Bright of the Sky

by Kay Kenyon

  The steps sank directly into the pool. He sat on the steps and pulled out a small brick of food, a compressed bar that was his food allowance for the day, and shared it with the carp. The bits of food floated, attracting a pod of fish, but not the orange-backed one.

  Cho stood at the head of the stairs mopping his brow with his scarf. His jacket bore the understeward emblem of the lowly white carp. Cho took a step forward, startled. "Dal Shen," he said, "here is a sight."

  As Quinn joined him, Cho said, "This is a day of wonders. There is the high prefect herself."

  Quinn Joined Cho at the head of the stairs and looked where he pointed. Here was the very woman he'd come to see. On so short a woman, her hair looked impossibly tall, and glinted as though lacquered. She held a parasol, and was dressed in bright green edged with orange. At her side was an enormous Chalin man, richly dressed.

  "The preconsul Zai Gan," Cho said. "You had known Master Yulin's brother in the great sway?"

  "No. I was banished from court."

  Cho cut a glance at him. "Indeed? Shocking, Excellency." He frowned, considering something. "That must be why he knows so little of you, and is reduced to asking questions of a steward such as myself."

  Quinn covered his alarm. "What sorts of questions?"

  "Oh, as to your business here." He looked offended. "I told him nothing, I assure you. As though I know the business of personages!"

  Bel had spoken truly when he'd said that the Magisterium was full of spies. Far from passing unnoticed, Quinn's every movement seemed to draw interest. Truly, his best chance was to leave as soon as possible. But, so far, he could not leave.

  Cixi hated to be under the bright. She once had had a reputation for never leaving the Magisterium, but she had gradually changed her habits in order to allow just such an outing as this. Once every few days she took a walk, and often, it was only walking.

  Unaccustomed to walking, Zai Gan was already puffing at her side. But he wouldn't have turned down an offer to be seen with the high prefect. Many eyes were following them, Cixi was sure, though no one dared to approach them without a summons. Around the promenade near the canals her presence was becoming noted, as functionaries bowed, even from a great distance away. She was the center of attention. Given this inescapable fact, it became essential to do her treasons in a most public manner.

  Z.ai Gan did not often accompany her on these little forays. She bestowed the honor of her company on a different functionary each time. Once, to shock her sycophants, she had walked with a clerk. But it was all for one purpose, that out of her many forays, she would hear the thing she longed for in the tower of Ghinamid, in the alcove where she could lose her life.

  Her hands felt slick with perspiration, but she didn't dare wipe them on her jacket, lest a hundred pairs of eyes take note. God's beku, but she hated going abroad!

  Z.ai Gan whipped out a fan from his belt. "Are you warm, Your Brilliance?" He fluttered the thing at her face.

  She cut him a look: One more evil exhalation from your mouth, and I will have it stuffed with offal.

  Zai Gan snapped the fan shut and they strolled on.

  "Such lovely swimming creatures," Cixi said in her sweetest tone. She had cultivated the impression over these thousands of days that she was fascinated by the fish, though there was not a nonsentient in the All that she could abide. Of course, as the saying went, not all carp were carp.

  Zai Gan grunted. "It's not natural to breathe water."

  "Whatever the lords decree is natural," Cixi snapped.

  He slid a glance at her, always watchful for how far her loyalties went. He knew she spied incessantly, and perhaps he wondered what her purposes were. No. Zai Gan didn't wonder. He could see no farther than master-of-thesway. He no doubt believed that her machinations were all for who should be promoted in the Magisterium, and who merited advancement in the sways. Someone like Zai Gan could not imagine that Cixi's vision reached farther than his own.

  She made a turn toward the great tower. She meant for it to be a natural meander in that direction. On some outings she stopped at the tower, and some outings she didn't. All to make the real visit appear trivial.

  Leaving Z,ai Gan outside the entrance, Cixi entered the tower. Ahead of her were the three hundred stairs. She had only a few moments to do what she must. Once finished, she must climb to the top and appear to be taking in the view from the ramparts. Sentients all over the city-those who had noted that she visited the tower-would expect to see her there.

  Cixi took off her elevated shoes, leaving them at the first bend in the stairs, and raced upward.

  They were stairs made for giants, and already her thigh muscles ached. The Tarig could ascend them easily; the length of their stride was unnerving. They could cross a room in an instant just by standing and taking a huge stride forward. She shuddered.

  Coming to the alcove, she placed her hands inside and pressed the nub that gave her access to the bright. Or that might give access. Here, in the tallest structure on the palatine hill, one was very close indeed to the river of fire. The fiends shaded the city from its fierceness, somehow. And also, somehow, they passed messages through the bright, and not at speeds they allowed their subjects, but at bright speeds. Cixi's spies had discovered this long ago. Nor was she surprised to find this so. Of course the bright lords communicated at a distance. Would they have created the Entire any other way?

  And where could they send messages or receive messages from? Her investigations had revealed three additional places: the brightships, any axis city, and the River Nigh. Only Tarig commanded the ships; and only Tarig knew how to empower messages at bright speed at the axis cities. But all navitars knew how to send messages from the binds. And whether navitars were loyal or not, now that was a question of great complexity. For one thing, they were deranged.

  After a thousand days of subterfuge, Cixi had found a navitar who might send a message. The navitar was one who plied the river in the Long Gaze of Fire. Cixi had both ends covered.

  Once all this had been well ordered, Cixi began looking for the message. But so far, her envoys had failed to signify that they had reached her beloved girl. For four thousand days, there had been no word, but she kept faith, returning again and again to the tower.

  Oh my dear girl, Cixi thought. Her devotion to the child was an alwaysburning coal, and the girl had a matching ember in her own heart. So Cixi's messengers had told her. She loves you still, mistress. Cixi believed them, because her own heart was that steadfast, and because she had told them that, should they lie, she would pull out their intestines through their navels. Slowly.

  Now, kneeling in the alcove, she placed the redstone in the cup, and it disappeared. Nothing, nothing. But these things took time.

  There were days in which Cixi felt that Mo Ti was her last hope. Mo Ti was the most intelligent, able, and fearless servant she'd ever had. If he couldn't succeed, she might never in this life have another chance to bring a mentor to the dear girl's side. Had Mo Ti escaped blinding? Even if he hadn't, had he managed to infiltrate Priov's encampment? And if so, had the girl come to trust him?

  And then, miraculously, words formed on the wall, a section of stone that for a moment became a screen. Her answer. She stared at the letters forming: Always to last.

  Always to last ... Cixi's face flushed hot with shock. Mo Ti had arrived.

  There was no further message, nor was there need. Had he failed irrevocably, Mo Ti would have sent, Dark as rose night. And if he had not yet surmounted barriers, Hold up the bright.

  Without completely absorbing this joyful news, Cixi rushed up the stairs, raising her knees high under her robes, straining against the demands of another hundred stairs. Her legs stung with pain, but she yanked her old body up the risers. Up, up, and may God look upon all fiends. Up, up ...

  At the top she leaned against the stones of the rampart, her chest near exploding, her legs melting. Below, Zai Gan kept guard, ready to create a diversion should someone try
to enter before he saw her at the top.

  By his demeanor below she knew that he'd seen her. No doubt the fat fool must wonder what she was doing all this while. How astounded he would be to know the truth.

  Turning to leave, she found a Tarig standing before her.

  "Lord, my life," she said.

  But it was not a fiend. It was the image of a fiend, captured in the stone walls of the tower. His features looked pockmarked and rumpled in the imperfect screen of the rough wall.

  "Ah, Cixi," he said.

  By his voice, it was ... But he must speak again.

  "Is that you, Bright Lord? Your likeness in the stone?" She wished she were not barefooted. Perhaps he wouldn't notice.

  "Yes, it is our likeness, not our self. Unless we have become ugly in one day?"

  Lord Oventroe. Cixi almost collapsed with relief. It was a disaster if he knew what she'd done. But he was the best fiend to encounter here.

  "Lord, my life," she repeated, skipping the rest of the benediction, as she dared to do as high prefect.

  "Yes. Your life." He watched her with stony eyes, stony face. "Have you ever thought how you would choose to die if a lord uncovered repugnance for you?"

  Her heart sank like a stone in a pool. He was going to kill her.

  "Yes."

  "Now we shall guess. You would die by poison rather than by the slow death." He held up a long-fingered hand. "No, not true. We think this would not be your way. Ah, we have it." He pointed to the rampart, where it was cut low enough to create a viewing port. "Stand near there, Prefect."

  "Shall I climb up?"

  "Don't be dramatic. What if you please us, and you go down again, down the long stairs? Then there would be scandal from the prefect having stood on the lip of the tower as though despondent." He looked behind him, giving the impression that he was actually there. "Everyone is watching you, ah?"

  "Surely they do watch. But cannot see you, Lord."

  "No. We must be secret." He turned and paced, walking around the circular summit, walking in the walls.

  Lord Oventroe was the only lord she knew of who paced. He'd often claimed that it was the only useful thing that humans had ever taught him. It was peculiar in the extreme, that after all they knew of the Rose, he picked this senseless thing to mimic. This minor thought came unbidden into her mind as she considered throwing herself from the tower. She thought of her dear girl, and her throat constricted.

  "Secrets," Lord Oventroe was saying. "We both of us have secrets, Prefect."

  She tried to think which one he knew, besides that she used the bright like a lord.

  He went on: "My secret is well kept by you, Cixi of Chendu wielding."

  It was almost a term of endearment, his use of her childhood name. She held her breath.

  His face came to rest on a flat piece of stone, bringing his features into better resolution. He was fuller of face than most fiends, and it softened him. The ladies of the city-Tarig ladies, of course-found him handsome. "Yes," Lord Oventroe went on, "you have known that we have a personal alcove. Other lords know not of it. This is the secret you have kept, Prefect."

  She had kept it secret. All secrets were coins to be hoarded, and praise be to Heaven, she had hoarded this one.

  A change in Lord Oventroe's expression signaled pleasure. "We would thank you, but it's not our style, is it?"

  "Unthinkable, Lord."

  "You should have been a Tarig, Cixi of Chendu." No doubt he meant it as an extraordinary compliment.

  "Sometimes I feel that I am." She cut a glance down the stairs, thinking of the alcove.

  He said, "There are legates who know what you know?"

  "No."

  "We hope this is true, Cixi. We also hope that your messaging is for minor villainy and doesn't cross this lord's interests."

  And what were his interests? Cixi would give much to know. Lord Oventroe had a fanatical hatred of the Rose, as all sentients knew. Also, and as few sentients knew, he had hopes to replace Hadenth as a high lord, because Hadenth had failed in security in the past. But no high lord ever stepped down, so this was not a reasonable goal. One could assume it was not.

  "Dragons are content with their caves and their treasures, my lord."

  His face flickered with amusement. Cixi thought that pacing was not the only thing that Oventroe had copied from the Rose. In all his fanatical observations of the enemy, he had unwittingly become more like them.

  "The day you are content, Prefect, we will open the doors to the Rose."

  She bowed very low, acknowledging this truth. She was not content. But let him believe that she possessed common ambitions. Let no one guess-and never the lords-that she meant to raise the kingdom. The Chalin kingdom.

  When she rose from her bow, Lord Oventroe had disappeared.

  A slight breeze wicked sweat from her face. "By my grave flag," she whispered, shivering.

  She was safe, for the time being. But he knew that she partook of forbidden things. How had he discovered her, and who else might know? From now on she was under his scrutiny. Where else did he lurk, and in what guise? Did he really see her today, or was it only an image? It was sickening to think that the lords might spy so easily...

  She began descending the three hundred stairs. Why had the lord spared her life? Only one reason: she might have told someone else what she knew. And now he needed her to keep them silent, who otherwise might divulge his secret. Oh, the power of secrets. By their leverage one could topple a high tower, or an empire.

  Partway down the stairs she slipped into her shoes again.

  At the bottom, Zai Gan met her, noting her distress. "A hard climb, Your Brilliance?"

  "No, Preconsul," she managed to say in a neutral tone. "But sometimes the way down is harder than going up." And when he looked at her inquiringly, she gave him the face that said, Shut up and let me think.

  Then she concentrated on making it back to her quarters without collapsing.

  That night in his cell, Quinn stared at the luminescent ceiling, dimmed for ebb-time. In its cool light he saw Hadenth's face, heard his shredded voice. The creature had been watching him. Eight days on the rim ...

  The Chalin rumor wasn't true, that Quinn's beating had addled the lord's mind. Hadenth was the same as he'd always been. Predatory and unpredictable. Why had Hadenth been watching him, or did the Tarig watch everything?

  He felt cooped up, and restless. Nine days in the Magisterium, and still no contact with the traitor Tarig. If he was a traitor. And no word from the high prefect.... Abandoning sleep, he rose and took his clothes off the pegs on the wall. The cleaning fibbers had done their work, and he dressed in his silk garments, now spotless.

  Out in the corridor, he noted that the Jout's door was open. Brahariar had also given up on sleep, and sat on her bed weeping. He knew that the Jout's petition, whatever it was, languished. Pitying her, earlier Quinn had asked Cho to help her, if he could.

  Quinn walked. Was Hadenth watching him even now? If they thought their city so vulnerable that they spied incessantly, why have the Magisterium here at all? Why not install it at the base of the pillars instead?

  The halls at ebb-time were as active as during the day. The great bureaucracy needed every hour of every long Entire day to govern the universe, the only universe worth having. The All they sometimes called it, their way of assuring themselves that they were superior.

  He descended the ramp to the fourth level, which housed the archive, where scholars and functionaries pursued their arcane studies, and where all knowledge gathered by scholars eventually found a home.

  There were several subjects he longed to pursue there. But it would draw attention if he pursued Johanna's records, from the time she was interrogated here. A minor son of Yulin shouldn't be looking up information about Johanna Quinn and her interrogator, Kang. Even though Kang's record would only be a fragment of Johanna, fragments might be important, if, as the navitar had said, Johanna was at the center of things.
r />   This level was crowded with clerks. They wore the wide and backwardsloping hats that housed their computational boards, a type of stone well. From the back, the clerks' hats were alive with readouts as the stones made their way from top to bottom, spitting into a long sock that hung like a kite's tail down the clerks' backs. Making his way through twisting corridors, past the cells of factors and stewards, he came at last to the archive, which he wanted to enter, and shouldn't. He stood at the open door to the great hall. Here, giant pillars held the computational wells, and stairwells corkscrewed around the columns, accessing the wells.

  He would have liked to see what information the library held on the Inyx sway, so that he could bolster his plan to free Sydney, the one that Yulin was so sure would fail. Certainly if the Inyx could probe his mind, then he was deprived of his strongest tactic: stealth. As well, he hungered to delve into the question of the correlates, if the lords by some lapse had left clues here.

  But none of these paths of inquiry were open to him. He didn't know how to use the library. He didn't know how data was stored, how to access it, how to conduct searches. His very ineptness might draw attention.

  He stood at the archive door undecided. Once, he had known the ways of the archive. Once, he had come here looking for the correlations between here and there. But he was not that same man. This version of Titus Quinn was stone well illiterate.

  He turned away from the archive door. Min Fe was standing in the corridor.

  The legate blinked at him, his eyes magnified in his glasses. "A soldier who studies? A wonder."

  "I was curious about the great library. Very impressive." He tried to pass, but Min Fe blocked him.

  "The man of weapons offends us."

  "Was there an offense? If so, my pardon."

  Min Fe hissed, "Pardon, is it? I grant no pardon for your insults." Two clerks emerged from the archive, bowing deeply as they passed. Min Fe watched them retreat down the corridor.

  "Cho's promotion is an outrage, of course. He is without merit, without distinction. A pedantic, visionless underling who has contributed no new scrolls to the pandect in five thousand days...." Min Fe noted Quinn's look of surprise. "Certainly you've heard that Shi Zu, taking revenge against me for imagined faults, raised the worthless menial to full steward?"