The Snow Queen (8 page)

“What do
you want—?” 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 bastard. 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 bloody
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.

“Gods, 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, BZ—” she
gestured-”that I hate having to dress up like something out of a costume strobe
to play spaceman’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 massive 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 latitudes 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 superstitions, Inspector? I mean,
these are people who still believe in human sacrifice. Who deck up in masks and
have orgies in the street every time the Assembly comes to visit—”

“Don’t you
celebrate, when the Prime Minister drops in 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 ofiworlder 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 assistant 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 homevrorld 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—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 damned 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 scum 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 nobility 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—or simply that she was too preoccupied
with other matters to indulge in petty harassments 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 Assembly; 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 damned. 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 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—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 superstitious 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—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, embarrassed, 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 space, 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
space 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 god’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 sadist’s fun-house
? ...
knowing
that the technology that had designed it could
easily have circumvented 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.