Bright of the Sky

by Kay Kenyon

  "Do you think Bei will help us, Anzi?"

  "If you must pick a destination not endorsed by Master Yulin, Su Bei is not a bad choice. He is loyal to Yulin."

  "But not to me."

  "Now they are the same thing."

  Quinn let himself hope so. He had been fueled by hope from his first day back. There wasn't much left without it. He had a young nephew who unwittingly depended on his uncle to return from the Entire. Helice Maki had made it clear: Quinn had to come back. Preferably with good news, but he must come back. Perhaps he would come back with more than she could imagine.

  A commotion on the distant train platform signaled the approach of the train. They quickly rose, eager to be under way. It was a risk to be in close quarters with the denizens of this new world, but they had no choice. Anzi had listed all the rules of riding on trains. Every few moments she thought of one more thing he should remember to do or refrain from doing. They set out across the field of graves.

  Anzi caught his attention with her eyes. Someone was following them.

  She murmured to him, "I will pretend to relieve myself, Dal Shen. When he approaches, I will spring at him, and you also."

  He turned his back as Anzi went off a distance, crouching. And then their pursuer was upon them, taking Anzi down easily and catching Quinn's punch before it was even thrown.

  Standing above them was a man with half a face. "You learned nothing," Cl Dehai said, looking sour.

  Anzi brushed herself off, rising to bow before the fighting teacher.

  Quinn had fallen hard, but rose with what dignity he could muster.

  Handing Anzi a small pouch, Cl llehai said, "Four hundred primals. Spend little." He fixed Anzi with a cold glare. "But spend, instead of stealing."

  Anzi bowed. "Thank you, High Warrior of Ahnenhoon." The purse of money disappeared into her tunic pocket. Then, under his critical gaze, she reached into her pocket and withdrew the redstone, handing it to him.

  The general took the stone, but still waited.

  From his waistband, Quinn removed the knife.

  Cl llehai made no move to take it. "I would have thought my lessons better repaid than this."

  Quinn nodded. It was fair to think so, but a man needed a weapon, despite Helice Maki's theory that the Entire would be nonviolent.

  "The Tarig-," Anzi began.

  Cl llehai interrupted: "Wanted a tour of the famed gardens of Master Yulin. A lord, snooping-but finding nothing." He recounted the conversation of the lord and Yulin. "Best to leave now, however."

  "Dal Shen insists that we see Su Bei," Anzi said. "I couldn't dissuade him."

  The old warrior turned his face so that his one eye locked on Quinn. "Su Bei? No. Better to prevail on someone less conspicuous. Jia Wa, for example."

  Quinn responded, "I need what Bei can tell me of my history."

  "Not advisable."

  "Nevertheless."

  Cl llehai looked at the man of the Rose with new concern. This Dal Shen had enticed Yulin into a ludicrous alliance: the Master of the sway and the Rose fugitive. The blackmail was explicit: Help me, or you'll be my people's enemy. And even Suzong of a thousand ambitions had urged her husband to comply. But to what advantage? What did it matter if Yulin was an enemy of the Rose? Since the Rose was powerless against the bright lords, why should anyone fear Dal Shen or his masters?

  He looked at Dal Shen, still hoping to convince him against this new course of action. "Bei is in disgrace, and has little to offer." But Dal Shen set his mouth and wouldn't budge.

  Perhaps, Cl llehai thought, he should save his master the peril of this rash scheme by dispatching Dal Shen here and now. A small matter, to slit his throat in this field. How could the man's patrons know that Yulin hadn't cooperated, if the emissary never returned? The Rose would send other scouts who would find other personages to exploit, and he would be doing Yulin an enormous favor. He itched to take his blade from its sheath at his waist and put this man into one of these convenient graves.

  His hand hovered over his knife, and he saw that Anzi saw this, and moved between Cl llehai and Dal Shen.

  As Dal Shen grew wary, Cl llehai saw his moment evaporating, when he could make a clean kill. He had lost the advantage of surprise, all because of Yulin's worthless niece. Still, it could all easily be done within a moment.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the train coming into the station.

  Anzi said, "I doubt that my uncle cares whether it is Bei or Wa whom we take refuge with. Both are loyal. I'm sure my uncle would permit it, Warrior of Ahnenhoon."

  He relaxed his knife hand. He didn't want to hurt Anzi nor face Yulin's outrage if she was wounded. And now she was giving him an excuse not to kill Dal Shen, either. And so the moment passed when he might have killed the man. A part of him was relieved-the part that had sized up Titus Quinn in training sessions and knew him for a better man than most.

  Cl llehai turned to Quinn. "I see you are set on this course."

  "I am," came the answer. "Tell Master Yulin I believe our enterprise will be safer if Su Bei can tell me my history."

  In the distance, on the train platform, crowd noises surged.

  Cl llehai snorted, giving in, feeling older than his days. Time was when he wouldn't have hesitated to save his master from a troublesome individual.

  He glanced at the knife Dal Shen had stolen. "Keep the blade. Use it on Master Yulin's enemies." Or on yourself if events turn bad.

  He unstrapped a small pack from his back. "Here are some children's scrolls to continue your journey from ignorance. Also inside is a thong on which are strung four redstones, each one a copy of Yulin's message to the prefect." He handed the pack to Quinn, who thanked him.

  Turning to Anzi, he said, "Once again you have leave to create disorder. Your uncle has given you another chance. Don't squander it, Ji Anzi."

  Looking up to note the approach of the train, he said to Quinn, "If you make it to the Ascendancy, Master Yulin warns that you must, above all, win over the high prefect Cixi. But know this: She despises the One Who Shines. Master Yulin is second only to Cixi. Do you understand what this means, Dal Shen?"

  Quinn nodded. "She won't welcome any chance for Yulin to succeed."

  "Can you charm a dragon, then?"

  "Any hints?" Quinn asked.

  "No," he said. "I'm a fighter, not a diplomat." As Quinn and Anzi repeated their thanks and headed off, Cl Dehai added, "And beware of her legates. They're worse than she is."

  Quinn and Anzi began hurrying toward the train platform, threading their way through the graves. "Does he like anyone?" Quinn asked Anzi.

  She smiled. "He's too wise to have friends."

  Carrying the pack of scrolls and data stones, he took his position behind his mistress. She assumed a regal stride, clutching the purse Cl Dehai had given her.

  They approached the platform where the thing they called a train was waiting. It was very long, and here at the loading dock he couldn't see the front of the assemblage, or the rear. The surface of the compartments was smooth but mottled, looking more like cooled lava than worked metal. No wheels, and no tracks. He could almost conclude that it was not a train at all, not as he would define it. But there were coaches. Between each coach, a connecting tube.

  Just before they boarded, he had time to hope that when they copied this from the Rose, they'd had the decency to keep a caboose.

  CIIAf TEK TWELVE

  The Three Vows are these:

  Withhold the knowledge of the Entire from the non-Entire.

  Impose the peace of the Entire.

  Extend the reach of the Entire.

  -from The Radiant Way

  A LI. CHILDREN LEARNED THE VOWS, as their first chant, first ditty.

  It was a sober nursery song, Quinn thought as he memorized the three vows with their stark verbs: Withhold. Impose. Extend. If Suzong was right, among the officials at the Ascendancy there might be some who chafed at withholding, who wanted converse between the worlds
. Su Bet knew one person, but would he reveal the name? Yes. Because Quinn wouldn't leave Bei's reach without it.

  For the train ride, Anzi had booked quarters on top of a passenger car. It had half-wall sides and a small roofed section for sleeping. In the next car forward, a wealthy Hirrin camped atop her own car, and sometimes sat on the roofed section looking around. The Hirrin was a four-legged creature with a long neck and a bald face. She sat on the roof, rear legs splayed forward, her long neck turning 360 degrees as she viewed the scenery.

  Anzi said there were no lords on the train, and they could relax for at least a while. He saw Anzi glancing up now and then, watching, and he imagined the crescent shape that defined a brightship-as it must appear from the ground. He had never seen one from below, only from close at hand, when he had ridden them. The memory swam in and out, of his time as a prisoner in the Ascendancy. It was a city in the sky; he remembered that now. But every vision of the time before was hard-won, freed from oblivion only intermittently, and randomly. He felt like a rat, fed tidbits but caged from his own mind. Patience, he thought. It's coming. It's all coming to me, now that I'm here.

  Quinn sat on a bench that Anzi had coaxed from the floor. Nubs on the car sides responded when she touched them, a slow process, but dependable.

  Anzi fretted about the Hirrin. "She is watching us." But if they moved quarters, that would look suspicious, she concluded.

  "Let her watch." To Quinn, the Hirrin seemed merely curious, and nothing to quash his exhilaration at being on the move.

  Anzi said, "It's no small matter, if she doubts who we are. Since you left, all sentients have been alerted to watch for Titus Quinn. No one knows where you disappeared to, or that you went back to the Rose. It's not trivial."

  "No, perhaps not. But what can we do? The less we fret, the more natural we look. And if she turns us in, then the next move is ours."

  Absorbing this, Anzi said, "A contradiction. Interesting."

  "What is?"

  "So few days, for you of the Rose. And so careless of dying, yes?"

  He hadn't thought he was careless of dying, but it was true he hadn't given it much thought. People of the Rose didn't often think of dying. Maybe it was too big to carry around. He said as much to Anzi.

  She marveled at the thought. "So big, and yet it remains under cover. Or perhaps it's bravery. Yes, I think you're very brave."

  "But Anzi, so are you. Being with me is an indictment all by itself."

  "True. But being with you is my duty."

  "And being here is mine."

  She cut a glance at him. "I thought it was for love."

  He'd never said that. But he liked that she'd said it. No one, not even Caitlin, had ever said outright that it was for love. Most of the time he'd heard stubborn, hitter, and inflexible. He smiled at Anzi and, tentatively, she smiled back.

  The wind off the veldt brought a clovelike scent as the two of them watched the plains speed by, one region, or wielding, giving way to the next within the great Chalin sway. Moving without tracks, without wheels, the train hummed quietly. The material it was made of might have been metal, but it had an odd texture. There could hardly be natural deposits of metals in this world. Or petroleum. The materials were likely to be the result of molecular engineering. In a universe without stars, without a geologic history.

  The train's technologies were hidden, and taken for granted by Anzi. The energy source was the bright. What generated the bright? Or the walls, for that matter? These questions were apparently far from Anzi's mind. Whatever the source, it was colossal. Perhaps infinite.

  Anzi managed to convey that for the energy needs of industry, of computer stone wells, of dwellings nothing was burned, not even hydrogen. Modeled on a plant's photosynthetic reaction centers, plasma cells harvested photons. The longer the train, the more surface room for its molecular arrays, acting like antennae for the energy of the bright-no mere drizzle of photons, but a shower. The Tarig had remade photosynthesis in inorganic form. It made Earth's fusion technologies seem crass by comparison. In this universe, the likes of Helice and Stefan were not the savvies. The Tarig were.

  Eventually, Quinn grew restless, saying, "I'll go down to the passenger cars, Anzi. It's a long way to the reach. We can't just sit here." There was great variety; enough variety even in Chalin skin tones for him to pass, if he stayed silent.

  "No, please, Dal Shen." Other travelers might engage him in conversation he wasn't ready for, she said. Hirrin, especially, were meddlers, as proven by their neighbor who had no need to sit on her roof unless she wanted a better view into others' cars.

  Anzi's caution only emphasized what he already knew, that she thought this whole undertaking one of unconscionable risk. No one had asked her what she thought, and if they had, she could hardly argue that Quinn give up his daughter. On the subject of family, Anzi knew to be quiet.

  Still, he argued with her. "It attracts more attention if we never leave the roof of this car. People will wonder about us."

  "Dai Shen, you have an accent. It marks you as from the Ascendancy."

  This spooked him. "Since when?"

  "It's been coming into your speech. People will ask you of the bright city, and you will have nothing to say."

  They worked on ridding him of his accent. The subjects ranged among politics, social customs, religion, and the law. And always, the past, Quinn's past.

  Anzi told how she had brought him into the Entire. Her teacher, Vingde, had been studying a gravitational phenomenon in the Rose. By Anzi's general descriptions, Quinn thought it might have been black holes. At his reach, at the tip of a minoral, Vingde had been experimenting with forbidden connections to the Rose, and had determined that passages were easier between the Entire and black holes. Vingde planned to exploit this in an experiment, but the Tarig detected his fumblings and swept down on him. Afterward, Anzi worked for a hundred days before she locked on to a Kardashev tunnel. One day she observed an intense perturbation. This was the explosion and destruction of Quinn's ship. Anzi saw the capsule and who was in it. A man, a woman, and a child. She had only a moment to decide.

  He wondered if, when the time came, Vingde's reach might be an exit point to get home. Anzi said no. The Tarig had destroyed Vingde's reach, for one thing. And one reach was as good as another. Just because one entered from a certain reach, this was no reason to believe the site still correlated with home.

  As they talked, the bright subsided from lush silver flames to the verge of lavender, glowing with hints of incandescence amid the embers. It was not what one could call night. One could read a book all ebb long, and never need a candle.

  He was gazing at his pictures, shading them with his hands so the sky would not fade them. Johanna had been dead a long time. At some level he had known this, but now it was certain. Sydney was blind. But she was alive. It calmed him, knowing what his sorrows were instead of guessing at them.

  Next to him, Anzi murmured, "Tell me about your young girl."

  After a pause he said, "She liked to climb trees."

  Johanna stood at the foot of the mountain ashberry tree, looking up at Sydney in the upper branches. If you break your neck, you're grounded for a week."

  Sydney's face appeared out of a nest of leaves. "Its a deal."

  He began to improve the placement of his tongue for the glottal sounds.

  "What else did she like?"

  "Running. The color orange. Riding horses." The memories, no longer sharp knives, were still little cuts. "She had a train set."

  "Did she look like you?"

  "No." After a time he said in a low voice, "She looked like her mother."

  Quinn tried to imagine what Sydney looked like now as a young woman. Well, he would soon find out, after Bei's reach, and after the Ascendancywhen at last he arrived at the Inyx sway at the far end of the universe. A million lifetimes away, Anzi had said, but close, when we travel the River Nigh.

  We are near, Sydney, he thought. Wait for me.


  The next day, sitting on his bench at the Prime of Day, Quinn could see hundreds of miles, and within that view were only the sky, the mighty veldt, and in the distance, a pillar that descended from the bright. That slender thread, called an axis of the bright, marked a trading center and a communication center, Anzi said. If you wished to transmit messages within the Entire, it was as easy to go there in person as to rely on the axes. And going there in person involved "a thousand days," which was the Chalin answer to almost all questions of how far things were. This was because the answer was, in terms of travel, That depends. The River Nigh rendered distance beside the point.

  This river was no natural river, but it was a transport stream. Devised by the Tarig, it made travel possible in the Entire over galactic-scale distances, so Anzi claimed. The River Nigh bound the kingdom together, unifying the sentients and the sways. If you were determined, you could travel anywhere.

  "Where is the Nigh?" Quinn asked.

  Anzi pointed to the port side of the train, off into the distance. "At the storm wall. The river follows the storm wall. But one side only, and farthest from here."

  "How far does the river go?"

  She looked at him in surprise. "That's hard to say. Forever. It goes forever. And then, into the Sea of Arising, which is the sea above which the Ascendancy floats. And then, down each primacy, a similar river flows. Always called the Nigh. Eventually, the Nigh will bear us on its back, if God does not look on us."

  His scrolls said that the key to the Nigh resided in the binds, the nexus points. But when he asked Anzi about the binds, she said, "Only the navitars understand them. The pilots." She grew sober, speaking of the navitars, creatures so distorted that they no longer had normal lives, nor allegiance to any sway. The Tarig performed the needed physical alterations at the navitars' request, granting the pilots sole powers to navigate the dimensional transport stream. From Anzi's comments, Quinn gathered that she found the navitars both morbid and sublime.

  As relief from being cooped up and constantly studying, Anzi continued his fighting instruction. The swaying of the train was just enough to make them both more prone to falling. The Hirrin watched from her rooftop, then disappeared.