The Novels of the Jaran (307 page)

“I don’t think you ought to underestimate your mother. You certainly got your intelligence from her.”

“It isn’t that. She would try to understand, but it would hurt her. She just isn’t…it isn’t part of her world. Is it true that, in Erthe, what told you me—?”

“That not every marriage is between a man and a woman? Yes. It’s not common, but there are other ways to be granted a legal partnership.”

“Aunt Tess, you must let me go! There’s no place for me in the jaran. Maybe there will be a place for me there.”

“If there isn’t?”

“There has to be.”

Tess kissed her and left her, wondering if little Katya would brave the forbidden hall and just charge in on Cara even though she wasn’t supposed to. That would, in a way, seal her fate. She did not look back as she left the courtyard.

She looked forward.

She had to leave the palace entirely, go out into the park that lay on the landward side of the palace. The ring of guards waved her through, and she walked along a gravel path, the stones crunching in a soothing manner under her boots. She walked alone out here as twilight lowered down over the city and the palace. In its own way, in the three days since they had arrived in Jeds, this area had become even more interdicted than Cara’s laboratory. Not a soul stirred. Behind her, the line of guards was marked by an occasional torch and, here and there, a good blazing campfire.

The tent stood on a flat sward of grass, surrounded by a bower of trees and two desiccated beds of flowers. Ilya refused to sleep inside walls of stone. It had never bothered him before.

Tess halted on the edge of the sward and examined the tent. The gold banner fluttered weakly and sagged. Far away, barely audible, Tess heard the shush and sough of the waters on the rocks that buttressed the palace on its seaward front. The awning faced her, the entrance flap thrown open so that she could see into the tent. A single figure sat at the table, a lantern burning by his left hand and another hanging from the pole above. He seemed to be reading, but he was just distant enough that she could not make out the details.

The wind picked up again, a warming front that fragmented the cold haze that had hung over the city for the last three days. Branches shorn of leaves reached into the darkening sky, black lines etched into a night-blue heaven. They shivered in the wind, shuddering against each other. Like veins, they marked patterns onto the sky, pierced by the first stars.

Like a web. Tess blinked, and her implant triggered. She glanced around, once, as she always did, to make sure she was alone.

“Run Sakhalin transcript. Seek mention of transport codes delivered in tripartite sequences.” As she waited she was caught by another thought, a detail Sonia had mentioned in passing. “Open a second screen and transfer Sakhalin’s description of the emperor.” It came up simultaneously with an excruciatingly detailed documentation of transport codes, and Tess had to adjust her focus, dropping her gaze down to the ground, which provided a more uniformly dark backdrop, although the divided screen she read from provided its own transcript.

He sat in a throne. He was almost joined to it, as if part of a web, filaments linking his body to the stone that made up the throne itself.

“Cut in Sojourner transcript, also referenced to tripartite sequences.” The sudden swirl of figures fighting the ground and the gentle sway of branches made her dizzy. She put up a hand to cover the trees and the tent, so they wouldn’t distract her, and concentrated on the disembodied screen suspended in front of her.

Three sequences recorded by the relay stations as ships traveled through. One went to the public record: That was clear enough. One went to the house record, and that made sense; a ship might reserve information for its own affiliates that it would not want to transmit as public knowledge. But the third sequence, the highest level of encryption, went to an unknown destination.

She shifted her focus back to the screen detailing Sakhalin’s visit to the emperor. The emperor, who sat connected to his throne by filamentlike threads. Anatoly Sakhalin had seen this female who called herself Genji in his window visions, as if she was tracking his progress as he traveled across the empire. Ilyana Arkhanov, their under-aged spy in Genji’s Chapalii household, had seen Genji connected, also with filamentlike threads, to a chair, which could be a kind of console.

What if the emperor could travel the web? What if the emperor was tapped into the entire Empire, not like a brain, but like the switching board through which most information passed? Everywhere and nowhere. Everyone and no one. He would no longer be a true individual. Like the ke, he would be nameless, because he would be everywhere. It was like a metaphor: his body represented the Empire, just as, according to the Arkhanov transcript appended onto Sakhalin’s transcript, the net itself might be the body of the Empire.

Nets could be cut. Like Ilya’s mind, the threads severed at random intersections by the stress of his captivity.

If they could cripple the web, they could cripple the Empire. If they could cripple the Empire, they might be strong enough to simply take their freedom or at least to bargain for it while the Empire was weakened.

And Anatoly Sakhalin was now perfectly placed to set out the pieces and begin to move them. It would have taken Charles years to get the information Anatoly had so blithely included in this transcript; if Charles, the Tai-en, could even have gotten it at all. Anatoly was restricted, as far as Tess could tell, only by his willingness to throw himself into the fray and his ability to outface the Chapalii at their own game, once he had figured out how to play it. For the former, she could not guess whether he would choose to support independence or promote his own interests; as for the latter, he had already done it. It was enough to make you laugh, the sheer audacity of presenting himself as a true prince—whatever the hell that meant—to the Chapalii emperor and to expect to be honored as such. To succeed.

Could Ilya have done it? Oh, gods, was she doubting him, now? Was he less than what she had once thought he was?

She blinked off the implant and walked forward. Ilya sat with two books open and a scroll opened and pinned down by an elbow and a hand. She stopped outside the entrance flap. He did not notice her. He was talking to himself.

“ ‘And a bright light appeared out of the darkest skies, and on this light He ascended to the heavens where His Father dwelt. To mark his passing, the glance of God’s Eye scorched the dirt where His feet took wing into the heavens.’ ”

He was reading out loud from one of the books; from the
Gospel of Elia
, the
Revelation.
She watched his gaze shift from the book to the scroll. He opened the scroll a bit farther by tugging his elbow down, unrolling the parchment, and sliding the scroll to the right so that the lantern light illuminated it better. His face was aglow in the light, his hair a patch of darkness shading into the shadows that filled the rest of the chamber, surrounding him with night.

“ ‘So will the light…the lantern…the
torch
of God fall to earth…” He worried at his lower lip with his teeth as he squinted at the scroll, translating it. Tess could not see what language it was written in. “
Descend
to earth. From the stars. From the
wandering
stars.” He switched his attention to the second book. “No… No… Damn it.” He leafed through the pages, searching for a reference.

“ ‘Because the fixed stars are quiescent one in respect of another, we may consider the sun, earth, and planets, as one system of bodies carried hither and thither by various motions among themselves; and the common center of gravity…will be quiescent’… This is impossible.” With his right hand still immobilizing the scroll, he drew two other books toward him and flipped them open on top of the one he had just been looking in. “The realm of the fixed stars. The realm of the wandering stars.”

Tess got a chill. He was reading astronomical texts. After a moment he shifted back to the scroll.

“The mysteries of the wandering stars are these: That they come in two types. The first are the chariots by which the angels sail upon, sail? Ride? Drive? Travel upon the roads that lead through the heavens, borne on the wings of the south wind. The second are the gates to the dwelling places of the angels. Dwelling places…palaces…no, more like a park or garden. Then why wouldn’t the fixed stars be the gardens and the wandering stars the chariots?” He
was
talking to himself. He pulled the topmost book toward him, one of the new books.

“ ‘In this fashion the sun and the sphere of the fixed stars remain unmoved, while the earth and the wandering stars revolve about the unmoving sun in a series of circles, each nested inside the other.’ ” He flipped pages further, losing his grip on the scroll, which rolled up against his fingers. “ ‘Suppose a man lived in the heavens and he was carried along by their motion, and looking down he saw the earth and its mountains and valleys and rivers and cities, as far above as angels, might it not appear then to him that the earth moved? Just as it appears to us that the heavens move. Unable to stand in the heavens, we can only stand on the earth and make our judgment.’ ”

Running a hand through his hair, he shoved that book aside and pulled the last one closer to him. “ ‘You know from astrological computation that the whole circumference of the earth is no more than a pinpoint when contrasted to the space of the heavens… The man who recklessly strives for glory and counts it his highest goal should consider the far-reaching shores of heaven and the narrow confines of earth.’ ”

Abruptly, his expression changed. He flung the book against the wall, but it only fell to the floor with a soft thud, having nothing hard to impact. He had lost his hold on the scroll. Turning to stop it from rolling up completely, he saw Tess.

At once, he looked guilty. Or he would have looked guilty, if the jaran had a concept of sin. She stepped into the tent. He closed the three books and was about to get up when she forestalled him by skirting the table and picking up the book he had thrown.

“
The Consolation of Philosophy
? Ilya …”

“Give it to me,” he snapped, and because he was in a mood, she handed it over without protest.

But she could not help trying to read the gold letters labeling the spines of the others. “
On The Nature of the Heavens.
The
Principia
?”

He opened his saddle bags and stuffed the books inside them. Then he rolled the scroll up carefully.

“What is that?”

“It is an old text from Byblos, that I took from the university today. It is called
The Mysteries of Elia
, but no one knows if it is the same Elia who has written the gospel in
The Recitation
, or another Elia. There is some debate. You know how scholars are.” He did not offer to let her look at it, which was strange of itself.

“What are you looking for?” she asked, although she already knew the answer.

He tied the scroll with a bit of string, slid it into a case, and shoved it into the saddlebag before he straightened up and looked at her. The light had the odd trick of making him look even younger—and he already looked younger than his years. “I will let you know, when I find it.”

He said it so dismissively that Tess winced. He did not seem to notice. He rose and untied the flap, pulling it closed. The sky, the trees, the stars, all vanished, and they stood, the two of them, alone in the enclosed chamber, which seemed very small, now, and dim, lit only by the two lanterns.

He kept his gaze fixed on the flap, as though he could see through it to the outside world. “In White Tower they kept me chained at night when I slept. Always. I can still feel the shackles.”

“Ilya,” she began, knowing that the time had come. There was no putting it off any longer. He had already begun. It was up to her to lead him the rest of the way. “For a long time now I have been trying to think of a way to tell you—”

He whirled. The expression on his face struck her to silence. But he spoke, his voice so low she had to strain to hear it.

“I want nothing given to me, Tess. Do you understand?” He began to pace, agitated. “I am not a slave to be led about in chains, to be cosseted with sweetmeats and pats on the head so that I can pretend that nothing shackles me. If the gods have spoken through me, then let them speak. Let me obey the vision they have sent me and not question it.”

“What is this, then?” she demanded, gesturing toward the saddlebag bursting with books. Books he did not intend to let her see.

“What the gods wish me to know they will allow me to discover on my own.”

“Ah, gods,” Tess said under her breath, watching him cross to the entrance and twitch the flap aside to look out, up, at the trees or the heavens or the dark outline of the palace she could not be sure. But she knew at that moment that if she handed him a book open to the page where the answers were written, he would close it and hand it back without reading it.

What Sonia had embraced, Ilya turned his back on.

But then her gaze caught on the saddlebags, on the tip of the scroll, which he had evidently kidnapped from the university. It was not truly knowledge that Ilya had turned his back on. Ilya allowed his gods to act through him, but no one else. Not even her. He would rather knowingly remain ignorant than learn that he was just another pawn in a greater game. That was the lesson he had learned from Prince Janos, that he could not bear to be anyone less than the king.

Unlike Charles, he could not reshape his life to a new path. That was his great weakness.

Finally he turned to look at her and smiled, almost shyly, testing the waters. “I will send a messenger north to Sarai,” he said. “Sonia can arrange for someone to escort Natalia and Yurinya by ship here, when the winds shift.”

Tess started, being perfectly able to feel guilty. “Yes. We hadn’t talked yet about how long we might stay in Jeds.”

“Filis must be conquered, once and for all, and Vasha settled safely in Mircassia. We must stay at least until those campaigns are over.” His gaze strayed toward the saddlebags, but he did not add that he evidently had pressing business at the university.