Prince of Storms (22 page)

“Who do you speak with, my lord?”

Lord Inweer walked toward the pilot's chair, looming as tall as the ceiling. Usually, in discourse, their custom was to sit—Inweer at the pilot's chair, Breund at his desk. It equalized their statures.

The lord stopped, his hand resting on the arm of the pilot's chair. “My cousins,” he said, very low.

It was a challenge, to speak so baldly of his cousins. Although Breund
waited, Inweer offered no chagrin, no explanation. “In the middle of the ebb, my lord?”

“We do not sleep, Breund. All times are the same for such as we.”

“Yes, but it could as well be done at Prime of Day or Early Day when we are together. And you did use my communication slate.”

“Did I?”

Now they were on the brink of lies. Breund did not wish to be the cause of Inweer's disgrace. Might it be possible that the lord could have reconfigured the pilot's function to incorporate communications along the bright? It would not matter so much how he did it, but it mattered very much
why
he did it.

“I shall make my report, then.”

“Ah? For something that is not contravened?”

It was true that the only rule was that the prison ship not approach Ahnenhoon.

“What did you say to your cousins, my lord? It will lighten my responsibilities to know your mind.” Breund wanted to sit at his table, but then he would have to look up at a steep angle to speak with Lord Inweer, and the lord already seemed an elongated shadow, a wraith.

“Do not report, warden,” came the Tarig's low voice. “You have no reason to accuse me. Have I given cause? I do not deny talking to my solitaire cousins, nor is it forbidden.”

“It never came up.”

“Because it is not disallowed.”

They stared at each other, having come to the crux of their dispute.

“Nevertheless. It is my prerogative to report.” Breund sat down. He found himself loath to turn his back on the lord. But surely, if the lord intended to kill him, he needn't wait until Breund's back was turned. He had always known the risk; this was not the time to lose courage. He touched the shadow line to bring up his scroll display and, with a shaking hand, wrote a three-line report:
Lord Inweer has admitted communicating with the solitaires. I found him doing so in the middle of the ebb. I do not know how he communicates.

He sent the message and turned back to Inweer. The lord had seated himself in the pilot's chair, like a king on his throne. But the lord looked
calm. Perhaps the conflict was behind them. Breund felt the ship change course. Good. The lord was preoccupied with his piloting once again.

When he idly turned back to his desk, Breund noted that the message still lay upon the screen, unsent.

Enduring a spike of alarm, he tried communicating again, but further messages also remained on his scroll. Breund could no longer talk with the Ascendancy. So, it had come to mutiny, as simply and quickly as that.

He turned his chair around. “Lord Inweer, release my communications.”

“Go back to sleep, warden,” the lord had the temerity to say.

But Breund knew he was no longer a warden, nor was the Tarig his charge.

“Y
OU LIED TO ME
.” Anzi stood before Iritaj in his garden, having waited a whole day to see him. He'd been avoiding her, she felt sure.

“You aged me!”

Iritaj was growing something new to wear. It sat on him incomplete like the molting hide of a midlands bear. He plucked at a half-finished sleeve. “We saved you.”

“Give me back what I was.” She would give up this effort to become one of them. Nistothom had told her it wouldn't work and he was right. Decent life art would take too long; but unless she had it, the Jinda ceb would never respect her. So she was no help at all to Titus.

“Give back?” Iritaj asked. “What
were
you when we picked you up from the void?”

“I had a husband. I was young.”

“Yes, you had little.”

She stared at him in aggravation. Venn had offered to change her back, but Anzi wouldn't make the mistake twice of persuading a lone Jinda ceb to make a decision. If she was going to resume a previous life, she would do so through Manifest. Beginning with her Nan Da.

She softened her tone. “Why didn't I ever know that we were all living…representationally? It wasn't even real time. Was it?”

“Ah, time…a difficult subject indeed. I would say, yes, there was time, in the sense that when one comes into form again, the time resets, one might say.”

Uncomprehending, she charged on. “But why didn't I
know
?”

“Would it have made a difference? Might you have rejected our help? You would have died in that sac you traveled in. It was in tatters when we managed to grab it.”

Would it have mattered had she known? Perhaps not, but was it right for them to keep such a thing from her? At least when she returned home, they might have told her they could restore her, so that she and Titus could have resumed their lives without the disturbing gap.

Iritaj concentrated his attention on a biot, bringing a bud onto one side of it. As he bent over, she gazed at his life art, startlingly vivid with its intricate small designs working together into a stunning whole. And the colors: violet and deep green, brown and red. Despite her preoccupations she found herself envious.

When he faced her again, his tone softened. “Anzitaj. Your idea—the Entire's concept—of form and time is different than ours. To us, it is unremarkable to have been representational. But after it happened, we had many archons to adjust. In your case, we wished to avoid the shock it would cause you. I am not pleased that the Complete One Venn has seen fit to divulge this. But it is done.”

He leaned against a tall old biot, resting. “So now the question, do you wish to return to that state wherein you first met us?”

It had come around to what she should do next, the issue that she'd been thinking about for hours. Now that it looked like Iritaj would help her, she hesitated. “What should I do, Nan Da?”

He remained silent a long while. Then he spoke softly: “Your life art is still a small, straight line.”

“Well, the bright is a line.”

“But the bright is a life-giving perturbed interface between branes, created by an advanced civilization. A supreme feat.” He shook his head. “No, Anzitaj, you must face yourself squarely now.”

“Are you saying my life art should be better?”

His head swirls flinched. “You move too fast to judgment. One piece at a time. Let us begin here: What do you desire in your life?”

She considered. “To be a helper to my husband. To save the Rose.”

“Which is it, though?”

She thought them one and the same and said so.

He pressed on. “Why, for example, should you care so deeply about the Rose?”

“Because we don't have the right to devour them. Another civilization.”

“No, that is wrong.” She began to argue, but he overrode her. “Wrong, because you do not care so much about grand affairs of state. Yours is a practical regard of the world.”

“Practically speaking, the war against the Rose is wrong.”

“I will not argue, Anzitaj. But this topic is a diversion. Your whole life is a diversion.”

She felt the comment like a slap.

“Life art does not lie.”

The conversation was slipping sideways, falling into disconcerting places. But if she had such poor prospects, why had he ever accepted her as a student?

He went on. “The reason you are a straight gold line is that you have been living for someone else. Whatever Titus Quinn loves, that you also love. You have taken on his life, living in his shadow.” He paused, letting her assimilate this. “The fact that you would throw away five thousand days of life to return to a previous level of experience is proof of immaturity. You asked for my counsel. I have decided to give it.”

“But what should I
do
?”

“In our path—and that is the only path I know—you would develop yourself, and it would manifest on your back. You would take each day and make it a step toward something beautiful. Then when you chose to love someone, you would be true and solid, not a mirror of another.”

Anger draining away, she sat down, sinking onto the springy moss of the ground. Since she had promised to listen to her Nan Da, she forced herself to think about what he had said. Still, the stubborn words emerged: “I do truly love him.”

“You undoubtedly do. But it is not for the best.”

“It is.”

“Then can you answer my question of what you want for yourself?”

Was that an important question? Must she desire something more than her husband, who was her future? She didn't accept his counsel, but its logic was drilling down, releasing doubts. The straight golden line on her back felt like a badge of ignorance. Was she a mature Chalin woman with nothing solid inside?

After a long silence, Iritaj bent down before her and placed a small box on the moss. “These are Titus Quinn's letters. I waited until you were stronger.” He trudged off down the twisting garden path.

For a very long time Anzi stared at the little box nestled in the moss. When she finally got up, she put it inside her jacket without opening it. She wandered from her Nan Da's garden into the commons garden nearby, walking, lost in a new territory.

“A fine place for an ambush,” Quinn muttered to Noheme.

They were deep in the undercity, in the Red Society Archive. Beginning in the Great Hall of Scrolls, the Red acolyte led them on through a warren of hallways lined with shelves and crammed with scrolls and manuscripts. Somewhere in this repository they would find Master Rekior, reputed to be in charge. Not a priest of the Red Throne, but the Archivist.

The acolyte led them on into the—but for them—deserted repository.

“We wouldn't be here,” Noheme said, “if I hadn't given your name. The Archivist sees no one.” Noheme kept a sharp watch at every juncture where the hall bisected another corridor. Down each new corridor, more stacks, all empty of visitors, readers, worshippers.

“What are these books?” Quinn asked their guide.

The acolyte murmured, “Here, the Sixth Form records. Genealogies of the navitars from the first archon of the Age of Radiance.”

Quinn thought no one had asked to look at these manuscripts for a thousand years. “One doesn't think of the navitars as having families.”

“
You
might not. We do.” The Chalin youth was proud of his faith, and in the way of minority religions, managed to find it superior to all others.

The young man stopped at a modest door. “The Archivist will greet you in the reception room.”

As they entered, they found a spacious but shabby room. On the far wall, a begrimed window showed onto the Nigh's underbelly. A toxic green light spilled onto a table covered in scrolls.

It took a moment before Quinn made out the Archivist seated at the table's far end. By his stooped shoulders, he was very old. A Jout, as so many of the Red Society adherents were.

“Titus Quill?” came the high-pitched voice.

“Titus
Quinn
, Excellency.”

“A good name for a scholar, Quill,” the Archivist squeaked. “I like it. It's the reason I agreed to see you, although they say you're important”—he pointed—“up there. We pay little attention to up there.”

Quinn wondered how far removed Rekior might be from the events above; did he even know whom he had agreed to see? If not, it was uncertain whether the Archivist would be happy to find out.

“This is my associate, Noheme.”

“Of the Society?” Rekior asked.

“I keep my own society,” Noheme answered, stationing herself at the door.

“Alas. We grow small and smaller....” Rekior looked around the reception room as though hoping to find at least one more adherent. “Well then, your business. You've wasted half your allotted time already.”

“Master Rekior, I hope I have more time than that.”

“When you're older you'll learn the value of time. I have read just eleven thousand scrolls, Quill; against the hundred thousand tomes I have yet to read, does it not suggest the need for haste?”

Quinn needed this Archivist's cooperation if he was to follow the clues Nimday had given him. The ship keeper's story of serving Geng De was important in some way. But which piece of it? Geng De reading an arcane book? Bringing children onto his ship? Or had Nimday left out even more important information?

“I've come with a question about a book. It needs elaboration from a scholar such as yourself.”

Rekior plucked at his sleeve, considering. Perhaps he had the impression that these two would not leave until he gave them answers, because at last he muttered, “Ask.”

“The
Book of the Drowning Time
.”

Master Rekior fell to a coughing fit, raising his sleeve to his mouth and coughing the harder for inhaling the dust from his robe. “Drowning…” he sputtered. “Drowning? You waste my time with sorcery?”

“I have to know. If you have a price, I'll pay it.”

Rekior shook his head, sucking in breaths. “Among all my thousand thousand books,
this
is the one you want.” The scholar stood—as thin a Jout as Quinn had ever seen. A belt cinched his sleeveless tunic around his emaciated form. “That book,” he muttered, “that book…”

“Please, Master Rekior. Share what knowledge you have.” He exchanged looks with Noheme, who looked ready to beat it out of the old Jout.

Rekior glanced at Noheme, then back at Quinn. Finally he waved in resignation. “It is deep in the stacks. We put the Illogics in the Eleventh Form, third shelving. I remember.” He tottered toward the door, brushing past Noheme. “Eleven and three, eleven and three.” Quinn followed him into the dim corridor.

Rekior motioned his assistant to attend him, leaning on his arm, declaiming as he hobbled along. “It's old legend. Distasteful, Quill. How did you rise so high with such unsavory interests? I'm disappointed. They said you were a friend of the Tarig, lived among them, and so forth. We have many Tarig friends. Oventroe, a high lord. And Lord Hadenth himself! He came here to see me once. You've heard of him? One of the Five, by the bright.”

Quinn found it best to remain silent, since he had killed the fiend.

“Jaffor.” The master muttered to his attendant. “He wants the
Book of the Drowning Time
, a book far outside the canon. I warrant you've never seen it, or anything in the Eleventh Form stacks!”

“I know the book, Master.”

“Of course you don't know it. It's old and outside the canon, I've already
told you. You haven't earned the right to read the Illogics, when you've barely kept up with the required scrolls. How many have you read? Tell me: how many?”

“Four hundred thirteen, Master.”

The old scholar shook his head in dismay, tottering on, as though at any moment he would collapse from the effort. “Now, Quill,” he said, turning slightly to the two who followed close behind, “as to the book you're keen on, it's a foul creation. Of interest only to the study of Illogics and sorcery. Who would cast such aspersions on the navitars? Indecent, scurrilous…Can the great navitars do evil? Do you think so, Quill?”