The Snow Queen (24 page)

Both men
rose abruptly as she entered the room. The unexpectedness of it left her
staring; she recovered in time to make her salute, a fraction of a second
before Mantagnes began his own. “Commander ... Your Honor.” The Chief Justice
acknowledged her; they both remained standing. She wondered whether they were
waiting for her to sit down first out of some misguided sense of tribunal
chivalry. She glanced at the emptiness behind her; if they were, then they must
be expecting her to sit on the floor. “Please . don’t stand on my account.” The
gracious tone rang very false in the small space. She didn’t try to match it
with a smile.

Mantagnes
moved out from behind her desk, offered her her own seat with a silent gesture.
The anger that she read in his eyes made her skin prickle. He was a
Kharemoughi, like the Chief Justice—Kharemoughis tended to rise to the top in
the foreign service; not surprisingly, since their homeworld dominated it. She
knew that on Kharemough women enjoyed relative social equality, since their
society valued skill and class status more than sheer physical strength. But
the foreign service, which included a wide variety of recruits from less
enlightened worlds, seemed to attract the most regressive and autocratic
Kharemoughis as well—Mantagnes included. She didn’t know anything about
Hovanesse, the Chief Justice, but she could read nothing encouraging in his
expression. She went to the desk and sat down, the feel of familiar territory
easing her fear a little. She glanced from wall to wall, wished with more than
usual feeling that the room had a window.

They were
still standing. “You’re probably wondering why we’re here, Inspector
PalaThion,” Hovanesse said, with pitiless banality.

She fought
down a sudden, monstrous urge to laughter. // that isn’t the understatement of
the millennium. “Yes, I certainly am, Your Honor.” She folded her hands on the
gray-lettered keyboard of her terminal, watched her knuckles whiten as they
formed a hopeless prayer gesture. She noticed a battered parcel sitting at the
corner of the desk, read her name; considered absently that she did not know
the handwriting. Her name was misspelled. / hope it’s a bomb.

“I
understand that—former Commander LiouxSked and his family left Tiamat today.
You saw them off?”

“Yes, Your
Honor. They left on schedule.”

“The gods
go with them.” He looked down grimly at the stained, ancient ceramic floor tiles.
“How could he do such a thing to his family, and his good name!”

“Your
Honor, I can’t believe—” She felt Mantagnes’s hostile gaze catch her, and
faltered.
They want to believe it; he
wasn’t a Kharemoughi
.

The Chief
Justice tugged sharply at his tailored doublet. Jerusha pulled surreptitiously
at the collar of her own tunic. It secretly surprised her to see him looking so
ill at ease. Kharemoughis were made to wear uniforms; it was the Newhavenese
who were miserable in the formality of any clothing. “As you know, Inspector,
Commander LiouxSked’s ... departure leaves us without an official head of the
police force on Tiamat. Naturally, we need to fill the post as soon as
possible, for reasons of morale. The responsibility for filling that post
belongs to me. But of course it has always been the policy of the Hegemony to
allow local rulers some say in the choosing of officials who will work most
closely with them.”

Jerusha
leaned back into her chair as Mantagnes’s expression darkened further.

“The Snow
Queen has asked—has demanded—that I appoint you as the new Commander.”

“Me?” She
caught at the desk edge. “Is this ... is this a joke?”

“A
monumental joke,” Mantagnes said sourly. “And we’re the butt of it.”

“You mean,
you’re going along with it? You want me to accept the position?” She could not
believe the words when she said them.

“Of course
you’ll accept the position,” Hovanesse said tonelessly. “If this is what she
wants from the police force that protects her people, this is what she’ll get,”
suggesting that he thought Arienrhod had chosen her own punishment.

Jerusha
pushed slowly up out of her seat, leaned across the desk. “You’re ordering me
to become Commander, then. I don’t have any choice.”

Mantagnes
put his hands behind him. “You had no objection to being made an inspector over
men who deserved it, to please the Queen.” It was the first time anyone had
ever acknowledged it openly. “I’d think you’d jump at the chance to become
Commander of Police just because you’re female.”

“It’s
better than never being promoted at all just because I’m female.” She felt
pressure growing in her chest, until she thought her heart would stop. “But I
don’t want this! Damn it, I don’t like the Queen any better than you do, I
don’t want to be Commander—not if it only means being a puppet!”
A trap, this is a trap

“That isn’t
up to you, Commander PalaThion ... unless of course you resign,” Hovanesse
said. “But I’ll see that your doubts about your ability to do a satisfactory
job as Commander are duly recorded.”

She said
nothing, unable to think of a single appropriate response.

Mantagnes
reached up to his collar, unfastened the insignia he had plainly been expecting
to wear forever. He threw them down on her desk; she put out a hand just in
time to stop one of them from skidding over the edge. “Congratulations.” He
saluted with utter precision.

She bent
her head stiffly. “Dismissed ... Inspector Mantagnes.”

The two men
left the room without a word.

Jerusha sat
down again in her seat. Her hands closed over the winged Commander’s badges,
felt them cut into her palms. This was Arienrhod’s doing, Arienrhod’s revenge.
Commander
PalaThion .
..
The Queen had hung her up to twist in the wind, thrown a challenge at
her that Arienrhod expected would ruin her career.

But by the
Bastard Boatman, she hadn’t gotten to be a Blue by being a weakling or a
quitter. So she was Commander PalaThion now—well, damn it, shed make the most
of it! She reached up with great deliberateness and pinned the badges to her
collar. “If you think you’re going to ruin me, if you think I’m going to fail,”
she said aloud to the Queen of the Air, “then that’s your second mistake.” But
her hands trembled.
I won’t fail! I’m as
good as any man!
feeling the pain of old, deep wounds that weakened her
self-belief.

She pulled
open the drawer in front of her, reaching for the pack of iestas. But the image
of LiouxSked’s agony crossed her vision, and her hand closed over itself
instead. She shut the drawer. She had not touched the pack of iestas in all the
time since his overdose.

Her glance
found the mysterious parcel again; she pulled it across the desk instead, to
give her hands and her mind a focus. She untied the twine, unwrapped the rough
brown cloth that covered a crude box. It looked like something that had come
from the outback on a trader’s ship; and there was no one out there whom she
could envision sending a parcel to an inspector of police.

She opened
the box and lifted the contents out carefully: a shell the size of her two open
hands, with one of the spiny fingers broken off of its fragile crest. It was
the color of sunrise, and its surface had been patiently burnished until it
glowed like the dawn sky. She had seen it last, and admired it, on the mantel
over the fireplace at Ngenet ran Ahase Miroe’s plantation house ... while she
stood listening to the flames crack in the easy silence, sipping the strong
black tea Ngenet had urged on her before she went on her way to Carbuncle. That
surprisingly peaceful moment came back to her now quite clearly, soothing her.
Ironic to think that the only pleasant social visit she could remember since
coming to this world ten years ago had been fifteen minutes spent in the
company of a man who was probably breaking the law ...

She probed
inside the shell with her fingers, dumped the packing out of the box; but there
was no message for her. She sighed—not sure what she had been expecting, only
disappointed that it wasn’t there. “Congratulations on your promotion, Geia
Jerusha,” she said wearily. She picked up the shell again, closed her eyes;
held it against her ear in the way Ngenet had shown her, listening for the
voice of the Sea.

HEY SPARKS,
DON’T LEAVE WHILE YOU’RE HOT. GIVE US A CHANCE TO BREAK EVEN.

The
hologrammic torso above the ravaged city on the game table threw the protest at
him as he removed his fragile headset. But he hung it up on the terminal,
officially withdrawing.

“Sorry.” He
grinned with nonchalant smugness, making his answer more to the hostile stares of
the other players than to the computer controlling the phantom croupier. “It’s
getting boring.” He tapped his credit card into the slot, saw it pop out again
with the new sum—more money than he had imagined existed in the world a few
months ago. The idea that it all belonged to him had almost stopped impressing
him now; now that he knew how much wealth circulated along the spiraling Street
of Carbuncle. He was even getting a feel for how much money must flow through
the Black Gates to the other worlds of the Hegemony ... he was learning fast.
But not fast enough.

He lurched
away from the table, drunk on rose-colored Samathan wine, but not so drunk that
he couldn’t quit while he was ahead. That was one of the things he was good at,
he thought, knowing the odds and his own limits—that was why he was winning
more and more often at the games. Arienrhod kept him supplied with money, and
he spent the time when he was free of Starbuck’s official persona squandering
it in the saloons and gambling halls up and down the Street; ingratiating
himself with as many of his fellow pleasure takers as he could stomach.
Listening, asking, watching the undercurrents shift: trying to get a feel for
where the information came from and flowed to.

But he was
struggling to climb out of a pit of abysmal ignorance, and when the wine and
the drugged perfume of too many rooms like this one began to clog his senses,
the frustration rose up in him until he ached. There was nothing about the city
that gave him any pleasure any more: The things that had delighted a Summer boy
might still exist here in the Maze’s vibrant convolutions, but he no longer saw
them. The longer he lived in Carbuncle, the more he despised the people who
were its life.

He had
begun to hate the sight of everything and everyone, without knowing why; the
blackness stained his past and future, and even the sight of his own face.
Everything—except Arienrhod. Arienrhod understood the blackness that lay like
poisoned pools in the deepest places of his mind; knew how to bleed off his
hostility; reassured him that every soul was black at the heart. Arienrhod
comforted him, Arienrhod brought him peace, Arienrhod granted his every wish
... Arienrhod loved him. And the fear that he might lose her love, make her
regret that she had let him become Starbuck—see her cast him off, as she had
cast off his rival—was a cloud always lying on the horizon of that peaceful
sea.

She used
her own extensive system of electronic spies and confiding nobles to augment
the scraps of information he brought her; but off worlders who really had
something to hide had effective countermeasures, and he knew that she missed
the insider’s knowledge of a real Starbuck, a man who had spent his life among
them. The day would come when she would begin to resent his Summer ignorance.
Maybe, drunk with the moment, he had lost sight of his own limits just once ...

Sparks
pushed his credit card into the
lining of his belt, felt his elation sour as he started away from the table. He
wondered briefly, resentfully, whether he was really any good at these games;
or whether Arienrhod watched him secretly even here and arranged the winning
for him.

He shook
the thought off, his hands bunching on his belt; glanced across the scape of
turba ned heads, bare heads, caps, helmets, gem woven coiffures, bowed in
unholy worship within the flickering panoramas of their chosen games of chance.
This was one of the high class hells; more sophisticated, less luridly obvious
than the cheaper joints in the lower Maze, which catered to a crowd made up
largely of Winter laborers. But even here there was no honest joy. The players
laughed and cursed with equal vindictiveness, oblivious to the glaring music
that blurred conversation and muted the sounds from the next room. In the next
room were the dream machines, where you could lock yourself into terrifying
experiences on other worlds, commit any crime, experience anything up to the
moment of death that you had the courage to endure. He used them more and more,
and they gave him less and less.

He began to
weave his way between the tables toward the entrance, moving with a purpose and
assurance that belonged to another man: a man who wore a mask and an off world
medallion on his chest. Sparks Dawntreader wore a bright-banded imported tunic
and high boots; his hair was cut short like a Winter’s—but it was the unaware
arrogance of Starbuck that made the other patrons step out of his way.

“You look
like a man who knows what he wants.” The one who didn’t move aside stepped
boldly into his path, the slitted silver of her long gown disguising nothing.