Aestival Tide (33 page)

A few people wondered that such preparations for the festival would be carried out following the death of a margravine. Many more still had not heard the news of Shiyung's death. It seemed the evening 'file broadcasts had been interrupted by one of the tremors shaking the lower levels. Still, there were rumors among the Toxins Cabal on Thrones, and even in one of the 'filers' pods on Powers, that there had been an assassination attempt of some kind. The Aviators had mutinied, under the command of the corpse that was their leader. Âziz had stabbed her sister Shiyung. Nasrani Orsina had killed all three margravines, serving them shark poached in a broth of speckled-fly mushrooms.

Nasrani Orsina had done no such thing. Clad in blue and gold robes and wearing the heavy conical crown of the Orsinate, as the nuclear CLOCK clanged the evening hour he hurried to the small gravator that serviced Coventry wing. Behind him the
rasa
moved silently, like a great dark insect on hinged steel legs, black robes flapping about him like wings and only his eyes betraying the man within.

“Embrace the Fear that feeds us.” The robotic sentry whispered the traditional Æstival Tide greeting as Nasrani waited impatiently for it to scan him. “Nasrani Orsina. Pass.” A moment longer while it read the
rasa's
cold blue eyes, then, “Margalis Tast'annin. Pass.”

Inside tiny red lights blinked across the ceiling. There were no views of the lower levels as this gravator dropped, only the chill black walls of its shaft and occasional glimpses of flickering lights and the leaping flames of the refineries. Nasrani settled into one of the cramped seats (no extraneous comforts for exiles) and gingerly rubbed his bandaged arm. The
rasa
stood beside him, staring out the narrow window.

Finally Nasrani spoke. “They'll find you, you know. If you go back with me now I'll argue for you—”

“They won't.” The
rasa's
voice might have come from the sentry's black cylinder. “They think the gynander did it. The one at the inquisition; the one who scryed Âziz's dream.”

Nasrani let his breath out and shrugged, defeated. “Yes, I heard about her. Âziz told me: she said it was—” He looked at the floor. For an instant Shiyung's image hung there before him, her long legs cool against his, her green eyes laughing as she drew him closer. He cleared his throat. “She said it was the dream of the Green Country.”

“Yes. That is one reason why I want to see the nemosyne.”

Nasrani plucked at a thread on his robes. He sighed and removed his crown, wiping his forehead where sweat had beaded beneath its weight. He tried to smile. “Still the inquiring skeptic, Margalis?”

The
rasa
turned to Nasrani. His eerie mask reflected the exile's face, distorted so that it was as though Nasrani gazed upon his own skeletal image, all hollow eyes and grinning fleshless mouth. He shuddered and looked away.

The
rasa
said, “I have seen things you would not believe, Nasrani Orsina: the fruits of your family's poisonous tree. Now I have become one of those rotting fruits. And so, it seems, will your sister Shiyung. Your ancestors invented the timoring after the Architects shared with you their secrets for rehabilitating corpses, so that you could indulge your passion for death without having to die yourselves. Although you do die eventually, don't you? Even the Orsinate dies, although you are scarcely more than ghosts yourselves, your blood has grown so sick and weak…”

He took Nasrani's hand. The exile gasped as he felt the steel fingers slice through the soft leather glove, the metal biting into his own palm until he cried out and looked down to see blood staining black leather and spilling onto the floor.

“Oh, but, Nasrani,” the Aviator said as he tightened his grip upon the exile's bleeding hand, “Nasrani, Nasrani…” as though nothing had happened, as though Nasrani were beside him at a dream inquisition, and not inside a gravator plummeting to the Undercity.

And suddenly that hollow voice took on a new tenor, a tone that was bright with wonder; and Nasrani looked up, terrified at what this might mean, that a
rasa
's voice should sound so human. “While I was out in the world I saw things that would take your breath away, things that even an Orsina would find sublime.
Children
—”

And here his voice dropped to a whisper, a hiss that made Nasrani's hair stand on end—

“I saw
children
butcher each other like animals, because your viral rains had turned them into ravening beasts. I took counsel from a cadaver, a hollow skull who spoke more wisely than ever your diplomats and cabinet did. And I saw a girl who could kill with her mind; and now who among your family can do that?”

Abruptly the
rasa
dropped Nasrani's bleeding hand. The exile snatched it away, moaning beneath his breath as he wrapped it in a handkerchief. He blinked away tears, then forced a smile. “Now, Margalis,” he began, trying to sound composed, “you know that we have scientists and researchers who—”

“Science?” The
rasa
turned to him, his eyes scorched pits in his empty face. “
Science?
You do not understand! I helped bring a
god
to birth in that accursed City, and all your science was for nothing there! What has your science done, but scald the earth and poison the seas, make howling beasts and tormented scarecrows of men and children and devise new ways to torture them, all for the pleasure of a family of inbred aristocrats! Did your
science
give my body back to me, my life and heart and soul?
No!
It twists everything, it can only hold up a charred skeleton to the image of the live thing it once was. But—”

His voice grew softer, and his hands as they groped the air were more graceful than any
rasa's
Nasrani had ever seen. “But I have glimpsed something stronger than your science, children lovelier than your most precious
timorata:
a boy who embraced Death and his sister, who defeated It.
They
had no need of laboratories or Architects or gabbling aristocrats.”

“In the Capital?” Nasrani breathed. The gravator jerked, throwing him against the wall, then dropped another level. “You saw this in the Capital?”

The
rasa
nodded. “Yes: the place they called the City of Trees. Those two children were stronger even than I was, at the end: else they would have died, and I would not.”

“Where are they now?”

“I do not know.” The
rasa
stared out the window, to where violet lights bored through the murk of Principalities. “When your sisters did not hear from me for many months they feared—rightly—their plans had gone wrong, and sent their own janissaries to seize the City. Their troops arrived mere hours after my death. All I have learned since my—
recovery
—has been chaos and lies. But I do not believe those children are dead.”

His pale eyes flickered and he looked out the window, as though seeing something besides the grim substrata of Araboth. “I know she at least is not,” he murmured a moment later. “That girl is bound to me now, somehow, through my death perhaps. She is alive still, I know she is. I do not sleep now, it is all like a constant dreaming and I see her, she is out there, somewhere, and I must find her.”

He leaned forward and placed his hands conspiratorially upon Nasrani's knee. The slashed remnant of one black glove fell to the floor as the
rasa
gazed into the exile's eyes and Nasrani gasped.

Because now it was no trick of the light that made him imagine features upon that sleek black mask. Somehow—whether by some perversion of the biotechnician's rehabilitative work or through the will of the Aviator Imperator himself—through some macabre machination the cold smooth metal had begun to form itself back into the semblance of a man. Like hot tar that bubbles and can be stretched and pulled about, the crimson mask rippled, seethed, was still. As Nasrani watched in horror a mouth appeared, the metal seeming to ooze as it outlined thin lips and shining black teeth that clashed as the
rasa
stared at him, grinning.

“What is it, Nasrani? ‘Bad Science'?”

“N-no—” the exile stammered. On his knees the
rasa
's fingers twitched. He glanced down to see that its steel fingers had cut through the fabric of his trousers as though it had been paper. He looked up to see the smooth planes of the
rasa's
mask protrude and sink as cheekbones appeared, a jaw, a pointed chin—the perfect simulacrum of the face of Margalis Tast'annin, cast in liquid flame. Eyes bulged beneath sharp metal brows; a metal blade protruded and shaped itself into a nose like a kite's bill.

“Do you think your sister would love me now, Orsina?” the
rasa
whispered. “Or—I forgot, she is a corpse too, of course she would love the dead—”

Crying out, Nasrani pushed him away and scrambled to his feet, his crown rolling across the floor.

“Sentry!” he shouted, yanking at the gold cord by the gravator door. But before he could touch it the r
asa
had sheared the cord in two, and grabbed him by the throat with his other, human hand.

“No, Nasrani,” he said, and drew the man back down beside him. Nasrani whimpered. The Aviator dabbed at his bleeding hand, then with a smile withdrew his finger and traced the outline of Nasrani's babbling mouth in blood. “I still need you. To find the nemosyne. And then—and then I think I will need you to help me leave Araboth for good.”

Nasrani cried out. “Leave the domes! I can't—we could never—”

The Aviator grinned. Blood trickled from his lip, and a silvery tongue like a steel serpent darted out to flick it away. “But we must. I was too hasty up there; they will realize soon that the gynander did not kill her. I should have brought her with me. She
knows
things. When I told her my dream, she recognized in it the germ of a memory that haunts me. There is much I could learn from her, I think.” He fell silent and stared broodingly out the window.

“From a morph?” Nasrani's voice was shrill. “They're all quacks, those pantomancers, quacks or half mad—”

“Not this one. She has the Sight. Âziz was frightened enough by what she said to have her imprisoned. I freed her, but then I lost my head….”

The
rasa's
voice faded. In the silence Nasrani could hear faint wails and the roar of the Architects' Conciliatory Engines grinding through the dim avenues of Archangels. The gravator slowed, then picked up speed again.

Nasrani licked his lips and said, “My sisters don't believe in the predictions of pantomancers. At least Âziz does not. She fears treason, that's all. She is a fool. They are all fools.” He bent to pick up the Orsinate's crown. His bleeding hand left sullen streaks across its lapis sides. “The gynander is right: Ucalegon will destroy us.”

“Then you believe her.”

“I know that on my brief forays Outside I saw things that my sisters would deny were possible.” His voice rose angrily. “I could have helped them, and their precious Architects: but they didn't believe me. It should have been enough, that I went Out, and made it back inside—”

“We are here.” The gravator lurched to a stop. As the door jerked open the
rasa
turned to Nasrani. “If you try to betray me I will kill you here, and do such things to you afterward that you will beg to be recast as a
rasa.”
Without a word Nasrani nodded and followed him outside.

The Architect Imperator sat watching the fougas outside his window, the bright banners with their weeping sun and devouring wave. He had returned from his encounter with the Compassionate Redeemer, his raucous laughter rousing his idle replicant; and then spoken with the Architects. The breach had spread to the intake valves beneath the Gate on Archangels; the sump pumps on Angels had been crushed beneath the weight of the ocean as it flooded the first tier of the filtration system. One of the Architects had run a meteorological survey and it was as he had hoped, one of the scores of storms that battered the coast each summer was building to the east. By the following day, Æstival Tide, the winds Outside would be strong enough to rip the hair from a man's head. When they opened the gate to free the Compassionate Redeemer and loose the throngs upon the beach to watch, the change in pressure would be enough to send fault lines rippling through the domes like fire through straw.

The Architect Imperator turned from the window and walked to the wall. He pressed a switch hidden beneath an oil portrait of his dead wife. A sweet smell filled the room, a smell of orange-flower and jasmine. There was the sound of soft laughter.

In the middle of the room darts of light flickered, red and green and gold, then slowly coalesced into the image of a woman sitting on a white high-backed chair. She was laughing, her gray eyes flashed mockingly, and though no sound came from her mouth as she spoke, he could still hear her saying, “By the time you need this you'll be so old you won't be able to see it clearly.”

Of course he was not that old at all, and she had been only a few months older than the polyfiled image when they'd murdered her. Without taking his eyes from the image he reached and switched it off.

He would go and tell them now, he decided. It would be the final commission of his duties. As he gathered his things he thought, briefly, of his son, and wondered where he had been these last few days. From his pocket he withdrew a small piece of paper neatly lettered with green ink, and with a tiny silver butane lighter he set it aflame and watched it turn to white ash. Then he walked down the hall to where the cylinders and monitors hummed contentedly to themselves. His last words to the Architects were a series of commands, and a final order to destroy all records of Araboth's construction.

After he left the fougas drifted out of sight. The empty room grew dark and the smell of burned paper gradually faded away, though the scent of orangeflower and jasmine lingered a little longer.