Read Online The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge - Free Book Online Page B

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