The Snow Queen Read online

  He began to feel as though he had been walking forever along the Street, that he had only been going in circles. Every alley was like every other, the noise and the crowds and the stink of fumes clogged his senses to overload. Makeshift buildings cluttered the cracks of the city’s hive form, sand and plaster, sagging and peeling; aging scabrously, ungracefully, against the support of far more ancient buildings as eternal as the sea itself. Nothing happened singly here, but in twos and threes and dozens, until every impression became a beating. The crushing weight of the city bore down on the fragile ceiling above his head, on his own shoulders. The catacomb of walls converged on him, closed in around him, until ... Help me! He stumbled back against the unnatural warmth of a building side, cowered in a nest of cast-off wrappers, covering his eyes.

  “Hey, friend, you all right?” A hand nudged his side tentatively.

  He raised his head, opened his eyes, blinked them clear. A sturdy woman in laborer’s coveralls stood beside him, shaking her head. “No, you don’t look all right to me. You look a little green, in fact. Are you land sick sailor?”

  Sparks grinned feebly, feeling the green go red over his face. “I guess so,” grateful that his voice didn’t shake. “I guess that’s what it was.”

  The woman bent her head with a faint frown. “You a Summer?”

  Sparks shrank back against the wall. “How’d you know that?”

  But the woman only shrugged. “Your accent. And nobody but a Summer would dress up in greasy hides. Fresh from the fish farms, huh?”

  He looked down at his slicker, suddenly embarrassed by it. “Yeah.”

  “Well, that’s all right. Don’t let the big city beat you down, kid; you’ll learn. Won’t he, Polly?”

  “Whatever you say, Tor.”

  Sparks leaned forward, peering past her as he realized that they weren’t alone. Behind her stood one of the metal half-humans, its dull skin dimly reflecting light. He had no idea whether the thing was male or female. He realized that it had lowered a third leg, almost like a tail, on which it was now sitting, rigidly at ease. Where its face should have been, a clear window showed him the sensor panels set into its head.

  Tor produced a small flat bottle from a sealed pocket in her coveralls and un stoppered it. “Here. This’ll stiffen your spine.”

  He took the bottle, took a swig from it ... gasped as a cloying sweetness burst into flame in his mouth. He swallowed convulsively, eyes watering.

  Tor laughed. “You’re a trusting one!”

  Sparks took another mouthful deliberately, swallowed it without gagging before he said, “Not bad.” He handed the bottle back. She laughed again.

  “Is ... um ... is—” Sparks pushed himself away from the wall, looking at the metal being, trying to find a way to ask the question without offending.

  “Is that a man in a tin suit?” Tor grinned, pushing a finger of drab-colored hair behind her ear. He guessed that she was maybe half again as old as he was. “No, he just thinks he is. Don’t you, Pollux?”

  “Whatever you say, Tor.”

  “Is he ... uh—”

  “Alive? Not in the way we think of it. He’s a servo—an automaton, a robot, whatever you want to call it. A servo mechanical device. He doesn’t act, he only reacts.”

  Sparks realized that he was staring, glanced up, down, uncertain. “Doesn’t he—?”

  “Mind us talking about him? No, he doesn’t mind anything, he’s above all that. A regular saint. Aren’t you, Polly?”

  “Whatever you say, Tor.”

  She slung an arm over his shoulder, bumping against him familiarly. “I do his maintenance myself, and I can guarantee he’s got no missing parts. He’s got a short circuit somewhere, though—tends to limit his vocabulary. You may have noticed.”

  “Well, yeah ... kind of.” Sparks shifted from foot to foot, wondering if it was catching.

  Tor laughed. “At least he isn’t stuck on ‘screw you.” Say, where’d you get that, anyway?” She reached out abruptly toward the off world medal on his chest.

  “It was my—” Sparks pulled back, keeping it out of reach. “I-uh—got it from a trader.”

  Tor looked at him; he had the sudden feeling that his skull was made of glass. But she only let her hand drop. “Well, listen, Summer—why don’t you stick with me and Polly here, until you get used to the way we do things in Carbuncle? As a matter of fact, I just got off shift; we were heading down to check out a little subterranean action. Have a good time, a little excitement, maybe pick up a bet or two on the side ... Got any money on you?”

  Sparks nodded.

  “Well, this could be your chance to double it! Come on along with us .... I’ve got a feeling this’s going to be a real education for him, Pollux.”

  “Whatever you say, Tor.”

  Sparks followed them down the alleyway, toward the twilight fading beyond the storm walls. Somewhere along the way Tor stopped at an unobtrusive door in a paint-thick warehouse front, rapped twice, then three times, with her fist. The door slid open a crack, then wider, to let them into a cavernous darkness. Sparks hung back, went forward again at Tor’s impatient gesture as he heard the rising murmur of sound and realized they were not alone.

  “How much are you betting?” Tor called back at him through the noise from across the vast room. She was already passing a fistful of coins to a shrunken man drowned in a cloak. She stood on the edge of a crowd of watchers who kneeled, squatted, sat, their attention fixed on the small arena closed off in their midst. Sparks joined her, trying to see through the pall of throat-catching smoke that lay in the stifling air. “Betting on what?”

  “On the blood wart of course! Only a fool would bet on a star against a blood wart Come on, how much are you good for?” Her eyes flashed the eager electricity that he felt rising around him everywhere, like the tide.

  “Lot of people are fools, then.” The man in the cloak stretched his mouth, and jingled the markers in his fist.

  Tor made a rude noise. Behind her the crowd murmur crested and broke, the echoes flowed away into cracks and shadows; the room waited. Sparks saw two beings—one human, one not—step into the empty space carrying oblong boxes. The alien’s skin had an oily gleam, its arms were fingered with long tentacles. “Are they going to—?”

  “Them? Gods, no! Those are just the handlers. Come on, come on, place your bet!” Tor pulled his arm.

  He rummaged in his sack of belongings, fished out two coins. “Well, here’s—uh, twenty.”

  “Twenty! Is that all you’ve got?” Tor looked crestfallen.

  “That’s all I’m betting.” He held them out.

  The shrunken man took his coins without comment, and flowed away into the crowd.

  “Hey, this isn’t illegal or anything, is it?” Sparks hesitated.

  “Sure is .... Clear us a path through these highborns, Pollux. We want a front-row seat for the last of the big spenders here.”

  “Whatever you say, Tor.” Pollux pressed forward with single minded purpose. Sparks heard curses and sudden yelps of pain marking his progress through the crowd.

  “But don’t worry, Summer, it’s not the death sport that’s illegal.” Tor pulled; Sparks found himself somehow halfway to the ring already. “It’s just the importation of restricted beasts.”

  “Oh. Sorry—” as he stepped on a gem stoned hand. About half of the crowd seemed to be laborers or sailors, but the other half glittered with jewels in the dim light, and some of them had skin the color of earth, or hair like clouds. He wondered whether they had stained themselves on purpose. Tor jerked him down at ringside; he folded his long legs under. Beside him Pollux towered back on his support leg; there were useless shouts of “down in front.” Tor pulled out her flask and drank, handed it to Sparks. “Finish it off.”

  The changing flavor of the smoke was already weaving a soft cocoon around his head, separating him from himself and everyone else. He put the bottle to his mouth and drank recklessly; there was plenty to finish
. His throat hurt, making him cough.

  Tor patted his knee. “That puts you in the mood, doesn’t it?”

  He grinned. “For anything,” hoarsely.

  She took her hand away. “Later, later.”

  Gulping, Sparks turned back with her to look out over the low partition; the movement made him giddy, like the sudden drop of a sea swell. The potential energy of the place was singing in him now, and the crowd’s long sigh of indrawn breath was his, as the handlers threw open their cases and leaped clear.

  If the whip-fingered alien in the arena had stunned his eyes (al though suddenly nothing surprised him), it had been no more than a promise. Now, over the rim of the container in front of him spilled a mass of lashing, fleshy tentacles; groping, slipping downward, drawing after them a flaccid pouch of body mottled like a bruise. “The blood wart,” Tor whispered. It had no head that Sparks could see, unless its head and body were all one, but ragged pincers scissored among the tentacles. He heard them click in the waiting silence. Abrupt movement at the other end of the square pulled his eyes away—“The starl,” Tor muttered—to a liquid shadow of black on black: the dappled hide of a sinuous creature as long as his forearm. He caught the spear of light from a bared tusk as the starl whined far back in its throat. All light was centered on the square now, and every eye. The starl circled the blood wart oblivious to the crowd, still keening far back in its throat. The blood wart tentacles lashed the air but it made no sound—even when the starl struck, ripping a flap of skin from its heaving pouch-body. Its tentacles whipped frantically, caught and wrapped the start’s narrow head. “Poison,” Tor hissed gleefully. The starl began to scream, and its scream was lost in the hungry roar of the crowd.

  Sparks leaned forward, drawn like a wire, knowing a dim surprise as the cry of protest he had expected came out of his throat as a hunting cry. The starl pulled free, snapping and ripping in a frenzy of pain at the blood wart tentacles and its soft, flabby body. The blood wart floundered, its oozing tentacles flailed again ... and exulting in his own lost innocence, Sparks threw open his heightened senses to take in the ballet of death.

  An eternity later, but all too soon, the starl lay with sides heaving as the blood wart wrapped it in strands of broken tentacle and closed in for the kill. Sparks saw the whiteness of the start’s wild eye, the white-and-red-flecked straining mouth; heard its strangled moan in the sudden silence as the pincers found its throat. Blood spurted; drops spattered his slicker and his sweating face.

  He jerked back, rubbing his face, stared at his hand freshly bloodied. And suddenly he had no need to look back again, no need to watch the flattened bladder fill and flush red or the redness seep out through its torn sides as the blood wart drained its victim ... Suddenly he had no voice either, to join the clamoring dirge of curses and cheers. He turned his face away, but there was no escape from the gleaming insanity of the crowd. “Tor, I—”

  And turning, he discovered that she was gone, that Pollux was gone ... and that the sack filled with his belongings had gone with them.

  * * *

  “I’m telling you, sonny, we got no city work available for a Summer—you can’t handle machinery, you don’t know the social codes; you got no experience.” The posting clerk looked at Sparks over the sill of the tiny office window the way he might have looked at a backward child.

  “Well, how can I get experience if no one’ll hire me?” Sparks raised his voice, frowned as it beat back on his aching head.

  “Good question.” The clerk gnawed on a fingernail.

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Life ain’t fair, sonny. If you want work here you’ll have to change your clan affiliation.”

  “Like hell I will!”

  “Then go back where you belong with your stinking fish skins, and quit wasting the time of real people!” The man behind him in the line pushed him aside; the gloved hand was studded with metal.

  Sparks turned back, saw the gloved hand make a fist twice the size of his own. He turned away again, away through the laughter, and went out of the hiring hall into the street. A new day brightened at the alley’s end beyond the shuttered walls, after a night when storm clouds had blackened the stars but darkness had never fallen here in the streets of the city. There had been no way to hide his rage or his humiliation, or the misery of the vomiting that had purged what he had drunk, and seen, and done. He had slept like a corpse on a pile of crates afterward, and dreamed that Moon stood looking down on him, knowing everything, with pity in her agate-colored eyes ... pity! Sparks pressed a hand over his own aching eyes to pinch her face away.

  Down the long slope of the street lay the harbor beneath the city, and the trader’s small boat waiting to take him home. His stomach twisted with fury and sick hunger. In not even a day he had thrown away everything—his belongings, his ideals, his self-respect. Now he would creep home to the islands, having lost his dream, and live with Moon’s pity for the rest of his life. His mouth pulled back. Or he could admit that he had learned the real lesson: that Carbuncle had only stripped him naked of his illusions, taught him that he had nothing, he was nothing ... and that he was the only one in this mother lorn city who cared. Whether that ever changed or not was in his hands only.

  His empty hands ... He moved them helplessly, brushed the pouch hanging at his belt, the one thing that Tor and Carbuncle had left him: his flute. He drew it out gently, possessively, put it to his lips as he began to walk; letting melodies from the time he had lost ease the loss of everything else.

  He moved aimlessly up the street, shutting out the restless motion that never ceased even through the night. Strangers looked at him, now that he had become oblivious to them. He did not notice, until at last something rang on the pavement in front of him. He stopped, looking down. A coin lay at his feet. He bent slowly, picked it up, flexed his fingers over it in wonder.

  “You’d make more if you worked the Maze, you know. The listeners there have more to throw away ... and more appreciation for an artist.”

  Sparks glanced up, startled; saw a woman with dark, plaited hair and a band across her forehead standing before him. The crowd separated and flowed around them; he had the feeling that they stood together on an island. The woman was his Aunt Lelark’s age, or older by some years, wearing a long dress of worn velvet and bands of feather necklace. She held a cane with a tip that glowed like a brand. The tip rose along his body to his face; she smiled. She was not looking at him. There was a deadness around her eyes, something missing, as though a light had been snuffed out.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  Blind. “Sparks ... Dawntreader,” he said, suddenly not sure about where to look. He looked at her cane.

  She seemed to be waiting.

  “Summer.” He finished it almost defiantly.

  “Ah. I thought so.” She nodded. “Nothing I hear in Carbuncle is ever so wild or wistful. Take my advice, Sparks Dawntreader Summer. Move uptown.” She reached into the beaded pouch hanging from her shoulder and held out a handful of torus coins. “Good luck to you in the city.”

  “Thanks.” He reached out to meet her hand, took the coins hesitantly.

  She nodded, lowering her cane as she started past him. She paused. “Come to my shop sometime, in the Citron Alley. Ask for the mask maker anyone can tell you where it is.”

  He nodded too; remembered, and said quickly, “Uh—sure. Maybe I will.” He watched her go.

  And then he moved uptown. Into the Maze, where the building fronts were painted with lights, in strings and whorls and rainbowed pinwheels; where the colors, the shapes, the costumes that peered from windows or moved on bodies along the street never repeated twice; where the flash of signs and the cries of hucksters promised heaven and hell and every gradation of degradation in between. Finding a half-quiet street corner under fluttering flowered banners, he stood and played for hours to a jingling harmony provided by the coins of passersby—not as many as he had hoped, but better than the nothing he had
started with.

  At last the fragrance of a hundred separate spices and herbs pulled him away, to spend a few of his coins filling his empty stomach with a feast of strange delights. Afterward he shed his slicker for a shirt of red silk, chains of glass and copper beads; the shopkeeper took the rest of his money. But as he started back through the evening alleys to his corner, to try to earn keep for the night, he sang a silent prayer of thanks to the Lady for the gift of his music that She had sent with him into Carbuncle. With his music he could survive, while he learned the rules of his new life Four off worlders in spacer coveralls without insignia, who had walked the alley behind him, closed around him abruptly and dragged him into the dark crack between two buildings.

  “What do you want—?” He twisted his head, freed his mouth from a hand that reeked of machine lubricant. Blinking frantically in the dim light, he saw the three others, not sure he really saw white teeth bared in the grin of a closing hunt, but sure of the gunmetal gleam of something deadly held by one, and the restraining cuffs, more hands reaching out for him as the crushing grip tightened across his throat.

  He threw back his head and felt it impact in the face of the man behind him, heard a grunt of pain, then used his elbow and his heavy boots. The man fell back, cursing unintelligibly; and Sparks stumbled free, opened his mouth to shout for help.

  But the shadow with the gunmetal gleam used his weapon first. The shout went out of Sparks in a gasp as black lightning struck him. He fell forward on his face, a string-cut puppet, helpless to keep his head from cracking on the pavement. But there was no pain, only dull impact, and the dry rattle of a thousand synapse lines gone dead in a body that could not respond. A band of steel was tightening around his throat, he heard the ugly sound of his own strangling.

  A foot rolled him. The shadow men closed over him, looking down; he saw their smiles clearly this time, as they saw the terror on his face.