Tangled Up in Blue, Page 3

  Some Winter courtiers whispered that by now she spied on them more for her own perverted amusement than from any urge for justice or need for protection; that she had come to crave the act itself as if it were the water of life. But the Queen’s deeper motivations were of little concern to Devony Seaward, because they had so little impact on her own life.

  On the other hand, if the Queen was successful in her plans, the rest of Devony’s life would continue to be lived in comfort and pleasure. While if the Queen failed, her new life would turn back into the old one, which she had hated so much.

  She knew only two ways of dealing with difficulties: either you changed the difficulties, or you changed yourself to endure them. She liked her new life, and who she had become. Before she was forced to surrender either one, she would do anything in her power to help Arienrhod change the Change.

  Even as she spoke, the corner of Devony’s mind that always stood apart, observing, analyzing, watched Arienrhod as intently as Arienrhod watched others. It registered the Queen’s striking coloring: her mass of milk-white hair, upswept and braided, interwoven with strands of pearls; the almost translucent paleness of her skin; the strange fog-agate color of her eyes.

  Arienrhod was already dressed for the reception she was hosting tonight. Devony noted the deceptive simplicity of the Queen’s imported gown and robes, how they set off her features to stunning, ethereal effect. She admired the clothing’s sophisticated lines, the sensuous beauty of the fabrics, the crown of spun silver set with moonstones.

  Devony recorded every detail of Arienrhod’s appearance in the artificial memory of her sensenet. She had long since added the Queen’s personal mannerisms and way of speaking to her own performance repertoire, with the uncanny precision of a born actress and mimic.

  In the beginning, when both the sensenet and her use of it were new, she had been surprised by how many clients had wanted Arienrhod for a lover. That no longer surprised her at all. Arienrhod was power incarnate—a woman who had ruled for nearly a hundred and fifty years, yet seemed never to age, thanks to the water of life. Arienrhod alone, out of all the people in the Hegemony, could afford to use the drug every day. She controlled this city, this entire world. Just to be standing in her presence was an achievement that Devony had never imagined in her wildest fantasies while growing up in the outback—a goal as unattainable, for most people, as the water of life itself.

  There was an exquisite and absurdly expensive liquor named for the water of life. Devony drank it with the clients she entertained, while wearing her exquisite and absurdly expensive re-creation of the Queen’s persona, almost as often as the real Queen drank the real thing. She had come to realize that an imitation of the one was as necessary as an imitation of the other; and in its own way, nearly as rewarding.

  “… even though I spent the entire afternoon with Special Investigator Jashari.” She sighed. “His lunch hour seems to be quite flexible, unlike his personality. If only certain of his body parts were as rigid as his opinions—”

  The Queen laughed. “So your affair with Internal Affairs revealed no … unusual quirks, or exploitable vices, when the Special Investigator finally let his hair down?”

  “His hair is very short, I’m afraid.” Devony’s smile was genuinely spiteful. “The only thing I can say with any conviction is that as a lover, he has no gifts … and, I might add, after we had sex he badgered me about whether I actually came or only pretended to. Calling me a liar aroused him more than having sex did … and then he began to call me a bitch, and a slut; and he actually pushed me down on the bed and tried to force me—”

  The Queen’s eyebrows rose. “He preferred to rape you?”

  Devony shrugged. “If it was just a kink, at least it would have been a little exciting. But when I saw his eyes … I’d become a thing to him. I wasn’t even human anymore.” The Queen leaned forward but didn’t interrupt, as Devony frowned faintly. Devony’s gaze was hard and clear as she looked up again, and murmured, “Perhaps he forgot he wasn’t at work.… So I pretended to cry, and told him he was hurting me, and called him eshkrad to remind him of his precious Technician ‘honor.’ That shriveled him up.”

  Her smile came back, widened with satisfaction. “He was so humiliated afterward that he actually gave me this, in apology.” She held out her hand, displaying the fine filigree of gold that joined four jeweled rings to a jeweled bracelet circling her wrist.

  “A beautiful piece of work,” the Queen said, her laugh acknowledging more than simply the jewelry.

  “A family heirloom, he claimed. I’m sure his wife will never miss it.” The edge on Devony’s smile as she glanced up again was honed to perfection. “I don’t expect I shall be seeing the Special Investigator again.… And that is absolutely everything of any interest, Your Majesty.”

  Arienrhod nodded, with another laugh. “Thank you, Devony. As usual, most entertaining, as well as instructive.”

  Devony bowed.

  The Queen rose and moved past the corner of her desk. “My guests are starting to arrive; I must go and greet them.… Would you like to come to the party?” Unexpectedly, she extended a hand in invitation.

  Devony’s jeweled fingers pressed her throat. “I would be honored, Your Majesty.”

  “Good, then.” The Queen’s smile widened. “I’m sure you’re bound to make some new friends.…”

  * * *

  “Here is the palace, my lord Humbaba.” Bells chimed softly as Mundilfoere exposed a delicate, night-black hand from beneath her veils. She gestured across the pristine spiral of alabaster pavement that marked the courtyard at Street’s End.

  “At last,” her husband said, his voice muffled by the hood of his cloak, and tinged with impatience. He studied the massive, carven doors they were approaching. Two members of the Snow Queen’s guard stood on either side of the entrance, in their costumish imitation of offworlder Police uniforms. “I had expected … more,” he murmured, and shook his head. “I confess, Carbuncle as a whole is so much less than I had imagined it would be, from the legends. How does it strike you, my jewel? Is it disappointing?” He reached up to caress her cheek through the layer of dark, semitransparent cloth. His large blunt-fingered hand was perfectly normal, unlike his mutilated face, and he had never raised it against her in anger.

  She shrugged slightly, making the bells sing. “I find it … both less and more than I had expected, my lord.” The traditional shadoudt robes she wore hid her striking features from curious eyes far more effectively, and purposefully, than his hooded cloak disguised his elaborate facial scarring. “On the surface, it is most disappointing: its shabbiness, the provincial ignorance. But I sense that so much lies hidden.…” She glanced up at her husband’s face, masked by cicatrice.

  On his homeworld, Tsieh-pun, ugliness symbolized strength, power … i-shin scarring such as his had come to be regarded as a unique form of beauty. That uncommon cultural perspective was obviously lost on the citizens of Carbuncle. “You have seen how the Source remains here—centers his entire sphere of influence here,” she added, “and not simply because it is convenient to him.”

  The massive palace doors opened, and a Winter noble greeted them. The pale, elegant woman led them down a corridor muraled with scenes of ice and snow; her mannered disinterest scarcely betrayed her hidden disgust.

  “That fact alone leads me to wonder about so many other things.” Mundilfoere went on expressing her thoughts aloud, confident that no one they passed could even identify the language they were speaking. “For one, how did Carbuncle survive, and why does it still thrive, this long after the end of the Old Empire? It must hold secrets no one can imagine, not even the Source. Perhaps he senses that, and that is why he remains here.…”

  She did not mention that Carbuncle had recently, quite inexplicably, chosen to surrender one of its secrets: an Old Empire artifact that was potentially of incalculable value. That information had been offered to only a handful of individuals at the highest levels of
the ancient, hidden order known as Survey. The chosen ones included Mundilfoere herself—and also Thanin Jaakola, the monster of corruption who called himself the Source.

  Survey’s inner circles did not include Sab Emo Humbaba, and never would. Nor, ironically, did they include the Snow Queen. Arienrhod could never be allowed even a glimpse into Survey’s hidden world, even though she must become their ally in obtaining the artifact—because, more ironic still, she alone had access to it. Which meant that she must eventually also become Survey’s pawn.

  “The Snow Queen was nothing but a peasant girl when the Hegemony reopened Tiamat, a century and a half ago. But she has ruled Carbuncle, and dealt with offworlders, successfully for nearly a hundred and fifty years.” Mundilfoere went on musing aloud as Humbaba made no comment. “What are her strengths, after so long, and what are her weaknesses?” And how best to make certain that Arienrhod never came to suspect she held the future itself in her hands?

  “It is fascinating, my lord, is it not, when one thinks of it? And in any case, the Source certainly has the influence to provide you with a new Head of Research, and the additional equipment you will require, so that you can expand your operations when we return to Ondinee. Your time here will be well spent.” Her husband’s trade was dealing in illegal drugs, a line of work that became more profitable with the introduction of each new escape hatch from reality that his researchers provided—although for her own part, she still found that the most powerful mind-altering substance of all was simply the truth.

  “Yes … all that is quite true, my jewel.” Humbaba’s massive arm curved contentedly around her. “You have peeled away the superficial, as always, until the naked body of the truth lies revealed.…” He ran his hand along her side, exploring the hidden mysteries of her body, barely concealed beneath the layers of gossamer cloth.

  “You flatter me, my lord.”

  He made a sound that might have been laughter; their guide walked a little faster, up ahead. “I am many things, wife, but I have never been a flatterer,” he said. “And you have not been my First Wife, or my most trusted advisor, for this long because you are one, either.”

  “No, my lord,” she murmured. “Of course not.” Beneath her veil, a faint smile formed.

  They fell silent as a deep moaning sigh filled the air: They were approaching the Hall of the Winds. Mundilfoere had tried to prepare herself and Humbaba for this trial by air, which everyone who entered the Snow Queen’s presence was forced to endure. Well before their arrival, she had studied everything it was possible to learn about Carbuncle without actually being in the city.

  But there were some things that not even the resources of Survey could fully prepare one for.

  The Hall of the Winds had no floor. The center of the chamber, called the Pit, was a vast well separating the uninvited from the upper levels of the palace. She knew that its open shaft dropped through the city’s heart all the way down to sea level, and that it was in fact a service well, giving access to Carbuncle’s self-sufficient operating plant. The city’s Old Empire technology had not needed servicing, as far as anyone knew, during the entire thousand-year history of the Hegemony’s relationship with Tiamat.

  Spanning the Pit was a railingless bridge, wide enough to be crossed easily in quiet air. But a constant, powerful updraft rose through the hollow core of Carbuncle, bringing with it the smell of the sea, and a moaning like the voice of an elemental being.

  And high above their heads, the city’s transparent storm walls stood open. Everywhere else in Carbuncle those same walls, visible at the end of every alley, sheltered the inhabitants from Tiamat’s pitiless weather. All of them were perpetually closed … except here. In this one spot, the winds of the open sky were allowed to run wild, sucking the breath out of the city’s subterranean hollows.

  Suspended high overhead, panels of some fluid, resilient material billowed like sails, creating treacherous crosscurrents and backflows in the relentless winds above the Pit. Unless the winds were somehow stilled, crossing the bridge would be suicide.

  The Winter noble wore a small whistle suspended from a cord around her neck. She raised it to her lips as they drew near the bridge, and glanced back at them; Mundilfoere saw her eagerness for a taste of their fear. The woman looked away again abruptly, as if she had forgotten what she would find instead.

  “Stay close together,” the woman muttered. “Don’t lag.” Gathering herself, she sounded a note on the whistle and stepped onto the bridge.

  Mundilfoere followed, suddenly as hungry for what came next as a hunting cat that had scented prey. Humbaba followed close behind her, less eagerly, she knew, but with the stolid lack of fear that was both his greatest strength and his most dangerous limitation. The shrill notes of the Tiamatan’s whistle created a zone of quiet air around them, barely large enough to encompass them all.

  As they crossed the span, Mundilfoere looked up in fascination, watching the wind curtains reposition themselves high above: somewere, the deft progression of notes being played by the Winter woman was activating automated controls. The noblewoman strode forward, sounding one tone after another with complete confidence, seeming never to doubt either her ability to play the precise sequence of notes at precisely the right intervals, or the millennia-old system that diverted the winds for their protection.

  Mundilfoere exhaled in pure exhilaration as she reached the far side of the span; the Winter noble glanced back, frowning. She led them onward without speaking, up the glacial flow of stairs that lay ahead.

  Mundilfoere’s fascination only grew as they entered the vast, arching space where the Snow Queen held court, and she caught her first glimpse of Arienrhod. The still-sparse gathering of guests had scattered like multicolored jewels across an imported carpet as white as a field of new snow. At the center of the room, and, more subtly, at the center of their attention, the Queen sat on a throne that seemed to be made of crystal, or even of ice.

  The Tiamatan people were pale-skinned and pale-eyed to a degree Mundilfoere rarely saw: the result of inbreeding among their original, long-isolated genetic stock. But the Snow Queen herself, dressed in white velvet, crowned in silver, was so fair that the title might have been created to describe her alone, and not simply her position as ruler of the Winter clans.

  “I was not aware that this was a costume party,” Humbaba murmured disparagingly, as he glanced toward the throne.

  At the Queen’s side, leaning against the throne’s high back with the desultory arrogance of a spoiled pet, was a man dressed from head to foot in black. Even his face was masked by a helmet of black leather; the effect was made all the more striking and barbaric by its rack of silver-spined antlers.

  If the calculated effect of the Queen’s icy, ageless beauty was to make her seem Elemental Winter personified, then her consort was the avatar of Winter’s age-old companion, Death.

  “He is called Starbuck, my lord,” Mundilfoere said, with a hidden smile. “He is not only the Snow Queen’s consort, but her Hunter. He oversees the blood harvest of the mers, and shares in its rewards. The mask is a holdover from the time when the Queen was worshiped as the Goddess Incarnate, and her consort was a kind of shaman. He wore a magic mask while in her presence, so that he could look upon her without being destroyed.”

  The tradition still served a purpose; the purpose had simply changed. The position was always held by an offworlder now, his real identity a secret known only to the Queen. That way, unmasked, he was free to roam the city among his former associates, supplying the Queen with intelligence about their activities as faithfully as he supplied her with the water of life.

  The mask of Starbuck served the Queen in the same way that the veils of shadoudt served Mundilfoere’s purposes … although the difference between the worlds to which those masks gave them access was as vast as the distance between the stars.

  “I will present you to Her Majesty,” their guide said abruptly, and started across the hall.

  “Go with he
r,” Humbaba said, gesturing indifferently. “The Queen is your concern, not mine. I will observe the gathering.”

  “My lord,” Mundilfoere demurred, taking hold of his hand, lightly but insistently. “You must come with me. It would not be seemly for me to go before her unaccompanied.”

  Humbaba acquiesced without protest. She knew from his manner as they crossed the room that secretly he was pleased by her gesture of subservience—as pleased as she was by his willing embrace of the shadoudt’s oppressive patriarchal tradition. No one who ever met her while she was accompanied by Sab Emo Humbaba could even think of ignoring her.…

  Arienrhod glanced up as they approached, and her gaze lingered. There was no revulsion on her face, as there was on Starbuck’s when Mundilfoere looked into his eyes. Visible through the slits of his mask, his eyes were dark and long-lashed. She guessed that his face was probably handsome, but there was nothing besides disgust that she could identify as human in his stare.

  Her gaze dismissed him and her attention moved back to the Queen. The Queen’s eyes were the color of moss agate, and Mundilfoere saw in them the same kind of hunger for new experience that had filled her own as she entered the Hall of the Winds.

  Arienrhod rose to her feet, extending a hand as they bowed before her. “We meet at last,” she murmured, raising Mundilfoere up with a touch. “I was told by our mutual acquaintance that you would be attending tonight.”

  “Your Majesty,” Mundilfoere said, smiling behind her veils. “The pleasure is truly all mine.…”

  4

  “Tree! Pass the pitcher down. Suddy needs refueling!”

  “By the Boatman, SudHalek,” Staun said. “Didn’t you get a bellyful of that klee-piss on your own nameday? I heard it corrodes ceralloy.”

  “Hell, that was a … um, three months ago, already,” SudHalek slurred indignantly. “Seems like a lifetime.… You want me to get stinkin’ drunk only once a year?”

  “Beer,” Staun muttered, propping his chin on his fists. “It’s not just for breakfast anymore.”