“Yes,” he said, feeling the sound of her voice fill his vision again with colors he had almost forgotten the names of, here in this monochromatic twilight. He had not seen her face, but somehow she had seemed more real to him than he had ever felt her to be, except when they had made love together on Mask Night, reunited at last in the extraordinary union of souls that had carried them outside the bounds of time. “She said I’d be free, soon.…”
“Those stop, after a while,” Bluekiller said, looking back at him with a mix of disgust and pity. “Better when they do.”
Gundhalinu said nothing, holding on to his inner vision. He squinted his eyes against the stinging reality of windblown sand.
They wandered for unmeasured hours through the shifting hills and valleys, over the cinder-strewn plains of their territory, finding meager scrapings at the round of pits they already knew. He had not yet developed the uncannily precise sense of time the other men in the work gang seemed to possess, that told them when to start work, when to eat, when to sleep. The human body had rhythms of its own, Piracy had told him; but he had never been forced to pay attention to them.
“Stop pushing,” Bluekiller said abruptly. “I need to take a piss.”
Gundhalinu stopped in his tracks, more than happy to take a break, although he made a point of never requesting one. But this time, instead of sliding down to sit, he began to climb the rise above them, still driven by the restlessness that had filled him since he woke. The luminous arc of Big Blue hung above him like a giant’s eye, watching his every move the way he had watched insects struggle over the gray stone of the estate grounds when he was a boy on Kharemough. A surveillance craft passed through his line of sight as he looked up, its running lights like stars in the gloom far overhead.
He looked down, shielding his eyes as he searched the horizon beyond the hill’s crest. In the distance he saw the plume of dust that marked the track of another sledge, another work team scouring their ground, probably Piracy and Contract.
The ground shuddered under his feet. He staggered, staying upright by sheer luck. His vision fell to his own footing, until he was sure he was safe again. Glancing on down the slope into the rift below him he froze, as he saw the telltale black-lipped mouth of a crater where he had never seen one before. He stared for a long moment before he was sure he believed his eyes, and then he turned back. “Bluekiller!” he shouted. “I found one! I found one!”
Bluekiller came scrambling up the ridge, slipping and sliding, until they stood side by side. “Sonuvabitch,” Bluekiller said. “You did.” He laughed, a sound Gundhalinu had never heard him make before.
They slid down the far side of the hill, cinders and dirt cascading into their boots with every step, until they reached the blackened mouth of the new crater. “Maybe this is your lucky day, Treason.” Bluekiller said. “Look at that—it’s got teeth. Big time! After you—” He gestured.
Gundhalinu kneeled down, reaching into his equipment pack. The unharvested crystals lay like a strange bouquet before him; he had never seen untouched growth like this. The crystals had a peculiar asymmetrical grace that was as close to beauty as anything he had seen in this bitter landscape. He pulled on his protective gloves, and reached out to pluck the first spine.
The ground shuddered. He lost his balance and fell forward; his hand smashed into the growth of spines, snapping them and sending them into the maw of the pit. A second, harder shock almost sent him headlong after them; he flung himself backward frantically.
He heard Bluekiller shout something unintelligible, saw him stagger and fall as the shaking did not stop. A rumbling so deep and omnipresent that at first he had not even recognized it as sound vibrated through the ground, the air, every atom of his body. He lay paralyzed by disbelief and fear, until Bluekiller crawled to him, shoving him roughly. “Up!” Bluekiller bellowed. “Climb! Up! Nothing to hold on to here—”
Gundhalinu felt his instincts take over, pushing him to his knees. His body sent him scrambling up the hill as if he were inside a machine that he did not control.
The hillside rose and fell, undulating beneath him as if he were a ship on the sea, throwing him flat on the cruel ground. He swore as he felt himself begin to slide back down the slope.
He heard Bluekiller shout, behind and below him. He rolled over for a clear view of the other man, just in time to see the tortured earth split open along the bottom of the ravine, spewing fumes and ash, swallowing up their prize crater. And Bluekiller, sliding downward toward the sudden rip in reality.
Gundhalinu flopped onto his stomach, slithered down the smoking slope until he caught hold of Bluekiller’s ankle. He lay spread-eagled, digging into the surface of the heaving ground with his feet and one free hand. “Hang on!” he shouted, not knowing whether Bluekiller could hear him, not sure that he even heard himself.
He shut his eyes, gritting his teeth, fusing his body with the slope’s surface, stopping their downward slide, while the entire planet seemed to convulse with gigantic seizures beneath and above and around them.
At last, after what seemed to have been all of eternity, he realized that the ground beneath him was still, that there was no roaring like the voice of a chthonic deity in his ears; that what still seemed to him to be noise and motion were only aftershocks in his mind. That only his fear was real. He lay there, too spent even to raise his head, feeling Bluekiller’s leg clamped inside the rictus-grip of his gloved fist, until even his fear faded, leaving his mind a white wilderness like fields of snow. And he saw her hair, like fields of snow, falling around her face, along her shoulders, her skin as translucent as moonglow, her eyes like mist and moss agate.…
“Treason!” Someone was shaking him, calling his name—or what had come to be his name, now, as if he had never been someone else; as if there had never been any other existence. He shook his head, not certain of anything now, except that Bluekiller was beside him, pulling him up, trying to make him react. He grunted, spitting out cinders and ash, feeling the rawness of lacerated skin as he rubbed his face. “Gods…” he croaked. “You all right?”
Bluekiller nodded, jerked his head at the gaping wound in the surface of the ground, barely two meters beyond them. “Yeah.…” He wiped his forehead on his sleeve. “The Hidden One set a good trap that time, by Hanu!” His voice turned sour as he gazed at the spot where minutes, or centuries, ago, they had had in their hands the closet thing to treasure that this benighted land could offer. “Damn it to hell!” Bluekiller flung away a handful of ash, and then he looked back at Gundhalinu. He went on staring, for a long moment, and Gundhalinu heard in his silence the words that some unhealed memory would not let him speak.
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 their 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.
TIAMAT: Carbuncle
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 urg
ency 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 overshirt 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, felt 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 t
he 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.