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 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.”
Moon bent her head. “What does that mean?” blankly.
His smile grew wryer. “Nothing, I suppose, in this town. Gods, I want to see hot, running water again! I want to feel clean again.” He turned away and went into the bathroom; after a moment she heard water running.
Moon ate her share of the fisherman’s-pie they had panhandled on the street, sitting by the window with her back to the room’s self conscious schizophrenia — a room like all of Winter, caught between the Sea and the stars. The rooms were on the second floor, and she looked down on the Festival from above, watching humanity course like blood through the arteries of the city. So many… there were so many.
Cut off from the life support of its artificial vitality, she felt her endurance break down again, lost her confidence that she would ever find that one face in the thousands. The sibyl machinery had brought her to Carbuncle; but what did it expect of her now? Aspundh had not been able to tell her anything about the way in which it acted; only that it was the most unpredictable and least understood of the things a sibyl might experience. She had believed that it guided her; but now that she had come to the city there was no blinding revelation to help her: Had it abandoned her, forgotten her, left her to count grains of sand on the endless shore? How would she find Sparks without its help?