Aestival Tide (14 page)

When Reive awoke the third morning, Ceryl was already dressed, in a severe suit of black satin with tiny buttons of green jade down the front. Upon her brow she wore a brass and malachite fillet, her sole concession to the upcoming festival.

The somber clothes matched her mood. When Reive yelled to one of the servers to bring her kehveh and fruit, Ceryl hushed her impatiently.

“I'll probably be late today,” she said, rifling through a stack of credit disks and several invitations on parchment and allurian cards. “There's a ceremony I have to attend. There'll be some kind of reception afterward, and Shiyung always gets a headache after a party.”

“Can we go with you?” Reive pulled a sheet close about her and cocked her head. “It's nearly Æstival Tide, no one will notice us—”

“No!” Ceryl shoved credit disks and cards into a pocket. “It's too dangerous, Reive. It's a military ceremony, the margravines will be there. You'd be bored. And look, there's 'files here neither of us has ever seen, and—”

Reive glowered. Ceryl hesitated, then said, “And I'll get you an invitation to something—something special, I promise.”

Reive glared as Ceryl hurried out the door. For a few minutes the gynander lay on the divan, staring balefully at the ceiling. A military ceremony, with the margravines. The Feast of Fear was practically here already, and Ceryl wanted to keep her imprisoned. She sulked for a quarter hour, then throwing the sheets on the floor she slid from the divan. She dressed quickly, painting her face cursorily and braiding her hair into a single long plait. She thought of leaving Ceryl a disdainful note, something along the lines of
See You At The Palace,
but decided against it. She was in such a hurry that she forgot to take anything to eat or drink.

There was not much of a crowd at the gravators that morning. Many of the cabinet members had finally obtained their invitations and found temporary lodgings as palace guests, or within one of the Imperators' elaborate pagodas. The few aristocrats Reive saw this morning were on foot. Most rickshaw drivers refused to work this close to the feast; they had already retired to their own ritual preparations below. The remaining cabinet members milled about rather desperately, their snatches of conversation shrill—

“… said she
loved
the work I'd done on the hecatombs ten years ago and
of course
there'd be a seat for me—”

“—stole it right out of my hands!”

“… so I explained then that
I
wasn't actually a
Disciple,
only
curious,
but you know how they are…”

This subdued mood extended to their passage into the gravator. Reive even got a seat this time; but she had grown so blasé that she sat with her eyes closed, humming to herself.

The trip went quickly. There was little conversation, no proselytizing priests or disciples. The fretful cabinet members eyed Reive distrustfully where she sat alone on a marble bench. When the gravator finally stopped they stood aside fastidiously and permitted her to leave first. Reive mistook their caution for respect. She did not notice how one of them made the sign against Ucalegon as she passed, or how another pointed furtively at her eyes.

Outside, Reive was startled to see the same sort of crowd that she usually found below during one of the lesser festivals. Men selling pappadams and fried cuttlefish, girls sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of steaming pots of black tea and kehveh. Several grubby-looking moujik children wearing discarded janissary's uniforms were hawking banners, black and red and with the toothed wave that symbolized Ucalegon blocked on them in vivid green. There were
galli
from the Daughters of Graves dispensing prayer wheels and blessings for a small fee, and one of the white-skirted Disciples of Blessed Narouz's Refinery shouting in the 'filers' dialect, seemingly to himself. A solitary Aviator stood broodingly, the sleek black mask of her sensory enhancer covering her face as the crowd parted around her, priests and diplomats alike falling silent in her shadow. Someone had set up a little stall selling figures of the Compassionate Redeemer made of marzipan, its evil spade-shaped head and gaping mouth bright pink, its long saurian's tail dusted with golden flecks of opium sugar. With a start Reive recognized a hermaphrodite from Virtues, a pasty-faced morph who had never been very popular either with clients or her own kind. Pushing aside a plump
galli,
Reive hurried away before she could be seen, head bowed as she stared resolutely at her feet.

She ended up on an unfamiliar spur of the main boulevard. There were no strollers here, not even any of the omnipresent replicants walking the countless Orsina bastards. But the boulevard did not seem empty. Sculptures lined the broad avenue, stasis anaglyphs executed by the adolescent prodigy Karvo Solicitas. Their subject matter was uniformly morbid, scenes of executions and torment, the sort of thing made popular during the current regime. Reive stared at them bemused and walked on. In the distance the palace glowed white and gold in the simulated sunlight. She squinted, trying to see if the ceremony had started yet.

“You find Karvo's work dull?” a voice croaked beside her.

Reive jumped and looked around nervously, seeing nobody. Finally she glanced down. A very small man, a dwarf actually, stood gazing up at her with mild round eyes of a vivid, childlike blue.

“Um—yes, we, uh—” she said, glancing back uneasily at the sculptures. “Very dull!”

“I've always found him insipid myself,” the dwarf confided. He gazed up at her as though she had said something quite insightful. “This whole mania for torture: idiotic, don't you think? The banality of evil and all that.” He began to walk with a peculiar rolling gait toward the next little square, looking back at her expectantly.

“Yes, of course,” she said, and followed him.

“Now this at least demonstrates a more mature grasp of the sculptor's art,” the dwarf said thoughtfully. He pointed to three monolithic pandoramas, multidimensional images of men and women illuminated in ghastly greens and blues. As they watched the huge shapes moved with painful slowness, contorting themselves in baroque and tormented poses.

At the last image the dwarf halted. The moving figures froze, then one groaned the name of the piece.

“
Mormo
,” it said, and resumed its posturing.

“
Mormo
,” the dwarf repeated, as though Reive might not have heard. “Late Kendall Browning—one of his last, as a matter of fact, before that tragedy with the poisoned apples. Always unwise to eat fruit with the Orsinate. Now I think that
Mormo
approaches the truly horrifying, not just the horrible. Don't you agree?”

Reive grimaced. The pandorama showed the gigantic figure of a man devouring another, smaller man whose piteous screams were blunted by the sound of the giant's teeth cracking his ribs. Time had caused the pandorama to suffer some fallout, so that the image fizzed and popped and every few moments the sound faded. Reive quickly looked away, and caught the dwarf staring at her with an intense expression shaded with something like approval.

“Strong stuff, eh?” he remarked, and began walking once more.

“Ye-es,” Reive replied, trying not to look back at the gruesome scene. They strolled for a few minutes in silence, Reive relaxing when they came to a fountain that smelled strongly of lime blossom.

“You're new here,” the dwarf said a few minutes later. Reive was splashing water on her face. She glanced at the dwarf, then wiping her cheeks she nodded.

“Interesting eyes,” he said. He pressed his fingers to his forehead and bowed. “Rudyard Planck, always a pleasure.”

Reive stared at him, suddenly recalling Ceryl's warnings. But the dwarf only stared at her with a slightly amused expression. Finally she said, “We are Reive.”

“Reive,” the dwarf repeated. He had hair of a dark reddish hue, like brick dust, and wore beautifully cut trousers of azure velvet and a vest trimmed with brilliant green piping. Around his neck dangled a heavy gold chain hung with the heraldic eye and letter
of the pleasure cabinet. Something about him—perhaps the way he walked, with a hint of a swagger, or maybe it was that lurid green trim about his vest—struck Reive as being not so much the mark of a dandy as of a potentially dangerous individual playing at being one.

“Well, Reive, it is always a pleasure to talk with a fellow art lover.”

His voice dropped ironically. He bowed again and for a moment held her hand. His grasp was surprisingly solid for one so small. “I have to go now—some tedious business about our new Military Commandant Imperator—but I hope to see you again soon.”

Reive nodded dumbly, waving after him. She waited several minutes, until the little figure was lost to sight among the crowd gathering in the distance. Then she followed him down the boulevard, until at last she stood on the promenade that fanned in front of the Orsinate's palace.

Beneath her feet the pale marble glistened, still damp from having been hosed earlier. Blue lightning whipped about the twin statues atop the palace, sending shivers of light across the dome. The air crackled, the scent of ozone nearly overpowering the scents of frangipani and lemon, ginger blossom and expensive cologne. Most of the vendors seemed to have moved here, and Reive was surprised to see many other commoners as well. The inevitable 'filers, of course, they would be at any public ceremony of note. But gynanders too, and biotechnicians still in their yolk-yellow smocks; somber women from the Chambers of Mercy and a small knot of moujiks glaring suspiciously at the splendor around them. She even glimpsed a solitary
rasa,
shuffling past in a faded set of clothes that no longer fit, its face set in that horrible rictus all
rasas
had, its sunken eyes flecked with luminous phosphorescence. Everyone looked uneasy, as though they had been plucked from their own levels and whisked up here, which was close to the truth of it. The Orsinate never wasted a major ceremony on their own staff. A few gaping moujiks and socially ambitious gynanders, the usual complement of eager 'filers—by the time they all returned to the tedium of their own levels, even the dullest execution or promotion would seem extravagant.

But this looked to be an extraordinary ceremony, even for the Orsinate. Anticipation shimmered in the air like heat. Reive could hear it in the whispered gossip of the
galli,
see it in the wide eyes of the courtesans and vavasours calling to each other eagerly from the palace steps. To keep the peace, members of the Reception Committee roamed about in their pinstriped suits. The entire Urban Cohort had been deployed. Reive ducked behind a column as a watchman rolled past, huge and shining as one of the Aviator's aerocraft. Its immense metal head swiveled back and forth as it surveyed the promenade with its seven glittering eyes, and the pavement groaned beneath its weight.

When it was gone Reive stepped back onto the boulevard, subdued. The air had grown uncomfortably warm, the reek of the unseen ocean so thick she tasted it in the back of her throat. She thought of Ceryl, and looked around, foolishly hoping she might see her in the mob. But she saw nothing but seething faces and the occasional banner with Ucalegon's fangéd wave thrust above the crowd. Her head thrummed; her eyes watered from the smoke drifting up from the vents. From the palace steps she could hear nervous laughter. Snatches of song trilled from a wireless.

“Welcome the Healing Wind!”

Someone jounced into her. A young coenbite, one of the novitiates who performed the ritual vivisections and other research functions in the Chambers of Mercy. Her eyes were wild, her hand stippled with blood where she clutched a jagged piece of plastic. A crude version of the Orsinate's heraldic emblem had been painted on it, but with a lurid red line streaked across the eye. Beneath it swirled the gaudy whorls that symbolized Baratdaja the Healing Wind. “Death from Outside!” she shrieked.

Reive shoved her way past, ducking as the coenbite swung the sheet of plastic like a scythe. Behind her a man screamed and someone else laughed; but Reive was gone, forcing her way toward where the promenade ended in a cul-de-sac in front of the palace.

The crowd here was marginally more subdued. There were more priests—lesser functionaries from the Church of Christ Cadillac, wearing the chromium skullcaps of their faith; a number of indigo-clad
galli
from the Daughters of Graves, whistling and bowing before three huge cutout images of the margravines dangling from the front of the palace; several dozen Disciples of Blessed Narouz, their pale skirts cutting a wide white swath through the jumble of blue robes and silver chrome. Near the front of the crowd was a small group of coenbites, their yolk-yellow robes bloodstained and torn from their ecstasies. Reive hastily retreated behind the
galli,
who seemed more intent upon a large hubble-bubble that they circled, giggling and smoking earnestly.

“Will you join us, holy child?”
a galli
called out to her. He made two circles with his fingers and brought them to his face like spectacles, then indicated Reive's eyes. His laughter was not unkind.