Aestival Tide (21 page)

“She gave me an invitation—this afternoon—at the Investiture—”

Tatsun Frizer cried out and shook her head.

“A charming place to meet, I'm sure.” Âziz smiled coldly at the stammering Tatsun, then turned to Reive. “And of course you wanted to come here this evening—”

Reive nodded. “Yes, Margravine…”

“She is fearless,” Rudyard Planck whispered to Ceryl. Tatsun Frizer was silent now, her face bright red and teary-eyed.

“She's insane.” Ceryl closed her eyes and turned her hands so they faced palm-upward, and murmured the soothing verse the
galli
had taught her.

On the other side of the room the gynander and Âziz faced each other, the margravine still smiling that tight twisted smile.

“Well,” Âziz said at last. She traced the outline of Reive's cheek, her finger smearing the rest of the gynander's makeup. “We don't normally allow uninvited guests into the Four Hundredth Room, especially at the beginning of Æstival Tide…”

She paused and looked across the room at Tatsun Frizer, who gibbered in protest.

“
But
,” the margravine continued, “seeing as how your scrying satisfied the Aviator Imperator, I am curious to hear what you have to say about
my
dream.” Her face grew taut as she drew her hand back from Reive. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I have not slept well for many nights, Reive. I would be very—
pleased
—with you, if you could discern the meaning of this dream….”

The gynander nodded silently. Ceryl found she couldn't keep her eyes shut. Watching Reive, her own terror was almost overcome by pity—the gynander was trembling, her face smeared with powder and green kohl. She stared unblinking at Âziz as the margravine began to speak in a halting voice.

“It is two weeks now, I have not slept because of this dream….”

From the air vents wafted a soft odor, something redolent of lavender smoke and new leather. The faces around the circle grew more relaxed as the incense filled the room and the margravine recited her dream. Ceryl inhaled deeply, her thoughts drifting. She smiled, recalling Reive's spindly figure declaring
This is not a dream
to the new Aviator Imperator. It would make a good story to tell, tomorrow, the stuff of
tanka
parlor gossip and much speculation among the pleasure cabinet. An unknown gynander appears and within a week is the margravine's new favorite. The parallels to Ceryl's own situation were obvious. Perhaps Reive would be given her own chambers on Thrones, or be brought up to Seraphim, there to tend to Âziz's nightmares. Or even stranger things might happen.

This is the game that moves as you play it….

But then something broke Ceryl's reverie. The pleasant droning in the background had stopped. Âziz, after speaking for some minutes, had suddenly fallen silent. In front of her Reive stood stiffly, eyes half-closed, her hands clenched. Ceryl rubbed her forehead. Had she fallen asleep? She looked up in time to see Âziz take a handful of white powder from a raku bowl and toss it on a tiny cast-iron brazier. A harsh scent cut through the lulling incense. Rudyard Planck fidgeted and Tatsun Frizer looked around anxiously, as did most of the other guests. Only the Aviator remained unmoving, staring at the gynander.

In the center of the room Reive seemed to sway a little. With one finger she touched her temple, then sneezed and looked around, blinking. Âziz gazed at her through slitted eyes and continued.

“And then I was standing at a window in the gondola. In front of us the domes seemed to be cracking. For a minute I thought they were shattering, but then I realized it was just the skygates opening. The fouga started up through them. I was afraid for a moment, because I had never been Outside—I never
have
been Outside—but then I was excited, to think of what I'd see there—”

Ceryl choked. Her whole body felt as though it had been grasped by giant pincers. She hunched forward, gripping her knees, her face absolutely white.

Rudyard Planck tilted his head. “Are you all right?” he whispered. “You look sick—come, I'll help you outside—”

“No,” said Ceryl. Dimly she could hear the margravine, going on and on, a voice she knew she would never stop hearing, ever—

“Ceryl?”

—because all of this, now, was like a dream—

“
Ceryl?
”

—and she had to see how it came out.

“Oh, my god,” whispered Tatsun Erizer. “The margravine's gone mad…”

From the expressions of others in the circle, she was not the only one who thought so; but Ceryl could only hear Âziz—

“… the fouga going higher and higher. And when I looked down, I saw this—this
crack
in the ground beneath the domes—and I knew in a moment I would see something, something—”

A rush of images in Ceryl's mind: the bluish lights of the vivarium; the shadows of the trees on the boulevard; her lover Giton's face beside hers in bed and then Reive in that same bed, Reive there now with her green eyes glowing…

“… and I knew if I looked out the window I'd see—”

Âziz hesitated. The room was deathly silent as the margravine reached for another handful of white powder. Nike stirred, looking around in vain for her serving girl, who had crept to the door. Ceryl tried to count the number of steps it would take to join her. Rudyard Planck pointed a thumb at Reive and whispered, “Waxwing, I think maybe your friend is getting a little too—”

“I
knew
,” Âziz repeated more loudly, her face flushed, “if I looked out the window, I would see—”

“
The Green Country
,” Reive announced in a voice shrill as a kite's.

All around her was a sudden sharp intake of breath, as though the Four Hundredth Room had become a wheezing bellows.

“The
what?
”

Âziz's hand had stopped in midair above the raku bowl. White powder sifted from her fingers as she stared at Reive.

“The what?” Âziz said again.

Oh, Reive, no,
thought Ceryl.

“Oh, dear,” said the dwarf.

Ceryl gazed at the gynander. Dimly she could see dark-clad figures rushing from hidden doorways of the Four Hundredth Room, hear voices and someone beside her frantically repeating her own name. A woman was shouting. She remembered a plain of endless verdure, and that sense of exhilaration, of doors opening everywhere…

“The Green Country,” repeated Reive.

She turned her pinched face to gaze one final moment at Ceryl, a look of love and triumph and utter hopelessness. From across the room the
rasa
stared at her, his gloved hands clenching and unclenching. Âziz was screaming something to the dark figures swarming like fire ants around the gynander's slender form, their prods and whips singing. And then Reive was gone, a prisoner of the Reception Committee.

“I
MUST SEE HER.” SAJUR
Panggang nodded wearily. In the library across from him sat Margalis Tast'annin, a friend very long ago when they were both young and students at the NASNA Academy. Their friendship had long since ended, weakened by the wearying decades of Sajur's rise in Araboth and Margalis's decline into obsession and then madness as he became the most powerful military commander on the continent. Sajur had always assumed Margalis would die a violent and terrible death. Now it seemed that even death was not enough to destroy him, at least not as long as Shiyung Orsina was alive. The Architect Imperator leaned back in his favorite chair, an oaken Morris chair grown black and hard as ebony with the centuries, and tapped his chin with one long finger.

He had left the Four Hundredth Room immediately after the gynander's revelation. Not a prudent move on his part; but he had been overcome by his own reaction to Âziz's dream. That part about the crack in the Undercity—at once he felt elation and a sort of greed. To think of the margravine being foolish enough to admit to such a dream! It was too perfect. In Araboth's enclosed world, such fears worked like a virus, seeping into the populace and spreading until others would be felled by that same nightmare of the Undercity crumbling and the dome caving inward like a bad fruit.

There were already fearful rumors everywhere. Every level of the city had felt the tremors that now shook Araboth four or five times a day. Early this morning there had been reports of a conflagration on Archangels, with hundreds of
rasas
immolated in moments as one of the refineries blew. The resulting shock waves had been felt as high as Thrones Level, and here on Cherubim a greasy pall hung in the air, a smell like rancid oil and rotting cloth.

And now news of Âziz's dream would spread throughout the city. The Architect Imperator smiled at the thought. A margravine having an apocalyptic dream on the very eve of the Feast of Fear! If only his sisters hadn't exiled Nasrani. He was the only one who had anything like a sense of diplomacy, and of course his youth had been spent in training as an Architect. But Nasrani was lost to his arcane longings as meanwhile the city was slowly being teased open, rivet by rivet, fiber by fiber, the joists and beams and hidden underpinnings of Angels painstakingly prised apart like the corpse of an aardman within the Chambers of Mercy. And all the while the margravines fretted over half-baked plots and imaginary threats by bastard pretenders to the Orsinate dynasty.

None of them would ever know the truth, because no one but Sajur communicated with the Architects, and not even Sajur ever ventured to the Undercity. He glanced up at the
rasa
sitting across from him and shook his head very slightly.

“I understand, Margalis. Really I do. But, well, you must see how it is right now. Âziz is in a state over this, I know it seems petty to you but they get worked up over these things. She takes her dreams very seriously—”

The
rasa's
harsh voice cut him off. “Oh, but so do I, Sajur. So do I. That is why I would like to see the hermaphrodite.”

Sajur reached for his glass. He stared into the emerald liquid, nodding as though he were trying to think of a way to arrange such a meeting; but in truth it could not be done. For the sake of their dead friendship he wished he could help Margalis; wished he could do something as simple as offer him some of this very fine Amity, or show him the new wind-chamber he had installed in Angelika's old dressing room. But these things were lost on a
rasa.
Sajur sipped his Amity and sighed.

“I wish I could. But it would do no good for me to intercede for you—Hell's teeth, Margalis, you're their chief of staff now!
You
know what it's like. They listen to no one except each other. Once the Reception Committee's taken someone, well it's all over. And Âziz has made up her mind about this. Sedition, treason, the old sad song. And, well, it's just a morphodite after all, not worth dirtying your hands—”

He finished awkwardly. The hands that rested on the edge of the library table across from him were encased in black leather gloves. On one finger a heavy ring winked in the light, a gold ring set with a blue stone and circled by letters spelling out
NASNA.
Sajur imagined that one of those hands lay quite calmly: the one with the Academy ring—a peaceful hand, a
tamed
hand in its steel and glass and plasteen sheath; while the other twitched restively. In truth both hands were as ominously still as the Aviator Imperator himself.

“My memories—my memories are incomplete,” the
rasa
said slowly. “The morphodite at this evening's dream inquisition somehow saw the truth of what I told her—it was not a dream at all, but a fragment of my earlier life. I would ask her how she knew this. I would see if she could help me—
remember
—other things.”

His voice ended in a hollow whistling breath. Sajur knew that Shiyung had gone to great pains to revive Tast'annin's voice, the long hypnotic drawl that could charm a rector at the Academy as easily as it could command a phalanx of Gryphons in maneuvers over the Medaïn Desert. But the man's voice was gone. The empty sound that boomed at him now was as cold and dull as the voice of a Gryphon itself. The voice of something meant to obey, twisted within this tortured husk of a commander.

“I'm sorry, Margalis,” Sajur said gently.

On the divan the
rasa
that had been Margalis Tast'annin raised his empty face. He had been the Ascendants' greatest soldier, the most brilliant student ever to graduate from the NASNA Academy. A tall, proud man, his shoulders stooped a little from having forever to look down upon those who answered to him. Sajur remembered him as a youth, reckless and with that sharp tongue ready to lash out at the slow, the unwitting, the men and women doomed by their birth on the wrong level in Araboth, the wrong creche in the desolate Outlands, to a lifetime of service to the Ascendants. Tast'annin had been a bold if frightening figure even then, with his gold-straw hair gone early to gray and his colorless eyes that reflected whatever the sky showed them—the sky that only the Aviators saw now, and the mongrel slaves bred to serve them.

That power to command remained in the hooded figure that sat and stared at Sajur Panggang. The metal mask hid what Shiyung had been unable to salvage from the decomposing corpse. Though there were the eyes, of course, she had managed to save the eyes. A whim of the youngest margravine who, while not truly soft-hearted, liked to be thought so. And perhaps she had believed it would somehow make him seem more human.

This final conversion had been her idea. Tast'annin had been rehabilitated before, of course, he was too valuable a commander to have blinded or lamed in battle. But each regeneration had left his mind frailer and more prone to madness—Sajur thought of a particular kind of dog that Shiyung had bred for several years, thirty generations compressed and refined in the nucleovats, until the elegant structure and slender muzzles she so loved had collapsed into whimpering heaps of bones slung in a sack of flesh, drooling and twitching at their mistress's ankles.