“A Hound!” She couldn’t keep the disdain out of her relief.
“No, Your Majesty,” coldly. “A dillyp. A free citizen of the Hegemony, a guest of Citizen Ngenet. He had been stabbed. According to Ngenet another of his guests was missing, and she is also presumed to be dead. She was a citizen of this world, a Summer woman named Moon Dawntreader. The mer bodies had been mutilated.” She made it as ugly as she could.
“Mutilated?” Sparks said, too loudly.
Arienrhod felt the spotlight of PalaThion’s gaze on her as she spoke Moon’s name: She suspects. But she was prepared for this, and she kept her polite disgust unchanging. “The name is vaguely familiar to me… Is she a relative of yours, Sparks?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” One hand closed over his other wrist; Arienrhod saw his nails bite into his flesh. “If you remember, she was — my cousin.”
“You have my condolences.” She gave him no warmth.
PalaThion was watching her with something that was neither amazement nor disappointment, but some of both. “She was an illegal returnee. She disappeared about five years ago.” Something grated.
“I think I recall the incident.” And I thought it was the end of everything; but it wasn’t.
“What do you mean, the mers were — mutilated?” Sparks said again. “Mutilated how?”
“I have a filmed record of it at headquarters, if you enjoy that sort of thing, Dawntreader.”
“Goddamn it, I didn’t mean — I want to know what happened to Moon!”
“Sparks.” Arienrhod leaned forward in quiet warning. “It’s his cousin, after all, Commander. Of course he’s concerned about what happened.” Damn him… seeing just how concerned he was.
“They had been — skinned, Your Majesty.” PalaThion still frowned tightly.
“Skinned?” She glanced at Sparks with veiled disbelief, saw in comprehension in his eyes. “Starbuck would never do something like that. Why should he?”
“You’d know his reasons better than I would, since he’s your man.” PalaThion toyed with her weapons belt, coming treacherously close to arrogance. “Who else would have the resources to drown so many mers at once?”
I don’t like this. I can’t see far enough into it. Arienrhod probed the transparent convolutions of the throne’s arm. “Well, frankly, Commander, even if he did do it, I don’t see why you’re so concerned. He’ll be dead soon enough, when the Change comes.” She shrugged with fatalistic acceptance, and a trace of smile.
“The law can’t count on that, Your Majesty.” PalaThion looked at her pointedly. “And besides — that would be too easy on him.”
Sparks turned back; stopped himself, running a hand through his hair.
Arienrhod felt the blood sing unexpectedly in her ears. “Speak for yourself, off worlder I suggest you concern yourself with your own fate after the Change, and leave ours to us.”
“Your fate and mine are bound together, Your Majesty, since Tiamat belongs to the Hegemony.” Arienrhod thought there was a subtle emphasis on belongs. But PalaThion’s confidence cracked even as she made the bluff, and drove her back into her place. PalaThion knew — yes, knew — that Winter had plans; but she knew just as surely that she was helpless to stop them. “In any case, I want Stabuck for questioning, and I expect that you will cooperate,” expecting nothing of the kind.
“I’ll do what I can to get this unpleasantness straightened out, of course.” Arienrhod untangled the free-falling collar of crystal beads that cascaded down her silver shirt. “But Starbuck is his own man, he comes and goes as he pleases. I don’t know when I’ll see him next.”
PalaThion’s mouth twisted skeptically. “My men will be looking for him too. But of course it would help me more if you’d tell me his name.”
Arienrhod gestured Sparks up onto the dais, stroked his bare arm with her hand. She felt it quiver as though her touch burned him with cold fire. “I’m sorry, Commander. I can’t reveal his identity to anyone; that would be a violation of trust, of the whole concept of his position. But I will keep my eyes open for him…” She reached up to touch a lock of Sparks’s hair, curled it around her finger; he only looked at her with sudden apprehension. She smiled, and he smiled, uncertain.
“I can find it out for myself. And when I do, I’ll get him!” PalaThion bowed with all the appearance of propriety, and strode away.
Sparks laughed tightly, a release of tension. “Right in front of her eyes!”
Arienrhod allowed herself to join him, without any real pleasure; remembering a time when laughter was a simple thing, with its roots in joy, not pain… “What a shame she’ll never appreciate what she missed.” But I need to make certain of that. “Starbuck will have to wear the mask of Everyman for a while.”
Sparks nodded, suddenly sober. “That’s all right with me,” as suddenly bitter.
“What happened on that beach?” She leaned toward him, holding him with her eyes.
“I told you everything I know, everything I saw! We killed the mers in the usual way, and we left them for Ngenet to find. We didn’t do anything else.” He folded his arms in front of him. “I don’t know what happened after that. By’r Lady, I wish I did…” a miserable prayer of loss and longing.
She looked away from him, feeling her face pinch with an unnameable emotion. Do you? Then by all the gods, I hope you never find out!
35
“Lady’s Eyes!” The snow skimmer slewed to a halt.
Gundhalinu echoed the muffled curse of Moon’s exasperation silently. A new stretch of bare, stony ground blocked their path up the exposed face of another hillside. He had never seen, or expected to see, the land beyond the spaceport when it was not covered by meters of drifted snow. But Tiamat had reached orbital summer again while he had been held prisoner; and it was entering the high summer of the Change as well — when the Twins reached the periapsis of their path around the Black Gate. The Gate’s gravitational influence was increasing the solar activity of the twin suns; slowly thawing this frozen world, gradually turning the equatorial regions insufferably hot.
In the past few days, as they made their way down out of the black and silver wilderness where the bandits camped, the weather had smiled on them. The vast, shining solitude had stretched a pristine carpet below the glacier-bitten volcanic peaks, beneath the flawless purity of the sky, day after day. And with every passing day, although they journeyed northward, the temperature edged up and up toward freezing, and passed it at the suns’ zenith. Their gratitude had turned to curses of frustration as more and more patches of naked stone and tundra blocked the snow skimmer way.
He crawled out from under the pile of skins and blankets, trudged to the front of the sledge and leaned down to lift the runners and the fragile underside clear. Moon threw her weight against the rear of it, and together they dragged it up the endless slope. He watched the sun-cast giants that mimicked their stumbling progress, trying to ignore the bands of red-hot metal tightening in his chest — and the awareness that his weakness forced a girl to do all the heavy work; the awareness that she did it quite adequately alone, and without complaint.
They reached the crest of the hill, the snowy downslope, at last. He let out the breath he had been holding, and the spasm of deep coughing he had held in with it. He felt Moon come up beside him, pulling him back to his seat on the sledge.
“How much longer, BZ?” She frowned, pulling furs up under his chin again like a fretful nanny. She had no herbal medicines now, and he knew that she knew the cough was worse again.
He smiled briefly, shook his head. “Soon. Maybe another day, we’ll be there.” The star port Salvation. Heaven. He didn’t admit that he couldn’t remember now whether it had been five or six days that they had been journeying. He never let himself believe that it had been too long, or that his calculations might be wrong.