“I’ve got these.” He held out his identification and his stunner. “They make me look considerably more regulation.” He sealed the open collar of his coat.
“No.” She felt the tightness turn to pain. “I’m going in there to find Sparks, BZ.” She forced his shadowed brown eyes to keep hers when they tried to slip away. “However it turns out, I have to do that alone. I can’t do it…” in front of another lover. Her mouth quivered.
“I know that.” He did look away now. “And I — I couldn’t watch it happen. Moon, I want the best for you, believe me; I want whatever happens to be what will make you happy. But damn it, that doesn’t make it any — easier.”
“Harder.” She nodded. “It makes it harder.”
“The entrance… let me take you that far. The guards would ask questions if you didn’t have some kind of escort. And I’ll stay here at Street’s-end until you come out of there — or I’ll learn the reason why.”
She nodded again, not trying for words. They waded the whirlpool of the circle-dance; she felt her hopes and her regrets sucked down into a vortex of agonizing anticipation… You are the Queen; be the Queen, stop shaking! She held her breath as the guards at the massive doors focused on their approach. The guards wore stunners, as Gundhalinu had predicted. Oh, Lady, do you hear me? remembering that it was not a goddess who would guide her now, but only a machine; a machine that had told her she must come.
At the moment she was certain the guards would challenge her she threw back her hood, keeping her head high, trying to believe strongly enough to make them believe.
“Your Majesty! How did you—” The man on the left remembered himself, brought his hand up to his chest, bowing his head. The woman on the right joined him, their off worlder-style helmets gleaming whitely. The immense, age-darkened doors began to open.
Moon turned quickly as her face began to fall apart, to Gundhalinu’s face taut with dutiful respect… with a frustrated loss that only she could see. “Thank you for your — cooperation, Inspector Gundhalinu.”
He bent his head stiffly. “My pleasure… Your Majesty. If you need me again, call me,” emphasizing each word. His hands twitched uncertainly in front of him; he saluted, and turned away to lose himself in the crowd.
BZ! She almost called after him; didn’t, as she looked back toward the open doors, the darkly shining hallway beyond, beckoning her on to journey’s end. The guards glanced surreptitiously past her at Gundhalinu’s seedy, retreating back. Wrapping her cloak close around her, Moon entered the palace.
She moved like a ghost along the empty hall, her soft shoes’ passage belying her substantiality. She put blinders on her senses, afraid of stopping, of losing herself in the crystalline hypnotic wilderness of purple-black peaks and snow-burdened valleys, Winter’s domain that mural led the endless walls of the corridor. And ahead of her, gradually, her straining senses caught the murmur of the Hall of the Winds. Her hand gripped the control box Herne had given her; her palm was moist and cold.
Herne had broken out in a sweat and his own hands had shaken while he told her what she would find there — the captive wind, the billowing cloud forms the single vaulting strand of walkway above the Pit. The Pit that he had almost made the grave of Sparks, his challenger; the Pit that had destroyed him instead — because of Arienrhod. Arienrhod had defied her own laws to intervene, to save Sparks, and left Herne a prisoner in a broken body, while pitiless love-hatred ate away his soul.
Moon reached the end of the hall where it opened out on the air — vast, moaning reaches of restless air above her, pale cloud-wraiths swelling and shuddering under the caress of an unearthly lover. She felt herself dwindle and diminish as the frigid back flow of the outer air discovered her solitary intrusion, swept hungrily around her, pulling at her cloak. Beyond the breached walls the thousand thousand stars lay white hot on the ruddy forge of night; but there was no warmth here, no light except the haunted green glow of the gaping service shaft below her… no mercy.
She took one step forward, and then another, toward the thin span of utter blackness silhouetted above the abyss. He didn’t tell me it would be dark! Fear made her falter, her fingers playing over the sequence of buttons on the control box at her wrist — the sequence Herne claimed would unlock a safe tunnel through the air. Did he lie about everything? But she wasn’t the object of Herne’s twisted passion, only its surrogate. If her presence here was anything to him it was only as a tool for his revenge.
She took another step, and another, until she came shivering to the brink of the Pit. The sudden damp updraft rising out of the shaft caught her by surprise, butting her back on the platform. And with it came the smell of the sea, pungently sweet-sour, fish and salt and moldering pilings. Moon cried out in amazement, her voice swallowed by the wind. “Lady!” The breath of the Sea blew her back again, stumbling over her unaccustomed skirts; she caught her balance, instinctively, a sailor on a pitching deck… only a sailor, not a Queen.
She lifted her head, saw the shuddering ghostly curtains not as clouds now, capricious and uncontrollable, but as flapping sails un tended under the sea wind. And in her hand, in this palm-sized box, were rudder and line to set a course across this well of the Sea. The updrafts beat her back again, in final warning.
“I will go.” She touched the first button, heard the first tone in the sequence, felt the air grow quiet around her. And with the skill of a hundred generations before her, a people who had dared the sea and the stars before that, she stepped out onto the rimless span and began to walk. Every third step she sounded a new note, being sure each step was neither too short nor too long, holding her concentration locked into the sequence, the pattern, the rhythm.
And as she passed over the center of the bridge, the greenish glow intensified and she felt a nameless presence, a soundless voice, an echo from a distant place and time… the song the sibyl cave had sung to her. She moved more slowly, until she could not move at all; mesmerized by its inhuman beauty, imprisoned in the moment. Her fingers relaxed on the control box, its shrill intruding tone grew thin and faded… A sudden clout of wind knocked her to her knees, the sound of her own scream shattered the prism of spell and set her free. She scrambled up again, recapturing the control note with frantic hands. She hurried on, reckless with panic, feeling the call still tend riling through her mind, but even fainter.
She reached the far rim, stood sobbing for breath on solid ground, dazed and uncomprehending. This wasn’t a choosing-place! How could it know her?… She remembered dimly that somewhere in this city Danaquil Lu had been called by the sibyl machine. Was this the same well of the Sea that had sung to him? She shook out of her cloak, backing away from its rim in silence; turned away from the sight of the abyss, and left the Hall.
She chose another corridor, tracing the arteries of the palace diagram Herne had drawn on paper and graved into her memory. She began to hear music again — mortal music this time, the sounds of a graceful Kharemoughi art song played by a string quintet. She saw in her mind’s eye Aspundh’s gardens, the shimmering splendor of the aurora dancing into dawn across a velvet sky. She reached the wide, carpeted stairway leading to the vast hall that was half the palace’s second story; met the music drifting sedately down it, and two startled servants who bowed their heads and hurried on past her.
She hurried on, too, climbing past the landing that gave entrance to the grand hall, where tonight the Queen was holding a reception for the Prime Minister and the Assembly members. She went on to the third level, where Herne had told her Starbuck’s chambers were, knowing that he would probably still be in the crowded hall below, but knowing that she did not dare enter the place where Arienrhod herself was the center of attention.