“All right. Then we’ll map it with recordings and instruments,” he said, hearing the coldness in his own voice. He folded his arms, echoing her unconscious gesture of self-defense. “If you have no objection to that.”
She looked at him for a long moment, still holding herself tightly, and he saw—thought he saw—a tremor pass through her. “Do what you must,” she said faintly.
His anger turned to ashes, as he saw what filled her eyes. She stepped back as he reached out; eluding him when he would have touched her, when he wanted suddenly to take her in his arms. “But it won’t do you any good,” she said, turning away. “You won’t learn anything. It’s impossible.” She went on across the room, moving toward the light, the doorway; escaping, leaving him there to meet Jerusha’s uncomprehending gaze with his own
“Da—?”
Sparks looked up, surprised by the sound of his son’s voice calling his name. He straightened, looking past Ngenet’s shoulder, to see Tammis coming toward them across the Hall of Winds. “What is it?”
Tammis stopped a short way from the two men, staring at the small pile of equipment they had been going over. He glanced at the half-dozen assistants, including Danaquil Lu Way away s, who waited nearby to monitor their descent.
“You’re really going to explore the Pit?” Tammis asked.
“What does it look like?” Sparks jerked his head at their preparation. The words sounded harsher than he had intended, and he felt Ngenet glance up at him. He told himself that his nerves were simply on edge.
“You didn’t tell me—” Tammis’s own voice took on an accusing tone; but Sparks saw him swallow his anger, as if he were afraid of it, or of the worse response it would bring down on him. “Nobody told me. I overheard Aunt Jerusha talking about it. Did you tell Ariele?” He tried to disguise the jealousy in his voice, with less success.
“No,” Sparks said, truthfully, realizing why his son had asked the question.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
Sparks sighed. “We did.” He nodded toward the small gathering near the edge of the Pit, where the access to the elevator modules lay.
“It wasn’t a secret,” Ngenet said, fastening his equipment belt, lifting a pack. “But an experiment like this is not something that you want a big crowd for, either.” He shrugged. “Probably just be a bloody anticlimax, anyway.”
“Are you going to repair the city’s power system?”
“We’re only going to look at it,” Ngenet said patiently. “This is our first try. The gods only know if we’ll be able to make any sense out of it. If we can we’ll decide from there what our next move will be.”
Tammis looked away, toward the rim of the Pit, and the span that bridged it. He had been crossing that bridge all his life, but Sparks knew he had always been afraid of it. Even now, he could see the shadow of fear in his son’s eyes. Sparks looked away from it, picking up his own pack.
Tammis turned back to him. “I want to come with you.”
Sparks looked at him incredulously. “Why?”
“I know I’ve always been afraid to look over the edge,” Tammis murmured. “But I’ve always wanted to know what was down there.” The only fear in his eyes now was the fear of rejection.
Sparks reached out, feeling an odd surprise, and put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Maybe next time,” he said. “It could be dangerous; we just don’t know enough about it.”
“You’re not worried about getting hurt,” Tammis protested.
Sparks laughed. “On the contrary. I don’t want to have to worry about you too. That would cause me twice the pain of something happening to myself.”
Tammis blinked as the words registered, and then he smiled. It was not an expression Sparks saw on his face often. “I’m seventeen, Da,” he said softly. “Can’t we watch out for each other?”
Sparks began to shake his head, but Ngenet said, “Let him come. Originally we’d planned on taking a third person. He’ll be safe enough, between the two of us.”
Sparks glanced toward the rim of the Pit, remembering how it had been before … remembering the moaning of the winds, the way he had always heard them long before he reached this place. Then, this had been a place hungry for death. He had a sudden strobing vision of himself at seventeen, standing alone on that bridge facing Herne, the Snow Queen’s Starbuck, in a duel to the death over Anenrhod… .
“All right,” he said at last, aware again of where he was now, of when, and with whom… “All right, he can come.” He looked back at his son; telling himself that perhaps at least Tammis might not walk like a condemned man every time he crossed the bridge if he saw what was really down there. That maybe after a willing descent into that green-lit darkness, neither of them would have to feel that way ever again He met Tammis’s half-eager, half-uncertain stare. “You stay between us,” he said, “or you stay in the car, if it makes you dizzy to step out.”
Tammis nodded, his face resolute. “I will.”
Sparks looked into his son’s eyes for a long moment—eyes that were the clear windows to a soul untouched by bitterness and disillusionment; as clear as his own eyes must have been, when Arienrhod had first looked into them. He turned away, not saying anything. He led Ngenet and Tammis toward the waiting car, toward the people waiting beside it. The one person he had needed to see was not there: Moon.
He wondered what it was that made her avoid this place. Was it her own memory of the things that had happened here? Or was there something else, something more, some secret hidden in the way those windows high overhead had closed miraculously at her command?
But he didn’t believe in miracles, any more than he still believed in the Sea Mother. It was easier to believe that something had gone wrong with his wife’s mind, as Kirard Set had muttered at the last Council meeting; that the sibyl net had done something to her on the night he had seen her seized by the Transfer. He thought of the sibyl he had seen stricken by a fit. He looked up at the wind-curtains where they hung still and dust-softened in the space where they had once held clangorous sway. They reminded him of corpses.
He looked down again, hastily, as the morbid image formed in his brain. He searched the stairway leading up to the palace, finding it still empty; tried not to follow the other images that spread like ripple-rings deeper into his mind, of other kinds of death, the death of innocence, of love and trust between two people, all rippling outward from this haunted place, from that long-ago time. Moon, where are you? I can’t reach you anymore.
He looked back again, at the expectant faces waiting for him. He saw the others move aside to reveal the open hatch that gave access to the car.
Jerusha PalaThion glanced past him at Tammis, and looked a question at her husband, who shrugged and nodded. “Does Moon know about this?” She turned, inflicting a look full of official scrutiny on Tammis. He shook his head, and her mouth pulled down. “Be careful,” she murmured, looking at no one in particular.
“We’ll keep the comm link open all the time we’re down there,” Ngenet said, touching her shoulder briefly, reassuringly.
“You’re sure the link will work down there, in all that EM noise?” She frowned; lines of concern deepened around her eyes.
“It did when we sent equipment down in the capsule yesterday as a test,” he said. “No reason why it shouldn’t today.” No one said anything more, but Sparks knew every one of them felt the need for that fragile link between the capsule and the people waiting above; the need to preserve that tenuous psychological bond, even though there was no way anyone could help them if they ran into a problem. Ngenet looked toward Danaquil Lu. “I wish I could say the same for the visuals. It just isn’t sophisticated enough.”