The Snow Queen Part 3

"Well, this could be your chance to double it! Come on along with us... I've got a feeling this's going to be a real education for him, Pollux."

"Whatever you say, Tor."

Sparks followed them down the alleyway, toward the twilight fading beyond the storm walls. Somewhere along the way Tor stopped at an un.o.btrusive door in a paint-thick warehouse front, rapped twice, then three times, with her fist. The door slid open a crack, then wider, to let them into a cavernous darkness. Sparks hung back, went forward again at Tor's impatient gesture as he heard the rising murmur of sound and realized they were not alone.

"How much are you betting?" Tor called back at him through the noise from across the vast room. She was already pa.s.sing a fistful of coins to a shrunken man drowned in a cloak. She stood on the edge of a crowd of watchers who kneeled, squatted, sat, their attention fixed on the small arena closed off in their midst. Sparks joined her, trying to see through the pall of throat-catching smoke that lay in the stifling air. "Betting on what?"

"On the blood wart of course! Only a fool would bet on a star against a blood wart Come on, how much are you good for?" Her eyes flashed the eager electricity that he felt rising around him everywhere, like the tide.

"Lot of people are fools, then." The man in the cloak stretched his mouth, and jingled the markers in his fist.

Tor made a rude noise. Behind her the crowd murmur crested and broke, the echoes flowed away into cracks and shadows; the room waited. Sparks saw two beings a" one human, one not a" step into the empty s.p.a.ce carrying oblong boxes. The alien's skin had an oily gleam, its arms were fingered with long tentacles. "Are they going to a" ?"

"Them? G.o.ds, no! Those are just the handlers. Come on, come on, place your bet!" Tor pulled his arm.

He rummaged in his sack of belongings, fished out two coins. "Well, here's a" uh, twenty."

"Twenty! Is that all you've got?" Tor looked crestfallen.

"That's all I'm betting." He held them out.

The shrunken man took his coins without comment, and flowed away into the crowd.

"Hey, this isn't illegal or anything, is it?" Sparks hesitated.

"Sure is... Clear us a path through these highborns, Pollux. We want a front-row seat for the last of the big spenders here."

"Whatever you say, Tor." Pollux pressed forward with single minded purpose. Sparks heard curses and sudden yelps of pain marking his progress through the crowd.

"But don't worry, Summer, it's not the death sport that's illegal." Tor pulled; Sparks found himself somehow halfway to the ring already. "It's just the importation of restricted beasts."

"Oh. Sorrya"" as he stepped on a gem stoned hand. About half of the crowd seemed to be laborers or sailors, but the other half glittered with jewels in the dim light, and some of them had skin the color of earth, or hair like clouds. He wondered whether they had stained themselves on purpose. Tor jerked him down at ringside; he folded his long legs under. Beside him Pollux towered back on his support leg; there were useless shouts of "down in front." Tor pulled out her flask and drank, handed it to Sparks. "Finish it off."

The changing flavor of the smoke was already weaving a soft coc.o.o.n around his head, separating him from himself and everyone else. He put the bottle to his mouth and drank recklessly; there was plenty to finish. His throat hurt, making him cough.

Tor patted his knee. "That puts you in the mood, doesn't it?"

He grinned. "For anything," hoa.r.s.ely.

She took her hand away. "Later, later."

Gulping, Sparks turned back with her to look out over the low part.i.tion; the movement made him giddy, like the sudden drop of a sea swell. The potential energy of the place was singing in him now, and the crowd's long sigh of indrawn breath was his, as the handlers threw open their cases and leaped clear.

If the whip-fingered alien in the arena had stunned his eyes (al though suddenly nothing surprised him), it had been no more than a promise. Now, over the rim of the container in front of him spilled a ma.s.s of lashing, fleshy tentacles; groping, slipping downward, drawing after them a flaccid pouch of body mottled like a bruise. "The blood wart Tor whispered. It had no head that Sparks could see, unless its head and body were all one, but ragged pincers scissored among the tentacles. He heard them click in the waiting silence. Abrupt movement at the other end of the square pulled his eyes away a" "The starl," Tor muttered a" to a liquid shadow of black on black: the dappled hide of a sinuous creature as long as his forearm. He caught the spear of light from a bared tusk as the starl whined far back in its throat. All light was centered on the square now, and every eye. The starl circled the blood wart oblivious to the crowd, still keening far back in its throat. The blood wart tentacles lashed the air but it made no sound a" even when the starl struck, ripping a flap of skin from its heaving pouch-body. Its tentacles whipped frantically, caught and wrapped the start's narrow head. "Poison," Tor hissed gleefully. The starl began to scream, and its scream was lost in the hungry roar of the crowd.

Sparks leaned forward, drawn like a wire, knowing a dim surprise as the cry of protest he had expected came out of his throat as a hunting cry. The starl pulled free, snapping and ripping in a frenzy of pain at the blood wart tentacles and its soft, flabby body. The blood wart floundered, its oozing tentacles flailed again ... and exulting in his own lost innocence, Sparks threw open his heightened senses to take in the ballet of death.

An eternity later, but all too soon, the starl lay with sides heaving as the blood wart wrapped it in strands of broken tentacle and closed in for the kill. Sparks saw the whiteness of the start's wild eye, the white-and-red-flecked straining mouth; heard its strangled moan in the sudden silence as the pincers found its throat. Blood spurted; drops spattered his slicker and his sweating face.

He jerked back, rubbing his face, stared at his hand freshly bloodied. And suddenly he had no need to look back again, no need to watch the flattened bladder fill and flush red or the redness seep out through its torn sides as the blood wart drained its victim... Suddenly he had no voice either, to join the clamoring dirge of curses and cheers. He turned his face away, but there was no escape from the gleaming insanity of the crowd. "Tor, Ia""

And turning, he discovered that she was gone, that Pollux was gone... and that the sack filled with his belongings had gone with them.

"I'm telling you, sonny, we got no city work available for a Summer a" you can't handle machinery, you don't know the social codes; you got no experience." The posting clerk looked at Sparks over the sill of the tiny office window the way he might have looked at a backward child.

"Well, how can I get experience if no one'll hire me?" Sparks raised his voice, frowned as it beat back on his aching head.

"Good question." The clerk gnawed on a fingernail.

"That's not fair."

"Life ain't fair, sonny. If you want work here you'll have to change your clan affiliation."

"Like h.e.l.l I will!"

"Then go back where you belong with your stinking fish skins, and quit wasting the time of real people!" The man behind him hi the line pushed him aside; the gloved hand was studded with metal.

Sparks turned back, saw the gloved hand make a fist twice the size of his own. He turned away again, away through the laughter, and went out of the hiring hall into the street. A new day brightened at the alley's end beyond the shuttered walls, after a night when storm clouds had blackened the stars but darkness had never fallen here in the streets of the city. There had been no way to hide his rage or his humiliation, or the misery of the vomiting that had purged what he had drunk, and seen, and done. He had slept like a corpse on a pile of crates afterward, and dreamed that Moon stood looking down on him, knowing everything, with pity in her agate-colored eyes ... pity Sparks pressed a hand over his own aching eyes to pinch her face away.

Down the long slope of the street lay the harbor beneath the city, and the trader's small boat waiting to take him home. His stomach twisted with fury and sick hunger. In not even a day he had thrown away everything a" his belongings, his ideals, his self-respect. Now he would creep home to the islands, having lost his dream, and live with Moon's pity for the rest of his life. His mouth pulled back. Or he could admit that he had learned the real lesson: that Carbuncle had only stripped him naked of his illusions, taught him that he had nothing, he was nothing ... and that he was the only one in this mother lorn city who cared. Whether that ever changed or not was in his hands only.

His empty hands... He moved them helplessly, brushed the pouch hanging at his belt, the one thing that Tor and Carbuncle had left him: his flute. He drew it out gently, possessively, put it to his lips as he began to walk; letting melodies from the time he had lost ease the loss of everything else.

He moved aimlessly up the street, shutting out the restless motion that never ceased even through the night. Strangers looked at him, now that he had become oblivious to them. He did not notice, until at last something rang on the pavement in front of him. He stopped, looking down. A coin lay at his feet. He bent slowly, picked it up, flexed his fingers over it in wonder.

"You'd make more if you worked the Maze, you know. The listeners there have more to throw away... and more appreciation for an artist."

Sparks glanced up, startled; saw a woman with dark, plaited hair and a band across her forehead standing before him. The crowd separated and flowed around them; he had the feeling that they stood together on an island. The woman was his Aunt Lelark's age, or older by some years, wearing a long dress of worn velvet and bands of feather necklace. She held a cane with a tip that glowed like a brand. The tip rose along his body to his face; she smiled. She was not looking at him. There was a deadness around her eyes, something missing, as though a light had been snuffed out.

"Who are you?" she asked.

Blind. "Sparks ... Dawntreader," he said, suddenly not sure about where to look. He looked at her cane.

She seemed to be waiting.

"Summer." He finished it almost defiantly.

"Ah. I thought so." She nodded. "Nothing I hear in Carbuncle is ever so wild or wistful. Take my advice, Sparks Dawntreader Summer. Move uptown." She reached into the beaded pouch hanging from her shoulder and held out a handful of torus coins. "Good luck to you in the city."

"Thanks." He reached out to meet her hand, took the coins hesitantly.

She nodded, lowering her cane as she started past him. She paused. "Come to my shop sometime, in the Citron Alley. Ask for the mask maker anyone can tell you where it is."

He nodded too; remembered, and said quickly, "Uh a" sure. Maybe I will." He watched her go.

And then he moved uptown. Into the Maze, where the building fronts were painted with lights, in strings and whorls and rainbowed pinwheels; where the colors, the shapes, the costumes that peered from windows or moved on bodies along the street never repeated twice; where the flash of signs and the cries of hucksters promised heaven and h.e.l.l and every gradation of degradation in between. Finding a half-quiet street corner under fluttering flowered banners, he stood and played for hours to a jingling harmony provided by the coins of pa.s.sersby a" not as many as he had hoped, but better than the nothing he had started with.

At last the fragrance of a hundred separate spices and herbs pulled him away, to spend a few of his coins filling his empty stomach with a feast of strange delights. Afterward he shed his slicker for a shirt of red silk, chains of gla.s.s and copper beads; the shopkeeper took the rest of his money. But as he started back through the evening alleys to his corner, to try to earn keep for the night, he sang a silent prayer of thanks to the Lady for the gift of his music that She had sent with him into Carbuncle. With his music he could survive, while he learned the rules of his new life Four off worlders in s.p.a.cer coveralls without insignia, who had walked the alley behind him, closed around him abruptly and dragged him into the dark crack between two buildings.

"What do you want a" ?" He twisted his head, freed his mouth from a hand that reeked of machine lubricant. Blinking frantically in the dim light, he saw the three others, not sure he really saw white teeth bared in the grin of a closing hunt, but sure of the gunmetal gleam of something deadly held by one, and the restraining cuffs, more hands reaching out for him as the crushing grip tightened across his throat.

He threw back his head and felt it impact in the face of the man behind him, heard a grunt of pain, then used his elbow and his heavy boots. The man fell back, cursing unintelligibly; and Sparks stumbled free, opened his mouth to shout for help.

But the shadow with the gunmetal gleam used his weapon first. The shout went out of Sparks in a gasp as black lightning struck him. He fell forward on his face, a string-cut puppet, helpless to keep his head from cracking on the pavement. But there was no pain, only dull impact, and the dry rattle of a thousand synapse lines gone dead in a body that could not respond. A band of steel was tightening around his throat, he heard the ugly sound of his own strangling.

A foot rolled him. The shadow men closed over him, looking down; he saw their smiles clearly this time, as they saw the terror on his face.

"How much did you hit him with, lard fingers Looks like he's choking."

"Let him choke, the wormy little b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Brain damage won't hurt his price off world The man he had hit in the face wiped blood from a split lip.

"Yeah, he's a pretty one, ain't he? Not just mine fodder, nosiree. We'll get a load for him on Tsieh-pun." Laughter; a boot settled on his stomach, pressed. "Keep breathing, pretty boy. That's the way."

One of them knelt, locked his useless hands with the metal cuffs. The man with the b.l.o.o.d.y face dropped down beside him, pulled something from a pocket, flicked a switch at its base. A narrow blade of light flamed, the length of the man's hand; fingers of his other hand probed Sparks's mouth, found his tongue. "Last words, pretty boy?"

Help me! But his scream was silent.

Chapter 5.

"G.o.ds, I hate this duty!" Police Inspector Geia Jerusha PalaThion jerked the end of her scarlet cape free of the patrol craft door seal The car trembled lightly, hovering on repellers in the palace courtyard at the high end of Carbuncle's Street.

Her sergeant looked at her, an ironic half-smile crumpling the pale freckles on his dark, fine-boned face. "You mean you don't enjoy visiting royalty, Inspector?" innocently.

"You know what I mean, Gundhalinu." She jerked the cape roughly around to open from one shoulder, hiding the utilitarian dusty-blue of the duty uniform beneath it. A brooch with the Hegemonic seal pinned its folds. "I mean, BZa"" she gestured a" "that I hate having to dress up like something out of a costume strobe to play s.p.a.ceman's burden with the Snow Queen."

Gundhalinu tapped the flash-shield at the front of his flaring helmet. Her helmet had been sprayed gold; his was still white, and he was cape less "You should be glad the Commander doesn't put a potted plant up there, Inspector, to make you more impressive... You have to look the part when you go to lay down universal law before the Mother lovers, don't you?"

"Manure." They began to walk toward the ma.s.sive doors of the ceremonial entrance, across the intricate spiral patterns of pale inlaid stone. At the far side of the courtyard two Winter servants scrubbed the stones with long-handled brushes. They were always out here, scrubbing, keeping it flawless. Alabaster? she wondered, looking down, and thought about sand, and heat, and sky. There were none of those things here, not anywhere in this cold, spun stone confection of a city. This courtyard marked the beginning of the Street, the beginning of the world, the beginning of everything in Carbuncle. Or the end. She saw the frigid sky of the upper lat.i.tudes glaring at them helplessly beyond the storm walls. "Arienrhod is no more taken in by this charade than we are. The only possible good that could come out of this would be if she believes we're as stupid as we look."

"Yes, but what about all their primitive rituals and superst.i.tions, Inspector? I mean, these are people who still believe in human sacrifice. Who deck up in masks and have orgies hi the street every time the a.s.sembly comes to visita""

"Don't you celebrate, when the Prime Minister drops hi on Kharemough every few decades to let you kiss his feet?"

"It's hardly the same thing. He is a Kharemoughi." Gundhalinu drew himself up, shielding himself from contamination. "And our celebrations are dignified."

Jerusha smiled. "All a matter of degree. And before you start throwing around cultural judgments, Sergeant, go back and study the ethnographies until you really understand this world's traditions." She turned her own face into a mask of official propriety, letting him see it while she presented it to the Queen's guards. They stood stiffly at attention, doing their own costumed imitation of the offworlder police. The immense, time-gnawed doors opened for her without hesitation.

"Yes, ma'am." Their polished boots rang on the corridor leading to the Hall of the Winds. Gundhalinu looked aggrieved. He had been on Tiamat for a little less than a standard year, and had been her a.s.sistant for most of that time. She liked him, and thought he liked her; she felt that he was on his way to becoming a competent career officer. But his homeworld was Kharemough, the world that dominated the Hegemony, and a world dominated by the technocracy that produced the Hegemony's most sophisticated hardware. She suspected that Gundhalinu was a younger son from a family of some rank, forced into this career by rigid inheritance laws at home, and he was Tech through and through. Jerusha thought a little sadly that a hundred replays of the orientation tapes would never teach him any tolerance.

"Well," she said more kindly, "I'll tell you one man in a mask who probably fits all your prejudices, and mine too a" and that's Star buck. And he's an off worlder whoever or whatever else he is." She looked at the frescoes of chill Winter scenes along the entry hall, tried to wonder how many times they had been painted and repainted. But in her mind's eye she already saw Starbuck standing at the Queen's right hand, wearing a sneer under that d.a.m.ned executioner's hood while he looked down on the hamstrung representatives of the Law.

"He wears a mask for the same reasons as any other thief or murderer," Gundhalinu said sourly.

"True enough. Living proof that no world has a monopoly on regressive behavior ... and that sc.u.m tends to rise to the top." Jerusha slowed, hearing the sigh of a slumbering giant deep in the planet's bowels. She took a deep breath of her own against the Trial by Air that was a part of the ritual in every visit to the palace, and shivered under her cloak with more than the growing chill of the air. She never got over the fear, just as she never got over her amazement at the thing that caused it: the place they called the Hall of the Winds.

She saw one of the n.o.bility waiting for them at the brink of the abyss, glad that for once the Queen had seen fit not to keep them waiting. The less time she stood thinking about it, the less trouble she would have getting across. It might mean that Arienrhod was in a good mood a" or simply that she was too preoccupied with other matters to indulge in petty hara.s.sments today. Jerusha was thoroughly informed about the spy system the Queen had had installed throughout the city, and particularly here in the palace. The Queen enjoyed setting up minor ordeals to demoralize her opposition ... and it was obvious to Jerusha that she also enjoyed watching the victims sweat.

Jerusha recognized Kirard Set, an elder of the Wayaways family, one of the Queen's favorites. He was rumored to have seen four visits of the a.s.sembly; but his face, below the fashionable twist of turban, was still hardly more than a boy's. "Elder." Jerusha saluted him stiffly, painfully aware of the crow's-feet starting at the corners of her own eyes; more aware of the moaning call of the abyss beyond her, like the hungry laughter of the unrepentant d.a.m.ned. Who would build a thing like this? She had wondered it every time she came to this place, wondered whether the crying of the wind was not really the voice of its creators, those lost ancestors who had dreamed and built this haunted city in the north. No one she knew a" knew what they had been, or done, here, before the collapse of the interstellar empire that made the present Hegemony seem insignificant.

If she had been anywhere else, she might have sought out a sibyl and tried to get an answer, obscure and unintelligible though it probably would have been. Even here on Tiamat, in the far islands the sibyls wandered like traveling occultists, thinking they spoke with the voice of the Sea Mother. But the wisdom was real, and still intact even here, though the Tiamatans had lost the truth behind it, just as they had lost the reason for Carbuncle. There were no sibyls in the city a" by Hegemonic law, conveniently supported by the Winters' disgust with anything remotely "primitive." Calculated and highly successful Hegemonic propaganda kept them believing it was nothing more than a combination of superst.i.tious fakery and disease-born madness, for the most part. Not even the Hegemony would dare to eliminate sibyls from an inhabited world ... but it could keep them unavailable. Sibyls were the carriers of the Old Empire's lost wisdom, meant to give the new civilizations that built on its ruins a key to unlock its buried secrets. And if there was any thing the Hegemony's wealthy and powerful didn't want, it was to see this world stand on its own feet and grow strong enough to deny them the water of life.

Jerusha remembered suddenly, vividly, the one sibyl she had ever seen in Carbuncle a" ten years ago, only a short time after her arrival here at her first post. She had seen him because she had been sent to oversee his exile from the city, had gone with the jeering crowd as they led their frightened, protesting kinsman down to the docks and set him adrift in a boat. There had been a witch-catcher of iron studded with spikes around his neck; they had pushed him along at pole's length, rightfully afraid of contamination.

Then, down the steep dropoff to the harbor, they had pushed him too roughly, and he had fallen. The spikes bit into his throat and the side of his face, laying them open. The sibyl's blood that the crowd had been so afraid of spilling had welled and run like a necklace of jewels under his chin, patterning down his shirt (the shirt was a deep sky blue; she was struck by the beauty of the contrast). And stricken with fear like the rest, she had watched him sit moaning with his hands pressed against his throat, and done nothing to help him...

Gundhalinu touched her elbow hesitantly. She looked up, embarra.s.sed, into the faintly scornful face of the Elder Wayaways. "Whenever you're ready, Inspector."

She nodded.

The elder lifted the small whistle suspended from a chain around his neck and stepped out onto the bridge. Jerusha followed with eyes looking fixedly ahead, knowing what she would see if she looked down, not needing to see it: the terrifying shaft that gave access for the servicing of the city's self-sufficient operating plant, servicing that had never been needed as far as she knew, during the millennium that the Hegemony had known about it. There were enclosed elevator capsules that gave technicians safe access to its countless levels; there was also a column of air, rising up this shaft at the hollow core of Carbuncle's spiral the way an updraft formed in an open chimney. Here was the only area of the city not entirely sealed off by storm walls; the bitter winds of the open sky ran wild through this s.p.a.ce, sucking the breath out of the subterranean hollows. There was always a strong smell of the sea here high in the air, and moaning, as the wind probed the irregularities of cranny and protrusion in the shaft below.

There were also, suspended in the air like immense free-form mobiles, transparent panels of some resilient material that flowed and billowed like clouds, that created treacherous cross-currents and back flows in the relentless wind. And there was only one way across the hall to the upper levels of the palace: Here the corridor became a drawbridge vaulting the chasm like a band of light. It was wide enough to walk easily in silent air, but it was made deadly by the hungry sweep of the winds.

The Elder Wayaways sounded a note on his whistle and stepped forward confidently as the s.p.a.ce around him grew calm. Jerusha followed, almost stepping on his heels with the need to include herself and Gundhalinu in the globe of quiet air. The elder continued to walk, at a calm even pace, sounding another note, and a third. Still the globe of peaceful air surrounded them; but behind her Jerusha heard Gundhalinu take some G.o.d's name in vain as he lagged a little and the wind licked his back.

This is insane! She repeated the litany of fear and resentment that always went with her crossing. What sort of a maniac would build this s.a.d.i.s.t's jun house... knowing that the technology that had designed it could easily have circ.u.mvented it, if it had simply been meant as a security measure. At the tech level permitted the Winters on Tiamat now, it was effective enough. Whatever nerveless madman had had it put here in the first place, she suspected that it suited the purposes of the present Queen all too well.

They were midway across already. She kept her eyes fixed on the elder's back, hearing the atonal wind-charmer's notes that held back death shrill above the groaning pit. It was not the weaving of some magic spell, but the activation of automated controls that diverted the wind curtains to the travelers' protection instead of their destruction. Knowing that was no great comfort to her when she considered the potential for human error, or for a sudden failure in such an ancient system. There had been control boxes once that did what the whistle player did now; but as far as she knew the only one that still worked hung on Starbuck's belt.

Safe. Her boots found the security of the far rim. She controlled the overwhelming desire to let her legs melt out from under her and sit down. Gundhalinu's sweating face grinned at her gamely. She wondered whether he was trying not to think about the return trip, too. Looking ahead again, she read triumph in the Elder Way a" aways' walk as they followed him on into the audience hall.

Even here, so near the pinnacle of Carbuncle, the hall was overpowering in its vastness; she imagined it could hold an entire villa from Newhaven, her homeworld. Fiber hangings in chilly pastels drifted down from the geometric arches of the pillared ceiling, winking and chiming with the exotic song of a thousand tiny handmade silver bells.

And across the expanse of white carpet a" an off world import a" the Snow Queen sat back on her throne, a G.o.ddess incarnate, a taloned snow hawk in an ice-bound aerie. Unconsciously Jerusha drew her cloak closer around her. "Colder than the Karoo," Gundhalinu muttered, and rubbed his arms. The Elder Wayaways motioned them to wait where they were, went ahead to announce their presence. Jerusha was sure that the dark, distant eyes beneath the crown of pale hair were already more than aware of them, although Arienrhod did not acknowledge them, but gazed out across the hall. As usual Arienrhod had struck Jerusha's eye first; but now, as she followed the Queen's gaze into the nearer distance, a searing line of light, the hum-snap of an energy beam striking home, wrenched her attention away.

"Schact!" Gundhalinu hissed, as voices cried out and they saw the knot of n.o.bles split open as the bolt knocked one sprawling onto the rug. "Dueling a" ?" His voice was incredulous. Jerusha's hand tightened on the empire-cross of her belt buckle, barely controlling her sudden outrage. Did the Queen mock police authority to the degree of staging murder in her presence? Her mouth was open to protest, to demand a" but before she could find words, the victim rolled over and sat up, not blistered or charred, with no blood staining the snow-field purity of the rug. A woman, Jerusha saw; the fads in clothing affected by the n.o.bility sometimes made it hard to tell. There was a faint distortion of air as she moved; she had been wearing a repeller field. She climbed gracefully to her feet with an elaborate bow toward the Queen, the rest clapping and laughing their amus.e.m.e.nt. Gundhalinu swore again, more softly, in disgust. As the n.o.bles shifted, Jerusha caught sight of the black figure, the cold gleam of metal, and realized that the one who had playacted the murderer had been Starbuck.

G.o.ds! What sort of jaded half wits would try to burn each other down for laughs? They treated a weapon that could maim and kill like a toy a" they no more understood the real function or significance of technology than a pampered pet understood a jewelled collar. Yes a" but whose fault is that, if not ours? Arienrhod's gaze caught her suddenly in mid-expression. The strangely colored eyes stayed on her; the Queen smiled. It was not a pleasant expression. Who says the pet doesn't understand its collar? Jerusha held the gaze stubbornly. Or that the savage doesn't see through the lie that makes him less than human?

The Elder Wayaways had announced them and was backing from the Queen's presence as Starbuck came to stand beside her throne. His hidden face also turned toward them, as if he were curious about the effect of his playacting. We're all savages at heart.

"You may approach, Inspector PalaThion." The Queen lifted a desultory hand.

Jerusha removed her helmet and walked forward, Gundhalinu treading close behind her. She was certain that no more than the bare minimum of respect showed on either his face or her own. The n.o.bles stood off to one side, striking poses like so many hologrammic traders' dummies, watching with sincere disinterest as she made her salute. She wondered briefly why they found playing at and with death so amusing. They were all favorites, young-faced a" the G.o.ds only knew how old in reality. She had always heard that users of the water of life became pathologically protective of their extended youth. Could it be that there really came a time when you had experienced everything you could possibly desire? No, not even in a century and a half. Or could it be that they simply didn't know, that Starbuck hadn't warned them of the danger?

"Your Majestya"" She glanced up, half at Starbuck, then back at Arienrhod enthroned on the dais. The sweet girlish face was made into a mockery, a mask like Starbuck's, by the too-knowing wisdom of her eyes.

Arienrhod raised a finger, the slight motion cutting off her words. "I have decided that from now on you will kneel when you come before me, Inspector."

Jerusha's mouth snapped shut. She took a moment, and a long breath. "I'm an officer of the Hegemonic Police, Your Majesty. I have sworn an oath of allegiance to the Hegemony." She gazed deliberately at the rising back of the Queen's throne, through her, around her. The blown-and-welded surfaces of gla.s.s, the shining spirals and shadowed crevices dazzled her eyes with the hypnotic spell of the Maze; the bizarre artistry that catalyzed out of Carbuncle's volatile mix of cultures.