City Without End (12 page)

“I’m Titus Quinn,” he said, putting aside all pretense in this gathering of Inyx.

“Oh, we all know. I am Akay-Wat. We rode hard to get here when we heard you approaching.”

“Thank you,” he said, putting the best face on his reception party.

Akay-Wat nodded at her mount. “This is Gevka.”

He bowed at them both. “I’ve come to talk to my daughter. If she’s here.”

Akay-Wat shook her head on its long neck. “Come at last, oh yes? Come for the daughter, have you?”

He could see where the conversation would go. “I’d see her if I could.”

He allowed himself a moment to survey the other riders and their mounts.

One was a catlike creature who rode upright. He had rarely seen a Laroo up close. Voices pressed on him. No, not voices, thoughts. The mounts snorted and swayed, giving the impression of being mentally active, while remaining in position. Those farther away might not hear all the conversation, but they heard it by relay from Gevka. So he’d been told. Many things about the Inyx were guesses on the part of sentients who’d never seen one.

Akay-Wat said, “She is not here.”

“My daughter . . .”

The Hirrin interrupted him. “Call her Sydney, that is best among us. We are her family, I think.”

When he hesitated to go on, she added, “I am no friend to the Hel Ese woman. Speak freely.”

He looked back at Mo Ti for some support, but he was still with Ghoris.

Turning back to the Hirrin, he said, “And her companion too? Helice is gone also?”

“Yes, and Riod too. Oh dear, gone to the longest city.”

City? The Inyx had no cities . . . And then the thoughts in the minds of the mounts and their riders came flooding into him: she was in Rim City. The Tarig had freed her from banishment. They’d given her a sway. The news brought a spike of hope. Sydney might have her freedom. But Akay-Wat was guarded if not hostile, and he needed backup. “May I ask Mo Ti to join us?”

Akay-Wat nodded. “He is a friend.”

At a gesture from Quinn, Mo Ti descended the ship’s ramp, his duties to Ghoris apparently fulfilled for now. As he came closer, Akay-Wat’s expression changed to one of open relief. She went to Mo Ti, and her long neck stretched forward, allowing her to rest her head on his arm for a moment in a gesture of obvious affection. They spoke in low tones for some time.

When Mo Ti finally approached Quinn, he said, “We will share a campfire.”

The cook fire burned down to embers. They’d prepared a meal for him, and he’d accepted, though it was nothing more than small baked bricks of food. They were nomads, comfortable under the bare sky, living and sleeping. Many of them slept now, the riders flung upon the ground with only a travel pouch for a pillow.

Mo Ti stood, signaling his impatience to be gone. “Ghoris waits,” he said.

Akay-Wat sat on her haunches, apparently sobered by Quinn’s long story of all that had happened to him since first suffering capture in the Entire. Quinn wasn’t sure whether she believed everything, but he hadn’t withheld any of the terrible things he’d done. She listened carefully when he told of going to Lady Chiron’s sleeping chambers, of killing Small Girl, of almost— but fatefully, not quite—rescuing Sydney when he had received permission to travel to the Inyx, back when he was still incognito in the Entire. All that was long ago now—just how long ago could never quite be parsed. A year and a half had passed here. At home, it was longer, if it was not shorter.

He had hesitated to tell Akay-Wat of Helice’s plan to destroy his home. She might be in favor of that. But he told her anyway, subterfuge among the Inyx being pointless. Given Akay-Wat’s hostility to Helice Maki, he thought they were safe.

“Mo Ti,” Quinn said, “stay a moment.”

The big man watched him stonily. Mo Ti’s suggestion was to beat Sydney and Helice to the Rim City and take Helice down on the quay. Quinn was susceptible to Mo Ti’s urgings. But he couldn’t leave yet.

Seeing that Quinn would not soon leave, Mo Ti turned away to thread among the cook fires. He had many friends here, and they accepted him as a rider. Quinn wondered if the big man might choose to stay among the Inyx, waiting for Sydney’s return. But Sydney wasn’t coming back. Even Akay-Wat seemed resigned to that.

Left alone with the Hirrin at the fire pit, Quinn asked, “Have I any hope for her?”

Akay-Wat hooved a stray ember back into the pit. Gevka moved to her side, looming over both of them. The Hirrin nudged Gevka with her nose. Perhaps they conferred privately on what to say.

“Hope is not a bad thing, Akay-Wat thinks.” The Hirrin cut a glance at him. “But Sydney will measure you, as she does everyone. In your case the measure falls short.”

That said it clearly enough.

“Here is a thing to know,” Akay-Wat went on. “When we lived in the barracks, before we had free bond with our mounts, she had a book, yes? I heard her in the ebb, pricking the pages, making her account of the day. All the things the day brought. Or did not bring.”

“Pricking the pages?”

“We were blind.”

That he had momentarily forgotten chagrined him. “Go on, please.”

“She keeps the book with her always. It is the list of her days. You are in the list, Akay-Wat thinks. Oh yes. As—this you must remember—when we had word you stole all the brightships. As when Sydney asked Riod to watch the bright, waiting for one of those ships to come into our skies to bear her home.”

Quinn’s eyes felt hot as he stared at the coals.

“‘The bright,’ she would say to her mount. ‘Do you see anything, Riod? Look again.’”

The words cut him, somewhere deep enough that he could bear it.

“Through our mounts, we all saw her lift her face to the bright, waiting, waiting. Mo Ti told her, ‘He is not coming,’ and she nearly killed him for it. Not for saying you would not come, but for saying out loud that she cared.”

The embers fell, darkening. “You wonder what else is in the book? Akay-Wat wonders too; wonders what Sydney said about this Hirrin. Once she called me a good captain. That I will always remember.” After a long pause she said, “She took the book with her. Still using pin pricks, so no one else can read it. Still saying who did what and why.”

If she meant to give him hope, she did so begrudgingly. But it was true there was more to come, and Sydney, along with many others, would be taking his measure. He didn’t know if that was comforting, or not.

Mo Ti loomed over them. He never spoke much, and didn’t need to now, either. He wanted to be under way.

Quinn rose, thanking Akay-Wat and Gevka for the meal. Standing so close to an Inyx made a strong impression. He could not imagine how it would be to ride one. His shoulders did not reach even to the animal’s back.

He turned to the Hirrin. “The navitar said there are—or were—Paion here. Do Paion ride with you, Akay-Wat?”

She looked at him, her eyes large in surprise. “No one has ever seen a Paion.”

“So I thought.”

“Once they fought near here. Did the navitar mean the great battle?”

Quinn was puzzled. He’d been told the Paion always attacked at Ahnen-hoon, never elsewhere.

“Once,” Akay-Wat said, “the Paion fell upon the Entire nearby in great numbers and the Tarig themselves came to repel them. Their entrance point is marked by the Scar.” She turned down-primacy, nodding her head. “Many Paion were slaughtered, and even the Tarig died, or they laid down their minds in dead corpses and picked them up again, later.” She swiped a quick glance at him to see if he’d dreamed such things. “So it is said.”

“The lords do not die,” Quinn murmured. “I’ve heard that, too.”

Akay-Wat gave out a puff of air through her lips that passed for a sigh. “Oh, but they do not
live
, and that is more shameful.”

“And the Paion?”

The Hirrin gazed down-primacy again. “There is only a great scar on the storm wall. It has been there since ancient times, many archons. But no Paion anymore. Akay-Wat has been to and fro across the primacy.

Blind, though, Quinn inadvertently thought.

Instantly a thought came into his mind:
The riders see through Inyx eyes.

Even a Gond is not so ignorant.

Apologies
, Quinn thought, as hard as he could, but whether Akay-Wat’s mount heard him, he didn’t know.

“Akay-Wat, have the Inyx ever read a Paion’s mind? Inyx often are recruited to the Long War.”

She turned to her mount to let him answer.

The thought came eerily clear:
Yes. Their thoughts are all on conquest.

The Hirrin went to her pack, drawing something out with her prehensile lips. She cocked her head, and Quinn understood he was to take the object.

It was a small hoop with a handle, like a miniature sports racket with the strings missing. Quinn studied the worn metal of the thing. Along the perimeter were intricate but faint designs, almost invisible.

“Akay-Wat was Sydney’s captain, her messenger to the herds across the steppe. In the journeys I once found the Scar, yes? Too close, you are in danger of the storm wall. But at a distance, my mount kicked up this object.” She added, “It is no Inyx thing, nor Jout, nor any thing the riders have ever seen.”

Paion thing
, Gevka sent.

“Perhaps,” Akay-Wat mused out loud.

Quinn thought again about Ghoris urging him to go to the Scar, but from Gevka’s mind came the image of many days’ travel, and he knew he didn’t have that long.

“Does it have any use that you’ve discovered?”

“No. The middle of it is empty, lost.” She still hadn’t taken the hoop.

Mo Ti was waiting.

Akay-Wat kept Quinn in her steady brown gaze. “Navitars know things, yes? Perhaps you are meant to keep it. So you have not come to the Inyx Sway for nothing.”

He looked into those enormous eyes, eyes that, these days at least, seemed to see more than most. “Thank you, Akay-Wat. But it’s already been for something.” He tried to give the artifact back, but she made no move to accept it.

“Give my greeting to Sydney, Titus Quinn. You will?”

He promised, knowing that the day would not be far off when he saw his daughter again. He was certain now. Amendments were needed to the book of pin pricks. He clutched the gift of the small metal hoop and then he and Mo Ti made their way back to the vessel, a black hump against the darkened river.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The station of navitar is neither sought after by petitioners nor
bestowed by the Magisterium. Far otherwise! The pilot is chosen
by the Nigh.

—from
The Radiant Way

O
N BOARD THE NAVITAR VESSEL
, Sydney’s hair whipped around her face.

She was sailing toward the Ascendancy, toward civilization, and toward her confrontation with the Tarig. She could not have said at that moment which of these she found more exhilarating.
Oh, Mo Ti, they handed it to me.

Rim City.
Since the day Mo Ti had suggested a scheme to supplant the Tarig, she’d known she would return to the Ascendancy. Now she’d be a stone’s throw away.
Mo Ti, look at me now.

She welcomed the wind in her face like the breath of the steppe as she rode her mount, like the future hitting her fresh and hard. Having emerged from the binds, the ship skimmed over the Sea of Arising, bearing only her, Helice, and Riod. And her watchful escort, Lady Anuve.

Before her lay a smudged curve of land that was the closest shore of Rim City; behind and much further away, the glowing pillars of the Ascendancy.

She wondered why they sailed at all, when the pilot could have aimed closer to their destination. Happily, the navitar provided this slow approach, perhaps for her to savor. If she craned her neck she could see the floating city, the home of all her enemies and her one friend.

Cixi
, she thought,
I’m almost there. Cixi, I have a sway.

The riders had told her all about Rim City, city of ten billion souls. Around the campfire, they had told her of the never-ending city pierced by the five rivers and linked by bridges. The great crystal bridges arched over not only the rivers, but leaned far away from the storm walls like horseshoes set at an angle in the sand. By this means, a sentient could set out at any point and, with enough time, travel the length of the city, back to the starting point. She was Mistress of this Sway. Although not much more than a decoy, she thrilled to her new prospects.