“Holy Mother! BZ—” She took a deep breath, clenching her hands. “You lie too well.”

His mouth quirked. “So much for Good Blue Gundhalinu.” He reached up and took off his borrowed helmet, patted it almost reverently. “Nobody understands that it doesn’t fit any more.” His voice turned harsh with self-recrimination. He bent over and set the helmet down on the pavement.

“BZ, no one needs to know.” She pulled at his arm with sudden understanding. “Can you say I slipped away in the crowd?”

He straightened up, his mouth like a knife cut, his eyes like cinders; and she saw that this was not the catalyst, but only the precipitate of his change. “The Commander told me what she knows about your cousin. We can’t get at him in the palace, but she said he visits a woman named Ravenglass sometimes, in the Citron Alley. That’s as good a starting place as any.” He stood away from her, and away from himself, retreating onto safe ground. “I guess we can go as we are; nobody will look at us twice in this mob.” He frowned abruptly, looking at her. “Braid your hair. It’s too much like — it’s too obvious.”

She obeyed, not understanding.

“Hold on to me, and whatever you do, don’t get separated in this crowd. We’ve got half a city to go, and it’s all uphill.” He put out his good hand; she clasped it tightly in her own.

They made their way up the Street, assaulted by the appalling intensity of Carbuncle’s high spirits. The Winters celebrated with a kind of uninhibited desperation, because it was the last Festival they would ever know; the Summers celebrated the coming of the Change that would set their world right. The sight of kleeskin boots and slickers, the weather-burned faces of the countless islanders who had made this pilgrimage, filled Moon’s eyes and clogged her throat with longing. She found herself searching the faces for one she knew, always disappointed — until she glimpsed a red head bobbing, a youth in a slicker moving away. She struggled to break Gundhalinu’s grip, but he would not let her go. Shaking his head, he towed her up the Street, until she realized for herself that there were half a hundred redheaded Summers adrift in this sea of faces.

Vendors cried their wares, people danced in human chains, performers and musicians climbed boxes and stairs to win the fickle worship of the passing crowd. It was the middle of the night, but no one seemed to know it from the middle of the day — Moon the least among them. The Prime Minister had arrived, and from now until the night of masks the revels would only grow wilder.

Offworlder storekeepers sold the last of their stock for near nothing, or gave it away, piled clothes and food and unrecognizable exotica in their doorways, TAKE IT AWAY. Winters wrapped in yards of family totem-creatures paraded along the street-center, alight with hologrammic cold fire. Moon yelped as a firecracker I burst beside her, wrote her name in the air with an incandescent I I sparkler she found unexpectedly in her hand. Fistfights and worse fights broke out along the alleys as the electric tensions that lay be I neath this Festival’s melting valences exploded in sudden, petty violence. Moon had to struggle to keep her own hold on Gundhalinu as ‘ a fight broke out beside them and his instincts started him toward it. But a regulation Blue in a shining helmet had claimed it for his own, I and Gundhalinu changed direction again with wrenching urgency. v As they went on up the Street, Moon felt the crowd spirit infect f her with giddy optimism, pummeling her with the absolute awareness that she was here at last — this was the city, this was Carbuncle, and it was a place of unimaginable delight. She had come in time, she had come in the time of Change, when probabilities broke down and anything became possible. She had come to find Sparks, to change the Change, and she would.

I But more and more she found herself leading Gundhalhiu, pulling him against the current of humanity, his own senses and endurance failing him as hers heightened. She looked back at his sweating face, falling from the heights as she heard him cough and remembered that he had thrown away rest and treatment to help her. But he shook his head as she slowed, pushed her on again, “Almost there.”

They reached the Citron Alley at last. Moon found a store that was still open, asked the shop man eagerly for Fate Ravenglass. He looked at her face with peculiar surprise; she drew the neck of her tunic together over her tattoo. “Fate’s right next door, little lady-but you won’t find her in. She’s seeing to her masks, all around the city. Come back tomorrow, maybe you’ll have better luck.”

She has to be in! How can she be gone—? Moon nodded, speechless with disappointment.

Gundhalinu leaned against the peeling building wall. “Do you-have anything for a cough?”

The shop man shrugged. “Not much now. An amulet for good health.”

Gundhalinu gave a grunt of disgust and pushed away from the wall. “Come on, let’s ask around the hells.”

“No.” Moon shook her head, caught his arm, stopping him. “We’ll — we’ll find somewhere to sleep first. And come back here tomorrow.”

He hesitated. “You’re sure?”

She nodded, lying, but knowing that she would be utterly lost here in the city, if she lost him now.

They found refuge at last with his former landlady: a pillowed, mothering woman who took pity on him, once she believed that he was more than a ghost. She put them in the rooms that belonged to her grown son. “I know you won’t steal anything, Inspector Gundhalinu!”

Gundhalinu grimaced wryly as the door clicked shut, granting them privacy at last. “She doesn’t seem to care whether I brought you here for immoral purposes.”

Moon bent her head. “What does that mean?” blankly.

His smile grew wryer. “Nothing, I suppose, in this town. Gods, I want to see hot, running water again! I want to feel clean again.” He turned away and went into the bathroom; after a moment she heard water running.

Moon ate her share of the fisherman’s-pie they had panhandled on the street, sitting by the window with her back to the room’s self conscious schizophrenia — a room like all of Winter, caught between the Sea and the stars. The rooms were on the second floor, and she looked down on the Festival from above, watching humanity course like blood through the arteries of the city. So many… there were so many.

Cut off from the life support of its artificial vitality, she felt her endurance break down again, lost her confidence that she would ever find that one face in the thousands. The sibyl machinery had brought her to Carbuncle; but what did it expect of her now? Aspundh had not been able to tell her anything about the way in which it acted; only that it was the most unpredictable and least understood of the things a sibyl might experience. She had believed that it guided her; but now that she had come to the city there was no blinding revelation to help her: Had it abandoned her, forgotten her, left her to count grains of sand on the endless shore? How would she find Sparks without its help?

And what if she did find him? What had he become — a coldblooded killer, doing the dirty work of Winter’s Queen, even sharing her bed? What would she say to him if she found him; what could he say to her? He had rejected her twice already, on Neith, and on that hideous shore… how often did he have to tell her that she was no longer his love? Had she really gone through so much, just to hear him say it to her face? Her hand rose to her cheek. Why can’t I let go? Why can’t I admit it?

The curtain at the bathroom doorway pushed back and Gundhalinu came out, clean and freshly shaven, but modestly redressed in the same filthy clothes. He stretched out on the bed-sofa with a sigh, as though it had taken the last bit of his strength. Moon shut herself into the tiny washroom in turn, to hide from him the doubts that she could not speak and could not disguise. She showered; the steaming water soothed her crippling tension, but it could not wash her guilt away.