The Snow Queen Part 9

Ngenet turned away, struck the frost-rimed windshield of the hovercraft with a gloved fist. "My faulta""

"And mine. If we'd held onto them she would have been all right." And that's what happens when you start trying to change the rules.

"What was she to you, Citizen Ngenet?" Gundhalinu asked. "More than a pa.s.sing stranger." Not a question.

"She's a sibyl." He looked back at them. "It doesn't matter if you know that now."

Jerusha raised her eyebrows. "A sibyl?" The wind off the bay clutched her in icy talons. "Why a" would that make a difference to us?"

"Come now, Inspector." His voice turned bitter, like the wind.

"We're law officers. We enforce the law" a" liar a" "and the law protects sibyls, even on Tiamat."

"Like it protects the mers? Like it protects this world from progress?"

She saw Gundhalinu stiffen like a hunter scenting his prey. "How long have you been living in the outback, Citizen Ngenet?"

"All my life," with a kind of pride. "And my father before me, and his father... This is my homeworld."

"And you don't like the way we're running it?" Gundhalinu made it a challenge.

"d.a.m.n right I don't! You try to choke the life out of this world's future, you let a maggot like Starbuck wipe his boots on you while he slaughters innocent beings for the gratification of a few filthy-rich b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who want to live forever. You make a mockery of 'law' and 'justice'a""

"And so do you, Citizen." Gundhalinu stepped forward; Jerusha could see everything that had locked into place inside his head. "Inspector, it seems likely to me that this man is involved in more serious criminal activities than just smuggling. I think we ought to take him back to the citya""

"And charge him with what? Behaving like an arrogant fool?" She shook her head. "We have no evidence that would justify that."

"But hea"" Gundhalinu gestured, accidentally struck her arm.

"d.a.m.n it, Sergeant, I said we're letting him go!" She lost his startled face in a burst of pain stars Blinking, she refocused on Ngenet instead. "But that doesn't mean I'm letting you off completely, Ngenet. Your presence here and your att.i.tude are questionable enough to warrant my revoking your permit to operate this hovercraft. I'm impounding it. We're taking it back to the city." A trickle of perspiration crept down the side of her face, burning cold.

"You can't do that!" Ngenet straightened away from the hovercraft's door, towering over her. "I'm a citizen of the Hegemonya""

"And required to obey me." She lifted her head to glare back at him. "You're a citizen of Tiamat, by your own choice. If that's what you want, then you can live like one."

"How am I supposed to run my plantation?"

"Just like any other Winter. Use a ship, deal with traders. You'll get along fine, if that's all you really need it for... Or would you rather take the trip to Carbuncle with us, and have your plantation electronically searched for contraband?" She watched him struggle against speech, and was gratified.

"All right. Take the vehicle. Just let me get my things."

"That won't be necessary."

He looked back at her.

"I'll drop you off at your plantation before I take the craft to Carbuncle. BZ, you'll pilot the patroller home."

Gundhalinu nodded; she saw some of his disappointment shaken loose in the motion. "You want me to tandem you, Inspector?"

"No. I don't think Citizen Ngenet is going to do anything stupid. He doesn't strike me as a stupid man."

Ngenet made a sound that was not really a laugh.

"We might as well get started." She bent her head grimly at the patrol craft It's going to be a long trip.

"Yes, ma'am. See you in Carbuncle, Inspector." Gundhalinu saluted and walked away.

She watched him get into the patrol craft watched it rise from the stone terrace of the quay. The sky was clouding over again; she shivered more violently. At least Carbuncle has central heating ... suddenly longing for the touch of a warm wind fragrant with sillipha, the endless summer afternoon of her childhood on Newhaven. "Well, Citizen Ngeneta""

Ngenet reached out, his hand closed gently but firmly over her aching arm. She gasped, stiffening with surprise and sudden alarm.

"Ah," as he held up his other hand in a cautionary gesture. He let her go. "I just wanted to be sure. The Summer girl hurt you, Inspector. Maybe you better let me see how badly."

"It's nothing. Get in." She looked away from him, jaw tight.

He shrugged. "Feel free to be a martyr if you like. But it doesn't impress me. As you say, I'm not a stupid man."

She looked back. "I prefer to wait until I can see a medic at the star port "I am a qualified medic." He turned, pressed his hand against a seal on the side of the hovercraft. A storage compartment opened, but in the poor light she could not see what was inside. He removed a dark satchel, set it on the ground and pulled it open. "Of course," he glanced up with a sardonic smile, "you'd probably consider me to be a vet. But the diagnostic tools are the same."

She frowned slightly, not understanding, but let him take her hand and run the scanner along her arm.

"Hm." He released her hand again. "Fractured radius. I'll splint it temporarily, and give you something for the pain."

She stood silently while he tightened and sealed the rigid tube of the splint around her arm. He pressed a small, spongy pad into the palm of her ungloved hand; she felt blissful nothingness begin to extinguish the fires up her arm, and sighed. "Thank you." She watched him put the bag away, wondered suddenly whether he saw her as a gullible female. "You know this isn't going to change my mind about anything, Ngenet."

He reseated the compartment, said brusquely. "I didn't expect it to. I was indirectly responsible for your getting hurt; I don't like that. Besides" a" he faced her again a" "I expect I owe you something."

"What do you mean?"

"For offering me a choice of the lesser of two evils. If that overeager sergeant of yours had his way, I expect I'd end up a deportee."

She smiled faintly. "Not if you have nothing to hide."

"Who among us really has nothing to hide, Inspector PalaThion?" He unsealed the hovercraft's door, watching her with a faint smile of his own. "Do you?"

She circled the craft, waited until he unlatched the far door and settled in carefully. "You'll be the last to know, Ngenet, either way." She fastened the straps one-handed.

He said nothing, but went on smiling as he started the power unit. And all at once she was not so certain that he would be the last one.

Chapter 13.

"... So his presence there gives us reason to think the man may be involved in the interference with the mer hunts. I personally confiscated his hovercraft, though; I don't think he'll give your hunters much trouble without it."

Arienrhod rested her head against the flower-fragrant pillow that protected her from the cold back of the throne; listened to the inspector give her tight-lipped report with much more interest than she allowed herself to show. She read the look the woman gave Starbuck as she finished speaking, and sensed more than saw his reaction to it. He had driven off the arrogant boot who was PalaThion's a.s.sistant some time back, much to his amus.e.m.e.nt; she had enjoyed his graphic fantasies of what he would do to the woman if he had the chance. She had no particular interest in Starbuck's past, but it intruded into the present in ways that sometimes surprised her ... though he rarely surprised her in any way at all any more. "Who is this man, Inspector? Why didn't you arrest him, if you knew he was guilty?" Her voice was sharp with the need to uncover a deeper mystery that shrouded Shotover Bay.

"I didn't have sufficient evidence," PalaThion said ritually, as though it was something she had repeated over and over. "Since he is an off worlder he's under Hegemony jurisdiction in any case, Your Majesty, so his ident.i.ty wouldn't be of use to you." Her expression became a shade more stubborn.

"Of course, Inspector." And I can find it out easily enough, off worlder She glanced down at the foot of the dais, at the bright, burnished head of Sparks Dawntreader where he sat uneasily on the steps. She had sent the crowd of jabbering n.o.bles away on the inspector's arrival, and for the same private reasons had ordered the boy to stay. PalaThion had stared at him with astonishment showing. And Arienrhod had seen Sparks's body stiffen with what might have been pride as PalaThion bent her head in a brief acknowledgement of his new station. "Did you also see the Summer girl to whom this off worlder of yours gave a ride?"

PalaThion started visibly; she had not mentioned the girl. "Yes I did, Your Majesty." Her left hand moved unconsciously to press the thin sheath of cast on her right arm. "But she didn't stay to be questioned. She ran off with the smugglers when they made their break. They a" got away from us, as you know," she glanced down, "and they took her off-planet with them."

"No!" Arienrhod pushed forward, the one word escaped between her teeth before she could trap it. Gone, gone... ? She loosened her fists, sat back again fluidly as she felt three sets of eyes move to her face. The inspector's brown, deep-set ones narrowed with calculation; Arienrhod realized that she must have noticed the remarkable resemblance. But PalaThion only looked down again, as though she were unable to follow the suspicions through to any logical end.

"Do you know the girl's name? I have reason to believe that she may have been a a" kinswoman." Let PalaThion make of that what she wished.

"Her name was Moon Dawntreader, Your Majesty."

Expecting it, she kept her reaction under control this time, felt the surge of emotion sing inside her body. But below her the boy, hearing the name and understanding at last, dropped his flute. It rolled down from the step onto the carpet at PalaThion's feet, soundlessly, leaving the silence of the hall perfect. PalaThion looked at the boy for a long moment before she looked up.

"I'm sorry this happened, Your Majesty." She glanced at the boy again as she said it, as though she had realized there was some tie between them. "I a" don't think anybody meant it to happen that way."

Not half as sorry as I am. Arienrhod twisted a ring with her thumb. And not half as sorry as you will be, off worlder "You are dismissed, Inspector."

PalaThion saluted and walked quickly away toward the Hall of the Winds, her red cape flaring behind her. Arienrhod's hands tightened again, trembling. Sparks stood, picked up his flute, struggling with grief and bewilderment. "Your Majesty, I a" may I go... ?" He kept his leaf-green eyes downcast; his voice was barely a whisper.

"Yes, go. I'll call you when I want you." She lifted a hand. He left the dais without making the proper bow. She watched him leave, forgetting her, with his haha" like new blood against the snow-white carpet: a wounded thing needing a hole to hide in, hurt, abandoned, vulnerable ... beautiful.

Ever since he had come here she had felt something asleep within her stir. A freshening, a renewal, a desire ... But not desire hi the way she knew it for Starbuck, or any of a hundred other lovers past or present a" for that soulless flesh hungry to answer power's insatiable needs. When she looked at Sparks Dawntreader, yes, she ached to have that slender, supple body beside her on the bed, longed to touch it and feel it against her own. But when she looked at him she also saw his face, the freshness of his wonder, the innocence of his grat.i.tude ... those things that she had learned to despise in others and deny in herself through her long Winter's reign. He was the beloved of Moon a" her other ness the daughter of her mind a" and half man, half-boy, his presence breathed on the dim embers of her own long-forgotten girlhood and stirred a warmth in the cold halls of her soul.

But he had not responded when she had let him know subtly, and then not so subtly, that she wanted him. He had retreated, mumbling and seeming half-afraid, behind the shield of his pledge to her other self. There he had remained, unyielding as stone against all temptation, while the heat of her unexpected frustration fed the fires inside her. But now, now that they had both lost their future... She willed him to turn back, to look at her once.

He stopped, a lonely figure on a field of snow, and looked back. A kind of haunted realization filled his face as she held him there with her eyes, thinking, We have both lost her...

He turned away again at last, went on to the spiraling stair that led to the upper levels.

"Now that you've lost the fish, maybe you'll throw the bait back."

She twisted to look at Starbuck, feeling the razor edge of envy that was always on his voice when he was talking about the boy.

"Get rid of that Summer weakling and his d.a.m.ned whistle, Arienrhod. The sight and sound of him makes me want to puke. Throw him back on the Street where you found him, before Ia""

"Before you what, Starbuck? Are you commanding me now?" She leaned toward him, lifting her scepter.

He drew back slightly, dropped his eyes. "No. Just asking, Arienrhod. Just asking you a" get rid of him. You don't need him, now that the girl'sa""

She brought the scepter down sharply on the hand that rested on the throne arm; he gave a yelp of startled pain. "I told you never to speak of it." She pressed a hand against her eyes, shutting him out of her view. She had lost the gamble; she had lost it! Her plan, her future, all were gone, on this one final miscasting of fate. Nine seeds that she had succeeded in planting, one flawless blossom that had grown up from them ... and now that one was gone. Because of the interfering incompetence of those same off worlders whose cycle of tyranny she had hoped to break. If they had known what she was planning they could not have ruined her plans more neatly. And now a" what was she going to do now? She would have to begin again, with a new plan, and one that would have to be less subtle, less fragile ... and so potentially more dangerous to her own position. But it would take time to search out the possibilities...

And in the meantime she could have her revenge on the ones responsible. Yes, she could. "LiouxSked. I want him to pay for this, I want the Blues to suffer. I want him taken care of, gotten rid of."

"You want the Commander of Police killed, over this?" Star buck's voice betrayed a small astonishment.

"No." She shook her head, shifting her rings on her fingers. "That's too easy. I want him ruined, I want him utterly humiliated, I want him to lose everything: his position, the respect of his friends, his respect for himself. I want the police degraded. You know the kind of people who can make it happen to him ... go into the Maze and arrange it."

Starbuck's dark eyes filled the slots in the blackness of his mask with darker curiosity. "Why, Arienrhod? Why all this over a Summer brat you've never even seen? First the boy to get her here; now this, because she's gone a" What in seven layers of h.e.l.l could she possibly be to you?"

"She is something to mea"" she took a breath, held it, "was something to me, and I could not begin to explain to you, even if I wanted to." She had given him only the skeleton of the matter, no flesh on the bones, when his jealousy of the boy's presence had begun to make him unmanageable. As long as he was certain her interest in other lovers was superficial, he was content; but Sparks was something more, and she was not the only one who realized it. She disliked Starbuck's possessiveness, but like his other weaknesses it had its uses. And so she had told him of the girl's existence, but not the reason behind it... "Since she's gone now, there's no reason for you to know what she was, in any case. Forget about her." As I must...

"And the boy?" resentfully.

"Forget about him, too, if it makes you feel better." She saw him frown. The more one withdraws, the more eagerly one is pursued. She thought of Sparks Dawntreader. "Concentrate on LiouxSked, and you'll make me feel much, much better." She reached out, touched his arm lightly.

He nodded, easing under her touch. "What about PalaThion? It was her fault the smugglers got off-planet at all. You want me to-arrange something for her, too?"

"No." She glanced away toward the Hall of the Winds. "I have other plans for her. She'll pay her debt ... believe me, she will. Now go. I want it to happen soon."

He bowed, and left the hall. She sat alone in the vast white silence.

Chapter 14.

Sparks lay spread-eagled across the bed in his private suite of rooms, his fingers tracing the tendrils of an alien vine across the elaborately carven headboard, and retracing them. Gone. She's gone repeating the words as he repeated the pattern, over and over. But he had no strength to believe a" no strength to react, to move, to feel. No tears. How could she be gone a" gone from his world as irretrievably as if she had died? Not Moon, who had been a part of his life from the day he was born. Not Moon, who had pledged herself to be a part of him forever...

Moon who had broken her pledge, and become a sibyl. Why? Why had she done that to him? Why had she done this to him now? Because shed believed he was never coming back? Then why hadn't he gone back to Neith long ago! If he'd been there when she came home, this wouldn't have happened.

But he hadn't gone back. First because of all that had gone wrong, and then, after the Queen had come to find him, because of everything that had gone right. And always, because of Carbuncle. Neith and the whole of Summer's world seemed as distant and gray as a bank of fog now; the only reality was the kaleidoscope of city images that had expanded his senses and his awareness until he would never be content in that narrow world of islands and sea again. The Sea ... the sea was no more than a film of water on a ball of stone to the people of the city. They swore by a thousand G.o.ds, and prayed to them rarely a" and the answers they really wanted they got from their machines.

He had an outlet for one of those machines here on a table in the next room. He had filled up the absurd amount of s.p.a.ce the Queen had set aside for him with instruments that talked and sang and even listened, that took pictures and showed pictures, that told him the time or the distance to the nearest stars. Sometimes he had tried to take them apart, only to find that their workings crumbled to dust in his hand, or that they were empty, except for flakes of metal painted with insect tracks and furred with filaments. But the Queen had encouraged him to do it, let him explore the tech devices of the palace; even sent him out into the labyrinth of shops in the Maze to choose more.

He still wondered why she had chosen him, and why she had rewarded him so greatly for the little he had to offer. Although he no longer wondered about it as much as he had in the beginning. He had first grown aware of the way the Queen watched him while he played for her a" the intensity that had nothing to do with his music, that made his fingers begin to stumble, and left him feeling as though he stood before her naked. And later there had been a touch, a whispered word, a kiss, a chance encounter in a private place... And she was so like Moon that he had found it hard to keep his own eyes off her, hard not to meet her gaze, hard not to match the emotion and answer the demand he found there.

But she was not Moon, she was the ageless Queen of Winter, and as he watched her deal with the off worlders and n.o.bles who came before her at court that truth was made plain to him over and over. There were things she was that Moon lacked the years for a" the wisdom, the calculating judgment, the depths of experience that lay behind her knowing smile. And there were things she was that Moon would never be, things he found harder to name ... like the nameless things that were Moon which he never saw in her. And she could never become the memories, never be the one he had shared everything with.

Yet they were so alike, and it had been so long ... until sometimes, like the city, Arienrhod became the reality, Moon only an afterimage. And that made him afraid; the fear of losing his own reality stopped his tongue when he would have taken her invitation.

But now the string had been cut that kept him bound to the Summer half of his life. Moon was gone. She was gone. There was no Ill reason now for him ever to go home ... they would never unravel the tangle they had made of their future now. He would never see her again; he would never lie beside her again, as he had lain beside her for the first time on the braided rug before the hearth, while the wind rattled and wailed through a midnight blackness beyond the walls and Gran slept peacefully in the next room... The tears came at last, he rolled onto his side and buried them in the soft darkness of his pillow.

He did not hear so much as feel someone enter the room, a chill draft as the door opened and closed again silently. He sat up, wiping at his face, started to rise as he recognized the Queen.

But Arienrhod put a hand on his shoulder, forced him gently back down onto the bed. "No. Tonight we aren't subject and queen, but only two people who have both lost someone they loved." She sat down beside him, the pleated fluidness of the robe she wore baring one shoulder. She was dressed almost plainly, with no jewels but a necklace of beaten metal leaves on a knotted silk cord.

He wiped his face again, wiping away his embarra.s.sment but not his confusion. "I a" I don't understand ... Your Majesty." Seeing her beside him here, it occurred to him at last to wonder... "How did you know? About Moon. About Moon and me?"

"You're still asking me how I know things, after all the time you've been here?" She smiled.

He looked down, pressed his hands over his knees. "But ... why us? Out of everyone in the world a" we were just Summers."

"Haven't you guessed even a little of it by now, Sparks? Look at me." He looked up again. "I reminded you of someone ... I remind you of Moon, don't I?" He nodded. "You thought I didn't understand," she touched his arm. "But I did; I know it a" bothered you. She is my kin, my flesh and blood, closer to me than even you are to her."