The Snow Queen (11 page)

“Mutes tell
no tales ... though where you were going they wouldn’t have understood a word
you said anyway. And they sure wouldn’t have cared ... No, it’s not a pretty
thought, is it?” She squeezed his thin arm gently. “But it happens all the
time. Only these big-hearts won’t be making it happen again. You’re from
ofiworld?”

His hand
tightened over the medal again. “Yeah ... I mean, no. My mother wasn’t. My
father was.” He squinted fiercely into the light.

She kept
the surprise off of her own face. “And the medal belonged to him.” She made it
a statement of accepted fact, not caring where he’d gotten the medal, more
interested now in the possibility of bigger crimes. “But you were raised here?
You consider yourself a citizen of Tiamat?”

He rubbed
his mouth again, blinking. “I guess so.” A trace of hesitation, or suspicion.

Gundhalinu
reappeared from the alley; the beam of his light overlapped her own to drive
the shadows back. “They’ll be here for a pickup any time, Inspector.” She
nodded. He stopped by the boy. “How you doing?”

The boy
looked up at Gundhalinu’s dark freckled face, almost staring, before he seemed
to remember his manners. “All right, I guess. Thanks ... thanks.” He turned
back to Jerusha, met her eyes, looked down, away, back again. “I don’t know how
... I just . thanks.”

“You want
to pay us back?” She smiled; he nodded. “Be more careful where you walk. And be
willing to swear in a monitored testimony that you’re a citizen of Tiamat.” She
grinned at Gundhalinu. “Not only kidnapping and assault, but attempting to take
a citizen of a proscribed planet off world She stood up. “I’m feeling better
all the time.”

Gundhalinu
laughed. “And somebody else is feeling worse.” He bent his head at the
prisoners.

“What does
that mean?” The boy climbed to his feet, leaning heavily on the wall. “Do you
mean I can’t ever go to another world, even if I want to?” Gundhalinu put out a
hand, steadying him.

Jerusha
glanced at her watch. “In your case, maybe you can. If your father was an off
worlder that makes a difference—if you can prove it. Of course, once you leave
here you can never come back ... You’d have to take it up with a lawyer.”

“Why?”
Gundhalinu asked. “Were you planning to ship off?”

The boy
began to look hostile. “I might want to, some time. If you come here, why won’t
you let us leave?”

“Because
your cultures haven’t reached an adequate degree of maturity,” Gundhalinu
intoned.

The boy
looked pointedly at the off world slavers, and back at Gundhalinu. Gundhalinu
frowned.

Jerusha
switched on her recorder. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just get a few facts for the
record. Then we’ll see about taking you down to the med center for—”

“I don’t
need it. I’m all right.” The boy straightened up, pulling at his clothes.

“You’re
probably not the best judge of that, you know.” She looked at him sharply, met
embers in his gaze. “But that’s up to you. Go home and get a good night’s sleep
instead, if you want. In any case we need to know where to reach you when we
want you. Please state your name.”

“Sparks
Dawntreader Summer.”

“Summer?”
Belatedly she registered the burr in his speech. “How long have you been in the
city,
Sparks
?”

He
shrugged. “Not very long.” He glanced away.

“Hm.”
Which explains a lot of
things
.
“Why did you come to Carbuncle?”

“Is that
against your laws too?” sarcasm dripping.

“Not as far
as I know.” She heard Gundhalinu’s sniff of disapproval. “Are you employed, and
if so, doing what?”

“Yes.
Street musician.” The boy’s hand began to grope suddenly, searching his shirt,
his belt, the air. “My flute ...”

Jerusha lit
the corners of the darkness with a sweep of her helmet light. “Is that it?”

The boy
dropped down on hands and knees beside one of the slavers, and picked up the
pieces. “No—no!” His face and his hands tightened with pain. The slaver
laughed, and the boy’s fist hit him in the mouth.

Jerusha
moved forward, pulled the boy up and away. “That’s enough, Summer ... You’ve
had a hard time of it here, because nobody’s told you the rules. And nobody
can, that’s the problem. Go back to your quiet islands where time stands still,
while you’re still able to. Go home, Summer ... and wait another five years.
You’ll belong here after the Change.”

“I know
what I’m doing.”

Like hell you do
, she thought, looking at his battered face and
the broken flute still clutched in his hands. “In that case, since you now lack
a means of earning a living, I’m going to charge you witrr-vagrancy. Unless, of
course, you leave the city within the next day period.”
Anything to get you
back
on a ship and away
from here, before Carbuncle ruins another life.

The boy
looked incredulous. Then his anger came back, and she knew that she had lost.
“I’m not a vagrant! The—the mask maker in the Citron Alley. I’m staying there.”

Jerusha
heard the sound of another patrol craft arriving, and booted feet in the
alleyway. “All right, Sparks. If you have a place to stay, I guess you’re free
to go home.”
Only you won’t go home, you
fool
. “But I still need your monitored victim’s deposition, to put these
leeches away for good. Stop in at police headquarters tomorrow; you owe me that
much at least.”

The boy
nodded sullenly, and stepped out into the alley. She didn’t expect to see him
again.

“What do
you mean, you don’t know what happened to the boy?” Arienrhod leaned out of her
seat, glaring at the bald dome of the trader’s bent head. Her fingers sank into
the soft arms of the lounging chair like talons.

“Forgive
me, Your Majesty!” The trader glanced up at her with the eyes of a terrified
rodent. “I didn’t think you were interested in him, only in the girl. I told
him to go to Gadderfy’s in the Periwinkle Alley, but he didn’t go there. If you
want me to search the city” His voice wavered.

“No, that
won’t be necessary.” She managed to produce a placating tone of voice, not
wanting the old man to keel over dead at the thought of it. “My methods are
much more efficient than yours. I’ll find him myself if I decide that I need
him.”
And I think that perhaps I was
meant to find him.
“You said that he decided to come here because ... Moon
... has become a sibyl, while he was rejected?”
How hard it is to call yourself by another name.
“What does he
expect to find in Carbuncle?”

“I don’t
know, Your Majesty.” The trader wrung his tooled leather belt-end between his
hands. “But like I told you, they were pledged to each other; they were always
together. I guess it hurt his pride, that he couldn’t join her in the
hocus-pocus. And his father’s an off worlder he always wears that medal ... I
guess he’s curious.”

She nodded,
not looking at him. Over the years he had brought her stories of the two
children growing up together, childhood sweethearts bound by some invisible
cord of loyalty ... which perhaps could be used to draw the girl here to
Carbuncle, and get her away from her superstitious sibyl-fixation. She couldn’t
blame the girl for aspiring to the highest honor in her limited world; that
only proved how surely they were the same woman. But Moon’s obsession had kept
her unreceptive when the trader had tried to interest her in Winter technology,
though it had caught the boy’s interest, perhaps because of his off worlder
father. At least Moon had never rejected her cousin for being a tech lover, as
any true Summer would have. That had prompted Arienrhod to tolerate their
relationship, in the hope that even such diluted contact with technology would
help make Moon ready for her destiny. At least she hadn’t gotten pregnant by
him—even the Summers grew child bane and knew how to use it. If he were here in
the palace, waiting for her ...

“You’re
sure that Moon is ‘studying’ with these sibyls on their island now? Will she be
safe there?”

“As safe as
anywhere in Summer, Your Majesty. Probably safer. She may even be back on Neith
by the time I put in there again.”

“And you
say the sibyls you’ve seen aren’t actually deranged—?” Her voice tightened. She
had hoped to bring the girl here before she had the chance to contract the
sibyl disease; but now it was too late.

“No, Your
Majesty.” He shook his head. “They control their fits completely; I’ve never
seen one who couldn’t.” His own lack of fear reassured her.

Arienrhod
studied the mural on the wall behind his head. As long as the girl was sane,
that was all that really mattered; the disease could even be an asset, a
protection, if it made the Summers trust her. She looked back at the trader.
“Then you’ll bring her a message from her cousin, which I will supply. I want
her to come to Carbuncle.” Moon would have to come of her own free will; the
Summers would never stand by and let someone kidnap a sibyl.

The trader
kept his head bowed; she could not tell what his expression was, although he
twitched slightly. “But, Your Majesty—if she’s become a sibyl, she may be
afraid to come to the city.”

“She’ll
come.” Arienrhod smiled. “I know her; she’ll come.”
If she thinks her lover is in danger, she’ll come.
“You’ve served
me well—” she realized that she had forgotten the man’s name, and did not use
it, “trader. You deserve to be well rewarded.”
Gods, I must be getting old
. The smile altered slightly. She
pressed a sequence of lighted keys on the chair arm. “I think you will find
that the debts for your new cargo of trade goods have all been canceled.”

“Thank you,
Your Majesty!” She watched his sagging face jiggle as he made obeisance, hating
the sight of the ugliness that age inflicted, even while she took pleasure in
the awareness of her own invulnerability.

She
dismissed him, not even cautioning him to keep this meeting to himself. He was
a distant but loyal kinsman; no matter what he might wonder about his strange guardianship
or the stranger object of it, she knew that he would never ask, or betray.
Particularly not when he was paid so well.

She rose
from her seat in the small private room when he had gone, and went to the
doorway, drawing the white inlaid panels aside. She found Starbuck waiting
there, not quite expected, in the wider hall beyond it. With him were his
Hounds—the amphibian hunters from Tsieh-pun, ideally suited to the work of
outwitting mers. The Hounds stood in a cluster at the far side of the chamber,
tentacled arms waving as they grunted at each other in desultory conversation.

But
Starbuck stood leaning with his usual public insolence against a massive
Samathan side table very close on her left ... very close to the door. She
wondered whether he had been listening; decided that he probably had, decided
that it probably didn’t matter.

He was
hooded and still in black, but instead of his court costume it was a
utilitarian thermal suit hung with equipment for the hunt. Light caught on his
sheathed killing knife as he straightened up. He bowed to her with rigid
propriety, but not before she saw the searching look and the questions in his
dark eyes.

“Are you
leaving already?” She gave him nothing but the coldness of her voice.

“Yes, Your
Majesty. If it pleases you.” She detected the faint assumption of a ritual
between equals.

“It pleases
me very much.”
Yes, flinch, my
overconfident hunter. You are not the first by many, and you may not be the
last
. “The sooner you go, the better. You hunt the Wayaways preserve this
time?”

“Yes, Your
Majesty. The weather is clear there and should hold.” He hesitated, came toward
her. “Give me luck in the hunt—?” His hand caressed her arm through the film of
cloth.

He lifted
his mask, and she drew his face toward hers with her hands, giving him a kiss
that was a promise of greater rewards. “Hunt well.”

He nodded
and turned away. She watched him gather the Hounds and go looking for life and
death.

“Input—”

An ocean of air ... an ocean of stone.
She was flying. Moon gaped with a stranger’s
eyes at the vaulting walls of striated rock that funneled her out into the
canyon lands an immeasurable vastness of eroded stone like scrimshaw lace,
stained violet, green, crim son, gray. She was trapped in the maw of a
transparent bird, an airship in flight; dials and push buttons and strange
symbols blinked and clicked on the panel before her. But she was held in stasis
by her trance, and she could not reach them, as the ridge of purple stone rose
like a wall into her headlong flight.

The ship
banked steeply on its own, clearing the ridge and plunging into a deeper chasm,
leaving her giddy. Something on the panel flashed red, bleeping critically as
her altitude stabilized once more. Where she had come from, where she was
bound, where this lithified sea existed, were mysteries she would never be able
to answer; along with who, and how, and why ... Overhead the sky was a
cloudless indigo, blackening toward the zenith, lit by only one tiny, silvery
sun. She could not see water anywhere ...