The Summer Queen (76 page)

Sparks stood watching a moment longer, almost but not quite
confident enough to continue on his way. And then, not sure why, he started
back the way he had come.

He watched Tammis stop, staring up along the glowing wall
just as they both had done. And then he turned, leaning against the rail of
light, looking down; leaning out over it in a way that made Sparks’s heart
stop. “Tammis!” he shouted. Ngenet broke into a run. Sparks began to run too,
heading back around the rim.

Ngenet reached Tammis’s side first, pulling the boy back,
holding on to him. Sparks heard their mingled voices, made unintelligible by
distance and echoes. He pushed himself, not thinking now about the narrow track
or his own precarious progress along it. As he closed with them, he heard
Ngenet’s voice asking Tammis questions, saw Tammis’s eyes, the dazed look he
had seen there before grown nearly opaque, as if the boy were in a trance.

He pulled up short as he reached them, because there was no
room to maneuver on the narrow walkway. “Tammis,” he said, the concern in his
voice hardening into imtation. “Get back in the car. I don’t want you out here.”

Tammis looked at him. “But I had to come out. I have to be here
....”

“You don’t have to be anywhere, but safe,” Ngenet said, with
surprising gentleness, his hands still firmly on Tammis’s shoulders. “It’s all
right; you’re just a little shaken up. It’s too much for anybody out here—”

“But it’s so beautiful here,” Tammis murmured, and there was
something eerily like the manner of a sleepwalker about him. His eyes drifted
away from them as he spoke; he strained toward the rail again. “The light—it
keeps getting brighter. And there’s a kind of music here, do you hear it? I had
to come out.”

“What are you talking about?” Sparks snapped. “Tammis! Damn
it, look at me—”

But Tammis turned toward the void again, staring down into
it as if he were looking for the sea, his straining body silhouetted by whorls
of light.

“What’s happening down there?” Jerusha PalaThion’s voice interrupted
suddenly, through the earjack of Sparks’s headset. “Is everything all right?”

“No problem,” Ngenet grunted, pulling the boy back again. “He’s
all right; I think maybe there’s a kind of effect the light down here has, a
kind of rapture ....”

“Sparks—”

Sparks started, as Moon’s voice suddenly filled his ears. “Sparks,
I don’t like this. Bring him up, it isn’t safe. Bring him up now!”

“He’ll be all right. He’s just got a case of vertigo.”
Sparks felt himself frown again. “We’re not finished here.”

“I can’t leave,” Tammis echoed, not looking at them. “I have
to get down there—”

“Come on, Tammis,” Ngenet said, more insistent, trying to
pry him away from the rail, pulling him around. “Come on, boy, let’s get back.”

“No, I don’t want to get back in the car. I have to be near
it; I have to go to it—”

“Tammis—!” Moon’s shrill, panic-stricken voice made Sparks
wince; he jerked the jack out of his ear. He pushed forward, his exasperation
giving his movements too much force as he caught his son’s shoulder, trying to
propel him in the direction of the car.

Tammis twisted, resisting as he was caught between the
movements of the two men, trying to break free. He lost his balance, and
stumbled into Ngenet. His hands flailed wildly as he began to fall outward; as
behind him Ngenet lost his own footing in the middle of a move to stop the boy
from pitching over the rail. Tammis’s cry of surprise was drowned in Ngenet’s
sudden, louder cry, in Sparks’s shout of warning as he lunged forward—colliding
with Tammis, knocking him down, as Ngenet struck the rail and went over the
edge.

 “No—!” Sparks’s scream filled his own ears, as his frantic
lunge grasped nothing but air, too late. “Ngenet!” He hung against the rail,
his body strengthless as he looked over and down, at the tiny speck of black
falling downward through the pinwheeling light, still falling and falling
toward the black depths. Voices clamored in his head, through the headset, out
of the mouth of the pathetic figure clinging to his feet, beside him on the
catwalk. But he had only eyes, no other senses; only eyes to watch that spot of
black growing smaller and smaller, until it was lost at last in the utter
blackness below.

Tammis ...

Tammis spiraled up through an endless tunnel of darkness
shot with light, rising like a swimmer, knowing only that he fled from some
horror in the bottomless depths. It howled after him like a lost soul, like the
sound of his own madness gibbering, calling him by name. He felt it gaining on
him; knowing that if he looked back, if it caught his gaze and forced him to
put a name to it, it would drag him down into madness forever ....

“Tammis—”

He woke, hearing his terrified cry half-drown the sound of
someone calling his name. He jerked upright, felt hands press his trembling
body back against pillows. He opened his eyes, staring in disbelief at the
ceiling of his own room. His gaze slid down over the line of molded trim onto
the wall’s long sky-blue expanse, found the familiar triptych painting of the
sea. His hands rediscovered the heavy quilts and woolen blankets of his bed.

His mother’s face hovered above him, her hands still
pressing his chest in gentle restraint. “What ... ?” he said, his voice a
broken whisper. “What am I doing here?”

As he spoke the words, he felt himself begin to fall away,
back down into the blackness without bottom ....

“Stop—” Moon said, and there was something in her voice that
he had never heard before. Abruptly the compulsion that was suffocating his
thoughts began to dissipate like fog. Her hand brushed his hair gently away
from his eyes. “Whenever you feel yourself begin to slip away like that, you
must say stop,” she murmured. “That’s all ... stop. And it will.”

He nodded, staring at her for a long moment, uncomprehending.
His eyes caught on the white bandage wrapping her wrist, the matching strip of
bandage around his own. He frowned, trying to remember why the sight of those
bandages filled him with such awe and terror and grief. He closed his eyes,
looking inward, trying to make sense of the images as they began to take form.

The Pit. At first it seemed to be the last thing he
remembered: the descent into the Pit with his father and Miroe Ngenet ... the
hypnotic kaleidoscope of light and darkness swirling upward around him. The
light had been made up of all colors, and yet it had seemed to him to become
greener and greener, and to have music in it, like no music he had ever heard
or could ever possibly hear, outside of his own soul, or the song of the mers.

He remembered nothing more, nothing except the terrible need
to join that calling beauty ....

And then somehow he had found himself in the Hall of the
Winds again; with hands holding him up, holding him back when he would have
gone to the edge—

And as his head began to clear, he had heard the cries and
the questions, seen Jerusha PalaThion’s stricken face, heard her voice
repeating endlessly, “It can’t be! He can’t be—” And Miroe Ngenet had been
nowhere.

He had searched every face around him; seeing only a
strobing nightmare of a figure falling, black against night, that couldn’t be
real, couldn’t be his fault, couldn’t be .... He saw his father’s face, with
eyes as hard as emeralds, turning back his confusion with grief, and his sudden
fear with fury.

“What is it?” he had asked, almost desperately. “What is it—?”

The others had looked at him, and their faces gave him no
comfort. “Miroe is dead,” his father had said flatly. “He fell. He fell because
of you—”

And then his mother the Queen had been there beside him, putting
her arms around him protectively, saying, “He doesn’t remember! He doesn’t
understand.”

He had followed her away, up the stairs, moving as clumsily
at first as if he were newborn, stumbling over his feet. His mother led him to
a small, quiet study, a room he had always felt comfortable in, and settled him
on the couch.

She sat beside him, looking at him for a time without
speaking. He saw compassion in her eyes, and something that might be understanding—although
he could not believe she understood something which was so incomprehensible
even to him. “I killed Uncle Miroe ... ?” he said, his voice breaking with his
own disbelief. “I killed him?”

“No!” Moon reached out, covering his fists with her hands. “No
...”shesaid again, softly. “You were called. There in the Pit. It’s a choosing
place. You were meant to be a sibyl, and it chose you, then and there—as I was
chosen, when I was barely older than you are.”

“But ...”He looked away, at the walls lined with books and
other more arcane forms of datastorage; at the strange collected whimsies of
his real grandmother, Arienrhod, the Snow Queen. His gaze caught on an emerald
egg, the shadowy form he could not quite make out trapped in its heart .... “But
didn’t he fall—?” He remembered it now, as if it were a dream: the falling
form, the scream that went on and on .... “Because of me.” He looked back at
her, felt himself trembling. “I made him—”

“He tried to help you,” his mother whispered, and he saw her
eyes fill with sudden, unshed tears. “And he fell. It was an accident ... not
your fault.”

“Da ... Da was there,” he said thickly. “He saw it. He
thinks it was my wilt. I saw it in his eyes when he looked at me.”

“He didn’t understand,” Moon said, her voice strong with feeling.
“He will. He saw it happen to me, too ....” She broke off. “When it happens, it
takes you, and there is nothing you can do to stop it, nothing at all.” She
looked away briefly, before she drew him close and held him, rocking him in her
arms as she had done when he was a small child.

She let him go again, at last, as someone else entered the
room. Tammis looked up, to see Danaquil Lu looking back at them, with the same
unspoken understanding that he had seen in his mother’s eyes.

“He was called, wasn’t he?” Danaquil Lu said to Moon. “I
know the signs.”

She nodded, straightening away from Tammis’s side. “Yes.”

“The Pit is a choosing place?” Danaquil Lu asked,
incredulous. “How is that possible?”

Moon shook her head. “I don’t know.” A look that almost
seemed to be pain passed over her face.

Danaquil Lu hesitated. “You stopped the winds, there ....
Does that have anything to do with it, do you think?”

“I don’t know,” she said again, as woodenly as before; as if
she could not say anything else, caught in a trance like he had been. Tammis
touched her arm tentatively. She started, glancing at his hand.

Danaquil Lu came on across the room, stood looking down at
them both Tammis stared at the trefoil hanging against his shirt; at the one
his mother wore. He felt his hands begin to perspire.

“It’s a great honor that you have been chosen for, Tammis,”
Danaquil Lu said softly. “And a great responsibility. The very act of being
chosen proves that you are deserving and capable of it—”

“I don’t want it!” He flinched at the rawness of the words. “I
killed someone because of it! He’s dead—” He broke off, as someone else
hesitated in the doorway. Merovy. She crossed the room, passing her father with
barely a glance, to settle beside him on the couch. He fought the urge to move
away, feeling unclean, untouchable. But she put her arms around him, and he saw
that his image in her eyes had not changed. Hesitantly, painfully, he put his
arms around her and pulled her to him. She rested her head on his shoulder.

“Nothing is free, Tammis,” Danaquil Lu said, gesturing at
the scars still visible down the side of his face, his throat—the marks a
witchcatcher lined with iron spikes had laid on him. Tammis remembered how
Danaquil Lu’s own people, driven by prejudice and fear, had cast him out of
Carbuncle. “There’s always a cost—a life ... a death.”

Tammis looked at his mother. She nodded, slowly. “If your father
had been chosen, along with me ... or if I had been turned away, along with him
... we never would have been separated, back in Summer, or come to Carbuncle,
or ...” She looked down, her body moving slightly, in a shrug. “Nothing was the
same for us, afterward, as it had been before. But I wouldn’t change it back,”
she said, seeing the look in his eyes. “Once you know, nothing is ever the same
again, anyway.” She shook her head. “Oh, Tammis, don’t deny the gift you were
given today. Miroe wouldn’t want that ... Jerusha wouldn’t. Accept the gift, or
the cost will be that much harder for everyone to bear.”

Tammis looked down, away from the sudden insistence in his
mother’s eyes. He turned back to Merovy. “What should I do?” he murmured. “Should
I—?”

She nodded, touching his face. “You must,” she said, and it
was not so much a command as an observation, as if she had seen in his eyes
what he refused to see himself: that he had no choice, now that he knew.

“Clavally and I initiated your mother,” Danaquil Lu said. “We
would be honored to do the same for you.”

He hesitated, unable to speak, caught between fear and
desire. Nothing will ever be the same.

Moon took his hand, holding it in her own. “Let me be the
one who gives s the ... the Lady’s Gift to you.” She used the old Summer term,
not “the virus” or “the sibyl net,” as if those words were too hard and
literal, not possessed of ough mystical awe to express the power of the life
change that a human being underwent in becoming a sibyl.

He nodded, at last, and held out his hand, offering his
wrist; wishing his arm is,was steadier. “Then let’s do it now.”

Danaquil Lu hesitated, glancing at Moon. “It isn’t usually
done that way ....”

“Everything’s already changed, because 1 was chosen,” Tammis
said. “If I’m “going to become a sibyl, I want to do it now. The sooner I can
start helping people, jthe sooner I can start making up for what happened
today.”