The Snow Queen (56 page)

“I’ll do
it.” He spoke as though she did not exist. He pushed bun self off of the table,
stood down unsteadily, gathering himself to his duty. “They’ve already treated
me, Commander. I’m fine,” absently. “I have to do this; have to do it now,
before I change my mind.” His freckles stood out like stars, anemic white
against the darkness of his skin.

Moon looked
at him, stopped where she was across the room.

“BZ?”

Gundhalinu
said quietly, “Moon, you’re under arrest.”

Moon
huddled at the very edge of the seat, pressed against the curving window, as
the shuttle car began to move soundlessly out of the star port station. There
was a handful of other people in the car, I mainly technicians going off duty,
going to join the Festival crowds I in the city. Carbuncle—she had reached the
end of the journey that I had taken so long, and cost so much. She looked ahead
into the sucking blackness through a progression of pulsing golden rings, I
blinking each time the car threaded a ring like a silent needle .... blinking
and blinking, to keep her vision clear. Betrayed. Betrayed ..

She twisted
her hands again with impotent fury, feeling the cold, unyielding binders bite
into her wrists. Gundhalinu sat beside her, separated from her by an unbridgeable
gap of betrayal and Duty. What had that woman said to him? Or had he always
meant to do it? She glanced at him, looked away again abruptly when she found
him still watching her. Misery was in his eyes now, soft and yielding, not the
unforgiving iron of Inspector Gundhalinu that she could beat against with
honest rage. She could not look at his misery, afraid of becoming lost in it;
drawn down into the memory of those all-too human eyes touching her face in the
dawn-light, needing her, wanting her, asking but never demanding ... the memory
of how she had almost answered them ... almost ...

Let him
suffer! ...
Damn you, you liar, you
bastard; I trusted you
. How could you do this to me! Her head bumped the
window in rhythmic frustration. He was taking her to jail; and in a few more
days his people would take her from this world again forever, abandon her to a
lifelong exile on some other planet. He had even lied to PalaThion, telling her
that the medics had treated him so that she would let him do this job himself.
And she had heard him volunteer—volunteer—to bring in Sparks as well; to do his
penance by letting her lover be charged with murder and sent away to some hell
world prison colony for the rest of Ms life ... if he could be found in time.
And if he couldn’t be found ...

She had
told First Secretary Sirus everything, trying not to hate him, and she had seen
the light-echo from a distant time in this same place shine out in him as she
told him of the medal that bore his name, and his son ... “He always wore it;
he always wanted to be like you, to learn the secrets of the universe.”

He had
laughed with startled pleasure, wanting to know where his son was now, and
whether they could meet. She had told him^ hesitantly, that he could and would
see
Sparks
at
the Snow Queen’s court. Sirus had been born, like
Sparks
, after the celebration of an official
visit by the Assembly on Samathe; at the Prime Minister’s next visit he had
taken his nearly middle-aged son with him on a whim. She saw the possibilities
for his own son registering in Sirus’s mind, and with suddenly tangling hope
and fear she had told him the rest:

“... and
Starbuck will be sacrificed with the Queen at the end of the Festival, unless
someone saves him.” She had waited for the shock to register, and then, turning
all her willpower on him, “You can save him! He’s the Prime Minister’s
grandson, your son, no one would dare execute him if you ordered them to let
him live!”

But Sirus
had stepped back from her with a smile of grief. “I’m sorry, Moon ... niece.
Truly I am. But I can’t help you. As much as I want to—” his fingers twitched.
“There’s nothing I can do. We’re figureheads, Moon! Images, idols, toys—we
don’t run the Hegemony; we simply decorate it. You’d have to change the Change
itself, and the ritual of the Change is far too important to be disrupted at my
whim.” He looked down.

“But—”

“I’m
sorry.” He sighed, and shrugged, hands empty. “If there’s anything I can do to
help that’s within my power, I’ll do it; just contact me, and let me know. But
I can’t perform miracles ... I wouldn’t even know how to try. I wish you’d
never told me this.” He had turned away and left her standing alone.

Alone ...
In all her life she had never felt so alone. The shuttle car showed, coming
into the light at the tunnel’s end, and brought them to a sighing stop. Looking
out she could see an immense manmade cavern, a wide, harshly lit platform. Its
walls were painted with lurid stripes, a heartless, futile attempt at
celebration. The plat form was deserted, except for three well-armed security
guards; access to the star port was even more strictly limited tonight than
usual. They had reached Carbuncle, but she had no impression at all of its real
identity.

The
technicians left the car in a laughing, elbowing knot; one or two glanced back
briefly before they went on across the platform. Gundhalinu stood up, coughing
heavily, and gestured her to her feet, still without speaking to her. She
followed the technicians’ path, head down, lost in the silence of questions
without answers. At the far side of the platform were elevators of various
sizes. The technicians had already disappeared into one. Gundhalinu still wore
his blood-stained coat, and a borrowed helmet; the guards studied his own
identification more closely than they looked at his prisoner.

The lift
took them up, and up and up, until Moon felt her empty stomach turn over in
protest. There were no stops along the way. The elevator shaft rose through the
hollow core of one of Carbuncle’s supporting pylons, into the heart of the
lower city—where goods had come from and gone to the entire Hegemony ... but
would no longer.

The doors
slid open as they reached the city level. Noise and color and raucous
celebration rushed in to overwhelm them like a joyous madman. Men and women
danced past them to the glaring music of an unseen band; locals and off
worlders together, filling the bare, littered loading docks with motion and
every imaginable cont, trast of clothing and being. Moon shrank back, felt
Gundhalinu recoil beside her, as the cacophony shattered senses attuned to the
fragile silence of the snow.

Gundhalinu
swore in Sandhi, breaking his own silence in self defense. But he took her arm,
pushed her out of the elevator before the doors could close again. He led her
along the edges of the mauling crowd, navigating the interminable gauntlet to
the warehouses where the crowded Street began. At last he stopped her, finding
shelter in a pool of quiet, the corner space between two buildings. He backed
her resolutely up to the wall. “Moon—”

She turned
her face away, drowning his face in images.
Don’t
tell me you’re sorry—don’t!

“I’m sorry.
I had to do it.” He took her hands in his. His thumb pressed the hollow lock on
the crosspiece of the binders, they snapped open. He took them off and tossed
them away.

She looked
down at her wrists in disbelief, shook them, looked up into his face again. “I
thought—I thought—”

“It was the
only way I could get us here to the city, past security, once the Commander
recognized you.” He shook his head, wiped his face with the back of a hand.

“Holy
Mother! BZ—” She took a deep breath, clenching her hands. “You lie too well.”

His mouth
quirked. “So much for Good Blue Gundhalinu.” He reached up and took off his
borrowed helmet, patted it almost reverently. “Nobody understands that it
doesn’t fit any more.” His voice turned harsh with self-recrimination. He bent
over and set the helmet down on the pavement.

“BZ, no one
needs to know.” She pulled at his arm with sudden understanding. “Can you say I
slipped away in the crowd?”

He
straightened up, his mouth like a knife cut, his eyes like cinders; and she saw
that this was not the catalyst, but only the precipitate of his change. “The
Commander told me what she knows about your cousin. We can’t get at him in the
palace, but she said he visits a woman named Ravenglass sometimes, in the
Citron Alley. That’s as good a starting place as any.” He stood away from her,
and away from himself, retreating onto safe ground. “I guess we can go as we
are; nobody will look at us twice in this mob.” He frowned abruptly, looking at
her. “Braid your hair. It’s too much like—it’s too obvious.”

She obeyed,
not understanding.

“Hold on to
me, and whatever you do, don’t get separated in this crowd. We’ve got half a
city to go, and it’s all uphill.” He put out his good hand; she clasped it
tightly in her own.

They made their
way up the Street, assaulted by the appalling intensity of Carbuncle’s high
spirits. The Winters celebrated with a kind of uninhibited desperation, because
it was the last Festival they would ever know; the Summers celebrated the
coming of the Change that would set their world right. The sight of kleeskin
boots and slickers, the weather-burned faces of the countless islanders who had
made this pilgrimage, filled Moon’s eyes and clogged her throat with longing.
She found herself searching the faces for one she knew, always
disappointed—until she glimpsed a red head bobbing, a youth in a slicker moving
away. She struggled to break Gundhalinu’s grip, but he would not let her go.
Shaking his head, he towed her up the Street, until she realized for herself that
there were half a hundred redheaded Summers adrift in this sea of faces.

Vendors
cried their wares, people danced in human chains, performers and musicians
climbed boxes and stairs to win the fickle worship of the passing crowd. It was
the middle of the night, but no one seemed to know it from the middle of the
day—Moon the least among them. The Prime Minister had arrived, and from now
until the night of masks the revels would only grow wilder.

Offworlder
storekeepers sold the last of their stock for near nothing, or gave it away,
piled clothes and food and unrecognizable exotica in their doorways, TAKE IT
AWAY. Winters wrapped in yards of family totem-creatures paraded along the
street-center, alight with hologrammic cold fire. Moon yelped as a firecracker
I burst beside her, wrote her name in the air with an incandescent I I sparkler
she found unexpectedly in her hand. Fistfights and worse fights broke out along
the alleys as the electric tensions that lay be I neath this Festival’s melting
valences exploded in sudden, petty violence. Moon had to struggle to keep her
own hold on Gundhalinu as ‘ a fight broke out beside them and his instincts
started him toward it. But a regulation Blue in a shining helmet had claimed it
for his own, I and Gundhalinu changed direction again with wrenching urgency. v
As they went on up the Street, Moon felt the crowd spirit infect f her with
giddy optimism, pummeling her with the absolute awareness that she was here at
last—this was the city, this was Carbuncle, and it was a place of unimaginable
delight. She had come in time, she had come in the time of Change, when
probabilities broke down and anything became possible. She had come to find
Sparks, to change the Change, and she would.

I But more
and more she found herself leading Gundhalhiu, pulling him against the current
of humanity, his own senses and endurance failing him as hers heightened. She
looked back at his sweating face, falling from the heights as she heard him
cough and remembered that he had thrown away rest and treatment to help her.
But he shook his head as she slowed, pushed her on again, “Almost there.”

They
reached the Citron Alley at last. Moon found a store that was still open, asked
the shop man eagerly for Fate Ravenglass. He looked at her face with peculiar
surprise; she drew the neck of her

1.

tunic
together over her tattoo. “Fate’s right next door, little lady-but you won’t
find her in. She’s seeing to her masks, all around the city. Come back
tomorrow, maybe you’ll have better luck.”

She has to
be in! How can she be gone—? Moon nodded, speechless with disappointment.

Gundhalinu
leaned against the peeling building wall. “Do you-have anything for a cough?”

The shop
man shrugged. “Not much now. An amulet for good health.”

Gundhalinu
gave a grunt of disgust and pushed away from the wall. “Come on, let’s ask
around the hells.”

“No.” Moon
shook her head, caught his arm, stopping him. “We’ll—we’ll find somewhere to
sleep first. And come back here tomorrow.”

He
hesitated. “You’re sure?”

She nodded,
lying, but knowing that she would be utterly lost here in the city, if she lost
him now.

They found
refuge at last with his former landlady: a pillowed, mothering woman who took
pity on him, once she believed that he was more than a ghost. She put them in
the rooms that belonged to her grown son. “I know you won’t steal anything,
Inspector Gundhalinu!”

Gundhalinu
grimaced wryly as the door clicked shut, granting them privacy at last. “She
doesn’t seem to care whether I brought you here for immoral purposes.”