CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Flower Night

Ilyana woke up suddenly. For some reason she had been dreaming of Kori's Uncle Gus dancing the part of Lord Shiva, exotic, uncomfortable to watch yet impossible not to watch; but even as she remembered it the dream faded and vanished in the dark rather stuffy air of the tent. Abruptly she knew what was wrong: Valentin was gone. It was so still that above the quiet breathing of Evdokia and Anton she heard footfalls on the path outside, scritching on pebbles. She got up, checked the little ones, and slipped a skirt on over her sleeping shift.

Ducking out through the entrance flap, she was disoriented for a moment by the dark square of the caravansary in front of her, by the pale globes of moons in the sky above, by the slash of distant wall and ridge, by the faintest nimbus glowing in the air above which, as she oriented herself, she realized was the energy field of the huge dome which contained them. Valentin's nocturnal escapes were so much a part of her life that she had forgotten where they were, and when she remembered it, she felt a thrill of excitement: They were the first humans to set foot on a Chapalii Duke's private planet, in his very palace, or at least, in as much of it as they were allowed to see.

Valentin disappeared inside the gateway to the caravansary. She followed him. Pebbles slid under the soles of her feet and, as she passed under the gateway, became stone paving.

At first, halting inside the courtyard, she did not see him. He was hidden in plain sight: crouched in the gazebo, fingering the latticework with desperate concentration. His hands shook. When she came up behind him, he turned, starting. The gazebo's lattice shone with just enough of an unnatural glow that Ilyana saw sweat break on his forehead, running down his neck.

"What are you doing?" she whispered.

"There's a nesh port in here somehow," he muttered, turning back to the latticework. "I heard M.

Unbutu say so yesterday to Gwyn Jones. It must go with the map or something. I gotta get access, Yana. I can't stand it anymore."

She knelt beside him. "But Valentin, if there is one, then it was built by the Chapalii. That would be dangerous to—"

His hands, sliding over the lattice, abruptly stopped, and his face altered expression so quickly that she gasped out loud. Then he was gone. Not his body, but his mind. Spirited away from her so utterly that her limbs froze in terror.

Traceries of light shifted along the mosaic floor of the gazebo, and an aroma like incense brushed past her, fleeting, like a glimpse of a butterfly. She touched Valentin's shoulder. A thrumming caught up in her blood, and she could almost see what he was seeing, as if the contact through their skin was enough to link her in as well. She smelled, suddenly, the scent of heat baking on stone.

She jerked her hand away. The movement woke her out of her stupor. She had to find M. Unbutu.

She knew which tiny room was his: They had held tutorials there the last five days. Like all of these rooms his was screened off not by a door but by a curtain. She hesitated, fingers brushing the coarse weave, then coughed and said, softly: "M. Unbutu?"

No answer.

"M. Unbutu?"

From the other side she heard the sound of a person grunting in his sleep and shifting. She glanced up and down the corridor and slipped inside, pressing back against the cold wall.

"M. Unbutu. I'm sorry to disturb you, but—"

"Hmm?" He woke up suddenly and sat up. She could see him like a bulky shadow, his wild hair, his naked torso, against the faint gleam of light that came in through the open window. "Yana!"

The room wasn't large. If she took a step forward, she could touch him. He peered at her through the gloom. The silence was a third presence in the room. Ilyana felt acutely uncomfortable for a reason she could not understand.

"Uh, Yana," he said finally, sounding very odd, "I don't think you should be here."

She got her breath back. "It's Valentin. He's been caught in the gazebo. I think he's neshing."

He began to stand up, froze, and said, "Yes. I'll be there in a minute."

She felt herself flush. Too mortified to speak, she stepped backward out of the room and fled down the corridor, back to the courtyard where Valentin crouched, locked into his strange union with the latticework. A striped moon hung squarely above the courtyard. Stars blazed. Valentin was unnaturally silent, only the lift and fall of his chest revealing that he still breathed. Ilyana shifted from one foot to the other, and back, and back, and waited forever.

M. Unbutu's white shirt and trousers appeared like a pale flag at one corner of the courtyard. A moment later she saw the shadow of his face and hair. He hurried over and halted an arm's length from her.

"Oh, Goddess," he exclaimed under his breath. "I see what you mean. When did this happen?"

"It just did. But when I touched him, it was like I could almost nesh through him, the connection is that strong."

"I don't know how that could be. But why would he risk neshing on a system we know nothing about and which might be antipathic to the human mind? Valentin is not stupid."

Under her bare toes, the gazebo tiles felt slick, almost damp. She chewed on her lips.

"Oh," said M. Unbutu suddenly. "He's addicted. The signs all point to it, once you think to put them together. So that's why my portable nesh was tampered with on the ship out here. I thought it was odd."

Ilyana cringed.

When he spoke again, he sounded angry. "Why isn't he getting help? Your parents must know how dangerous—"

"They don't understand."

"They don't understand? Yana, do you know that nesh addiction can kill?"

She gulped down panic. "Yes."

"Oh, Goddess, of course you do. I'll have to talk to them."

"No. Don't. They really won't understand. But... maybe you could help me."

"I'm not licensed or experienced in—" He glanced at her and stopped. She felt more than saw him wince.

"There isn't anyone else to help him anyway, not here."

"Yana! Your parents have to—"

"Don't you see? They already know, they just pretend that they don't. They can't. They can't help him!"

He swore, something long and convoluted, under his breath. "We'll discuss this later. Right now we'd better get him out of there." He placed a hand, fingers splayed, on Valentin's back. Ilyana's eyes had adjusted to the dark well enough that she could see details now: The way M. Unbutu's eyes began to track something that wasn't there; the way his nose twitched, sniffing. He licked his lips, and with his free hand reached and touched something that didn't exist. With an effort, he dragged his hand away from Valentin's back.

He whistled softly. "Damn me to hell. I don't know what kind of interface they're using, but that field is emanating through him somehow. All I got was shadows, but still ... you know we just can't pull him away."

"I know. I've done this before. Gone in myself and guided him out."

"We'll have to try. But I'm going with you."

She swallowed. Her throat was dry. "He might not look like himself."

"Oh, tupping hell. You mean he guises, too? I thought they'd stopped letting minors do that."

"Yeah."

"Sorry. I'm not usually that naive. All right. Take position on either side and imitate how his fingers are positioned. Wherever we end up, stick with me. We will not split up."

She nodded and knelt beside Valentin, making sure she didn't touch him. M. Unbutu knelt on his other side. Valentin breathed. A breeze had come up, and it tickled the stray hair that had escaped from her braid and lay now along the back of her neck. She placed her fingers on the latticework.

A great web, thrumming with light, set over (into?) an abyss of endless nothingness. Ilyana stood on a strand of light and it pulsed with the warmth of blood against her bare feet, filling her, drawing her in.

She dissolved into sound.

"Valentin!"

She stood in a vast echoing space ringed with pillars of black stone. She was alone. A floor of obsidian stretched out to the pillars, and above and beyond was a darkness so absolute that it had texture, as if it was a dome of velvet. Then she smelled Valentin's trail. Or not him, precisely, but camel, and knew that it marked his passage through here.

She followed the foul smell, walking carefully, and just as she crossed between a set of pillars she heard a stutter in the thrum that lay so quiet along her consciousness that she had forgotten it was there until it was, so briefly, interrupted.

"Yana!"

She turned. M. Unbutu ran over to her. When he halted beside her, he took hold of her wrist. His hand was solid, warm.

"Complete perceptual immersion. We could just as well be here in the flesh." He dropped her hand and tapped at the pillar instead. "Solid. I just spent about an hour wandering around a huge reconstruction of what must be the palace here, about waist-high models, just amazing. Needless to say, I was the only living soul there, and there was no obvious way out."

"But I just got here. I mean, just a minute ago we were in the gazebo."

"Huh. I found this, though." With great care he fished into a pocket and drew out ... nothing. She looked closer and saw that it was a short strand of blond hair. "Do you think it's Valentin's?"

"How could a nesh lose a piece of its hair?"

"Can't. How could I have noticed it? But I did, and as soon as I picked it up it gave me a kind of pulling field, as if I could suddenly sense where you were. That's how I found you."

"Quick!" The camel scent was moving off. "He's this way—"

She stepped off between the pillars only to realize that she was stepping into nothing Winds buffet her. Sand stings her face. This place again, the barren, storm-wracked desert.

Always this place. She gropes blindly and finds a solid hand and grasps it as if it were a lifeline.

Its fingers work in hers, but the storm is so fierce that she cannot even see the person beside her, so hard does the grit and sand batter her eyes and grind and groan in the streaming air.

The wind howls.

They emerge into an eddy.

"This is his place," she cries, cracking open one eye that swells with tears, aching and dry.

M. Unbutu holds tightly on to her and stares at something ahead. The blistering sand doesn't seem to bother him as much, but his lips are shut tight against it. "He always comes here."

"Look," he murmurs, awestruck. "He's building it."

She lifts her chin against the weight of the wind and squints upward, toward the hills. But they aren't hills. They are detritus, they are the streaming wind that pours out of the back, the arms, the legs, the head, the whole being of the slight adolescent boy trudging forward head bent slightly as against a steady grinding force and that wind is both the storm and the desert he leaves behind him.

She gulps in sand and chokes on it. "Oh, gods. Is this what's inside him?"

The boy presses forward, receding from her, and the wind moans and shoves her after him and thrusts her back, caught in the whirlpool of his creation. A blinding light frames Valentin's fragile outline, as if he is the conduit through which it passes.

"It's like the old conundrum," says M. Unbutu, canting his voice high to pierce above the torrent, "about gravity and time and the edge of the universe— that explorers could never find the edge of the universe because their very presence, their mass, would cause the universe to keep expanding in front of them because of their gravitational field."

"How do we get him back?" she wails.

"Formless matter. It's like the formless matter out of which Earth, the universe, any cosmological order is made."

She realizes he isn't listening to her. She drops his hand and plunges forward into the maelstrom. Sand pelts her. Pebbles scrape her skin. The dry barren heat is overpowering. Sheer frantic force of will brings her to Valentin in sixteen agonizing steps. She grabs his arm and tugs him to a stop. What else can she do?

He strains away. "Let me go. Let me go, Yana. Can't you see it? I'm almost there."

She sees nothing but light. Stillness shudders into being around them.

And there, maybe, something golden, like a shimmer, like a golden sea seen through a tiny, distant gateway.

She hesitates. She can feel the strength of his yearning, can taste it, like the husk of grass on her tongue.

"Yana! Valentin!"

M. Unbutu is solid. His hands have weight where they close on her arm and pull Valentin into her. He swears.

"We're going out of here." His tongue wets his lips. "I don't know how the hell you did this, Valentin, but—" As he says the last word the stream of sand still pouring out of Valentin coalesces and begins to form an archway, turns into wood, and then Ilyana smells the leafy mold of thick vegetation, rotting.

"Damn it," say M. Unbutu mildly, surprised. "Oh, well. Good enough. Through here."

Valentin goes meekly.

They step through into a pocket of dense jungle. Vines trail down from tree trunks that shoot up into a dome of leaves. The vines twine and curl and form a lattice and they place their fingers on the latticework

Ilyana heard the softest scrape of a shoe on stone and she started back, but the three of them were alone in the courtyard. Valentin slumped backward and she caught him, and together with M. Unbutu eased him down onto the smooth mosaic tiles. She still smelled the desiccating heat of the sandstorm.

"M. Unbutu, how did he do that? What was he doing?"

"If we're going to try that again, you'd better just call me David. The formal style takes too damned long."

"We're going to do that again?" She hesitated, tried out the word "David" on her tongue, and decided just to not call him anything unless she absolutely had to.

"You don't want to?" He laughed under his breath, and she realized with a shock that he was exhilarated.

And that she was, too. If Valentin could do that, could she? Could she pour light through her and create a world? "Well. Yes. I'd like to see that model of the palace."

"I'd like to see if we can use it to get through to the real palace, even in nesh form."

At that moment, Ilyana knew that she was part of the conspiracy. She felt suddenly very ... adult.

"Yes," she said fiercely. "Oh gods. We'd better get Valentin back to my mother's tent."

Anatoly watched from the shadows as Ilyana and David supported Valentin between them and helped him off toward Karolla Arkhanov's tent. When the courtyard was empty, he emerged from behind a column and examined the gazebo and the latticework wall. It hummed in the way the great wall that anchored the dome hummed, but although he had seen the way their hands clutched it, he was not so foolhardy as to make such an expedition alone.

In the morning, he woke to exclamations coming from outside. Portia and Diana were already gone. He dressed quickly and ran outside to find the Company gathered along the east wall of the caravansary, facing the gardens. Yesterday a bank of green shrubs had grown here. Today they had all come into bloom at once, white flowers with a scattering of crimson blossoms at their center, forming a shape that Anatoly vaguely recognized as glyph, something Chapalii, he thought, but he found it difficult to remember visual markers of language.

"What kind of flowers are those?" he asked, coming up alongside Hyacinth, who looked flushed.

"Flower night," said Hyacinth. "That's how Roki translates the glyph. It's a summons."

"A summons?"

Already Yomi was calling out orders. Several of the younger actors were shaking out skirts and gowns, hanging them out in the open air on a line set up by some of the techs.

"To perform." Hyacinth paused, slapping his fingers on his cheeks, eyes wide. "Tonight!" He laughed. "The bastard made us wait so long to even get here at all, made us wait weeks here, you'd think he'd give us more notice. Not even a tech rehearsal. We don't even know what kind of space we'll be performing in."

"He is zayinu."

Hyacinth lowered his hands, glanced at Anatoly, and grinned. Anatoly grinned back, realized what he had done, muttered an excuse, and went to find Diana.

"I don't have time for you right now," Diana said, catching sight of him before he'd even said a word to her. She was helping shake out costumes. "Yana already took Portia. Maybe Yomi has something for you to do."

But he was superfluous. The repertory company was like a well-honed jahar, adept at working together. His presence would only throw off their drill. Even David, by virtue of his relationship to Charles, fit in with them. Anatoly did not. And while it was always appropriate for a man to take care of young children, it certainly would be unseemly for him to do so in the company of an unmarried young woman to whom he was not related.

So he went out to the horses and rode the mare he now thought of as his. A summons meant, of course, that the zayinu duke Naroshi commanded the Company to come to him. How would he bring them there? Where was he? Anatoly rode at once to the great slab of ebony stone embedded in the rose wall. Was this the doorway through which they would pass? Through the rose wall he saw the blurred lines of the other world, drowned in rain.

He dismounted and went to lean against the rose wall where its color changed from rose to ebony, an abrupt break, like a seam. Through the wall he could make out... towers, a host of spears thrusting up into the sky. He had seen a gathering of towers from the platform hovering high above the palace, when they had first come here. The foundation of those towers had been lost beneath the confluence of two rivers, and yet in the map in the courtyard of the caravansary, there was a similar nest of towers which rose from a spit of land bounded by rivers: Was it possible that some catastrophic flood had risen and covered them? But that meant, then, that the map in the courtyard might not be accurate.

Only the khaja put their faith in maps. The land changed over time, over the seasons, and over the lifetime of a man. Anatoly knew better than to trust anything he had not seen with his own eyes or heard from the wisest elders, and even then, nothing truly remained constant except the plains themselves.

And he thought bitterly of Diana.

The humming pitch of the stone changed. He ran to stop his mare from bolting. A shudder shook through the ground, running up through his boots, up through his whole body, like the charge of the air in a lightning storm out on the flat plain.

The gate opened, just opened, dissipating into the rose wall, leaving a gap the width of eight horses riding abreast through to the other side. Hot, humid air spilled out, spattering him with warm rain and the sheer weight of heat and dampness. In the world beyond it rained in dense sheets, pounding rain, like the thunder of hooves of an army charging into battle.

He got on the mare and rode for the opening. He did not get there in time.

A great vehicle appeared, a barge, filling the opening. The mare shied and reared. As he fought to hold her, the barge moved through, floating above the grass, and the opening sealed shut behind it.

Water poured off its sides, sprinkling the grass, and then it was dry, gleaming, a boat flat on both the bottom and the top, with a silver railing wreathed in white and red flowers. It was empty. It sailed off over the grass, leaving a wave of wind in its wake. Anatoly could do nothing but follow its trail back to the caravansary.

By the time he got there, the company was fitted up and mostly onboard. Most of the actors were chattering with excitement, voices loud, faces flushed. He left the mare waiting and ran to find Diana.

She sat on the prow, a calm eddy in the midst of the wild stream of movement around her, her skirts arrayed around her and her expression distant, contemplating not the far line of wall but something else, something unseeable, unknowable. Then she caught sight of him.

"Thank goodness, Anatoly, I was wondering where you were." Gods, it hurt, the leap of hope in his heart any time she gave the slightest smile to him. He walked over to her, careful not to let the hope show on his face. "Portia is staying with the other children, and I wanted you to know where she was in case she needs anything. They don't want anyone except the Company to come this time, because it's the first time. They're being extremely careful about protocol."

"I thought I might come with you."

"You can't."

She sat above him on the boat, not looking particularly sorry about it. She was so beautiful, in her khaja gown given life by her presence in it. "What play are you doing?" he asked dutifully.

She pulled a face. "The Tempest. You know, the one about the magician Prospero and the island he rules through his magic, and how his enemies are shipwrecked on that island and he rights old wrongs done to him. Charles Soerensen told Owen and Ginny to play it for our first performance. I suppose ..." she canted her voice lower and leaned down toward him. He had not truly grown used to the immodest clothing khaja wore: Her gown was cut so low that he could see the swell of her breasts. "... it's meant to be subversive."

Caught by a sudden overwhelming impulse, he stood on tiptoe, steadied himself with one hand on the side of the barge and with the other hand stilled her chin, and kissed her on the lips.

"Anatoly! You'll ruin my makeup." But she laughed. "If only you were playing Ferdinand instead of Vasil. He's too old for the part, but he's so damned pretty. He would have done better as Ariel—that's the spirit who is servant to Prospero—but he just couldn't do it."

"Why do you wish I was playing Ferdinand?" Anatoly asked suspiciously.

She gave him her most brilliant smile, and moved slightly to make room for Vasil Veselov, who appeared at just that moment to strike a pose, standing, at the railing. "Because I'm playing Miranda, Prosper's daughter, you idiot, and she and Ferdinand fall in love with one another."

"Sakhalin," said Vasil, acknowledging him, and went back to his pose, adjusting his sleeves to drape over the railing.

"Veselov, surely you will bring back a report to me," said Anatoly, "of what you see."

Vasil glanced at him. "I'm not in the army anymore."

Anatoly grunted under his breath and then, to his surprise, Diana got to her knees and leaned down toward him, ducking under the railing. He lifted his arms and caught her and swung her down from the deck into his arms. She was giggling.

"I'm not going to sit next to him," she whispered, leading Anatoly away to the back of the barge.

"He hogs every scene he's in, and especially entrances." Pulling him against her, she pressed her lips against an ear. "Don't talk about reports and scouting," she breathed, so close against him that he almost forgot to listen to her words, "not to Vasil. He isn't part of it."

"Diana," he murmured.

She broke away from him. "You will remember that, won't you?"

"I am not a fool, Diana! But Veselov was in Bakhtiian's army once. Surely he still feels loyalty to his people—"

"Vasil feels loyalty to no one but himself. Don't be naive. Himself and perhaps, just perhaps, the memory of what he once shared with Bakhtiian. Oh, stop getting that stubborn look on your face. I don't care whether you believe it or not, or if it offends your prim sense of virtue, it is true. I get so tired of your oppressive moral code. Give it up, Anatoly. Haven't you learned anything?"

"I will thank you not to insult my—"

"Oh, you're impossible to talk to." She turned and walked over to the barge, leaving him.

As usual, Hyacinth had listened in. He was crouched about twelve paces away worrying at his shoes—if one could call those lavender cloth wrappings on his feet shoes. His clothes were absolutely obscene. He stood up, revealing bare chest and wings made of a glittering fabric like gems spun into silk.

"May I give you a piece of advice?" Hyacinth asked.

"No!" growled Anatoly, and stalked off.

He unsaddled the mare, brushed her down, and let her go back to the herd. She was reluctant to leave him at first; she liked him—which was more than he could say for anyone else—but finally she kicked out her heels and ran off. Anatoly watched the barge go from a distance, garlanded railings and the splash of colors that Was the Company in their costumes, the bleaker black figures of the techs in the center with their boxes and props.

Leaving the caravansary almost empty. He heard the children's laughter as they ran after the barge, waving and calling and halting finally to watch it shrink as it sailed away over the grass. Soon it would pass beyond into the other world, a world he might never be permitted to visit.

But, gods, he was determined to get there somehow. He wandered into the courtyard. Dust motes drifted down in shafts of light, playing over the surface of the mosaic map in the center of the gazebo.

Anatoly stopped in front of the latticework. Perhaps he could go there with the boy. With Valentin's knowledge of that way of traveling, and with Anatoly's knowledge of intelligence and scouting, they could pierce the wall, they could discover the secrets of the palace.

He heard a footfall and turned, caught a glimpse of a skirt, then nothing. It was silent in the caravansary, empty of life. Everyone, even David, even the khepelli steward, had gone, leaving only Karolla and her khaja servant and the children. And him. The afternoon light mellowed, ripening toward evening.

At last he sighed and went back to Diana's chamber, pushing aside the curtain to go in. Stopped dead in his tracks.

Color flared in the dim room. Lying next to his saddle rested a bouquet of freshly picked flowers.

Flower night. His heart racing, he bent down to pick them up. Their smell was heady and intoxicating.

He stood there for a long time, until shadows filled the room. Finally he stirred, putting on his other, fresher shirt, wiping the dust off his boots, running his finger through his hair. Then, clutching the flowers in his right hand, he went in search of Ilyana Arkhanov.