City Without End (7 page)

Below the city in the sky, navitar vessels on the sea sparked in and out of existence. As Quinn watched he saw, out toward one of the five primacies, a congregation of Adda cruising slowly, far from their usual cross-primacy routes. A trick of perspective, to see so far. Today was especially good for mirages. Quinn gazed at the closest storm wall where it stopped short at the shore in a view that appeared to be twenty miles away. He squinted, trying to see the storm walls of Sydney’s primacy too, but as most things relating to his daughter, they were obscured by time and distance. Yet by navitar vessel, she was close. That was the overwhelming reality of the Entire. Immensity and immediacy were two sides of the same coin.

Could anyone choose to destroy this? The Entire endured. Earth was under threat. He could have traded these two circumstances. He hadn’t.

At a noise downstairs, Quinn found his knife—a beat too slowly, but fast enough.

Zhiya appeared in the doorway, key in hand. Nodding her overlarge head at the sea, she said, “Anzi’s not out there.”

Quinn slipped the knife back into the folds of his shirt. “No. Out in the void.”

“Don’t try to guess.”

“Was I?”

Zhiya gamboled in, joining him on the balcony. “Even I don’t know where she went. No use trying to ply me with sex, I won’t tell you.” She threw a lock of her white hair over her shoulder. “On second thought, you could try.”

Quinn smiled, saying nothing. In the nearby public square he could glimpse from his balcony, a God’s Needle jutted up from the city, where sentients left offerings for the god whom they hoped would not notice them.

The needle looked neglected. This was a city favoring a different religion, the faith of the Red Throne. He didn’t know which he preferred: the Red, with its fatalistic and pious acceptance of all futures, or the Misery, acknowledging that the more you attracted notice, the worse God dealt with you. Having experienced the foretelling powers of the navitar Ghoris, he was inclined to believe that if any being was close to a creator, it might be the red-robed pilots. The navitars didn’t encourage such devotion. They were oblivious to it. An excellent clergy, and immune to corruption.

Zhiya led him back to the sitting room. “Let me look at your face.” She hauled a chair closer. “Sit.”

He got to her level, and she examined his bruised face, where the needles had instructed his face to move and his face had responded with slow, painful morphing.

“My drunken physician did well. But you look tired. Did you sleep?”

“Badly.”

“Dreams?”

“Of Tarig.”

Zhiya shrugged “A plague of nightmares. We all have them.”

“I dream of fighting them.”

“Good idea.”

Ever since she’d given him a ride in her airship, she’d had in mind that he’d lead a revolution. In Zhiya’s peregrinations, she’d always looked for someone who’d take the role. Unfortunately, she had settled on him.

He rose. “So, you approve the new face?”

“Lovely. But I fancy a soldier, dear one. Strap on a sword and you can have me on the balcony.”

“I’m no soldier. You’ve mistaken me for a hero.” He went back to his post at the doorway. “I’m Ji Anzi’s husband.”

Zhiya blinked. “Hm. Well, for my part, I liked you better when you were important.”

Quinn turned from her. He gazed at the pillars of the Ascendancy. Once he’d thought of slicing the legs off that hovering beast. Now his chance was gone. The cirque lay at the bottom of the Nigh. The cirque, that flawed device he’d brought from the Rose. Flawed, full of changeover nan. Escaping, it would have rushed out and enveloped the world, along with the bright sky, the dark walls. All. It was not a limited device, as the Rose engineers had promised. It would have taken it all.

So the engine at Ahnenhoon remained, churning into the Rose. Whether he’d chosen rightly or wrongly, the moment was past. No one man could destroy so much.
He
could not. The cirque was gone.

“I suspected you would turn me down.”

He turned back to Zhiya, cocking an eyebrow.

“About taking a little comfort in my arms.” She swept her hand toward the door. On cue, a stunning woman in deep purple and gold entered, bowing. A courtesan. She drew the eye, locked it on.

Zhiya avoided Quinn’s look. “One of my girls. Your lovely wife won’t mind. It isn’t our way to put too much meaning into physical delight.”

“It isn’t my way to pay for sex.”

“My treat,” Zhiya said.

He left the porch and approached the woman. “Your name?”

“Ban, Excellency.” She glanced at the quarters, noting that she’d be entertaining a man of means.

“You may leave, Ban. Thank you.”

Zhiya signaled Ban to stay. “It will do you good, Ni Jian,” she said, using Quinn’s new name. When Quinn didn’t answer, she drew closer. “She’d want you to live naturally—while she’s gone.”

“I
am
living naturally.”

“Staring at the sea? Thinking too much about what’s gone, what’s done and not done?”

“I’m recuperating.”

“Some things still work, I’m sure,” she muttered. After a long moment, she gestured Ban out of the room. “You’re no use to anyone if you let yourself go dark.”

“No use to
you
.”

Zhiya put on a hurt expression. “As though I’ve ever asked anything of you.”

It was true. She’d helped him in the bad times, never calling for a favor in return. But she hated the Tarig, and counted on Quinn to share that hate. Maybe do something about it, if the day ever came.

Softening his tone, he said, “Don’t ask me to go back to what I was. There’s no going back.”

“There’s going forward.”

“I do go forward.”

She smiled, shaking her head. “Stuck in place, dear one. Someone has to tell you.”

He saw how it was with her. She remembered him striving, half mad with despair over Sydney and guilt over his wife’s suffering. Zhiya had seen him engulfed in pain and thoughts of revenge. Maybe she liked him better that way.

“I’m not dark.” He had the words, finally. He knew the feeling that had lurked there these last days. “I’m at peace.” Amid all of this, it was the simple truth. The world was at war, but he was relieved of duty. “I’ve become a plain man. I’m glad of it.” He knew how it sounded. Like he was settling for less. There was a big difference between peace and surrender, though. “At peace. Do you know how good that feels?”

Her response dripped with sarcasm. “I can just imagine.” She went to the chair where Ban had left her shawl and picked it up. “Recuperate, then. I can see you need more rest before you pillow a beautiful woman who is the best of my whores and who, besides, is your own height.”

He smiled at her. “If I was going to pillow with anyone—which I’m not, because I’m done betraying the women in my life—it would be you.”

She threw the shawl over her white hair that was the hallmark of Chalin women. “Recuperate, Ni Jian. Let me know when you’re worth talking to again.” Before closing the door, she gave him a sideways glance. “Anzi might be gone a long time, you know.”

“I know.”

The longer she was gone, the safer it was for the Rose. Standing at the door again, and looking at the God’s Needle nearby, he almost threw out a prayer. It wouldn’t do, though, to have the wrong god hear it.

Days passed. Quinn counted them. Ten, twenty. Zhiya came and went, reporting on Tarig presence in Rim City, listening for news, spying out new sources. But to what purpose? She wanted him to bring them down, and Quinn only wanted peace.

At times, he was able to sleep. Sometimes he dreamed lucidly. Tonight was such a night.

He pivoted to avoid the slashing blow. The Tarig lord missed, but more Tarig
swarmed around him. He was dreaming, he knew, but he still fought for his life. Each
Tarig he felled was replaced by another, jumping up from the ground, created from soil.

They replicated wildly; not born, but sprouting unnaturally. They were made of dirt,
but no less strong for that. Within seconds of springing up, their skin hardened off,
congealing under a thousand years of fire curing. The foremost creature came for him
out of nowhere, her talon aimed for his eye. Before the claw went in, he had time to see
it was the Lady Chiron. She was supposed to be dead. No longer.

To escape blinding, he woke.

It was Deep Ebb, what passed for night in the Entire. Through the haze of broken sleep, Quinn noted the lavender sky with clefts of purple, shedding a dour twilight. Though every day Zhiya begged him to secure his doors, he left them thrown wide to his deck for the view of the sea, where Anzi had set sail.

A creature poised on the balcony. Small, misshapen, ominous.

Quinn rolled to his feet, his hand clamping on to his knife. He circled around the creature, trying to see how many there were. The room in shadow. The creature, a monkey.

A Ysli. Simian creature, but sentient. He wore a belt with tools hanging from it. It sprang at him. Before Quinn’s knife had completed its upward swing, the Ysli jumped high to crash into Quinn’s chest. Quinn sprawled onto his back; the Ysli rode him down.

A knife was at Quinn’s eye. “Calm,” the Ysli said in a hissing voice. “No movement.”

Quinn felt the blade press at the corner of one eye. He remained still.

“No knife,” the creature said, still whispering.

Quinn released his grip on his own knife, and the Ysli kicked it away, still sitting on his chest like a nightmare.

“I’ll pay you more than the Tarig can,” Quinn whispered.

“Under sentient,” the creature hissed. “I serve the mistress, don’t I? Ghoris. You remember?” He grinned at Quinn’s reaction. “You know her, so no cause to draw knives. You drew yours first, or I wouldn’t have jumped. Can you be calm? I’ll let you up.”

“Yes.”

The Ysli climbed down, placing the knife in his tool belt. The back of his arms and thighs bristled with hair, as did its chest and groin. Golden eyes peered out at Quinn from a bald and wizened face. Quinn knew this ship keeper. “Ghoris says you must come.”

“To her ship?”

“Does a navitar leave her ship?”

“Why does she want me?”

“She doesn’t. The visitor does.”

“Visitor?”

The Ysli frowned, massive eyebrows meeting in the crease of his forehead. “Coming or not?”

Quinn grabbed a cloak, leading the way down the stairs to the street.

Anzi
, he thought. She’s here, somehow on Ghoris’s ship. Ghoris had taken pity on him and would give them a cabin to indulge their longing and bodily hunger. But remembering the navitar, he thought not. Ghoris was barely aware that she
had
a body.

Nighttime made a splendor of Rim City. The isthmus of lights extended out on either side in a hot strip of molten colors, a neon foam on the endless shore. The tracks of the longest city in the universe, in any universe.

Quinn and the ship keeper walked quickly through the lanes of the nearest residential quarter, offering glimpses of the sea peeking between courtyards and back passageways. They stayed off the great Way, the circular road that meandered more or less parallel with the shore. Keeping to back ways, they passed into a more humble sector with a chaotic assortment of shops and apartments above. The only rule in this city was never to block the Way. In theory, a citizen of the Entire could walk the full circumference of the sea, the better to see the lords’ glory. One step at a time, it would take thousands of years.

When the back ways came to a dead end, the ship keeper reluctantly led him into the Way. Fortunately, few sentients were abroad at the late hour.

On the sea side of the Way, habitations and wharves huddled, blocking off a view of the mercurial waters. His instinctive caution made him wary of this ship keeper. But if the Tarig knew him to be at Zhiya’s hiding place, they didn’t need a ruse to bring him out.

Ghoris was an ally, if a slightly mad one. She had brought him out of Ahnenhoon. She had predicted Johanna would be the key to Earth’s future. And Ghoris had been right.

He hoped the navitar had good reason to bring him out into the streets. As long as he stayed hidden, the lords would think he had a doomsday device. That piece of deterrence would argue for leaving the Earth alone, and the Rose. As long as he remained hidden. He cast a quick look at the Ysli, taciturn, working hard to match strides with Quinn.