Bright of the Sky

by Kay Kenyon

  He took a calming breath. "I need to get information any place I can. And I will."

  "Did you ever think that in taking extreme measures-for no reasonyou jeopardize the young girl who is your daughter?"

  A silence descended between them as he struggled with his temper.

  Anzi went on: "If your death means nothing to you, then think of her."

  He snapped. Lunging at her, he took her by surprise, and was able to yank her arm while delivering a punch to her shoulder. At the last moment he pulled back, so that he missed her, but he drove his fist into the half-wall of their coach. He left a dent the shape of his fist, and thought he might have broken a few fingers, but fortunately the material had given slightly. He cradled his hand for a moment, looking away from her.

  He flexed his fingers as the adrenaline subsided. "I'm sorry I almost hurt you."

  She gathered herself up. "You didn't hurt me."

  "Still."

  "I deserve to be hurt."

  The Hirrin spectator turned away, as though embarrassed for his lapse. "No," Quinn said. "I don't think you do." The fist-dent in the wall was losing definition, flattening out.

  He offered her a cup of water, and she drank with him.

  "Dal Shen," she said. "I don't think you know me yet, though I believe I know you."

  He sat down on the bench, using a towel to wipe down. Drained of tension, he looked at her for a long moment. A scrim of sweat covered her face, and her color was high. The effect was like a very subtle pink marble that now cooled again to white.

  "I could tell you," she said, "that I will defend you with my life. But that's easy to say, isn't it? My uncle has told me to defend you, but I would in any case. You depend on me here. If I fail you, I don't want to live." She put a hand up to stop his protest. "But you don't trust me yet."

  In the distance a smudge at the horizon registered the presence of the great storm wall, as they called the edges of the Entire. It would come to dominate the veldt in the days to come, he knew.

  She sat next to him, watching the veldt dim. The sky, having lost its high glitter, now fell quickly into Last of Day. A lavender blush colored her face, the roof of the train, and the veldt. In the distance, the storm wall crouched dark and solid-looking, and to one side a wisp of the sky, an axis, fell to the plain like a dust devil. The train carried them onward, swaying and humming. They had been traveling for eight days, and in all that time they had not passed one other inhabited area. The Entire, Anzi had said, was mostly empty. This emptiness, combined with the vast distances, forced a calm on activities, as though there was time enough for all things.

  "Tell me about yourself, Anzi," he said. "I want to know."

  Her story came then, of her parents, who were both soldiers and had died at Ahnenhoon when she was very young. She was one of many nieces, children, and hangers-on in Yulin's court, where his general benevolence was not enough to fill the gap. Yulin had indulged her wish to be a scholar. He apprenticed her to Vingde, who thought her scholarship sloppy. She was looking at the Rose, but she pursued little more than personal histories. Vingde thought her prospects dim, but gave up trying to restrain her. She was, after all, Yulin's niece.

  "Do you still wish to be a scholar of Earth?" Quinn asked.

  "Once I thought so. But scholars pursue their endless facts. I wished to really know. The way you live, on the Earth."

  "Why?"

  She paused. "I am one of those who thinks the Rose is a lost place. A place lost to the Chalin, that we once had, in the sense that humans are the template for the Chalin people. And being a lost place, or a place denied to us, I feel its pull."

  She went on: "Most sentients say the Tarig improved all Rose templates, and the Entire is superior in every way. But to many-to me-you are the revered ancestors, created from evolving matter. We are only pale copies."

  He looked at her in the fading light. "It isn't better in the Rose, you know."

  "I think that it is." She turned to him. "Don't you sometimes feel that the Entire is better? Because you are denied this place?"

  He was stunned by her observation. Yes. He did feel that sometimes.

  "I'm hungry to know about the Rose, Dal Shen. I always have been. All the glimpses I've ever seen through the veil, when I served Vingde my teacher-each one only increased my hunger."

  The train hummed beneath them, and they were silent for a time. Then she said, "Tell me. About the Rose."

  He had nearly forgotten his own world. It was far away, in all respects.

  She prompted him: "Here is a thing we wonder about. The night. What is the night, Dal Shen? In your world, how does it seem?"

  Such an obvious thing. But of course, to her, it was a bizarre occurrence. He tried to imagine nighttime from her perspective. "Everything changes," he said. "The world seems to sleep, and colors drain away. The sky is black except for the small spots that are stars."

  "But still, is it dark half of the time?"

  He nodded. And the thought came to him: The Tarig are afraid of the dark. So they created a world without it.

  Anzi continued, "Do you stare at the traveling sun? When it disappears, are you amazed?"

  "No. It seems as it should be. And the sun is too searing to look at."

  "And do many go blind, doing so?"

  "No one goes blind. No one looks." He thought this odd, but the truth. Looking up at the bright, he realized that here was the most profound difference between their worlds, this river of suns. Johanna could find no rest under its relentless light.

  "I would look," Anzi was saying. "To see a star, it would be worth it. And mountains," Anzi went on. "You have mountains in a row."

  "Yes, mountain ranges."

  "I once saw this, through the veil. And never forgot such a sight."

  In the next car, the Hirrin princess went down from her roof perch, bowing at them, a courtesy Anzi ignored this time, judging that she was too friendly and even friends could be an unwitting danger.

  The train slowed, approaching a village that looked to be little more than a dozen rounded huts. Still, Quinn would have liked to debark and see what was there-as perhaps the Hirrin princess planned to do.

  But he would debark in any case, in just a few hours. Tomorrow would bring them to the minoral, where they would leave the train and journey by pack beast to Bei's reach at the far tip of the minoral.

  The minorals were small geographic features compared with the stupendous primacies. Like minor branches, they grew from one side of a primacy only, since the other side of the primacy was bounded by the River Nigh. At the ends of the minorals were the tips, or reaches, where scholars studied the Rose. From the minorals sprang still smaller branches: the nascences, with storm walls so close together they were unstable and could close up without warning. As bizarre and impossible as all this surely was, nevertheless he half remembered it and found it strangely normal.

  The day fell into Shadow Ebb, when the sky simmered instead of boiled, and the wellings of the sky rose into brilliance and sank into folds of pewter. Although it was time for sleep, he and Anzi remained seated, neither one eager to end the day.

  She asked, looking out, "Tell me what is love in your world, Dal Shen."

  "It's the same as here, Anzi."

  "No, not the same, I'm sure. Stronger, yes?"

  "Doesn't Yulin have a favorite wife, and love her strongly?"

  Anzi smiled. "He isn't consumed with love for Suzong." Looking out, she continued: "This strong affection is a thing I remember from my days of study. In your world, I saw people burn with desire for each other, and sacrifice everything." From somewhere underneath, someone laughed loudly, a jarring sound.

  "Hasn't anyone sought you, Anzi? No one who wished to love you?" He thought that unlikely, despite her faults.

  The soft purr of the train filled the silence. "No."

  "You are young yet," he said.

  She shrugged. "Nine thousand days."

  Calculating, he came up wit
h about twenty-five, in Earth years.

  She regarded him a moment. "I know there is a price for how you live with intensity. I think, in the All, we can't live this way. We're too long on the Radiant Path, and in the end, we love as much as you, but in our many days, it's stretched thinner."

  He thought about this remarkable summation, and for a moment he envied her that metered-out life. Stretched more thinly, both the good and evil of it. Perhaps if, like Caiji of a hundred thousand days, he lived long enough, Sydney's memory-and Johanna's-would grow more muted. Ci Dehai had urged him to look forward. So had Caitlin. It's time. Her words came back to him. Time to find someone else. There were moments when he had almost been ready; times when he desired Caitlin herself, the wife of his brother, mistaking her kindness for something else. Which was one good reason he kept apart from Rob's family.

  Anzi was looking down onto the station platform, where the train had now halted.

  Turning to look, Quinn saw four men carrying a burden-a hammock, in which reclined a Gond, just leaving the train. Bending over to speak to the Gond was the plump godman Quinn had met.

  Anzi pushed Quinn back out of sight, but the godman had already seen him, and raised his hand in a wave, or in a gesture for the Gond to look up.

  Quinn whispered, "What are they doing together?"

  "Sharing information," Anzi whispered, her face frozen in a noncommittal blandness. "Did I not tell you that all godmen are rogues, and sell what they know?"

  It was an hour before the Gond's load of live meat was unloaded from the train-a time during which Quinn and Anzi sat in dread of a knock on their door from the train magister. None came. Perhaps the godman-and the Gond-shared only gossip, not alarms. But when the train finally got under way again, neither he nor Anzi was inclined to sleep.

  CI AfTEK THIRTEEN

  Saddle an Inyx and it will ride you.

  -a saying

  WO THINGS SYDNEY GUARDED MOST CAREFULLY. The first was her journal, where she recorded her life; the second was the window in the stable beside which her bunk staked out a berth.

  The journal was to record the wrongs that were done, for later reckoning. The window was for the pleasure of the light on her skin. Everyone wanted a window. But only a few, like Sydney, were willing to fight for them.

  She sat hunched up by her window, punching the tiny holes in the paper, writing about Glovid's death and her new mount. Riod was a fine racer, but in accepting him, Sydney's status had fallen. Riod had a bad reputation. He had long refused war service, along with a few rogue mounts that he led on sorties to harass other Inyx herds, creating ill will and incurring Priov's displeasure. Making matters worse, he sniffed around Priov's mares, insulting the old chief. Given this poor match with Riod, she might draw trouble. In the stable, sometimes trouble was bloody.

  She called her living quarters a stable, because she liked the irony of the riders living there. The mounts, of course, needed no shelter, preferring openness, always. So their riders slept and lived in a big, drafty barracks, created by the sweat of their own labor and poorly built, often leaking during a heavy dew.

  "Click, click, Sydney. I hear you click click with the pin in the paper." From the next bunk came Akay-Wat's breathless voice.

  Sydney gripped her needle and punched.

  "Akay-Wat hears the clicks, yes. You tell your book about Akay-Wat, why don't you?" She chuckled, that wheezing strangle that seemed to close her windpipe.

  "You're in here," Sydney said.

  Akay-Wat gasped. "Oh yes?" She clapped her four limbs. "Pleased, then."

  The rider wasn't the worst neighbor in the barracks by any means, though she talked too much. Akay-Wat was a Hirrin sentient, one of the best riders, despite looking like she could be ridden herself. She had a sturdy back and long legs with hoofed feet that could hug an Inyx's sides, holding fast. The mounts liked Hirrin, because they never wanted saddles. Her face was small compared to her body, a mere knob on the end of a long neck.

  Akay-Wat was always trying to curry favor with Sydney, despite how mean Sydney had to be just to make her shut up so she could get some sleep at ebbtime. When Sydney wasn't around, Akay-Wat protected Sydney's things: her book, her bed, her blanket. So she was loyal. And stupid as spike grass.

  "Click, click," Akay-Wat crooned.

  You couldn't answer her or she would never shut up. Sydney punched with her needle, forming her ideograms that no one else could read because she had made them up. Particularly the Inyx couldn't read them, because they couldn't feel such subtle bumps. The diary was invisible to them, just like their world was to her. That was fair.

  She ran her hands over the pages where she had recorded her days among the stinking beasts. Punched into the pages was the record of those grim days at the Ascendancy, when her world had collapsed. The blinding, the loss of Titus and Johanna. Time was when she had called them Father, Mother. After they abandoned her, after it was clear they would never come for her, they became only Titus, Johanna. Seldom thought of these days.

  Now she punched in her account of her return ride after Glovid's fall, and the ripple of muscle under Riod's coat, his young body fairly exploding with energy. The bright overhead, the steppe beneath, and pressed between, only the ride.

  Her right hand cramped at her task of punching words, but she continued to write.

  Akay-Wat had grown used to the pricking noise. It came at all hours of the day and the ebb. Now that Sydney had secured a bunk with a nice warm window, Akay-Wat had become her neighbor, and her status had increased, yes, immeasurably. Akay-Wat's bunk was in a space between windows. When the bunk next to her emptied due to the Jout who went off to war-and, so sadly, never returned-Sydney laid claim to it and, by sheer ferocity, won it. This event, more than any other, taught Akay-Wat the value of violence. For herself, of course, physical violence was impossible. Because Akay-Wat, so regrettably, was a coward.

  Akay-Wat was one of the few sentients actually born in Priov's barracks. At her majority, she could have chosen to go or stay, but if she stayed, she must be blind. Her mother, before she went to the Long War, had begged her daughter to leave for a better life, but Akay-Wat had been afraid to leave the life she knew. Then, shortly after Akay-Wat relinquished her sight, Sydney arrived: dirty, scrappy, and silent, unable to speak the Lucent tongue. AkayWat helped her to learn, but she knew she was not clever enough or brave enough to be chosen as a friend. Once, she had dared to join in one of Sydney's fights. An enormous Jout sentient had nearly taken her head off. Since then, Akay-Wat had resigned herself to the meekness that came so naturally. However, Sydney's contempt was hard to bear, and got no better despite the little services Akay-Wat performed for her. Someone should perform them, certainly, for Sydney was a personage, even if foul-tempered and disfavored by the mounts. She was a former denizen of the vast darkness, a creature of Earth-a human. Astonishing enough, but there was more: she had lived for a time in the Ascendancy, and been the special prisoner of the Lords Hadenth, Inweer, Nehoov, Chiron, and Ghinamid. Her father was the infamous barbarian Titus Quinn, criminal and fugitive.

  None of Sydney's past history mattered to the Inyx nor singled her out for preference. The Inyx lived apart, in a sway far from the heartland, and in a manner remote from the cultures of the Entire. Lucent-speaking creatures feared and reviled them, oh very. The Inyx formed no ties except among themselves and their riders. Some even believed that the Inyx considered themselves above the bright lords. The Inyx despised all those who could not speak heart-to-heart. In other words, everyone else. The Tarig, for their part, tolerated the Inyx as little more than beasts who were too base to understand Tarig greatness. Truly the lords were gracious.

  Akay-Wat heard a snuffling noise near Sydney's bunk. Someone was awake early, and came snooping. Bad. Sydney did not like to be interrupted when writing. Akay-Wat waited to see what the human would do at this provocation.

  Sydney heard the noise too. Someone was shuffling next to her bunk. It was Puss, announc
ing his presence by a faint whiff of urine.

  The catlike creature had long limbs for swinging in trees, of which there were none in this sway. For this reason, Puss's arms were always busy, gesturing and scratching and getting into trouble. Its long tail made it vulnerable at payback times.

  "Got the book, I hear. Nice little book," he rasped, like he had a tootight collar.

  Puss was an Inyx spy, a smarmy Laroo, of a species that seemed born to be base. "Take a bath, Puss." He couldn't know the term, but he could guess it meant no good.

  "What a sensitive little nose. I wonder how you can bear to ride. Our mounts are such animals."

  She wouldn't be led into criticisms of the Inyx. Once, Priov had beaten her for an insulting remark about the state of the chief's broodmares. Old, flabby, and barren, Sydney had said. Some of the mares took exception, and Sydney had paid for it.

  Puss rasped: "Tell what you write in that book, little rose."

  "That you stink because you pee on yourself."

  "Maybe you just pretend to write, but it's all nothing but pinpricks. That's what everyone thinks. The little rose thinks she's better than us, doesn't she?"

  She was trying very hard to ignore the rose bit. However, after a certain point, her reputation was at stake. Once you showed weakness in the stables, you lost everything. Her knife hung in its sling on the bedstead beside her. It had drawn blood before.

  "I try not to piss on myself. It's not a high standard."

  Puss jumped onto her bunk, murmuring, with fetid breath, "I don't like you, and neither did Glovid, my good friend." She heard a stream of urine fall onto her mattress.

  Sydney jumped off her bunk, yanking Puss with her by one furry leg. Puss screamed in pain as he hit the floor. Racing back for her knife, Sydney unsheathed it and advanced on the creature. "Lick it up, piss-face." She gestured at her soiled bed.