The Snow Queen (39 page)

He leaned
into the cabin; but something caught his collar, jerked him away and back into
the snow again. Not bells, this time, but the ugly music of human laughter
echoing off the cliff face; ugly, because he knew it was directed at him. He
rolled over, pushed up onto his knees to face his tormenters—saw with no
surprise at all the white parkas and leggings, half a dozen pale, amorphous
faces half obscured by slitted wooden goggles, like the bulging eyes of a family
of insectoids. But these were human, all right—nomadic Winter pfalla herders
turned thieves by opportunity, who had shed their bright, traditional clothing
for the antiseptic camouflage of arctic commandos. A blow on the back ended his
assessment as he sprawled forward into the snow; he felt someone roll him onto
his side and deftly disarm him. There was a whoop of triumph as the bearded
male held his stunner up like a prize.

Gundhalinu
sat up, wiping snow from his face, forgetting the indignity of his position in
the urgency of his need. “That’s going to blow—!” He pointed, not sure how much
they would understand. “Help me get him out of there; there’s not much time!”
He climbed to his feet, relieved at the murmur of consternation that ran
through the group. He started back toward the patrol craft but another of the
nomads had gotten there first, and straightened holding TierPardee’s gun,
grinning satisfaction. “He’s good for nothing, that one—this’s all I found.
It’s too hot in there; forget about it.” The roving muzzle of the stunner
suddenly targeted Gundhalinu’s chest. “Zap, you’re paralyzed, Blue!” A
high-pitched adolescent giggle escaped from the muffled figure.

Gundhalinu
stopped, looking past the teenager and the filamented muzzle of the gun. “He’s not
dead, he’s hurt! He’s alive; we’ve got to get him out of there—” His breath
rose up white in his face.

But the man
who had taken his own gun and another man caught him by the arms at a sharp
command. They began to drag him back away from the craft. The teenager strutted
behind him, on snowshoes like the rest, giggling again as his boots broke
through the snow crust and he floundered.

“No! You
can’t do this; he’s alive, damn you, he’ll be burned alive in there!”

“Then be
glad you’re only watching, and not joining him.” The first man grinned at his
side. They forced him to go with them as far as the outcropping of fallen rock
where they had hidden their snow skimmers. They all stopped then, and turned
back, crouching down to watch. The two men still held his arms locked between
them, forcing him to keep his feet as they made him turn with the rest. He
could see the distant patrol craft melted clear of snow now, and a dull glow
spreading over its crumpled frame. He looked up into the sky, filling his eyes with
the blue of heaven, and prayed to the gods of eight separate worlds that
TierPardee would never know what was happening to him now.

But the sky
was empty, and in the empty white silence of the frozen Winter world a sun ball
of searing light burned his sight away and the blast that followed obliterated
all his other senses.

Consciousness
followed pain back into his aching body; he lay propped against a boulder while
the nomads shuffled and muttered and pointed past him in subdued awe. One of
them laughed nervously. Memory came back to him and he remembered why they were
laughing ... he leaned over and vomited into the trampled snow.

“They send
you to kill us, and you can’t even stomach the sight of death!” One of the
nomads stood over him and spat. The spittle landed on the heavy cloth of his
uniform coat; he watched it begin to freeze. He looked up, aware of how the
cold air burned as his lungs sucked it in, aware of the fact that he had just
been spat upon by a barbarian, by an old hag with a face like fishnet, who
wasn’t fit to touch the lowest Unclassified on Kharemough.

He pulled
himself up the rock, clumsy with stiffness and cold, until he could stand
looking down at her. He said, his voice brittle with fury, “You are all under
arrest, for murder and robbery. You will return with me to the star port to
face charges.” Hearing the words, he could not quite believe that he had really
said them.

The old
woman stared at him incredulously, burst into obscene, frost-clouded laughter,
wrapping her arms around her. The rest of the bandits began to close in around
him, having lost interest in their first victim now that he no longer existed.
“You hear him?” She poked an arthritic claw at his face delightedly. “You hear
what this sniveling foreigner with the dirty skin says to us? That he thinks
we’re under arrest! What do you think of that?” She swept her hand away again.

“I think he
must be crazy.” One of the men grinned; Gundhalinu thought that there were
three men and one other woman ... guessed that the adolescent was female, too,
but he wasn’t sure. This damned world turned civilized behavior upside down
until he couldn’t judge anything by standards he knew.

But there
was one thing he understood clearly enough—that he was not going to get out of
his alive. They were going to kill him next. The realization made him dizzy; he
pressed back against the rock for support. He watched them push up their
goggles to get a better look at him, and saw no mercy in the pale-ringed,
sky-colored eyes. One of them fingered the sleeve of his coat; he jerked his
arm away.

“What’re we
going to do with this one, huh?” The teenager elbowed one of the men aside for
a better look. “Can I have him? Oh, let me have him, Ma!” The stunner pointed
him out again. He realized she was speaking to the old woman. “For my
collection.”

He had a
sudden vision of his own mutilated head jammed on a stake, like a piece of meat
in some grisly charnel-house freezer. His stomach knotted again; he pressed his
tongue against the roof of his mouth.
Gods!
...
oh
, gods, not like that. If I have to die let it
be
clean ... let it be quick
.

“Shut up,
brat,” the crone said sharply. The girl made a face behind her back.

“I say kill
him now, shaman,” the other woman said. “Kill him ugly. Then the other
foreigners will be afraid to come out here any more.”

“If you
kill me they’ll never stop coming after you!” Gundhalinu took a step forward,
saw two knives come out of hidden sheaths. “You can’t murder a police inspector
and get away with it. They’ll never stop until they find you.” He knew he was
saying it only to comfort himself, because it wasn’t true. He felt the lameness
of the lying words, knew that the others felt it, too. He began to shiver.

“And who’s
ever going to know what happened?” The old crone grinned again; her teeth were
flawless, as white as the snow. He wondered, absurdly, whether they were false.
“We could throw your corpse down a crack and the ice would grind up your bones.
Not even all your gods will ever find where you lie!” Abruptly she brought up the
thing hanging at her back and jammed it into his chest, driving him back
against the boulders with a grunt of surprise. “You think you can hunt us down
on our own land, foreigner? I’m the Mother. The earth is my lover, the rocks
and the birds and the animals are my children. They speak to me, I know their
language.” The opacity of madness made porcelain of her eyes. “They tell me how
to hunt a hunter. And they want an offering, they want a reward.”

Gundhalinu
looked down at the long, bright metal tube that pinned him against the icy
rock, recognized a police-issue electron torch before his eyes blurred out of
focus again. He stood up with rigid dignity, controlling his physical responses
by an effort of will, as the old hag backed slowly away. The others moved with
her, out of range of the energy backwash; leaving him alone in a circle of
eddied snow. His mouth hurt, his lungs ached from the frigid air. Every breath
now might be his last, but in his mind he saw no playback of life scenes, no
profound revelation of universal truth in his final moment nothing; there was
nothing at all ...

The old
woman raised the torch, and pressed the trigger.

Gundhalinu
swayed with the shock of the blow that did not fall; opened eyes that he didn’t
remember closing, in time to see the woman press the trigger again and again,
with no result. She muttered furiously, shaking it; curses of frustration
circled the fence of leering witnesses.

He moved
forward unsteadily, holding out his hands. “Here—let me fix that for you.”

Amazement
came back into the washed-out blue eyes; she jerked the torch out of his reach.

He stood
patiently with his hands extended, palm up. “It’s jammed. Happens all the time.
I can fix it, if you’ll let me.”

She
frowned, but her expression shifted subtly again, and she made a small gesture
with her head. He was aware of two stunners directed at him now, aware that he
would never get away with an escape attempt. She thrust the torch into his
hands. “Fix it then, if you’re so eager to die.” The tone suggested that she
thought he had lost his mind; he wondered if he had.

He kneeled
down, sinking back, feeling the bite of the snow as it soaked through the cloth
of his pants leg. He balanced the torch across his thigh, pulled off his gloves
and unsnapped the tool pouch ijj he wore at his belt. He withdrew a hair-fine
magnetized rod and inserted it into the opening at the base of the torch
handle, began to probe the hidden mechanisms with gentle confidence. His
sweating hands stuck to the frozen metal as he worked; he scarcely noticed.
Feeling his way along unseen paths, he came at last to the crucial crossroads
and separated the two components that had locked together. He withdrew the
probe again carefully, grateful that the problem was only what he had expected.
He put the probe away in its place, wondering why he bothered, and held the
torch out to the old woman. He met her eyes without expression. “That ought to
do it. You shouldn’t steal our toys unless you know how to take care of them.”

She jerked
the torch out of his hands, taking a layer of epidermis with it. He grimaced,
but his hands were like wood, senseless, useless already. Like his face; like
his brain. He got up, letting his gloves drop at his feet. At least he had
proven his superiority over these savages, at least now he could die cleanly,
with honor, executed by a superior weapon.

But she did
not aim the torch at him this time. Instead she turned, bracing it against her,
and took aim at the stand of evergreen shrubs below the cliff wall. She fired;
he heard the electric crackle of the beam and a small explosion as a solitary
tree-shrub burst into flame. Shouts of approval rose around him, and the
eagerness for death came back into the wild, pitiless faces.

The crone
shuffled around toward him with the torch. “You did a good job, foreigner,”
smiling without any humanity.

He watched
the blazing tree from the corner of his eye. The smoke collected against the
cliff wall; the smell of the burning wood was pungently alien. But burned human
flesh smelled like any other seared meat ... “I’m a Kharemoughi. I can repair
any piece of equipment made, blindfolded. That’s what makes us more than just
animals.”

“But you’ll
die like any of us, foreigner! Do you really want to die?”

“I’m ready to
die.” He stood straighter; his whole body seemed to belong to someone else now.

She raised
the torch, her arms trembling faintly with the effort of supporting it. Her
hand closed over the trigger and her eyes probed his face, wanting him to break
down and beg for his life. But he would die before he gave them that
satisfaction ... and he knew that he would die anyway.

“Kill him.
Kill him!” The voices began to rise with the watchers’ impatience. He glanced
distractedly at the ring of faces, saw on the teenager’s face an expression he
couldn’t name.

“No.” The
old woman let the tube drop, grinning with hideous spite. “No, we won’t kill
him; we’ll keep him. He can repair the equipment we steal from his people at
the star port

“He’s
dangerous, shaman!” one of the men said, angry with frustration. “We don’t need
him.”

“I say he
lives!” the hag snarled. “He wants to die—look at him! A man who’s not afraid
to die is crazy, and it’s bad luck to kill a crazy man.” She still grinned at
him, with self-aware mockery.

Gundhalinu
felt his fatalistic stupor clear as he finally understood: They were not going
to give him a clean death. They were going to make him their slave ... “No, you
filthy animals!” He threw himself at the old woman, at the torch. “Kill me,
damn you! I won’t—”

She brought
the tube of the torch up instinctively and hit him in the face with it.
Gundhalinu fell back into a snowdrift, blood burning on his skin, pain rattling
in his head like a scream. He spat a mouthful of blood and a tooth into the
snow, sat moaning behind his frozen hands as the nomads began to drift away
from him. He heard the old woman giving orders, but not what she said; not
caring, not caring about anything.

“Here ...
put on your gloves, stupid.” The teenager stood over him; waved them in his
face. He pulled back, tried to ignore her as he scooped up a handful of snow
and packed it into his torn mouth.

“Blue!”
This time it was TierPardee’s stunner shoved into his face. “Blue-boy, you
better listen to me!” She tossed the gloves onto his stomach.