Bright of the Sky by Kay Kenyon

wasn’t too late to cast them away, to be innocent of breaking the vows. Yes, perhaps she should do that. She was too old to embark on new scholarship, to become an important personage. She was a minor scholar, of course; why else would she be stuck at this piddling, dusty reach, working alone and without decent help? She’d grown used to her routines, with her Rose gleanings filling a redstone every day, or every arc at the least. Why strive at her age? On the other hand, she might live to reach 100,000 days, and that meant she was only in the middling years of her life. Hadn’t Master Yulin’s wife Caiji just died at exactly 100,000 days? Yes, there was still time for important work. She glanced back at the unconscious man. But the fool spoke English, so again, this opportunity was not for her. It was a relief to decide this. Let those who wanted God’s notice strive for importance. She would give the stranger up and have done with it.
    Who to give him to, though—the lords or Master Yulin? Yes, Yulin might take it amiss for her to deal directly with the bright lords. She had family ties to Yulin’s household; there was that as well. Yulin’s oldest wife Suzong was Wen An’s distant cousin. She knew enough of that exalted lady to suspect that Suzong did not love the Tarig, so let her grapple with the problem. People in high places had high responsibilities, and those in low didn’t. She liked the justice of it. There’s an end to it then: Let the man go to the Tarig, through the hands of Yulin, and leave her in peace.
    Her feet hurt, treading on the rocky minoral floor. She sighed, feeling cowardly and also cross for having to walk six hours with the breath of a beku on her neck.
    She turned to see the man stirring on the riding platform. A shame to have saved his life only to see the Tarig take it from him again. Or perhaps as with that other Rose visitor, the bright lords would keep him in a cage for their amusement, or so the story went, that a man of the Rose had been spared for the sake of the bright lady Chiron, who found him a source of amusement—though, of course, the Tarig didn’t laugh.
    As the Heart of Day cast its fiery heat over the trail, Wen An plodded onward, looking for a good resting spot now that the man was stirring.
    Lying blind, his head riddled with pain, Quinn probed his surroundings with his sense of smell. A complex, pollen-filled breeze, tangy and fragrant; an organic musk of an animal. Underneath all other smells lay the memory-laden scent of cloves.
    He hovered on the edge of consciousness, clinging to a hard platform that rocked under the swaying plod of some beast of transport. The smells of the beast staggered him. Hundreds, maybe thousands of compounds, churning, churning.
    Under an impossible sky.
    He rode in an open-sided tent. Sprawled against a hard backrest, he lay staring at a woven cloth sparkling here and there with defects through which the day needled at his eyes. They had stopped.
    A woman peered in at him, old and strangely dressed. She spoke to him in a jumble of sounds, then handed him a cup of what smelled like water. He leaned on his side to slake his thirst, and this brought him closer to the edge of the overhead canopy. Gaping at the sight of the sky, he dropped the cup, drawing a blameful stare from the woman. She left, and his view widened.
    The sky was on fire. High, stratified clouds boiled in a blue-white fire. It seemed as though it should blind him, but after the initial shock, he realized the fire was both gentle and bright. Why didn’t the woman look up and remark on the clouds being on fire? But even as he thought the question, he knew the answer.
    Because it was always like this: the sky, on fire.
    It wasn’t until that moment, as his transport beast crouched on the ground, and as the woman brought him another cup of water, that he was certain he was back. “Back,” he croaked, using his voice for the first time. His eyes watered, perhaps from