SLOW AND STEADY, the Adda floated across the endless topography. In their haphazard drift, they had long since parted company with the other Adda that had launched at the same time, though now and again they spied one floating far away, its ladder hanging like the tail of a kite.
After the immense prairies, they crossed regions of stone up-crops, and abysmal chasms where the ground had split. Although no tectonic forces shaped this world, Anzi said that the nearer to the storm walls, the more that shocks split and shaped the land. It made her uncomfortable to talk of the walls—the bulwarks that sheltered this world in a necessary but violent embrace.
Bags of feed gradually disappeared up the Adda's feeding tubes. At times Quinn rode on the ladder, inhaling the clove-scented air. He missed seeing the horizon and the sky, where the Entire's soothing aspect was more profound. Huddled inside the Adda's pouch, his thoughts drifted to his betrayal of Johanna. He wondered, not for the first time, if the peace of the Entire so overtook him the last time that he'd lost himself, and if that peace might again rob him of his will. But no. This time, he was going into the thick of it.
The Adda bore them onward through a heavy fog. In the Entire, fog was the usual form of precipitation, sometimes so thick the condensation rained from the ladder. The Adda absorbed the humidity, and her tissues temporarily swelled throughout the cavity. Among the other things Quinn learned about the Adda were her riders’ innovations in relieving themselves: the ladder partially folded up into a reasonable seat to cover the entrance orifice. It became the privy when sitting was called for.
Quinn had come to the end of his scrolls, and to pass the time, Anzi told tales and histories—of the five ages of the Entire, including the First Age when the lords lived in their original realm of the Heart, and the subsequent ages of building lands and creating sentients. There were stories of the manifesting of animal life from many different Rose templates—true stories of when and how such things occurred. She also recounted mythological tales of creatures like dragons—a tale from Earth, she conceded—and stories from other worlds, such as the myth of the river walkers that crept along, hanging upside down from the surface of the Nigh.
She also told stories of the Long War, and the warrior traditions of the Chalin. Anzi was an expert fighter because she expected to go as a soldier someday, when Yulin decided she should bolster the ranks of conscripts from his sway. The Entire military traditions were as old as the famous Paion Incursion, happening at a period that Quinn thought of as six thousand years ago, but expressed by Anzi as seven archons ago, each archon a span of three hundred thousand days. A thousand years later the Long War began in earnest.
Except for the Incursion, which occurred in the Long Gaze of Fire, the primacy where the Inyx dwelled, Paion attacked only one primacy, the one they were now in, and in only one place, at Ahnenhoon. If, as Anzi believed, they were not from the Entire, then their accuracy in returning to Ahnenhoon was worth noting. Here were beings who might know at least something of the correlates. But Anzi thought not.
“They aren't of the Rose. They're from elsewhere.”
“Where else is there?” It was a startling question. Where indeed?
“Between,” Anzi said. “Realms between.”
“What lies between?”
But she gave the standard response: “No one ever knows.”
It left him musing about other regions beyond his cosmos and hers. No reason that there should be only two...
In the direction of the Nigh, a black tidal wave grew. They were approaching the other side of the Entire, with its storm wall. Here there were no minorals or nascences—all chased away, as Anzi put it, by the great river that was not a river. The heartchime throbbed against his chest. Drawing it out, he put it to his ear, wondering at the evolving tone that proclaimed the proximity of the bright city. He prayed to be there only a short while, to pass Cixi's scrutiny and have her endorsement of his Inyx mission. With this in hand, his disguise would be perfect, only to be shed once Sydney's escape raised an alarm. He had already planned how they would camouflage themselves then: as godmen. Who would take note of two castaways of the Miserable God?
So he would come home with two prizes of inestimable value: the correlates if he was fortunate, and Sydney.
Wait for me, he sent to her, as if thoughts could journey and arrive intact.
The time came when the bags of seed were depleted and they had arrived on the banks of the Nigh. The Adda went to ground, allowing them to climb down the ladder. The creature was quick to depart, having failed to attract a seed-bearing rider here, and disliking to linger near the perpetual storm of the wall.
The height of the storm wall was sickening. It looked like it couldn't stand, that it was already falling. It seemed wrong that the Entire was contained and defended by such chaos. In the distance, at the foot of the wall, the River Nigh streamed in a coarse blaze. Between him and the river's edge was a transitional marsh, with pools of reflective river matter.
The smell of ozone flooded across Quinn's mouth. The blue-black undulations of the wall were very close, and air turbulence rippled clothes and tents. A small crowd of travelers—some sentients he hadn't seen before— were scattered at the edge of the marsh waiting for a boat. They kept their gazes averted from the wall, tending cook fires with flames that flowed unnaturally, in greasy slicks. Between tide pools, tendrils spread out like dendrites.
Anzi warned against stepping in the pools. “Suzong told me that a small girl of the court traveling here with her parents fell in the river. She lived, but she never talked again.”
Since Anzi had never traveled on the Nigh, all that she could tell Quinn about the river was what she had been told. She was no physicist, to talk of space-time or temporal and spatial turbulence. Nor was he, for that matter. But one thing Bei had told him: Travel on the Nigh was not faster than light; there would be no time-dilation effects. In creating the Nigh, the Tarig used a technology far beyond what humans knew.
The river made it possible to traverse the primacy from end reach to heartland. Along the lengths of the primacy were the Empty Lands that corresponded, Quinn felt, to interstellar space. These lands were solid ground only in a conceptual sense, and not according to everyday logic. Sometimes everyday logic didn't apply, as with Einstein's explanations of gravity and relativity. Long ago a mathematician had said, “In mathematics you don't understand things, you just get used to them.” Quinn—the new Quinn—was getting used to the Entire.
They had just kindled a fire to cook supper when the crowds stirred. The travelers pointed out toward the Nigh.
A boat was coming. It was no more than a small blot skimming across the marshlands until it stopped some hundred yards off, hovering slightly above the ground. It looked very much like a small ship, except that it had a funnel in front that Anzi said served to collect river matter for fuel. In the center of a surrounding deck was a passenger cabin crowned by a smaller upper deck. Even as he and Anzi hurried in its direction, they saw a person on the prow, standing and waiting.
“The navitar?” Quinn asked Anzi as they hurried.
“No, Dai Shen, that's an Ysli, the servant of the navitar.”
Quinn hadn't yet seen this manner of sentient, and watched with interest as the boat approached.
The Ysli was short and apelike, with a bare snout, and eyes peering from shaggy hair. It was difficult to think of it as sentient because it wore no clothes, but in fact the Ysli's eyes were alight with intelligence as it surveyed the crowd now massing before the ship. The navitars were utterly dependent on the hired servants, since they were incapable of mundane tasks. The individuals that gave themselves over to navigating the Nigh had abandoned extraneous capacities for the sake of a Tarig enhancement: to guide ships by sensing the fundamental forces underlying the Entire. The navitars do not know what we know, Anzi had said. They know different things.
Suddenly Anzi was pulling on his sleeve. “Don't take notice,” she warned. “Tarig.”
“Where?” He turned, spying a tall figure in his peripheral vision. And more: he smelled the Tarig. He had been close to a Tarig in the Adda, but the yeasty smells of the sinuses had cloaked other scents. Now, the smell came strongly, like burned sugar; not unpleasant by itself, but overlain with old emotions.
The Tarig was making its way toward the ship. The crowd parted amid bowing and murmurs of Gracious One. Anzi tensed and pushed Quinn ahead of her. She was nervous that she had lied to the Tarig earlier, nervous that they were searching for Wen An, that they knew the name of the person who'd first helped Quinn.
Now the Tarig stood next to them looking at the Ysli, who bowed but seemed unimpressed amid his other concerns of who should board and who should not. The Tarig wore a sleeveless tunic that revealed glistening arm muscles. Quinn was acutely aware of the creature, but avoided looking, most of all, into her eyes. It was a her. He could smell this. He could also smell Anzi's sweat, her fear.
The Tarig turned to Quinn. “We do not know you.”
Quinn turned to her, gazing into her black eyes. “Dai Shen of Master Yulin's household, Bright One,” he said, in his best unaccented Lucent tongue.
“Ah. Inyx matters,” the rich voice murmured.
It chilled him that the Tarig knew this, although it was their prepared story. That she had called attention to Inyx, the very heart of the matter, worried him.
“Yes, Lady.”
At that moment the Ysli screeched to the crowd, “Where bound?”
Shouts of destinations greeted this question, and among them, Anzi's cry of “The Ascendancy!”
The Tarig looked over Quinn's head, scanning the crowds, alert. It was unnerving that the creature could look over his head. Then she said: “Ascendancy bound, then. Good.” She fixed her gaze on a nearby Chalin man. “And you, going where?”
The Tarig brushed past Quinn, trailing her scent, like sugar gone wrong. Anzi was pulling on Quinn's arm, dragging him to the ship.
Spying her, the Ysli asked, “Number traveling?”
“Two.”
The Ysli beckoned, releasing a movable stairway that spanned a pool of river matter.
Anzi and Quinn pushed through the remaining crowd and boarded. Anzi murmured at him, “The Tarig dismissed us because the guilty do not travel to the Ascendancy.” Quinn couldn't resist looking behind him, toward the Tarig. She was watching him. He cursed himself for looking. Then, glancing at the upper deck, Quinn saw a reddish blur where something moved inside darkened windows.
Behind Quinn and Anzi came a Chalin, weighed down by boxes roped to his back. The Ysli directed him and his luggage into the cabin, where, perspiring and panting, he accepted Quinn's help in lowering them onto the deck.
“Careful!” he said. “Meant for the legate, you oaf.” He waved at the baggage. “It's all written down, for the eyes of the legate Min Fe and the consul Shi Zu.” He eyed his fellow travelers to reinforce the importance of these names.
Through the window Anzi watched the Tarig as the man went on: “Min Fe must have everything in a hurry so it can sit in piles while he does not read it.” He shook his head, looking at the central cabin that they must all share. “I don't know where you intend to sleep, but not on my trunks, thank you.”
The Ysli frowned. “Talks too much,” he chittered. Then he went aft, ambling past the companionway that led to the upper deck. He disappeared into the small aft cabin, and soon the vessel was under way, purring as it gathered speed over the marsh.
Despite his concern for his trunks, the man sat on one and wiped his brow with a silken cloth. He was slight of build and of that maddening middle and indeterminate age of the Chalin, who seemed to be thirty for most of their lives. “I am Cho, steward of the high clarities.” He seemed unperturbed by the recent presence of the Tarig, a being he must have grown accustomed to in his duties. “And who might you be?”
Quinn and Anzi introduced themselves.
When Cho heard Dai Shen of the Long War and Master Yulin's household, he stood up in alarm. “Of the household of Master Yulin? Of the Long War?” He bowed. “Pardon. You must pardon. Born in a minoral. Inexcusable ignorance.” He bowed again. “You are great personages, then. I am only a steward. You may sleep on my trunks. Pick as you like.” He bowed again.
Quinn said, “Only distantly of the master's household. A minor soldier of Ahnenhoon. I take no notice.”
Cho shook his head. “I am honored, even so. Allow me to serve you, of course.” He seemed unable to decide to sit down again.
Anzi intervened: “It would be agreeable if you would consider us simply fellow travelers, until we arrive in the Ascendancy. There we must wear our distinctions. Not here.”
Cho nodded gratefully. “Just so. In the bright city you will speak to the legates directly, even to the high prefect herself?” He snaked a look at them. “But fellow travelers, yes. I would be honored, naturally.” He shook his head, murmuring, “A simple steward with great personages.”
From the upper deck, a warbling voice cried out: “Ahh, Ascendancy ways can be opened. Bind the travelers to me. Scatter the lines. Scatter…. ”
Cho looked at the ceiling. “The navitar. It's all nonsense, pay no attention.” But he looked nervously at the stairs to the upper deck. “Her name is Ghoris. I have traveled with that one before. Very good pilot, I assure you.”
From the aft cabin, amid slamming of cookware, glorious smells of cooking began filling the cabin. Despite having just seen a Tarig an arm's length away, Quinn was settling down enough to be hungry. But soon the Ysli climbed up the companionway carrying platters laden with soups and dumplings and baskets of unguessed-at delicacies. Soon the Ysli was cleaning the galley. It seemed that, for the others, supper was not in the offing.
Cho sat back, deflated. “We must feed Ghoris, or she won't last through the binds.”
They were on the river. Through the windows on one side was sheer dark, where the junction of storm wall and river boiled. On the other side of the boat, the river lay thick and flat like mercury, sucking into eddies here and there, but otherwise smooth and empty of other craft. Quinn felt a heaviness grow in his stomach, and his mind dulled.
At last the Ysli brought down the platters with their remnants and set them out on Cho's crates, where the Chalin steward tucked in with relish. But Quinn had lost his appetite, as had Anzi.
Finishing his meal, Cho looked at his traveling companions. “Sleep is the only thing now. I have been on the Nigh a dozen times, and each time I am sicker than the last.” He made a bed among his boxes and lay down.
As they sailed closer to the storm wall, a bluish light infused the ship, and the nausea that Quinn had first experienced at the minoral returned. Anzi leaned against the bulkhead, closing her eyes. “Rest, Dai Shen,” she said. Her skin had taken on a bluish cast. “When the navitar goes through the knots, it's best to sleep.”
He'd already resolved he wouldn't sleep through this experience.
The ship shuddered. In the Ysli's galley, implements rattled. Looking down at his hands, Quinn thought they were not occupying just one space, but several. He watched them, intrigued. An undercurrent tried to sweep his thoughts away and pull him under. He fought it.
Beside him, Anzi and Cho were already asleep.
He looked outside. The river came halfway up the cabin windows. They were descending into the binds, an alarming sight. Just outside, he could see a strange creature. Walking along the river, but hanging upside down from the surface, was an animal with a number of legs, almost like a spider. River walker, he thought. But he couldn't be seeing it, because it was a mythological beast of the Entire. If you followed a river walker, it would lead you to oblivion in the binds. He turned his face away, muddy-headed.
The lights in the cabin blinked out.
Quinn walked, tottering, to the galley, peering in. He was going to ask the Ysli if he could fix the lights. In the corner was a hammock where the creature hung in a lump. From the galley windows Quinn saw that they were now fathoms deep in the Nigh. It was not water out there, but a more vital medium, exuding its own dull light and pierced by icicles of lightning. Turning to the other side of the galley, Quinn saw a similar view. The vessel shook again, rattling the galley wares.
Quinn caught a glimpse of light outside the galley door. He saw that the companionway was lit, spilling light from above. His mind was crawling.
The door narrowed and then bulged out. Belly churning, Quinn steadied himself against the galley counters and walked toward the light from the companionway. As he came to the first step, it moved farther away, but when he took a step up, he had gone halfway up.
At the top, he faced an oblong room with a dais at one end. The ceiling was of a membranous material like the veil-of-worlds. On the dais sat Ghoris the navitar, her head quite close to the ceiling.
Dressed in a red caftan, her body was of an indeterminate shape and size. Her white hair hung loose, flowing around her chest. She pointed at him, the end of her finger coming closer than he thought possible. Then he saw that she was moving her hands in front of her, without reference to him. She was conducting. She opened and closed her mouth, over and over again
“See the twist, there,” she said in a shredded voice. Her wrist turned, and she smiled beatifically. “See, traveler, do you see?”
“The lights went out,” he found himself saying, wondering if it made any sense.
The navitar's hands were pudgy, as though her muscles had all gone to skin and gristle. She looked down at them, her face doughy and rounded.
“It is not light; it is the fundament. Yesss.” Her eyes closed, but her hands played in front of her. “There are thirty-six, and some are paired. Then eight fields and all the generations. Coming in now. To my hands.” She picked one out of the air, bringing it to one side.
She continued, her voice a gargle: “To make them a family. Combining them, creating a structure, from which we know what we know. Yesss, the symmetry of it. Gone are the anomalies. Coming to my hands, the complete set of symmetries, yes.” She opened her eyes, sweeping her gaze over him, never quite focusing. “You cannot see them. Light is what you see. It is not light. That is the surface of one thing. Being what you are, it is your mistake. You have all agreed on the world, to keep from going mad.”
Madness was more a term he would have applied to her. That, or savant.
“Traveler, what holds it all together?” she said, as though teaching a pupil.
“Holds what, Navitar?”
She gestured around her. “All. What keeps it from collapsing? Think of the—ahh, the cosmos. What keeps it from succumbing to its own weight? Because it is flying apart, do you perceive? But the Entire does not move, in your plane of life. Think on this, most carefully. In your ignorance, you answer that the storm walls resist collapse. But what powers the great storm? What is its energy? That is something even you can know.”
In his plodding logic he said, “The Tarig power it.”
Ghoris sighed. “Poor under-sentient.” Her attention moved to a point just over his head. “The lines,” she whispered. Opening her mouth, she stared as though she was trying to smell the lines. Quinn opened his own mouth, letting the air move over his Jacobson's organ. He thought he could smell them.
“What—,” he began.
“No speaking! It frays, frays.”
She was looking directly over his head. “Traveler, you are the knot. Things converge in you. It will make our journey much harder.”
She began to move her hands more quickly, as though dealing with a tangle of invisible yarn. “All the lines converge. You are looking, looking. Yes. Finding things you never looked for, losing all that you sought. I see. I see her, too. She is at your side. A tangle of lines also. Ah yessss.”
“Who?” Quinn whispered. “Who do you see?” He believed her. That she saw things in the lines.
The navitar's heavy face fell slack for a moment. She shook her head. “Her knot is at the center of things. You are there, but her lines are, yes, strong.”
He fumbled in his pocket for the pictures. Grabbing the picture of Sydney, he thrust it toward the navitar. “Is this who you see? Tell me.”
She glanced at the picture, then stood abruptly. Pulling a fastener at her neck, she stood up, and her caftan fell around her waist. She stood tall, pushing into the membrane, distorting it, and then puncturing it with her head, standing as though decapitated. She brought her hands up through the membrane.
He looked at her fleshy body, her breasts like deflated balloons on her chest.
Poor creature. Fire, oh fire. He heard her voice inside his head now. Lost. Her strings are cut. In all the worlds. After a moment she sat down as, over her head, the membrane closed up. Her hair hung in ropes, curling and wet. Closing her eyes, she whispered, “Gone to fire.”
Quinn was stricken by her words. “My Sydney,” he murmured.
The navitar's eyes blinked open. She growled, “That is not her name.”
From her sitting position the navitar began conducting the lines again. She reached out her hands in his direction, grabbing the air, curling her fingers, and drawing the lines close to her chest, forcibly pulling him in her direction. He staggered to the foot of the dais, where he fell to his knees.
Pointing up with a finger, she said, “Look up!”
He did so. The sky was stitched with needles, stabbing down, retreating up, like an aurora borealis made of knives.
She moaned, “You have many lives. I have many lives; all are up there.” She shook her head, flapping her heavy jowls. “But you cannot see.”
“No,” he admitted, devastated. He was both very emotional and fending off sleep with all his strength.
She rose up again, plunging through the membrane. She swayed, as though buffeted by exotic winds. He heard in the back of his mind: I see your lives, your knotted lives. It twists, oh twists. But which world is it? He could see her blurred image above him as she waved her hands above her, where knives of light slashed down and gathered in her fists, making her look like a goddess of lightning. I see the world collapsing, the fire descending. I see a burning rose. Oh so beautiful, so dead. They do not combine; they do not have symmetry. One excludes the other; both cannot be true. The rose burns, and the All flies apart. Choose, Titus, choose.
He whispered, “What must I choose?”
The navitar suddenly crouched down and squatted over him, her face slimed with mercury. Her thoughts came to him: Your heart.
She was silent for a long while, hanging her head in exhaustion. Then she picked up eight or nine threads—this time Quinn could see them, spiraling filaments that came from thin air into her fingers—and, tugging on them, she thrust her upper body and hands into the sky. As she did so, the ship's prow fell into a long well, and Quinn fell forward, onto the soft and puffy wood deck.
Sleep sucked him down.
Quinn opened his eyes a crack, just wide enough to see the Ysli's pinched face scowling down at him.
Someone was saying, “We're here, after all. And Dai Shen is the only sick one, when I thought it would be me.” Cho's voice.
Quinn came fully awake in a room filled with an eye-stinging light.
Anzi hovered anxiously. “You went up, but why Dai Shen?”
The Ysli chittered. “Sleeping. You should all have been.”
Sitting up, Quinn said, “The lights went out. I went looking for light.”
The Ysli's face crumpled into a deep frown. “No light in the binds.” Then he brought forward a crumpled photo, thrusting it into Quinn's hand. Without another word, he left them, retreating to his galley.
“Are you all right?” Anzi asked.
Quinn nodded. His stomach felt grease-laden and his head ached, but he was in one piece. He flattened the photo out. It was a pale wash of film, now so faded that he could hardly see the image. But, unmistakably, it wasn't Sydney.
Not his daughter. It was his wife. The photo he had inadvertently shown to the navitar was Johanna. Ghoris had been talking about Johanna. Poor creature. Her strings are cut in all the worlds. On the upper deck he had understood what that meant, but now it was not so clear. He must have one more interview with the pilot.
As Cho, struggling with his trunks, left the cabin, Quinn whispered to Anzi, “The navitar—she said that—”
“Said what?”
“Things will burn. Fly apart.”
“Her type is half-mad,” Anzi said. But she looked alarmed.
“She said the lines—the lines she sees as events, that they converge in me. In Johanna.” He jerked to his feet and confronted the Ysli. “I would bid farewell to the pilot.”
“Leave,” the Ysli squawked, standing in front of the companionway.
A noise drew Quinn's attention. Looking up, he saw that the closed door at the top of the stairs shook in its frame.
“Let me speak to her,” Quinn said. From the upper deck came a whimpering noise.
The Ysli's face contorted. “The navitar is unwell.”
In proof of these words, the foul smell of excrement came from behind the doorway, hitting Quinn's sense organs in a wave of revulsion.
The navitar was paying the price for seeing things. No wonder she was mad; if the river played with space-time, perhaps she sometimes observed effects before the cause. He wondered how the madness and suffering could be worth it. But then, he didn't know what she saw, and thought that, quite possibly, it was everything.
He took a last glance at the companionway and nodded to the Ysli. He'd never let Quinn upstairs now, and quite possibly Ghoris was rendered helpless at the moment. Quinn picked up his satchel and followed Anzi onto the deck.
As he stepped out and looked around him, the world fell away.
With his focus on the navitar, Quinn hadn't registered the fact that they were here.
At the Ascendancy.
It was a view to stagger the mind. The boat was tied to a floating dock amid a mercurial sea, vast in all directions. Pillars of exotic matter extended from the sea to a distant structure overhead, tiny at this distance of some thirty thousand feet. However, it was, Quinn knew, an enormous habitat containing the impregnable mansions of the Tarig.
Of course, the pillars didn't hold up the city. Rather, they supported the Entire by replenishing the exotic matter of the sea and the great rivers of the primacies. On either side of him and far away, Quinn saw the storm walls of the primacy converging on the great sea. Closer, the great Rim City stretched out, hugging the shore and forming a profoundly long and narrow metropolis connected by the instant transport of the navitars.
Amid a small crowd, he and Anzi were shuffling toward the center of the dock, where a gatekeeper metered the flow of travelers. As they had planned, they would give their names, which had been sent ahead by Yulin from an axis communication node. The Chalin sway was not forbiddingly distant from the heartland, and, for this reason, timely communication to and from the Ascendancy was possible, although limited to the speed of light.
Quinn lifted the end of Cho's trunk from the man's back, to help him.
“Many thanks, Excellency!” Cho huffed. “I could have brought all this in redstones, but Min Fe will have his paper.” He lowered the trunk to the dock with Quinn's help as they waited for a Chalin legate to check them through.
Anzi was staring at the view above her.
“Born in a minoral?” Quinn asked, grinning.
Her cheeks flushed. “I...I was,” she said, giving up on pride. “I never saw such a sight.”
Nor had he. The last time he'd come here, it was by the bright. But he knew there was only one other sight to match this one in all the worlds. And that was at the top.
It was time to leave his photos behind. He had agreed that they were too dangerous to take to the bright city, but now that it was time to discard them in the sea, he hesitated. They had been his traveling companions as much as Anzi had. And although the photos were bleached to ghosts, his heart had supplied what was missing. At last he knelt on the dock and let them fall. When they lit on the water's surface, the images seemed to come back. As they floated a moment, he saw Sydney in acute detail, and for a moment it seemed that she was a young woman grown, with blighted eyes….
Anzi was at his side, gently pulling him away. They stood in line. He wished he'd put the pictures in the water one at a time so he could have seen Johanna, and what the lens of the sea would have shown him, or the lens of his imagination.
The line inched forward. Anzi was giving her name to the legate. Ahead, shimmering in the streaming pillar and meant to ascend in it, was a spacious elevator capsule with its door open. Quinn tried to shake the uneasiness of being in close contact with a material as dangerous as river matter; but others seemed unconcerned. The capsule created a region of safety.
Something was amiss. Anzi was saying, “A mistake, surely. I have been sent by the master of the great sway.”
The Chalin legate was shaking his head. He looked at Quinn, scowling. “You are Dai Shen, to see the high prefect?” Quinn nodded. “Then you have leave,” the legate said, “and no one further, of Master Yulin's sway.”
The legate tried unsuccessfully to wave Quinn past. Anzi went on, “We have a clarity of great importance, and I will help present it to the high prefect, for the sake of the realm.”
The legate turned a stark gaze on her. “No, you will not. One named Dai Shen has leave to ascend.” He turned to Anzi. “Wait here for him if you wish, and if you don't mind sleeping on the dock.”
Cho was watching this exchange with consternation. He had already passed through the checkpoint and was ready to board the elevator, but now he came back. “I can vouch for the woman,” he said. “A very high personage, and so forth. Charming, with important connections to the Yulin household, I assure you.”
The legate turned a withering glance on him. “Do I need help from a steward?”
Cho backed away, murmuring, “No, no, pardon.”
“I don't ascend without her,” Quinn said, stepping closer to the legate.
“None of my concern,” the man answered. “Who is next, with approvals in order?”
People pressed in from behind. Quinn stepped out of line, going to Anzi.
“No, Shen,” she said. “You know all that you need to know. You are all that you need to be. Without me.”
“I need you with me, Anzi.”
Her mouth formed the word no. He had the sinking feeling that she was going to leave him.
She pulled him toward the edge of the dock, where the mercurial sea lapped up against immortal pilings. “Shen, you will succeed without me. You have the redstones; you have your story.”
“We've been together all this way, Anzi. I'm not sure I can do this without you.”
Now her face had grown stubborn. “Yes you can. Despite what my uncle thinks, I believe you can succeed at the Inyx sway. You can earn back this daughter.”
Unexpectedly, and at the mention of his daughter, he found he couldn't speak.
Anzi nodded. “You'll love your daughter finally, and enough.”
They stood looking at each other. The dock seemed bleak indeed, and its views more daunting than before. “You know what I was,” Quinn said in a low voice. “All that I did and didn't do—before.”
“Yes. But you remember Ci Dehai's wisdom? The river runs forward. We are what we will be. I have to believe this. So I can be good in my own view.”
“Anzi, come with me. We'll make this legate listen.” The legate might be mistaken, it might be cleared up—his mind cast about for ways around the gatekeeper.
“No.” She put a hand on his arm and tightened her grip. “You're like that gatekeeper, Shen. You stand at the place where our worlds will cross, will mix. You'll have to choose how it will happen—who will win and who will suffer.”
“I don't have that kind of power. If you only knew how little—”
She waved the response away. “Titus,” she whispered, “the navitar is right.”
She had used his true name. It gave him a shiver.
“Things converge in you. Because of who you are, because of Johanna, I don't know why. But you're a great man. Bei told me. The navitar says so. I believe. I've always believed.”
He turned away, looking at the sea, blindingly reflective. What Anzi said was true. Maybe he wouldn't control the gate. But it would come down to the question of where his loyalties lay: with this land that held his daughter, or the one where she used to reside. Rather than straddling the worlds, he would have to put both feet in one place. And he had no idea which place that would be. Even though he couldn't say exactly why—and when—he must choose; he knew that if he didn't, he would never stand on firm ground again.
The line of travelers was moving forward. Now and then the legate frowned at Quinn and Anzi. Cho waved from the elevator capsule, urging him to hurry.
There was no more time for conversation.
Anzi looked as though she wished to say more. As though she wanted to confess that she had feelings for him. He wanted that from her, but he had no right to hear it.
In a rush, he said, “Anzi, why are you so aloof? You say that you admire Rose passion, but you're composed, even now.”
She looked away. “Bei asked me to bind you to me—by intimate means. To win your loyalty to our world. So it became part of my honor not to.”
He looked at her, those features that had become so familiar to him: ivory and white. Once so cold. “Anzi, I...”
She put her hand on his mouth. “Say nothing. Go.”
“You can't wait here,” he said.
“I'll take lodging in the Rim City. The first place I come to. You can find me when you're done, above. Make no more trouble here. Pass through, like the common thing that it is.” She gave him a small push, tense and urgent.
Quinn picked up his satchel, still thinking how to persuade the legate. But in the end, he knew that Anzi was right: making a scene would draw the kind of attention that they must, at all costs, avoid.
Quinn walked to the elevator, his stomach clenched, still casting about for a solution, but finding none. He turned around just as the doors began closing. He saw Anzi standing, the silver sea behind her, a smile on her face that he was ashamed to find he could not return. He lifted his hand in farewell.
The door closed.
At his side, he heard Cho exclaim, “Oh dear. That was ill luck. I wouldn't be surprised if Min Fe was behind it, may God look at him.” He sighed. “Politics.”
People found seats on benches. “Make way,” Cho spat at someone. “A personage must sit here.” Quinn was so stunned by the turn of events that he hardly registered the launch of the elevator. He sat next to Chalin officials who no doubt had made the trip many times.
There was no view in the cabin as they shot upward. Someone turned a spindle, pulling a filament from a spinning basket.
It would be a long ride.