Her grandmother patted her hand firmly; she saw a determination to keep hope and belief foremost fill the deep-set gray eyes. “Well, child, he’s gone. We can only say a prayer that he finds his way home to us again. Now the Lady’s waiting for you, too. The sooner you go, the sooner you’ll come back to me!”
She took Moon’s arm and started along the pier. “At least that mother lorn old crackbrain won’t be around to see you off.” Moon glanced up, realizing with some relief that Daft Naimy had gone his way. Gran remembered herself and made the triad sign, “Poor soul that he is.”
Moon’s mouth twitched up briefly, made a firm line as she felt her strength come back. Sparks had gone to Carbuncle to spite her… damned if shed drift with the tide. She had her own destiny lying across the water, one shed waited half a lifetime for; the calling beauty of it filled her again. She began to walk faster, hurrying her grandmother along.
4
Sparks stood on the deck, pressed against the mast by the force of the frigid wind from behind him, listening to the ship’s engines strain against the heavy seas. Gazing straight ahead, he saw Carbuncle lying at the sea’s edge like the incredible fragment of a dream. They had been approaching it for an eternity across the white-flecked sea, as they had sailed north forever along the boundary of this endless island’s shores. He had watched the city grow from the size of a fingertip into something beyond the range of his comprehension. Now it seemed to spread like a stain across the sky, filling his awareness until there was nothing else in the world.
“Hey, there, Summer.” The trader’s voice broke open his reverie; a gloved hand cuffed his shoulder lightly. “Damned if I need another mast. If you can’t find anything useful to do on deck, get inside before you freeze.” Sparks heard the high laughter of a deckhand; turned to see the smile on the trader’s heavy face that took the smart out of the words.
He pulled back from the mast, felt the crackle of resistance as his gloves broke away from the ice film. “Sorry.” His breath rose up in a cloud, half blinding him. He was bundled in heavy clothes until he could barely bend his arms, but still the northern wind cut him to the bone. Carbuncle was protected from being totally ice locked only by the presence of a warm sea current following this western coastline. There was no feeling left in his face; he couldn’t tell whether his own smile still worked or not. “But by’r Lady, it’s all one piece! How could anyone even imagine a thing like that!”
“Your Lady had nothing to do with it, boy. And She’s had nothing to do with the people who live there, ever since. Always keep that in mind while you’re there.” The trader shook his head, looking at the city, and pressed his wind-chapped lips into a line. “No… nobody really knows how Carbuncle came to be. Or why. Not even the off worlders I think — not that they’d tell us, even if they did.”
“Why not?” Sparks glanced around.
The trader shrugged. “Why should they tell us their secrets? They come here to trade their machines for what we have. We wouldn’t want them if we knew how to make our own.”
“I guess not.” Sparks shrugged, flexing his fingers inside his mittens. The Winter trader and his crew ate, talked, and slept trade, as they sailed from island to island; it had worn thin very quickly. The only thing that had impressed him — until now — during this interminable voyage was the fact that they dealt as freely with Summers as with Winters, as though the differences between the two were unimportant. “Where are all the starships?”
“The what?” Laughter shook the trader. “Don’t — don’t tell me you were expecting a skyful? By all the gods! Did you think there was one for every star? And after all the tech stories you’ve wormed out of me over the years. You Summers really must be as thick headed as everyone claims!”
“No!” Sparks frowned, humiliation prickling his numb face. “I just — I just wanted to know where the star port was, that’s all.”
“Sure you did,” the trader wheezed. “It’s inland, and forbidden territory to us.” He sobered abruptly. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Sparks, going to Carbuncle? Are you sure you understand what you’re getting into?”
Sparks hesitated, glanced out over the water. Moon’s face at parting drove the distance out of focus; he heard her voice in the calling of seabirds, in the air. Death to love a sibyl. Cold pain lodged suddenly in his chest, like a dagger of ice. He shut his eyes, shivering; the voice, the vision were gone. “I know what I’m doing.”
The trader shrugged and turned away.
The trader’s ship nudged the floating pier where Sparks stood; a skater on the calm, dark water. It was dwarfed on every side by larger, taller, longer ships, dwarfed in turn by the expanse of the moorage like a mat of floating weed. And reducing it all to insignificance, Carbuncle itself, crouching like a great sheltering beast overhead. Pylons whose girth would swallow a house rose barnacled from the sea, a strange forest crowned by the city’s underbelly, trailing festoons of chain and pulley and incomprehensible appendages. The smell of the sea mingled with stranger and less appealing odors; the city’s underside dripped and oozed unnameable effluence. A broad causeway bristled with more alien shapes, rising from the artificial harbor’s floating docks into the city’s maw… He thought suddenly of a great beast’s waiting hunger.
“You stick to the lower levels, boy!” The trader had to shout to make himself heard over the shouting of a hundred others, the clanking and groaning and shifting that reverberated in this strange underworld caught between land and sea. “You look for Gadderfy’s place in the Periwinkle Alley; she’ll rent you a room!”
Sparks nodded absently, lifted his hand. “Thanks.” He swung the sack of his possessions up onto his shoulder, and shuddered as the cold wind off of the water wrapped itself around him.
“We’ll be here four days, if you change your mind!”
Sparks shook his head. Turning, he began to walk, and then to climb. The trader watched until the city swallowed him up.
“Hey, out of the road, you! What’re you, blind?”
Sparks threw himself aside into a pile of boxes as the house on treads loomed above him at the head of the ramp, then tipped slowly over the lip and down the way he had come. High up in a tiny windowed room he saw the face, too small to belong to the warning voice, with eyes that did not even look back to see whether he had gotten clear. He picked himself up numbly, thinking, It is true… it’s all true!” suddenly only half-glad.
Afraid to let his thoughts settle, he began to move, following the main street as it started its long, slow spiral upward; keeping to the edges now, warily. The street went on forever, gently rising, gently circling, tunneling upward through canyon walls of gaping-eyed warehouses and stores, apartment hives hung with railings. There was no sky, only the underside of the next spiral, gleaming dully with a kind of striated phosphorescence. Spurs of alleyway like centipede legs scrabbled at daylight — at the true sky of the world that he had always known, dim and unreachable at the alley-ends beyond the shuttered storm walls.