The Summer Queen (148 page)

Something was still happening inside of her, the residue of
changes at the molecular level as profound as those that had occurred when she
had first been infected with the sibyl virus, and changed so irrevocably ....

She pushed up again, dizzy and faint; found herself face to
face with Merovy’s concerned, uncertain eyes.

“Are you all right, Ama?” Merovy murmured, touching her
shoulder gently, almost hesitantly.

She nodded, sitting upright, rubbing her face, her eyes. “Ah,
Lady ...” she whispered, incapable of anything more, as realization followed
realization, out of the realm of formless radiance and into the spectrum of
coherent thought. Slowly she allowed herself the knowledge that she would live,
that she had been spared, that she had answered her own prayers ... more slowly
she began to see what remained to be done; and to comprehend what the cost had
been. She sat, strengthless and motionless, a moment longer, pulling her
thoughts together enough for speech. “Merovy ... bring your medical kit here.”

Merovy brought the kit to her. Clavally and Danaquil Lu were
behind her back, supporting her now. “Do you have a syringe?” Moon asked. “A
large one, for drawing blood.” Merovy nodded. “I want you to draw some of my
blood. Inject it into Reede’s vein. The water of death is dead.”

Moon got to her feet, feeling giddy, feeling her own veins
burn as if her blood were superheated. Clavally and Danaquil Lu rose with her,
still supporting her. “Reede,” she said; saw his pain-filled eyes already on
her, saw him afraid to hope.

Merovy looked up from her medical supplies, “But—”

“Moon,” Clavally said, “if you do that you’ll infect him
with the sibyl virus.”

Moon shook her head, turning to look at them. “It won’t happen,”
she said faintly. “I’m not a sibyl anymore.”

“Not a sibyl—” Danaquil Lu broke off.

Clavally’s eyes widened. “But I thought that was impossible,”
she murmured.

“No,” Moon said, with tremulous laughter. “There is a place
where everything is possible.” She moved to Reede’s bedside. Merovy followed
her, and took blood from her arm. Moon watched it flow, deep red, with an odd
detachment, almost disappointed that it did not show gleams of a strange light.

Merovy turned to Reede, with the syringe in her hand; Moon
saw her hand tremble slightly as she looked at him. Merovy glanced up again,
her eyes reminding Moon that no one had been able to bring their son and
husband back from the dead.

Moon looked away.

“Lady ...” Reede whispered. “It’s true—?” He lifted a hand,
reaching out to her.

“Yes.” Her fists tightened at her side, as something
grieving inside her balked at taking his hand. But she reached out, folding her
fingers gently around the swollen flesh of his own. She held his arm steady as
Merovy, taking a deep breath to steady herself, injected the blood serum into
the lurid track of a vein dying by poison.

Reede stiffened, making a sound that made her shudder. He
murmured something in a language she did not know, as the needle came out of
his arm. And then his body went slack; his grip loosened, his fingers slid from
her grasp.

Moon glanced at Merovy, watched her check for a pulse. “He’s
still alive, Ama ...” Merovy murmured. She laughed once, a chirrup, half of
relief, half of bitter irony.

Moon took Reede’s limp, dangling arm, settled it gently at
his side on the bed. She turned away; swayed suddenly, as reaction struck her.
She took a step forward. Jerusha’s waiting arms caught her as she fell, and
that was the last she remembered.

“You look too cheerful,” Bluekiller said, as Gundhalinu
emerged from his creaking hovel, dragging his equipment pack after him.

Gundhalinu climbed stiffly to his feet, bracing himself
against the full impact of the wind, shielding his eyes from the swirl of ash
and cinders, the blinding brilliance of the setting sun. This workshift he
barely noticed the bite of the cold air, the sting of grit against his skin. He
could feel himself smiling, unable to stop it. “I had a good dream last night,”
he said. He still thought of the time he slept, habitually, as “night,” although
in fact it was this world’s day: during most of it the sun was eclipsing behind
Big Blue, making their days as black as pitch and freezing cold. They worked at
night, in the endless twilight of Big Blue’s reflected planetshine. The only
time they saw real daylight was for a few brief minutes at sunrise and sunset.
He looked toward the sun, as a vision of golden light enfolded him, and her
voice, whispering, Sleep, my beloved ... soon .... “A good dream,” he murmured.

“Musta been,” Bluekiller muttered, scratching his beard. As
the days passed Gundhalinu had grown used to the other man’s distorted speech,
until now he understood it without much trouble. “Otherwise I think you lost
your mind, Treason. Only a shufflebrain smiles when it’s workshift here. Or
when it’s not ....”He shrugged. “Good dreams are maybe good omens. Maybe we
find a fresh harvest today “

Gundhalinu sighed, pulling on his pack. “Nice thought,” he
said, stuffing a ration biscuit into his mouth. Usually he was the first one
up, ready and waiting, wanting to avoid Bluekiller’s volatile temper, or Piracy’s
unfavorable notice. But today he had slept late, warmed and eased by the dream’s
hallucinogenic reality, for once not wanting workshift to come and end the
cold, interminable hours that passed for his time of rest.

He chewed and swallowed while Bluekiller watched impassively.
It could have been a cake of pressed sawdust he was eating, from the flavor and
consistency; but it kept him alive, and so he assumed it was nutritious. He
washed it down with a gulp of water from his canteen. Most days the act of
eating only left him feeling hungrier, just as waking from a dream left him
feeling emptier. “Let’s go.”

Bluekiller picked up the rope of their sledge and yanked it
into motion, as Gundhalinu shoved it from behind. The sledge’s runners made a
high whining, an endless protest, as they moved out through camp toward the
lifeless plain. Gundhalinu glanced at Piracy’s hovel as they passed, as he did
every workshift; seeing the dead plant that sat beside its door, a withered
seedling in a container filled with ash. Piracy had smuggled the seeds in from
a trip to the perimeter fort; had tried to make them grow. They had sprouted,
like hope ... and like hope they had withered and died. There was not enough
light to support photosynthesis. The only things that survived here were the
bacteria and parasites within a living human body.

“You dream about your woman?” Bluekiller asked, just when
Gundhalinu had begun to think he was not going to. Gundhalinu seldom spoke
unless spoken to; still half afraid, after what had been done to him when he
arrived, that even Bluekiller might suddenly turn on him and break his neck
over some casual remark.

“Yes,” he said, feeling the sound of her voice fill his
vision again with colors he had almost forgotten the names of, here in this
monochromatic twilight. He had not seen her face, but somehow she had seemed
more real to him than he had ever felt her to be, except when they had made
love together on Mask Night, reunited at last in the extraordinary union of
souls that had carried them outside the bounds of time. “She said I’d be free,
soon ....”

“Those stop, after a while,” Bluekiller said, looking back at
him with a mix of disgust and pity. “Better when they do.”

Gundhalinu said nothing, holding on to his inner vision. He
squinted his eyes against the stinging reality of windblown sand.

They wandered for unmeasured hours through the shifting
hills and valleys, over the cinder-strewn plains of their territory, finding
meager scrapings at the round of pits they already knew. He had not yet
developed the uncannily precise sense of time the other men in the work gang
seemed to possess, that told them when to start work, when to eat, when to
sleep. The human body had rhythms of its own, Piracy had told him; but he had
never been forced to pay attention to them.

“Stop pushing,” Bluekiller said abruptly. “I need to take a
piss.”

Gundhalinu stopped in his tracks, more than happy to take a
break, although he made a point of never requesting one. But this time, instead
of sliding down to sit, he began to climb the rise above them, still driven by
the restlessness that had filled him since he woke. The luminous arc of Big
Blue hung above him like a giant’s eye, watching his every move the way he had
watched insects struggle over the gray stone of the estate grounds when he was
a boy on Kharemough. A surveillance craft passed through his line of sight as
he looked up, its running lights like stars in the gloom far overhead.

He looked down, shielding his eyes as he searched the
horizon beyond the hill’s crest. In the distance he saw the plume of dust that
marked the track of another sledge, another work team scouring their ground,
probably Piracy and Contract.

The ground shuddered under his feet. He staggered, staying upright
by sheer luck. His vision fell to his own footing, until he was sure he was
safe again. Glancing on down the slope into the rift below him he froze, as he
saw the telltale black-lipped mouth of a crater where he had never seen one
before. He stared for a long moment before he was sure he believed his eyes,
and then he turned back. “Bluekiller!” he shouted. “I found one! I found one!”

Bluekiller came scrambling up the ridge, slipping and
sliding, until they stood side by side. “Sonuvabitch,” Bluekiller said. “You
did.” He laughed, a sound Gundhalinu had never heard him make before.

They slid down the far side of the hill, cinders and dirt
cascading into their boots with every step, until they reached the blackened
mouth of the new crater. “Maybe this is your lucky day, Treason,” Bluekiller
said. “Look at that—it’s got teeth. Big time! After you—” He gestured.

Gundhalinu kneeled down, reaching into his equipment pack.
The unharvested crystals lay like a strange bouquet before him; he had never
seen untouched growth like this. The crystals had a peculiar asymmetrical grace
that was as close to beauty as anything he had seen in this bitter landscape.
He pulled on his protective gloves, and reached out to pluck the first spine.

The ground shuddered. He lost his balance and fell forward;
his hand smashed into the growth of spines, snapping them and sending them into
the maw of the pit. A second, harder shock almost sent him headlong after them;
he flung himself backward frantically.

He heard Bluekiller shout something unintelligible, saw him
stagger and fall as the shaking did not stop. A rumbling so deep and
omnipresent that at first he had not even recognized it as sound vibrated
through the ground, the air, every atom of his body. He lay paralyzed by
disbelief and fear, until Bluekiller crawled to him, shoving him roughly. “Up!”
Bluekiller bellowed. “Climb! Up! Nothing to hold on to here—”

Gundhalinu felt his instincts take over, pushing him to his
knees. His body sent him scrambling up the hill as if he were inside a machine
that he did not control.

The hillside rose and fell, undulating beneath him as if he
were a ship on the sea, throwing him flat on the cruel ground. He swore as he
felt himself begin to slide back down the slope.

He heard Bluekiller shout, behind and below him. He rolled
over for a clear view of the other man, just in time to see the tortured earth
split open along the bottom of the ravine, spewing fumes and ash, swallowing up
their prize crater. And Bluekiller, sliding downward toward the sudden rip in
reality.

Gundhalinu flopped onto his stomach, slithered down the
smoking slope until he caught hold of Bluekiller’s ankle. He lay spread-eagled,
digging into the surface of the heaving ground with his feet and one free hand.
“Hang on!” he shouted, not knowing whether Bluekiller could hear him, not sure
that he even heard himself.

He shut his eyes, gritting his teeth, fusing his body with
the slope’s surface, stopping their downward slide, while the entire planet
seemed to convulse with gigantic seizures beneath and above and around them.

At last, after what seemed to have been all of eternity, he
realized that the ground beneath him was still, that there was no roaring like
the voice of a chthonic deity in his ears; that what still seemed to him to be
noise and motion were only aftershocks in his mind. That only his fear was
real. He lay there, too spent even to raise his head, feeling Bluekiller’s leg
clamped inside the rictus-grip of his gloved fist, until even his fear faded,
leaving his mind a white wilderness like fields of snow. And he saw her hair,
like fields of snow, falling around her face, along her shoulders, her skin as
translucent as moonglow, her eyes like mist and moss agate ....

“Treason!” Someone was shaking him, calling his name—or what
had come to be his name, now, as if he had never been someone else; as if there
had never been any other existence. He shook his head, not certain of anything
now, except that Bluekiller was beside him, pulling him up, trying to make him
react. He grunted, spitting out cinders and ash, feeling the rawness of
lacerated skin as he rubbed his face. “Gods ...” he croaked. “You all right?”

Bluekiller nodded, jerked his head at the gaping wound in
the surface of the ground, barely two meters beyond them. “Yeah ....”He wiped
his forehead on his sleeve. “The Hidden One set a good trap that time, by HarmI”
His voice turned sour as he gazed at the spot where minutes, or centuries, ago,
they had had in their hands the closet thing to treasure that this benighted
land could offer. “Damn it to hell!” Bluekiller flung away a handful of ash,
and then he looked back at Gundhalinu. He went on staring, for a long moment,
and Gundhalinu heard in his silence the words that some unhealed memory would
not let him speak.