She looked away from him, feeling her face pinch with an unnameable emotion. Do you? Then by all the gods, I hope you never find out!

35

“Lady’s Eyes!” The snow skimmer slewed to a halt.

Gundhalinu echoed the muffled curse of Moon’s exasperation silently. A new stretch of bare, stony ground blocked their path up the exposed face of another hillside. He had never seen, or expected to see, the land beyond the spaceport when it was not covered by meters of drifted snow. But Tiamat had reached orbital summer again while he had been held prisoner; and it was entering the high summer of the Change as well — when the Twins reached the periapsis of their path around the Black Gate. The Gate’s gravitational influence was increasing the solar activity of the twin suns; slowly thawing this frozen world, gradually turning the equatorial regions insufferably hot.

In the past few days, as they made their way down out of the black and silver wilderness where the bandits camped, the weather had smiled on them. The vast, shining solitude had stretched a pristine carpet below the glacier-bitten volcanic peaks, beneath the flawless purity of the sky, day after day. And with every passing day, although they journeyed northward, the temperature edged up and up toward freezing, and passed it at the suns’ zenith. Their gratitude had turned to curses of frustration as more and more patches of naked stone and tundra blocked the snow skimmer way.

He crawled out from under the pile of skins and blankets, trudged to the front of the sledge and leaned down to lift the runners and the fragile underside clear. Moon threw her weight against the rear of it, and together they dragged it up the endless slope. He watched the sun-cast giants that mimicked their stumbling progress, trying to ignore the bands of red-hot metal tightening in his chest — and the awareness that his weakness forced a girl to do all the heavy work; the awareness that she did it quite adequately alone, and without complaint.

They reached the crest of the hill, the snowy downslope, at last. He let out the breath he had been holding, and the spasm of deep coughing he had held in with it. He felt Moon come up beside him, pulling him back to his seat on the sledge.

“How much longer, BZ?” She frowned, pulling furs up under his chin again like a fretful nanny. She had no herbal medicines now, and he knew that she knew the cough was worse again.

He smiled briefly, shook his head. “Soon. Maybe another day, we’ll be there.” The star port Salvation. Heaven. He didn’t admit that he couldn’t remember now whether it had been five or six days that they had been journeying. He never let himself believe that it had been too long, or that his calculations might be wrong.

“I think we should make camp down there.” Moon pointed; he saw her shiver as an ice-barbed lash of wind struck the spine of the hill. “The suns are setting already.” She looked out across the infinity of hills falling toward the distant sea, looked up into the deepening indigo sky. “It’s getting too cold for you to travel.” He heard her sudden indrawn breath, louder than the wind’s sigh. “BZ!”

He looked up, following her hand, not knowing what he expected, but only that it was not what he found.

Out of the blue-black zenith stars were falling. But not the broken-glass stars of this winter world — these were the stars that shone in dreams, stars that a man would die for, the stars of empire, grandeur, glory… the impossible made real.

“What — what are they?” He heard in Moon’s voice the awe and the dread of countless natives on seven separate worlds down through a millennium, as they witnessed what she was witnessing now.

The five starships grew against the sky with every heartbeat, the harmonies of color and intensity shifting and reordering as parallaxes changed, building complexity on complexity like light poured through prisms of flowing water. He watched the five ships slowly realigning, moving into a cross pattern; saw the lightning-play of their cold fire spreading, coalescing, into one immense star, the sign of the Hegemony. The colors blazed with a music he could almost hear, filling the sky with all the hues, all the impossible permutations of an aurora-filled night sky on his homeworld…

“The Prime Minister? Is it the Prime Minister?” Moon’s words came to him muffled by her protective face mask, and her upraised hand.

He swallowed, and swallowed again, unable to answer.

“They’re ships!” She went on answering her own questions. “They’re only ships. How can they be real, and be so beautiful?”

“They’re Kharemoughi.” He might have said “the Empire”; he might have said “gods.” He did not say that they were only coin ships wrapped in cloaks of hologrammic projection to astound a subject world. He looked back at her, glory blind, and took her smile at face value.

“Are they?” She touched his cheek, turned back to the sky as the formation split apart again, the flames died away and embers fell to earth… behind the hills, scarcely two ridges away. “Look!” She shook off her wonder. “That must be the star port BZ, we’re almost there. We could reach it tonight.” Frost clouds feathered around her cheeks. “We’re on time!”

“Yes.” He took a deep breath. “Plenty of time. Thank the gods.”

He watched the last of the ships snuff out behind the snowy hills. Tonight… “There’s no need to push on tonight. One more day won’t matter. Tomorrow is soon enough.”

She glanced at him, surprised. “It’s only a couple of hours. It’s as easy as if I set up camp.”

He shrugged, still looking into the distance. “Maybe so.” He began to cough, smothered it behind his hand.

She put a mitten to his forehead, as though she were feeling for a fever. “The sooner you see a healer — a medic — the better,” firmly.

“Yes, Nanny.”

She poked him. He grinned, eagerness coming back into him, as she started the power unit. The snow skimmer slipped quietly over the ridge and into the valley, blotting out even the afterglow of the ships’ landing. Hours… only hours, until he would rejoin the living, regain the life he had almost lost forever, the only life worth living. Gods, yes, he wanted to reach the star port tonight!

Then why had he said “tomorrow” to her? Tomorrow is soon enough. He moved his hands under the blankets, shifting Blodwed’s caged pets that shared the warmth of his body — only two of them now. The green bird had died, three or four nights ago. In the morning they had made a small grave in the crusted snow. There but for you go I… He had spoken those words aloud to her, kneeling in the snow beneath the silent witness of heaven.

And he had spoken them with his eyes at every new dawn’s light, when he woke to find himself a free man, and see her beside him in the bubble tent — close enough to touch, but never touching, since that one night. He had watched her unguarded sleep, the dreams that moved across her face… the fair face and the snowy tumbled hair, the wild, unnatural paleness of her, more familiar to him now than his own darkness, suddenly grown beautiful and right. In his mind he had held her again, kissed her lips to wake her to the day… and in this timeless wilderness he was free in a way that he had never been free, from his past and his future, the rigid codes that defined his existence. Here he drifted formlessly, an embryo, and he felt no shame at his yearning for a barbarian girl with eyes like mist and agate.

And he had seen her wake from troubled dreams to his imaginary kiss, lie looking back at him with a drowsy smile. He had seen the awareness fill her eyes, knew the hesitant answering desire that filled her, too. But only his eyes had asked, and only her eyes had answered him. And now there would never be one more morning…