Into the sea, under the water … drowning, death, blackness. The images filled his mind, and again he did not know whose fear filled him, who had always been terrified of death by water, who had always known that it would be his destiny. … He swore under his breath, wanting to cry out. You’re damned anyway, you miserable bastard, he thought, with furious self-loathing. Death by water, or the water of death. It doesn’t matter how you die! But it did. … He looked out at the night, so that he would not have to look into the eyes of the two people watching him.
“Why does Tammis have to go with you?” the Queen demanded, and he heard fear for her son in her voice. “I’m a sibyl; the sibyl net chose me.”
“That’s why. You have to remain clear, where you’re protected. You’re going to be in deep Transfer, for hours, inside its mind … it will show you, and you’re going to tell me, what’s wrong. I need you to guide me, let me know when the healing is done. That’s going to be dangerous enough.” He felt the heat of her resistance, her uncertainty as she searched the face of the man who had poisoned her only other child. “You won’t be functional, damn it! I need someone who can work with me—and it has to be another sibyl who can act as go-between for us.” He gestured at Tammis.
“But I thought you were a sibyl,” she said, still frowning, even though there was the beginning of understanding in her eyes now.
He laughed, with another man’s bitter terror. “No, Lady,” he whispered, with another man’s voice. “I am not a sibyl. Sibyls are sacred. I am a human sacrifice. …” Tammis shuddered, staring at him.
The Queen’s face changed. She reached out slowly, as if she were afraid he might bolt, and touched his cheek, as gently as she might have touched her own child. The barest contact of her fingers sent a shock jittering through the nerve endings in his face. But he did not pull away.
He felt her withdraw her hand, after a moment. “I’ll get the data and underwater equipment for you as quickly as I can,” she said. “But how will you reach the computer? You can’t go into the city; you can’t get to the sea without Vhanu’s patrols seeing you.”
“Yes, we can.” He rubbed his eyes, forcing himself to concentrate again, to stay focused, to function as one human being. “The Pit is an access well, it goes down to the sea. It goes exactly where we need to be.”
“But there’s no power—even the well is shut down.”
“Not for us,” he said gently. “It knows about us. I want you to come with us down into the well. We can’t risk being interrupted. Even Vhanu can’t reach us once we’re down there.” He hesitated, seeing her face change. “Have you ever experienced an extended Transfer?”
She nodded. “Once. It was—” She broke off, and he saw the memory of an endless absence that still haunted her. Like drowning …
“It won’t be like that, this time,” he murmured. “It will be—nothing like anything you’ve ever known. But it will still be difficult. …”
“I know.” She looked up at him with a weary, sorrow-filled smile. “Isn’t everything?” She rose from the couch. “I’ll see to things,” she said, looking away again, suddenly distracted. For a moment she gazed at Tammis, and then she went silently out of the room.
Moon entered the room that had become her husband’s entire world within the palace, before his journey to Ondinee … to the Land of Death. She moved slowly about its perimeter, her eyes taking in every detail of its contents … the study materials, the imported electronics equipment, the makeshift bed to which he had exiled himself, after she had driven him away. He had never allowed servants to enter his private workspace; she had not allowed it either, since his disappearance.
She sat down on the edge of his cot, picking up a rumpled shirt that he had carelessly thrown aside. She pressed it to her face, inhaling the familiar scent of his skin until her mind filled with images of lying beside him in the sweet abandonment of love… memories of all that they had meant to each other, for so many years. Even knowing all that they had done to each other, all that they had thrown away or let slip through their hands, still in this moment she could remember only the good things. Because there was no need now to remember anything else. Because he was dead. He was dead… .
She dropped the shirt and rose from his bed again, moving on around the room, passing the terminal, remembering the work he had done, alone and unappreciated: the hidden secrets of the mersong he had discovered, the difference that his discoveries were about to make, which no one would ever be able to thank him for, now.
She stopped again before the small table whose private drawer she had forced, seeing its contents still scattered on the tabletop where she had left them, thoughtlessly, on the day she had lost the only other man she had ever loved. The sign of the Brotherhood still lay on the floor where she had dropped it: the symbol of Survey, in all its endless permutations of treachery and betrayal—yet with a gemstone as beautiful as the sun, the symbol of enlightenment, glowing at its heart.
She looked away from it, kicking it aside with her foot. She sat down by the table, picking up the objects that lay on its surf ace, one by one … the wooden top that Sparks had played with when he was a boy … the lock of someone’s hair, as pale as milk, inside a blown-glass vial … the embroidered love-token that she had made for him, when they had first pledged their lives to each other… . Why had no one ever warned them about how long the years would seem … about how they would end, without warning? She fastened the small embroidered pouch to the inside of her shirt, next to her heart, as Sparks had always worn it in his youth. She wiped the wetness from her face with the edge of her sleeve.
And then she rose from her seat, dry-eyed, and went out of the room; because the sibyl mind was waiting, and her life was not her own.
TIAMAT: Carbuncle
Moon followed her son and Reede Kullervo down into the transport car that waited below the rim of the Pit. She looked up at the last moment at Jerusha, who stood watch over her here, now, as it seemed she had always done. She saw the memory that haunted Jerusha’s eyes, the way memory had always haunted her own vision, here in this place. She had told Jerusha only that Reede believed he could find a way to reactivate the city’s silent core, and give them a bargaining point in their war of nerves with the offworlders … all that she could tell anyone, but it had seemed to be enough.
“The gods—the Lady—go with you,” Jerusha murmured. She glanced past Moon at Tammis’s pale, upturned face below them, his own eyes clouded with memory. She looked at Reede. Her concern turned suddenly to doubt, and she frowned.
“We may be gone a long time,” Moon said. “Maybe for hours. We won’t be able to communicate with you from down there.”
“I’ll be waiting,” Jerusha said. “For as long as it takes.” She gripped Moon’s arm tightly, as if she could send her own energy, her own spirit, with them, before Moon let herself down into the space below.
Moon saw instrument lights scattered like gems across the dim faces of the equipment around her, more and more of them winking on as she watched, just as Reede had predicted. The hatch sealed above them, sealing them in. Beyond the expanse of the viewing window the walls of the Pit remained dark and dead, revealing no sign of active response. But Reede stood at the window beside Tammis, gazing down, the two of them equally still and intent.
Moon slipped in between them, holding on to a support rail along the instrument panel as they began to move down the spiral course into the well’s depths. Looking out as they did, she did not find utter blackness, but instead the green light waiting, intensifying as her mind accepted its presence.