City Without End (52 page)

Helice came awake suddenly.

The walls glowed with a feral light; skylights stared up at the gilded sky. A little dusk would be welcome in this too-bright house. In her sick bed in the middle of the outsized room, she felt exposed and uneasy.

Far down the mansion corridors someone screamed. It was the screaming that awoke her, horrid, foreboding screams.

Struggling to rise, she managed to dress and slip her feet into soled slippers. She staggered against the bed, then breathed deeply, mustering her equilibrium. Although fevered and weak, she made her way to the door opening and peered out. Another cry, louder, and then one fainter, as though the person in distress was not always moving in the same direction.

Helice expected someone to come for her, but no one did. No caretaker, no Tarig, no healer—she had banished those. Without someone to guide her, and since she would not be able to go far in her condition, her instinct was to hide. Turning into the hall, she headed opposite to the direction of the screams.

The precincts of Lord Nehoov’s house were strange. The halls were sometimes tubes, round on all sides but the bottom; at other times they were absurdly wide corridors, filled with artifacts like statues, fabric hangings, and tables displaying jewelry and what might be tools or weapons. Worse, the halls changed. She didn’t know where she was.

Behind her the wails occasionally pierced the silence. As she hurried down the odd corridors, she wondered how long she had slept and what could have happened that a person could scream for so long in Lord Nehoov’s mansion and not attract notice.

When she found a corner that was obscured by an imposing and incomprehensible sculpture, she crept into the space behind. It was a good hiding place, so long as she crouched down. She shrank into the little space and put her head on her knees, exhausted.

After a time, the screaming ceased.

Perhaps the person in distress had left, or found someone to help her. It was a she, Helice felt certain. The longer the silence stretched, the more ominous Helice found it. Something was dreadfully wrong. It was the worst timing for bad events and screaming women. After her meeting with Nehoov and his council, things should have proceeded calmly and directly to renaissance. She feared that anything else was profoundly counterproductive.

Lord Nehoov, get it together. Just fucking
handle
it. Whatever it was, he must smooth it over. So close now.

After a very long wait, during which time Helice was dismayed to find she needed to urinate on the floor, she decided that no one was in the building.

Determined to find Nehoov or one of his companions, she hauled herself to her feet and began to hunt for the way out. The mansion lay icy and silent.

Where were the Tarig? Surely they had servants, guards, flunkies of some kind. How could the palace be so utterly empty?

She had noticed a thin line of light along the wall; unconsciously, she had been following it. Keeping to the light trail, she passed what looked like a kitchen. Then, within a few steps a doorway gave onto a room with a table covered in a cloth. . . .

There, a Tarig lord lay bleeding, head on the table. She froze in the door opening, heart pounding.

Without a doubt, it was Nehoov. Immobile, a puddle of blood around him, he looked quite dead. A small robot was busily cleaning up around the lord, cleaners fizzing in the blood. The sight appalled her. Nehoov, her ally.

His enemies had killed him. And his enemies were her enemies.

Adrenaline fueled her rush away from the room and its body, down the hall, following the line of light. As she hurried, she shrank from doorways that might reveal the conspirators. Nehoov, dead, oh God. Didn’t they know she could cut them off, dispose of the Heart door? Hadn’t Nehoov explained this to them? Or had she threatened too much? Would it all unravel so easily? If so, then she wanted to die. But it was not a release she could give herself, not yet.

Ahead of her, a lumpish form on the floor, in the middle of the corridor. A body. An older Chalin woman in an apron lay in a heap. By the angle of her neck, dead. No cleaning bots had found this one yet; so she’d died after Nehoov. The screamer. The conspirators were ruthless, killing even servants. No doubt they were just working up to the main murder they had in mind: Helice. She was determined to make it cost them.

At last she found a vestibule she thought she recognized, and the door to the outside. Slowly opening it, she peeked out, then slipped into the empty street.

Anzi watched with increasing anxiety as the Jinda ceb showed her scenes from the Ascendancy. She would have to decide soon where to insert, but with Lord Ghinamid on the loose, she had better choose correctly.

The Jinda ceb were masters at maneuvering their field of vision. They worked in tandem with Anzi as she suggested places to look. The problem with the lords’ mansions was that they revised themselves, and thus any previous paths the Jinda ceb found were irrelevant as guides. Anzi watched the shifting views on the veil: old Cixi staring up from her balcony at the empty plaza; masses of Tarig in the upper streets; flights of bird drones over the city. And just now, Ghinamid’s swift and sickening murder of Lord Nehoov.

But where did the lords keep Titus?

Although she had been among the Jinda ceb a long time, just an arc of days had passed for Titus. She vividly remembered her dismay when the time difference became clear to her, and she’d thought for a terrible moment that the time discrepancy would be the cruelest separation of all. But realignment was possible. They had done it, unless what she was viewing was history. It was too perplexing to hold in mind. She was going back, whatever it meant.

A new scene: Lord Ghinamid had entered a different house. There he rounded on a group of Tarig and, being larger than they, and quicker, he cut them down. A few fought, while others actually knelt to him, but whether asking forgiveness or welcoming destruction, she couldn’t tell. Some Tarig lords, he didn’t harm. Then Ghinamid lurched away.

Anzi’s Jinda ceb companion explained: “Lord Ghinamid is designed as a soldier to guard the interface. He has more skill in fighting than other Tarig.”

She nodded, realizing that Ghinamid was indeed imposing. He appeared to be looking for someone, and it made her frantic to think that it might be Titus.

The veil drew her attention again. Here was a glimpse of a small woman with a deformed face racing down a side street on the palatine hill; had Lord Ghinamid attacked her, leaving her face in shambles?

And there! Deep in the underbelly of a lord’s mansion, it was he. Anzi moved closer to the veil. Titus. In his cell, Titus. She had no idea how she would get him out of there, but she must not waste a moment.

“Now,” she said. “If you please, now.” Then a tardy thought came to her.

“No, wait! Set me outside the cell, not in it.”

With that adjustment, they sent her.

The insertion took the wind out of her, and she went to her knees, accidentally touching the light bars. Jerking backward, she was left with a painful scorch on the back of her hand and the smell of burning skin.

When she looked up, she saw that the cell was empty. But he’d been there only a moment ago! Were the Jinda ceb wrong in how they aligned the timeframes between their realm and this one? Had they erred? She stared into the cell, staring past the bars of hot light.

Titus had vanished.

Tai stood in the recessed porch of a closed foodery watching for any sign of Hel Ese. He was as close as he could reasonably get to the palatine hill. If she was in the Tarig confidences now, she might be given free reign to move about. From the foodery, he had a clear view up to the lords’ mansions. Scanning the porches and such avenues as he could see from here, he waited.

No one was in the streets or the great plaza. Occasionally he noted a Tarig on the hill, but those great massings of lords in the streets had evaporated.

He could not help Titus Quinn. The great man had asked for prayers, but Tai couldn’t recall one. His mind was focused on one thing alone: Find Hel Ese and strike her down.

Tai had been working to destroy the Rose. She had known his great desire to be in the Rose, and she had used him without mercy, making him complicit in a crime so large it left him stunned. But it wasn’t for his own humiliation that he would kill her. It was for the Rose. Maybe he could make right what had gone so terribly, unthinkably, wrong.

From the corner of his eye, he caught a movement. A figure came down the street, walking like one who was lame and furtively looking around. He drew himself further into the shadow of the portico. By the bright, it was she. She didn’t look triumphant, or even healed. It gave him a spike of hope that perhaps the lords had spurned her. This changed nothing of his plan.

Then, behind Hel Ese came several Ysli whose short legs hampered their panicked run away from the palatine hill. Others followed: a Jout in company with a Chalin legate; a gaggle of clerks. By their haste and troubled expressions, all seemed to be fleeing something.

Tai moved into the street, mixing among the other sentients, following Hel Ese.

Quinn felt his way in the dark, narrow passageway, with Lady Demat just behind him. They crept with as much silence as they had in them. Lord Ghinamid had wakened. He stalked them, Demat said.

Quinn stopped, whispering, “There’s a split in the tunnel.”

“Go to the left,” Demat’s voice wavered in her terror of the dark, though it had been her idea to come into the tunnel, leaving it dark.

“Do you have a weapon?” he whispered. “If he finds us?”

“No weapon will help you.”

He shuffled on, Demat behind him, like the ghost of his previous life, still trailing. He would end in the Entire where he began, in an alliance that confounded and mesmerized him: a bond with a Tarig female.

“Another split.”

“Still left.”

They crept on, trying to hear any sound besides their own. Quinn knew from Demat’s report that Helice had forged an agreement with Lord Nehoov.

Now Ghinamid was here to be reckoned with. What did he want? Quinn profoundly hoped he wanted Helice dead.