“Yes, ma’am.” Their polished boots rang on the corridor leading to the Hall of the Winds. Gundhalinu looked aggrieved. He had been on Tiamat for a little less than a standard year, and had been her assistant for most of that time. She liked him, and thought he liked her; she felt that he was on his way to becoming a competent career officer. But his homevrorld was Kharemough, the world that dominated the Hegemony, and a world dominated by the technocracy that produced the Hegemony’s most sophisticated hardware. She suspected that Gundhalinu was a younger son from a family of some rank, forced into this career by rigid inheritance laws at home, and he was Tech through and through. Jerusha thought a little sadly that a hundred replays of the orientation tapes would never teach him any tolerance.
“Well,” she said more kindly, “I’ll tell you one man in a mask who probably fits all your prejudices, and mine too — and that’s Star buck. And he’s an off worlder whoever or whatever else he is.” She looked at the frescoes of chill Winter scenes along the entry hall, tried to wonder how many times they had been painted and repainted. But in her mind’s eye she already saw Starbuck standing at the Queen’s right hand, wearing a sneer under that damned executioner’s hood while he looked down on the hamstrung representatives of the Law.
“He wears a mask for the same reasons as any other thief or murderer,” Gundhalinu said sourly.
“True enough. Living proof that no world has a monopoly on regressive behavior… and that scum tends to rise to the top.” Jerusha slowed, hearing the sigh of a slumbering giant deep in the planet’s bowels. She took a deep breath of her own against the Trial by Air that was a part of the ritual in every visit to the palace, and shivered under her cloak with more than the growing chill of the air. She never got over the fear, just as she never got over her amazement at the thing that caused it: the place they called the Hall of the Winds.
She saw one of the nobility waiting for them at the brink of the abyss, glad that for once the Queen had seen fit not to keep them waiting. The less time she stood thinking about it, the less trouble she would have getting across. It might mean that Arienrhod was in a good mood — or simply that she was too preoccupied with other matters to indulge in petty harassments today. Jerusha was thoroughly informed about the spy system the Queen had had installed throughout the city, and particularly here in the palace. The Queen enjoyed setting up minor ordeals to demoralize her opposition… and it was obvious to Jerusha that she also enjoyed watching the victims sweat.
Jerusha recognized Kirard Set, an elder of the Wayaways family, one of the Queen’s favorites. He was rumored to have seen four visits of the Assembly; but his face, below the fashionable twist of turban, was still hardly more than a boy’s. “Elder.” Jerusha saluted him stiffly, painfully aware of the crow’s-feet starting at the corners of her own eyes; more aware of the moaning call of the abyss beyond her, like the hungry laughter of the unrepentant damned. Who would build a thing like this? She had wondered it every time she came to this place, wondered whether the crying of the wind was not really the voice of its creators, those lost ancestors who had dreamed and built this haunted city in the north. No one she knew knew what they had been, or done, here, before the collapse of the interstellar empire that made the present Hegemony seem insignificant.
If she had been anywhere else, she might have sought out a sibyl and tried to get an answer, obscure and unintelligible though it probably would have been. Even here on Tiamat, in the far islands the sibyls wandered like traveling occultists, thinking they spoke with the voice of the Sea Mother. But the wisdom was real, and still intact even here, though the Tiamatans had lost the truth behind it, just as they had lost the reason for Carbuncle. There were no sibyls in the city — by Hegemonic law, conveniently supported by the Winters’ disgust with anything remotely “primitive.” Calculated and highly successful Hegemonic propaganda kept them believing it was nothing more than a combination of superstitious fakery and disease-born madness, for the most part. Not even the Hegemony would dare to eliminate sibyls from an inhabited world… but it could keep them unavailable. Sibyls were the carriers of the Old Empire’s lost wisdom, meant to give the new civilizations that built on its ruins a key to unlock its buried secrets. And if there was any thing the Hegemony’s wealthy and powerful didn’t want, it was to see this world stand on its own feet and grow strong enough to deny them the water of life.
Jerusha remembered suddenly, vividly, the one sibyl she had ever seen in Carbuncle — ten years ago, only a short time after her arrival here at her first post. She had seen him because she had been sent to oversee his exile from the city, had gone with the jeering crowd as they led their frightened, protesting kinsman down to the docks and set him adrift in a boat. There had been a witch-catcher of iron studded with spikes around his neck; they had pushed him along at pole’s length, rightfully afraid of contamination.
Then, down the steep dropoff to the harbor, they had pushed him too roughly, and he had fallen. The spikes bit into his throat and the side of his face, laying them open. The sibyl’s blood that the crowd had been so afraid of spilling had welled and run like a necklace of jewels under his chin, patterning down his shirt (the shirt was a deep sky blue; she was struck by the beauty of the contrast). And stricken with fear like the rest, she had watched him sit moaning with his hands pressed against his throat, and done nothing to help him…
Gundhalinu touched her elbow hesitantly. She looked up, embarrassed, into the faintly scornful face of the Elder Wayaways. “Whenever you’re ready, Inspector.”
She nodded.
The elder lifted the small whistle suspended from a chain around his neck and stepped out onto the bridge. Jerusha followed with eyes looking fixedly ahead, knowing what she would see if she looked down, not needing to see it: the terrifying shaft that gave access for the servicing of the city’s self-sufficient operating plant, servicing that had never been needed as far as she knew, during the millennium that the Hegemony had known about it. There were enclosed elevator capsules that gave technicians safe access to its countless levels; there was also a column of air, rising up this shaft at the hollow core of Carbuncle’s spiral the way an updraft formed in an open chimney. Here was the only area of the city not entirely sealed off by storm walls; the bitter winds of the open sky ran wild through this space, sucking the breath out of the subterranean hollows. There was always a strong smell of the sea here high in the air, and moaning, as the wind probed the irregularities of cranny and protrusion in the shaft below.
There were also, suspended in the air like immense free-form mobiles, transparent panels of some resilient material that flowed and billowed like clouds, that created treacherous cross-currents and back flows in the relentless wind. And there was only one way across the hall to the upper levels of the palace: Here the corridor became a drawbridge vaulting the chasm like a band of light. It was wide enough to walk easily in silent air, but it was made deadly by the hungry sweep of the winds.
The Elder Wayaways sounded a note on his whistle and stepped forward confidently as the space around him grew calm. Jerusha followed, almost stepping on his heels with the need to include herself and Gundhalinu in the globe of quiet air. The elder continued to walk, at a calm even pace, sounding another note, and a third. Still the globe of peaceful air surrounded them; but behind her Jerusha heard Gundhalinu take some god’s name in vain as he lagged a little and the wind licked his back.