Bright of the Sky (48 page)

He sat on a low wall at the pond’s edge. Eddies and currents disturbed the water, rumpling the reflections of the surrounding palace walls. This was the dwelling of the lord who once had custody of Johanna, and still led the armies at Ahnenhoon. It was the one lord he’d never met. But the grounds did not look abandoned.

His thoughts turning to Johanna, Quinn hardly noticed that a small boat approached. It tilted past a vortex and nudged up against the side of the pool near him. The boat was an excellent likeness of a navitar’s vessel. On the upper deck, in the navitar’s spot, was a doll.

“Push it back,” came a voice.

Quinn looked up. On the opposite side of the pond, where dark vines cascaded from the bank into the water, a branch trembled. He gave the boat a shove in that direction, but misjudged the current, and the craft circled aimlessly in the center.

“Hnnn,” came the voice, high-pitched and soft.

Could this be a Tarig child? In his past life Quinn had not met that many Tarig children, as they were always closely watched by an adult. Tarig children were as rare—perhaps rarer—than youngsters of other sentients.

The branch shook again. “Push it in to us,” came the command.

“Hard to know where to push it when I can’t see you.”

“We are hiding.”

“I know you are. It’s a pretty good hiding spot.”

The boat slipped out of the eddy and, propelled by the centrifugal force, drifted across the pond, thumping against the side.

The voice in the bushes said, “The ship hit the storm wall. Everyone has become dead.” With that, a young Tarig stepped out of the hiding spot and went to retrieve the boat. To Quinn, to human eyes, she looked to be about six years old, except that her face was an exact miniature of an adult’s. By the heavy bracelets, she was a girl. She wore a black jumpsuit and a long, sleeveless coat. Leaning over the edge, she fished the toy from the pond. Her black hair was cropped short and heavily greased. As she picked up the boat, water dripped onto her lavender coat, creating dark spots.

Looking into Quinn’s face, she said, “The Chalin man.”

“Dai Shen, soldier of Ahnenhoon, young mistress.”

She took the doll out of the boat and peered at it closely before stuffing it back inside the toy. “You call us Small Girl.”

She gazed at him for a long while, not attending to her boat. It was a child’s gaze: open and frank. “Small Girl has a boat of the Nigh,” she said at last, speaking with childlike gravity.

“Yes, you do. Show me how it sails.”

Just as she was about to oblige him, she sat back on her heels and glanced at him. “You do not tell us what to do, though.”

“No. Only sail the boat if you like to.”

“We like to.” She leaned in and set the boat into a current. “But this boat went into the storm wall and got all knotted up and died.” She watched the boat as it drifted under the overhanging bushes.

“Maybe you can fix it,” he suggested.

“Hnnn. But what is fixing?”

“Repairing.” He tried another synonym, but still she looked confused. “When you give attention to something that is broken.”

She sat on the low wall next to him, swinging her legs. He noticed her shoes were the most elaborate thing she wore: colorfully beaded, and the toes, pointed and curled. A poor choice for a child’s adornment. They sat in comfortable silence for a time, in the way he remembered sitting with Sydney. He thought this Tarig child had never run at play or climbed a tree. Her dress was too elaborate. It was no way to raise a child, not even one destined to grow tall and cruel.

She looked at him with large, black eyes. “Tell Small Girl what is fixing.”

He should leave. The child’s parents might not like her talking to a stranger. Sitting next to one, in a private garden.

“Fixing,” he began. “If my clothes are dirty, I clean them. If my knife is dull, I sharpen it. So I can use these things again.”

“Some things cannot be fixed?” She swung her feet, and the beaded shoes sparkled under the fiery sky.

“Sometimes you can’t, if something is badly broken.”

The girl craned her neck around and gazed up at the high windows of the courtyard walls. Her guardians would not leave her alone for long. He rose.

She glanced up at him. “The Chalin man sits down.”

“I have business elsewhere, Small Girl.”

“Ah. Business. But not right now.”

He looked down on her. She sat primly swinging her feet. She was nothing like Sydney, but his heart caught at the sight of a child of the Entire.

“Fixing,” she said again. “Badly broken, and then things must be abandoned?”

“Yes,” Quinn replied. “Sometimes I will buy a new thing to replace the old.”

“But sometimes the old one was better?”

He looked more closely at her, wondering at how much she understood of things being broken and the fondness for what was.

“Yes,” was all he could say.

“If Small Girl’s shoes get dirty, we throw them away.” She seemed wistful, gazing at her sparkling shoes.

Something prompted him to challenge her thinking. He said, “Or you could ask your mother to fix them.”

Her dark eyes flashed at him, as if to say,
You do not tell me what to do. . . .
Then she stood, placing her feet carefully on the clipped lavender grass. She returned to the bushes where her boat had drifted, kneeling carefully by the water to avoid soiling her coat.

Now was a good time to leave, before she could command him to stay. He bowed, saying, “Small Girl.”

She reached into the pond where her boat had caught in the branches. Pulling the toy from the water, she reached into her coat pocket and took something out, placing it on the boat. Then she launched the boat in his direction.

As it sailed toward him, a flash of light spit from the top, and a flame quickly caught the upper deck on fire.

On the upper deck, the doll’s hair was on fire, while the deck below added fuel to the burn. Finally, fully engulfed, the boat floundered. An acrid smoke threaded through the air. The smell hit him hard, a revolting smell of burning hair and poisonous compounds.

As the boat sank, Small Girl watched gravely. “Everyone has become dead.” She looked up at him. “Tomorrow, you will fix it?”

She had ruined her toy in the expectation that a Chalin man could fix things. It was pathetic and bizarre—it was time for him to go before her caretakers smelled fire and found a stranger among them. “Small Girl,” he said. “I can’t come back tomorrow.”

Her voice quavered. “You cannot come back?” She looked at the eddy where the boat lay submerged.

“No, I can’t.” he said. He shouldn’t have come. And he must not come back.

She looked stricken. Tarig didn’t cry, but their faces were exquisitely expressive, once you learned to read them. He walked away.

After a few paces he turned back to find her standing by the garden entrance, watching him. She would live out her life in Tarig restraints, never learning what normal beings knew, never stubbing her jeweled toes.

He descended the stairs from the palatine hill, seeing no one on the paths. High above him, a few Tarig stirred on the balconies.

He walked, putting distance between himself and the child in the garden. Small Girl, as she called herself, was in a prison. Like a unicorn in a corral, they had her on display, cut off from whatever true childhood she might have had. It was the same with the brightships. They were a dreadful cage, full of pain. Somehow he knew this from the time before. Confinement was all the Tarig knew, for all their power and knowledge. It was a piece he’d missed the first time; he’d caught up, now.

The city revolted him. Its sterile palaces and bleak gardens . . . it was nothing he could ever have loved. The smell of fire and burning hair lingered in his nostrils.

He rushed down the steps, eager to be done with the bright city, eager to reunite with his daughter. His throat tightened with emotion. My little girl, he thought. No longer little. Grown up now. He tried to imagine her mature face, but saw only Johanna’s.

Hurrying down the promenade, he nearly collided with Cho.

The steward bowed deeply. “Sightseeing in the city after all?”

Quinn managed to say, “Yes, Cho, sightseeing.”

The steward nodded, looking worried. He fell into step beside Quinn, and together they made their way toward the Magisterium, with Cho uncharacteristically silent.

An Ysli sentient passed them, looking cross and preoccupied, and then several Chalin clerks busily chatting. The city, in all its pursuits, was normal. But not for Cho.

Cho hardly knew how to begin this conversation with Dai Shen, son of Yulin.

From the moment he’d met this most interesting personage, he had greatly liked him. Dai Shen was a man of importance, yet behaved without pretenses, despite Cho’s offensive behavior at their first meeting, an event he still cringed to remember.
Don’t sleep on my trunks, if you please. . . .
But now he had disturbing questions about this personage.

Truth to tell, doubts had been building each time he’d seen Dai Shen. There were little things: something about his accent; the occasional mangling of an idiom; his skin tones marking him as from someplace far away, yet his history suggesting that he was of the great city Xi. By themselves the things were trivial, but someone with a talent for details might just wonder about the man. And Cho was a man of details, a functionary who prided himself on accuracy.

Now there was the matter of Johanna Quinn, and Cho was disquieted.

Walking next to Dai Shen, he at last forced himself to say, “You asked me to look into a matter.”

Dai Shen said, “Yes, the woman of the Rose. The woman called Johanna.”

The way he said the odd name,
Johanna
. Almost a perfect pronunciation. But not quite. Cho’s stomach churned with unhappy doubts. Looking firmly ahead as they walked, Cho murmured low, “I have found the scholar Kang’s records, of course.”

Dai Shen didn’t respond, forcing Cho to add: “Anyone might have found them.
You
might have found them.”

“Thank you, Cho,” the soldier of Ahnenhoon said. “A service to me, thank you.” Dai Shen kept walking, but slowed his pace as they approached the banks of a canal.

Cho responded, “I owe you more than such a simple thing, Dai Shen. A matter any clerk could accomplish.”

“You don’t owe me favors. You earned that promotion, probably long ago.”

Cho could leave this topic now, could abandon his suspicions and give the man the information he’d requested. But he would not. He had been a functionary in the Ascendancy for seven thousand days. He had served the Magisterium, the Great Within, since his childhood, and loved it as his home. It had not always been kind to him, but the thought of living in the Great Without filled him with dread. Could he lose everything? What, after all, did he really owe to this stranger?

His resolve stiffened. “You didn’t want to research the woman of the Rose yourself.”

After a pause came the response. “No.”

Cho stopped and looked directly up into Dai Shen’s face. “Are you loyal on the Radiant Path, Dai Shen?” As he asked the question, the man’s eyes slid away, and he grew very still, and then Cho knew with a sinking heart that something terrible was unfolding.

Dai Shen said in a low voice, “I have a mission beyond the one I told you. It’s one that other Chalin share with me. Some might be against me.”

“Some.”

Dai Shen glanced at the palatine hill. “Yes.”

Cho felt his chest constricting, his stomach turning sour. Then he asked with more boldness than he could believe, “Are you the son of Yulin?”

“Sent by Yulin, I promise you.”

Cho turned his gaze to the waters rippling by in the canal. He could leave now, report to Min Fe, and be excused from further complicity. But something drove him to help Dai Shen, to give him a chance to vindicate himself. He thought he knew why he was doing this. It was because of Brahariar.

Dai Shen was now looking at him, his gaze firm and yet vulnerable. This was a man you didn’t easily cast aside.

Cho began in a soft voice, low enough not to be overheard on the crowded pathway. “I am troubled, Dai Shen, by doubts. I did owe you this favor, and much more. I liked you from the time when I met you and your companion on the Nigh. You didn’t flaunt your status. And then you told the consul Shi Zu that I had helped you with protocols of the Magisterium, to avoid needless stumbling. That was a kindness. Still, you might have done it in order to put me in your debt, in order, pardon me, to ask for this favor of finding records of the woman of the Rose.”

Dai Shen was still looking at him with an impassive face. Not arguing, not fearful.

Cho leaped to his decision. It was the most impulsive action of his whole life. His skin began to zing with the tension as the implications cascaded into his mind.

He turned back to Dai Shen, searching the taller man’s face. “I have come to a conclusion. My judgment is that you are a personage of good intent. And the reason? Because you asked me to help the Jout, Brahariar, a sentient whose petitions—whatever they may be—have now found a decent hearing. A lesser man wouldn’t have noticed her troubles.”

He saw Dai Shen’s relief as the man murmured, “Thank you.”

They resumed their stroll in the direction of the great plaza in front of the Hall of the Sleeping Lord. Cho asked, “Have I shown good discrimination?”

What else could Dai Shen—or whoever he really was—say, except yes? But Cho needed reassurance, now that it had come to treason—treason of some sort, he couldn’t imagine what kind.

“I think my cause is worthy,” Dai Shen said. “But I can’t tell you what it is.” He added: “I don’t think you want to know.”

Cho glanced up at the Hall of the Sleeping Lord. “No. I don’t.”

With that, Cho held out his hand, revealing a small redstone. With this action, he had become part of the assault on protocols. That was what Cho preferred to think was going on. “There is no visual likeness of the personage here, nor any auditory, and so forth. But it’s Kang’s account of the interrogation of the woman Johanna.”

“My gratitude, Cho,” Dai Shen said, taking the stone. He smiled at Cho, and Cho managed one in return. Then, bowing, Dai Shen parted company with him.