Prince of Storms (8 page)

The Jinda ceb ignored the newcomers. “You travel in narrow strips. We will do our best to understand you.”

Quinn paused. Had they just compared him to a carp?

He decided on a change of subject. “Where can we set up quarters for you, Tindivir? We have cloth tents over there. It's not much to offer. But other places might not be as comfortable for you.” He meant
not as safe
. They couldn't be unaware of the dangers.

Turning, he saw that Anzi had arrived, dressed in a black silk chemise and, in her haste, barefoot.

She came to his side. “Tindivir, welcome,” she said, “and also this friend whom I have not met.” She nodded to Ahnwalun.

They gazed at her. Rather too long, Quinn thought.

Anzi went on, “We share the Entire, now. As it always should have been. I see you have met my regent husband.”

At this, Ahnwalun said, “You are Ji Anzi, then.”

“Yes, I have that humble name.”

“But not humble actions, to suit.”

Quinn took her hand. “She has welcomed you courteously, Ahnwalun.”

Turning to the other Jinda ceb, Anzi said, “Tindivir. Will you greet me?”

He said, more softly than Ahnwalun had spoken. “Yes, certainly, Regent-wife.”

Quinn had had enough. “That's not her name. Please call her Ji Anzi.”

Anzi removed her hand from his, and brought out from a fold in her clothes a scroll. “These are my formal words to your people. Please share them, Tindivir. I would like to speak for my actions, since there wasn't time to do so before.”

Tindivir took the scroll. “You have written an explanation. That is good, Ji Anzi, but it will not make up for what transpired.”

“It's a start,” Quinn said pointedly.

Tindivir put the scroll in a slit in his clothes. “You cannot know what fell out from your actions, Ji Anzi, so I will explain. Briefly: Nistoth was your teacher. You prevailed on him to create an involution to the Entire, bringing you into the center of the conflict here in the Entire. The justification was that your husband was in danger. But you had many weeks in our time to make your request in Manifest. You chose not to do this, and Nistoth chose not to do this in the mistaken belief that you had to act with immediacy. What transpired from this rash behavior? Did you save your husband? No, he saved himself. Did your actions have consequence in the Rose? No, we watched, and think that you did not greatly influence that outcome. So Nistoth has lost his position. Everything of his life art has been erased. Because of you, although your former teacher graciously takes his own blame. I am sorry to report that you have engendered much resentment among us for your actions and for Nistoth's sake. I do not share the anger, since I must work with the regent. I am not happy to have told you this news, Ji Anzi, but you should not be the only one who does not know.”

Anzi could barely speak. “Tindivir, I may have been wrong, but I thought the Rose would die.”

“That was of high importance to you. But not to us.”

Quinn let those words settle for a moment.

Tindivir turned to Quinn. “Show us the tents you spoke of, Regent. That would make a better beginning than reciting old mistakes.”

Anzi stood forlorn at Quinn's side. He took her hand again. It was not a good start, but for now, he and the Jinda ceb had met each other without guards drawing swords and without the Tarig creating an uproar, or any of the hundred things that could have gone wrong by them showing up like this. It might have been worse.

“This way.” Quinn gestured them toward the pavilion. He kept Anzi with him by imprisoning her hand in his, despite her trying to tug away. He would not, by God, let them drive her from his side.

When they got to the pavilion, everyone was awake and standing by— Tai, Zhiya, Ci Dehai—all looking amazed and uncertain, if he read the expressions aright. On the hill, he thought he glimpsed a lone Tarig standing at a railing, watching.

He told Zhiya that the pavilion had to be moved. He wanted it placed away from any canals—unlike its present location. Once that was done, the Jinda ceb could choose their place in the configuration of tents.

Zhiya cocked her head. “I thought you liked the sound of the water as you slept.”

“Yes, but I can do without it.” He added, “Not all carp are carp.”

The Jinda ceb had already made themselves useful, if only inadvertently, by revealing his security lapse. He felt a sense of relief that they had finally come.

It was no longer just him with his mSap holding the Ascendancy by force of a clumsy threat. The Jinda ceb would guide him, and despite his uncertainties about their motives, he most desperately needed them.

THE
J
INDA CEB DID NOT LIKE TENTS
, but that was the least of Quinn's problems with the newcomers.

By the morning after their arrival, the two Jinda ceb had spun a narrow habitation with a high-peaked roof, like an attenuated African hut. Here they sat with Quinn and explained that their interests were rather more limited than he could have wished.

Most crucially, they did not admit a stake in, nor sense a responsibility for, safeguarding the Rose.

Anzi sat at Quinn's side, offering insights when she felt Tindivir had been obscure. When she was present, Ahnwalun absented herself from the hut as a protest of Anzi's presence. The slight distressed Quinn, but he kept Anzi at his side.

“Ahnenhoon cannot become active,” Quinn declared. “If the solitaires take over the engine, we have to remove them.”

“We stand aloof from this question,” Tindivir asserted.

Quinn laid out his arguments that to burn the Rose would be unconscionable—not only morally objectionable, but dangerous to the Entire, if it provoked a Rose attack on a realm fragile in its configuration.

“We stand aloof,” was Tindivir's stark response.

“They have all the brightships. I ask for a ship, Tindivir.” What could
one ship do against five? But he must have mobility. The army stood guard at the fortress, but he was hamstrung, shut up here at the Ascendancy. And was it certain that the army would fight against the solitaires?

Tindivir said, “We cannot intervene in the matter of ships.”

They perceived themselves between two dark choices: destroy the Rose or abandon the Entire. But it was self-serving of them to remain disengaged. The solitaires were now free to start up Ahnenhoon. Doing nothing, the Jinda ceb could still have all they wanted.

He broached the closer political question of Sydney. They understood who she was, given their long association with Anzi. Now that they were here and could judge more directly for themselves, they might need some time to choose sides. Still, he had to be clear: “It concerns me that you might have reason to support her.”

“We are neutral in this.”

He wondered if they were. If they could be. But Anzi had said this topic would surely be discussed in Manifest. She had seen lesser things take hundreds of days.

Quinn turned to her. “Am I understanding him correctly? They won't help us secure Ahnenhoon from the solitaires?”

“They will not, Titus.”

“But they won't help the Tarig, either.”

Anzi glanced at Tindivir for confirmation.

“Neutral,” Tindivir said. “As I have told you.”

When Quinn felt that they had thrashed at the issues long enough, he and Anzi excused themselves. There was no getting past the answer,
We will discuss this in Manifest.

Later that day when Quinn took up the discussions with Tindivir again, the hut had changed somewhat. There was a different table surface than before, and benches instead of chairs. Bumps clustered on the walls like a colony of mollusks. These were
forma
, as Anzi termed them, objects that could assemble into larger, useful items, retracting at command. Anzi had told him
of the Jinda ceb fondness for minimalism and assembling items instantly. When in growth mode, the forma built themselves up from material in the hut walls and floor.

There were many technological issues of interest. Quinn assigned John Hastings to debrief Tindivir, to the extent possible. Meanwhile, he broached the subject most immediately on his mind.

“The Tarig must go back to the Heart.”

“Yes.”

A point of common interest at last. They both saw the Tarig as dangerous. Sending the lords back to the Heart couldn't happen without Tindivir. In fact, everything now depended on the Jinda ceb. A troubling dependency.

Quinn sent a messenger to the Palatine Hill, to tell the Tarig to prepare themselves. If the Tarig had a psychology complicated enough that they needed such preparation. No one, not even Tindivir, was quite sure.

“And regarding Lord Inweer,” Quinn began at the next meeting with Tindivir. Anzi attended with him. The hut was not brightly lit; in that dimness, the room flickered with the muted glow from Tindivir's life art. More forma had grown on the walls high above. “Would you object if Lord Inweer stayed among us?”

Anzi darted a glance at him. He saw her distress; but he hadn't decided about Inweer. This was an exploratory question.

Tindivir sat a long time. Then he answered, “I will bring this to Manifest.”

“I think this is my decision,” Quinn risked saying.

“Perhaps,” Tindivir said, “it is not substantive, whether one more Tarig stays. A mass of them have already been allowed to escape.”

Anzi changed the subject. “Have you brought my letter to Manifest, Tindivir?”

“It made no difference.”

“I would like to apologize to Nistoth.”

“Nistothom.”

“Yes, to Nistothom.” Her old mentor had lost his status as Beautiful One and therefore had another syllable attached. In the matter of names, the shorter the name the higher the status.

Tindivir said, “He understands you are sorry, Anzi. But you must understand, Nistothom erased his life art.”

That hung heavily in the air, as though he'd said,
he lost everything
.

Anzi paused. “So there is no point to anything I might say to Manifest.”

“Words are unimportant, Ji Anzi.”

Quinn bristled.
Sometimes they are. It's called communication.

He wished she would stand up for herself, but he didn't intervene. Anzi wanted to proceed slowly. She had evidently learned a bit about patience during her sojourn with the Jinda ceb—this Anzi who had always been impulsive and sometimes rash. He wasn't sure this new prudence was a good thing; he wasn't used to seeing passivity in her, although she had always been self-contained.

He couldn't help but say, “It's not as though Nistothom, as a Beautiful One at the time, didn't know what he was getting into. He could have refused Anzi.”

Tindivir paused. “He had grown fond of Ji Anzi. She had pleaded with him. He should have taken more care. Nistothom does not speak against her.”

It was the rest of them, on Nistothom's behalf, who wanted to punish her. “No concept of pardon here?” Quinn snapped.

Anzi put a hand on his arm. “Pardon is easy. But trust has been lost. That can't be repaired.”

“Ever?”

Tindivir watched this exchange with apparent interest. Anzi was speaking for them, perhaps doing a fairly good job.

She answered, “One's life art is the creation of a lifetime. They had five thousand days with me. That is a small portrait.” She left unsaid:
A portrait with one ugly blot.

Tindivir did not disagree.

One of the first things the Jinda ceb did after building their hut was to find and cleanse the detonating particles attached to the tower of Ghinamid. Presumably their effort had disabled any military capability that the mSap had.

Quinn wasn't sorry to see the mSap disarmed. It had been remarkable that Helice Maki had ever conceived of using a machine sapient as a
weapon
.

The mSap still had its uses, however. John Hastings was using it to assess Jinda ceb technology. He had already begun to work out how the Jinda ceb made use of what he called
dimensional exchanges
. Tindivir and Ahnwalun passed freely between their hut and the minoral where the Jinda ceb were creating their villages. The two representatives traveled by loaning space to another universe. Trading space away allowed them to collapse distances, creating travel shortcuts.

Dimensional exchanges also allowed them to
borrow
space across branes, a maneuver that was fraught with fewer difficulties than exchanges with local time and space. Quinn had already seen an example of this when the Jinda ceb appeared to occasionally have expanded their huts on the inside but not on the outside—something that John called an orbifold. Such loans were not free; the Jinda ceb paid back in either spatial or even temporal dimension. In the latter case, the world would speed up relative to others. Rather, Quinn thought, like horse trading in space and time.

John Hastings said that such borrowing could not help the ultimate resource problems. One could borrow dimensions, but not energy. That still needed to be stolen.

Quinn had a long list of topics to take up with Tindivir. Foremost on his mind was the departure of the Tarig gathered in the manses on the hill.

“Can they fashion another door? A way back, once they're gone?”

“We can prevent them.”

No explanation. But it was one time when he found Tindivir's self-assurance welcome. Quinn hoped it was true, that in the contest between Tarig and Jinda ceb Horat, the Tarig had a technological disadvantage.

He could not rest easy until the Tarig—the bulk of them—departed. They huddled in their warrens, afraid of damage to their homeland or of being cut off
from the Heart's congregate state. In turn, he still feared them. The sooner gone, the better.
Gone
. How strange a concept. The Tarig abandoning the Entire. It seemed impossible that it had come to this pass. But the Jinda ceb Horat joined him in the desire to banish them, and that had changed everything.