, he had said.
You need your sight to win the herds, to show them a new way.
. . . Sydney murmured, “I knew I shouldn’t trust the surgeon. Now we know the price for Tarig gifts.”

The sounds of the camp came to them distantly—the sounds of riders milling at their tents and speeding off on their mounts to test their skills and ride for the joy of it.

Inside the tent the three of them stood quietly, absorbing the news. “What sources, Mo Ti?” Sydney asked at last. “How would you know what the Tarig have or have not done?”

A long pause stretched out, until it became clear that Mo Ti wouldn’t answer.

Riod sent,
The high lady of the floating city. The high lady speaks to him.

Sydney cried out, “A Tarig speaks to him?”

“No,” Mo Ti said. His voice went low. “Cixi. It was Cixi that told me.”

Now Sydney had to sit down. She huddled on the side of her pallet, staring at Mo Ti. “Cixi? How do you know Cixi?”

“I will tell you, though it means my life.” He turned to Riod, and opened his heart to all that he had so carefully concealed.

Riod picked up the flood of images and shared them with Sydney: Mo Ti kneeling before Cixi, receiving her instruction; Mo Ti traveling at Cixi’s request to the Long War battlefields, and there finding an excuse to displease his superiors, securing his banishment to the Inyx sway. All as planned by the high prefect, all carried out by her obedient servant, Mo Ti.

Sydney murmured, “Cixi might have told me this. You might have told me this, Mo Ti. She sends word to me sometimes. She might have told me, if this were true.”

Mo Ti said, “It is true, I swear it. She and I convey messages on the bright. I send a message by one of the riders who goes to a navitar loyal to Cixi, and through the navitar, our words find each other.” Mo Ti looked to Riod. “These thoughts must be shielded from the herd, Riod.”

Riod concurred. He was already doing so.

Mo Ti continued, “I was to prepare you to raise the kingdom. No one must know; her position is too unsafe. She is surrounded by spies. Thus she bid me keep this secret. I was content with this plan at first, but as I grew to love you, it has weighed heavily.” He went to his knees in front of her. “Forgive me, my lady.”