Bright of the Sky Page 10

  "Rise, then, Niece. I am finished with you."

  She stood, smoothing her jacket, looking properly deferential, and yet flushed with excitement. Best to quash her schemes before she could launch them.

  "He is not welcome, Niece." He locked a gaze on her so that she would know his intention. "It shall not be."

  Yulin nodded, feeling a moment's pity. "Go now, and find occupation for your energies." He added, "Somewhere far from here." He liked her well enough, but she brought misfortune, as even his late wife Caiji had admitted.

  "And the others who have seen him come here?"

  "They shall not be welcome, either."

  Her face reflected her inner strife, but to her credit, she held silent. Then she blurted: "But Wen An is your wife's cousin."

  "Even so."

  "A shame to kill Suzong's cousin for no reason." Her next words came in a rush. "Wen An is utterly loyal to you. She spends all her days in a minoral no one has ever heard of, and travels only by beku. She will die with her mouth shut, yes, Uncle."

  Perhaps she was right, that Wen An might be spared....

  Her voice needled at him: "And Suzong loves her so."

  His voice rose. "Do you decide when my orders are obeyed and when they are not?"

  She fell to her knees, speaking into the floor once more. "No, Uncle of my deliverance." He pulled at his mustache, thinking how she had brought disquiet and uncertainty to a day that had begun so well. Her voice was barely a whisper. "But such a waste, to kill Titus Quinn."

  "Eh?" What was this, a plea for the breaker of vows as well? He'd already given his ruling: They all die. Except, perhaps Wen An. Wife's cousin. Cause no end of trouble.

  Her voice hovered like a swarm of gnats. "And Titus Quinn?"

  He glanced around the audience chamber-private enough, but not impervious to spies: "His name, until I drown him, shall be Dal Shen. Never speak his Rose name again."

  "Yes, One Who Shines."

  This whole situation was her fault, if one went back far enough to find first causes. But he had long ago forgiven her. That is, until this man of the Rose had returned to haunt them.

  Still, he took pity on her distress. "Rise, Anzi. You are in disfavor, but you may stand if you behave."

  As she rose, she met his eyes, and he saw that in the many days since he'd last seen her she had become a strong young woman, no longer gawky and too tall. Well, perhaps taller than a short man could wish, but her face was fine enough. Perhaps Suzong should be thinking of a suitable first husband for the girl....

  "This man-Dal Shen," Anzi was saying. "Perhaps we might yet wring advantage from him, learn from him. Learn what the Rose intends, now that they will come."

  Yes, a husband for the girl, and then a child. Either that or send her to the Long War, where she would learn the value of life, instead of living spoiled and demanding, as he had taught her to be. After her parents had died, she had been just another brat around the palace, but one he'd liked, and it was his own fault how she'd turned out.

  She was still prattling on. "Everything will change, Uncle. The people of the Rose know us now. They will come here, as he has said. In your lifetime, you will see them come. Since many things will change, might you advance because of it? Better to plan than to be caught unawares." She bowed quickly at his glare.

  He murmured, "Well, I can kill him and then plan what to do when the rest come." Why was he bothering to argue with her? She was a minor niece, and not in his counsels. This was a matter of high state that threatened his rule, his family, and his sway. Why argue with a girl who was so unlucky and of so little consequence?

  Her voice became soothing and less confrontational. "Yes, you might want to kill him, eventually. But not until he's told you all he knows. Uncle, think of what he knows! You can gauge what the Rose will do, and plan with extreme delicacy how best to prosper."

  Waving her words away, he shook his head. Too dangerous.

  Her face betrayed her misery. "I beg you, Uncle."

  He surged to his feet, upsetting the tray of dumplings, sending it clattering to the floor. "You dare to beg?"

  She fell to the floor, burying her head.

  He stormed toward her. "You dare to push me thus? To presume on my favor, after I have forgiven and protected you?" He looked down on her abject form, his face hot with rage, that she could be so base as to beg him.

  Because of you, he thought, we almost died at the feet of the bright lords, that day now long past. Yet I hid you, protected you, and in a thousand days peace returned, and the Tarig were no wiser. And then the man of the Rose tried to kill a lord, and the nightmare began again. The lives of my family trembled on the tip of a branch, like a drop of water ready to fall with a nudge. And then it all passed, and life returned. Until now. May God look at Wen An and curse her.

  He stared down at Anzi, the dumplings in his gut turning to stone. He took a calming breath. Many things, he thought, are this worthless niece's fault. But not Titus Quinn's return. To be fair, that's not her fault. And she gives good counsel about exploiting future events. Who does the man of the Rose serve, and what do his masters intend? I'd like to know the answers. I can always kill the man later.

  "Sorry, so sorry, Uncle. Forgive me." She huddled, still shrinking from his anger.

  "If," he began, "if I spare him for a few days, and we learn from him, I still doubt that I will welcome him in my sway."

  Even in his private chambers, he preferred not to use the words kill, murder, drown.

  "Yes, Uncle. Just a few days, then decide. Very wise."

  He snorted. Craven flattery.

  Turning her head, she looked at him from her crouch.

  "Rise," he said, weary of her, and less peaceful of mind now than before.

  When she stood before him and raised her face to look at him, he saw her happiness, and it struck him with some force how temporary that state was likely to be. But in a long life, he noted philosophically, pain was no more than a ripple of water under a passing breeze.

  "Anzi," he said, "you speak the dark languages. I have in mind to assign you to bring forth Dai Shen's memories of how to speak proper Lucent. Why he has forgotten, we do not know. But you will teach him again."

  "Yes, Uncle of my deliverance." In her eyes he saw the veneration. One day soon it would be sorrow, when the day came that Dai Shen Joined Sen Tai at the bottom of the lake. That was the problem with Ji Anzi. She was too easily impressed, too susceptible to kindness.

  The sooner she learned to be cruel, the happier she would be. Quinn had exchanged the prison of the jar for the prison of the garden. He could, with difficulty, climb the smooth compound walls, but an impenetrable, invisible barrier at the top thwarted attempts to pass over.

  He paced, longing to be away from here rather than wait for the one called Yulin to decide his fate. The vision of Sen Tai standing on the bottom of the lake haunted him, for its useless cruelty. It was better, the fat lord had said, for Titus Quinn to be dead than to have come back. He was unwelcome, and in danger. He'd gleaned as much from the old woman with the pack beast. He had a history here, and a bad one. Had it saved his life so far or jeopardized it?

  He had been in this world nine days. Perhaps that interval was not nine days on Earth, nor even one day. But what was the relation of time between this place and home? Einstein had proven time was malleable. Did time pass at a different speed here? And was that relative speed constant? He might guess that fewer hours had passed on Earth in his absence. But wasn't it actually as likely that the progression of time was unpredictable-just as the location of the Entire was uncertain, shifting in Minerva's sensors? Whatever the relation between home and here, he hoped that Helice Maki had not had enough time as yet to set her gun sights on young Mateo.

  The sky waxed and ebbed, disorienting him. Night and day were no such thing here. In an approximation of night, the sky cooled to bluish gray, ushering in a twilight of several hours. Then the sky burned white again. These were his
nights and days. While Quinn slept, someone left food in stacked baskets outside his hut. He saw no one except the gardeners, who avoided him.

  During the day he roamed the garden, examining the profusion of plants and Yulin's collection of animals. The smells were a thick soup, rich and jumbled, augmented by the sharp scents of dung. The animals paced in their pens, fluttering petaled flanks or tossing heads crowned with elaborate horns. For all their alien aspect, they were side-by-side with Earth animals: pandas and a pair of tigers. He kept casting about for theories to explain what he saw. The Chinese, he thought, had come here long ago, as had beings from other worlds. The world was a collection, perhaps, as this zoological garden was.

  On the sixth day of his sojourn in Yulin's garden, he paced restlessly in a remote corner of the garden, coming unexpectedly on a gardener feeding a long-necked biped through the bars of its cage. The gardener, young and with a malformed hip, looked at Quinn in alarm and, dropping his pail of slops, fled into a dense stand of trees.

  "Excuse me," Quinn said. And then louder, after the man's retreating form, "Come back." Using English, so it was useless. He'd grown tired of the isolation and wondered if the man might speak with him, might know Earth languages as others here did. But the gardeners acted afraid of him, so it was no use to try and engage them. Wearily, he continued his rounds of the walled park.

  The screams of the animals in nearby cages set up a furor from deeper in the garden. Feeding time always created tension in the cages, and now the beasts seemed to sense that their meal would be late.

  But these matters were far from the mind of the animal steward as he hurried to put distance between himself and the patient.

  Chizu's loping gate compensated for his short right leg, and carried him swiftly if not gracefully. Hiding from the patient was Chizu's only thought. He had been foolish to let the man sneak up on him, so to endanger his position as animal steward of the second rank. Chizu's wage would hardly support a godder much less a demanding wife and hungry baby, but his side income as the eyes and ears of Preconsul Zai Gan, Yulin's brother and enemy, was sufficient to make him a most careful follower of Yulin's rules. The rules being, do not disturb patient, do not speak with patient, do not show yourself to patient except at a distance.

  Chizu was so distressed at the near encounter that he voided his bladder right at the base of a sangwan tree, one of Yulin's favorites. He directed the stream up the fuzzy bark for good measure, pretending it was Yulin's hairy chest. One last pulse from his faucet for good measure, the old bastard.

  Calm now, Chizu tried to absorb the startling new discovery: that the patient spoke a strange language. If the man were a scholar, dark languages could be at his command; but the man-Dal Shen his name was-was a soldier of Ahnenhoon, a remote son of Yulin by a mistress of another sway. Well, the Long War had delivered this Dal Shen of a head wound, stealing his ability to speak and remember who he was, and in his goodness Yulin had brought him here to speed his healing, for which he needed happy peace and no disturbing or clanking of food pails. But if the man was a scholarspeaking dark languages, after all!-then why put out the story that he was a soldier? For whatever the fat master wished to hide, that was a matter of interest to the fat master's brother.

  True enough, if the patient were addled, he might babble outrageous words. But in truth he didn't act crazy, except for looking at common things as though startled that plants grew and animals screeched. Chizu and the others had been ready to believe he was gone in the head, since the patient wandered through the grounds like a child, like one stunned from a blow of a beku's hoof. But not raving.

  He rubbed his hip absently, bringing blood to the gnarled joint. Would Zai Gan pay for this tidbit?

  Zai Gan was Yulin's younger brother, and might rise to master of the sway if Yulin should fall from worthiness, perhaps disgracing himself. As a lofty preconsul of the Magisterium at the Ascendancy, Zai Gan was in position to lead, except for Yulin blocking the way. Of course, there was also the matter of Yulin's many daughters and sons, also eager to replace him, the consequence of Yulin's bedding of a thousand women, Yulin being a fountain of inexhaustible waters. This long line of replacements caused Yulin never to leave his house except in extreme necessity, as must have been the case when he fathered Dal Shen, since the mother's name was unknown in these parts, and no one had heard of this bastard son either. So Zai Gan had his spies, and waited for favorable events, of which this patient might be one.

  What had the man said? Kum bdk? Chizu memorized these words. Kum bak, and something else that he couldn't remember because he was a cursed animal steward and not a farting preconsul or a fat master of the sway. So he had perhaps not yet earned a reward from Zai Gan. No sense to risk a communication with the preconsul if the surmise that the patient was not a patient was unimportant, much less false.

  Chizu rubbed his hip and frowned, considering. He could imagine the look on Zai Gan's face when the preconsul easily explained how the patient came to say this odd thing, and how Chizu had broken silence for no good reason and might be blind eyes and deaf ears and unworthy of Zai Gan's confidence.

  Yes, better to wait and lurk, watching from a discreet distance this Dal Shen of the addled head.

  He made his way to the low garden gate, the one even Yulin, very short, must bow down to pass through. The hinge squeaked as the Door of Eight Serenities swung closed behind him and locked.

  In the lavender time, the twilight that passed for night, Quinn found he could gaze at the sky and watch its fires without straining his eyes. In the narrow patch above the canopy of trees, the sky-bright was a river, constantly changing, yet always the same. It settled him to watch it. Despite his hard start, and the death of the interpreter, he felt a barely controlled elation. The world beyond the ocean's horizon, the world no one had believed in but him, existed. He was standing in it. He was back. His brother would be dumbfounded. See, Rob? The universe is larger and more strange than you believed. And your brother isn't as strange as you thought.

  Sleeping, he dreamed of the alien being in the village, staring at him, approaching with the garrote. Quinn stepped closer, engaging with the creature, eight inches taller, with a reach a yard long. I will kill him, he thought. The creature gazed at him with black eyes, without fear. Waking in the middle of the time-that-passed-for-night, he tried to remember what had happened to him here. But at his probings, the strands of memory dissolved.

  In the morning, he woke with a start, feeling watched.

  There on the edge of the clearing stood a woman. Even at this distance, her hair was iridescent in the morning light. She wore it at chin length, and was dressed in the same quilted, squarish jacket and pants that Sen Tai had worn. Standing to meet her, he saw she was tall for a woman. She regarded him a long time without speaking. He let her stare at him, because he was frankly staring at her. The strength of her face gave her years, but without lines, he thought her young. Her skin was very pale, and would have seemed chalky except for its fine tone. He couldn't decide whether she was beautiful-but striking, certainly.

  Reaching into a deep pocket on the front of her jacket, she withdrew something and held it out to him.

  His pictures.

  He took them. Though creased and grayed, Johanna's likeness looked out at him with her half-playful, half-ironic expression. Her expression held strength, the kind she would have needed here, the kind he had so loved in her.

  "Nahil," he said. Thank you. He tucked the photos in his own jacket pocket. This was a small triumph-to demand his pictures, and to receive them.

  The woman bowed slightly from the waist. Then she said in heavily accented English, "I am called Anzi. I will teach you to speak. When you speak Lucent words, then you leave the cage." She gestured at the walled garden.

  The man who could kill him wished instead to teach him. Perhaps Yulin had absorbed the message that humans were on their way. And that one of them had already arrived.

  Quinn said, "I have forgotten
your words."

  Anzi nodded. "You forget. You remember, soon." She gestured for him to follow her as she turned down a path.

  The overhead canopy closed in, obscuring the sky, tingeing the understory with a false twilight. Now and then she stopped to point at something, and utter its foreign name. She was pleased when he began to repeat the sounds after her.

  He pointed to the sky, describing its fullness with a wave of his hand.

  "The bright," she said.

  "What is the bright?"

  She frowned. "Bright is ..." She struggled for a moment, then said, "Above us."

  Her linguistic compromise brought a smile to his face.

  She joined in, smiled broadly. Then the smile vanished, as though their endeavor were more serious in nature. She began naming things closer to the ground. Some sounded familiar.

  Once, when she pointed at something, he gave the name on his own, from the Lucent tongue, as they called it. This brought a clap from Anzi. He thought it strange that the language these Chinese-seeming people spoke was not Chinese, if he was any judge, but some tongue with origins he couldn't even guess.

  He stopped on the path, unable to wait any longer with the foremost question on his mind. Anzi turned, waiting for him.

  "Where is my daughter?"

  She didn't respond. To make it clear, he brought out Sydney's picture. "Where?"

  She pointed over the wall, a gesture that thrilled him. "Long way ago," she said.

  "But she is here. Johanna is here." He pointed over the garden wall. "Far away?"

  "Wait for asking, yes, please." She continued walking, and he joined her, struggling to restrain his questions.

  Nearby, a long patch of leaf mold humped up, revealing a black snake a yard long, slithering away from them. She spoke its name, then added, in English, "Like Earth, you remember?"

  It startled him to hear this, though he'd known he was not on Earth. Just where in all the cosmos was he, then?

  He put the question to her: "Where am I?"

  She told him in the Lucent tongue. Then in English: "Master Yulin's garden of animals."