Reality tears apart and re-forms around me, in a split second of gut-wrenching vertigo.
A scream is echoing in my ears. My eyes are ^training to see, although I don't remember the instant when they didn't see--the instant when the three men on the platform became one and a half.
The man left alive stands motionless for a long moment, staring at the half a body still bound to his own.
And then he sits down, jibbering. A stream of red spills over the platform's edge.
I watch in wonder as the possessed woman comes out of her trance and sways forward to the pennant wreathed railing. She clings there a moment, gazing down at the outcome of her judgment. Her mouth pulls back in a smile of terrible satisfaction. Somehow, using some power I cannot imagine, she has done this thing to them.
She goes to the survivor and cuts him free with a knife. Then she straightens up again, shaking her fists in the air, and calls out in a trembling voice, "This is the truth!" The survivor half scrambles, half falls down the gossamer ladder that ties the platform to reality. He
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
crawls away, disappearing into the crowd.
138
WORLD S END
The woman stands at the rail, searching the crowd with her eyes. . . . And then suddenly she has found me.
She lowers her arm until it is pointing me out. It is as if she knew that I had come, as if she has staged this performance only for my sake: to show me her power.
"Bring me the captive!" she calls. I see her face clearly at last, and I gasp.
"She wants you," Goldbeard says, almost resignedly.
Of course she wants me. My heart leaps inside my empty chest. Goldbeard seizes my arm and pushes me forward through the crowd to the floating rope ladder, but now I am as eager as he is to reach the platform.
Somehow I climb, and he follows me. The pain in my shoulder is nothing; even the Lake, lying below the trembling, swaying rungs of the fragile ladder, is nothing
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
Page 107
to me, when I know that my heart's desire is waiting.
And she is waiting--just as I remember her, just as I
left her so long ago. But now she is the queen she was meant to be. Her hair falls around her like a shroud, white/black as the fields of snow, and I am snowblind with longing. Her face is patterned with an intricate filigree of red stains. The trefoil shines against her robes.
Her eyes are like moss-agate and mist... when she looks at me my eyes cannot break her gaze.
She stands motionless, holding me with her eyes for an endless moment.
The awareness of her power, over these people, over me, leaves me shaken.
Goldbeard plants a hand in the middle of my back. I
stumble forward, slipping in the blood, and fall at her feet. I touch the dusty hem of her red/gold cloak. "Moon
..." I whisper. "I knew it would be you. I knew it." I look up at her again, and her face fills with surprise.
Goldbeard kicks the severed body off the platform behind me. "We found this garbage on the shore, Song."
He comes forward and pulls me to my feet; he makes her name into the name of a goddess when he speaks. "He
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
139
JOAND. VINGE
say he's come for you. Even had your picture." She looks at him sharply, and back at me. "He's a sibyl. You want him, or--?" There is a barb of jealousy in Goldbeard's voice. I wonder if I will have to kill him.
"You're not afraid," Moon murmurs, and reaches out to touch me, as if she cannot believe I'm real. "You're not afraid of anything." She traces the scar on my forehead.
"Yes . . . oh, yes," she says to Goldbeard. "I want him desperately. You don't know how long I've waited for this moment--" Her fingers feel cool and dry against my skin. She lets them wander down my cheek and across my lips. I kiss them hungrily; she pulls away. "I knew he would come someday. The Lake showed him to me.
Someone who was not afraid; who knew the answer.
. . . And he comes from my mother!" She gives a shrill laugh. Goldbeard looks at her blankly.
Her restless hand falls to the trefoil hanging in the gap of my ragged shirt. "Sibyl. Then the Lake called you
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
Page 108
here?"
I shake my head. "I came for you."
She frowns unexpectedly. "Do you wear this honestly?"
Her eyes are too black as they stare into mine.
I shake my head again, barely.
Her hand tightens over the trefoil until the chain bites into my neck. "You will," she whispers.
Aloud, she says, "The Lake has chosen another servant! The Lake has shown me his coming. ... I claim him for the Lake; for myself." She holds my trefoil up so that it catches the light. The crowd rumbles with amazement. She looks back at Goldbeard. "Give me the solii you took from him."
Goldbeard stiffens. Slowly, reluctantly, he takes the stone from his pouch and hands it to her.
She holds it up in the air for the crowd to see, turning it between her fingers. She presses it between her palms
. . . and suddenly there is a large, sparkling gemstone in
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
140
WORLD S END
her hand instead. The crowd laughs and cheers. "Your reward." She flips the gem to Goldbeard.
He catches it.
I watch greed and awe commingle on his face. "My
Watchman," she says almost tenderly, "you've brought me the right one at last--the one I've waited for, the one
I prophesied to myself."
Goldbeard's expression turns dark and uncertain. "He wants to take you away from us!" he says.
The crowd's voice echoes his suspicion ominously.
"I will never leave you," she says calmly, to him, to the watchers. "I can never leave the Lake."
"Then what you want with him?" Goldbeard's eyes are hot with anger. She stares at him. He looks down, glances at the Lake with fear on his face.
She turns back to the crowd. "This speaking is over!"
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
She raises her hands and claps them. The red/gold cloak drops from her shoulders, to lie in a puddle of blood. It is lined with black. She wears only a thin, white shift beneath it; the shift Page 109
clings to her sweating body, concealing nothing. I suck in a breath of furnace-hot air. The crowd mutters and shouts its disappointment. They call out for something more, they want her to show them proof of what I am .. . they want more miracles, or more blood. But she ignores them. She ignores me, too, as if my gaze does not burn her flesh where it touches her.
"I will return to the tower," she tells Goldbeard.
"Bring him."
She goes down the ladder as lightly as a ghost. Figures materialize, bearing a canopy to shade her as she walks.
I want to go after her. Goldbeard knows it; he holds his gun on me. He holds me back until she grows small in the distance, following the canyon's edge . . . until I am ready to throw myself over the rail to keep from losing her. "Nobody goes with her," he says. "You only go to her." He lets me leave the platform at last as she disappears from sight; his men are still waiting below.
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
141
JOAND. VINGE