The Summer Queen Read Free

her?” Capella Goodventure demanded. “What did she
look like?”
    “She would be young, and very fair—her hair was almost
white. Her eyes were a strange, shifting color, like fog-agates ....” She knew
again, from the look on the other woman’s face, that she had described the new
Queen.
    “She is a sibyl.” Danaquil Lu said abruptly. “We trained her
ourselves. And she was a Summer. I would have known if she was not.”
    Capella Goodventure looked at him, her eyes narrowing; he
met her stare, until finally she was the one who looked away. “She isn’t right,”
she said finally, looking at Clavally again. “I will tell you what I have told
every sibyl I’ve seen—I have to return to the city, but you do not. Don’t go to
Carbuncle.” She turned and started away, her angry momentum splitting the crowd
like a ship’s wake.
    Clavally looked at Danaquil Lu, found him already looking at
her. “Perhaps the only thing that’s truly wrong with the new Queen is that she
isn’t a Goodventure,” she murmured.
    Danaquil Lu’s mouth twitched with a fleeting, ironic smile;
the smile disappeared. “What do you really think?” he asked her.
    She brushed at a fly that was buzzing in her ear like doubt,
and felt another frown start to form. “I remember the girl Moon Dawntreader
that we knew. She was different ... there was something about her ... but I
always felt that it was good. 1 think that 1 want to know for myself what the
truth is, Dana.”
    He nodded, his face pinching. “You want to go to Carbuncle.”
    Slowly she nodded. “But what do you think? What do you feel?
... What do you want to do?”
    He looked out across the sea again, squinting with the glare
of light on water, looking north. She saw him swallow as if something were
caught in his throat. At last he said, “I want to go home.”

ONDINEE: Razuma
    “Halt. Who are you?”
    He stopped in the inquisitory’s shadowed corridor as weapons
surrounded him, with cold-eyed men behind them.
    “The Smith.” They knew him only as the Smith when he came on
errands like this; when he wore openly the pendant of silver metal that he
usually kept hidden beneath his shirt. He could pass unmolested through circumstances
that would be suicidal if he did not wear the cryptic star-and-compass, which
stood for so many things to so many people. The star in this particular pendant
was a solii, a rare and secret gem born in the heart of dying stars, more
precious than diamonds, believed by some mystics to hold powers of
enlightenment. In this setting it symbolized all that, and more. “The High
Priest sent tor me.”
    The men surrounding him wore the uniforms of the Church Police,
with the blood-red badge of the High Priest’s elite guard. They looked dubious
as they took in his face, his youth; they studied the sign he wore. Their
weapons lowered, slightly. They carried plasma rifles, not the stun rifles that
most police forces used, that were both cheaper and far more humane. The High
Priest’s red-badges were called the Terror, and the name was not an empty
threat. “Come with us,” one of the guards said finally, nodding his head. “He’s
waiting for you.”
    The Smith followed them along the dark, echoing corridor,
down a flight of steps cut from stone. The steps had been worn into crescents
by the pitiless tread of booted feet going down, and up again; by the feet of
the inquisitory’s countless victims, going only down. Someone screamed,
somewhere, as they reached the bottom. The guards glanced at him as he
hesitated, measuring his reaction to the sound. Infidel, their stares
whispered. Criminal. Off\vorlder scum.
    He looked back at them, letting them into his eyes, letting
them see what waited for them there. “Let’s go,” he whispered. They looked
away, and started on into the inquisitory’s bowels.
    They passed many closed doors; he heard more screams, moans,
prayers in more than one language. The parched heat of the streets was a
reeking