A World Too Near (51 page)

Reaching a junction of corridors, he looked in both directions, but there was no sight of Anzi. Weak from the sprint, he leaned against the wall. With one of his lungs already collapsed, his strength was ebbing fast. He had managed to pop his dislocated shoulder back into its socket, a maneuver that had left his arm swollen, almost useless. His face was still a ragged wound of rock abrasions. By rights he should be unconscious. But not yet.

Sounds of footsteps drove him around the corner and into a chamber crowded with military stores. He waited by the door, knife drawn, as soldiers passed outside: two Jouts talking in their gravelly voices. When the corridor was quiet again, Mo Ti looked around him. Dun-colored blankets were stacked on shelves, along with bales of goldweed, a Hirrin’s preferred bed stuffing. No weapons, no uniforms, or other things he could have used.

Mo Ti was still pawing through the storeroom when the Jouts returned.

They hesitated only for a moment, but it was enough for Mo Ti. He exploded into action, slicing his hand against the throat of one while head-butting the other one and sending him sprawling. Still on his feet, Mo Ti drew his knife, making swift work of one Jout as the other sidled back, drawing a blade too long for the close quarters. Mo Ti evaded the first thrust and smashed his good hand down on the Jout’s hand. The weapon fell, and Mo Ti had him in a hard grip across the neck. The Jout, despite his considerable size and good health, was no match for his adversary.

Mo Ti sang softly in his ear, “Do you wish to live?”

Johanna kept Anzi at her side, the proper place for an attendant, and Quinn walked behind. Johanna had warned Quinn that they would encounter sentients in the precincts of the centrum, and they did—not many, for a place of such size, but each of them—whether Chalin, Jout, or Hirrin—bowed as Johanna passed. Some of these denizens glanced at Quinn and Anzi, assessing them, perhaps registering that they were strangers. It wouldn’t matter in a short while, and for now, no one thought to detain them with questions. Oventroe had said the Repel was complacent. Perhaps too, no one could imagine that Johanna was not loyal.

The deference shown to his wife suggested to Quinn, more than anything, that she had a history here, not all of it as a hostage. If Johanna was in hell, then she had standing. Quinn knew that he had no right to judge her. Walking behind Johanna through the centrum, his thoughts spun away from him, but always fell back to the engine. Close now, by the reverberations.

The halls of this deep fortress went on too long and too far for Quinn’s comfort, eating up the time they had, judging solely by the cirque’s tightening grip. In an unhurried pace they went up broad stairs and through enormous galleries and chambers. Johanna knew the way.

Though their advance through the centrum seemed endless, it had been no more than a half hour, Quinn guessed, by the time they arrived at their destination. He felt a rumbling through his boots.

Johanna nodded at the massive doors before them. The containment chamber. The drumming sound they had been hearing all through the centrum clearly issued from this place.

“The engine,” Johanna whispered. Pushing against the massive doors, she opened one of them, and urged him and Anzi to pass through. As the door swung open, the booming of the engine fell over them like a pall.

Captain Erd listened to the soldier’s breathless report. He considered carefully whether his dignity as a captain of the guard required him to dismiss the report with impatience or take decisive action. It wasn’t common in the Repel garrison for a Ysli like himself to rise as high as Erd had done, and the troops watched him constantly for signs of incompetence.

“A giant with a tuber for a face?” Captain Erd repeated the soldier’s words so that the man might hear how foolish he sounded. “Crossing the sere like a maiden strolling to market?” He rose from his seat behind his desk, so as to muster a bit of height, but he was still far shorter than his
subordinate.

“Well, he were no maiden, Captain. A monster, more like.”

Erd regarded the Chalin man, still flushed from his vision and the strain of reporting high in the chain of command. Just a few days ago had come another fanciful report, with a few sentries claiming that Mistress Johanna had been on the sere, decked out in a fine gown and never a wisp of smoke to announce that her feet trod solid ground. Now come giants, and tomorrow, who knew?

It was time to put a stop to this breakout of hallucinations. “You see this?” Erd nodded at a quiescent scroll on his desk.

“Sir, it be a scroll, for certain.”

“Well noted,” Erd said. “Toss it out the window.”

The soldier hesitated, snaking a glance at the window looking onto the sere.

“That’s an order.” Erd watched the slow-witted man with growing contempt. “So you claim the sere is cold? Let us see.”

The soldier shrugged, then pitched the scroll out the opening. He peered down to see the effect.

“Satisfied?” Captain Erd remarked.

“Yes, sir. It’s off, all right. Colder than a Gond’s kiss.”

It took a beat for Erd to register this remark. “Off, did you say?” He strode to the window. There lay a small object on the dirt, intact. The sere looked the same as always, but there the scroll lay with no hint of fire or even smoke. Off, impossibly off.

As the captain rushed from his office, he heard pounding feet. In another moment, around the corner came two soldiers, breathless.

They had seen a man crossing the sere, one so large he looked hewn from a boulder.

“A monster,” one of them said.

Erd pulled out the orb he wore around his neck on a thong. He activated it with the heat of his hand, signaling a general alarm.

Once inside the containment chamber, Quinn found himself in the largest room he had ever seen. The ceiling vaulted far overhead, shedding a harsh illumination on a plain of machines that hid his further view, but left him a clear line of sight to a mezzanine that wrapped around the room some hundred or more feet high. A metallic churning came from the center of the place, setting up a vibration in the floor and in his chest.

Johanna crouched down, bringing something from her pocket. Needles. Slender but substantial pins. One at a time, she proceeded to prick them into the floor and twirl them. “To find our path,” she said as she worked. “Every day Lord Inweer changes the maze. These needles will forge a way.”

Satisfied at last, she rose from her task, her face gleaming with sweat. “Now we run.”

Around them, the machines were moving. Some of them were sinking, melting down and disappearing into the floor or whatever was under it. A swath four yards wide was opening in front of them, and it led straight into the heart of the great room. At that distant point, Quinn could see a monolith, smooth and shining.

Johanna waved them onward. The three of them ran down the aisle formed by the vanished machines, their footfalls barely audible amid the engine’s droning. As they ran, Johanna took Quinn’s arm to command his attention. “The engine has two lobes. I’m the right size to fit between them. That’s where Lord Oventroe said to place the chain. I’ll take the chain.”

“It doesn’t need to be close.”

“No, it does. What if the Tarig come in time to stop the nan? For the sake of the Rose, Titus, give it every chance.”

He could barely hear her through the roaring throb of the engine. When they had gone halfway to the center, Quinn stopped and took Anzi by the arm. “Stay here, Anzi. If anyone follows us, prevent them. And shout for all you’re worth.”

She nodded, drawing her knife. He put a hand on the side of her face. “I love you,” he said.

She held his gaze. “And I you, forever.”

Quinn ran to catch up with Johanna. She was running, looking back to be sure he followed.

They came to the center of the sprawling complex. On every side, racks of instruments and the housing of unknown machines shouldered up. Clear passageways lay between them. Behind Quinn, a clear path stretched straight to the doors through which they’d come. It was deserted, though Anzi hid somewhere back there.

Before him the great engine towered some sixty feet above. Its lower half was embedded in a deep well. With smooth sides, it looked almost egglike. Innocuous on the outside, but it allowed the Entire to feed where it shouldn’t, where it wouldn’t in another few minutes. Its two lobes thundered in a split-second difference of timing. Quinn glanced at the mezzanine above: long and thin, empty of defenders. He wished more than anything that he could hear beyond the pounding of the engine, which cloaked any sounds of pursuers.

Johanna pointed to a railing around the engine where a ladder went over the side to the lower level. “Give me the chain.”

Joining her at the rail, he looked down. Here, the drop was some thirty feet. At the bottom, he saw that the crack between the lobes was narrow, hardly a foot wide.

He sat on the floor, pulling up his pant leg. Blood welled from the crease where the chain cut into his ankle. He bent closer, repeating in his mind the combination to release the clasp holding the chain in a circle: Four, five, one.

At his side, Johanna gasped. “It’s sunk into your leg.”

“I have to yank it off. Give me some cloth.”

Taking the knife Quinn offered, Johanna tore a strip of cloth from her dress.

While she did so, Quinn took the cirque between his forefinger and thumb. Placing his fingers carefully into the indentations in the chain, he pressed in the sequence to break the circle. Four, five, one. A total of ten, Stefan had said. And then, responding to the code, the chain opened at the clasp. It remained embedded in his skin.

Taking the cloth from Johanna and shoving it into his mouth to muffle his cry, Quinn yanked, letting loose a searing pain. But the chain still clutched the back of his ankle. Gritting his teeth, he yanked again. The chain came free, trailing blood. He didn’t know if he’d cried out. By the way Johanna was looking up to the mezzanine, he figured he had. Grasping the cirque, he hobbled to the ladder.

Johanna rushed to join him. “Titus. Give it to me. You can’t get close enough.”

The gap between the two lobes was merely a crack. He could almost toss it there, but then he’d have to set the timing sequence before he threw. How fast would the nan rush out? Would he have time to throw it well?

Johanna saw him hesitate. “Titus, the storm wall will repel the nan, sending it Nigh-ward, not letting it spread back to the engine. It must go between the lobes.” She looked back down the cleared path, becoming frantic. “Give it to me.” She knew how to do it, she said. Lord Oventroe had explained it.

She was small enough to slide between the lobes. He had only a moment to decide. “Do it, then.” He handed her the chain. As she listened intently, he showed her how to press the reverse code sequence into the links.

Drumming its two-part rhythm, the engine seemed a robust heart, but it was a doomed one. For Johanna, the awful booming could not be gone soon enough.

She took the chain, clenching her fist around it. Although she must hurry, she paused, looking into her husband’s face. At this moment she desperately wanted to let him know that he wouldn’t survive. He had a right to know this, to make his peace. Let him rush back through the fortress, and back onto the plains—but neither he nor anyone else would survive for long.

“Ask God for his mercy,” she whispered.

“I leave the prayers to you.”

“No, you must ask.” She reached out to grip his arm. “It’s over, Titus. We’ll
die of this. Make your peace with God so I can be at peace.”

“We won’t die. We’ll have nineteen minutes. It’s enough.”

Johanna hated the deception. Titus still thought it was local destruction. When Lord Oventroe had come to her last night in her forest cell, he had told her the Entire’s days were over. He said that in the natural sequence of things, the Entire couldn’t be sustained, and it must give way to the Rose. The lords had had their Entire for a time, but it was artificial, doomed. With Johanna’s help it would die early, cleanly. All at once. Oventroe couldn’t save her, nor did she ask it.

Oventroe didn’t trust Titus to remain firm. But facing the imminent release of the plague nan, Johanna couldn’t bear to let her husband go unrepentant into that long night.

She told him what he had to know: “Eventually, the nan will take us all. Me, you, Sydney. Everyone.”

His eyes locked on her. “What do you mean, Sydney?”

“No one is saved. Except the Rose.” The basso thrumming of the machine was shredding her mind. She would put the nan in place just to be rid of that pounding forever.

“Good-bye, Titus.” She swung herself over the railing. “Make your peace.”

She began descending, but heard a commotion above her. Titus had jumped on the railing and was clambering down. From the rung above he reached down and seized her by the arm. “Why will Sydney die? Is it the nan? Is it out of control?”

What did it matter if the nan was out of control? The Rose was at stake. The Rose would die. She yanked furiously. “Let me go.”

“Tell me, by God, or I’ll take your arm off.”

She spat out, “Yes, the nan will spread. Hell is about to fall. This hell. And we’re all going with it.”

“But Sydney might live. The sways far away might live.”

Still denying it. Poor Titus and his optimism. “No one lives,” she spat. “There’s no stopping it.”

Mo Ti crept through the massive door to the hall where the engine lay. True to his promise, he had let the Jout live. The soldier had brought him to this spot, hoping for his life to be spared. Mo Ti had told him, “I swear by my mother’s grave flag, if you give warning to others, you are the first one I will kill. But if you guide me aright, you shall live.” Just outside the door the Jout was firmly bound, and stunned by a blow to the back of his head.

Mo Ti knew where Titus Quinn was ultimately headed. The man’s thoughts had been clear and obsessive, and Distanir had dutifully relayed them. Still, the destination was a murky concept: the engine room. Fortunately, every soldier in Ahnenhoon knew what the engine room was.

The soldier had said there was a maze, but he was wrong. Before Mo Ti was a clear path heading straight to the center. Anzi and Quinn were nowhere in sight. Fearing he might already be too late, Mo Ti ran, for Sydney, for the Entire.