Dream Dancer Read Free Page B

are your papers and its, er, hers. I still think you should let us test her,” grumbled the spectral man as he handed a package, wrapped in fine paper that seemed never before to have been used, across her to Marada.
    But Shebat was not impressed by the virgin paper as she might otherwise have been. Arbiter? Her flesh turned so cold that the arm beneath her head and the thigh meeting hers seemed to scald her. There was no need to consult her new vocabulary for the meaning of that word: every denizen of Bolen’s town cowered before its speaking, so that she had known it from her earliest days.
    Marada was saying: “—get those bodies up here, posthaste. Have your ‘enchanters’ retrieve them. By the way, is it really necessary to propagate a reign of terror over a people whose situation could hardly be more abject?”
    “Sir, I have a feeling you are going to find your own answer to that question, sooner than you might choose.” He looked meaningfully down at Shebat. “And in a manner more convincing than anything I could say. I will have the proconsul order the retrieval of the bodies of your brother and your betrothed. They will be at your ship by 2400. Until then, I offer you the hospitality of the consulate and the proconsul’s sympathies.”
    The magical cart seemed about to crash into a blank wall as tall as her faraway forest’s oldest trees. She tensed, reached out for Marada, then stayed her hand. The arbiter was talking yet to the other man, unconcerned. Then the blank wall spht in half, drawing apart: Shebat gasped as the eye-teasing vista of the Stump opened before her. Above her head the sky rippled, a candent pewter pond. From glaucous downward-curving hills around it shining villages like jasper berries seemed to hang suspended. Before her, a serpentine construction of shimmering glass and enchanted iron glimmering bright as silver crouched above the cinereous roadway, which seemed to disappear within it.
    The man who controlled the cart caused it to pull up to a tessellated path that led to trident-blazoned pavonine doors, saying, “Sir, you are from very far away. I suggest you consider yourself lucky. I must remind you that you were granted landfall at your own risk, against our objections; and that you have bent the rules about as far as you can without breaking one, Kerrion or no, in case of which I doubt whether even your esteemed kinship bond group could help you. Keep your pet in sight. Arbiter, lest something happen to it.”
    “Let’s hope nothing does,” drawled Marada, sliding out of the lorry and lifting the girlchild out of her seat. He did not understand why she was suddenly so stiff against him, putting it down to awesome sights and the disorientation of a planetdweller first confronted with an inverted horizon.
    It was much later, inside a gaudily threadbare visitors’ suite done in chatoyant taupes that he drew from Shebat her understanding of what an “Arbiter of Enchantments” was and did.
    Cracking his knuckles in consternation, he paced before the deep sofa in which the ragged girl was sunk, curled in its corner with her feet drawn up, watching him from leaden, luminous eyes full of resignation.
    His disclaimer of the “enchantment” part of the title did not ease her.
    Out of the oral tradition which was the only store of lore she possessed, she replied, “Thus it has always been,” incontrovertibly fatalistic.
    “Well, it is not like this, everywhere, between the platforms and the planets. Some consular families, mine included, even maintain planetary estates. Shebat, you must trust me, not only half the time, but all of the time, if I am to help you.”
    She merely looked askance at him, calmly waiting, her bony shoulders hunched up about her ears.
    He found himself at the end of his patience. Doubts he had not had previously crowded in upon him. Had he done the right thing? His professional self said he had not had enough information to make a decision, that he had