“You’re sure that Moon is ‘studying’ with these sibyls on their island now? Will she be safe there?”
“As safe as anywhere in Summer, Your Majesty. Probably safer. She may even be back on Neith by the time I put in there again.”
“And you say the sibyls you’ve seen aren’t actually deranged—?” Her voice tightened. She had hoped to bring the girl here before she had the chance to contract the sibyl disease; but now it was too late.
“No, Your Majesty.” He shook his head. “They control their fits completely; I’ve never seen one who couldn’t.” His own lack of fear reassured her.
Arienrhod studied the mural on the wall behind his head. As long as the girl was sane, that was all that really mattered; the disease could even be an asset, a protection, if it made the Summers trust her. She looked back at the trader. “Then you’ll bring her a message from her cousin, which I will supply. I want her to come to Carbuncle.” Moon would have to come of her own free will; the Summers would never stand by and let someone kidnap a sibyl.
The trader kept his head bowed; she could not tell what his expression was, although he twitched slightly. “But, Your Majesty — if she’s become a sibyl, she may be afraid to come to the city.”
“She’ll come.” Arienrhod smiled. “I know her; she’ll come.” If she thinks her lover is in danger, she’ll come. “You’ve served me well—” she realized that she had forgotten the man’s name, and did not use it, “trader. You deserve to be well rewarded.” Gods, I must be getting old. The smile altered slightly. She pressed a sequence of lighted keys on the chair arm. “I think you will find that the debts for your new cargo of trade goods have all been canceled.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty!” She watched his sagging face jiggle as he made obeisance, hating the sight of the ugliness that age inflicted, even while she took pleasure in the awareness of her own invulnerability.
She dismissed him, not even cautioning him to keep this meeting to himself. He was a distant but loyal kinsman; no matter what he might wonder about his strange guardianship or the stranger object of it, she knew that he would never ask, or betray. Particularly not when he was paid so well.
She rose from her seat in the small private room when he had gone, and went to the doorway, drawing the white inlaid panels aside. She found Starbuck waiting there, not quite expected, in the wider hall beyond it. With him were his Hounds — the amphibian hunters from Tsieh-pun, ideally suited to the work of outwitting mers. The Hounds stood in a cluster at the far side of the chamber, tentacled arms waving as they grunted at each other in desultory conversation.
But Starbuck stood leaning with his usual public insolence against a massive Samathan side table very close on her left… very close to the door. She wondered whether he had been listening; decided that he probably had, decided that it probably didn’t matter.
He was hooded and still in black, but instead of his court costume it was a utilitarian thermal suit hung with equipment for the hunt. Light caught on his sheathed killing knife as he straightened up. He bowed to her with rigid propriety, but not before she saw the searching look and the questions in his dark eyes.
“Are you leaving already?” She gave him nothing but the coldness of her voice.
“Yes, Your Majesty. If it pleases you.” She detected the faint assumption of a ritual between equals.
“It pleases me very much.” Yes, flinch, my overconfident hunter. You are not the first by many, and you may not be the last. “The sooner you go, the better. You hunt the Wayaways preserve this time?”
“Yes, Your Majesty. The weather is clear there and should hold.” He hesitated, came toward her. “Give me luck in the hunt—?” His hand caressed her arm through the film of cloth.
He lifted his mask, and she drew his face toward hers with her hands, giving him a kiss that was a promise of greater rewards. “Hunt well.”
He nodded and turned away. She watched him gather the Hounds and go looking for life and death.
7
“Input—”
An ocean of air… an ocean of stone. She was flying. Moon gaped with a stranger’s eyes at the vaulting walls of striated rock that funneled her out into the canyon lands an immeasurable vastness of eroded stone like scrimshaw lace, stained violet, green, crim son, gray. She was trapped in the maw of a transparent bird, an airship in flight; dials and push buttons and strange symbols blinked and clicked on the panel before her. But she was held in stasis by her trance, and she could not reach them, as the ridge of purple stone rose like a wall into her headlong flight.
The ship banked steeply on its own, clearing the ridge and plunging into a deeper chasm, leaving her giddy. Something on the panel flashed red, bleeping critically as her altitude stabilized once more. Where she had come from, where she was bound, where this lithified sea existed, were mysteries she would never be able to answer; along with who, and how, and why… Overhead the sky was a cloudless indigo, blackening toward the zenith, lit by only one tiny, silvery sun. She could not see water anywhere…
“Input—”
An ocean of sand. An infinity of beach, a shoreless dune-sea whose tides flowed endlessly under the eternal wind… Her ship moved over the sand in rippling undulation, and she was not certain from where she sat, helmeted against the furnace of light, high on its armored back, whether it was truly alive or not…
“Input—”
An ocean of humanity. The crowds surged around her on the corner of two streets, pushing and dragging at her like treacherous undertow. Machines roared and clattered past her, clogging the roadways, filling her nose with their bitter reek and battering her ears… A dark-faced stranger dressed all in brown, peaked hat, shining boots, caught at her arm; raised his voice in an unknown language, questioning. She saw his face change abruptly, and he let her go…
“Input—”
An ocean of night. An utter absence of light, and life… a sense of macrocosmic age… an awareness of microcosmic activity… the knowledge that she would never penetrate its secret heart, no matter how often she came back and came back to this midnight void of nothing, nothing at all…
“…No further analysis!” She heard the word echoing, felt her head drop forward in release, caught her breath as the end of another trance wrenched her back into her own world. She sat back on her knees, relaxing the muscles of her body consciously, in a rising wave… breathing deeply and aware of each tingling response.
She opened her eyes at last, to the reassuring presence of Danaquil Lu smiling at her from the rough wooden chair on the other side of the chamber. She controlled her own body now during the Transfer; they no longer had to hold her down, tying her to the real world. She smiled back at him with weary pride, shifted to sit cross legged on the woven mat.
Clavally ducked in at the doorway, momentarily blotting out the puddle of sunlight that warmed Moon’s back. Moon twisted to watch her enter the second pool of light below the battered window frame; Clavally dropped her hand absently to smooth Danaquil Lu’s always-rumpled brown hair. Danaquil Lu was a quiet, almost a shy man, but he laughed easily at Clavally’s constant whimsies. He struck Moon as being somehow ill at ease or out of place here on this island, in these rooms chipped from a wall of porous rock. Where he did belong she couldn’t guess; but sometimes she saw a longing for it in his eyes. Sometimes she caught him looking at her, too, with an expression on his face that she couldn’t name — as though he had seen her somewhere before. There were ugly scars on his neck and the side of his face, as though some beast had clawed him.