“I have an objection, damn it!” Borah Clearwater loomed up suddenly beside him, glaring at Kirard Set. “It’s my plantation, and by all the gods, 1 won’t have any Wayaways touching so much as a speck of dust on it!” He turned toward the Queen as he spoke, bellowing as if she were halfway across the planet, and not almost next to him. Danaquil Lu covered his ears.
The Queen looked up at him with a mixture of alarm and disbelief. “But all that he requested was an easement—”
“Today! And tomorrow he’ll bribe you into— Get your hands off me!” The lastwas directed toward the two city constables who had come in, at Jerusha PalaThion’s summons, from their post outside the door. They took his arms and led him forcibly out of the room, still protesting loudly.
Danaquil Lu let his hands fall into his lap. He shook his head, meeting the Queen’s astonished stare as the room around them rippled with relieved laughter. She looked away from him again, toward Kirard Set. “Your request is granted, Elder Wayaways,” she said, with apparent calm and something like satisfaction.
Kirard Set smiled, nodding his head in what appeared to be grateful acknowledgment. But Danaquil Lu caught the gleam of knowing amusement in his eyes as he looked at the Queen, a secret assumption of complicity that the Queen’s expression did not return, or even seem to register. Danaquil Lu looked away, glancing toward the empty doorway. It seemed to him that he still heard Borah Clearwater’s voice echoing through the halls of the Sibyl College.
He pushed to his feet, slowly and awkwardly. Murmuring his apologies to the Queen, he left the Council chamber by the same exit.
TIAMAT: Carbuncle
“Motherless blasphemer!” The shout came at her from some shadowed doorway. A fishhead came with it, thudding against her shoulder.
Moon Dawntreader stopped walking and turned back, her eyes burning. “Come out!” Her voice echoed along the almost-deserted street. “If you have a criticism, say it to my face!” But whoever had hurled the insult and the fishhead stayed hidden.
“Lady—?” Jerusha PalaThion asked the question with her motion as she unslung the rifle from her shoulder. She glanced toward the silent buildings gazing back at them with empty eyes.
Moon shook her head, putting her hand on the gun.
“What is it. Moon?” Fate Ravenglass turned toward their voices, her own empty eyes moving restlessly, blindly.
“Nothing, Fate,” Moon murmured.
“Just some stinking Summer with fish for brains, losing their mind,” Tor Starhiker, the fourth woman in their party, said sourly. She took the blind woman’s arm, guiding her steps as they started on again.
Moon raised her hand, pulling down the smile that unexpectedly tried to turn up the corners of her mouth. “The Summers have every right to criticize me. Tor.” She felt the smile disappear. “They are my people. Don’t insult them for it … at leastnot in my hearing.” She looked down, fingered the trefoil pendant that hung like a star against the dappled greens of her robes. “Even when they deserve it.”
The stench of rotten fish filled her nose, as inescapable as doubt, or truth. She glanced at the women who surrounded her. There was not a Summer among them. She was not the Queen her people had expected when she was chosen at the Change. And she was not the Lady they wanted—a symbolic avatar of the Sea Mother, who would preside over their sacred rituals and safeguard their cherished traditions. They had not asked for a Queen who needed and wielded real power, one who believed that the ways of offworlders were superior to the ways which had served them for centuries … a Lady who did not even believe in the Goddess.
They went on in silence until they reached the mouth of Olivine Alley, one of the countless labyrinthine ways that branched off the rising spiral of the Street, honeycombing the ancient shellform city of Carbuncle. Moon looked down at her feet, shod in soft leather, moving over the smooth surface of the pavement. The pavement was made from some material that never seemed to decay, no matter how many footsteps, wheels, treads, or burdens passed over its uniform surface.
She looked back down the alley, as they turned into the Street, taking a final look at the Sibyl College, where they studied and labored day after day to unlock the secrets of technology. She could still see the alley’s end, where the transparent storm walls let in the sunset, the last light of another day. The meeting with the Council had made this day run even longer than most.
One more day was gone in which she had not accomplished all she had hoped to; but still they were one day further along the path to real knowledge, the way to her world’s future. She began to walk again, feeling her weariness grow as they made their way on up the Street.
“This is where we get off, folks.”
Tor Starhiker’s voice startled her out of her reverie, and she nodded. “Rest well. Fate,” she murmured. “We have a long way to go tomorrow. Good night, Tor.” Their answers were equally subdued, as if her mood had spread to them all. She went on with Jerusha at her side, her head still echoing with the arguments of Winters and Summers, and with doubt.
Tor stood beside Fate with a hand resting on her arm, and watched the Summer Queen go on her way toward the palace at Street’s End. “Must have been a rough one,” she said, as much to herself as to the woman beside her.
“About as usual,” Fate answered, with a sigh. “Council days are always a trial. The ex-nobility’s eagerness to build a new world is matched only by their eagerness to be the first and richest in it… They argue endlessly with the Summers, as if everything were some court pettiness over who was the Snow Queen’s favorite this week. They don’t seem to realize that Moon is not the old Queen—”
“Well, she looks just like her.” Tor said bluntly.
Fate sighed again, as they started on down the alleyway toward her empty shop. “Yes, I remember…” Tor looked at her. While the Snow Queen ruled. Fate had possessed vision of a sort, using imported sensors; she had been an artist, a professional maskmaker, the one chosen to make the Summer Queen’s mask for the final Festival... the one who had placed it on Moon Dawntreader’s head. But her vision had gone with the offworlders, like so much else that had made both their lives bearable. Now at least Fate had found a new life in the Sibyl College.
And Tor who had been her acquaintance for many years, had made a new life of a sort as her assistant. But the vacant trances of sibyls, the endless questions that were all but meaningless to her, the stupid wrangling among stupid aristos, still left her feeling cast-adrift. She was glad enough to go on sharing in the lives of the powerful and important people whose destiny she had been sucked into during the Change; what they believed and what they were trying to do awed her, and at least they weren’t dull.
But her own life was dull. The present was still too much like what she had expected it to be, inconvenient, narrow, stinking of fish. She had spent her entire life’ before the Change doing the offworlders’ work; she missed the past, with all its excesses and terrors. She had almost escaped this future; nearly married an off worlder and gone offplanet with him. But destiny had stepped into their path—other people’s destiny—sending her lover Oyarzabal to prison with his employers and stranding her like an empty boat when the Hegemony’s tide went out.