We did not know the function of the ninety-nine spokes, or of the core they buttressed. No matter; the core made a useful foundation, a place upon which to build. From the vantage point of the rising shuttle, it was a scribble of luminous neon, packed tight as a migraine. I could not distinguish the lights of individual buildings, only the larger glowing demarkations of the precincts between city-sized districts. Pressurized horseways a whole li wide were thin, snaking scratches. The human presence had even begun to climb up the golden spokes, pushing tendrils of light out to the moon’s inner surface. Commercial slogans spelled themselves out in letters ten li high . On Founder’s Day, drink only Temujin Brand Airag.
Sorkan-Shira rental ponies have low mileage, excellent stamina, and good temperament. Treat your favorite wife: buy her only Zarnuk Silks. During hunting season, safeguard your assets with New Far Samarkand Mutual Insurance. Think you’re a real man? Then you should be drinking Death Worm Airag: the one with a sting at both ends!
I had spent only one night in Gansu, arranging a eunuch and waiting for the smaller ship that would carry us the rest of the way to Kuchlug. Now Goyo, the eunuch, and I were being conveyed to the Burkhan Khaldun, a vessel that was even smaller than the Black Heart Mountain that had brought me to Gansu.
The BK was only one li from end to end, less than a quarter of that across the bow. The hull was a multicolored quilt of patch repairs, with many scratches, craters, and scorches yet to be attended to. The lateral stabilization vanes had the slightly buckled look of something that had been badly bent and then hammered back into shape, while the yaw dampeners appeared to have originated from a completely different ship, fixed on with silvery fillets of recent welding work. A whole line of windows had been plated over.
As old as the BK might have been, it had taken more than just age and neglect to bring her to that state.
The Parvan Tract was a notoriously rough passage, quickly taking its toll on even a new ship. If the Kherlen Corridor was a wide, stately river that could almost be navigated blindfold, then the Tract was a series of narrow rapids whose treacherous properties varied from trip to trip, requiring not just expert input from the crew, but passengers with the constitution to tolerate a heavy crossing.
Once I had checked into my rooms and satisfied myself that Goyo was being taken care of, I made my way back to the passenger area. I bought a glass of Temujin airag and made my way to the forward viewing platform, with its wide sweep of curved window—scratched and scuffed in places, worryingly starred in others—and leaned hard against the protective railing. The last shuttle had already detached, and the BK was accelerating toward the portal, its great human-made doors irising open at the last possible moment, so that the interior of Gansu was protected from the Parvan Tract’s unpredictable energy surges. Even though the Infrastructure shaft stretched impossibly far into the distance, my mind kept insisting that we were about to punch through the thin skin of the moon.
The ship surged forward, the sluggish artificial gravity generators struggling to maintain the local vertical.
We passed through the door, into the superluminal machinery of the Infrastructure. The tunnel walls were many li away, but they felt closer—as they raced by at increasing speed, velocity traced by the luminous squiggly patterns that had been inscribed on the wall for inscrutable reasons by the khorkoi builders, I had the impression that the shaft was constricting, tightening down on our fragile little ship. Yet nothing seemed to disconcert or even arouse the interest of my fellow passengers. In ones and twos, they drifted away from the gallery, leaving me alone with my eunuch, observing from a discrete distance. I drank the airag very slowly, looking down the racing shaft, wondering if it would be my fortune to see a phantom with my own eyes. Phantoms, after all, were what had brought me here.
Now all I had to do was poison the eunuch.
The eunuch answered to “eunuch,” but his real name (I learned after a certain amount of probing) was Tisza. He had not been surgically castrated; there was an implant somewhere in his forearm dispensing the necessary cocktail of androgen-blockers, suppressing his libido and lending him a mildly androgynous appearance. Other implants, similar to those employed by government operatives, had given him heightened reflexes, spatial coordination, and enhanced night vision. He was adept with weapons and unarmed combat, as (I had no cause to doubt) were all Batu eunuchs. I had no need of his protection, of course, but appearances were paramount. I was posing as a woman of means, a well-healed tourist. No women in my circumstances would ever have traveled without the accompaniment of a man such as Tisza.
He served my purpose in another way. We shared the same rooms, with the eunuch sleeping in a small, doorless annex connected to mine. Because I might (conceivably) be drugged or poisoned, Tisza always ate the same meals as me, served at the same time and brought to my cabin by one of the BK’s white uniformed stewards.
“What if you get poisoned and die on me?” I asked, innocently, when we were sitting across from each other at my table.
He tapped a pudgy finger against his belly. “It would take a lot to kill me, Miss Bocheng. My constitution has been tailored to process many toxins in common circulation among would-be assassins and miscreants. I will become ill much sooner than you would, but what would kill you would merely make me unwell, and not so unwell that I could not discharge my duties.”
“I hope you’re right about that.”
He patted his chin with napkin. “It is no occasion for pride. I am what I am because of the chemical intervention and surgery of the Batu Escort Agency. It would be equally pointless to understate my abilities.”
Later, feigning nervousness, I told him that I had heard a noise from his annex.
“It is nothing, I assure you. No one could have entered these rooms without our knowing it.”
“It sounded like someone breathing.”
He smiled tolerantly. “There are many foreign sounds on a ship like this. Noises carry a great distance through the ducts and conduits of the air-circulation system.”
“Couldn’t someone have crawled through those same conduits?”
He rose from the table without a note of complaint. “It is unlikely, but I shall investigate.”
As soon as he had vanished through the door into his annex, I produced a vial from my pocket and tipped its sugary contents onto the remains of his meal. I heard him examining things, pulling open cupboard doors and sliding drawers. By the time he returned, with a reassuring expression on his face, the toxin crystals had melted invisibly into his food and the vial was snug in my pocket.
“Whatever you heard, there’s no one in mere.”
“Are you sure?”
“Completely. But I’m willing to look again, if it would put your mind at ease.”
I looked abashed. “I’m just being silly.”
“Not at all. You must not be afraid to bring things to my attention. It is what you have hired me for.”
“Tuck in,” I said, nodding at his meal, “before it gets cold.”
Tisza was moaning and sweating on the bed, deep in fever, as Mr. Tayang appraised him warily. “Did he tell you he could detect poisons? They don’t all come with that option.”
“He can. Isn’t that the point?”
“It could just be a bug he’s picked up. On the other hand, he may have been hit by something intended for you that his system wasn’t designed to filter out.”
“A poison?”
“It’s a possibility, Miss Bocheng.”
Tayang was a steward, a young man with a pleasant face and a highly professional manner. I had seen him around earlier, but—as was the case with all the crew—he had steadfastly refused to engage in any conversation not related to my immediate needs. I had counted on this, and contrived the poisoning of the eunuch to give me heightened access to one or more of the crew. It need not have been Tayang, but my instincts told me that he would serve excellently.
“Then why isn’t it affecting me?” I asked.
“I don’t wish to alarm you, but it could be that it’s going to in a very short while. We need to get both of you into the sick bay. Under observation, we should be able to stabilize the eunuch and ensure you come to no harm.”
This was the outcome I had been hoping for, but some indignation was called for. “If you think I’m going to spend the rest of this trip in some stinking sick bay, after I’ve paid for this cabin…”
Tayang raised a calming hand. “It won’t be for long. A day or two, just to be on the safe side. Then you can enjoy the rest of the trip in comfort.”
Another pair of stewards was summoned to help shift the hapless Tisza, while I made my way to the sick bay on foot. “Actually,” I said, “now that you mention it… I do feel a little peculiar.”
Tayang looked at me sympathetically. “Don’t worry, Miss Bocheng. We’ll have you right as rain in no time.”
The sick bay was larger and better equipped than I had been expecting, almost as if it belonged in a different ship entirely. I was relieved to see that no one else was using it. Tayang helped me onto a reclined couch while the other stewards pulled a screen around the stricken eunuch.
“How do you feel now?” Tayang asked, fastening a black cuff around my forearm.
“Still a bit funny.”
For the next few minutes, Tayang—who had clearly been given basic medical training—studied the readouts on a handheld display he had pulled from a recess in the wall.
“Well, it doesn’t look—” he began.
“I should have listened to my friends,” I said, shaking my head. “They told me not to come here.”
He tapped buttons set into the side of the display. “Your friends warned you that you might end up getting poisoned?”
“Not exactly, no. But they said it wasn’t a good idea traveling on the Burkhan Khaldun, down the Parvan Tract. They were right, weren’t they?”
“That would depend. So far, I can’t see any sign that you’ve ingested anything poisonous. Of course, it could be something that the analyzer isn’t equipped to detect—”
“And the eunuch?”
“Just a moment,” Tayang said, leaving the display suspended in the air. He walked over to the other bed and pulled aside the curtain. I heard a murmured exchange before he returned, with a bit less of a spring in his step. “Well, there’s no doubt that something pretty heavy’s hit his system. Could be a deliberate toxin, could be something nasty that just happened to get into him. We’re not far out of Gansu; he could have contracted something there that’s only just showing up.”
“He’s been poisoned, Mr. Tayang. My bodyguard. Doesn’t that strike you as a slightly ominous development?”
“I still say it could be something natural. We’ll know soon enough. In the meantime, I wouldn’t necessarily jump to the conclusion that you’re in immediate peril.”
“I’m concerned, Mr. Tayang.”
“Well, don’t be. You’re in excellent hands.” He leaned over to plump my pillow. “Get under the blanket if you feel shivery. Is there anything you’d like me to fetch from your room?”
“No, thank you.”
“In which case, I’ll leave you be. I’ll keep the analyzer attached just in case it flags anything. The other stewards are still here. If you need anything, just call.”
“I will.”
He was on the verge of leaving—I had no doubt that he was a busy man—when something caused him to narrow his eyes. “So if it wasn’t about being poisoned, Miss Bocheng, why exactly was it that your friends didn’t want you taking this ship?”
“Oh, that.” I shook my head. “It’s silly. I don’t know why I mentioned it at all. It’s not as if I believe any of that nonsense.”
“Any of what nonsense, exactly?”
“You know, about the phantoms. About how the Parvan Tract is haunted. I told them I was above all that, but they still kept going on about it. They said that if I took this ship, I might never come back. Of course, that only made me even more determined.”
“Good for you.”
“I told them I was a rationalist, not someone who believes in ghosts and goblins.” I shifted on the couch, giving him a sympathetic look. “I expect that you’re fed up with hearing about all that, especially as you actually work here. I mean, if anyone would have been likely to see something, it would be you, wouldn’t it, or one of the other crew?”
“That would make sense,” he said.
“Well, the fact that you obviously haven’t… there can’t be anything to it, can there?” I crossed my arms and smiled triumphantly. “Wait until I tell my friends how silly they’ve been.”
“Perhaps,” he began, and then fell silent.