The Summer Queen (149 page)

Gundhalinu nodded once. “Better see if we’ve still got a
sledge,” he murmured, looking away up the hill. He forced himself to begin
climbing, sliding back as often as he made real progress, his body rubbery with
shock. Bluekiller climbed after him, until they reached the top of the rise
together. The sledge with their day’s take and most of then—important supplies
still lay below, tumbled onto its side but intact. He sighed.

Bluekiller grunted in satisfaction, straightening upright.
He turned, glancing back down the slope; looked at Gundhalinu again. “Do me a
favor, Treason. Don’t have any more dreams,” He shook his head, and started on
down the hill.

Gundhalinu looked over his shoulder one last time. Then, silently,
he followed Bluekiller down.

Falling ...

Moon opened her eyes, her cry of terror choking off as she
found herself in her own world, her own room, her own bed. She sat up, pressing
her chest, as her fall from an impossible height ceased in midair, ceased to
exist.

She sagged forward, supporting her head in her hands, breathing
deeply ... piercingly glad to be awake, and alive, in the brief moment before
she remembered who she was.

She shifted her body to the edge of the wide bed, pushed
away the covers and dropped her feet over the side, driven to a kind of
mindless urgency by the sudden, overwhelming return of memory. She froze there,
staring, with one foot settled on the fur rug at her bedside.

Reede Kullervo sat in a chair across the room, watching her
silently. She glanced away from him, searching the room for the presence of
someone else.

He shook his head, with the ghost of a smile. “It’s only me,
Lady. And I haven’t got the strength to get myself in trouble, or PalaThion
would have tied me to the chair.” He shrugged, lifting his hands. “I wanted to
be here when you woke up. So you’d know.”

Moon pressed her own hands against her body, through the
cloth of her sleep gown. “How are you feeling?” she asked faintly. He was
wearing a loose, handspun overshut and shapeless pants; it surprised her how
much like a Tiamatan he looked. He could have passed for an islander.

“I feel like shit,” he said, his smile turning rueful. “But
that’s a hell of a lot better than I felt yesterday. Your vaccine stopped the
deterioration in my cells. Now I’ve got to heal what’s left, without its help.
I’ve got to heal a lot of things ....” He looked down suddenly. “Some of it’ll
never be right.” He looked up again, his gaze as clear and deep as the sky. “I
don’t understand why ... why you did this for me. Gods, even I thought I
deserved to die! The sibyl mind—” He broke off.

“—has changed its mind,” Moon said gently. “And perhaps its
perspective.”

Reede ran an unsteady hand through his hair. “And you?
PalaThion said Vhanu wants me handed over to him.” She saw a haunted knowledge
come into his eyes. “She said it’s up to you, whether I stay or go.”

“Your coming has released me from a geas, Vanamoinen,” she
murmured. “That’s the last time I’ll ever call you that—” she added, as he
looked up in protest. “You have given me a kind of freedom. And so I would like
to give you what freedom I can, I suppose. You may stay here, under my
protection, for as long as you want to.” She twined her fingers together in her
lap, stared at them.

“Thank you,” he whispered. She did not look up. After a moment
he asked, “Is it true, that you’re no longer a sibyl?”

She nodded, feeling oddly insubstantial as she admitted it,
as if she had lost her moorings and was drifting with the tide.

“Can you forgive me?” he asked, barely audible.

“To be a sibyl was all I ever wanted from my life.” She
raised her head. “But it’s a kind of freedom ....” And within her the memories
were still alive, would always be, of what she had done, and seen, beyond the
gates of time. She had been allowed that much, a gift of parting. “ Ariele is
the one you’ll have to ask forgiveness of.”

He grimaced, and nodded. She pictured Ariele, adrift in
space far above them in a stasis coffin, in a ship tethered to this world by an
invisible cord of gravity; her life tethered by something far more fragile. “Reede,
how soon can we get to Ariele, so that we can—heal her?”

He shook his head. “You can’t, Lady. Not now. Vhanu’s got my
ship. If we’re lucky he won’t search it again, while he knows where I am. If he
found out about her ....” He did not finish it.

Moon took a deep breath. “Goddess!” She heard her voice turn
tremulous, fell her precarious control slipping. “When does this stop—?”

He looked up at her, and she realized that the man behind
his eyes suddenly was seeing her with an unimaginable parallax view. “It never
stops ...”he murmured. “It isn’t meant to. That’s what we’re all about, you and
I. We took the frayed ends of time and rejoined them, inside the sibyl mind.
Its circle is complete again, because of us. Think of it, Lady! Think of what
we’ve done together, what we’ve already accomplished. We’ve healed the net! I
started a process, millennia ago; and thanks to you and ... me ...”he glanced
down at himself, “it will continue as it was meant to. We’ve already performed
a miracle. Two ....”He touched his face. His eyes shone, willing her to remember,
and believe. “The wheel is still turning,” he said softly. “Be patient. Have
faith. We have to give it time.”

She nodded, and sighed, feeling belief struggle toward the
light inside her as he held her gaze.

He looked away at last. “You contacted the inner circles of
Survey, didn’t you, while you were in Transfer, in symbiosis with the matrix?”

She started. “Yes,” she said. “I—the net—threatened them
with what would happen if the slaughter of mers goes on, and promised them
access to the starmap, if they stop the Hunt. I think it will turn the tide;
but I don’t know how long it will take—”

“Then we wait.” He shook his head. “That’s all we can do.”

She sat up straighter, her eyes going to the window behind
him, its view of the sea hidden by drawn drapes. “The mers are in the waters
around the city again; Vhanu was going after them. Did Jersuha call out ships—?**
She pushed to her feet.

“No need,” Reede said. He rose from his chair and moved
stiffly to pull aside the heavy, brocaded cloth. “They’re protected.”

Moon stopped where she was, staring without comprehension at
the expanse of boundaryless gray that met her eyes. There was no ocean, no sky;
only storm, merging one into the other, a rippling ferocity of wind and water
pounding the unbreakable window surface with a rage that made it tremble.

“The sea lung ...” Moon murmured, clutching a table for support.
Reede looked back at her. “It’s what the Winters call a storm like this, when
there is no difference between the sea and sky.” She had never experienced it,
but she knew Winters who had. “The Summers say it’s the Sea Mother’s fury.”

Reede smiled strangely, and went on looking at her. After a
moment he glanced back out the window at the storm. “I wonder ...”he said.

“We heard reports that a storm was moving up the coast, for
days,” she said. “A bad storm. But they said it would move out to sea and miss
the city.”

“It’s come inland directly over Carbuncle, instead.”

She found herself for the first time in years, making the
triad sign of the Mother with complete sincerity. She thought of Capella
Goodventure suddenly—remembered her without pain for the first time. “Vhanu won’t
be able to send out his hunters until it’s over. By then the mers will have
gained some distance at least.”

He nodded, looking at the storm again. Her own eyes went to
it as if she were hypnotized.

The door to the room opened suddenly, and one of the palace
servants came in. “Lady!” she gasped, bobbing her head in apology. “The
offworlders are in the palace! We couldn’t stop them—”

Blue-uniformed figures appeared in the space behind her, carrying
weapons. Moon looked toward Reede, where he stood frozen beside the window,
still holding back a sweep of curtain.

She looked down again, at the tray of food someone had left
by her bedside. She picked it up, moved to Reede’s side without a backward
glance of acknowledgment for the intruders who had forced their way into the
room. She held the tray out to Reede, pressed it into his unresponsive hands. “That
will be all. You may go,” she said, urging him with her eyes.

He came alive, taking the tray from her without too much
awkwardness. “Yes, Lady ...”he murmured, bowing his head. Carrying the tray, he
went toward the door, moving lamely, his shoulders knotted with tension. The
Police edged aside, letting him pass. The woman who had brought the warning
crept out in his wake, followed by their baleful stares.

Their stares turned back to her. Curiosity and faint
amusement crept into the men’s expressions at they saw her standing before
them, disheveled, exhausted, in her nightgown. “Commander Vhanu wants you—” the
sergeant in charge began.

She felt her sudden self-consciousness turn to anger. “You
will wait outside, and allow me to dress,” she said, lifting her hand. “Now.”

They hesitated, glancing at each other, suddenly uncertain.
And then, lowering their guns, they went one by one back out the door, closing
it behind them.

She took her time, having no eagerness for whatever came
next. She dressed pragmatically, in trousers and a robe cut Kharemoughi-fashion,
but made of cloth in the shades of green that always soothed her eyes. She
reached for her trefoil where it lay on the bedside table; hesitated, and left
it behind.

When she opened the door they were waiting, nearly a dozen
of them. She ignored the raised weapons, and said in a voice like glass. “What
do you want? If it’s Reede Kullervo, your Commander gave me his word that—”

“No, Lady,” the sergeant in charge said. “It’s you he wants
brought to him.”

“Where is Jersuha PalaThion?” she asked sharply.

The sergeant looked down, up again. “Under arrest. For obstructing
justice.”

“Justice,” Moon murmured. She held out her hands. “Does
Commander Vhanu want me bound?”

The sergeant grimaced, and nodded. They were all looking at
her again, at her throat. Even without her trefoil, her tattoo was still
visible. One of the men stepped forward at the sergeant’s abrupt order. He drew
her hands behind her, locking them into binders. She felt suddenly giddy; she
had not believed they would actually do it.

They led her away through the halls, past the stunned, uncertain
stares of the palace staff. She did not see Reede anywhere. She did not ask
where they were taking her.

The sergeant and two of his men transported her in a
hovercraft down through the city; she watched in surprise and half-fear as they
passed by Police headquarters and kept going—through the Maze, down through the
Lower City, without explanation. She remembered Arienrhod: her mother, her
other self; remembered the final journey she had made down through the city to
her death. Arienrhod had tried to change her world, defied the offworlders ...
and it had ended in a journey like this. There was only one imaginable
destination they could be heading for now ... and a storm was raging outside
Carbuncle’s walls.

They stopped at last at the head of the ramp which led down
to the docks, and she was urged out as the craft’s doors rose. She obeyed,
moving awkwardly with her hands pinned behind her. The wind struck her and she
staggered; one of the patrolman caught her, steadying her. The wind’s fist
drove them back against the side of the hovercraft with another blow. The
impact knocked the breath out of her; she heard him swear in surprise and pain.
She was drenched to the skin, without even realizing how it had happened.

The others gathered around her; they pulled her forward together,
moving into the wind’s teeth with arms linked, as if they were facing an angry
mob. She could see nothing, blinded by pelting rain; but she heard the wind
screaming, the thud and boom of storm-driven waves crashing over the docks far
below her feet. She felt the city itself shudder with the blows. Her feet were
suddenly in water up to her ankles as the sea swept up the ramp, flooding the
pavement, and poured back down it again.

Vhanu was waiting for them, flanked by half a dozen more Police,
in the security watchpost to one side of the ramp. The men around her crowded
inside eagerly, dragging her with them out of the direct force of the wind. But
even here the wind found them, drenching them with fresh volleys of rain and
spray, whipping her hair loose, blowing it into her eyes maddeningly.

Vhanu pushed between his men until he stood face to face
with her, and there was something in his eyes that made her want to shrink
away.

She held her ground, even as he violated her space, pressing
too close to her, intimidating her physically under the pretense of making
himself heard. “What do you want?” she demanded, shouting over the wind’s
screaming moan. “Why am I here?”

“This!” he shouted. He caught her painfully by the arm,
turning her, pushing her between bodies toward the watchroom’s wide window. She
caught a blurred glimpse of the causeway leading down, into what appeared to be
nothing but the ocean. There were no moorings, no ships at all visible—only the
sea, swirling with unidentifiable wreckage. As she watched, another wave broke
against the city’s pylons; its crest barely cleared Carbuncle’s understructure,
which was fifty feet above the normal high tide. She felt the city shudder
again with the impact; saw water surging up the ramp into the city’s open throat,
before windblown spray struck the window in front of her, obscuring her view.
She felt cold water lap her ankles again and withdraw.

She turned away, into the fanatical fury of Vhanu’s gaze,
shaken more by the sight of his face than by the power of the storm.