The Novels of the Jaran (256 page)

A feather touch brushed her ankle, and she bent and picked up a square of white silk. It fluttered in the wind, caressing her hand and twining in through her fingers. Unthinkingly, she lifted it to her face, brushed the smooth cloth along one cheek, and shut her eyes, taking in a breath. And felt a presence, knew that some
thing
was aware of her. She heard, like a whisper, the rustle of a robe shifting, the murmur of layers of starched fabric dragged over the ground, and the light but deliberate tap of footsteps, nearing her.

Her eyes snapped open, but she stood alone in the courtyard with David. “Someone knows we’re here,” she said. Her back tingled. She shuddered and turned all the way around, but there was only the courtyard, the palace, and the arcade that opened onto the avenue. She opened her hand, releasing the square of silk, and the wind caught it and lifted it up the stairs that led to the massive doors. She followed it.

“Yana!”

“No, let me just follow it. I won’t go in or anything.”

David came after her as she hurried up the steps—there were a lot of them—and the doors rose up before her, pale gray touched with lavender, framed by an inscription, letters in black stone in an alphabet she did not recognize which was itself contained within a mosaic trim of stars and hexagons. The door was not solid; it was a screen, riddled with holes, and Ilyana stopped in front of it and carefully set her hands on it and peered through. She saw nothing at first. Then her eyes adjusted to the dimness within and she saw a vast hall caught in twilight, shadows and light equal presences within, and in the center a person stood, frozen, ringed by a mandala of fire.

Not a person. A statue: a man, dancing, caught in the still heart of the hall, each of his four arms striking a pose, each hand framing a gesture, one leg lifted, knee bent, the foot swept forward.

She breathed as she stared and abruptly felt as if the hall within had captured the pulse of her heart, the cycle of her breathing, and breathed with her, waiting. The statue moved.

Except no, it hadn’t at all, that was a trick of her eyes. But she flashed on Kori’s Uncle Gus, and recognized who it was: It was Shiva, in his aspect as Lord of Dance, enthroned in a Chapalii gallery within a Chapalii palace.

A hand touched her back and she yelped and jumped back.

“Yana!”

“You startled me,” she said sheepishly. “Look in there.” David peered through the door, closing first one eye, then opening it and closing the other in an attempt to get a good look. “It’s too dark. I can’t see anything. I think we should go back and get the others and discuss this.”

Ilyana sighed and agreed, having no choice; however mildly David might phrase his orders, they were still orders.

They found Valentin in the plaza.

“Where is Sakhalin?” David asked him.

“I dunno. I came back here to look for you guys. He kept walking on down that way.” He waved vaguely toward one of the ten avenues.

“Valentin,” said David, “I get a little tired of your world-weary pose. Which one? We went off the avenue and this whole place seems to be changing. I want us all out of here.”

Valentin looked interested suddenly. “Oh, so I guess he shouldn’t have opened that door and gone in, huh?”

“What!”

Valentin snickered.

David swore in a language Ilyana didn’t recognize. “That isn’t funny.”

“No, no, he didn’t leave. But he was making me answer all kinds of questions, so—”

“So you thought you’d be better off with us?”

“He’s okay. I mean, I like him.” He shot a glance toward Ilyana. “And I’m not just saying that to make you mad.”

“I’m relieved,” said David. “Can you take us back to where you were?”

Valentin had many faults, but a lack of sense of direction had never been one of them. Nevertheless, they walked forever down the avenue Valentin indicated and did not find Anatoly Sakhalin.

“Maybe he went back,” Ilyana suggested, “and we missed him.”

So they went back to the plaza, back through the gateway, and came out in the gazebo in the courtyard, sunny and warm and glowing with afternoon light.

Anatoly still knelt at the latticework, eyes half shut, seeing some other sight, and his lips moved, but no sound came out.

“Damn it,” said David. “Listen, you kids stay here. I’m going in to look again.”

Even Valentin looked worried now. He sat patiently beside Ilyana on one of the benches for upwards of an hour, halfheartedly playing a Diathetics game on his slate while Ilyana mended a tear in one of Evdi’s shifts. Once, twice, one of the actors walked through, glanced curiously at them, and went on into the remodeled lavatories, but otherwise the faint scent of flowers drifted to them on the breeze and the planet sank in the sky, creeping below the walls, and Ilyana smelled supper cooking, some kind of meat stew whose aroma made her mouth water. She’d forgotten how hungry she was.

When David came back to them, he came back alone.

“Where is he?” demanded Ilyana.

David stared at Anatoly, who was clearly right there, fingers wrapped tight around the latticework, and yet was just as obviously utterly gone.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Anatoly knew very well that by conventional measurements a forest of towers that were clearly hundreds of meters high could not fit between the avenue he walked on now and the avenue that he knew lay beyond it. If the plaza was the center and the ten avenues the spokes on the wheel, it was simply impossible that those towers could be so distant. He stood with one hand resting on his saber hilt (he always wore his saber in nesh); he shaded his eyes against the sun with the other hand and studied the towers. Valentin had gone back to find David and Ilyana, but Anatoly had walked on, endlessly on it seemed, and finally the mosaic walls that lined this avenue gave out to a procession of buildings with fantastically curved roofs, all of them black or white, unrelieved by color. Then the buildings stopped, and he was left standing on a paved road that struck out onto a flat plain. To his left rose the towers. He estimated they were perhaps a kilometer away. If only he had Sosha….

To his surprise, she neighed and came cantering down the road toward him.
Stay on the path
, David had said. He hesitated as the mare halted before him. Then he swung up on her and headed out over the—well, it wasn’t grass, it was a gray-green plant with tiny, bulbous leaves that hugged the ground. The plants made little squelching noises under Sosha’s hooves and brought a tangy scent like seawater wafting up from the ground.

As he neared the towers he was sure that these were the same towers he had seen from the platform, when they had first arrived at Duke Naroshi’s planet, that they were the same towers he had glimpsed through the hazy barrier that surrounded their camp. They should have been underwater. But there was no river here.

Black, vermilion, and glass, they thrust straight up out of the ground, spears piercing through from some other place. Their shafts were pure and smooth; far above, each one terminated in a different form: a striped onion dome, a bright spire, a silver needle, a seven-storied pagoda. He counted forty-seven towers, then forty-nine, then fifty-one, then fifty, and finally gave up.

One tower stood a bit away from the others, like a sentry. He pulled Sosha up at its base, dismounted, hobbled her, and walked up to the wall. But the black surface wasn’t wall, it was darkened glass. Halfway around the base stood an opening, no door, just an empty space that led inside into a corridor that spiraled in until it reached the base of the stairwell that itself spiraled up, and up. Anatoly climbed. He did not get winded, nor did his legs ache. The stairs were black and slick, like obsidian, and the walls slicker still, almost like they were wet. In the center of the stairwell a luminescent shaft of pale gray stone gave off light. He lost count of the steps, just kept ascending until he thought he must have climbed far higher than the tower itself was tall.

He came around the curve and it ended in an arch that looked onto—

He stopped dead, right before the threshold. The archway opened out onto a great hall, vast in silence, lined with statues of a hundred hues and textures: a pallid griffin; an armored warrior hewn out of wood polished to a satiny gleam; a double helix wrought in diamond; a creature like melted wax with six probing appendages; a human woman in a belled skirt and a fitted vest that revealed—Anatoly looked quickly on down the line, imagining what his grandmother would say about such an immodest display; a pattern of lights pulsing over a black base; a man with four arms, one leg frozen in a graceful sweep in front of him, the other balancing his weight on the back of a misshapen dwarf….

Anatoly stepped over the threshold and into the hall. Which could, of course, not possibly be here, at the pencil-thin tip of the tower. The hall was silent, except for a faint whisper, like the slither of a snake through grass, like the hiss of sand sliding down a funnel. The noise stopped, started again, and he saw a figure moving toward him from the other end of the hall.

His heart pounded. But because he was a Sakhalin, he stood his ground and waited.

As it neared he saw that it was a Chapalii, dressed in robes that left only the creature’s hands and head uncovered. Anatoly had seen few Chapalii; other alien races were more commonly seen in Earth’s cities. This one must be male, although its skin had the lustrous glow of a fine pearl, less like skin and more like a smooth shell. Its stiff robes rustled as it walked, flaring out in a complicated drapery.

Ten paces from him, it stopped. He regarded it. It regarded him. Although he could not by and large tell the difference between individual Chapalii, he knew this was not Duke Naroshi. Nor did he think it was a steward.

“Who are you?” it asked in perfectly intelligible khush.

“I am Anatoly Sakhalin, a prince of the Sakhalin tribe and grandson of Elizaveta Sakhalin, etsana of the Sakhalin tribe and by her wisdom and her years foremost etsana among all the tribes.”

“A prince? Do you truly name yourself a prince?”

“Who are you?” he asked, a little annoyed by this inquisition.

“You are young in your power. You are of the—” Its voice had the resonant tone of a bell, and the shadows seemed to capture and hold the echoes of its words in the dark interstices of the hall while it studied and classified him. “—human race. A male.” The light had an odd quality here, planing the Chapalii’s head into a smooth oval without shadow or highlight. It had a narrow face cut by a lip-less mouth and its head broadened in back—or perhaps that was just a trick of the light. “How did you come here?”

“I came with the Bharentous Repertory Company. My wife is one of the Singers—one of the
actors.
I accompanied them.”

It lifted one hand—elongated fingers that were, like the plants he had ridden over, bulbous at their tips—in a gesture obviously dismissive, mimicking a human gesture.
“Here.”

“Here?” Anatoly glanced back at the trellis arch that framed the doorway. “I climbed up the stairs.”

“It is forbidden for males to walk in the hall of monumental time.”

“I beg your pardon,” he said politely, realizing that
she
must be a female, and certainly by her bearing a great etsana. “I was not aware that I needed permission to explore here.”

She blinked. The movement was doubled: first a thin lid like hazy glass followed by a thicker, opaque lid. An instant later he realized that it wasn’t a reflex. It was a command.

The hall of monumental time melted around him and reformed into the plaza that anchored the map room.

“My brother will attend you in the Garden of the Thousand Petals of Gold,” her voice said, but she did not appear.

“When?” he asked into the air, amazed and startled.

“When you reach there, he will attend you, as is fitting.”

“But how will I get there? I can’t get through—”

“For a prince of the blood, the doors in a duke’s palace are always open.”

A wall of air hit him like a blow, and he reeled and found himself kneeling, hands clutching spasmodically at the latticework. Stunned, he lifted his head to a thousand echoing gasps, the ringing of his ears, and looked straight into Ilyana Arkhanov’s face.

“Where were you?” she demanded, then looked up over his shoulder. “Valentin! Go get David, you idiot!”

Anatoly put his hands down on the cool tile of the gazebo floor. Its solidity reassured him.

“I don’t know. Gods, and I’ve got a headache. Have you ever heard of the Garden of the Thousand Petals of Gold?”

“Anatoly!”

He turned. The movement sent spears of pain through his eyes.

“Anatoly!” Diana knelt beside him and put her arms around him. “Do you know how long you were in there?”

He knew better than to attempt to shake his head. “No.”

“Hours. Just hours. It’s evening. What happened? Where were you? Goddess, I was so worried.”

That she was worried pleased him, and caused the headache to recede slightly. “I’m not sure,” he said, and then smiled at her, and her beauty worked to soothe away more of the pain. “But I’m to meet with Duke Naroshi.”

“But no one meets with Duke Naroshi,” said David, above him. “No one but Charles.”

“Nevertheless,” said Anatoly, “I am to meet with him. I am a Sakhalin, after all.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Under the Protection of the Gods

V
ASHA HAD NOT RIDDEN
in a wagon since he was a small child. With his wrists and ankles bound, he had no way of holding on, so he jolted along and now and again was slammed against the side of the wagon. Katerina sat against the backboard. The fetters on her wrists looked like massive iron bracelets.

“Katya!” he whispered.

The bleak fury in her eyes troubled him. “We must kill him,” she said in a low voice, accompanied by the steady tramp of Janos’s infantry alongside the wagon, “to avenge the insult to our tribe.”

“Sakhalin?”

“The khaja prince. Sakhalin will be brought before the tribes and given the sentence he deserves.”