The Law of Becoming: 4 (The Novels of the Jaran) (35 page)

Then Konstans spoke. “Why strike with your anger against the boy? We have enemies enough. Set us loose against them, and the gods will give us greater strength, greater riches, and many more people to rule. You need only to ask, ‘Which people?’ and I would tell you that the king of Mircassia and the prince of Filis alone prevent us from ruling all the lands between the plains and Jeds. Let us strike at them now and with such fury that they will scatter and run and beg to become our servants.”

There was a long silence.

Bakhtiian stirred finally. For the first time his gaze shifted away from Vasha. Vasha’s knees almost gave out. “It is past time for me to rejoin the army, and to call in Zvertkov’s army to join with Sakhalin’s in the attack against Mircassia and Filis. Between those two swords, the khaja will fall.” He paused. “The boy can go to Kirill Zvertkov, providing he behaves himself. He may ride with us southward until we meet up with Zvertkov’s jahar.”

He lifted a hand, to signal that the audience was over.

Vasha gaped. So casually came the reprieve. At first he was too stunned to feel anything. Hard on that came shame: Shame, that Katya had been right. Bakhtiian coddled him, in the wrong way, making things easy for him because, perhaps…well, how could he know why? A real father would have been less lenient.

But I will prove myself worthy
, he said, voicing the words soundlessly. Aware that the other men watched him, he accepted the pronouncement with a cool nod, turned without haste, and walked out of the tent on steady legs. But it was too much to have to face the crowd that greeted him outside.

Tess saved him, as usual.

“Come, Vasha. I want you and Stefan to attend me at Princess Rusudani’s tent.”

The thought of Rusudani calmed him at once. With her serene face and composed voice as a promise held before him, he could press through the assembly without quailing.

In the end, Tess did nothing more on that visit than establish the language Rusudani spoke, a dialect of the Yos language, confirm the princess’s pedigree, and listen politely while Rusudani, through Jaelle, begged leave to bring the word of her God to the attention of Bakhtiian and the elders and women of the jaran.

Vasha needed to do nothing but sit in respectful silence. Slowly the weight of tension sloughed off him. He was surprised by the revelation that he felt more at ease sitting here with khaja women than with the women of his own people.

F
ROM THE SHIP, ILYANA
and the rest of the company boarded a shuttle that took them down not to the surface but to a platform, like a thin sheet of glass, that floated high above Duke Naroshi’s palace. Stepping out from the interior of the shuttle, she felt exposed and dizzy. It was a long long way to the ground.

“This is amazing,” David ben Unbutu was saying to Maggie O’Neill. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Any idea how it levitates?” she asked nervously. About the size of a soccer field, the “plate” on which they stood seemed no thicker than a hand, and there were no railings along the sides.

“None. Goddess, if I only had access to their technology—”

Ilyana clutched Anton’s wrist with a strong grip and told Valentin in a voice made brusque by fear to pick Evdokia up. It was just the kind of awful accident that might happen, one of the children plunging off the side. To her right, Diana Brooke-Holt had already grabbed hold of both Evdi and Portia.

The air smelled funny, but it was breathable.

The palace spread out below and before them, but they were still nightside and all she saw were pinprick lights and vast contours of shadow. The platform glowed with a silver tinge that echoed distant clusters of subdued and delicate lights.

One of the actors whistled, low, marveling. “Can you tell how high up we are?”

“Pretty damned far.”

The musician Phillippe swore: “Tupping hells, I
hate
heights! Let me sit down!”

“Here, hold on to my legs,” said Hyacinth to Anatoly Sakhalin. Hyacinth lay down on his stomach and inched forward until he got to the edge.

“Oh, Goddess,” wailed Phillippe, sitting in the very center of the crowd, hair clutched in his hands. “Don’t
do
that, Hyacinth. You’re making me sick.”

Hyacinth grinned. Sticking his hand out, he groped forward with it, kept going until his shoulders and head were out over… nothing. “Yeah, yeah, you can pull me back now,” he said, laughing with nervous excitement. When Anatoly had dragged him a body’s length back, he sat up, smiling madly. “There seems to be a beacon, like a lighthouse, underneath us. But there’s nothing around or below the platform, no forcefield, nothing.”

Anatoly walked up to the edge of the platform, right up so that the tips of his boots edged the rim, and stared down into the gulf of air. Nipper shrieked and fainted. “He’s right,” said Anatoly calmly. “Is there some tool that can measure the space between air and land?”

No one spoke.

“Oh,” said Anatoly suddenly. “The
transit
,” He unclipped his hand-sized computer slate from his belt, keyed a command into it, and held it out. Ilyana caught in her breath. With his arm extended he seemed even less stable, as if the merest touch of breeze could push him over. Nipper revived, but catching sight of Anatoly poised as if to plummet, she began hyperventilating until, mercifully, the company medic rummaged through his bag and slapped a patch on her skin. Her head lolled back, and her breathing slowed.

Anatoly drew the slate in and puzzled out the letters on the screen. The pale light turned his hair to spun gold, and Ilyana saw his lips move, sounding out the terms. “One thousand three hundred and six meters.” He clipped the slate on his belt and stepped back.

The others had already clustered at the center, except for Hyacinth, on his knees an arm’s length behind Anatoly. Ilyana heard the group give a collective sigh, whether at Anatoly retreating from the brink or at the appalling height at which they now stood. Without warning, the shuttle retracted its landing ramp and banked away from the platform, stranding them there. Its leaving did not rock the flat surface at all. They watched it go until the darkness swallowed it up and the last red and blue lights were lost to distance.

“Damned lucky we can breathe the atmosphere,” said one of the women sardonically. Wind gusted and died and rose again more gently. A thin strip of cloud drifted beneath the platform. It was cool, but not cold. And it was weirdly quiet.

“Now what?” asked a lonely voice in the anxious silence. Ilyana counted thirty-eight people huddled in the middle of the platform. The silver light emanating from the platform lit them from below, gilding their forms. Most of them now looked toward David ben Unbutu and Maggie O’Neill, except for Phillippe and a handful of others who had their eyes shut.

M. Unbutu lifted his hands, palms up. “I don’t know. Charles was supposed to be here to meet us, and to, ah, formally present us to Duke Naroshi. We can’t enter the ducal house without the formal ‘crossing of borders,’ that’s the literal translation. It’s some kind of ceremony, although I don’t think retainers, like us, are truly introduced to a duke.”

There was a bit of tense laughter at this comment, which Maggie O’Neill followed up. “I’m not sure we actually exist as individuals to them,” she said.

A light flared on the ground. It rose and steadily approached them. One light resolved into four, four into the curve of a ship set off against stars and the pale glamour of clouds. Noiselessly, it slowed down, stopped, and drew up along one side of the platform. A hatch opened. Two figures stepped out, followed by a third. Ilyana sidestepped and yanked Anton along beside her. She had never seen Chapalii this close before.

“Anton, look, the one on the right. That’s Charles Soerensen.”

“Who?” Anton seemed more interested in Nipper, who was now snoring softly, than in the fantastic events taking place.

“Shhh! You idiot. The only human who has a place in the Chapalii court. Duke Charles.”

Ilyana had seen him before, of course, a sandy-haired man of medium height, except there was something oddly unsettling behind his unprepossessing appearance. Ilyana always had a feeling that, like the mythic creature called the basilisk, if he looked at you in the wrong way he would turn you to stone. He was the one person in the whole universe who she suspected her father was scared of.

The two Chapalii looked alike to her, tall, awkward, and angular, but she supposed that the one who stood next to Duke Charles must be the Chapalii duke. His skin was so pallid that he seemed to reflect back the muted light given off by the platform.

“Maggie,” said Duke Charles in a low voice. Maggie O’Neill stepped forward and handed Soerensen a rod. He ran a hand down it, as if his fingers were reading something carved into its surface.

“Tai-en,” he said, speaking in Anglais. “This is the manifest of my retainers, whom I pass into your hands for safekeeping while they sojourn in your lands.” He held out the rod. Duke Naroshi accepted it from him and replied in Chapalii, which Ilyana could not understand.

And that was that. Duke Charles walked over to Owen and Ginny, the leaders of the Company, and conferred with them briefly while the Chapalii duke waited, oblivious to his new companions. To her left, Ilyana saw her father inching by degrees closer to Duke Naroshi. She opened her mouth to say something, but Duke Charles broke away from Owen and Ginny and headed for the little ship, David ben Unbutu and Maggie O’Neill with him.

Without thinking, Ilyana tugged Anton along behind her as she followed them. Had she misunderstood? Was M. Unbutu leaving now? It was too awful to contemplate!

But Duke Charles paused in front of the hatch. “Good luck, David,” he said in a low voice. “You’ll transmit to Maggie once a day if you can manage it, otherwise through the regular communiques. What do you think?”

M. Unbutu grinned. “I think I’m going to die happy.” He kissed Maggie.

Duke Charles glanced back over the platform, caught sight of Ilyana, and gave her a brief nod before his gaze swept out, locked, and retreated back in again. “Hell.” Ilyana was shocked to hear his voice shaking. “I’m glad to get off of here. I
hate
heights.” He crossed over into the ship. Maggie followed him inside.

The hatch closed. Retreating, M. Unbutu waved at Ilyana to move back with him. The ship sighed away from the platform, banked, and headed up into the sky, which was lightening.

M. Unbutu smiled kindly at Ilyana and Anton. “Planetrise. I guess it should be some sight.”

“What’s planetrise?” asked Anton, but Ilyana hushed him and said, “but why did we have to come here, M. Unbutu?” She motioned toward the platform, where they hung in the air.

“We’re crossing the border, passing from one fiefdom to the other. This place is not quite in one domain or the other.”

“Oh. This platform is like a crossing place. But where is Duke Charles going now? I didn’t expect to see him here.”

“Look!” said Anton. Ilyana turned to see her father standing not five paces from Duke Naroshi, who seemed unaware of Vasil’s presence. But Anton was pointing toward the horizon. The smooth line of a luminescent ball nosed up over jagged hills. “Is that the sun?” he asked.

“No, silly,” said Ilyana. “That’s a planet. Isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said M. Unbutu. “We’re on one of its moons. One of the few things we know about this system is that this satellite has an erratic orbit around the planet, so I’d guess it’s practically impossible to calculate simple things like sunrise.”

“Moons don’t have atmosphere,” said Anton stubbornly.

“Yana!” Valentin sidled over, now carrying Evdi, who stared open-mouthed at the planet rising into the sky. “Look at that, will you!”

Bronze and ivory-colored bands girdled the planet, swirling together in thick stripes, and by its light Ilyana could see the suggestion of curves and planes on the ground below, the palace taking form as if light itself brought it into being. But the glory of the great planet was its magnificent rings. The rings stretched out as far again on either side as the planet’s diameter, so that the planet and rings together appeared monstrous.

“Oh, gee,” said Valentin, who was never awed by anything.

Even their father simply stood and stared, forgetting how close he stood to the Chapalii nobleman. Karolla, sitting, nursed the baby, but she glanced up at intervals to look, she who never truly looked at the khaja world, who had learned to avoid seeing it. The company whispered and exclaimed to each other in a reverent hush. The planet took so long to rise that Evdi fell asleep in Valentin’s arms.

A sharper light caught and splintered over the horizon, and the sun rose. It was bright, bluish-white, and small, disappointing compared to the huge planet. But the sun and the reflected light of the planet combined to bring dawn.

Ilyana’s first thought was that the horizon was curved.

Then she saw the palace.

First, the sheer size of it, stretching out in a web over the land, curving away from the horizon. A huge river cut through the palace, infested with towers; a nest of towers even grew up from the middle of its confluence with one of its tributaries. Almost directly beneath them a canyon cut deep into the earth, spanned by three gossamer bridges whose arches splintered the new light into rainbows. Domes huddled in the depths.

Phillippe started to hyperventilate. A spate of wondering talk flooded the group on the platform.

“Goddess bless us,” said M. Unbutu under his breath.

Ilyana had not had time to take in everything when an opaque dome coalesced over the platform and the floor sank. Her heart and stomach collided. She thought she was going to fall, but the descent was even and slow and anyway her feet seemed to be stuck to the platform.

After a long time, they stopped. An arch of silver light appeared in the opaque dome. Duke Naroshi walked out through it. Light flared around him and vanished back into gray. He was gone. The dome moved again, slowed and stopped, and the opaque wall steamed away into nothing.

They stood in the middle of ruins. The platform sank, melting into the ground until they stood on dirt. Pale crumbled brick walls surrounded them. A squat tower, half fallen in, marked a gateway. Through it, Ilyana saw green. The sky above had a hazy density, and the planet loomed along the horizon. It seemed to have sunk a bit, so that its bottom rim lay hidden behind the jagged mountains. The sun’s light cast weak shadows out from the ruined walls, and a few stars shone faintly. The air still smelled funny, and here in the middle of the dead brick city it carried grit unleavened by filters or plants.