Prince of Storms (6 page)

The lord gestured toward the nearest doorway, flicking his wrist in a casual gesture. “Make your report, Breund.”

“First we look to the wounded.” Breund kneeled down beside the nearest guard.

“When a Tarig means to kill, success is usual.”

The lord might be right, but Breund knelt to his task, by each of the four guards. The solitaires had dispatched all of them with a stroke to each throat. So close to the bright, the bloody floor shimmered in its glare.

“Remain here, Lord Inweer,” Breund said. He left with what haste his old legs could muster. He would be the bearer of dark news, indeed: The solitaires fled. And toward what machinations?

IN
D
EEP
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, Quinn moved among a contingent of guards across the plaza, making for the hill of mansions.

At his side Zhiya said, “Let me take stock of the hangar. No need for you to come among them.”

“If they wish me dead, easily done.” Four hundred eighty lords remained.

“Why hand them the knife, my dear?”

He didn't believe these Tarig posed a danger. They still feared the mSap. He could activate it and destroy their door home. They wanted to go home, now that it was inevitable, now that, he suspected, they no longer cared about staying—the whole charade being over: the radiant land, the gracious lords, the patriotic war.

Zhiya said, “The worst is, they took the brightships.”

He nodded. A major blunder that they had let the brightships get away.

Zhiya's guards, twenty strong, clattered in full weaponry behind him. Her ready force of supposed godders provided him with bodyguards if not a fighting force. They crossed two plaza bridges and began climbing the steps, now moving double-file, Quinn and Zhiya in the lead.

“Send Ci Dehai to Ahnenhoon,” Zhiya said, “to stand watch over it.”

He had thought that he should send the general. But it did little good to hold the fortress when the engine could be activated remotely. Had the solitaires that power? He thought that they did.

But why would the solitaires want to restart Ahnenhoon? The game was over for them. They would now be a small, despised fragment of the Tarig elite. They could not, even with all their powers, hope to control the population unless by the consent of the masses. Ahnenhoon was likely safe from them; they had fled for their lives, as simple as that. And yet it was safest to order Ahnenhoon reduced to rubble.

“What happens if I take Ahnenhoon down? Dismantle the engine.” They ascended past the terrace where he had once hidden with Lady Demat when Ghinamid was on the hunt. Then, a few steps more, and off to the left lay the garden of the child he'd known only by the term of endearment
Small Girl
. His history was all here, woven into the adobe stone of the mansions where he had been prince, fugitive, prisoner. They went past the mansion of Chiron, climbing.

“I could have the army take it apart. Rebuilding might be impossible for a handful of lords.”

“Time to do it, Titus.”

But taking away the thing that fueled the Entire might paint Quinn as an enemy of the Entire. “Sentients might see it as the Entire's death sentence. They might favor Sen Ni.”

“Then she takes control. But without Ahnenhoon's engine, she is declawed. Tear it down, I say.”

They entered the hangar. Empty of ships, as he had known; but still, a shock. Twenty-three solitaires had escaped, all of them except Inweer, who waited in the shadows against the distant wall. The enormous shelter with its wedge-shaped ship bays was a lonely and bloody scene. Zhiya went forward, kneeling by the nearest body.

Breund came forward. “Master Regent, Inweer is still here.”

“Thank you, Breund. Did Lord Inweer raise a hand against these guards?”

“No, Regent.”

“Or threaten you?”

“No, Master Regent.”

Well, then. Inweer would live to see another day. Quinn turned to a guard. “Take the bodies away, please. See to the place.” The guard left to summon workers.

Zhiya crouched by a Chalin woman, stocky and older. “Her name was Weng.”

“The last to die at the hands of the Tarig. I'm sorry, Zhiya.”

Zhiya's long braid had fallen over her shoulder, dipping onto the floor, where it wicked up blood. “The last?” She looked toward the edge of the hangar where the ships had launched. “It will be the last when they all swim in the fire.”

Quinn walked over to the lip of the hangar, very close to the edge. Below, the spires and roofs of the lords' mansions, and beyond, the glare of the Sea of Arising. Above, the dome of the silver sky. It was as though he stood in a void, with a few floating houses at his feet, habitations of creatures he could not understand although he had spent long years among them.

Breund came to his side again. “Lord Inweer asks to join you, Regent.”

Quinn stared at the roofs below. Little specks of black littered the roofs and pinnacles. Bird drones. Stopped in place, encrustations on the roof tiles. He wanted no flying spies, though he could have used some to warn him of this disaster.

“He may come.”

Breund glanced at the precipitous fall. “Will you have a guard, Regent?”

“Let him come.”

Breund ducked away.

He had driven the solitaires to this escape. They, of all the Tarig, were averse to the undifferentiated consciousness of the Heart. He should have banished them first, not waited like this. He could have demanded their Tarig cousins send them home. But how to tell which were solitaires and which were not? And, further reason to wait, of all the Tarig he might have trusted the solitaires to protect the Entire's functions, its arts and devices that bloody well kept it humming. Why should the others care who had their homeland and for whom the Entire had only been a diversion? So he'd delayed, and given them time to conspire.

He heard Lord Inweer's approach. “Where did they go?” Quinn asked him without turning.

“To hide.” Inweer moved next to him, gazing out also. “They did not tell me where they would go; perhaps they do not know.”

No apology. Well, Inweer took no responsibility for this, Quinn guessed. “They might go to live in another cosmos.” He snaked a look at Inweer. “Or they might shore up the engine at Ahnenhoon.”

“If they do, let me prevent them.”

So this was his leverage. “What do you want, my lord?”

“My true life.”

It gave Quinn pause to hear the lord state a humble wish to live. Add to that, Inweer no longer affected the twisted pronouns. Maybe this was one way that he asserted his new individualism. Behind them, Quinn heard the arrival of attendants who came to take charge of the bodies. It reminded him of all that the lords had done against him and those he loved.

Perhaps Inweer guessed these thoughts. He said, “We lose our particularity in the congregate state. It is a horror to those who have kept separate these thousands of days. Perhaps you will grant a reprieve, ah?”

“Do you ask for all of them, or only yourself?”

“In your place, I would banish them. Twenty-three Tarig is a force. One is not.”

Quinn turned to look at Inweer at last. He stepped back a pace so that he did not have to look up at such an angle. “You can't go free.”

“I wish to be free.”

“No, my lord. Your crimes…I can't, I won't pardon them.” Inweer had been at Ahnenhoon, the one charged with keeping the machine ready.

Inweer countered, “You do not know the Jinda ceb Horat. You will be at their mercy, for the disciplines required to preserve things.”

“It's their home. They'll preserve things.”

“But perhaps not the Rose.”

That was the ugly thought that was never far from his mind. That the Jinda ceb would solve the resource issues by the easiest course just as the Tarig had.

“In that case you and I, Lord Inweer, can't prevent them.” Inweer would have to offer more than policing of Ahnenhoon.

“There is Johanna, though,” Inweer said.

A gust of wind scoured into the hangar, taking with it the remains of the conversation. Irrelevantly, Quinn remembered that since the brightships had just flown, the force field that kept the hangar protected would still be suppressed.

“Johanna,” Quinn said, low and wary.

“Her story is different than you know.”

The lord stood under the scalding bright, his skin glinting bronze, impervious. Quinn felt an urge to back the lord against the lip of the hangar. To see him fall.

“Tell me, by the Miserable God.”

Breund and the attendants approached with queries written in their expressions.

“Leave us!” Quinn snapped. He turned to Inweer, struggling for control.

The lord narrowed his eyes at this display of temper, and said, more conciliatory, “I sent her to safety. I gave out that she was buried at Ahnenhoon where she fell. The Five had to be placated, and she was a traitor to my cousins. For myself, I understood her.”

Quinn tried to understand what he was hearing. Johanna's death. A lie. Relief moved through him, strong and fresh. She had not deserved what she got when he'd left her to the Tarig revenge. He remembered that terrible hour at Ahnenhoon: He had had the nan, and it was leaking, and he had to give it to the Nigh before it destroyed the plains of Ahnenhoon, and everything with it. So he fled and Johanna lay dying. Mo Ti reported her dead.

“Where is she?”

“That knowledge is, you understand, my last advantage.” Inweer went on, “I am a lord of the Tarig consensus. I am a part of the Tarig
will
that created the Entire. Now I have become less, a separate being, a particular entity. I do not know what I am, altogether. But I will not give up Johanna's truth without an advantage. You would do the same, against me. Give me the honor of a bargain.”

Quinn moved to the very lip of the hangar, trying to catch another breath of wind, but it was all calm and hot. “Is she well? Is she free?”

“She is as free as one could devise. Her wounds are healed.”

“What is the bargain?”

“Leave me free for a thousand days. Then learn her fate.”

Quinn turned back to the lord, letting bitterness come into his voice. “A thousand days? Not a long life, for a lord of the Tarig consensus.”

“After a thousand days say whether I am a danger or not. If not, let me stay.”

Quinn waved Breund forward, eager for a practical problem to resolve. “What?” he asked Breund.

“Regent, the attendants need the shield back, to make active the cleaning devices that will do for the stains.”

Bloodstains. The molecular cleansing of the Ascendancy might not work with the shield gone, lest the function somehow interfere with ships coming or going. Well, why didn't they trigger the dome in that case? Then he realized that he stood too near the edge for the shield to be safely activated.

“Yes, Breund, activate it.” Moving back from the edge, he approached Inweer. “A thousand days is too long.” The lord was begging for his life. It seemed pathetic that Inweer had fallen so far. “Go back to your quarters, my lord. Give us respect for our dead.” He walked away, heading back through the hangar, leaving them all to their duties. Overhead the shield fell over the place in a soft buzz and a waver of light.

He went down the outside steps alone, waving off the guards, thinking,
Johanna is still alive
.

Lord Inweer was using her once again.

“When the Jinda ceb come, Titus, let them heal your arm.” Anzi murmured this as they sat together in bed reading scrolls that Tai said needed their attention. She stroked his forearm, where a deep scar made a furrow.

“I may not need that arm.” He smiled at her, trying to make light of the infirmity, the one he kept in penance. Penance for killing the Tarig child, for drowning that being who was no child at all but who always would be mixed up in his mind with another child he had betrayed. His own.

“We have need of everything,” Anzi said. Every advantage, she thought,
every strength. For what was coming. When the Jinda ceb arrived, she would persuade them to safeguard the Rose. She knew them and was their friend. Especially, she was Nistoth's friend. She would never forget his kindness in delivering her into the fray when the Ascendancy was coming apart and she feared for the loss of her husband and the Rose. Had he not acted quickly, she might have been too late; had he stopped to consult Manifest, it all would have been too late.