The darkness magnified his separate breaths, and his silence.
Arienrhod held her own. At last she detected the faint inclination of his head, and he said, “Yes. I’ll handle the matter, for the agreed payment. I’ll enjoy thinking of you ruling Tiamat after we’re gone, without the water of life to keep you young. Ruling in Carbuncle after we’re gone… it won’t be the same place without us, you know. It really won’t be the same.” His laughter tore like rubber.
Arienrhod stood up without further comment, and only after her back was to him and she was crossing the room to the door did she allow herself to frown.
“Where the hell are you going?”
Tor started guility as the voice caught her from behind in the corridor — Herne ’s voice; she was just past the room she had arranged for him to use here in the casino. Most of the other rooms along this corridor were used by prostitutes and their clients. But a new day was dawning somewhere in the outer world, and the hall was empty; the casino was closed for a brief span of rest and recovery.
Tor turned back with deliberate slowness to study Herne . He leaned heavily against the door frame, his useless legs wrapped in the clumsy, powered exoskeleton that let him get around on his own after a fashion. A short, slashed robe thrown on carelessly over his head left him just short of indecent. She frowned. “I’ve got a heavy date. What’s it to you, grandmother?”
“Dressed like that?”
She glanced down at her coveralls; saw her face in the mirror of memory stripped of its painted persona — her own dreary, genuine self, tired of pretending to be someone she was not, glad just to see her own lank and mousy hair emerge from underneath the gold capped wig. “Why not?”
“Only you would ask a question like that.” He sneered his disgust, tugged at his robe. His eyes were bloodshot, his face heavy with fatigue, or drugs, or both.
“If I dressed to turn you on I wouldn’t get much return on the investment.” She watched his mouth thin; satisfied. Time had not made her like him. And it never will. She was bound for a meeting with Sparks Dawntreader, not a rendezvous with a lover; time had made her like him even less than Herne . It was hard to remember that he had ever been the frightened Summer kid shed found cowering in an alley. She had changed outwardly since that day, until sometimes she hardly recognized her own face; but she knew that when she threw off the trappings, she would always find herself. But she had watched the inner thing that had made Sparks Dawntreader himself slowly suffocated by something inhuman… “What are you standing around the hall like a hooker for, anyway, for gods’ sakes? You spy for me, not on me, remember? Sober up and get some sleep; how do you expect to do your job if you stay up all day?” She wished that she were safely asleep in her elegant rooms upstairs, and not starting out for a thankless confrontation at dawn.
“I can’t sleep.” He bent his head, rubbed his face on his arm against the doorjamb. “I can’t even sleep any more; it’s all a stinking—” He broke off, looked up at her abruptly, looking for something he didn’t find. His face hardened over again. “Get off my back!”
“Lay off the drugs, then.” She started on down the hall.
“What was she doing here last night?” His voice caught at her.
Tor stopped again, recognizing the emphasis, his recognition of the Source’s midnight caller who had passed this way, too. Arienrhod, the Snow Queen. The Queen had been muffled in a heavy cloak, like her bodyguard; but Tor was a Winter, and she knew her Queen. It surprised her that Herne would know her, too, or care what she was doing here. “She was here to see the Source. Your guess about what they were doing is as good as mine.”
He laughed unpleasantly. “I can guess what they weren’t doing.” He glanced away down the hall, back in the other direction. “It’s getting close to the final Festival; close to the end of everything, for Arienrhod. Maybe she’s not ready to give it all up to the Summers, after all.” He smiled, an iron smile, full of pointless amusement.
Tor stood still as the idea struck her that the Change was not an inevitability. “She has to. That’s the way it’s always been; otherwise there might be a — a war or something. We’ve always accepted that. When the Summers come…”
He made a derisive noise. “People like you accept the Change! People like Arienrhod make their own changes: Would you give up everything, after being Queen for one hundred and fifty years? If you could get hold of official records, I’ll lay odds you’d see every Snow Queen before her tried to keep Winter here forever. And they all failed.” The smile came back. “All of them.”
I “What do you know about it, foreigner?” Tor waved a hand, brushing oS the idea. “It’s not your world. She’s not your Queen.”
“It is now.” He looked up, but there was only ceiling above them. He turned away, dragging his legs inside their steel cages, turning his back on her. “And Arienrhod will be Queen of my world forever.”
23
Time is flowing backwards. Moon hung suspended where she had hung suspended before, in the cocoon surrounded by controls at the coin ship’s heart. Everything the same, just as it had been… even the thundering image of the Black Gate on the screen before them. As though her passage through the Gate had never been; as though she had never set foot on another world, never been initiated at its springs of knowledge under the guidance of a stranger, a sibyl who had no right to exist in her universe at all. As though she had never lost five years of her life in a single, fatal moment.
“Moon, dear.” Elsevier’s voice touched her hesitantly from above; gently urging, full of quiet tension. The invisible web of the cocoon had closed her in already until she could not look up at Elsevier’s face; it was becoming hard to breathe, or maybe it was simply her own tension closing around her. She shut her eyes, felt a tremor thread through the ship; sealing the inevitability of their destruction, unless she-She opened her eyes again, to the dreadful face of judgment.
But the Black Gate was not the face of Death — only an astronomical phenomenon, a hole in space punctured at the beginning of time, falling in and in on itself. The singularity at its heart lay now somewhere in another reality, in the endless day she imagined must be heaven for the dark angels of this night’s dying suns. But around that unknowable heart, the fabric of space turned inside out in the maelstrom of the black hole’s gravity well. Between the outer reality of the universe she knew and the inner one of the singularity lay a zone where infinity was attainable, where space and time changed polarity and it was possible to move between them unfettered by the laws of normal space-time. This strange limbo was riddled by wormholes, by the primordial shrapnel wounds of the universe’s explosive birth and countless separate corpses of dying stars. With the proper knowledge and the proper tools a starship could leap like thought from one corner of known space to another.
Even the starships of the Old Empire, traveling faster than the speed of light, had used this Gate, because they could not cross direct interstellar distances instantaneously. And now, when the nearest source of the rare element needed for those star drives lay in a solar system a thousand light-years from Kharemough, its ships could not cross them directly even in weeks or months. They would do so again only when the ship that Kharemough had sent to that system to bring it back returned, and brought the New Millennium with it.
Even with only a fraction of the black hole’s total radiation showing on the screen before her, she could catch no glimpse of what lay at its secret heart; because once light fell into that hole, it never came out again. The blinding glare she saw was an image frozen at the limit of this universe’s perception: All journeys of all things that had ever entered this Gate — ships, dust, lives — were suffused there into a red smear on the horizon of time, a scream of despair echoing all across the electromagnetic spectrum, echoing and reechoing through eternity.