Aestival Tide (48 page)

It was some time before he realized that it should not be this dark. In the distance the tunnel's mouth gaped, no bigger than the end of his thumb. Light trickled from the opening, but it was fainter than before, and had a greenish cast. His legs felt numb from walking. To either side the walls of the tunnel seemed to glow faintly. There was a strong smell of dead fish.

From the corners of his eye he glimpsed small shadows flickering against the tunnel walls. When he stopped he saw that it was only a trick of the feeble light. There were no real shadows, only dark blotches on the tiles. He rubbed his eyes, then stepped toward the wall. There was something odd about it, something he hadn't noticed before, when he had been so intent upon listening to Tast'annin ranting on and on. His foot caught on something, and he kicked away a soft object. There was enough light for him to see it was some kind of clothing, a bundle of dark blue cloth that hit the sand with a soft thud. He turned from it, knelt and ran his fingers across the wall's broken tile, heedless of the dank mold catching under his nails.

There were words there, written in a script all but erased by time. Words and crudely drawn pictures. Nasrani snatched his hand back when he saw that he had smeared the images, patches of ruddy clay and something black like charcoal clotted across his palm. He drew back a little, squinting as he tried to read in the watery light.

The letters slanted down and disappeared into the sand etching the wall's bottom edge. Behind him he could hear a faint whistling sound. Very slowly he lifted his eyes, and saw it drawn above the broken lettering. A shape like a coiled spring etched upon the tile, opening into a fluid line that circled something meant to be a hill, he thought, a hill dark with small shapes that might have been people, or houses. Above it spear-shaped missiles, wavering lines to indicate flames, a horrible thing meant to be a human face, but veined with glistening tendrils of mildew. Beneath the spiral was a carefully drawn curl, opening into a hand with fingers splayed, like the claws of a stooping raptor.

“ ‘
The Wave is come
,' ” Nasrani breathed. He traced the air above the image, leaned forward until his cheek pressed against the moist wall, and closed his eyes. Teeth had been drawn jaggedly in the mouth of the wave, teeth and a tongue that unfurled until it reached the smooth base of the hillside.

Behind him the whistling grew louder, was swallowed into a gurgling roar. Too late he turned and tried to run. But it was already there, it had found him as it would find his sisters and all the others who waited for it, arrogant or fearful or unknowing. Just as they had always said, as had been predicted for a hundred years, as it had come centuries before and would come again to claim the city they had been proud and foolish enough to build within its path. He tripped in the darkness and fell, and as he slumped to the ground he heard it, a million feet pounding up the twisted passageway, its voice a roar that deafened him, winding and turning until it found him crouched beneath its image and crushed him there, while all about the stones shrieked and tumbled into sand.

“Ucalegon,” he whispered. The wave devoured him.

I
T WAS DIFFICULT TO
see what was happening from the viewing platform in the Narthex.

“Is that some kind of
fish?
” asked Nike, incredulous. Rain blew in sharp cold gusts up from the open Gate. She shivered, wishing she'd worn a rain cape or something warmer than her thin silk suit.

At her side the precentor, still upset that her rendition of the hyperdulia had been interrupted, stood smoking a camphor cigarette and gazing out to sea with an unfocused, rather sour expression.

“Someone over there yelled it was that thing you keep down on Dominations. The whale.” She flicked her cigarette ash in the direction of a group huddled at the edge of the balustrade, primarily intimates of the Quir who seemed giddy from kef and champagne. The chromium mitre of the Archbishop of the Church of Christ Cadillac rose above the little crowd, a somber note amid the doomsday revelry. A moment later, the Archbishop detached herself from the gathering and hurried to Nike's side.

“There is something you didn't tell me,” she said angrily. Her face was bright pink and shining with sweat. She looked terrified. “This morphodite you chose for the sacrifice, what's her name, Reed—”

“Reive,” Nike corrected her. She patted her cheeks with her handkerchief and looked about distractedly for her sister.

“Reive,” the Archbishop went on. “She's innocent!” She inclined her head toward the group still leaning over the balustrade, calling excitedly to unseen people below as a hapless servant tried to hold a sheet of plastic over their heads. Shrieks and laughter as the balcony shuddered and debris hailed down from the ceiling. “The Quir says she told him she was
innocent.
Someone else says your sister acted in collusion with the Aviator Imperator to murder Shiyung, and falsely accused this mantic. To deliberately enact the rite of propitiation with such a sacrifice—”

She stopped, breathless, and stared out to sea. Nike stepped beside her, wiping rain from her nose and squinting as she tried once again to pick out the Redeemer's small shadow amid all that gray and silver. Black clouds moved so quickly overhead that she could imagine the howling wind was the sound of their passing. She could barely make out a dark shape leaping dolphin-wise upon the horizon before it was swallowed by immense waves.

“Zalophus,” she said, turning to the precentor and shaking her head. The Archbishop stared at her as though she were mad. “The whale: a very archaic geneslave, its name is Zalophus. I can't imagine how it escaped.”

“The entire city is collapsing!” exploded the precentor, ignoring the Archbishop's disapproving gaze. “You've brought this upon us, you and your sisters—”

Nike made some vague
ttt-ttt
sounds and flapped her hands in the precentor's face. “My sister is a fool,” she said with surprising vehemence, and poked the Archbishop with one wet finger. “Actually, they're both fools, but at least Shiyung is a dead fool. Âziz is the one you want to talk to about all this, Your Eminence. Not only was that morphodite innocent, she was Shiyung and Nasrani's child. My sister wanted her dead. If you can find a 'file crew you might question her about it. Also about the death of Sajur Panggang, who claimed that the domes are collapsing. Please excuse me.”

The Archbishop and the precentor fell back, dumbfounded, as Nike pushed her way past them. On the balustrade behind her triumphant cheers arose as the Quir's aluminum shades were hoisted above the small crowd and the rain sluiced off in shining sheets.

“May Day, May Day,” Nike muttered to herself. It was something she had heard once in a cinema show about explosions on large ships. The floor shook and she steadied herself against a column, reached into a pocket and emptied a morpha tube into her mouth. She waited a moment and tapped an amphaze ampule to her throat for good measure, then closed her eyes and grimaced, waiting for the burst of clearheadedness to come. Her back molars tingled and her mouth went dry. For what seemed like a very long time there was a shrill buzzing in her ears and a popping sound. When she opened her eyes she saw that the column she had been leaning against had toppled. She looked over to see if Âziz was with the group on the balustrade and saw that the balustrade too was gone, sheared away as though it had been a bit of unwanted furze on a topiary sculpture.

“This is very bad,” Nike said thickly. The high-pitched buzzing turned out to be screams, an unrelenting series of shrieks and moans that seemed to come from everywhere, above and beneath and to every side of the margravine. She started to take a step past the fallen column, her legs moving with unnatural slowness, and almost immediately stopped. There were people pinned beneath the column, some of them still moving and at least one of them screaming so loudly that Nike's hair stood on end. When she glanced down at her feet she saw that the pointed toes of her boots were splashed with blood and what at first looked like grass. Nike made a small unhappy noise and stumbled backward. Her siblings' many complaints about her intemperance finally seemed to be not entirely unwarranted. She wished she had not taken so much morpha.

“Your Grace, Your Grace—”

She turned unsteadily, her eyes tearing. Smoke was billowing up from somewhere, not the sweet-scented smoke of Æstival incense but black oily clouds with a horrible chemical tang. She could scarcely make out the small plump figure of the Quir, one half of his pallid face covered in blood as though sloppily rouged.

“
Yes?
” she heard herself asking politely, but the Quir had grabbed her hand and was dragging her after him as though she had refused to acknowledge him. And indeed, when, coughing, she brought her hand to her mouth, she could feel her jaws tightly clenched, and could hear a droning humming noise that she realized, with embarrassment, that she herself was making.

“Your Grace, here, may be safer, you took a bad hit back there—”

She let her hand fall back to her side and saw that it was bright red; from the handkerchief dangling between her fingers dripped large spots of blood. She started to say something to the Quir, ask him what exactly it was the morphodite had said to him about her innocence. But then they were struggling down a long stairway, the Quir pushing bodies from their path, some limp but others lively enough to shout or howl as they tumbled from the steps. It was not until they reached the bottom that Nike could catch her breath and look around, and see that the Quir had brought her to the very mouth of the Lahatiel Gate itself.

“My sister,” she gasped, pulling away from the Quir's surprisingly strong grasp and striving to peer through the haze of smoke and rain that clouded everything. “Âziz—”

It was not what she had meant to say, she had meant to thank him—she had some vague idea that his intent in bringing her here was to save her—but suddenly all she could think about was Âziz, and how if there was any way out of this hellish morass, Âziz was sure to know of it. But the Quir's expression as he stared back at her was not precisely that of a person, even the leader of a young and disagreeable cult, who had gone to some trouble to save the margravine of the Holy City of the Americas.

“Your sister has fled,” said the Quir. For the first time Nike noticed that his large eyes, red-rimmed and slightly protuberant from smoking kef, were keen and, possessing of a certain malevolent intelligence. He brushed a tear of blood from one cheek, leaving a brownish smear. His voice rose as he strove to be heard above the shrieking wind. “As soon as I set eyes upon that child I saw Nasrani in her, strong as steel. If I had known sooner I would have taken her in myself. We have seen now where your carelessness has led. The Compassionate Redeemer is dead, and the Healing Wind is upon us.”

He gestured angrily. To Nike it seemed that he pointed where the Lahatiel Gate was flung open, one of its immense steel doors as carefully askew as a bedroom screen. The steps leading down to the beach were mobbed with people, screaming, fighting, trapped between the collapse of Araboth above and behind them and the oncoming tide before.

“The Wind,” Nike repeated in a childish voice. She lifted her head, as though to see the Healing Wind coiling in the air above her; but what she saw was far worse.

In the uppermost reaches of Araboth, where for time immemorial the domes had cast their bluish light—periwinkle, cobalt, violet, but always blue—there where they had always curved protectively above the twinkling city, a hole had rent the sky.

It
was
the sky. Steel-gray, slashed with a dull poisonous green, a jagged gash larger than the Gate itself gaped within the domes, a hole larger than the palace, larger than anything Nike could imagine—

As she stared, black specks flew into it, like motes swimming in a huge eye, and horrified, the margravine realized that these were
people,
people and rickshaws and buildings, all manner of things from within the city, sucked upward by the rocketing change in air pressure. Nike clapped her hands to her ears and screamed—she could feel it now, something pounding at her skull, but without a sound because suddenly she could no longer hear. Everything around her was whirling, flying, falling. In the numbing silence walls and floor gave way, and then she too was falling only something caught her, someone—she glimpsed the Quir, white with terror but pulling at her desperately—and then there was an explosion, and she could hear again, and she was lying behind piles of broken stone and there was glass everywhere, shining, and blood, but she was safe for the moment and alive.

“What—” Nike coughed. The Quir, his indigo robes torn and bloodstained, gave her a cruel look.

“Shut up,” he said hoarsely. There were other people with them other
galli
she saw now, some of them badly injured but all seemingly able to walk. They were in a sort of alcove hidden behind the stairs leading down to the beach. Rain flooded the floor, driven through gaps in the wall through which Nike could glimpse the mayhem outside. Waves were lashing at the steps, driving those who had survived the collapse of the domes upward; but at the top of the steps there was nothing but wreckage now, human and stone and steel.