The Snow Queen

18

HEY SPARKS, DON’T LEAVE WHILE YOU’RE HOT. GIVE US A CHANCE TO BREAK EVEN.

The hologrammic torso above the ravaged city on the game table threw the protest at him as he removed his fragile headset. But he hung it up on the terminal, officially withdrawing.

“Sorry.” He grinned with nonchalant smugness, making his answer more to the hostile stares of the other players than to the computer controlling the phantom croupier. “It’s getting boring.” He tapped his credit card into the slot, saw it pop out again with the new sum — more money than he had imagined existed in the world a few months ago. The idea that it all belonged to him had almost stopped impressing him now; now that he knew how much wealth circulated along the spiraling Street of Carbuncle. He was even getting a feel for how much money must flow through the Black Gates to the other worlds of the Hegemony… he was learning fast. But not fast enough.

He lurched away from the table, drunk on rose-colored Samathan wine, but not so drunk that he couldn’t quit while he was ahead. That was one of the things he was good at, he thought, knowing the odds and his own limits — that was why he was winning more and more often at the games. Arienrhod kept him supplied with money, and he spent the time when he was free of Starbuck’s official persona squandering it in the saloons and gambling halls up and down the Street; ingratiating himself with as many of his fellow pleasure takers as he could stomach. Listening, asking, watching the undercurrents shift: trying to get a feel for where the information came from and flowed to.

But he was struggling to climb out of a pit of abysmal ignorance, and when the wine and the drugged perfume of too many rooms like this one began to clog his senses, the frustration rose up in him until he ached. There was nothing about the city that gave him any pleasure any more: The things that had delighted a Summer boy might still exist here in the Maze’s vibrant convolutions, but he no longer saw them. The longer he lived in Carbuncle, the more he despised the people who were its life.

He had begun to hate the sight of everything and everyone, without knowing why; the blackness stained his past and future, and even the sight of his own face. Everything — except Arienrhod. Arienrhod understood the blackness that lay like poisoned pools in the deepest places of his mind; knew how to bleed off his hostility; reassured him that every soul was black at the heart. Arienrhod comforted him, Arienrhod brought him peace, Arienrhod granted his every wish… Arienrhod loved him. And the fear that he might lose her love, make her regret that she had let him become Starbuck — see her cast him off, as she had cast off his rival — was a cloud always lying on the horizon of that peaceful sea.

She used her own extensive system of electronic spies and confiding nobles to augment the scraps of information he brought her; but off worlders who really had something to hide had effective countermeasures, and he knew that she missed the insider’s knowledge of a real Starbuck, a man who had spent his life among them. The day would come when she would begin to resent his Summer ignorance. Maybe, drunk with the moment, he had lost sight of his own limits just once…

Sparks pushed his credit card into the lining of his belt, felt his elation sour as he started away from the table. He wondered briefly, resentfully, whether he was really any good at these games; or whether Arienrhod watched him secretly even here and arranged the winning for him.

He shook the thought off, his hands bunching on his belt; glanced across the scape of turba ned heads, bare heads, caps, helmets, gem woven coiffures, bowed in unholy worship within the flickering panoramas of their chosen games of chance. This was one of the high class hells; more sophisticated, less luridly obvious than the cheaper joints in the lower Maze, which catered to a crowd made up largely of Winter laborers. But even here there was no honest joy. The players laughed and cursed with equal vindictiveness, oblivious to the glaring music that blurred conversation and muted the sounds from the next room. In the next room were the dream machines, where you could lock yourself into terrifying experiences on other worlds, commit any crime, experience anything up to the moment of death that you had the courage to endure. He used them more and more, and they gave him less and less.

He began to weave his way between the tables toward the entrance, moving with a purpose and assurance that belonged to another man: a man who wore a mask and an off world medallion on his chest. Sparks Dawntreader wore a bright-banded imported tunic and high boots; his hair was cut short like a Winter’s — but it was the unaware arrogance of Starbuck that made the other patrons step out of his way.

“You look like a man who knows what he wants.” The one who didn’t move aside stepped boldly into his path, the slitted silver of her long gown disguising nothing.

He looked, and looked away again, still less than comfortable with the publicity of sexual advances here in the city. “No, thanks. I just want to get out of here.” The silver of her gown, for a flashing instant, made him think of silver-white hair… He pushed on past, trying not to touch her. He felt no real desire for any woman except Arienrhod now: Arienrhod who was teaching him to desire things he had never even dreamed about. And the idea of sex for money seemed grotesque and perverted, even though he knew that half the women and men who offered their bodies in these places were Winters. Bored or money-hungry, they had adapted their normal easiness about sex to the off worlders mercenary appetities.

There were off worlder prostitutes here, too, controlled by other off worlders higher up in the covert power web that covered the Maze. There were worlds in the Hegemony where slavery was an accepted fact or a tacit one — and Arienrhod did not interfere with the customs of her customers. Some of them looked no different from the local body sellers (only, to his eyes, more exotic); but there were the zombies, too, flesh-and-blood victims for hire who satisfied the kind of customers who weren’t content with dreams. They moved nearly naked through the crowds, flaunting their scars — no, flaunting was the wrong word. They were the living dead, they moved vacant eyed, like sleepwalkers; theirs was the dream, and the nightmare. They were drugged, he had been told, or drugs had already destroyed their brains. He had been told by Arienrhod that they felt nothing. And once, when his own mood had turned especially black, he had almost…

But the memory of lying helpless in an alley while four slavers called him “pretty” had broken the black mood the way his shell flute had broken that night; left him wondering whether it was really the off worlders he despised, or the off worlder in himself.

But Arienrhod had eased his conscience again, brushed away his questions, laughed gently and told him that there would always be evil, on any world, in any being, because without it there would be no measure for good…

Sparks took a deep breath as the casino doors swept shut behind him, stood letting his lungs clear on the inset slab of rare metallic ore that served as a doorstep. A tawny cat slipped past his feet, disappeared into a hidden cranny in the wall, hunting.

“…Come on, S’eing, gimme a break.” Something familiar yet strange about the voice made him turn and look along the building front. “I’ll do anything, for gods’ sakes, anything to get out of this hellhole and back to someplace where they can help me! Sign me on—” The speaker was an off worlder thick dark hair, brown skin, a sparse half-grown beard. He sat on a box, propped against the wall, wearing a stained crewman’s coveralls with no insignia. He was a stranger; he looked like a strong man slowly starving to death, and Sparks began to turn away from the sight of him. But the voice… “You owe me, damn you, S’eing!” He watched the stranger push away from the wall with an awkward twist of his spine, catch the pants leg of the second man’s flightsuit.

The second man was a freighter captain, he guessed, or something less official: a heavy man with a scarred face. He stepped back suddenly, jerking the seated man off-balance. Sparks watched the first man sprawl helplessly into the street, realized with a shock of empathy that the man’s legs were paralyzed. The scarred officer laughed, the kind of laughter he’d never wanted to hear again. “I don’t owe you shit, Herne , if you can’t collect.” Herne ’s curses followed him down the alley.

The man called Herne rearranged his useless legs laboriously, ignoring the subtle and the not so subtle stares of the passersby. Sparks stood staring like the rest, trapped in the voyeurism of pity. He moved forward at last, tentatively, as he watched the man try to drag himself back onto his seat. The man glanced up at him; slid back down onto the pavement.

“You!” Hatred followed recognition like night behind day. “Did she send you here? Did she tell you where to find me?… Yeah, take a good look, kid! Fill up your eyes, fill up your brain; and then don’t ever forget that someday she’ll do the same to you.” Herne ’s hand closed on a fistful of dust, flung it away.

“Starbuck.” He was not sure he had even spoken it aloud, but he knew it for the truth. “She — she said you were dead.” He had imagined she meant fallen thousands of meters into the sea. But there were platforms and machinery jutting out into the shaft. One of those must have broken his fall… and broken his back. And now he might as well be dead — but he was alive. Sparks felt the sudden release of an unconscious pressure somewhere in his chest, a thing he became aware of only in its absence. “I’m glad…”

Herne twisted in futile rage; his hand leaped out at Sparks ’s leg. “You son of a Summer slut! If I could get my hands on you I’d finish what I started!” He slumped back again, letting his hand drop. “Go ahead, enjoy it, kid. I’m still twice the man you are, and Arienrhod knows it, too.”

Sparks stood just beyond reach, his face burning. The memory of what Herne had done to him, and failed to do, there in the Hall of the Winds drowned his compassion like a gnat in a bowl of bitterness. “You’re no man at all, Herne, any more. And Arienrhod is all mine!” He turned and started away down the alley.

“You fool!” Herne ’s angry laughter beat at his retreating back. “Arienrhod is no man’s! You belong to her, and she’ll use you until she uses you up—”

Sparks walked on. not looking back, until he reached the corner of the Street. But he did not start uphill toward the palace; he stood while his anger drained away and left him purposeless, before he chose the downhill route. He walked aimlessly for a long time, moving into the heart of the Maze. He passed the bars and casinos that had become a second home to him; glanced desultorily at shop windows filled with imported spices and herbs, jewelry, paintings, caftans, terminals… and a hundred different technological toys: costly, sophisticated baubles spread out for the jostling free port trade and the wondering eyes of the natives. Once every window had stopped him in his tracks, and a walk in the Maze had been like a walk through heaven. Now they barely caught his eyes; and somehow, without his being aware of it, time had coated his awe with a rind of disillusionment, and the wine of wonder had turned to vinegar.

Even the many-colored alleys, the fert’le meeting ground where artisans of this world and seven more let their creativity bloom, had grown strangely dim and separate from his own reality. He was no longer drawn into the sight and fragrance and music as he moved along them; and now the vivid bruise left on his awareness by Herne ’s living death pressed painfully, acutely, against the walls of yielding glass that closed him in. Surrounded by the beating heart of the city he had come here to discover, he discovered instead that somehow the thing he had reached out for had slipped through his hands again. Like everything he had ever cared about, or counted on… His hand closed violently over the stem of a kinetic sculpture in the display stall he was passing; harsh notes clashed among its spines, leaping like cats. But the jangling isotonic music stopped at his skin, the cool metal stem swayed into another dimension. Or maybe he only imagined their unreality; but still it did not pass… Why? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong?

He let it go in disgust as the sculptor came indignantly to the door of his shop. He went on, realizing only now what alley he had come into: It was the Citron Alley, and ahead of him he could already see Fate

Ravenglass sitting as she always did with her trays and trimmings on her doorstep. The place he had come to once before for shelter, and been taken in without question or demand. The place that he could always come back to, a haven of calm and creation in a universe of indifference and broken parts.

He saw that Fate was not alone, saw her visitor rise from the step in a cloud of midnight-blue veils embroidered with rainbows. He recognized her friend Tiewe — by the veils, he had never seen anything more of her than her ebony hands. He heard the sweet song of her hidden necklace of bells. He had asked Fate why she never showed herself, thinking that she must be disfigured; but Fate had said that it was a custom of her homeworld. He had seen only one or two others like her since, carefully protected by chaperones. Tiewe was uneasy in the presence of men, and he felt a jealous gratification as he realized that she was leaving because she had seen him. Fate had many friends — but there were none who seemed to be anything more than friends to her. He had wondered from time to time about her celiacy.

As Tiewe moved away, trailing music, Fate’s face turned to his approach: half a smile, half a frown of concentration. “Sparks — is that you?” Malkin the cat meowed affirmation from his crouching spot in her doorway.

“Yes. Hello, Fate.” Sparks stopped in front of her, suddenly uncertain.

“Well, what a nice surprise. Sit down, don’t be a stranger. You’ve been too much of a stranger these past months.”

He grimaced his guilt as he sat down, carefully, among the trays on the stoop. “I know. I’m sorry, I—”

“No, no, don’t apologize.” She waved her hands, absolving him goodnaturedly. “After all, how often have I come to the palace to visit you?”

He laughed. “Never.”

“Then I should be grateful you come here at all.” She felt for the mask she had laid down. “Tell me gossip about the court — what they wear, how they play, what marvelous inconsequentialities they brood over. I need some cheering up. Tiewe is inspired with a needle and floss, but such a sad person…” She looked away, frowning at nothing, reached out abruptly for a tray of beads and upset it. “Damn!” Malkin leaped up from the doorway and disappeared into the shop.

“Here, let me—” Sparks leaned out, barely catching a cascade of shimmering green as it poured over the step’s edge. He righted the tray and refilled it patiently, soothed by the mindlessness of the task. “There.” He handed her three beads at a time, falling back gratefully into the habits and the comfortable feel of his days with her.

“See how I’ve missed you.” She smiled at the beads dropped into her palm. “But not just for your patient hands — for your lilting Summer songs and the freshness of your wonder.”

Sparks let his fingers dig into his knees, said nothing.

“Will you stay and play for me awhile? It’s been too long between songs in this alley.”

“I—” He swallowed the stone in his throat. “I didn’t bring my flute.”

“No?” More incredulous than if he’d told her he wasn’t wearing clothes. “Why not?”

“I — don’t feel like playing, lately.”

She sat leaning forward over the mask form, waiting for something more.

“I’ve been too busy,” defensively.

“I thought that was what you did for the Queen — played your music.”

“Not any more. I do… uh, other things, now.” He shifted on the hard surface of the step. “Other… things.”

She nodded; he had forgotten how disconcerting the gaze of her third eye was. “Like gambling and drinking too much wine at the Parallax View.” It was a statement of fact.

“How’d you know — where I’ve been?” not quite willing to admit the rest of it.

“I can smell you. Their incense is imported from D’doille. Every place has its own identity, and so does every drug. And your voice is just a little slurred.”

“Tell me if I won or lost.”

“You won. If you’d lost you wouldn’t sound so smug about it.”

He laughed, but it was not an easy laugh. “You’d make a good Blue.”

“No.” She shook her head, and searched a bead for its hole with her needle, “To become a Blue a person needs a certain sense of moral superiority; and I refuse to pass judgment on my fellow sinners Ah—” as the bead slipped into place. “Some green feathers, please.”

“I know you don’t.” He passed feathers to her.

“And is that why you’ve come here today?” She dipped her fingers in glue and dabbed the feather stems. “As long as you quit the tables while you’re ahead, the Queen can’t object to how you spend your free time and money, can she?”

“She wants me to gamble. She gives me the money.” The words came out inexorably; he could feel the forbidden secret rise inside him, knowing that it was only a matter of time.

“She does? Are you that good?” Fate said it as though she doubted it.

“No. I do it to learn things, about how the off worlders think, what their plans are, so I can tell her…”

“I thought that’s what she has Starbuck for.”

“It is.” The invisible wall of his anomie seemed to close them into a place of utter silence, and his voice that should have been proud barely carried across it: “I am Starbuck.”

The small sigh of her indrawn breath was all the answer she made, at first. “I heard that there was a new Starbuck. Is this true, Sparks? You, a Summer, a—” A boy, but she didn’t say it.

“Half Summer.” He nodded. “Yeah. It’s true.”

“How? Why?” Her hands lay motionless over the mask’s gaping mouth.

“Because she’s so like Moon. And Moon is gone.” Arienrhod was the only thing that had not changed for him. the only thing whole and real, more real to him than his own flesh. “She knew about Moon, knew what she meant to me. She’s the only one who could understand…” The wounded words crept out, to tell her what (but not all) had passed between Arienrhod and himself after the news of Moon’s kidnapping reached them. “…So I had to challenge Starbuck; because I love her. And she let me challenge him, because she loves me. And I won.”

“How did you manage to kill a man like that?”

“I killed him with my flute… in the Hall of the Winds.” Only he didn’t die.

“And you haven’t played it since.” Fate shook her head, her thick braid rolled on her shoulder. “Tell me — has it been v.orth it?”

“Yes!” He flinched back in surprise from his own voice.

“Why did I think I heard ‘no?”“

His fingers tightened over a tray of beads, his muscles tightened; she didn’t see it. “I had to be Starbuck. I had to be the best, or I wouldn’t be — worthy of her. I have to be the one who counts. But I thought once I won the challenge, the rest would be easy; and it’s not. I thought it would be everything I ever wanted.”

“And it’s not.”

He shook his own head. “What the hell’s wrong with me, anyway! Everything always goes wrong for me… everything I do.”

“Then maybe you weren’t meant to do it. You could still go back to Summer; nothing’s stopping you.”

“Back to what?” He spat the words. “No. I can’t go back.” He had already asked it of himself, and been answered. “Nobody goes back, I know that now; we just go on and on, and there’s never any reason… I won’t leave Arienrhod; I can’t. But if I can’t be what she wants me to be, I’ll lose her anyway.” Herne knew; Herne knows everything…

“You’ll find a way to take the off worlders pulse. If you were smart enough to outwit Starbuck, you’re smart enough to take his place. You’ll get the feel of being him; you’ve already begun to.”

Something in the words, a sorrow, surprised him. He made a fist, wrapped it in his hand. “I’ve got to. I’ve got to believe it — before the Hunt comes again.”

“The Hunt that brings in the water of life? The mer hunt?”

“Yes.” He stared down through the pavement, through the heart of the city and the world, toward the spaces of the sea controlled by the Winter nobles. In his mind he could see the Hunt again: the necklace of barren rocks strewn over the open sea; the rhythm of the ocean swells singing through the ship timbers, the song of the world he had left behind. Remembering how he had searched the horizon with sudden longing… But if the Lady called him home, he could not hear Her voice any more. Perhaps because he had come to hunt mers; or perhaps because the Sea was only the sea, a body of water, a chemical solution.

He had watched the shore of the nearest island, where the dwindling colony of mers had lain along the black-pebbled beach… until the Hounds had driven them back into the sea, and into the waiting nets that would entangle and drown them. If they could not resurface twice in an hour to breathe, they died.

No Summer would kill a mer; they were the Lady’s children, born to Her after stars fell into the sea and became the islands, her consorts, the Land. It was said that the sailor who killed a mer by accident had no luck from that day on… the sailor who killed one intentionally was drowned by the rest of the crew. He had heard a hundred different stories of mers saving sailors gone overboard, even whole crews of a ship that had foundered; seen the mer that lived in the harbor at Gateway Island , its brindle back stitching a track across the supple cloth of the harbor surface as it guided ships safely through the treacherous Gateway Reef. He remembered the mers that had greeted them at the sibyl island. He had never heard of a mer doing anything evil, or anyone harm.

But for the good they could do humans — the ultimate good of eternal youth — they must die. He had always believed that the myth of mers being immortal, and granting immortality to humans, was only an old tale… until he had come to Carbuncle. And then he had met the Queen, who had reigned for one hundred and fifty years . and Arienrhod had placed the vial of viscous silver liquid into his hands, and he had let the spray fall into his throat, and realized that he too could stay young forever.

And so he had stood by, paying for his immortality with his presence, betraying all that he had ever been or believed in, while the Hounds netted and drowned their helpless victims somewhere below.

Then they had hauled the carcasses aboard the ship, and shoving him aside like the useless thing he was, they had squatted down with their knives to rip open the dappled throats. They drained away the precious mer blood while their tentacles reddened and the deck turned slippery under his feet.

And the red leaked back into the sea, and the mutilated bodies followed, their dark eyes still incredulous with death. Wasted… all wasted! He had turned away, sick at heart, long before the butchery was finished, trying to lose himself in the infinite vista of ocean and sky. But there was no escape from the splash of carcasses plunged back into the sea, too late, too late, or the savage lashing of the water as the scavengers gathered, defiling the green-blue purity with the ecstasy of their feeding. The Sea Mother in her pitiless wisdom wasted nothing, and cursed the wantonness of those who did…

“Sparks?” Fate’s voice called him back; the sheltering city closed around him, keeping him from the Lady’s curses, denying that they even existed at all.

“It was so ugly — it was all wasted’ I couldn’t—” He shook his head. “But I’m going to do it right this time. I can gut a dead mer, I’m not some superstitious Mother lover any more.” Remembering the disdain of the Hounds, which had been all too plain even without words; remembering Arienrhod’s soothing condescension as she set free the devils of doubt and self-disgust he carried back with him to Carbuncle. And then she had handed him the gilded vial of the water of life, without comment.

“No, I suppose you’re not, are you?” Again the regret. “Death is never an easy thing to face. That’s why we all long to taste the water of life. And we take it for ourselves because our own death is the hardest thing of all… We do what we think we have to.” She reached out, searched the air for his arm.

“Uh, not to interrupt—” A stranger’s voice came at them over his shoulder. “Got a delivery here.”

Sparks turned, looking up with Fate at the two figures standing in the alley, one drab, one inhuman—”You!”

The faceless face of the servo Pollux regarded him with unchanging nothingness, but Tor’s gray eyes registered along a scale from incomprehension to acute chagrin. “Dawntreader?” She shifted from foot to foot. “Hey, uh… Well, how’ve you been, kid? Looks like you’ve done all right for yourself,” raising an eyebrow. “I hardly recognized you.”

“No thanks to you if I have.”

“Yeah, well…” She glanced away self-consciously. “Hi, Fate. Got your new load of trims together finally. You want Pollux to stack them for you?”

Fate began to push her trays aside, clearing a path to the door. “I’ll show him where. I didn’t know you were a friend of Sparks ’s, Tor.”

“She isn’t.” Sparks stood up and stood aside as Pollux moved unconcernedly toward the step, towing the floating platform of containers. He watched Fate disappear inside, moving easily into familiar surroundings, and Pollux after her. But he blocked Tor as she tried to follow, with an arm across the doorway. “Uh-uh.” He backed her around and up against the building wall. “Let’s talk.

About what you did to me at the starlbaiting. About what you did with everything I owned, after you cleaned me out.”

Tor pressed back against the peeling paint, her eyes looking everywhere but at his face. “Listen, Sparks , I’m really sorry about that, you know? I really hated sticking you like that, I mean, you were so trusting… and so stupid… But I owed my life to Hardknot over at the Sea and Stars; I lost part of the casino’s daily take I was delivering up the line. If I didn’t pay it back shed’ve had it taken out of my hide, you know what I mean? It was either you or me, rfrankly. And I figured it’d teach you a lesson you needed, anyway.” She shrugged, beginning to recover her nerve.

“What did you do with my stuff?”

“Pawned it, what do you think?”

He laughed once. “How much did you get for it?” almost casualy.

“Birdseed, what do you th—” Her voice choked off as his arm came up and across her throat, pinning her against the wall again. “Ye gods!” She squirmed, trying to look away from something in his eyes. “What’s gotten into you, kid?”

“I learned your lesson.” He put more pressure against the arm, enjoying the expression on her face. “And now you owe me, Tor, and I coulu take it out of your hide right now.”

“You — you wouldn’t do that?” He felt her swallow in sudden fright; her hands came up, tightened over his arm. “What are you—”

“ Sparks , what are you doing!” Fate’s astonished voice.

He blinked as the haze of his wounded pride cleared, and let Tor go. “You aren’t worth the trouble.”

Tor sighed noisily, feeling her throat with her hands. “Just — just a misunderstanding, Fate. I’ll get you the money, kid. I mean, come payday—”

“Forget it.” He turned away, feeling his face hot with anger and embarrassment, wondering how much of it Fate could see. But something Tor had blurted in the diarrhea of her excuses caught in his mind, at the root of his bad humor, and he turned back again with calculated vengeance showing. “On the other hand — no, don’t forget about it. You owe me. and I’m going to tell you how you can pay me back. And there might even be something in it for you, if you play it right.” He pulled out his credit card, and held it up to her face.

Tor looked at it blankly, “Huh?” She reached for it, hesitant; he pulled it away.

“You’re a runner for the Sea and Stars, you said. You must know plenty about who controls what here in the Maze, you must hear a lot of interesting gossip around… ?”

“Oh, no — I don’t know anything, kid. I keep my ears closed.” She shook her head, shutting her eyes against temptation. “I just run a few errands on the side, for a little extra credit at the tables, that’s all.”

“Don’t give me that.” He frowned. “But maybe you don’t know enough to find out the things I want to know.” Inspiration struck him, blinding. “I know somebody who does, so it doesn’t matter! You can get the information out of him. and I can’t. You’re going to take care of it for me, take care of him. understand?”

“No.” She shook her head cguin. “What the hell have you gotten into, anyway? What’re you trying to get me into?”

“I work for somebody too. somebody — up the line. Somebody who wants to know what the opposition’s doing. And there’s a man named Herne who knows it all. only he’s down on his luck. You’re going to pick him up and help him oat; and he’s going to be so grateful he’s going to tell you anything you want to know.”

“Ha! I know a Herne, a big spender, and if he’s down on his luck now he can rot. Him and some of his buddies were drug ugly, and he tried to—” The word wouldn’t come out; her hands tightened over the seal of her coveralls. “I had bruises in places I wouldn’t show my own mother before Pollux pulled him of! me and changed his mind.” She glanced past Fate’s silent witnessing at the phlegmatic metal being in the doorway. “He may be a dumb machine, but he’s a damn sight more of a man than the ones who program him.”

Sparks grinned at the borrowed vision of Herne ’s discomfiture. “He really must have been drugged out of his mind to pick on a—”

Tor’s face reddened, her fists came up. “Listen. Summer, you don’t joke about a thing like that with a Winter woman!”

His grin fell away abruptly. “By “r — by the gods, that’s not what I meant! If it’s the same Herne . you’ve got nothing to worry about. He won’t give you any trouble this time. You’ll find him near the Parallax View. I’ll pay the expenses, and make it worth your while; just make sure that he never knows why you’re doing it. Don’t ever mention me.” He lowered his voice, turning away from Fate. “If I don’t get what I want, you’ll regret it, and even Pollux won’t be enough to keep you safe.”

Tor’s pallid face turned paler; he felt a brief surprise as he realized that she believed him. “Meet me back here at the same time in — one week.”

“Yeah, sure,” she said weakly, and oozed out from behind the barricade of his body. “Come on, Pollux, let’s go.”

“Whatever you say, Tor.” He stepped down off the porch and followed her away. She hit him spitefully on the chest, went on down the alley rubbing her hand.

“Shut up, you damn junk pile; I’m going to trade you in on a dog’

Fate was sitting again, decorating the naked, gaping mask form as though it were the only reality in the universe. She did not speak to him, or look up with any of her eyes.

Sparks felt his elation implode as he saw her withdrawing from him — as though she too were setting herself apart from him; or as though he had done it for her.

“You said I’d find a way to solve the problem. And I’ve done it.”

“Yes. I suppose you have.” She picked up a piece of satin cloth.

“I thought you didn’t make moral judgments.”

“I try not to. We all choose our own paths to hell. But some of the choices are easier to watch than others… I don’t like to watch my friends being hurt.”

“I just said that. I wouldn’t hurt her.” But he knew that just for a moment he had been inches from it. And that was the moment that Fate had seen.

“ ‘Today’s word is tomorrow’s deed,’ ” she quoted softly. “And I consider you my friend, too.”

“Still?”

“Yes, still.” She looked up at him, but without smiling. “Take care. Sparks. Life isn’t woven from a single thread, you know.”

“All right.” He shrugged, not really understanding. “I’ll see you again, Fate.”

She smiled at last, but it wasn’t the smile he had been waiting for. “

“In one week, at this same time.”

“Scuse me, buddy, have you seen a guy called H-Herne?” Tor broke off as the derelict’s face looked up at her, glaring with the use less hatred of a chained animal, and she realized that she had seen it before. Gaunt and bearded, it was still the same face: a dark off worlder face, a too-handsome face with eyes that were long lashed and beautiful and as cold as death. She stood for a moment staring down, pinched between the vise-fingers of the present and the past. This was Herne, the same Herne , whose eyes looking at her once had not seen a human being but a thing.

But there was no sign of recognition when he looked up at her now, no acknowledgment of the irony of their reunion. She backed up a step from the stink of him, his filthy coveralls, remembering the richness of his clothes the last time. Maybe the drugs had gotten the last laugh on him after all… She almost smiled. There were a half-empty bottle and a dented can with a handful of coins in it sitting on the box beside him. As she came along the alley she had seen a Blue lieutenant with incongruous pink freckles give him a citation for begging. But the truculent expectation faded from his face as her question registered; he inventoried her, and Pollux with her, in a quick, expressionless glance. “Maybe I know a Herne . Can’t seem to remember.” His hand closed significantly around the can. “Why?”

She dug into a pocket, tossed her loose change into the can. “I hear he’s down on his luck. Maybe I want to change it.”

“You?” He took a swig from the bottle, wiped his hand across his mouth. “Again, why?”

“That’s between him and me.” She folded her arms, almost beginning to enjoy the game. “So where is he?”

“I’m Herne ,” grudgingly.

“You?” She echoed his incredulity; laughed, going it one better. “Prove it.”

“You bitch!”

She leaped back from the memory of his brutal strength; but he only swayed forward on the box, would have fallen off it if Pollux had not put out a rigid hand to push him upright again. Tor stood staring, still beyond his reach, while she tried to assess what she had just seen. “So that’s what he meant. You’re a cripple!”

His mouth twisted. “Who? Who sent you here?”

“Nobody important.” She shrugged awkwardly. “I’m the one that wants to see you, Herne. I’m the one you better worry about.” She leaned against Pollux, ran a hand along the cool metal of his shoulder, smiling. “What do you figure you’d do to me, if our positions were reversed…?”

Startled doubt tightened the muscles in his cheek. He studied her again, and Pollux. For a moment she thought she saw recognition; or maybe it was only the fear of recognition. How many enemies did a man like that have in a place like this… how many real friends did he have in the whole universe? Herne slouched against the wall, resigned. “Do what you want, I don’t give a fuck.” He took another drink from the bottle.

“No.” She shook her head, remembering Dawntreader and her own troubles with something nearing empathy. “Just asking. So how’s business?” She peered into the can.

“Slow.” She felt him refusing to ask her her own business; a subtle tension filled the half of his body that still responded. Patrons from the Parallax View passed them by with averted eyes.

“You’ve come a long way down, since the last time we met.”

He didn’t remember. She was certain now, not sure if she was glad or sorry. “I’ve begged before; it never killed me.”

She shifted her weight against Pollux, looked him over slowly. “I think it might, this time.”

He glanced up, down again; didn’t answer.

“I hear you really knew your way around the Maze before your-uh, accident.” She wondered what or who had done this to him. “I hear you really know which way the power flows, off world and on. Well, that’s worth something to me.”

“Why?” sharply.

“What’s it to you?” She countered, not sure what reason was going to come off her tongue that wasn’t the truth. “You ask a lot of questions for a beggar.”

“I want to know why a Winter would want to know. There’s only one Winter—” He frowned.

“There’s thousands of us, and we’re just as interested in making it big as your are, foreigner.” She unfastened a pocket and pulled out her credit card, held it up in front of him as Sparks had held his up to her. “Maybe I don’t want to be a loader forever. Maybe I want to get my slice before all of you go off world and take the cake with you.” She felt a dim surprise that the words made sense to her.

He nodded, noncommittal, as though they even made sense to him. “You said it’s worth something. How much?” He squinted at the card face.

“I don’t have much… but it’s more than you’ve got. You even got a place to stay?”

A single shake of his greasy, unkempt head.

She swore. “That’s what I figured. You can stay at my place, for now. You need somebody around to feed you and clean up after you anyhow.”

“I need money, not somebody to wipe my goddamn nose! Don’t waste my time.” He reached over his shoulder and scratched, grimacing.

She watched him scratch. “It’s a wonder anybody gets close enough to put anything in that,” she gestured at the can. “What are you going to do when your clothes crawl right off your back some night?”

“You want to take ‘em off tonight, instead, sweetheart?” He leered.

Her mouth thinned; she forced it back into a smile. “You’re not my type, cripple. Pollux here does all my dirty work for me. He’s used to dragging around dead weights.”

“Whatever you say, Tor,” Pollux droned benignly. There was an indefinable suggestion of approval in the toneless voice. She stood away from him again, a little uneasily. Sometimes it was hard to remember that he was nothing but a predictably programmed loading device.

“You can have food and shelter as long as you’re worth it to me, Herne. Take it or leave it.” Take it or leave it, you bastard. I’m screwed either way.

“I can’t keep up with what’s happening unless I get to circulate. I need money for that, I need a way to—”

“You’ll get what you need — as long as I do.” As long as Dawn treader keeps his bargain with us.

He leaned back, with a smile that was something ugly on his handsome face. “Then you’ve got yourself an advisor, sweetheart.” He stretched his arms, carefully.

“I’ve got myself a big pain in the ass.” She picked up his battered can and emptied the coins out into her hand. “All right, Polly, cart him home.”