Sparks stared at her, his entire body suddenly rigid. “Why?” he asked at last.
Moon looked down. “He wants to help us. He feels responsible for what he’s done to Tiamat, by making it possible for the Hegemony to return.”
“Why?” Sparks asked again, roughly.
She raised her head. “He said … he said that he still loves me.”
Sparks sucked in a small breath, and did not ask the question that Moon saw come into his eyes.
She did not answer it. She glanced away, across the room; saw her own face looking back at her from a mirror on the wall. Seeing another woman there, in her memory—one with the face of a young girl. Not even certain whether it was herself she was remembering, or Arienrhod … She looked away. “We need his help,” she murmured. “Tiamat does. You know what this means. The Hegemony will want to control Tiamat full time. And we won’t be able to stop them.”
“I know,” he said, his voice strained. “The water of life … they’re going to want it. They’ll take it, if they can.” His jaw tightened. “And I don’t see how even Gundhalinu can prevent that.”
“I told him the truth about the mers. That they’re sentient.” She wove her hands together on the tabletop, finger by finger, tightening. “I don’t know if he believed me… . But the information is there for anyone to see, in the sibyl network. If he can make the Hegemony acknowledge that—”
“He can’t,” Sparks said angrily. “Lady’s Eyes, Moon—they don’t want to know!” His voice hardened. “The ones who want the water of life don’t care about anything but what it can do for them. They don’t have to—they’re the ones with the power. They don’t give a damn about anyone’s suffering; as long as it doesn’t hurt them. And mers aren’t even human. You’re talking about the ones who run the Hegemony, and they aren’t going to listen.”
Moon rose to her feet, staring at her own reflection across the room. “They will listen, this time.” She touched the trefoil dangling against her linen shirt. “Because there’s more. It’s not just about the morality of committing xenocide; it’s about enlightened self-interest.” She turned back to him, leaning forward on the table. “Because the mers are the key. They have to survive, or the … or …” Something was happening behind her eyes, like the beating of dark, enormous wings. They tumbled her thoughts into chaos, stopping the words in her throat.
“They’re… they’re the…” She pushed away from the table, falling back into her chair.
“Moon—?” Sparks reached out to her.
“I… can’t….” She shuddered, as something inside her collided with an impenetrable wall. “I can’t… tell you. I can’t… ever tell anyone.” She shook her head. Her thoughts began to clear, the black wings slowly furled, as she surrendered to the sibyl mind and its compulsion, still controlling her, holding her under its geas. That Carbuncle is the pin in the map. That the computer itself lies here—the secret heart, the hidden mind, of the sibyl net. No one could ever be allowed to know its hiding place, because that would make it vulnerable, and its reason for existence would be lost, along with its secrecy. The people it had been created to serve could not be trusted. And so she could not be permitted to reveal its existence here; or the mers’ reason for existence, even if saving them meant saving itself.
It had chosen her to do its work… but now she suddenly understood that it did not trust even her completely. She would not be allowed to share her secret with anyone, no matter how vital it was to the success of her task, to saving the mers, to saving the net itself. She had to save them, somehow, without letting the enemy know the one thing that might make them willing to compromise. Because she could never tell anyone why.
She turned away from Sparks’s confusion, the sound of her name being spoken again in urgent concern, and went wordlessly out of the room.
TIAMAT: Goodventure Holding
The small trimaran nosed in toward moorage at the docks, its engines tactfully silent. Moon Dawntreader stepped down onto the mortared stone surface of the landing wearing the heavy woolens and kleeskins of a Summer sailor, with her hair in braids. She knotted the forward mooring rope to an iron post in the chill shadows below the cliff-face; turned, with her cold-stiffened hands resting on her hips, to gaze at what lay waiting for her.
There was no one else on the pier, or on the ancient steps that zigzagged up the dun-colored sandstone slope to the town above. Here and there the steps showed the near-whiteness of fresh patching. A basket attached to a winch-rope, for hauling the day’s catch and other goods up the cliff, sat empty on the stones. Up above was the Goodventure clan’s ancestral claim, which lay a day’s travel north of Carbuncle. During High Winter it had been completely inaccessible, permanently buried under snow. But with the coming of spring it had been reborn; she could see the green of new grasses spilling over the cliff’s edge, limned by sunlight against a rare, perfectly blue sky. Seeds that had lain dormant beneath the snow had neither failed nor waited in vain… . The sight of green high above the bleak, barren shore was a testament to faith and change.
Moon took a deep breath, looking down again. There were thirty or forty other craft clustered at the docks, bobbing offshore, tied up along the pier or pulled up onto the narrow, stony beach below the cliff. Hers must be among the last to arrive for the triad of festival days. To find mooring space had not been the Lady’s luck: a place had been reserved for her, as Summer Queen.
Tradition dictated that she should be the one to oversee these annual celebrations. By rights they should have been held on ancestral Dawntreader lands, because she was the Queen. But the Dawntreaders were an obscure clan, whose few members had been scattered across the far islands of Summer. They did not even have a meaningful holding here in the north, but lived randomly spread among the other Summer families, as they always had. And she had neglected her traditional duties more and more over the years; she had always been too busy defying her heritage to make the time for them.
And so Capella Goodventure had come to oversee the festivals that were held every year at the annual midsummer of Tiamat’s orbital passage around the Twins—the ages-old festivals that must have given rise to the Festival of the Change, When Winter and Summer changed places in the revolving cycle of time. The Great Festivals of the Great Year had become tied to the cycle of offworld exploitation and onworld ignorance only after the Hegemony began coming to Tiamat. Remembering those things, she felt her resolve strengthen, and her belief that she was doing the right thing.
Behind her Moon heard Anele and Tammis come out of the small trimaran’s protected cabin onto its deck. Ariele looked sullen and annoyed, as usual. She shielded her eyes, gazing out across the sea to avoid having to acknowledge her mother. Tammis simply looked glum and uneasy. There was no one else on board. She had brought them here herself; had wanted to feel her own hands on the ropes and tiller, needed to prove to herself that she had not completely lost touch with her past.
Beyond the bright forms of her two children she saw another ship coming in, on a course that would ease it in beside her own craft to a precariously tight moorage. Miroe and Jerusha had followed her up the coast, at her request; not just as guardians, but to help her in what she had to do.
Ariele crouched down suddenly at the stern of the boat’s deck, watching intently until a familiar brindle-furred head broke the water surface. Ariele whistled shrilly and the merling swam toward her, meeting her outstretched hand with a sleek, wet caress. “Silky!” she murmured. “You came. I knew you would … beautiful Silky.” The young mer regarded her with rapt attention as she slid into a series of hums and whistles. Tammis stood behind her, watching silently, listening for the mer’s response.