City Without End (66 page)

It was a mighty surge. The gravity wave spread out, beginning the quantum transition that would have dissolved all matter. But it had no cohort in the Entire. Missing the connection as it had been programmed, the engine ceased its throbbing and fell silent.

The security forces that EoSap had hired spread everywhere through the vault, into the corridors, dressing rooms, control room, transition room. They found one body stuffed into the end hallway behind the control room.

Someone who’d been shot in the face. Those who thought they’d seen Peter DeFanti rush ahead into the vault must have been wrong, because he was nowhere to be found.

Night deepened in the desert. Those who were going to die, did. The rest gave themselves up, coming out of the dorms and the dining hall, and even straggling in from the scrub. They were herded into corrals. Stefan and others conferred, made their calls.

The police were standing some thousand yards away, having instructions from a Special Forces unit of Fort Lewis to stand off until an incident commander arrived.

The compound was eerily quiet. People kept looking at the reactor vault as though it was a time bomb. But the hulking steel cocoon was silent as the stars. No one knew why the engine in the vault had gone off line. Perhaps the assault shook its quantum base or the coolants failed. For an awful moment, Caitlin wondered if she had mistakenly set all this in motion in her paranoia. But the renaissance people were already admitting things, though the stories were varied and bizarre. Some lied, some cast blame elsewhere, but there could be no denying the machine that occupied the place of the old nuclear reactor.

Some moments before, Caitlin had taken Stefan to one side and made her last request of him. In return for his help, she promised that she would speak strongly for him with Titus. And since Stefan still hoped that Titus could pull strings in the Entire—lucrative ones for the company—Stefan Polich did not turn her down.

Leaving him to accomplish his delicate task, she left his side and walked over to the reactor building. It was off-limits, but the group was disorganized enough not to notice when she went inside, past the ruins of the outer door.

Here, in the anteroom of the old nuclear reactor, a cold, stale air tinged with smoke was giving way to a desert breeze. It was growing cool outside, as the remnants of the warm day escaped into the clear sky. It felt good on her weary eyes. Caitlin touched the drapes of the dressing rooms as she passed them, thinking of people undressing for the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

She had little curiosity about the transition stage, below. People had gone over, one at a time, stepping on what she thought of as a scale, where you weighed in, taking the measure of your load of sin and bullshit. She had little pity for those who, Anzi had said, were cut down on the other side.

Keeping to the upper level, she savored the quiet time, walking the old perimeter corridor between the outer steel and the old reactor building wall.

Her thoughts turned to Rob, Rob who had been a hero at the last. The man who saved the world, bringing EoSap for the good of the world and a handsome profit. She would have to learn what arguments he’d used. And all this time, she’d thought it would be Titus who made the winning save in whatever game had been afoot. But it wasn’t any longer clear what she had thought Titus would do, or wouldn’t do, except that he wouldn’t have her.

But it didn’t matter anymore.

Anzi’s declaration, far from breaking her heart, had freed her. That lightening of the burden of desire, resulting from a few words from the beautiful woman with the white hair, greatly surprised her. Things seldom proceeded as you expected. Thank God.

She walked slowly through the old nuclear reactor and listened to her footfalls against the metal floor grids until she was ready to go outside again.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

It is always a day.
The bright is never dark,
The Nigh flows ever on.
There will be time,
Under the sky,
In the forever land.
Only wait for me.

—a love song

B
Y THE TIME ZHIYA REACHED THE PLAZA
, Quinn had turned command over to his lieutenant, Li Yun Tai. The young man sat on a seat that had been raised between Ghinamid’s Tower and the nearest bridge. At his side lay a jeweled sword. In his hand he held the device that controlled the Heart. Zhiya couldn’t see all this quite yet as she hurried toward the middle of the plaza; the knot of legates by the pillar had told her. But where was Quinn?

She sucked in a hot breath from the glare of Prime of Day on the stones and gamboled toward the cluster of people at the center of things. Walking at her side were the three stalwart Chalin fighters she’d been permitted by her escort, a steward of the Great Within. But what was permitted and not permitted anymore remained the most interesting question in the history of the Entire.

With no Tarig in view, she felt acutely aware of the functionaries of the Magisterium milling on the edges, murmuring and certainly plotting.

As she came closer, she saw Quinn, oddly, sitting at Li Yun Tai’s feet. The reason for this soon became clear. He was asleep.

Quinn sat on the ground, his head thrown back against Li Yun Tai’s knee, gone to dreams. She had to admit he looked nothing like the conqueror the steward had described, the one who killed the Sleeping Lord—
killed
him
—and who had his foot on the collective Tarig neck.

The young lieutenant acknowledged her with a nod. He so thoroughly gripped the device he’d been given that his hand looked like a claw. He watched the crowd from the Magisterium with the apparent intention of blowing up the kingdom if anyone approached. Zhiya believed that, in his exhaustion, he might actually do it. The device was said to control the Tarig doorway home, but everyone believed that if the man of the Rose were to use it, the Ascendancy could not survive the tumult.

Two Ysli guards provided by the Tarig stood a few paces away. There was no sign of the reported bloodbath.

After a brief exchange with Li Yun Tai, Zhiya knelt beside Quinn, noting that he wore fresh clothes: a heavy quilted vest, a plain brown tunic and pants, and a soldier’s boots. His wounds, reportedly to arms and legs, were hidden, but a slash on his face into his hairline had begun knitting up. The Tarig had beaten and tortured him, but that had been several days ago, before the Sleeping Lord woke up, enraged by the permanent opening of a door between the All and the Rose. The steward had told Zhiya that Quinn’s right arm was nearly useless.

She put a hand on his good shoulder and whispered, “Quinn, it’s Zhiya.”

He didn’t stir. “Quinn.”

Still nothing. Zhiya investigated a covered litter a few paces off. Li Yun Tai had said that Quinn had sent for it and that Lord Inweer had granted him this, and much, much more. Inside, a pile of old clothes, a chamber pot, a few water flasks. So this litter and the bench outside comprised Titus Quinn’s command site. A strange billet, but the day was strange.

Returning to Tai’s side she had him relate all that had happened. He told how Hel Ese had cozened him into helping her and how he had pushed her from the edge of the city. Zhiya had never seen the four-minute ride and would have liked to have been there. He related how Master Quinn, as he called him, had climbed down the
outside
of the Ascendancy to confront Hel Ese and all with a right arm still healing from the gash of a Tarig claw. He told how, once Lord Ghinamid had perished, Quinn had asked for the removal of the bodies. Also, that the swarm of legates be forbidden access to the plaza and that a litter should be sent as a washstall. That Lord Inweer had agreed to these simple things. And then the large thing: the removal of Ahnenhoon.

At Quinn’s request, two Ysli guards, formerly clerks of the Magisterium, had been ordered into the plaza by Lord Inweer. Although Quinn felt confident enough to sleep, he still feared Cixi and her servants. They were to stay on the margins, and did. Li Yun Tai was not clear where the Tarig had gone, but not even one was in sight either on the plaza or on what Zhiya could discern of the hill of manses.

This young man had remarkable self-possession. As a mort, he likely had had little to do with the bright city, its Tarig kings or magisterial proceedings. Perhaps this accounted for his steadiness and clarity, she thought. He had no concept of what was really transpiring. But she took him for a devoted attendant since Quinn trusted him with the device.

Li Yun Tai wore clothes rather fancier than Zhiya thought necessary: dark green and orange silks and a sublegate’s padded jacket with an excellent embroidery of a spinner. Well, he advances quickly, Zhiya thought. Can pre-consul be far behind?

After hearing Tai’s account, Zhiya crouched once again in front of Quinn.

“My dear,” she murmured. “Wake up. Zhiya is here.”

He stirred, leaning into Tai’s knee. Stymied, she looked up at Tai, who was no help at all.

“You have water?” Zhiya asked him.

Tai glanced at a flask by the bench. Zhiya opened the stopper and poured the contents over Quinn’s head.

He came to life, sputtering.

“I tried being nice, but you wouldn’t wake up.” Quinn looked at her uncomprehending. She knelt next to him. “You are the lord of the Ascendancy, dear boy. It simply won’t do to sit on the ground.”

He pulled himself up, taking a seat on the bench vacated by his lieutenant. His right arm appeared to have some movement, at least below the elbow.

Li Yun Tai sent one of the Ysli guards for a basket of food. The other kept watch at the site where the young mort said the sacrificial humans had appeared in the plaza.

Zhiya gave Quinn the flask of water, and he drank. While he slaked his thirst, she asked, “Ghinamid died with your sword through his eye?”

Quinn mustered a scrape of voice. “Makes a good story. But the drones pecked him to death.”

“Where have the Tarig gone, my dear?”

“Resting. Or whatever they do when they aren’t pretending to be alive.”

“And Anzi?”

“Gone. The Rose. I’ll stay here until she comes back.” He looked behind him, perhaps remembering the earlier scenes in this plaza. “Lady Demat was Chiron, returned. We might have guessed that. I set a bargain with her, and what I hope is that she braced open the door for me to cross over, and when Anzi went through she got there safe.”

Zhiya blinked. Chiron was helping him?

“She set a condition. That I return to her.”

Oh, there was a story here. “And would you have?”

He looked at Zhiya, clearheaded, it seemed, at last. “I don’t know. It was my word I gave her. Are those things still important?”

“No. Not when you rule the Entire.”

His attention was back on the exact spot, apparently un-demarcated, where the Roselings came through. “Anzi took my place. Going over. To stop them.”

Zhiya sighed. None of this made much sense, but this was no time for sorting the details. Except for one—hardly a detail: “But Lord Inweer stopped things on this side? He shut down the engine?”

“Yes. So he said.” He looked to the place where he had last seen Anzi.

“One man came over from the Rose and survived. I talked to him. He said that they were on the verge of setting off the engine in the Rose. But it won’t mean anything, because Inweer shut Ahnenhoon down first.” He glanced at her. “It was a close thing, Zhiya. It could all have gone wrong.”

“And didn’t.”

“Didn’t. But there’s still a problem.”

Grinning gods, of course there were problems. The Tarig were still in their mansions, and the Magisterium was ready to revolt.

He waved the little device. “I don’t know how the damn thing works.”

By the Woeful God, he was
faking
it. She moaned.

A stir of people near the doors to the lift drew her attention. Another group had arrived at the nearest pillar station. Among them stood a woman with dark hair, wearing vivid yellow silks.

“My daughter,” Quinn breathed.

Zhiya had only seen Sen Ni once before, but she was hard to miss. A red figure in a navitar’s robes stood next to her.