Quibble, 51. Arc

Asuja triumphs. Desperate to save Quibble's life, Alnasl faces the final test of his faith.

51. Arc @Alnasl

We lived within a red hell. Still I stood behind Quibble, hugging her close. Before us stood the adept of utter control, his left hand a beacon of crimson light – the source of this red hell. It blinded me to everything but the three of us. Asuja’s grin fell away, and I heard his voice in the glass-dream.

Quibble, turn over your hand, and give me the amber.

Perhaps to gloat over my defeat, Asuja was allowing me my own thoughts, and I struggled to shout: “Don’t, Quibble! Resist the dream! Excel!” But, his captive, I could do only what he let me do, no more. I was mute.

Quibble did as commanded, letting her amber drop into his palm.

Now your kindness, he instructed. I know you have one. Give it to me.

I felt her move beneath me, and she held out the navy-blue glass I had given her. Asuja smiled again as it fell into his hand. He pocketed the glass, then flicked his eyes towards me.

Vision, give me your glasses. All of them, the amber first.

This demand was cruel beyond belief, but I took out my glasses, one by one, and handed them over. When I’d finished, Asuja backed off several paces and let his control die. Quibble stood rooted to the spot, but at once I was free of the dream’s influence and I lunged at him. He didn’t control me again. Instead, he thrust his left hand into a cloak pocket and popped – a soundless pop, night as dark as Within rushing in on itself. Now he floated out of reach above us.

Quibble woke and found her voice. “Coward!” she yelled.

Asuja only laughed. “Coward, yes, but not a fool! You excel at your best when you face death head-on, like you did with the rectifier. Fighting’s pointless, so I devised this solution. Look around.”

Beneath an afternoon sun, we stood high among hills of bare rock near the edge of a drop. Mountains encircled us on the horizon. Below us lay a gorge with a dry creek bed at its bottom. I knew the place. We stood atop the Arc of the Unnamed. Somehow, in a single pop, Asuja had transported us four and a half thousand miles, clear to the other side of the continent. And now I understood his intent. He wasn’t going to kill us himself. He was simply going to leave us here, stranded in the Eastern Waste, to die as nature or fortune dictated.

Drifting away into the space over the gorge and dropping nearly to our level, he took his left hand from his pocket to reveal the yinman, which shone dimly but imparted no dream. He spread his arms wide, like One cycling suspended. In his open left hand, so fiercely lit I imagined it must burn him, lay the amber he’d won – Meissa’s amber, the prize and pride of kindness. He looked at it, then at Quibble.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Asuja, Quotation, stop!” I pleaded. “Stop what you’re doing. Whatever Lesath told you, in your heart you know utter control is wrong, very wrong. Win or lose, it will damn you. But it’s not too late! You can stop now. You can denounce utter—”

“He knows it’s wrong, vision,” Quibble said in a strangely flat tone. “He thinks he has to do it. He doesn’t have the imagination to do anything else.”

“Oh, spare me the sermon, both of you!” retorted Asuja. “You were just a hapless fool, vision. As for you, Quill, you helped me. How easy you made it! All it took to make you disown your friends was a bit of hearsay. It didn’t even take that to make you toss Nish aside. Do you have any idea how desperate she was when she came to me?”

“What right,” Quibble said slowly, her voice now trembling in suppressed fury, “what right did you have to hide the truth about Index from her?”

“As much right as Vega did! But you need not fret over Nish now. When all the Dazed and Adroit lie dead, she won’t be one of the corpses. You couldn’t save her. You never could have saved her, Quill, but I’ll save her! And Index, too!”

“Quote, just think! Play the game: if, then. If you are the excelsior of utter control, then do you really think utter control will let you have a family? Children? And what do you expect out of Nish? If you give utter control the power to kill the Dazed and Adroit, then do you really think she’ll be grateful to you for anything? That she’ll become your adroitness out of gratitude for saving her son? If that’s what you think of her, if that’s what you think you’re getting out of this, then you’re the greatest fool of all.”

Asuja was silent for a long moment, and though his face was little more defined to me than a blur, I sensed his hesitation. Then he closed the hand holding the lit amber and turned his head to regard the yinman glass in his other hand.

“I guess I don’t need this anymore. You can have it, Quill. If the Waste or the Far don’t kill you, maybe you’ll figure out how to light a glass without an amber.” Looking again at Quibble, he winked and chuckled. “Now, wouldn’t that be excellence!”

Asuja tossed the yinman in Quibble’s direction and fell out of sight, laughing at his jest as he went. The glass fell to the arc and began to roll. Quibble sprang to the verge to catch it just as it was about to tumble off, and I sprang after her, clutching at her blurry form to pull her to safer ground. The snap of Asuja’s pop-out sounded below us and echoed back and forth between the walls of the gorge.

Steadying herself, Quibble drew and released a deep sigh. “That was just stupid of him,” she muttered.

“We have to get down from here and out of this sun,” I said. “I need your help. I can’t see where I’m going.”

The top of the arc was heavily pitted, weatherworn. Getting off the arc itself was not difficult: we simply walked onto the crest of one of its supporting hills. Going down the hill was more trouble. I kept a hand on Quibble’s shoulder, making her my crutch as my feet sought firm footing.

“How did you find me, vision?” she asked.

“I didn’t. My amber did. Like on the Egg, remember? We were on the mountain’s eastern face, near the scree—”

“We?”

“Definition was with me. I was holding her hand. We popped in together. Where were you? Where did we pop to?”

“The Vale of Teeth.”

“Damn it all! She’s alone there!”

To my surprise, Quibble said, “Don’t worry, vision. She’ll find her way out – at least, she will if she lives through the shock. Did you know Index is alive?”

“Kindness, no! In the vale?”

Despite the story she began to tell me, Quibble’s nonchalance about Definition’s plight was worrisome. Uncharacteristic of her, it made me wonder how the loss of her amber would affect her mind. How dependent on the glass had she become?

That question had obsessed me for days, ever since I’d realized what lay behind Asuja’s strategy at the Adroit consensus. First, chasing Quibble, he revealed the extent of his powers. Then, withdrawing but letting her know he was still there, still watching her, he let her anxieties play on her. And so, even as he drove a wedge between her and her adroitness, he pushed her deeper and deeper still into the world of the amber glass, into total dependence upon it. Anxious too, I only furthered his goal by speeding up her training – and so, unwittingly, I helped Asuja put on his disguise.

Now, without her amber, what would happen to Quibble? For that matter, how far off was my own madness? Dezeroing, would I last even a cycle?

“So I guess Nish made Cate tell her where I was?” Quibble said, interrupting my grim reflections.

“Asuja did,” I confessed. “I’m sorry. I know Indication meant a lot to you. If it’s any solace, you meant a lot to him, too. He was ready to let me control him rather than give up your secret.”

“Oh, I feel bad for Nish. They were always tangling, and she called him a fat old fox, but she loved him even more than I did.”

“After she found him dead, I couldn’t dissuade her from joining the search. So I gave her two glasses – amber and kindness. I just hope she learned well enough how to use them! The first labor, we popped with Rasalased over the mountain to Glossary’s cabin. And that was another horrible sight.”

“Not Gloss, too?”

“No, he was nowhere about. We found a dead Zero there.”

“Alphard?” Quibble guessed, and she recited the tale from Nihal about meeting the rogue.

“I suppose that was him, then,” I said. “Asuja killed him and stole his amber to cover the trail. So then we were at a loss. Rasalased was for hunting south or east, but Definition thought Asuja would only leave another corpse in plain sight if he was in a hurry, and if you’d gone south or east, he didn’t have much reason to rush. Rasalased explored the edge of the vale near the cabin. I backtracked with Definition.”

“You thought I ran back over the mountain?”

“We never imagined you ended up in the vale.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

We were now dripping with sweat in the Waste’s heat. As we neared the bottom of the hill, the grade evened and I could walk unassisted. We turned right, following a trough, going ever more downhill, until we found a broken rock path like wide stairs that led down to the gorge. The Arc of the Unnamed was somewhere to our right, but it was now out of sight.

We crossed the dry creek bed, scrambled up onto a trail which paralleled it and hugged the side of the gorge. Taking account of the sun, I guessed the arc to be south of us now. To reach the Sen-an-dah – the only place we could find food and fuel – we had to walk north, and I thanked kindness we wouldn’t go under the arc. I turned us north to follow the trail up the gorge.

Not far up the trail, to our surprise, the sound of running water came to our ears, as if from nowhere. The source turned out to be a small cave with a slant-roofed mouth in the gorge’s wall, just off the trail. I handed Quibble my near-empty water flask. She poured out the dregs, then went on hands and knees into the cavemouth. She pulled up short, only half of her body in the cave, and laughed.

“How’s the water?” I called.

“Cold! A bit tasteless, but it’s good. No wonder we heard the underground river. There’s a waterfall in here!”

I took off my cloak, swung the pack from my shoulders, examined its contents – two loaves of hardening bread and a paper packet of dried pollock. By tomorrow, food would be a problem. When Quibble reemerged, we shared the food.

“It’s a pity we only have this to carry water in,” she said, handing me the flask. “I haven’t seen anything to hunt and eat.”

“It’s the hottest time of the day in the hottest time of the year. Most animals are staying in the shade. But keep a lookout for snakes and scorpions – for the both of us. Don’t let me step on a snake! Remember what happened to Exclamation. Just for the moment, though, neither food nor snakebites are my real worry. The cold is.”

“Are you kidding? It’s scorching!”

“Quibble, we’re in the Waste. Recall, when Meissa and Exclamation crossed the Great Waste, they burned by day and froze by night. Once the sun goes down, the wind picks up and the cold sets in. Night in the Waste during the hottest time is as cold as the time of fires in the Northwest. We’re past the solstice now. The nights are only going to get colder as we travel.”

Quibble mumbled something to herself, as if she was talking to the absent amber.

“What?” I asked her.

“Just thinking of fire-making. I know how, but I don’t have all the tools. Did you bring a tinderbox?”

“Nish had it. I didn’t want to let go of my amber, so I put her in charge of all the camping. Anyway, we don’t have wood, and we won’t find it here.”

“So, the Sen-an-dah?”

“Yes. We’ll find fuel there. And we might get lucky. Asuja thought the Far might kill us, but actually, they’re the best chance we have. The Aht migrate through the Sen-an-dah twice a year. North in the spring. South in summer or autumn, depending. It’s a cold year, so I bet they’ll head south early. We’ll strike out through the valley and hope to meet them.”

Quibble shrugged inside her gray protégé’s cloak. “Won’t they attack us?”

“Maybe,” I said with a frown. “Meissa had the right idea. If you let them see us at a distance, they may be convinced we’re not a threat. We’ll throw off our cloaks and show empty hands – no glasses. Don’t hide the yinman, Quibble. Lay it on your cloak. Trust me, they won’t touch it. If you can explain it isn’t a threat, either, they might even let you keep it. But if you hide it, you can count on there being hell to pay when they find out. And they will find out – there’s no privacy with the Far. Now, remember this word: ‘nahli.’ When they approach us and you’re sure they see our hands are empty, give them a gesture and say ‘nahli.’ The gesture—”

Quibble put her hands to her chest, then held them out together towards me. “Im,” she offered.

I returned im. “Who taught you that?”

“Imay told me all about im – equality among the Far.”

“Good. Then you understand a lot about them already. Another thing you must know about is ‘say,’ place. We’re trying to make ourselves nahli to the Aht, asking for a place in the tribe. They don’t have to give it to us. Far law says to help wanderers who aren’t a threat, but really it depends on the nah. I hope their nah is more compassionate than the Aht-nah Meissa met. Now, we should discuss surviving in the Waste until—”

“Vision, why are you telling me all this? Can’t it wait?”

“No, it can’t,” I said.

Evening was coming on. A three-foot-tall stone wall skirted the trail not far from the cave. I walked to its terminus and eased myself to the ground in the shade it yielded on the side facing the trail. Quibble joined me.

“Asuja took all my glasses,” I explained. “He might have given back my amber when he gave you the yinman – but no, he wanted me to become your burden. It was a spiteful thing to do.”

“What’s going to happen to you?” Quibble said, concern in her voice.

“Madness. You’re going to lose me for a while. I don’t know how long.” I paused to consider the problem. Quibble needed to know what to expect. “The first thing to go is usually equanimity. So if I start losing my temper, that’s why. Then memory goes. I’ll start forgetting things, and that’ll make the anger worse for a while. Once I’ve forgotten everything, I won’t know what to be angry about, so at least I’ll be docile. But I’ll also be helpless, like One in the Small Spiral. I might do foolish things. Keep me close, keep an eye on me. Never let me wander off – I won’t come back. I’ll die out there without you. Eventually, the madness will pass, but I won’t be the same person anymore.”

“Who will you be?”

“I don’t know. I might recreate myself. But if Uhta-nahli-nuah emerges, I’ll be Far again. That would be a stroke of luck for us both, if we ever hope to get home. My people were the Uhta. They live in Qahn-dah, the North. It’s an enormous land. We can’t cross it without their help. That is, if by then we have homes to go back to.”

Quibble and I talked past sundown about the Waste’s perils and surviving them. I realized my advice was scanty. As a roguish vision, I knew how to live Without better than Within, but I had spent no time in the Waste since I was Far. Fortunately, Quibble had amazingly good horse sense for One only three months Without.

As night fell and the cold came on, we shared our cloaks and huddled together in the lee of the stone wall as well out of the wind as we could get. Neither of us got much sleep. I was troubled by a growing sense of detachment from myself. Deep in the night, as the moon was hovering over the gorge’s western rim, Quibble cried out in anguish in her sleep. Shaking her didn’t rouse her, and I had to slap her awake.

She’d dreamed of Within, of Unity’s control. Afterwards, she quickly fell back into an uneasy sleep. Her face was drawn. She looked exhausted. I wondered when she’d last slept well. Now, I knew, I was becoming her new burden, a greater burden than the adroitness for whom she had cried out in the nightmare’s throes. Almost, I resolved that I would leave her, once my memory began to desert me and I could be no more good to her. But then, I considered, she would only feel compelled to look for me, and that might prove more disastrous. At last, I decided I could do nothing now but trust Nuah the Far.

Drifting between wakefulness and sleep, my last thought was that it might be for the best. When Quibble and I met, I had been only a rogue, a vision, an adept of silence, a Zero. Blank. But from the moment she broke the orb, somehow Quibble had woken a shadow-self in me, a new person. Kind, caring, humorous, zealous to protect her, fierce and vulnerable in my love, helpless to leave her. Now, I hoped this mysterious self was indeed Nuah. If so, he was Quibble’s best chance, and – was there really such a hope? – he might even inspire what I’d failed to inspire. An excelsior of kindness.

This, I understood at last, was why Vega agreed to Quibble’s bargain and let me teach her. As much as my strength, the lesson for the excelsior was my weakness. And now Nuah the Far would teach that lesson better than I ever could.

Thus, Numberless, believing beyond the bounds of faith, I gave you up to him.

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