Æstival Tide

Prologue: IN ARABOTH

INSIDE OF A REGENERATION vat on Seraphim, the highest level of Araboth, something wakes. Once a man and now something less than that, still it thinks of itself as him; still he recalls the manner of his dying, as though it were a dream.

Because, as the poets say, Death was really just a brief sleep after all. There was a smell of brimstone, and of sleet; then a wash of light the color of the sea. Then, for a timeless reach, there was nothing: that was when he was really dead. But now he is waking once more; and if he had a voice he would shriek to shatter the chamber that imprisons him.

The woman stands above the vat, staring down at the puffy white body with its net of tubes and wires running from it. She knows he is alive again. She says nothing; only leans forward a little, so that the cuff of her crimson surgical gown trails into the vat of nutrients and tangles with a tube running into the man’s mouth. Her mouth opens and she whispers a name; and almost, almost she can imagine that he might hear her.

In the tank the man tries to stir, struggles to let his arms flow through this warm pool, but if no longer dead he is still unsure if he is alive. He can feel nothing. His arms are little more than a memory of flesh and sinew, his eyes open onto the saline darkness and there is nothing there to see. He wonders if this is another nightmare—there were many nightmares, untold nightmares, once—or if he has somehow, again, failed his masters. Because if that is the case, he knows where he is. He knows that this is not Hell but a regeneration chamber. He knows that Hell is not other people, as a man once said; Hell is oneself, the same broken body and twisted mind doomed to return to itself over and over again, a barren country where not even Death claims dominion. And from somewhere within the softly churning ocean that is all he now knows comes the memory of another face, a charred-white skull crumbling into ruin as its voice rings triumphantly through the cold air—

“ ‘ Look at the stars! Look, look up at the sky! —’ ”

But here in the regeneration chamber there is no triumph in rebirth. There is no sky here, there are no stars. He is in a place that sees nothing of the heavens. And then suddenly it is as though a caul has been stripped from his eyes. It seems that at last he can see something.

He sees a face, the face of a woman hovering above his watery crucible. It is a face he recognizes. The watery surface of the regeneration chamber ripples as he flails beneath it, knowing now the truth: that even in death he cannot escape her, even in death she will make a weapon of him. She has found him, she has reclaimed the fallen one and brought him to Araboth. The grinding wheel turns once more and he is doomed again to eternal service in the War in Hell.

To reach Angels, the Undercity, one must go down, down through the nine levels of the vast stepped pyramid that is Araboth. One begins at Level Nine, Seraphim, the pinnacle of the Holy City. Seraphim, where the Orsinate Ascendancy dwell—the city’s rulers, the surviving members of the deranged Orsina family who still exert their febrile will upon the ruins of the continent outside. The Orsinate, themselves subject to the whims of the true Ascendant Autocracy, who live in the slowly decaying wheels of the HORUS stations, the Human Orbital Research Units in Space, where they retreated after the mass extinctions and mutations of the Third Shining. On some evenings the skygates open in the Central Quincunx Dome. Then the Aviators return in their warplanes, the Gryphons and the great silent dirigibles called fougas arrowing down through the heavy air of Araboth to refuel. Afterward, the Aviators walk unsteadily upon the smooth white avenues, and behind their eyes one can glimpse the flames of islands burning in the Archipelago, and smell in their sweat the sweet reek of a madness that overcomes fear. On these evenings, after the Aviators are gone and the skygate remains open, the Orsinate and their cabinet gather on the viewing platforms and stare up through that little lozenge of ultramarine darkness. They imagine, some of them, that they can see the faint lights of the HORUS stations tracking across the sky—grimy stars dying an interminable silent death even as their masters continue to send their whispered commands earthward, to land with the Aviators on the ancient ramparts of the domed city. It is the only glimpse of the stars that anyone in Araboth will ever see, except for once every decade at Æstival Tide.

On Level One, the Undercity, no one has ever seen the stars. And few of the aristocracy on Level Nine have ever seen the Undercity. To reach it one must leave Seraphim and descend to Cherubim, and thence to Thrones, and Dominations, Virtues and Powers and Principalities and Archangels, each level of the ziggurat larger and more ancient and ruinous than the one above. The levels are named for the Divine Choirs, the orders of angels. A subtle joke played by those who founded Araboth centuries before. Those founders were religious people—thus The Holy City of the Americas —members of two cruel and ancient faiths who joined forces after the Second Ascension and have ruled this continent ever since. And so the oldest level of the ziggurat is Level One, Angels, where once another city stood, before there were domes and mutagenic rains and space stations marking drunken parabolas across the night sky. In Araboth, Level One is the Undercity. And few people go there of their own free will.

There are ancient things in the Undercity. The Beautiful One is one of them; but for centuries the Beautiful One has been asleep. Like the man thrashing feebly in the regeneration chamber on Level Nine, the Beautiful One is somewhere between wakefulness and dreaming; though not between life and death. Because the Beautiful One is not human, and so she has never really been alive.

But now the Beautiful One is waking, too. On the lowest level of the Holy City, Level One where only Angels dwell, there the Beautiful One is stirring. Her glass eyes flicker and her metal lips part and she sees them, the others who have come to worship her. Angels, they are called ironically on the upper levels; the fallen ones. But in her twilight state the Beautiful One does not see angels. She sees a man, tall and finely dressed, and around him pale forms crouched in the darkness, white-skinned, corpselike, their eyes glowing an unearthly green. They are rasas, “the scraped ones,” regenerated corpses set to work on Archangels’ refineries and the medifacs of Principalities. The ones who are here in the Undercity have somehow managed to escape their servitude above. Even the dead, it seems, can recognize that there are degrees of suffering in Hell. Sometimes the Beautiful One thinks that she hears them call her by an ancient name, their tongueless mouths struggling over the word; and in her sleep she answers them.

But the Beautiful One does not know this, not really. She does not know because she has slept these four hundred years, and dreamed another’s dream. Her mind is composed of glass and thread, of circuitry and nucleoreceptive fluids. And dreams, of course, and histories: all the memories of those who came before her.

“Mother.” The words are so garbled that only the Beautiful One can understand them. “Mother, Mother. Please.”

“Nefertity,” whispers the finely dressed man in his crimson greatcoat. It is the sort of clothing, of archaic yet fine, even baroque, styling, that only a member of the Orsinate might wear. His hand caresses her cold glass cheek, presses gently the spot upon her lower lip, the indentation that might have been left by too rough a kiss. “Nefertity, speak to me.”

Ah, she thinks. From within the coils of metal thread a flame begins to lick and preen. Ah.

Her eyelids snap open. From the watching rasas comes a sound like a hiss or a sigh, and their pallid hands move slowly.

“Nefertity,” breathes the waiting man.

“Ah,” she says again; and as her eyes begin to move the room flares gold with light.

“Ah,” the Angels cry out, and creep closer as she starts to speak.

“Greetings, sisters and brothers,” she breathes. It is a woman’s voice, calm and somewhat breathless. “This is the United Provinces Recorded History project, copyright 2109, Registered Nemosyne Unit number 45: NFRTI, the National Feminist Recorded Technical Index, or Nefertity.”

The voice pauses. There is a soft whir, the whicker of datafiles spinning. Then, “The intent of our project is to provide a record of oral histories of those who might otherwise be forgotten. The Albhuz Femicides, the Bibliochlasm of 2097 and the subsequent holocaust have taught us the terrible necessity of projects such as these. Together, the Nemosyne Units of the UPRH will ensure that these voices will not have been silenced forever. As the Recorded Feminist Index of the American Vatican, I represent only one portion of the vast database available through the UPRH. Your local infonet will tell you how to link with others.”

The whirring stops for a moment. The waiting rasas remain silent, oblivious to her words. It has been two hundred years since the bibliochlasm has even been admitted as part of the Ascendants’ heritage; more years than that since the last nemosyne was believed lost in the infernos of the Third Shining.

“Nefertity,” the man in the crimson greatcoat whispers, “speak to me.”

The nemosyne clicks; then,

“ ‘I am the Million,’ ” she begins. Even the man is heard to sigh.

The Beautiful One Is Here.

Chapter 1 A BREACH AMONG ANGELS

THE SCREEN SHOWED A luminous formation like the cutaway view of a chambered nautilus. At various points blinking lights signaled the presence of the Wardens, the computerized guardians of the Orsinate’s special entries to the gravators that shuttled them from one level of the Holy City to the next. In the very center of the nautilus a small rectangle glowed brilliant purple—the palace where the Orsinate Ascendancy and their staff lived and ordered the systemized destruction of the world outside the domes.

It was not really a nautilus, of course. Hobi knew that, as did his father, the Architect Imperator, whose long, thin fingers traced and coded new entries onto the screen. It was a bird’s-eye view of Araboth; but Hobi was doubtful as to whether any birds remained Outside to see those radiant tiers beneath the domes. In fact, the discovery that there were still birds Outside would have disturbed Hobi greatly. Hobi was only seventeen. His education at the chromium hands of a Seventeenth Generation Tutorial Scholiast had taught him (as everyone in Araboth learned sooner or later) that the world Outside was a treacherous place, even a hellish one. Anything that survived Out There—birds, insects, viruses—posed a threat to the survival of humanity, humanity of course being best represented by those who lived beneath the Quincunx Domes, in particular the Orsinate and their cabinet. At any rate Hobi’s education—heavily tilted toward the sort of effete skills (literature, calligraphy, computer programming) that young aristocrats had received for centuries, perhaps millennia—had fallen off in the last year, since his mother’s murder. Standing now behind his father, staring at the nautilus on the bright screen, was the first time Hobi had looked at a monitor in months.

“Structural damage to Studio Ninety-seven, Grid Fourteen, Powers Level,” a voice murmured. It was a mechanical voice, the voice of the Architects who had designed and now maintained the city, under his father’s supervision of course.

“Very good,” Sajur Panggang said softly. It was four o’clock, false morning under the Quincunx Domes. A porcelain cup of kehveh steamed on the desk at his elbow. It smelled of chocolate and bitter almonds and made the boy realize how tired he was. Sajur reached for the cup and sipped it absently. “Next level,” he said.

Hobi yawned. He had been passing his father’s workchambers on his way to the dining room and stuck his head in to say good morning. His father’s disheveled kimono and the spent tabs of amphaze on the desk indicated that he had been up all night, again.

“Something wrong?” Hobi asked. He inhaled the kehveh’s rich smell and wondered if he should have the servers bring him breakfast in here.

“Mmm? No, no.” Sajur bent forward until his nose touched the screen, squinting as a red trail spun out from Powers Level down to Principalities. The Architects were centuries old. While they constantly reassessed and repaired themselves, the image quality on the monitors had been deteriorating for decades now. “Just performing a criterion, couldn’t sleep.”

“Oh.” Hobi leaned against the wall and rubbed the scant stubble on his chin. Sajur had not slept well since his wife’s murder, many months ago. The boy rubbed his eyes, stared more closely at the screen. It looked odd: something different about the configuration of the outer walls, maybe. “Is there a problem?”

Sajur Panggang shook his head, then listened intently as the Architects recited the inventory for Principalities Level. “Now Archangels,” he commanded when the voice fell silent.

“Nothing has changed on Archangels,” said the Architects after a few minutes. Hobi thought of returning to bed.

“Good,” murmured Sajur Panggang. “Now Angels. Level One.”

The light-trail that had marked the descent to the other levels darkened to violet. The nautilus on the screen disappeared, was replaced by a seemingly random series of reticulated squares and rectangles and triangles, crosshatched with a dizzying array of blinking lights. Hobi straightened, peered over his father’s shoulders. Shivering he tugged his robe tighter about his narrow chest. He had never seen an enhanced image of Angels before. As far as he knew even his father had no business down there, and certainly the Architects had never renovated it. Only escaped rasas were rumored to live in the Undercity—if, of course, one considered them to be living at all. Hobi did not. Just thinking about them now was enough to make him wish he had stayed in bed. He rubbed his arms and leaned closer to his father, staring at the display. Even the model of the Undercity was disturbing: the frenetic lines and squares that had nothing of the exquisite order of the rest of Araboth; the black shapeless areas that showed where the ruins of the original city had decayed and even the Architects had failed to restructure them. Hobi had heard stories about people going to the Undercity. Nasrani Orsina, the exiled margravin who was a good friend of his father’s, was rumored to have a mistress down there. It was just the sort of dreadful thing you’d expect of an Orsina.

The Architects hummed and whirred. “Diagnostic,” ordered Sajur Panggang. Hobi was surprised at how impatient his father sounded.

Click. Click. Click. Hobi shifted his weight to his other foot, trying not to look too curious. After his mother died, his father had forbidden Hobi to spend time in his study. Before, the boy had liked to sip Amity pilfered from his father’s cabinets, watching the flickers and faint jets of light stream from the Architects as they programmed renovations and repairs beneath the Quincunx Domes.

But it had been months since Hobi had slipped in here. He wondered, sometimes, just what his father was up to in his study; but he didn’t dare ask him. No one disturbed the Architect Imperator. He was too important, the only person in Araboth who truly understood the workings of the Architects. Even the Orsinate’s murder of the Architect Imperator’s wife had been carefully scheduled to coincide with one of Sajur’s interminable love affairs, so as not to unduly disturb his work. Hobi thought that perhaps the Orsinate had misjudged his father. Certainly Hobi himself had been surprised by the intensity of Sajur’s grief, which had taken the form of a nearly monkish solitude. As for Hobi, Angelika Panggang had always been a somewhat mythic figure to him. He identified her more with figures from poetry—Medea, Anne Sexton, Quisa Helmut—than with flesh-and-blood women or even certain replicants. So Hobi could only assume that his father’s arcane doings in his study were somehow tangled up with his grief.

Now, gazing at the flickering screen in front of him, Hobi still could not imagine what the Architects were doing. Perhaps the Orsinate had commanded a new wing be added to the palace. Perhaps the Undercity had flooded—people were always predicting that; it was a favorite sport in Araboth, along with timoring and guessing who would be the next of Shiyung Orsina’s lovers to die a horrible death. The boy nibbled his thumbnail thoughtfully. His father only stared at the screen in silence, tapping one finger against his porcelain cup.

“There is a breach in the fundus of Angels,” the Architects replied at last. “The rift at Pier Forty-three is spreading.”

“Thank you. Indoctrinate Pier Forty-four.”

Hobi glanced sideways at his father. In profile Sajur Panggang resembled his dead wife, the same fine features and sharp nose. They had been first cousins. Like nearly everyone else on the upper levels of Araboth, they were distant relatives of the Orsinate.

“A breach?” Hobi asked, a little uneasily. “What’s that mean?”

Sajur Panggang started, looked at his son as though noticing him for the first time. He shook his head. “Nothing. Routine maintenance. Aren’t you up a little early?”

Considering how late you were out last night, Hobi thought. He grinned and shrugged. His father frowned and flicked at one corner of the screen. The monitor went blank. Sajur leaned back in his chair, the long ornamented sleeves of his kimono brushing the floor. “Would you please ask Khum to bring some more kehveh? Or no—I’ll go with you.”

The Architect Imperator stood and stretched. The brocaded sleeves slid from thin wrists to show the emerald mourning bands he still wore. Hobi noticed how his father’s hand shook as he picked up his porcelain cup, and how Sajur looked back at the empty screen, the banks of ancient monitors like the walls of a tomb. On one of them the image of the Undercity still lingered, its web of ruined roadways and empty channels glowing faintly. The Architect Imperator stared at it for a long moment while his son waited, puzzled. Then he carefully closed the door and turned down the hall.

Behind them in the empty chamber the other screens slowly started to glow, blue and gold and violet. The Architects began to click and whisper, doing their master’s work.

Chapter 2 THE GREEN COUNTRY

IN A RICKSHAW ON Thrones Level, Ceryl Waxwing watched a moujik girl die. The child’s arms had been pinned to the seat, the skin folded back and neatly pierced with slender spikes as long as Ceryl’s finger. As the girl moaned the exposed veins and muscles quivered like taut yarn, and blood seeped onto the seat’s verdigris leather. For nearly an hour now Ceryl had stared expectantly at her face, waiting for the look Âziz Orsina had told her would come—“When the timoring is successful and they know they’re dying,” the margravine had said. Every word she uttered always sounded as though she were somehow managing to suck it from the air. Ceryl hated her voice, her face (the same blade of a face she shared with her sisters Nike and Shiyung and their exiled brother Nasrani, the same face that appeared on the devalued currency that Ceryl had used to buy the moujik), the way she smelled, of cunt and sweat and opium sugar—but Ceryl was too close to them now, the Orsinate, to afford such simple prejudices. “They get this look when they know, children especially…”

That was why Ceryl had bought the moujik girl on Principalities Level, knowing she stood a good chance of having her throat slashed while she was there. As it was three moujiks had surrounded the rickshaw, gibbering at the rickshaw driver and spitting at her as she clambered back in, the sedated girl in her arms. It was nearly two hundred years since the particular conflict with the Balkhash Commonwealth that had brought the moujiks here, peasants who were ostensibly prisoners of war but really slaves put to work in the medifacs, the great abattoirs on Principalities. Nothing went to waste in Araboth: the bodies of the dead were processed as efficiently as the vegetable and animal proteins manufactured in the vivariums on Dominations. Only members of the Orsinate and their cabinet received the honor of a funeral pyre. And so the moujik peasants proved an ideal resource, a ready labor breeding pool that did not deplete the Orsinate’s own population.

Despite their centuries of servitude, the moujiks had never lost their belligerence, or their distinctive appearance. Tawny skin, flat face, round eyes the color of honey. Not as fair as Ceryl was, with her close-cropped sandy hair and blue eyes. But certainly darker than the Orsinate, although the Orsinas’ long alliance with the religious fanatics from the East had left its own imprint—one could tell an Orsina bastard by its doe eyes, just a little too close-set, and its dusky skin.

No one would ever mistake a moujik for one of the ruling caste. They lacked the Orsinate’s cunning and sophistication, and even the most rudimentary reading skills. But enough belligerence remained in the moujiks to impel them toward the body riots of the Third Ascension, when they had seized Principalities Level and murdered three Ascendant Governors who happened to be touring the medifacs. Since then, the Orsinate maintained an uneasy truce with the medifacs. Among other things, they allowed the moujiks control of the city’s black market body trade, for those on the lower levels who could not afford prosthetics. This same truce allowed for a brisk barter in moujik children for timoring, children not as highly prized as those from the upper levels, Thrones or Dominations say.

It had been Ceryl’s first solo attempt at timoring, her first trip down to the medifacs. She had felt more terror taking the gravator to Principalities than at gazing upon the moujik child’s contorted face. She turned to stare down at her again, then hastily looked away and groped at her pockets until she found a candicaine pipette. She broke it and inhaled, let the cold rush calm her. There had been no sublime wave of fear as she stared at the pathetic thing beside her. Oh, the child had struggled and screamed enough before the morpha set, there was no doubt that she was afraid. But Ceryl herself felt only disgust, and shame: the child looked so small and white against the dark leather. Blood had pooled on the seat beside her, staining Ceryl’s catsuit. She leaned over to touch one of the pinions of flesh gleaming slightly in the purplish light. The rickshaw driver had pulled down the plastic shades before they went down to the medifacs. Now the smell of blood and meat filled the inside of the tiny wooden car. Suddenly she felt sick.

“Stop—” she gasped. The rickshaw shuddered to a halt. The driver turned to stare at her blankly, spat a wad of betel juice onto the pavement. “Just wait,” Ceryl choked, and opened the door.

Violet light spilled onto her, the perpetual dusk of the upper levels. She smelled the warm mist heavy with the scent of the sea Outside. Despite the thousands of filters humming and doing their best to dispel it, the smell and damp of the sea still got in. Lately it seemed inescapable. Those members of the pleasure cabinet who were more superstitious than Ceryl shook their heads and whispered about bad omens—strands of kelp found floating in filtration chambers, the odd bit of mussel shell clogging a drain. Certainly Ceryl had noticed the smell more lately, but she attributed that to the fact that Æstival Tide was less than a week away.

Now it was that smell that made her feel better. She breathed deeply, eyes closed. A vague impression of warmth and green flooded her, a memory of the sound of birds. She had seen the ocean, of course, ten years earlier at the last Æstival Tide, when they finally opened the Lahatiel Gate. The sight of that restless sea had terrified her, the closest she ever came to the holy terror of timoring. Ever since then she had wondered whether you would always feel like that, if you lived near it. Really lived near it—on real sand and smelling real air and tasting brackish water—and not within this unimaginably vast and intricate labyrinth of a city, dying beneath its domes between the blasted prairie and the threatening sea. Maybe, if she lived by the sea, she would not be plagued by nightmares and forced to spend much of her monthly salary on pantomancers, those quack dream-merchants.

Her cheeks grew cool with mist and she sighed, opening her eyes. The rickshaw had stopped at the outermost rim of the Thrones Level Grid. The avenue here was in blessedly good repair, the surface beneath her feet smooth and cool. Only, behind one of the rickshaw’s wheels, she noticed a crack in the pavement, like a thread of water running down the avenue.

“That’s odd,” she said aloud. The rickshaw driver cocked his head at her and shrugged.

“Something new,” he said, spitting a crimson mouthful of betel juice onto the ground. “Cracks. I had to repair a wheel bearing twice in three days.”

“Cracks,” Ceryl repeated softly, and stared down at the ground.

Behind her were the broken spires and crooked facades of Thrones’ residential neighborhoods. Like everything else on the upper levels of Araboth, these apartments were prefabricated by the Architects. Over the last few centuries the metal and plasteel structures had cracked and buckled under the weight of the levels above, until all of Thrones seemed to be caving in upon itself, albeit in a subdued, almost genteel manner. Although of course living quarters here were a vast improvement over the dayglo ghettos of Virtues, where the hermaphrodites lived, or the grim cubicles that housed the ’filers and media crews on Powers. At least on Thrones the roads had always been in good repair.

Ceryl sighed and rubbed her nose. A few yards in front of her, a shimmering heat fence crackled and sparked as moisture filtered down from the Quincunx Domes. Beyond the fence was nothing, a dizzying plunge to the next level, Dominations, and thence to Virtues, and Powers, and so on down to the lowest level of the crazily layered ziggurat that was Araboth. If one could see the city from above (but of course you could not, unless you were an Aviator), it would resemble a huge and living pagoda, its vaulted domes rearing above the nine levels like the chitinous shell of some monstrous arthropod. And Outside, the sea: smashing against the domes during the months-long storm season, whispering through the dreams of the Imperators’ children as they slept in their gilded beds on Cherubim.

It was only the Architects that protected them from the horrors of the sea and the world Outside. There, an earth seeded by centuries of radiation and viral rains had given birth to heteroclites and demons. Only the tireless Architects protected them from that. On the uppermost levels, Seraphim and Cherubim, the Ascendants’ robotic engineers constantly built and rebuilt Araboth’s pinnacles and spires and moats. You might wake one morning and find that the outside of your chambers had been gilded. Or there might be a new place of worship where last night there had been nothing: a shining new crucifix-speared mosque, wherein the Orsinate propitiated the horrors of the ravening world with offerings of prisoners taken in ceaseless raids against the Commonwealth.

Or, if you were unfortunate enough to live on the lower levels, you might find that in a single night the Architects had destroyed your ghetto on Powers. Or they might have torched a refinery on Archangels, immolating thousands of rasas as the Architects’ grinding machines leveled factories and apartment buildings made of polymer-strengthened paper. The next day perhaps an ice-blue lake would be there, with Orsinate bastards skimming across its surface in their azure gas-fired proas, while from its banks their replicant nursemaids stood guard with blank yet watchful eyes.

Or there might be nothing there at all, a smoking ruin such as Ceryl’s dead lover Giton Arrowsmith had found once, where his chambers had been. That was before Ceryl’s promotion to the pleasure cabinet. She had never thought she would look back with any fondness upon Giton’s fishy-smelling cubicle on Dominations; but here she was, tearfully nostalgic in front of a heat fence on Thrones. There was no reason for it, for any of it. There was absolutely no reasoning behind the Architects’ ceaseless construction and deconstruction of the city. Even the margravine Âziz admitted to that, and Sajur Panggang, the Architect Imperator who was supposed to monitor the great machines.

“We grew lazy and forgot how to program them,” he had told Ceryl once, and shrugged. “So now they program themselves. I, um, occasionally make suggestions to them, and if I’m fortunate, well, they listen to me.”

He was a small slender man, the Architect Imperator, with the large gentle eyes and strong chin of his Orsina cousins. Unlike his cousins, Sajur was gifted with a keen, if narrowly focused, intelligence. The Architects had designed most of the buildings in Araboth—for example, those dizzying residences on Cherubim that assumed such bizarrely baroque proportions that they could scarcely be looked at by a sane person, let alone lived in. But Sajur Panggang had created the Reception Areas, the labyrinthine prisons that supplied the vivariums on Dominations with food. And he had also designed many of Araboth’s hundreds of kerchief-sized parks, where the marvel of holographic landscaping made it seem that one gazed across a moor swept with lavender sage in bloom, or peered up at the unimaginably distant bulk of mountains with peaks so sharp they might have been cut from paper—which, in essence, they were.

“The Orsinas have never been known for their intellect,” Sajur had confessed to Ceryl. This was not long after his wife’s murder. Ceryl, recalling her own grief after Giton’s death, had expressed her sympathy for Sajur’s bereavement. “It’s a miracle it’s all still standing, really.”

He had cast an ironic glance at the ceiling, and stroked the elegant cobalt cylinder of a drafting mannequin. “A wonderful, wonderful miracle.” Ceryl recalled him enviously. She wished she could consider anything inside of Araboth a miracle. Because as she stared out at the heat fence sparking a few feet in front of her, the pale violet light that made everything look like its own shadow, Ceryl felt only despair.

Behind her the moujik girl gasped. Ceryl’s knee bumped the open door as she turned and with one hand brushed a tendril of greasy hair from the child’s forehead. As she watched a film covered the girl’s wide eyes, like gray silk. Then she was still. Ceryl continued to stare at her, aware that she was experiencing nothing but a faint and rising nausea, the same feeling she had if she lingered too long at one of the promenades on Cherubim, looking down upon the dwindling lights of Araboth’s lower levels.

So, she thought, and grinned miserably. She really was incapable of the higher emotions. Not even Giton’s execution, not even this child dying in her lap, could move her. Only to the morphodites, the dream-mantics, could she confess what truly sickened her and haunted her dreams: the city itself beneath its shell of eternal twilight, breathing softly all around her, while its unseen Architects chattered and hummed and ordered the endless renovation of their animate hive.

She let her breath out in a long gasp and slid to the edge of the seat. A gust of hot air shot up from beyond the heat fence, heavy with the doughy smell of fermentation from one of the vivariums below. Ceryl lifted her head. She looked out over the abyss and saw a fouga, a dirigible warship, moving slowly and with a resonant wasplike hum toward the skygate in the highest of the Quincunx Domes. Behind it trailed a yolk-yellow banner, a pennon signaling an Ascendant triumph.

Ceryl sighed. The fouga would be returning from a skirmish with the Balkhash Commonwealth. She had seen last night’s broadcast, showing scenes of neurological warfare played out against the calm blue reach of an island in the Archipelago. The sight of men and women writhing and howling on the beach had finally proven too much for her, and she’d switched the screen off. No one really believed in the ’files, of course. Ceryl herself had once watched an ostensibly live broadcast of a desert battle being produced in a studio on Powers Level. A number of moujiks and even a few uniformed rasas stood in for the Commonwealth soldiers and Ascendant janissaries. Ceryl was only mildly shocked to learn that the blood, at least, was real.

The wars were real, too. Hundreds of wars, even thousands of them. Over the last four centuries the world had shattered into a thousand parts, each with its own petty tyrant fighting its neighbors for dwindling resources. The Shining that brought about the First Ascension all but destroyed the subtle network that held the world together. The next holocaust obliterated the faltering remnants of any telecommunications systems. That Shining was followed by others, too many to count. Those who survived the nuclear holocausts fell victim to mutagenic rains that desolated most of this continent and its southern antipode. Of the rest of the world, only the Archipelago and parts of the subcontinent, and Wyalong, the great Austral island, were relatively untouched by the viral wars. The Balkhash Commonwealth held sway over the detritus of Eurasia; the Håbilis Emirate controlled the Glass Continent and the Desert Lands. The vast mutated jungles and radiation deserts of the Americas had become the object of more wars than anyone could count. For two hundred years now they had for the most part been controlled by the NASNA Ascendancy—although that word “control” scarcely applied. There were huge areas of the continents where no Ascendants had ever stepped, where those who had survived the holocausts and viral wars had reverted to forms of barbarism surpassing even the excesses of their ancestors.

A few pockets of technological sophistication remained. Araboth was one of them. Ceryl could not have pointed out any of the others on a map. She knew that the centuries-long wars with the Balkhash Commonwealth and the Håbilis Emirates continued, but she could not have told you why. Something to do with water, maybe, or the hydrofarms still active in the western ocean.

Probably the Orsinate themselves did not really know. In the tangled web of diplomatic intrigue and barbarism that now constituted the civilized world, even the Orsinate took their commands from a higher source. The true Ascendants, the supreme military aristocracy who after the First Ascension had rebelled against their commanders and forsaken the ravaged earth for the network of HORUS stations circling the planet. Since then the Ascendant Autocracy lived in the HORUS stations, where they cosseted their ancient computers and failing stores of military hardware. Only the NASNA Aviators traveled between HORUS and the rest of the world, seeding the great prairies with viral rains, poisoning the hydrofarms of the Håbilis Emirate with metrophages and burning gases.

And now here was an Aviator fouga returning to Araboth from some unknown mission. Maybe last night’s broadcast had been real, after all. There might be more prisoners from the Emirate, captured to slave in the refineries of Archangels Level. Or the fouga might carry no one but the Aviators, returning for one of their periodic shows of triumph: a twitch of the long chain that stretched from Araboth to the heavens.

Ceryl heard a distant sound like the crash of waves. Slowly the shining skygate opened, like a bandage peeled away to show the wound beneath. Ceryl squinted to catch a glimpse of what was beyond, a purple sky fraught with orange flashes. The domes of Araboth besieged by enemy fire, perhaps; or perhaps nothing, perhaps some normal atmospheric disturbance—fallout from one of the HORUS colonies, or lightning. It was late spring, Outside; nearly Æstival Tide. That was the only time that Araboth opened its gates to the world: once every decade, when the city’s populace would surge from the Lahatiel Gate onto the beach Outside and purge itself in the ritual of ecstatic terror known as the Great Fear. Because the world Outside was a horror. And no matter that it was a man-made horror—to look upon that world more than once every ten years would drive one mad. Everything connected with it—the color of the ocean, the hot smell of it, the roaring of the wind—had over the centuries acquired a patina of superstitious terror. Even those children conceived during Æstival Tide (and there were many; the Great Fear was a powerful incentive to lust) were believed to be contaminated. Their screams during the sacrificial hecatombs had inspired many of the Orsinate’s artists.

But that was a long way off yet. The city had yet to survive, the Healing Wind. Because immediately after Æstival Tide (and sometimes earlier) the storm season would begin, with the murderous hurricanes and typhoons that were the ill-born children of Science as surely as were the geneslaves and the hermaphrodites and other monsters. The storms came each year, of course, but it was commonly believed that those following Æstival Tide were more furious and malign than in other years. The moujiks had names for these hurricanes. They believed that there were really only two of them, Baratdaja the Healing Wind and Ucalegon the Prince of Storms, and that they returned decade after decade to batter the domes like the hands of some monstrous lunatic. But inside of Araboth all was safe, all was still; all was under the protection of the softly humming Architects. And alone perhaps among the people there, Ceryl would awaken terrified in her broad, sumptuous, and empty bed and feel it all shaking around her, the Healing Wind gnawing at Araboth until the city collapsed in upon itself like a marzipan egg.

Leaning forward she stared at the crack in the pavement. On the lower levels, an avenue with only one such minor flaw would be a miracle. Here on Thrones, however, where the members of the Orsinate’s pleasure cabinet lived, Ceryl had never seen so much as a pebble out of place. And so close to Æstival Tide… The crack seemed a bad omen.

She thought of her dream, then. Of the wall of water green as—well, green as water—and alive, shattering into millions of fragments, arms, heads, bloated bodies like drumfish smashing into the crumbling seawall. She recalled the small body beside her and shivered. From where the driver stood, waiting, she heard the brisk snap of a candicaine pipette, a snuffling noise as he inhaled. Ceryl kicked at a slip of paper blowing past, stirred up by the change of pressure from the skygate’s opening. WELCOME THE HEALING WIND! she read. Another flyer printed illegally by one of Araboth’s many doomsday cults. She fumbled in her pockets for more of her own pipettes but found nothing, only bits of glassine and powder. Her month’s narcotic ration was long spent. Her last morpha tube had gone to sedate the moujik girl.

From high overhead came the clashing of immense hidden gears. The skygate began to close. Ceryl watched as the sky was skinned to a violet sliver, until the gate clanged shut and the brief vision of the heavens disappeared in the pulsing lavender light of the domes. She turned and, gently, stroked the dank white cheek of the dead girl behind her. Then she bent until her head touched her knees and silently began to cry.

The gynander Reive sat on the bed in her little room on Virtues, the hermaphrodites’ level, smoking kef and eating her last tin of krill paste. She dug the paste out with her fingers and sucked them pensively, wishing it were already evening, when at a dream inquisition she would be fed delicacies, fresh shark and sea urchin roe and prickly pears. But that thought only made her more hungry.

“Never mind, never mind,” she whispered. Like most hermaphrodites, Reive lived alone, and had grown into the habit of talking to herself. But then she remembered that she wasn’t really alone anymore. She smiled. Her face—rather too sharp, almost wizened—looked deceptively sweet and childlike, despite her fifteen years. “Wait!” she said softly, and pushed the krill tin away.

The empty canister rolled beneath the bed. Reive reached for her kef pipe, sucked at it vainly, and tapped the ashes onto the floor. The place was a mess, krill tins and broken morpha tubes everywhere, old kohl wands strewn beside clothes she’d received in payment for her readings, everything covered with a coat of kef ash like whitish fur. It all smelled of smoke and soiled clothing and shrimp paste, and from her bed Reive regarded it with a fastidious distaste that belied her grubby fingers and the broken rubber bands tied around the long black plaits of her hair. A room so small and narrow that if she lay on the floor she could practically touch each wall with her outstretched hands.

She sighed. If she hadn’t given that diplomat a bad reading last week, he might have taken her up to Thrones with him. There she might have found a wealthy patron, some dream-buggered politician eager to have his own mantic. Instead, Reive had scryed the diplomat’s dream quite bluntly, advising a change of métier, and he’d left the inquisition in a panic. Since then she was considered bad luck. She’d be lucky if she could get work scrying for some ’filer on Powers, the next level down.

“All right,” she announced, replacing the kef pipe in its little sandalwood box and shoving it onto a shelf. She wiped her hands on the worn spread and stretched across the bed, reaching down the side facing the wall. A moment later and she had withdrawn something, a small glass globe that fit easily within her cupped hands. Water splashed over its lip as she set the globe carefully in her lap and stared down into it.

In the periwinkle light that glowed from the tiny room’s ceiling the globe seemed to float, a softly gleaming turquoise. Within it something else floated, a shrimplike creature the length of Reive’s finger. Its segmented body was a translucent coral, so that she could see the violet bead of its heart pumping, the gold and red filigree that formed its organs. Its feathery legs were a brilliant acid green, its slender tail a yellow that was nearly luminous in the ethereal light. It had long whiplike antennae that moved slowly through the water and large round eyes that were an unexpectedly brilliant azure. Beneath its thorax was a tiny pouch holding what appeared to be myriad pearls of a nacreous pink. It was a mysid, a kind of shrimp that carried its young in a brood pouch until they were several months old. The eggs of this one were supposed to hatch very soon.

Reive gazed transfixed at the tiny creature, murmuring. It was not a wild creature, of course, but stolen from a vivarium on Dominations Level, where the mysids were raised to feed larger animals like fish and certain aquatic birds. A patron of Reive’s, a biotech who had befriended the gynander on one of her solitary visits to the vivarium level, had given it to her in exchange for a dream reading. A completely illicit transaction—if a sentry from the Reception Committee were to find it here, Reive would be executed. Animals and plants still carried all the ominous weight of their origins Outside, despite the fact that every creature now living within Araboth had by this point been so genetically altered as to bear little resemblance to its forebears. The mysid, for instance, was descended from creatures only an inch long. When the Håbilis Emirate took control of the Archipelago and its hydrofarms, the Ascendants engineered the mysids as an alternative to reliance on the Archipelago’s krill shrimp. But Reive didn’t know that; Reive just knew that the mysid was beautiful, and it was hers, a secret from the prying eyes of the other gynanders on Virtues.

“Don’t be afraid, we are here, we will protect you,” the gynander whispered, tracing the curved glass with a grimy finger. Within its turquoise globe the mysid swam lazily, its feathery legs sending phosphorescent ripples through the water. Reive reached one hand behind her, pulping the bedclothes until she found a box of papery rice crackers. She crumbled the corner of one into the globe and watched entranced as the mysid fed, the bits of cracker disappearing between the transparent mandibles and its inner organs deepening to royal purple as it digested its food.

Without warning a soft, bell-like tone echoed through the room. Reive sat up in alarm, spilling a little precious water onto her lap. She clutched the globe, looking back and forth. The room seemed to be trembling—she could not be sure at first. It was all so quick, a tremor so slight that it was only when she focused on her kimono on its brass hook, its faded sleeves swaying ever so slightly, that she was certain of what was happening. She took the globe and hid it behind her bed, bracing it with a mismatched pair of slippers. By the time she stood in the center of the little chamber all was still again.

“Damn,” Reive breathed. She crossed her hands in the ward against Ucalegon and flopped against the bed, her heart thudding. Maybe the storms were beginning early this year. It was only a week until Æstival Tide; perhaps the winds were rising in anticipation of the great festival. Or the Commonwealth might have struck against the city; but even Reive, untutored as she was, knew that was unlikely. She took a deep breath and stood, crossed the room and opened the door and stuck her head into the corridor.

Outside, the long, curved hallway seemed undisturbed, except that one panel in the ceiling lights was flickering deep violet instead of its accustomed pale blue. After the fishy must of her chamber Reive breathed deeply, grateful for the modestly fresher air out here. Virtues Level was not considered important enough to benefit from the more advanced filtration systems of the upper levels. A complex perfume filled the corridors connecting the warren of little chambers where the hermaphrodites lived. Opium sugar and krill paste; the lemony scent of the cheap cologne the gynanders favored this season, a perfume called Arielle; the muskier odor of the myrrh and sandalwood chips the hermaphrodites burned during their dream-trances; and beneath all of it the harsh acrid note of the periwinkle-blue lead powder that they used as the base for all their cosmetics. The powder was poisonous, of course, and after constant use many gynanders died quite young. This was not inadvertent, population control being a constant concern of the Orsinate. The hermaphrodites were sterile, but they still ate and took up space. And then of course they aged, and older hermaphrodites were ugly and therefore useless. The toxic lead powder was a fortuitous solution to this problem. Most gynanders knew the cosmetics were poisonous, but they were a vain lot and used them anyway. There was much competition for the business of dream-readings, and patrons were often influenced by an unusual face.

Several of these faces turned to stare at Reive as she entered the hall.

“You heard that?” one called, her voice high and childish.

“We heard it,” Reive admitted. “You did too?”

“We all did,” Drusilla, the other gynander replied. She stood in a small knot of six or seven, some in kimonos, one half-dressed in scarves and thin gold-colored chains. Two of them, like Reive herself, were naked except for filmy pantaloons and wore no cosmetics. She stepped gingerly from her doorway and tiptoed down the hall to join them.

“What was it?”

“We don’t know, Numatina said a bomb—”

“!”

“—but Charlless said it is the storms—”

“That’s what we thought,” Reive murmured triumphantly.

“There was another last night on Cherubim! The domes moved, we saw the walls shake—”

“Well, we think it is Ucalegon,” Drusilla finished, her lips tight. The others whispered urgently, crossing their hands across their small bud-breasts. The ones who wore no makeup looked alike: white, heart-shaped faces with almond eyes, thin mouths and high rounded cheekbones. All had the same spare build, the same black hair, the same fluting voices; the same tiny breasts and the same small bulge between their legs where they hid their twin sexes. If you were to scrub their faces clean and line them up in a room, it would be difficult to tell any difference between them at all. That was the curse of their common origins within the crucibles of Dominations.

But the hermaphrodites were too vain to spend their short lives being mistaken for each other. Thus their reliance on colored kohl wands and pots of red and silver rouge, their pride in a finely drawn mouth or eye, and also their dislike of Reive.

The first gynander gazed at Reive through slitted eyes. Drusilla had already painted herself, the periwinkle powder deepening to lavender where she had highlighted her cheekbones, her eyes drawn into elaborate wings with a stippling of scarlet dots beneath them, a full scarlet mouth pouting over her narrow lips.

“We heard you were dead, Reive,” she pronounced.

“We heard that too,” another gynander chimed in. Over her pale blue mask she had drawn a series of stark curves in black, outlining her eyes and mouth. “We heard your patron killed you.”

Reive drew herself up stiffly. She was taller than the other gynanders, and without makeup she looked different from them too—her face sharper, almost copper-colored where theirs were milk-white; her hair black but thin where the others had thick curling plaits; her eyes round and, worst of all, the forbidden color, where the others’ were black. She stared coldly at Drusilla.

“We are alive. We have a new patron,” she lied, “an aristocrat troubled by nightmares. A member of the Reception Committee,” she added grandly, and glanced to see if the others looked frightened.

“Oooh, Reive,” whispered a pallid creature shivering in a thin kimono. “Really, Reive?”

“You liar,” Drusilla spat; but Reive only tossed her hair.

“We must go to meet her now,” she said airily, and turned and walked back to her chambers, ignoring the whispers behind her.

“Ucalegon will take you,” Drusilla hissed, and as Reive slammed her door she heard the others giggling.

“Damn,” she muttered. She kicked her cosmetic box, sending it spinning across the floor. When she heard it crack against the wall she swore again, more loudly, then got onto her knees and gathered up the kohl wands and little tubes of rouge and mascara and powder. She settled on the floor, balancing a small broken triangle of mirror on her knees, and began to paint her face.

When she was finished a simple mask peered at her from the shard of mirror, her cheeks a pale copper, her mouth demurely small and golden, her eyebrows raised to give her a look of innocent surprise. Reive drew the mirror up to her face and tilted her head so that her eyes caught the dim blue light. For years she had planned to get tinted lenses to disguise the true color of her eyes. But there was always something else to buy with her meager earnings, decent food for one thing, anything besides krill paste; and of course she always needed more kohl and opium sugar, though fortunately she wasn’t as dependent on that as some. And, she had to admit, green was an unusual color, forbidden or not; and sometimes patrons liked that. Although now it seemed they wouldn’t like anything to do with Reive.

The gynander sighed and shook her head, her long uneven black plaits flying. She stood and rummaged under the bedcovers until she found a new pair of orange pantaloons of pleated false silk. She pulled them out, smoothing the fabric through which the outline of her penis could barely be seen, a small shadow against one pale thigh. Three thin rings of steel and rubicore pierced each of her nipples, and she wore a tiny pouch slung around her narrow waist. Last of all, she sat cross-legged on the floor and carefully drew two wards, one upon each tiny breast: the ward against Ucalegon, the Prince of Storms, and the one against Baratdaja, the Healing Wind.

Before she left she flopped onto her bed and leaned down to peer at the glass globe. The mysid floated tranquilly, hardly moving even when she gently prodded it with a finger.

“Goodbye, Gato,” she whispered. “We’re leaving now.”

She went out shirtless, shivering a little in the hallway. She was relieved to see that the others had gone, no doubt to gossip about her in Drusilla’s chambers. For a minute she leaned against the wall, deciding where to go. It was too early to look for inquisitors. She didn’t want to seem desperate. Fortunes changed with mercurial speed in Araboth, especially among hermaphrodites and the Orsinate’s pleasure cabinet. By evening she might find herself with a new patron, a new chamber on a higher level. Abruptly she turned and headed down the corridor toward the Virtues Level gravator. It was two hours at least until patrons would start filling the corridors, looking for dream-mantics. For now she would slip up to the vivarium and visit Zalophus.

“Ceryl! Is that you?”

Ceryl started, hastily wiped the tears from her face. From around the curve of the avenue an aardman stalked toward the rickshaw, carrying a small woman in a long, pleated white skirt, a fez perched unsteadily on her head. Tatsun Frizer, a taster in the Toxins Cabal and like Ceryl a member of the Orsinate’s pleasure cabinet. She wore absurdly ornamented yellow vinyl shoes that curled under so that she could not walk in them. In her arms she cradled a puppet, one of the newly fashionable and more odious geneslaves designed by the legendary puppeteer, Rudyard Planck. It licked its thin gray lips and glared at Ceryl with swinish red-rimmed eyes.

“Don’t stop,” it hissed loudly into Tatsun’s ear. Rudyard Planck despised the Orsinate. He had mocked them first with a series of bioengineered urangutangs that strutted about imperiously and, when asked their names, grunted “Âziz,” or “Nike” or “Shiyung” in reply. Then there had been an argala, a sexslave with Shiyung’s delicate features that bellowed like a man during coition. And now these hideous puppets, all of them possessing Âziz Orsina’s nasal voice. It was one of the imponderables of Araboth that Planck’s escalating burlesques of the ruling family had only earned him their favor.

“Go on, baggage. Eat spit. Faaugh.” The puppet drooled and gibbered at Ceryl until she had to look away. Tatsun gently cuffed the puppet’s hairless skull and commanded the aardman to halt.

“We missed you at Nike’s inquisition last night,” she said. As she spoke the coder in her throat pulsed violet and orange—last season’s accessory, still affected by members of the Toxins Cabal who claimed the coders helped them focus on the subtleties of the poisons they designed. The lurid colors made Ceryl’s head ache. She rubbed her temples distractedly and glanced over her shoulder at the body in the rickshaw. Tatsun ignored her pained expression and added, “It was lovely, there was a new morph there who obviously had never scryed for the margravines before—she was so awful it was funny, Âziz and I laughed and laughed! And that awful Rudyard Planck was there with one of his new generation of puppets, aren’t they just awful ? He gave me this one,” she added with a smug grin. The puppet continued to stare at Ceryl, working its mouth so that its long white tongue slid lewdly in and out between evil little teeth.

Ceryl sighed loudly. This was the second inquisition she’d missed this week. Soon there would be talk. But she couldn’t tell the others about her nightmare, the vision night after night of the dome cracked like a limpet’s shell and the sea burrowing into it like a huge green tongue. She looked up to see Tatsun gazing disapprovingly at the dead moujik girl, her aardman carrier staring into space.

“You’re timoring,” Tatsun said, a little primly. She had recently joined the Disciples of Blessed Narouz’s Refinery, a sect that, unlike many others—the First Church of Christ Cadillac the Daughters of Graves—frowned upon timoring and its attendant horrors. “Is that why you weren’t at the dream inquisition?”

Flushing, Ceryl shrugged. The puppet cackled gleefully, slunk to Tatsun’s other shoulder, and raising one leg squirted some acrid-smelling liquid into the air. The aardman snarled. Tatsun scolded the puppet and looked again down at Ceryl, frowning.

“Nice shoes,” Ceryl said at last. She started to ask about the dream inquisition, but the puppet’s leering eyes stopped her. She put her hand on the edge of the rickshaw door. “I’d better go—I just needed some air, that’s all.”

Tatsun shook her head. The puppet hissed, “Let her rot! Go, let’s go —” Tatsun whispered something to the aardman, who tightened his grip about her, turned, and began to stride off. As they disappeared around the curving avenue Tatsun called back to Ceryl, “Âziz is hosting a reception after the Investiture. Next week. In the Four Hundredth Room.”

“I’ll be there,” Ceryl sighed.

“You’d better be,” the puppet said, giggling wildly. In a moment they were gone.

Ceryl rubbed her forehead. It ached again, as it usually did after she had been to a timoring, or after a . night full of bad dreams. She was uneasy now: it had been a bad idea to skip the inquisition.

From the front of the rickshaw the driver cleared his throat. Ceryl looked up. “Sorry.” She clambered in beside the girl’s corpse, grimacing. “Bring me back down to Principalities—”

The rickshaw driver nodded and headed for the gravator. Once inside, the rickshaw jounced as the transportation chamber moved, the worn-out gears turning with a deafening squeal as they dropped, level by level. Ceryl winced and covered her ears. The narrow windows darkened as the chamber passed through Dominations, Virtues, Powers. When the doors opened on Principalities, the rickshaw shuddered out onto an avenue in such disrepair that some of its sidewalk plates bounced up behind them, jangling like broken glass. A hazy crimson light suffused everything, rising from the refineries on Archangels. Here on Principalities there was the stench to contend with as well. Peering through the slats at the rickshaw driver, Ceryl saw that he had pulled a mask over his face. Ceryl covered her nose and coughed. Kef smoke, burning rubber, rancid oil, and fenugreek. Over all a thick smell of the abattoir, of death and blood and singed hair; the smell of the medifacs.

“There—” Ceryl called out, choking, to the driver. “Stop there by that bonfire—”

Around the sputtering blaze a half-dozen moujiks were gathered, toasting something on twisted metal skewers and smoking kef. Ceryl gestured at them, pointing at the seat beside her as she leaned over to open the door. As she did so they ran to the cab, pushing her aside as their hands swarmed over the corpse, gabbling in their harsh patois. Ceryl leaned rigidly against the seat, gasping as the last one darted from the cab and followed the others toward the bonfire, all of them clicking their tongues excitedly.

“Now what?” the rickshaw driver sighed as she slammed the door shut. He looked at her wearily through the slats, his eyes bloodshot, his mouth stained red from chewing betel. Ceryl twisted a strand of hair around her finger, glanced up at the Nuclear CLOCK suspended from the Central Quincunx Dome. After eighteen already. She’d skip returning to Thrones, go directly to the vivariums.

“Back to Dominations, I guess,” she sighed. “To my workchambers.”

The rickshaw driver spat and yawned, then hitched up his poles and began pulling the rickshaw toward the gravator.

Obviously not everyone had heard of the disaster with last week’s diplomat: several biotechs solicited the gynander on her way to Dominations. Reive turned them down, hoping to find a more affluent patron from a higher level. Finally she consented to the demands of a plum-skinned young man wearing the pink fez and white skirts of the Disciples of Blessed Narouz’s Refinery. He made several lewd suggestions, touching Reive’s penis lightly with a finger. She shook her head—

“We are celibate,” she said somewhat curtly. Gynanders were sexually immature. They sometimes enjoyed passionate friendships with each other or were adopted by lustful patrons. Otherwise they avoided sensual attachments.

“A reading then—here—” The young man fumbled in the pockets of his loose white skirt and finally came up with a parchment card, imprinted in yellow ink with an invitation to a party that evening on Cherubim Level. “I’ll give you this, I can’t go—”

When Reive nodded he took her hand, small and pale and limp as her penis, and kissed her palm. Then he recited his dream in low urgent tones.

Reive listened, eyes closed. The young man finished and fell silent. She breathed deeply, letting his dream speak to her in its own words. From very far away she heard a strange plink… plink… plink, as of water dripping. When she slipped her hand from the boy’s and brought it to her face she could smell, very faintly, the refined petroleum used in Blessed Narouz’s rites. The young man stared at her eagerly.

“There is a small melanoma within your brain,” she began. “That is the symbolism of the burrowing worm. The girl with no eyes means that you will be refused treatment, because of your affiliation with the new cult. To prevent suffering we would suggest you offer yourself to the medifacs.” She heard him stifle a gasp. “We are sorry,” she added gently. She got to her feet, reaching for the parchment invitation. The young man snatched it away, cursing, and Reive turned and fled. As she ran down the corridor leading to the vivariums she heard him shrieking after her.

The Architects had left the entry to the vivariums unchanged for many years. Reive disliked it—an immense doorway of black resin, shaped like the head of an aardman with protuberant crimson eyes and fearsome teeth. She passed through its open mouth, beneath the archway where the motto of the Orsinate Ascendancy had been etched in looming block letters.

PAULO MAIORA CANAMUS!

The motto of the Second Ascension, the deranged Governors who had created the first generation of geneslaves, and released the horrors of the viral microphages across the continents. A psycholinguist in the pleasure cabinet had translated it for Reive one night after an inquisition.

“ ‘Let us raise a somewhat loftier strain.’ ” She had laughed bitterly. Reive still didn’t understand what it meant, but she didn’t ask the linguist to explain.

From above the curving narrow corridor long diatomaceous tubes shed waves of ultramarine light. In places the walls opened onto vast arrays of glass and cable and steel, tanks and catwalks and bubbling alembics the size of small buildings. Then the walls would close in again and the fretwork of struts and spans would disappear, but the smells rising from the labs remained. Seawater and kelp from the oceanic tanks, steam from the heating ducts, the piny resins of the Northern Pacific Diorama. The gynander approached the hallway that led to the Chambers of Mercy. There the vivisectors practiced their sanguine art upon Araboth’s dead, rehabilitating them into the rasas that tended the refineries and performed the most dangerous of the million tasks that kept the city alive. As she hurried by its entrance three novices passed her and nodded soberly. They wore faded yolk-yellow trousers and blouses of transparent fabric, to show that they had not yet attained full knowledge of their craft. Through the cloth she could see faint patterns tattooed upon their breasts, prescriptive nostrums to guard against natural childbirth and storms and nerotus, the psychic illness that afflicted those who spent too much time among the regenerated dead. The gynander returned the novices’ cool gaze and turned down the hall leading to the vivarium. Behind her she could hear them, whispering.

In this hallway the light tubes flickered a paler blue, the diatoms fed a lower algae content. Aquariums were set into the curved walls, long narrow tanks and smaller round ones, some with cracks where the Architects had not accounted for the diurnal contraction in the polymers that formed the walls. Luminous fish floated in black water, green water, water of deepest blue. Anglerfish with glowing crab-shaped lures protruding from their skulls; delicate fairypipes, their skeletons luminous pink; lightning fish spearing their tanks with brilliant arrows. The tanks had been tended for hundreds of years. Many of these creatures were extinct now, Outside. Their keepers could no longer recall why it was they cared for them.

The gynander walked here slowly. She loved these things, and the other half-human heteroclites that had been engineered in the nucleovats and cellular refineries of Dominations. Strange things, stranger than the gynander herself, things from the First Days.

Things like Zalophus.

Ahead of her the ceiling arched, and the passage split into two wide corridors. To the right the hall curved down to where the ghoulish aardmen were bred, and the birdlike argalæ, and the arboretums where sentient plants caressed passersby with slender branches. Reive grimaced. The soft, steady pumping of the ventilation system wafted the pungent scent of the argalæ’s excrement, nitrogen-rich and processed for fertilizer. She took the left-hand fork.

This was the final descent to the oceanic vivariums, where the biotechnicians imprisoned the genetically enhanced whales and sirens, the white-beaked telepathic inia and other dolphins, the manatees and orcas and half-human hydrapithecenes and, most ancient of all, sweet-voiced Zalophus, who would lure unwary visitors to his tank and devour them.

The corridor widened into a vast space, a sort of cavern that fed into the gulf Outside. Huge barred gates rose to the ceiling, allowing water to pass through the intricate system of weirs and nets and canals that supplied the open-air tanks. Mingled with the rush of waves sighing in and out were the explosive sounds of sirens breaching, the inquisitive whistles of dolphins, the soft insistent lies of the hydrapithecenes in their solitary enclosures.

“Free us,” they sang after Reive as she passed. She ignored the faces gazing at her from the depths. Faces from a nightmare, some of them, gilled and bearded with long fleshy tubes, or scaled like fish. Others more like their human ancestors, but with moist skin of palest peach or blue. Their lipless mouths twisted furiously, revealing the rows of razor teeth within, the suckers oozing toxins like ink through the water.

“Free yourself,” the gynander called airily; but she ran as one bearded siren smashed itself against the glass walls of its cage, blood swirling from its mouth as it screamed after her.

She met no one else. It was midnought, the middle of the thirty-two-hour day regulated by the Architects. On the levels above her, the Orsinate and their pleasure cabinet were still abroad, playing in the eternal twilight. On the levels below the workers would be rising, the ’filers on Powers readying for another broadcast day, the moujiks and rasas stumbling toward the refineries and medifacs. But here Reive was alone. She talked to herself, absently whispering invocations against Ucalegon, repeating the words she had replied to the plum-skinned boy’s inquisition. She stopped to call to the dolphins, leaning down to graze her fingers against their smooth heads as they butted against the sides of their tank. They whistled plaintively when she left, then returned to their endless circuits of their prisons.

In the center of the chamber was Zalophus’s pool, the largest in the vivarium, and the oldest. A marvel of the ancient engineers, it was rumored to plunge to unimaginable depths, to the Undercity itself, where the great whale slept and brooded, dreaming his endless dreams of hunger and escape. The Architects had designed his cage to resemble a huge grotto. Their memory files recalled such things; none of the Ascendants or the biotechnicians who toiled on Dominations had ever seen the lush green places Outside that inspired it. Boulders of molded, resin and real plants—bougainvillea, honeysuckle, purple eelgrass—cascaded beneath the brilliant growth lamps. Sea urchins nestled in a cleft between strands of kelp and sea fern. On one of the false boulders a cormorant perched drying its wings. It regarded Reive with one tangerine-colored eye and snapped its beak. She wondered if it had come from the labs, then shivered at the thought that it might be from Outside. Hastily she dipped her head and touched the whorls on her breast that formed the ward against Ucalegon.

A moment later she stopped at the edge of the pool. A heat fence separated her from its occupant. The gynander whistled softly to herself, shading her eyes against the growth lights. When she inhaled, waves of warm scent washed over her: salt and sea lavender, coconut oil and almond flower, an underlying musk like semen. She shut her eyes. It made her think of the long slant of beach outside the city, the rust-colored sand and impossibly blue water that she had seen only once before at Æstival Tide, ten years earlier when she was a very small child. There was a smell like burning roses and she could hear the Daughters of Graves singing, see the Orsinate standing stiffly on their viewing platform, tossing ginger blossoms and the dried leaves of sweet cicely onto the crowd below.

Her hands had already begun to stretch through the heat fence when a deep voice crooned, “You’ll harm yourself, human child. Come here to this side, where it’s open—”

Reive gasped. Her hands stung where the fence had burned them.

“Zalophus!” She tried to keep her voice from shaking, tried to smile.

In the dark water in front of her he hung suspended. All she could see was his head, like one of the gargoyles upon the facade of the Church of Christ Cadillac. Huge, grotesquely pitted and scarred by centuries of bashing against the concrete walls of his prison, his blunt snout ended in a mouth that held white teeth longer than her hand. A long furrow ran the length of his skull, hiding his blowhole. A flap of warted skin folded back from it when he breached. To either side of that knobbed dome glittered his eyes. Eyes larger than Reive’s clenched fists, liquid eyes, eyes so dark it was impossible to tell what color they were, if they had a color at all. They stared at her calmly; at least she supposed it was calmly—his eyes revealed nothing, just as his voice seldom changed. So deep a voice that it seemed he moved other creatures to his will by speaking, his voice alone manipulating their frailer skeletons. But Reive believed there was something else at work there as well, some subtle telepathy by which he bent the waves of air and water and made of them a web to snare the careless.

Ancient Zalophus, sweet-voiced Zalophus: Zalophus the ever-hungry.

“There was a siren here this morning,” the great cetacean boomed. Reive stepped back and covered her ears. “She wept, remembering when the seas were full of her kind, and men worshipped them and made them offerings of stillborn children.”

“She lied,” said Reive, dropping her hands. “The seas were never full of them, they were engineered here a hundred years ago. They have never seen open water.”

“So sad, she was so sad,” Zalophus moaned, sending up a plume of dark green spray. “I ate her.”

Reive laughed, covering her mouth. Zalophus stared at her with huge unblinking eyes. Then, without warning he breached. With a cry Reive stumbled backward. For an instant she glimpsed the rest of him, long body like a whale’s, but with narrower fins and tail, great pits gouged in his rubbery flesh by the crab-sized sea lice that scurried frantically across his back as he crashed into the water. The cormorant shrieked and flapped into the air. A headier smell overwhelmed Zalophus’s sweet scent, brackish, the odor of rotting fish. He disappeared beneath the surface, the water boiling and clouded where he had been. She could just make out his form far below, like a cavern in the deep water.

“Damn!” Reive glared at the cormorant eyeing her balefully from its new perch. He might stay submerged for hours now. “Zalophus,” she cried; then more loudly, “Zalophus!”

Nothing happened. The surface of the pool grew calm. Very faintly she could hear clickings and a deep brooding moan as the monstrous creature called out to sea, the constant and futile effort he had engaged in for centuries, seeking others of his kind.

But there were no others. There really never had been. He was the first of the hydrapithecenes, the very first of all the geneslaves bioengineered during the Second Ascension; the most grotesque of all the Ascendants’ creations, and the most useless. The aardmen had been engineered as slaves, combining canine servility with human cunning and cruelty. They were guardians and gladiators, fighting human men and women for the pleasure of the Orsinate, who loved to gamble. Of the other geneslaves, the swanlike argalæ had been bred for their beauty: limbs so long and slender they snapped during lovemaking, breasts that were never meant to suckle, feeble wings that would never take flight. They had a mad witless gaze, shallow rib cages that barely contained their lungs, tiny white teeth useless for anything but lovebites. Once Reive had accidently killed one, during an orgy in Âziz’s private chambers. She had wept, because the argalæ were beautiful: the Ascendants’ opium dream of the ideal partner, slender and childlike and utterly dispensable. And the rasas were simply a solution to the problem of Araboth’s dwindling population. Too many centuries of inbreeding on the upper levels; too many genetic mutations among the slaves brought back from the wars. So within their cruel alembics the Orsinate distilled a life essence, and with it infused the corpses carried daily into the Chambers of Mercy by yellow-robed coenobites. Thus the Orsinate could continue to vent their murderous caprices upon Araboth’s human population, and still be certain of a stable work force.

But Zalophus? Zalophus was the folly of those who had hoped to create the ultimate affront to the hated world Outside. Using human cranial matter and cellular tissue from the preserved carcass of a zeuglodon, an Eocene whale found in the channels of the Empire’s northernmost reach, they had engineered Zalophus. A sentient carnivorous whale, his fellows extinct for æons, kept alive for these hundreds of years by the ministrations of the Architects and their human disciples. Among all the creations of the Ascendants, he was the most grotesque and feared; save only for the Compassionate Redeemer, which lay mired in its decade-long sleep until awakened for Æstival Tide.

Like the rest of the Orsinate’s menagerie, Zalophus languished forgotten until Nike or Âziz or—more likely—Shiyung recalled him. Then the margravines might troop down to Dominations, party entourage in tow and stoned on negus or lucifer, to toy with the great sad-eyed monster. They would command him to call forth his memories of the First Days, the flames of the Biblioclasm, the silent holocaust of the Third Shining. Or Shiyung might ask his advice on some difficult piece of gene-splicing, or beg him to tell her of the chilly Eocene seas where he had preyed on eels the size of fougas.

Reive had been at one of these reckless gatherings. Alone among the drunken guests, she had been touched by the plight of the captive monster. Since then she came here often. Zalophus terrified her. She knew he was half-mad from the ages of his incarceration and would devour her as easily as speak to her. But still she came.

“Zalophus,” she called softly to the still water. A whale louse lay on its back at her feet, twitching its scorpion head. Reive kicked it into the pool. “Zalophus!”

His head erupted so near to her that she screamed and tripped as she scurried away. “Zalophus—”

“She was sad,” he repeated. The tolling voice was immeasurably sorrowful. “So sad.”

Reive stared at him warily. “We are bored, Zalophus. Do you have any news? Do you have a dream for us?”

Zalophus rolled onto his side so that one eye glared up at her. Water poured smooth as oil across his gray flank. “You are the one brought me the bird girl.”

“Reive. That’s right.”

“Reive.” One immense flipper slapped the surface, sent up a fountain high as her head. “Bring me another one. I had not tasted that before.”

Reive shrugged. “We will try. Can you tell us a dream?”

The bloated body righted itself, the huge head turned to regard her with what might have been construed as longing, or even sorrow, in a less horrible form. “A dream? I have nothing but dreams now, in my sleep I hear the icelands moving, I hear my sisters calling and the winds gathering for the great storm, I hear the voice of Ucalegon shouting in its sleep…”

Reive stepped back, uneasy.

“…in the Undercity the rift is widening, soon it will breach the open sea and I will be free! but only come with me now, human child, come with me and prise the gates open, free me—”

Reive shook her head, frightened to see the water roiling about the huge thing, the madness bleeding into his black and empty eyes. “We can’t,” she stammered.

Zalophus raised his head so that she could see his long jaw, the row of spike teeth where parasites raced to feed upon shreds of flesh and dripping strings of plankton.

“Free me!” he bellowed. From across the vivarium came high-pitched shrieks and whistles as the dolphins raced terrified about their tanks. “Soon the fissure will spread and my sisters will come for me, they are waiting in the icelands, they are waiting waiting waiting, FREE ME!”

The voice exploded in a screaming howl. Crying out, Reive fell back as he leaped, fins cutting long troughs through the water, the great body blotting out the light so that she saw only his skull silhouetted there, the prow of his jaw, the cruel mouth grinding as he fell and bellowing crashed into the pool. A wave rushed onto the walkway and she fled, while behind her the last zeuglodon roared and wept.

In the chambers of the Architect Imperator sat Nasrani Orsina and Horemhob Panggang. They were waiting for Hobi’s father to return from a meeting with Shiyung Orsina and the imperious Âziz.

“I’m sorry he’s not here to see you,” said Hobi. He felt distinctly uneasy entertaining the exiled Nasrani alone. This close to Æstival Tide, one always sensed that something terrible might happen. Ten years ago, when he was only seven, Hobi had watched horrified as Âziz sentenced a boy his own age to death for crying during a purification ceremony. “But I’m sure he’ll be here soon.”

He offered Nasrani another pickled apricot. “I think he’s gone to the ceremony at the palace. The—” He put the tray onto the floor and frowned. “The what-is-it, the Investiture.”

“Mmph,” replied Nasrani Orsina. At the word investiture he winced. He lay on a stack of pillows stiff with brocade and metallic trim. Not especially comfortable but sumptuous to look upon, the decor was in keeping with Sajur Panggang’s architectural theories. He took another apricot and drained a glass of Amity-in-Occis, a rare and powerful liqueur distilled from kelp and wormwood. “Eee s’a vern guh, Hobi.”

Hobi (correctly) interpreted this to mean that the Orsina in exile found the potent fruit to be very good. “Thank you.” He nodded politely. Like his father he was small and slender, but more muscular. His mother had been a cousin-german of the Orsinate. From her Hobi had inherited slanted eyes of an amber color and the surprising delicacy of his features—a strong chin that still seemed childishly rounded beneath Hobi’s recent attempts at a beard, high cheekbones, and long hair the color of the oak—real oak—paneling of the sitting room. “My father is very fond of them—I think they were something Mother liked.”

Nasrani nodded. “Do you miss her?” He sipped his liqueur, gazing at Hobi through slitted eyes. He was not unaware that the two of them were related: it was the eyes, mostly, that showed it. Tiger’s eyes, like Shiyung’s. She was the beauty of the family, and Nasrani had always thought it a pity that she had no living heirs. There had been a child, once. His child, he was certain; but the baby had been monstrous—a morphodite, Shiyung whispered to him months afterward. But that had been a long time ago. If the child had lived it would be nearly as old as Hobi now. Nasrani sighed and finished his Amity. The boy looked younger than the last time he’d seen him. He supposed the scrabbly beard did that. Nasrani smiled and said gently, “Your mother was a fascinating woman, Hobi.”

With a clumsy shrug Hobi reached for the decanter. “Yes. My father misses her horribly, I know.”

Nasrani nodded. Angelika Panggang had been poisoned last spring by a woman in the Toxins Cabal. A tiny venomous frog, sleekly orange as its innocent brethren and served with flaming raisins to Angelika after her morning sauna. The taster had looked on bemused as Angelika had a seizure. Later she claimed she thought her mistress was exercising, and was acquitted by the Orsinate. Because of her husband’s prominence, and her own relation to the Orsinate, Angelika was given a pyre with full funeral honors, including the sacrifice of her entire personal staff. The rumor was that her death had been a warning to her husband, whose predilection for very young girls had embroiled him in an affair with Âziz Orsina’s favorite bedmaid. The bedmaid, too, ended up in a fiery eclipse, but that was some months later.

Since his wife’s death the Architect Imperator had grown introspective. His attention had turned to arcane matters: divination by means of broken glass; a penchant for the nearly unlistenable form of sadist opera known as Fasa; an inexplicable fondness for the company of Rudyard Plank, the dwarf whose legendary bad taste had made him a favorite of the margravine Nike. Sajur had also developed a burning hatred for the Orsinate, and a taste for flouting it—for example, in his weekly tanka games with Nasrani Orsina, the infamous margravin now exiled (for a failed assassination attempt upon his sister Âziz) from the Orsinate’s Level.

Several more minutes passed. Nasrani fiddled with the glass buttons of his crimson greatcoat and drank another tumbler of Amity in thoughtful silence. Hobi was surprised the exile did not yet appear drunk, but experience had taught him that Amity caught up with everyone, sooner or later. The thought troubled the boy and he gnawed at a fingernail.

The decanter was nearly empty. Nasrani stared at it with bemused affection, as though regarding a beloved but naughty child. Hobi leaned forward to press a button beneath the table. A moment later a replicant appeared, ram-headed and wearing the same long linen shift and trousers that Hobi did.

“Khum.” The boy indicated the decanter, now empty. “Bring us more of that, please.”

Nasrani watched the server, amused, as it gathered the tray and glasses and retired to the pantry. “That is a very old one,” he said after a moment.

Hobi nodded, somewhat embarrassed. “I know. It was—well, it was a gift, I think, or something, I think we inherited them, my mother always said we should get some new ones—”

Nasrani shook his head. “No—it’s a very good one, they don’t make them like that anymore. Third Ascension: a vogue for things Egyptienne. And animals, of course, the fashion cabinet says that animals will be very popular this season. So your father’s old replicants will actually be quite stylish.” He smiled. The boy looked relieved. “Are you interested in such things?”

Hobi shrugged, started to say no when he recalled that Nasrani Orsina was an Orsina, even if an exile, and he was being kept waiting by his father. “Yes, I am.”

“Would you like to see some others?”

Hobi looked startled. He glanced around the room suspiciously, as though these others might be lurking behind the priceless oak paneling. The ram-headed Khum returned bearing a new tray and several full glasses gleaming with emerald liquid.

“Very good, then,” Nasrani announced. He stood, the tails of his greatcoat swirling, and swept up one of the glasses. “Khum, tell the Architect Imperator that as punishment for his tardiness I am not only drinking all of his Amity but stealing his son. Come on, Hobi.”

Hobi started to stammer something by way of protest— oh, no you needn’t trouble, he’ll be right back, help! —but Nasrani was already out the door. It seemed rude to remain. And since rudeness was often punishable by death within the Orsinate’s cabal, Hobi hastily decided to follow.

On the promenade outside, the pagoda-shaped houses of Araboth’s Imperators shimmered in the perpetual twilight, mauve and pink and faintest gold. Here on Cherubim Level the air smelled of some warm spice, cinnamon or galingale perhaps, piped in to counteract the briny scent of the heavily filtered breezes. Only a few yards away the heat fence crackled, and Hobi could glimpse the tops of buildings on the next level down.

“Should have thought of this sooner,” Nasrani was muttering to himself. “Inadequate education these days, never see anything outside their own homes. Good idea.”

Hobi hurried after him. In the middle of the next block the boy stopped, for a moment losing sight of the exile’s crimson coat as the older man strode on. At Hobi’s feet fluttered several paper billets. He stooped and slowly brought one to his face.

10,000 PRAYERS TO UCALEGON! he read, and PRAY FOR THE HEALING WIND! When he looked up he saw Nasrani waiting impatiently.

“Look at this,” Hobi said as he caught up with the exile. He held up one of the flyers. “Isn’t this treason?”

Nasrani glanced at it and sniffed. “But there is rebellion everywhere, my dear,” he said. He turned the corner near the Cherubim Level gravator. “That is why you Imperators have all those replicants with horses’ heads and rubber feet. But my sisters can afford the luxury of treachery, and so they employ human help. And humans won’t put up with this sort of thing forever. Public executions, children kidnapped for torture parties, people killed to be made into rasas, houses torn down while one sleeps. You can see how it would wear one down after a while.”

“But it’s religion,” said Hobi. From one of the lower levels he heard watchmen hoarsely chanting the midmorning call to prayer. He looked up; the nuclear CLOCK said nineteen. “I mean, Prophet Rayburn said that only the children of the chosen should be allowed to—”

Nasrani rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on, Hobi! I’m an exile, you don’t think you need to talk like that to me? ” Then, in a singsong voice, “ Here we are—”

Ahead of them was the gravator. Nasrani made a grand gesture and held the door open for Hobi. “Now!” The exile beamed as the doors folded shut and the ancient machine shuddered. “I think you will find this very interesting, Hobi.”

The gravator, while not as elegant as the one that served the Orsinate’s Level, was still quite ornate. Elaborately carven benches ran along the walls, heaped with pillows, and small round lanterns cast a rosy light on the faces of the two passengers. In the center of the moving chamber the Architects had installed a small perfumed fountain shaped like an argala, a popular motif several seasons ago. As the gravator descended, minty-smelling water spewed from her mouth onto the boy’s feet. He hastily moved to the other side of the room.

Nasrani sank heavily onto a bench. The gravator gave a horrible lurch and plummeted a thousand feet, then slowed as it passed through Thrones Level. Another sickening plunge. The chamber filled with the musky scent of the vivariums as they passed Dominations. Then Virtues, where the dream-mantics lived; and down to Powers, with its faint background hiss of electrical equipment.

Then, “Did we miss it?” Hobi asked, alarmed.

The gravator pitched, water slopped from the fountain onto the floor, and they dropped another level. Hobi tugged aside one of the heavy indigo curtains covering a window. He looked outside and then turned to Nasrani, his face white. “Nasrani—we’re still dropping—shouldn’t we have gotten off sooner?”

Nasrani smiled, hitched up the tail of his greatcoat to scratch his leg. Hobi swallowed. Beneath his flowing trousers the exile wore high boots of burgundy leather; and tucked neatly into a flap on each one was a stiletto of gleaming steel. “No, no, Hobi,” he said, flicking his fingers dismissively. “This isn’t an ordinary visit. You’ll see.”

The boy shivered. It struck him that there was a good reason Nasrani Orsina had been exiled; that he was not merely the polite and epicene dinner guest his mother had been so fond of. And with a small electrical thrill of terror—because of course this was something he should have considered all along—Hobi wondered just what this man was doing with him, the son of the Architect Imperator.

“Should we—maybe we should have waited for my father—” he stammered.

Nasrani shook his head. He frowned, pulling at a stray thread on his greatcoat, then slid one of the stilettos from its sheath and neatly cut it off. He twisted his head, gazing at Hobi with studied casualness. “Have you ever been to the Undercity?”

Hobi felt his whole body freeze, as though he had walked into a replicant’s holding chamber. “Level One? Angels?”

“Mmm mmm,” Nasrani said absently. He glanced at the window, marbled gold and black where they passed through the refineries of Archangels. “Yes, that’s right. The Undercity.”

Hobi bit his lip, grabbing on to the edge of the bench as the gravator bucked and rolled. Near the door hung a slender golden cord with a small neatly lettered sign dangling from it. Pull in case of emergency, it said. He and his friends used to joke about it, and once Magya Electroluxe really had pulled it, with exciting results. But doing such a thing now would mean admitting to himself that in a few minutes the damned thing would stop at Level One, Angels: the Undercity. When he looked aside at Nasrani he saw that the exile was smiling. Hobi reddened. Abruptly he let go of the bench, straightened, and tossed his long hair. “Oh, I’ve been there ,” he lied.

“Really?” Nasrani looked interested. “Weren’t you afraid you’d be tortured or go mad?”

But before Hobi could reply (tortured?), with a sudden boom the gravator jolted and was still. In front of them the heavy metal doors were fanning open. And he had no choice, really, but to follow Nasrani Orsina into the Undercity.

The rickshaw driver slowed to a trot as they rounded the entrance to the vivariums. Ceryl could hear him panting. She shook her head; she should have engaged another before returning to this level. She was thinking of walking the rest of the way when she sighted the gynander strolling by. As the rickshaw rattled past her, Ceryl looked over her shoulder at the slender figure, her mind racing.

The dream inquisition she missed last night; her failed attempt at timoring; and most of all her nightmares…

“Stop!” she ordered the driver, leaning forward until her head peeked out from the rickshaw’s bamboo shell. “Right here, please, stop—”

The rickshaw slowed to a halt. The gynander continued walking, singing to herself and not even raising her head. Ceryl stumbled to her feet, tugged at the rug covering the cab’s floor, and threw it onto the bloody seat beside her as she got out.

“You—”

The gynander stopped. For a moment Ceryl thought she had mistakenly called to a real woman. But no—the slender figure had an elaborately painted face, small breasts emblazoned with colored whorls and waves; and through her diaphanous trousers Ceryl glimpsed her penis, no longer than a finger. Perhaps it was just that she was taller than most morphodites, and had done something to straighten her hair. She looked to be about fifteen. Ceryl knew she could have been twice that age, though not much older—morphodites didn’t live very long.

“Yes?” The gynander’s tone was haughty, and for a moment Ceryl thought of flouncing back into the rickshaw. But then the gynander tipped her head, and for the first time Ceryl got a good look at her face. She gasped. Beneath the oily plaits of lank black hair, behind their heavy swirls of kohl, the eyes she turned to Ceryl were wide and cold as the open water that crashed relentlessly through her dreams, and green. Leaf-green, sea-green, poison-green. The forbidden color; the color of death.

“You,” Ceryl stammered. She would have fled, but the gynander had already stepped forward and was staring at her intently, her eyes slitted.

“You are troubled by a dream,” she said softly, her tone still oddly commanding for a morphodite. Ceryl shrank from her as Reive stretched one powdered hand to touch the other woman’s forehead. “ There —we can feel it, there—”

Reive murmured the traditional greeting to a client, hoping it would calm this woman. She was accustomed to people being startled by her eyes, but this woman seemed terrified. Reive thought maybe she had heard of Reive’s unhappy experience with the diplomat, but no; the woman seemed genuinely frightened.

That could be very good for Reive. If she gave this woman the right kind of reading, she might reward the gynander generously. At first, when the rickshaw passed her Reive had ignored it. She was ravenous, and wanted only to get to one of the shrimp stalls by the Dominations gravator. But then she had seen the woman leaning from the cab. Tall and pale, with yellow hair clipped elegantly short and curling about rubicore earcuffs, she wore a midnight-blue catsuit and bronze leather boots that reached above her knees. Around her neck hung a pendant with Prophet Rayburn’s crucifix and another, the heraldic eye and letter O that marked her as a member of the Orsinate’s pleasure cabinet. If Reive could impress this woman with her scrying, she might take the gynander to her chambers; might even bring her along to one of the Orsinate’s dream inquisitions.

“We are very experienced with nightmares,” she murmured soothingly, “very good, very reasonable…”

Ceryl swallowed. It might be an evil omen—it must be an evil omen—but then her nightmares were evil too. Maybe this green-eyed morphodite could exorcise her horrible dreams, before she was forced to share them with the Orsinate. “Reasonable,” she repeated, stalling.

Reive bit her lip, her mouth filling with the chalky taste of rouge. She hadn’t had a client this wealthy in weeks, not to mention one with access to the very highest levels of the city. She blurted, “Free! We’ll do it for free, for the honor of Prophet Rayburn and the Saints—”

Ceryl sucked in her breath. It was an omen, damn it! The venal morphodites never did anything for free. She toyed with the pendant around her neck, thinking. From behind her she could hear the traceman muttering to himself, his voice rising angrily. In a few minutes he’d refuse to take her any farther.

“Get in,” she said abruptly. “My workchambers are here on Dominations. But hurry.”

Reive frowned. This would be no immediate passport to Cherubim after all. For a moment she looked down the corridor, debating whether she should leave. But then Ceryl grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the rickshaw. Reive tossed her head and flopped in, making a face at the rug covering the seat. When the rickshaw jounced forward she started, drew her hand up smeared with blood. Beside her Ceryl stared through the slits in the bamboo cab, crimson light winking from her earcuffs as they headed down the avenue.

Ceryl Waxwing’s workchamber was at the outermost rim of Dominations Level, near the Amazonian dioramas. It was not a coveted spot. You could see the flat gray surface of one of the domes from here, and hear the boom of the ocean rolling against it. Because of its proximity to these reminders of Outside, the chambers had been empty for years before Ceryl was assigned to them. And since her promotion to the Orsinate’s pleasure cabinet, Ceryl herself should be in her new quarters up on Thrones. Every week she told herself she would move, that this would be the end of it; and every week she spent as little time as possible where the Orsinate might find her. She hated giving up her workchambers, although even she had to admit they were nowhere near as spacious or comfortable as her new quarters. When pressed, she said that she needed access to the plants and animals of the vivarium level for her work as a pharmacologist.

But the truth was, Ceryl couldn’t sleep on Thrones. She would never admit it, but she missed the sound of the sea. She wondered sometimes if that had something to do with her nightmares—knowing it was so near to her Outside, that constant crash and sigh that surrounded her as she worked.

But then, even Shiyung Orsina had been stirred by it.

“Does it keep you awake at night, listening to that?” she asked Ceryl the first time they’d met. The margravine stood staring out the workchamber’s strip of window, a glass of Ceryl’s cheap brandy in her hand.

This was not long after Ceryl’s lover, Giton Arrowsmith, had died. Shortly before his death, Giton had become involved with the cult of Blessed Narouz’s Refinery. Ceryl suspected that the Orsinate had him killed, ordering the destruction of the block of flats where he and several other disciples of Blessed Narouz lived. When Shiyung suddenly appeared at her door, Ceryl was convinced she was about to be hauled off by the Reception Committee. Instead she ended up being promoted to the pleasure cabinet.

She’d heard scuffling outside, and then the sweet yet commanding tone of the most popular of the margravines. Then someone had started banging on her door. When she’d opened it, there was Shiyung, with a full retinue of guards and ’filers following her, taping her official visit to the Amazonian vivarium for broadcast that night. In the crowd Ceryl glimpsed her supervisor, her white face belying her confident words.

“…Waxwing is our best pharmacist, I’m sure she can do something for your migraine—”

Ceryl tried weakly to explain that she was not a pharmacist, but the subtleties of her work were lost on the margravine. Shiyung drifted into the room clutching her forehead, gesturing dramatically for the others to leave. They did so, casting sympathetic glances in the stunned Ceryl’s direction.

The margravine was taller and even lovelier than she appeared on the ’files. As always when she made one of her highly publicized tours of the lower levels, she wore laborer’s clothes—in this case, a biotech’s yolk-yellow robe and high rubber boots. Her sleek black hair was pulled through a copper loop. At her throat the Orsinate’s heraldic eye glittered wickedly.

Ceryl stared at her, speechless. It was as though the dreaded Zalophus had appeared at her door.

“Thank god! A pharmacist!” The margravine moaned and sank into a chair, shielding her eyes from the dim light. “Please—the migraine—help me—”

With shaking hands Ceryl had mixed a nostrum combining tranquilizing neurots and a strong anaesthetic (cheap brandy laced with alomine) along with a mild hallucinogen (datura), followed by a few minutes of massage therapy. To her amazement (and eventual dismay) the philter worked. After an hour Shiyung lifted her head, batting her eyes weakly.

“It’s gone,” she whispered. She fingered the pendant at her throat and gazed at Ceryl with huge black eyes. “My god, you’ve saved me—”

Ceryl nodded, moving quickly to help the margravine as she got unsteadily to her feet.

“That’s a remarkable cure,” said Shiyung, her voice a little slurred. “Amazing. Nothing else has ever worked. You —” She pivoted and pointed at Ceryl, the tip of one long finger resting on the pharmacologist’s nose. “You are a miracle. Come.”

“Come?” Ceryl stammered.

The margravine nodded. “I hereby appoint you my Personal Pharmacist and Healer.”

“But—”

The margravine wiggled her fingers in Ceryl’s face. “Oh, please—don’t be obsequious. I can’t bear it when they’re obsequious.” She shook her head, wincing, then turned to the door. “But I must get back to the others! There was a rumor of a strike by the Amazonian staff—I must make them feel needed again—”

She extended her hands toward Ceryl, closed her eyes and murmured a blessing in which Shiyung’s own name figured prominently. Then she reached for the doorknob. When she hesitated Ceryl swallowed and took a wary step backward.

“A word of advice,” whispered Shiyung. She cracked the door open. “Hire your own Personal Taster before you move. You’ll need one up there.”

The margravine’s new Personal Pharmacist watched in disbelief as Shiyung floated back into the hallway, her headache transmitted to Ceryl. From her desk Giton’s holoed image stared at her accusingly.

That had been six months ago. She still hadn’t spent more than a few days in her new appointments. She was terrified that the Orsinate would discover she was nothing more than a low-ranking pharmacologist who sold quack remedies and bootleg narcotics to the other menial toilers on Dominations. Even with her promotion, there was no way she could afford her own food taster. Whenever possible she avoided her duties in the pleasure cabinet—which consisted mostly of attending parties and dispensing cures to hungover cabinet members—and fled back to her old workchamber. Ceryl Waxwing’s apartment on Thrones remained empty. Now she watched uneasily as the gynander stared out the grimy little window.

“What’s that?” Reive pointed outside as Ceryl rummaged in her tiny refrigerator for food.

“The dome.” Triumphantly she held up a jar of dulse jam and some crackers. “Hah! I knew I had something—”

The gynander continued to gaze out the window. “The sea’s out there?” she asked, trying to clear a spot on the glass.

Ceryl handed her the food and looked away, embarrassed. “I guess so.”

“Oh.” Crumbs fell to the floor as the gynander pressed her face up to the glass. “Right there? Right outside your window? The ocean?”

Ceryl cleared her throat and pretended to read a monitor on her desk. Perhaps this had been a bad idea after all. This morph had no manners whatsoever—imagine mentioning the ocean to a stranger! Ceryl fiddled with her monitor, glancing sideways at the morph. She’d be wasting her credit and, worse, her time. At the thought of another night plagued by bad dreams she sighed and rubbed her temples.

The gynander ate noisily but without further conversation. Finally she dropped the empty dulse tin and wiped her hands on her pantaloons. Ceryl watched her with distaste.

“All right,” the gynander pronounced. She cast a last curious look at the window. “Please tell us of your troubles.”

“I—I’ve been having these dreams.”

Reive nodded solemnly, as though she had never heard the words before.

“Nightmares,” Ceryl went on quickly. “I—they’re not the sort of dreams I can talk about easily at an inquisition when there’re others around. I’m—in the pleasure cabinet,” she added. She tapped nervously at her monitor. “You understand…?”

The gynander nodded. “It is, perhaps, a treasonous dream?”

Ceryl raised her eyebrows at the gynander’s bluntness. “We-ell,” she stammered, then nodded. “Yes, I think—well, someone might think it was treasonous,” she said lamely.

Reive stepped across the room to a chair and settled into it, drawing her feet up demurely beneath her and cupping her chin in her hands. She lowered her eyes so that Ceryl couldn’t see her expression.

A treasonous dream! Better and better—if this woman proved to be a stingy patron, Reive could always blackmail her. The gynander coughed delicately. “Please,” she said, closing her eyes and tilting her head so that Ceryl could see her face, painted with that mask of studied innocence. “We would like to help you.”

Ceryl took a deep breath. This is it, she thought, then said, “For the past year I have been having these terrible dreams….”

It came out hesitantly. Ceryl had thought it would be easier, telling it alone like this. Instead she found herself in a bizarrely intimate situation, sharing her worst secret with a stranger. She paused.

It wasn’t too late. She could throw the morph out and never tell anyone; though that would mean suffering from the nightmares, perhaps forever. Or she could expose her secret at the next inquisition and face the consequences.

The thought made her cringe. She hated the dream inquisitions. She had of course attended them before her promotion, with other biotechhicians and once even with a group of drunken Aviators slumming down on Dominations. But these were small homey gatherings, brisk with vivarium gossip; not the perilous intrigue of the Orsinate’s inner cabal. There, a faltering confession or a spiteful morphodite could result in one being dragged off by the Reception Committee.

She hated it all. The hermaphrodites with their languid expressions and voices slurred from smoking kef. The margravines watching with keen narrow eyes for the merest hint of treachery, as one by one their guests recited their nighttime journeys. Diplomats confessing to fitful reigns in imaginary kingdoms; Imperators intoning childish humiliations; the tedious minutiae of countless dark inexplicable passions and coughing sounds in the dark. Then the margravines themselves would speak; and the only remarkable thing about their dreams was that they were just as dull and absurd as everyone else’s.

Ceryl never told them about her nightmares. When it was her turn to speak, she made up dreams. So far no one had noticed the difference. She created oddly wistful scenarios—eyeless children in blue-lit alleys, sexual hijinks with aardmen—or else she repeated dreams she had heard at those simpler gatherings on the vivarium level. But after a few months she ran out of ideas. Then she had desperately gone through old cinemafiles and even crumbling books in the Orsinate’s library. Anything to come up with ideas to satisfy the grinning curiosity of Âziz and Nike and the others who sprawled in the Four Hundredth Room, smoking kef or prodding each other with morpha and endope, drinking the Orsinate’s wine and patting the creepily quiescent morphodites all the while.

She hated it because it was so banal; and so dangerous. The scrying morphodites could reduce the most lurid nightmare to a bad meal, twist an innocent fancy into betrayal. The angelic boy in one’s arms became a herald of senility and death; the bronze-winged hippogriff an assassination plot. Through it all the margravines listened and nodded among themselves, rewarding this fantasy, condemning that. And Ceryl cursed whoever it was had resurrected this ancient mania for probing one’s sleeping secrets, and prayed for another kind of game to become the Orsinate’s next fad.

She kept her dream to herself. Because in a way it was a beautiful thing, the only beautiful thing she had, maybe. Even though she knew it was as foolish as Tatsun Frizer’s account of the rubber wheel or Shiyung’s recurring vision of the whistling head.

To herself, Ceryl called her dream the Green Country. That was another reason she could never speak of it. Because everyone knew what the Green Country meant: the forbidden place and color, the horror of sky and plains unshackled. The world Outside, so dreadful that it could only be looked upon once every ten years, and then only to remind the people of Araboth of their good fortune to dwell beneath the nurturing domes.

But in Ceryl’s dream the world was not a firestorm of poisonous ash and viral rain. In Ceryl’s dream she was walking toward the fouga hangars, the steel and plastic warehouses on Seraphim where the dirigibles waited like sullen clouds, until the Orsinate ordered yet another strike against the enemies that crouched Outside. In the dream Ceryl walked through the hangars until she found a fouga just starting to waft upward. She ran to the ladder dangling from its gondola and climbed, until the choking chemical air inside the hangar gave way to the fouga’s metallic chill.

Once inside the steering cabin she was not surprised to find herself alone, or to hear the computer navigator whispering to itself as the airship floated silently toward the skygates. She stumbled as she walked along the narrow strip of uneven rubber flooring. From overhead came the insistent whine of the fouga’s propeller gears.

And then she was standing by a window in front of the gondola, and the skygates were opening before her; the shields parting like the struts of an ornamental silver fan to reveal the vastness behind them. Ceryl cried out as the fouga floated free into a sky thick with smoke and soot, ashes flung against the window so that she drew back, afraid the glass would break.

But it did not break, though she saw blue lightning lash against the curved horizon of the domes beneath her, and lightning like shining water streaming down the sides of the fouga as it rose up and up through the air.

And then (and this was the part she would never be able to tell them. It was their greatest taboo, the sublime imago that lurked behind all the excesses of the Orsinate, all the ordered horrors of timoring)—

And then she saw it. The darkness pared away as the fouga rose through the sunless air until there was nothing but sun, a radiance that blinded her so that she clutched at one of the metal pillars inside the gondola, as abruptly the fouga’s upward trajectory snapped and the airship plunged earthward.

And there it was, an endless country rising through the darkness like a mountain from the sea. Green everywhere, from the pale yellows and nearly blue washes of the dawn sky at Æstival Tide to the deepest most occult shades of emerald, lanced here and there by lakes and rivers that glowed in that painful light like the brightest of the Orsinate’s numinous sculptures. And even though there was more to the dream—a wave like the sky crashing down upon the city, the sight of the domes crushed and splintered into black, a fissure splitting the Undercity like a blade drawn through sand—even though the dream went on until Ceryl woke shivering in her bed, it was that color that tore at Ceryl’s stunned consciousness.

Because in all of Araboth she had never seen so much green. It was the color of death, the forbidden color; the color worn by fainting young artists and by the mob screaming into the surf once a decade at Æstival Tide, the color of the sea itself as it smashed against the Lahatiel Gate and sent the revelers laughing and screaming at the horrors of the natural world.

The color—and her hands grew cold as she stammered to a finish and stared into the mantic’s face—of the gynander Reive’s eyes.

He had never seen Night before. Hobi assumed that was what this was—an impenetrable, fetid darkness everywhere save behind him, where the gravator glowed softly. But even as the boy whirled to dart back inside, the chamber began to rise, and the machine started its journey (longer and noisier than its descent) back to the upper levels.

“Oh,” said Hobi.

Goose bumps pricked his arms and he shivered. On the upper levels it was always the same temperature, unless you were at one of Âziz’s weather parties. Hobi squinted, trying to see where Nasrani waited; finally made him out more by his smell (cardamom-water and snuff) than sight.

“Damn,” the boy whispered. He stepped forward cautiously, waving his hands in front of him. His eyes must be getting used to the darkness. He could see faint flickerings of red and orange that made the shadows of things, Nasrani for instance, loom even larger and more forbidding than what they portended. “Nasrani?” he called anxiously.

The exile was bent over one leg, pulling something from his boot. “Just a minute—” he cried, and turned to the boy.

A beam of light sliced through the air, blinding Hobi. He shouted and fell; then cringing waited for the exile to strike. When he dared lift his head he saw Nasrani standing in front of him, adjusting the levels on a lumiere.

“Sorry, sorry,” Nasrani muttered. “Had it all the way up. I always do that here. You expect it to be dark but forget that a little goes a long way. By little I mean light, of course.” The exile waved the lumiere impatiently, its beam now narrowed to the breadth of a finger. “Come on then. Mind the crocodiles.”

Hobi stumbled to his feet, glancing around nervously. “Crocodiles?”

The exile said nothing. Hobi followed him, hoping that by crocodiles Nasrani referred to the ground beneath their feet, which was waffled and beslimed as some great cracked reptilian skin. More than once he stumbled, or teetered swearing on one foot when the ground seemed to give way beneath him. The lumiere served only to point out bits of things—a glittering eye, for instance, that disappeared when Hobi stopped to stare more closely. When he turned back Nasrani and his lumiere were nearly out of sight. The boy hurried after him.

They seemed to be groping down an alley. It stank of sewers and something else, a strange grubby smell. Could it be mud? Hobi paused long enough to stoop and let his fingers touch the ground. It felt soft and damp, and gave way to the pressure of his hand. Maybe the rumors were true, and the Undercity really was the site of the original city, and he was walking on real dirt. The thought made his stomach churn. He shuddered and started walking again.

“Keep close to me here, Hobi.” The exile stopped. He grabbed Hobi by the shoulder and drew him close. Then very slowly Nasrani stepped forward, Hobi trying not to trip beside him. The alley ended abruptly. They took a step down, and another; and then the exile pointed upward.

“There it is,” he said.

Hobi gasped. Above them reared the immense ziggurat that was Araboth. Level after level after level it soared, so far above them that the periwinkle lights of Cherubim and Seraphim twinkled faint as stars and the fires of the refineries could be seen only as fingers of scarlet and gold clawing at the darkness. Gazing upon it like this a horrible feeling took hold of the boy: as though the city were alive and he crouched beneath it, his only hope of survival that the behemoth did not see him there.

“The Holy City of the Americas.” Next to him the exile’s voice rang coldly. Hobi wanted to cry out, beg him to keep silent lest he draw attention to them; but Nasrani went on, his tone bitter, almost cruel. “ Araboth is what the ancients called Seventh Heaven, the city of god. Did you know that, Hobi? But of course you wouldn’t. That is why the Prophets named each level after one of the Divine Choirs. So here you are, looking upon the celestial city. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

He laughed, a miserable sound, and swept his arms out. The lumiere’s beam lanced through the blackness until it was swallowed by the void. Hobi opened his mouth but could say nothing, only stare dumbly at the awful vision before him. With a last bitter laugh, Nasrani cried,

“When all the world dissolves,

And every creature shall be purified,

All places shall be hell that is not Heaven.”

Then he stepped forward once more, and Hobi had no choice but to follow.

He walked with his hands held out protectively in front of him, batting at the empty air. They seemed to be walking on the ruins of an ancient avenue. The shadows of crumbling buildings stood to either side, and openings that might be other roads leading into the darkness. There was a heavy stench hanging about it all, a smell that reminded Hobi of the scent that seeped in through the filters, the smell of the sea. But this was stronger, and there was in it too the rank odor of decay, of stagnant water and mildew.

Occasionally sounds echoed down from very high overhead, shrill noises and explosions from the refineries, and what sounded like chanting. From the shadows of the decaying buildings Hobi sometimes heard noises—a sort of slithering sound, like something being dragged across the ground, and once a murmuring like voices. But he saw nothing clearly, only occasional jots of gold, like candlelight reflected from a glass of claret.

“Sorry to bring you around this way,” Nasrani called to him. His voice once more held its accustomed note of playful irony. He seemed familiar with the way. At least he did not stagger and trip against things the way Hobi did, or swear except very softly when something snagged his greatcoat. It seemed they had been walking for a long time now, an hour maybe.

Hobi’s fear faded to a faint though constant anxiety. Finally he took a deep breath and said, “Um, Nasrani—this is—would you mind telling me—”

“What?” The exile turned, the lumiere showing his frown. “Did you say—”

Suddenly the man shouted and fell to his knees. With a cry Hobi reached to help him.

“Nasrani! What is it—”

“I don’t know!” He clutched Hobi’s hand and stood, brushing himself off, and retrieved the lumiere. “There—can you see anything there?”

He pointed the light at the ground. Hobi squinted, shaking his head. Nasrani pushed him forward a little, until Hobi felt the ground give way beneath him. He yelled and lurched against Nasrani.

“It’s a hole! ”

His heart pounded so that he gasped for breath. The thought of a hole down here, where it could plunge into the very core of the earth itself! And Nasrani had nearly pushed him into it! Hobi turned, his voice rising as he swore furiously, but Nasrani only grabbed his arm and shook him hard.

“I wouldn’t have let you fall, Hobi—but it’s there, right? You felt it too?”

Hobi yanked his arm free. He caught his breath, nodding. “Ye-es. There’s a hole there—what’s that mean?”

Nasrani’s voice echoed as he inched forward. Hobi could hear him shuffling carefully to the left. “Here—” he called after a minute. “Come this way, but be careful—”

Hobi edged after him, hugging his arms to his shoulders. He heard loose stones or dirt rattle under his feet and then fall away, the sound abruptly silenced.

“Oh, god,” Hobi muttered; but then Nasrani was gripping his arm and pulling him gently forward, until he felt more solid footing. He fell forward, his hands smacking against a wall as he gasped in relief.

“What does it mean?”

The exile’s voice came very close to Hobi’s face. The boy started, still trying to catch his breath. Something clinked; the lumiere cast its feeble light upon a handful of keys. Nasrani picked out one and held it up to the light. He said, “It means there is a fissure here that was not here yesterday.”

“What?” Hobi shook his head. “A fissure, what do you mean, a fissure?”

“A fissure. A hole, a rift. A break in the earth. Now.”

He raised the lumiere so Hobi could see that they stood in a recessed doorway. The brick walls gleamed damply. Tendrils hung from the corners of the ceiling. When Hobi touched them they felt wet and pulpy, and his fingers smelled of rotting fish.

“I don’t understand,” the boy said uneasily, wiping his hand on his trousers.

“It used to happen Outside.” Nasrani rattled a doorknob. “Earthquakes. The ground would open up. Not here—I mean not in this part of the continent. I don’t understand it, there shouldn’t be any threat of earthquakes here. A gap like that could breach the integrity of the whole foundation….”

Breach. Hobi went cold.

His father. The Architects. A breach in the fundus of Angels.

“…have to ask your father if he knows anything about this. Watch that fungus there.” Hobi jumped as the exile poked him. There was a loud click. “Ah, here we are—”

A gust of musty air rushed out to choke them. “Come now.” Nasrani coughed, pulling at Hobi’s sleeve. Behind them the door slid shut with a sucking noise. They stood in total darkness, except for the lumiere’s tiny glow.

“Wait here,” commanded Nasrani.

“What—” Hobi stammered, but the exile had already crossed the room. From the darkness came a faint ticking, a soft hum as of machinery. Hobi’s heart throbbed painfully. He thought he might faint.

From across the emptiness came a flltt! A candle flared into life, so bright and sudden that he gasped. Then another, and another, until the room was ringed with light. Hobi raised his arm, shielding his eyes. Across the walls Nasrani’s goblin shadow leaped and crouched. Hobi stepped forward, amazed.

“What is this place?” he whispered.

All around the circumference of the room were cabinets. Small ones that barely came to Hobi’s knees. Tall ones that towered above him. Cases that covered an entire wall, and some so small they must have been designed for ornamental value alone. In front of a metal cabinet stood the exile, the split tails of his greatcoat curling behind him like wings. In his hand flickered a candelabrum, so encrusted with yellow wax it resembled some bizarre plant. He raised it, pointing to where a long banner draped the wall.

“Witness the wonders of the ancients,” Nasrani said dryly.

Hobi walked until he stood beneath the banner. Across it spilled crude, luridly painted letters:

DOCTOR MONDO’S AMAZING CYCLORAMA!

Hobi glanced at Nasrani, then at the banner again. Ragged and charred at the edges, its colors had faded—blue to a pale shade that was almost white; red to a bloody smear; green to a pallor that reminded Hobi of the strings of moldy stuff hanging from the door outside. The corners of the banner had frayed and then been painstakingly repaired with heavy black thread that tore through the fragile cloth like a razor. It looked to be several hundred years old.

SEE! THE TITANIUM CHILDREN!

MAXIMILLIAN UR: THE BANE OF SHEIKS!

THE ANODYNE PHYSICIAN: HER SIGHT ALONE WILL HEAL YOU!

MOGHREBI: PRINCESS OF THE SANDS!

WISE APULIEUS: WILL HE MAKE AN ASS OUTOF YOU?

NEFERTITY: THE BEAUTIFUL ONE IS HERE!

Beneath the names was a badly drawn picture of a woman’s head. She stared straight out at Hobi with large tilted eyes, a cool gaze that was all the more unsettling for the crudeness of its execution. Hobi stared back at her, then crossed the room to join Nasrani where he stood in front of a tall steel cabinet.

It held a woman; at least he thought it was a woman. She stood behind the glass, regally tall, skin black as oil, eyes closed and mouth in a tight grimacing smile. Looking at her Hobi felt distinctly queasy. He was certain she was dead.

“She is only sleeping,” whispered Nasrani, as though he read his thoughts. The boy jumped. Nasrani held up his candelabrum so that its wavering light cascaded across the glass in ripples of black and yellow. “Second Ascension. Very rare.” He scraped a bit of wax from the case, shaking his head. “Be careful around her. She is very sensitive to noise and light.”

Hobi gaped. “She’s alive? Who is she?”

Nasrani made a small pfff of disdain. “Alive? Of course she’s alive. I told you, she is sleeping. They are all sleeping.”

He swept his arm in an arc, waves of light trailing the candelabrum and bouncing from the other cases. He gestured at each one as he intoned their names.

“Moghrebi, the Blackamoor Princess. The Skeptic Apulieus. Maximillian Ur, the Bladed Nemesis. The Titanium Children, Jackie and Jane. And Nefertity: The Beautiful One Is Here.”

Hobi looked around the room nervously. “She is?”

Nasrani tilted his head, annoyed. “Her name. That’s her name. Nefertity: The Beautiful One Is Here.” He gestured impatiently toward a case at the far end of the room, then said, “I found them when I was—exploring—down here, many years ago. There was a tunnel, the remains of a sewage system.

“It led—well, never mind where it led. I followed it, and eventually I found them, just sprawled everywhere, totally neglected. No sign that humans or Architects had been there in ages. Nothing but abandoned buildings, rusting machinery— such machines, Hobi! Giant wheels, immersible booths, elevated transways—they were rotting amid the ruins of a funfair ! Obviously the idiots who had found them had no idea what they were—they must have discovered some forgotten cache of an earlier Ascension and thought they had god’s own amusement arcade.” Patting the outside of the metal cabinet he added, “Moghrebi here was designed as an intelligence unit for the Thirty Wars in the East. But they were using her for”—he spat the words—“fortune-telling!”

Within her glass case Moghrebi remained motionless. Hobi stared at her, trying to focus despite the flickering light and shadows, trying to see if she was breathing. After a full minute he was certain she was not.

“She’s a replicant,” he said at last.

Nasrani looked at him as though he were mad. “Android,” he snapped. He turned and stalked across the room. Hobi trailed after him, chagrined.

When he reached the far wall, Nasrani put down his candelabrum and crouched to inspect a tiny cabinet. Hobi heard a soft click; then a figure no bigger than his hand somersaulted out, to straighten and stand at Nasrani’s feet.

“Toys,” said the exile. He extended a finger to touch the tiny figure’s head. It was a woman, a green woman. Antennae like filaments of glass sprouted from above her eyes, quivering. “That fraud Planck should see these. He’d be ashamed to peddle those pathetic cretins of his—” He snapped his fingers and the tiny woman vaulted back into her case.

There were others, many others. Hobi lost count after Maximillian Ur with his clashing knives and the Anodyne Physician, the Mechanical Baboon and her dog-faced brood who danced when Nasrani raised his arm and commanded them. A retrofitted scholiast with an eyeless face and hands like a young boy’s, groping and eager as they reached to stroke Hobi’s cheek. Wise Apulieus, looking surprisingly modern in his white jacket and simple gold jewelry. The Titanium Children, Jackie and Jane, their azurine eyes regarding him with detachment as they danced a silent tango across the darkened room. Moghrebi, intoning dire prophecies as she went through the motions of reading a small paper volume. Nasrani woke them all, going from case to case and opening the glass doors to release them into the flickering shadows of the great chamber, until the place was full of them: laughing, chattering, dancing, singing, silent androids and robots, tiny monads and automatons and replicants. Humanoid and animal, children of metal and monkeys spun of glass, they bowed to Nasrani and greeted him by name, then turned gracefully to his guest.

“Charmed,” murmured Apulieus, stroking the boy’s cheek with a hand that felt smooth and dry as wood.

“You must surrender!” roared Maximillian Ur. His three rows of steel teeth clashed together with a sound like grinding gears.

“If you will please lie down we can begin the examination,” crooned the Anodyne Physician.

Hobi looked around a little desperately. “Nasrani,” he called out, finally sighting him in a dim corner.

“I saved them,” explained Nasrani, walking with care to join the boy. In one hand he cradled another of the tiny monads, this one with dragonfly’s wings of transparent blue glass. “It took years—I watched every ’file I could find, read everything I could about them. They had all been perverted from their original uses, as weapons or medics or intelligence units. Except for these, of course.”

He held up the monad. Its wings whirred and it rose into the air a few inches above his palm. “Monitors, to watch children. Or maybe they were toys. By the time they ended up here no one remembered why they had been made.” He watched the graceful creature dart across the room, then sighing left Hobi among the small crowd of replicants.

Hobi watched him, curious. The exile seemed to have forgotten him: he crossed to the darkest end of the room and there stood brooding in front of a cabinet that Hobi had not noticed earlier.

“Nasrani?”

The exile said nothing. Gently the boy pushed away the Anodyne Physician’s probing hands and went to Nasrani, stepping carefully over flickering candles until he reached the cabinet. Nasrani stood in silence, one hand tracing the edge of a delicate golden handle in the front of the case.

Hobi had never seen anything like it before. A kind of sarcophagus of glass and chromium, with pale blue and yellow and pink tubes curved about its crown. Nucleoceptive fluid flowed through the tubes, silvery bubbles rising in long streamers until they disappeared at its top. Behind them the other replicants and robots hissed and clattered while the candles died and the air grew soft with the scent of burning wax. In front of him the sarcophagus glowed painfully bright, vivid rose shot with deep blue highlights. But he couldn’t make out what was within the case—the light had a peculiar clouded quality, as though it were heavily filtered; as though whatever was inside were so brilliant it would blind whoever gazed upon it. Still, after a moment or two his eyes grew accustomed to it. He glanced at Nasrani, but the man still paid him no notice. Hobi stepped closer to him and leaned forward to see what was inside.

Ever after, he remembered this moment as the one that changed his life: an instant when all the real sounds—Apulieus intoning to Maximillian Ur, the Automated Tenor doing scales, even Nasrani’s soft breathing—died, and he heard from somewhere else a single clear note, as though a glass bell had been struck. Nefertity would tell him he had imagined it, but Hobi had never imagined anything in his life. The sound was real as the figure in the case before him.

It was a woman: a woman of glass. He could see her veins, filaments of glowing jade and cerise, twisting around joints of silver metal. Her ribs curved like two hands cupping the softly glowing air, and behind them, where a human heart would be, was a sphere of the most perfect gold. Electrical fibers chased across it, and when Hobi touched the front of the sarcophagus threads of light streamed toward him. Even her face was transparent. It was as though someone had taken a living woman and replaced all her inner atomies with ice and crystal. Everything except her eyes. They glowed through translucent eyelids, beneath lashes that were like splinters of light—orbs like globes of living water, the deepest green he had ever seen. At the corner of each was a drop of blood. As he gazed transfixed her eyelids flickered. Blood welled from each eye and spilled to the bottom of the sarcophagus.

“Only when she sleeps,” whispered Nasrani. He too had outstretched his hand to graze the glass above her cheek. “Because then she dreams that she is human.”

“She’s beautiful,” said Hobi, hardly daring to speak. And she was: in spite of the arcane array of metal and glass, her antique, almost doll-like features, she was breathtakingly lovely. “What— who —is she?”

Nasrani only stared at her without answering. After a moment Hobi asked again. Nasrani turned away, to look out at the room where the other replicants engaged each other in witless conversations. When he spoke his voice was soft, almost a whisper.

“She is a nemosyne. One of the memory units devised after the First Ascension, when people feared that the holocausts would destroy all records of humanity. They were designed and then given to various wise men and women, who programmed them to record, oh, everything. There were nemosynes for agriculture and meteorology, oceanographic units and military units and units that had entire libraries of books and films and ’files on them.”

Hobi shook his head. “What happened to them?”

Nasrani shrugged. “Like everything else, they were destroyed over the centuries; most of them at least. But some must have survived—this one did—and probably they are out there now, keeping their secrets until we can find them and learn from them again.”

In the silence Maximillian Ur’s blades whickered and snapped, and Apulieus scolded noisily. Finally, Nasrani said, “If we could find them, we could rebuild the world. We could locate and renew the fallen cities. We could find the lost arsenals and defeat our enemies at last, and end the wars with the Emirate and the Commonwealth. We could do anything, if we could find more of these—they have blueprints for machines and computers, they could teach us how to stop the plagues, how to repair the starships, how to revive the poisoned deserts. They remember everything.”

He fell silent, staring at the imprisoned nemosyne.

Hobi pressed his face against the cool glass. From inside he could hear a very faint whirring, a sound more like running water than the pulse of circuitry. She had skin of some very thin fine metal stretched across the sharp planes of her cheeks and jaw. As he stared the translucent skin shivered, and her eyelids trembled.

“How do you know?” he asked at last.

Nasrani shook his head. “I found ’files about them. I even have records of where some of them were stored. But those cities are dead now, and the nemosynes like everything else in them were destroyed. Or else they are waiting until we find and wake them once again.”

His eyes as they gazed at the nemosyne were brilliant, almost feverish. For the first time Hobi noticed what an odd color they were. Nasrani’s voice rose plaintively.

“But I can’t even figure out how to get this one to operate correctly! All she will do is state her operating history and serial number. Sometimes she recites things at random, things from her datafiles. She was a storage unit for minority histories. Women’s folktales. Poems. Useless things—she’ll recite them forever. But I can’t get any response beyond that. She won’t answer my questions.”

His annoyance faded. “She is still half-asleep, and I don’t know how to wake her,” he ended sadly.

“Wake her,” murmured Hobi. He gazed with wide brown eyes at the glass woman, once more rested his cheek against hers to listen to her receptors softly pulsing.

“If I could wake her,” Nasrani went on, “ I could find out about the rest. They were supposed to be linked. I might even be able to access the others, if they still exist.”

“What would you do with them? I mean, if you could talk to them?”

Nasrani straightened, glanced at the boy, and cleared his throat.

“The world is too large now,” he said, as though addressing an audience. “Too small in some ways—how many people here, besides the Aviators, have ever been Outside? But too large as well. Too difficult to travel Outside, too many dangers, too many enemies. The nemosynes could— teach us —things.”

“But her?” Hobi stroked her cheek. “What could she teach?”

Nasrani sighed. “If I could find out how to access her interactive mode I might be able to question her, link with the others or at least access some of her classified files. But I just can’t figure it out. There must be a trick to it, but I’ve spent years trying and I still can’t wake her.” With a sigh he turned and walked away.

For a few minutes Hobi remained. “Wake up,” he whispered, his breath clouding the cool glass. Within her sarcophagus the Beautiful One slept on, heedless of him, heedless of all the world. He looked away, embarrassed.

In the middle of the room stood Nasrani, surrounded by the last few guttering candles. He seemed dispirited; even the tails of his greatcoat drooped to brush the floor.

“Moghrebi,” he called softly. “Apulieus, my good man. Come now, Moghrebi. Be a sweet girl, Jackie.”

One by one they returned to their sleep: the Anodyne Physician entering her cabinet with good grace, bowing her golden head to Nasrani and staring out at Hobi with unblinking glass eyes. Apulieus waved mockingly and disappeared behind his case’s oaken doors. The monads buzzed into their tiny compartments, their noise silenced as the doors snapped closed. Last of all went Maximillian Ur, his four arms with their glittering knives whistling through the air as he groaned and clicked and threatened, until Nasrani slammed the door after him.

In the hollow silence that followed Nasrani’s voice echoed mournfully. “ I keep them so she won’t be lonely,” he said, “so that in case one day she wakes, she won’t think she is the last of her kind.”

He bent to blow out another candle, then started for the door, motioning for Hobi to join him.

For a long final moment the boy gazed at the nemosyne, her staring green eyes with their golden veins, the sanguine tears welling up in them to spill upon the floor. His hand lingered on her face until he heard Nasrani shuffling impatiently.

As the boy went to meet him the last few candles began to sputter and go out. Nasrani fumbled for his key. The encroaching darkness frightened Hobi, and he stepped a little closer to the exile. It was silly, but when the replicants had been moving about, the place didn’t feel so desolate. At home he had often been in a room full of servers and tutors and scholiasts, but he had never felt like this, as though the replicants had characters of their own. The nemosyne most of all, of course: beautiful and tragic, trapped within her glass coffin. But the others too, although he had known them only briefly. Wicked Maximillian. Sarcastic Apulieus. The gentle Physician. His own robotic Physician had about as much character as his toothbrush.

But here for a little while, he had felt as though he were in a crowd; almost as though he were at a party. And he remembered something his mother had once said about Nasrani Orsina.

They had been at a gathering in the Orsinate’s sanctuary, the Four Hundredth Room. It was several years before Nasrani was exiled for his attempted murder of his sister—

“Look at him,” His mother raised her glass, a tiny bell-shaped tumbler dancing with the emerald spirits of Amity-in-Occis, and peered through it as though it were a spyglass. “Your father’s friend, Nasrani Orsina.” The name sounded like a curse in her mouth. “He’s like a clockwork man. Nods and talks and laughs on cue, bows to his sisters and smiles as he slices out your liver. A perfect gentleman. A perfect clockwork man.”

His mother was given to such blunt pronouncements. She had once, to her face, called Nike and her sisters “inbred swine,” a slur that had caused Nike to laugh with her hooting voice. The truth was that Angelika frightened her: Nike thought she was a witch. But now Angelika was looking not at Nike but at her brother Nasrani. Hobi wondered what it could be about this tall man, elegant in lavender moleskin trousers and crimson greatcoat, that reminded his mother of an automaton.

“His eyes,” she’d said. A drop of Amity clung to her upper lip like a petal of lime blossom. “His hands, his feet, everything. He has everything that a real person has, except a heart. Even that sow Âziz has a heart, although it’s a sick rotten thing.” She’d turned then to greet Âziz, kissing her and leaving a carnal smear of red across her cheek.

Hobi thought of that now as he watched Nasrani stoop to retrieve the failing lumiere. A clockwork man.

“What brought you down here? The first time, I mean.”

Nasrani turned to him, brandishing the lumiere so that Hobi shrank from him. But then he realized that Nasrani’s expression was not angry but tormented. Without a word he yanked the door open and stepped outside. Sudden terror seized the boy: that he had offended the man and would be left here alone. He started after Nasrani, stammering apologies.

“No, no,” said Nasrani. He held the door until Hobi stood beside him. Behind them something squeaked and chittered. Hobi looked over his shoulder in time to see a tiny form dart out to seize a bit of tallow. “I’m not angry, my dear. It’s just that—”

The exile’s eyes were immensely sad. “It’s just that I come here to forget. About all that—”

He shook his hand, indicating the ceiling and what lay beyond, level after level of misery and tumult and twisted steel, humans reduced to living in the ruins of monstrous machines and computers endlessly designing unlivable new habitats. “All that up there. The Holy City; the family curse.” He drew a hand to his face as though he were in pain.

In the doorway Hobi hesitated and looked back. For a moment he glimpsed the room, lit by a single pallid flame. In their cabinets the replicants and androids stood, gazing blindly or else with eyes closed, returned to that terrible dreamless state wherein they would wait forever until someone, came to rouse them. He stared at the nemosyne, her body shimmering blue and rose as the last blue flame leaped and tossed its feeble light upon her frozen smile. Then the flame went out. He heard tiny voices twittering, small feet pattering from the corners, and looked away as Nasrani locked the door.

Outside of Ceryl Waxwing’s chambers the nuclear CLOCK clanged twenty. Reive waited to see if this woman would say more. She had already said too much. But Ceryl was silent, her face pale as she stared at the window.

“That’s all,” she said at last. She would not look at Reive.

In her chair the gynander nodded and bit her lower lip, her brow creased as she debated how best to answer. Her breath felt heavy inside her; her head spun as she gazed at Ceryl and thought, She is mad, to have even dreamed of telling this to anyone, she must be crazy….

But Reive said nothing; only closed her eyes and wished she had brought the little brass case that held her joss sticks and incense burners, anything to gain a little more time, a few more minutes before Ceryl grew tired of waiting for her answer.

The meaning of the dream was clear. Reive had never before heard of a dream so obvious in its portents. Usually she had a little more trouble than the other mantics; just as she looked subtly different from them, so it was more difficult for her to scry the truth behind the mundane fantasies of bored technicians and anxious diplomats. The hermaphrodites had been bred for their sensitivity to the unconscious whims of others, but somehow Reive lacked their insight. She even wondered if she was a true hermaphrodite at all; but of course the physical evidence was unmistakable. It was simply that she had no gift for scrying. Often she just sat there, listening to the tiresome recitative of a nervous aristocrat while a yellow plume of smoke rose from her incense burner. When her patron finally grew silent, waiting for her to interpret the dream, Reive would make something up.

This time that would not be necessary. The back of her neck prickled, excitement burgeoned inside of her like a drug as she realized that this must be what it was like for the others, this certainty that she could read Ceryl’s sleeping thoughts like a map. As sure as she knew her name she knew what this dream portended. She took a deep breath and opened her eyes.

“You have dreamed of the holocaust that will destroy Araboth.”

Her voice sounded too deep, hollow as though it boomed up from some great depth. Across from her Ceryl Waxwing blinked.

“It is the dream of Ucalegon the Prince of Storms, and Baratdaja the Healing Wind.” Inside of Reive’s head was a pounding that threatened to drown the sound of her own voice. She gasped, “It is growing Outside; it is waiting for the gates to open….”

Ceryl nodded slowly. Her hands shook as she drew them to her face. “What else?” she whispered.

Eyes wide, the gynander shook her head, unable to speak. The thudding inside her head became a roar. She heard the voice of Zalophus shrieking—

I hear my sisters calling and the winds gathering for the great storm, I hear the voice of Ucalegon shouting in its sleep ….

The gynander began to shake. Behind her closed eyelids a light pulsed and words whistled through her skull—

Ucalegon. Baratdaja. Prince of Storms and the Healing Wind. The holocaust that will destroy Araboth.

She recalled the tremor that had shook her room that morning, and a hermaphrodite crying The domes moved, we saw the walls shake ….

And then once more the voice of the imprisoned leviathan warning her,

“… in the Undercity the rift is widening: soon it will breach the open sea ….”

“Zalophus,” Reive whispered.

He had not been mad. The city was in danger. It was all real, somehow he had sounded the very depths of the Undercity and seen it there; somehow this woman Ceryl had seen it too. It was not a dream that haunted Ceryl Waxwing. It was The Dream, the Great Portent, the Final Warning that the Orsinate had been searching for so desperately with all their occult games. They had placed all their trust in the Architects, in things that could be measured and quantified and engineered, but the one thing the Architects could not do was dream.

They had thought to keep the world Outside at bay, and had, ever since the Long Night of the First Ascension, when the prairies turned to glass and the sky choked beneath black and frozen rain. After that Araboth had been raised, the Architects set to guard the people who fled the poisoned world Outside the domes. In all those centuries they had never left. The ruling families retreated to the upper levels, where they bred with each other like mad wary spiders. And gradually the world Outside faded to nothing but children’s stories, a green monster resurrected each Æstival Tide and ultimately defeated when once more the Lahatiel Gate clanged shut. An emerald nightmare; the dream of the Green Country.

She saw it now as though it were etched upon her brain. A fissure splitting the Undercity like a wound, prying apart the monstrous colonnades upon which the city rested. Outside, the Green Country overtaking the city. Araboth crushed beneath the wave, a wave like a verdant cape covering the spires and struts and domes of the Holy City.

Reive’s eyes flew open. Ceryl cried out at the sudden flash of color in the gynander’s masklike face. They stared at each other, neither one daring to speak as they thought the same thing.

Treason. Torture. Execution. Death.

Ceryl spoke first, her voice trembling. “There is no other meaning?” Her tone was without hope.

The gynander shook her head. “No. But this is not the only sign. There have been other things,” she said slowly. “We have seen them—on Virtues Level the ground shook, and we heard a warning, from—”

She fell silent, reluctant to speak of Zalophus.

Ceryl nodded. She kneaded the sleeves of her catsuit, her palms leaving damp stains on the fabric. “I have too,” she said hoarsely. “Now that you mention it. A crack in the pavement…”

Such a tiny thing, it had seemed a few hours ago; now Ceryl stared at the floor of her room, terrified that she would see something there, a rift that would widen until it swallowed them all. She looked at Reive.

“You can’t tell anyone,” she said. Her hands tightened as she clenched her arms. Reive said nothing and she went on, desperately, “You know what will happen if you do—they’ll take me, the Reception Committee will come and take me away. This close to Æstival Tide, they’ll give me to—”

“The Compassionate Redeemer,” Reive said softly.

Ceryl nodded. She looked around her room at the alembics and vials of dried herbs, the weights and measures she used in her work. She could hear the steady crash of waves against the outer domes, a sound that thrummed counterpoint to the panicky beat of her heart. It all seemed tainted now, as though her dream were a sickly odor that had seeped into all her things. When she glanced back at Reive she saw the gynander watching her with wide frightened eyes. A pang shot through Ceryl. A feeling she had not had since Giton died: that there were other people in the world beside herself, and somehow she might be held responsible for them.

She took a deep breath. “I think I’d like for you to come with me. To my chambers on Thrones Level. It—I think we might be safer there. At least the rooms are larger than here, there would be room for both of us.”

On Thrones they would be closer to the Orsinate, and that was dangerous. But if the city was really threatened with destruction, it seemed they might be safer on the upper levels than here. And there was something to be said for hiding in plain sight. “Will you come with me?”

Reive crouched into her chair, looking more like a child than ever. For a horrible moment Ceryl thought she would refuse. And Ceryl couldn’t risk that; couldn’t risk letting the gynander return to her own level, where she might betray them both. The thought of killing Reive sickened her; but she would have no choice. She looked at the gynander beseechingly.

Reive lowered her head, drew her hands to her ears. She wished she’d never come here; wished she’d not been so greedy for food and a new patron. But it was done, now.

And Ceryl’s quarters were on the upper levels. There would be no other hermaphrodites there to snigger at Reive behind her back. She would be well fed, and, if she could trust Ceryl, well cared for. Very slowly, Reive nodded.

Ceryl let her breath out in a long whoo of relief. “Good,” she said, and paced to the door. “I think we should go now—”

Before you change your mind, she thought—

“Before it gets any later. I’ve got everything we’ll need up there, the kitchen’s full, I’ve never even spent the night—”

She practically dragged Reive after her, the two of them hurrying down the corridor to the gravator that would bring them to the pleasure cabinet’s level. It wasn’t until they reached Ceryl’s chambers and locked the door behind them that Reive realized that she had forgotten the mysid in its globe.

Hobi grew increasingly nervous as they waited for the gravator to arrive in the Undercity and bear them back to the upper levels. His eyes ached, striving to give sharp edges and angles to this shapeless night. Phantom pyramids and cubicles appeared before his eyes, ghostly well-ordered images that begged for substance; but Hobi knew there was only this inchoate blackness, this dank and primal air, this soft earth beneath his boots. He shuddered, longing for the cool blues and whites of Cherubim, the sterile and vivifying scents from the air ducts.

“Because of the Architects,” Nasrani was saying. Hobi started. He hadn’t been listening; a soft labored sound, like something breathing, had diverted his attention to a heap of rags near the gravator entrance.

“…back then they were training me to be the next Architect Imperator—”

Hobi looked up in surprise as Nasrani continued, “Before you were born. I had the finest tutors. The Kray Nine Thousand and Natambu Bellairs. I’m the oldest in the family, you know. Âziz comes next, but she’s three years younger and…”

Hobi nodded, fidgeting. Far above the gravator could barely be discerned, a square of violet light floating down, cables wrapping it like black velvet ropes.

Nasrani continued, “…and really she’s the least intelligent of all of us. That’s why she relies so utterly on the Architects; why for generations they have all enslaved themselves to the Architects. Because they were stupid; because no one had the education or temperament to question the machines.”

“But you did.” Hobi nodded. It seemed the right thing to say.

“That’s right. I did. I was researching the western storm system, what the moujiks call Ucalegon. Did you know there was another city here once, before Araboth?”

Hobi shook his head.

“There was. It was called Indianola.”

With a grating noise the gravator finally stopped in front of them. They stepped inside and sat down. Hobi practically groaned with relief as the doors closed and the machine began to rise once more, but Nasrani went on as though nothing had changed.

“We’ve found evidence that this site was settled nearly a thousand years ago. It was a port then, feeding into the Gulf—”

“The Gulf?”

“Yes, the Gulf! All that water out there? The sea? ” Nasrani glared at him. “You’ve been out at Æstival Tide?”

Hobi looked offended. “I just never heard anyone call it that.”

Nasrani raised his eyebrows triumphantly. “My point exactly. That’s because nobody knows anymore. The Architects clean their files periodically and purge them of old data, and then no one remembers the original names of things. But there was a city here, quite a large one. Indianola. The Gateway to Texas, they called it. It was a trade center for petroleum and metals and other things. Cattle, in the very beginning when there were farmlands here. A pleasure city for a while. Then a port again, for trade with HORUS and the Commonwealth, before the Long Night destroyed most of the cities and there was no one left to trade with: Then when things were restored somewhat after the Third Ascension, it became a port for the slave trade.”

Hobi tilted his head. “So was this city destroyed by the Commonwealth or the Emirate?”

“It was destroyed by a storm. By several storms. Hurricanes, tidal waves, typhoons. The first time—the first time we have records—was in the nineteenth century. Then again in the twentieth, and again in the twenty-first. Each time they rebuilt the city, and each time it was wiped away as though it had never existed. The last time was the worst—by then the storm systems had grown terrifically—the weather had mutated like everything else. Afterward the Long Night came before they had a chance to rebuild it. When the Prophets of the Two Faiths finally joined forces a hundred years later, they raised the Quincunx Domes atop the ruins of those earlier cities, and named the new city Araboth. Seventh Heaven.”

Hobi glanced out the window. Outside the glow of the refineries faded as they rose another level. “Is it a secret, then? That this was Indianola once?”

Nasrani took a snuffbox from his greatcoat and did a pinch, sneezed, then tucked his long legs under him. “No. No secret; just forgotten history.

“I learned other things, too. Especially later, when I started to try and find out about the nemosynes. I told you that the weather has been changing outside—the Shinings did that, and then some of the HORUS projects had an unanticipated effect. In the last few years it’s gotten worse—the Aviators bring back reports of storms in the Archipelago that wipe out entire islands in a single night. I myself have seen images from the HORUS satellites that show that the very shape of some of the continents has changed. There is a new storm system that builds in the seas to the east of Araboth. Every year for the last six or seven years at least one of these storms has come near enough to alter the topography of the coast a hundred miles south of here.”

Hobi stared openmouthed, but before he could say anything the exile cut him off.

“But did the Architects see this? They did not! Storms like these—if one of them were to strike here it could destroy us—”

Hobi protested, “But it would never break through. The domes…”

“The domes are hundreds of years old! And the Architects are even older. I believe they are starting to fail us—they are not as reliable as they once were. In the last year they have been giving the wrong data. Nothing anyone would notice during routine use; but as I told you, I was trained to be the Architect Imperator, so I noticed. Little things, like that hole we saw in the Undercity….”

Hobi cried, “But—but what does it mean?”

Nasrani took a deep breath. “It means, either the Architects are malfunctioning or—or they’re malfunctioning, that’s all.”

Suddenly he looked tired, not the margravin in exile but a haggard man no longer young. He looked at Hobi almost desperately. “That is why I’m trying to wake the nemosyne, to see if she can access others Outside. Perhaps there is a master diagnostic that could repair the Architects. Or one of the meteorological nemosynes that could track the storm systems accurately. Because otherwise…”

He spread his hands, shrugging, and said nothing more.

Hobi looked away, brushing his long hair from his face. Periwinkle light filled the gravator, and the smell of lemons. They were approaching Cherubim. He thought of his father sitting up all night, talking to the Architects. He thought of all those other nights since his mother had been murdered, his sleepless father bleary-eyed and grim in his study. He thought of the fissure in the Undercity, and of a clear voice intoning The rift at Pier Forty-three is spreading.

“How do you know all this?” he asked at last, his voice cracking. “Why haven’t the Architects said anything? Why doesn’t my father know?”

Nasrani threw up his hands, falling against the wall as the gravator lurched to a stop. “Because the Architects are wrong, that’s why! They’ve been relying on old data, the lines from HORUS have been skewed, I don’t know! But they’re wrong, there is a new storm system. And I know, because I’ve seen it.”

Hobi swallowed. He remembered what the exile had said earlier, about the tunnel that had led him to the replicants. “You’ve been Outside?”

Nasrani nodded. Without looking at the boy he stood and started for the door. Hobi followed, shaking his head.

“But you’re alive. They say you can’t go Outside, except at Æstival Tide. They say you’ll go mad. They say you’ll die.”

With a grinding clang the doors slid open. “Well,” said Nasrani as he looked down at Hobi with his clear pale eyes. “It’s like I told you:

“ They’re wrong. ”

Chapter 3 THE INVESTITURE

IT HAD BEEN SOME time since Ceryl had been to her chambers on Thrones. When she opened the door a musky smell greeted them, amber essence and patchouli, but everything was neat and considerably more luxurious than what Reive was accustomed to.

“You can sleep here.” Ceryl pointed to a long divan plumped with yellow velvet pillows. “I’ll be in the next room if you need me—help yourself to anything you can find.” She was exhausted. Not even the threat of more nightmares could keep her from sleeping. She drew a bolt on the door, then retired to the bedroom.

Reive collapsed on the divan and stared at the ceiling. She found herself listening for the sound of gynanders whispering or running down the corridors. But it was quiet here, quieter than any level she had ever visited. None of the growlings or splashes of the vivariums; no chatter of recording equipment as on Powers. With a sigh she fingered a plait of her hair, chewing the end wistfully. She had none of her own clothes with her, of course. Worse, she didn’t have her cosmetics. She would have to make do with whatever she found here, which (she had peeked in a closet) looked to be mostly somber blue and brown catsuits and heavy leather boots. But Ceryl’s quarters were large and comfortable. There were stacks of ’files along one wall, a huge viewing monitor on another; and the promise of parties to attend. Sinking into the divan’s plush cushions with the rich smell of amber wafting over her, the soft warm glow of a night-light nearby, it seemed to Reive impossible that anything could go wrong here on the upper levels. Ceryl’s dream was probably just that, a dream; the tremor she’d felt earlier some minor disturbance—maybe one of the Architects’ grinding machines at work somewhere below. And everyone knew Zalophus was mad. The gynander quickly fell asleep, her own dreams peaceful and utterly forgettable.

Until without warning she was tearing at the coverlet, her heart thudding as she staggered from the divan, crying out softly as she tried to recall where she was.

The woman with the dream. The upper levels. Reive grabbed the edge of a table, breathing deeply until she felt calmer, and then she recalled what had awakened her.

The mysid. She had given it no thought until now, but suddenly she was torn with visions of the frail thing floating dead and gray in its bowl. Left alone in her chambers it would die; might already be dead, if another tremor had shaken Virtues Level and sent some bit of rubbish falling onto its fragile globe. Or—and this would be worse—someone might find it, a snooping guardian or the awful Drusilla, and then it would be traced back to Reive, or else tossed with the day’s slops into one of the level’s septic tanks.

Tears burned at the gynander’s eyes. How could she have forgotten it? Her prized possession, the secret living thing she had hidden and protected all these months. Before she could think better of it she was at the door, sliding back the bolt with a soft whicker and padding into the hallway, headed for the gravator that would bring her back to Virtues.

She met no one on the way. It was too early for shift-change, and there was seldom much traffic between her own level and Ceryl’s, especially at this hour. Once in the pale blue and pink corridors of the hermaphrodites’ quarters she raced silently to her room, scarcely waiting for the sentry to bid her enter. Then she was inside.

All was as it had been, the same tangle of clothes and cosmetics, the same thick smell of unwashed bedcovers. A few flecks of plastic had peeled from the ceiling, and the dim lighting flickered as though the current had wavered in the last few hours. Otherwise there was no sign but that this was any other evening, with Reive returning late from an inquisition. She stepped breathlessly to where she had hidden the mysid’s globe behind her narrow bed, reached down and withdrew it.

Inside the orb of dusty glass the little creature floated, its translucent skin almost silvery in the uneven light. When Reive touched the globe with one eager finger the mysid stirred, darted to the bottom of its tiny cage with legs beating fiercely.

“It’s all right,” Reive whispered, hugging the globe to her breast. “We didn’t forget you, we came back….”

In a pile by the door she found a long scarf of iridescent blue cloth. Carefully she wrapped the globe in this, then gave a last look about her room. Her cosmetics box lay on the floor where she had left it, and there were her favorite gold chains, the little tin where she kept rings and earrings and odd bits of cloth for binding up her hair. She had a strange certainty that she would not be back here, but if she carried the mysid in its globe she would have room for nothing else. Finally she headed for the door, trying to hold the glass bowl tightly but casually, as though she carried nothing but a wad of cloth.

The hallway was still empty, but as she rounded the corner where the gravator waited she heard voices, shrill laughter, and Drusilla’s nasal squeal—

“—must have found somebody! Let’s bang on her door and find out—”

With a smothered cry Reive ran the last few feet to the gravator, moaning softly as precious water spilled from the globe to soak her chest. Then the doors were opening, nearly blinding light poured from the conveyance as she stumbled inside and, gasping, bade the gravator return to Ceryl’s level.

“Where the hell have you been?”

Ceryl stood inside the doorway, her eyes wild, smelling strongly of cheap brandy. “I’ve been up for an hour, I—”

Only of course she couldn’t admit just what had terrified her—the thought that the gynander had left to betray her and her treasonous dreams to the Orsinate. But here was Reive, disheveled as Ceryl herself, clutching a sodden knot of blue cloth and panting.

“We—we are sorry, we forgot something—”

She stepped into the room. Ceryl closed the door behind her and reached for a tiny glass of some bronze liquid. She took a sip, staring at the bundle in Reive’s hands, then asked, “Well, what is it? You know you could have been detained if you’d been stopped—”

“We saw no one,” Reive replied sullenly. She had thought she could return and find a new hiding place for her treasure. That would be impossible, now.

“Well?” Ceryl shook her glass impatiently, sending the spirits inside whirling in a diminutive vortex. Reive sighed, defeated, then slowly unwrapped the globe and set it on a table.

“What the hell is that?” Ceryl bent over the bowl, her tone more bemused than angry. Moisture pooled down the sides; it seemed to be half-full of cloudy water, and something like a bluish tear hung suspended in its center.

“It’s a—our—it’s a mysid. A shrimp.”

“A shrimp,” Ceryl repeated. She glanced at the gynander, her childish face pale and nearly tearful, then back at the globe. “Is it—wherever did you get it?”

“The vivariums,” Reive said miserably. “A patron gave it to us, as payment for a reading.”

Ceryl stooped so that she could peer more closely into the small bowl. Inside the frail creature darted about, its feathery fins beating the water to a reddish blur. “You’ve kept it? As a—as a pet?” When she looked up the gynander was staring at her, terrified. With a pang Ceryl realized that Reive thought she would get rid of the thing—toss it down the septic line or turn Reive in for illegal possession of vivarium property.

Reive nodded, rubbing her eyes. “It needs more water. Some spilled on the way here.” She pointed at the scarf leaving a sodden blot on the floor at her feet.

“Yes—well, there’s water in the kitchen reservoir, let’s refill it.”

“No.” The gynander shook her head. “That would kill it—the water has to stand for a few days. That’s what the woman told me.”

Ceryl sipped thoughtfully at her brandy. “Of course. Well, I can get you the right kind of water,” she said at last. “From my workchambers on the vivarium level. How long have you had it?”

“A few months. It’s going to have babies—see? That’s an egg-sac.” She stuck a grubby finger on the edge of the globe, then said shyly, “Its name is Gato.”

Ceryl gazed at the clot of tiny pearls beneath the mysid’s thorax, then back at the gynander. Sudden pity washed over her—to think of anyone, even a hermaphrodite, keeping such a pathetic thing for a pet! and completely forbidden, as well. Unaccountably she thought of Giton, the trouble he took with his few belongings, his prized holo showing himself and Ceryl outside the Cathedral of Christ Cadillac one festival day.

After a moment she said, “We’ll have to find someplace to keep it. Where it won’t be seen. What does it eat?”

Reive looked up at her, her pale eyes wide with relief. “Anything. Rice crackers, mostly. Sometimes krill paste.”

“It would probably prefer some kind of fish nutriment.” Ceryl stood, a little unsteadily, and placed her empty brandy glass back on a shelf. “Tomorrow, I’ll bring some water back, and something for it to eat.”

At the door to her bedroom she paused. The gynander still knelt beside the globe, looking more childlike than ever with her thin dark hair unbound, her white face pressed close to the glass. Ceryl nodded, once, to herself, then said, “Would you—would you like to sleep in here, with me? There’s more room, I mean you could probably sleep better—”

Slowly the gynander raised her head, brushed a tendril of hair from her cheek. She nodded, shyly, and reached to stroke the glass a final time.

For a few more minutes Ceryl waited, until at last the gynander rose and crossed to join her. Ceryl looked back at the globe, gleaming pale green and blue in the half-light, the mysid floating dreamily in its clouded center. Then she turned to Reive and shut the door behind them.

By next morning Reive had settled in. Ceryl wouldn’t let her go back down to her own room to retrieve her belongings. Reive didn’t care about the clothes; she found a few scarves among Ceryl’s things, some understated jewelry, and a pair of sandals that almost fit. But cosmetics were another matter. After a heated discussion, Ceryl arranged to have a box sent over from the pleasure cabinet’s private spa. Reive squealed and hid behind a mirror for the next few hours, delighting in expensive powders and liquid maquillage, kohl and real gold dust that she applied liberally to her cheeks and shoulders.

Best of all, there was a gravator that went up to Cherubim and Seraphim, the highest levels of Araboth. She removed the wards she had drawn upon her breasts and painstakingly outlined the Orsinate’s heraldic eye and Prophet Rayburn’s crucifix.

Ceryl watched her, smiling. She too felt better today. The gynander seemed genuinely happy; betrayal seemed as unlikely as the sudden destruction of the city. Her sleep had been untroubled for the first time in weeks. Maybe her luck had finally changed. Maybe she had just needed to share her fears with another person.

Still, before she left to go back down to her workchambers she warned Reive against going out alone.

“You don’t know your way around here yet.” She felt a slight twinge, knowing that the real reason was her doubts as to the gynander’s loyalty. “And sentries can be aggressive about checking newcomers.”

“We want to go see the palace.”

Ceryl sighed in exasperation. “The palace! But surely you’ve seen it on the ’files—”

Reive tossed a kohl wand into her cosmetics case. “It’s not the same.” She took a mango from a basket and peeled it sullenly. “We’ve never been to the upper levels before, why should we stay cooped up in here all day?”

“But if you’re not registered for this level, the gravator won’t let you in. They could do a trace on you, which means you’ll be detained by the Reception Committee—”

“We’re registered under the Orsinate,” Reive said. “We’re allowed free commerce on all levels, as long as we’re somebody’s guest.” Her tone turned pleading but her eyes held a trace of belligerence.

Ceryl turned, defeated, and went to gather her things. “If they detain you I can’t do much to help….”

Reive shrugged and took another bite of mango. At the door Ceryl paused and said, “I’ll be back—I don’t know when. This evening, probably. Please don’t go out alone—”

As soon as she was gone the gynander dressed, sprinkled a few flecks of rice cracker into the mysid’s bowl, and headed for the gravator.

Ceryl’s chambers were in a block of affluent residential buildings, pagoda-shaped and shining with blue and red lacquer. The air smelled of lemons, and banners proclaiming an Ascendant triumph over the Commonwealth hung limply from the corners of the pagodas. Between each block ran spacious avenues, crowded with rickshaws bearing members of the pleasure cabinet to and from the gravators. Everyone seemed short-tempered, even more so than one might expect bored aristocrats to be. This close to Æstival Tide, the competition for invitations to purification ceremonies and the more elite parties grew intense. In a day or two the scroll listing those who would join the Orsinate on their private viewing platform would be released. Until then, cabinet members and advisers, lesser relatives of the ruling family and even a few ambitious interlopers from the lower levels would all be scrambling for the opportunity to gain access to the margravines and Imperators.

Some members of the pleasure cabinet already wore the slender fillets of brass and malachite that were one of the first heralds of the Feast of Fear. They elbowed their way past the others disdainfully. Reive recognized a high-ranking diplomat who had been briefly famous during the Archipelago Conflict, and a woman who was lead soprano in the sadist opera Fasa. No one seemed to find it curious that a gynander wandered about unchaperoned. Once Reive saw another hermaphrodite, bouncing around in the back of a rickshaw with an austere-looking man whose black gowns marked him as a vicar in the Church of Christ Cadillac. Reive waved discreetly, but the other hermaphrodite looked through her with slanted agate eyes. After that Reive cultivated a cool expression, following the traffic and trying not to stare.

There was a bottleneck at the gravator that serviced Seraphim, the uppermost level where the palace stood. Diplomats clambered from their rickshaws, waving invitations at each other as they argued over who had seniority and their drivers demanded payment. When a scuffle broke out between the vicar and one of the eunuch followers of the Daughters of Graves, Reive slipped toward the front of the queue unnoticed.

The line moved quickly as the gravator’s sentry processed each person. When her turn came Reive approached it nervously. Sentries were unknown on the lower levels, since gravators there did not ordinarily service the rarefied reaches of the Orsinate and their cabinet. An awning of faux bamboo hung above the entrance, yolk-yellow military banners stirring in a breath of breeze emerging from the chamber’s vents. The sentry was a smooth cylinder of yellow metal, faceless. It beckoned Reive, with a long metal arm containing a tiny optic that glittered as it made a pass across her face. A long moment while she heard it whirring as it accessed her retina print. Then it sighed, “Reive Orsina. Pass.”

Inside, the gravator was opulent, but so crowded that all Reive glimpsed of it was a marble floor, scuffed and rather dirty, and overhead a chandelier made up of myriad holograms that showed the margravines’ faces shimmering and smiling down upon their disgruntled staff. Reive squeezed in between a member of the Toxins Cabal, a plump woman whose sweat smelled of fenugreek and bleach, and a Disciple of Blessed Narouz, the Orsinate’s heraldic eye dangling conspicuously from his neck. When the gravator began its smooth ascent he leaned against Reive, leaving a smear of petroleum along her arm.

In a few minutes they had reached their destination. Reive was expecting something—music, an announcement—but the doors only slid open and everybody walked out, with a little less shoving than on the lower levels but a few more sidelong glances. The Disciple of Blessed Narouz tried to push a flyer into her hand as he left, Blessed Narouz’s swarthy face scowling and gesturing from its surface, but Reive hurried past him.

At the apex of Araboth’s ziggurat, Seraphim was the smallest of the city’s levels—though still vast—and more wonderful than Reive could ever have imagined. She blinked, stumbling as she tried to find a place to stand and gape. Brilliant light filled the air, a light that was truly golden. Looking up she saw huge curved banks of lamps set within the domes, so near that the reflections of things on Seraphim could be seen faintly, like flaws in glass. A faint tinkling sound filled the air, ambient music commissioned from one of the countless artists the Orsinate retained as permanent guests of the Reception Committee. A heady, complex smell wafted up from vents in the walkway—lavender essence and amber musk, an underlying note of oranges and the faintest wisp of opium smoke. Reive stood a few feet from the gravator, trying to catch her breath. After several minutes she felt even more dazed, and happier than she had ever been in her life.

“Are you engaged, holy child?” A soft voice crooned beside her. Reive started, looking up into the violet eyes of the galli, the eunuch who had been in the gravator a few minutes before. His hair was dyed the same shade of deep blue as his robes, his palms stained red.

“Oh! Ye-es, yes, we are meeting someone—” She rubbed her eyes as though she had just awakened, then stared perturbed at the kohl smudged on her hand.

“Ah.” The galli nodded, his high voice betraying a giggle. “I understand. You are here for purely social reasons.”

He smiled kindly, then taking Reive’s arm pointed to where a path of stones and glass laid in an intricate mosaic twisted into the distance. He lowered his voice to a shrill whisper and said, “Many people find the Walk of Memorable Incidents to be an instructive way to begin their visit here.”

Reive stammered her thanks, but the galli only placed a finger to his rouged lips, murmuring, “Keep your eyes lowered here, holy child. Remember our margravines are sensitive to eyes like yours—”

He drew up his blue robes and raised one hand, exposing a scarlet palm. “May you come safely through the Feast of Fear,” he said, and walked off.

Reive waved at him limply. Her exhilaration began to fade. She yawned. A heavy tiredness seeped into her, like smoking kef or inhaling fine incense at one of the better sort of dream inquisitions. She started in the direction the galli had pointed and began to wander along the Walk of Memorable Incidents. Apart from several scenes depicting carnage from the Commonwealth and the Håbilis Emirate, the most memorable image on the mosaic path showed Roland Orsina embracing Melissa Sirrúk, his wife and partner in founding the Orsinate dynasty. Reive kept her head down, absorbed in the bright pictures. After a few yards the mosaic depicted another scene, this one of Sirrúk’s funeral pyre, the masses mourning her bizarre and untimely death by choking on a whole pear. A few feet farther on Melissa’s first successor appeared, her face picked out in chips of chalcedony and tourmaline, but by then Reive had lost interest in the path.

There was so much more to see. All of Seraphim was laid out atop a pavement of smooth marble, with pathways like brightly colored channels sweeping through it. Here and there were grids of intricate geometric shapes, blue and yellow and purple tiles, or expanses of highly polished stone, agate and obsidian and tiger’s eye, white jade and rounded steps of soft cinnabar. Sculptures from the Orsinate’s famed collection were everywhere, and fountains spewing jets of scented water into pools where pop-eyed koi swam languidly, waiting to be fed. In the distance Reive saw men and women in beautifully tailored cutaway suits and robes of silk jacquard. They seemed to stalk about purposefully, like figures in a puppet opera. Compared to the rancid air and garish neon of Virtues Level it was all quite stunning, miraculous in fact. She marveled that Ceryl ever returned to Dominations.

But after a little while Reive slowed her walking. The daylights hurt her eyes. Brilliant reflections bounced from the polished walkways, too bright and too hot. When she stopped to admire one of the fountains, its scent seemed harsh, the smell of jasmine cut with an unpleasant chemical odor. The ambient music grew annoying as well. Reive found herself missing the sudden shrieks and whistles that greeted her when she visited Dominations, the brackish smell of the oceanic tanks and Zalophus’s bellowing. Even the koi, with their golden scales and extravagantly furbelowed fins, seemed demanding, rushing to nibble at her fingers dangling in the water.

She was thinking that perhaps she might return to the gravator, when a long electrified wail drowned out the plashing fountains. It was a sound Reive recognized from the evening ’files: the signal for the arrival of new prisoners. She looked around and saw that most of the other strollers were pointing in the direction of the siren. They gathered in small excited groups, then began walking more quickly, all heading for what seemed to be a broad white avenue. Reive flicked one of the greedy koi from her hand and hurried after the crowd.

At first she kept her eyes downcast, remembering the galli’s advice. But it soon became apparent that no one was paying Reive the slightest attention, and so she looked around.

The boulevard was wide, nearly as wide as whole residential blocks on some of the lower levels, and made of a false marble cool and smooth and golden-veined as the real thing. Vents in the pavement released the scents of lemon and frangipani. But beneath the strong citrusy tang was another odor—the smell of the sea, stronger here than it ever was below, even in the vivariums. For a moment Reive shut her eyes, trying to imagine herself back on Dominations. When she opened them again she stopped in amazement.

Once Reive had met a poet from the pleasure cabinet who carried with him a beautiful piece of ephemera, a pagoda of brass and bamboo that housed a copper-jointed cricket that sang like a lark. That cricket-house had been a model of the building that loomed before her now. Gates of gold and vermillion and lapis rose behind snowy arches. Huge winged telamons upheld each of the palace’s nine levels. From every corner spun glittering spires of blue and gold, so long and fine and shining it was a wonder they did not dissolve into mist. At its very peak, seemingly, inches from the central of the Quincunx Domes, two statues soared. The first was of gold, a winged figure holding a trumpet. It had been salvaged from the Orsinate’s ancestral city after the Long Night. Beside it reared a second statue, the golden crucifix upon which Prophet Rayburn hung, smiling beatifically. Reive had always been confused by this symbol, since it was well known that Prophet Rayburn had been garroted by his own daughter Livia, and it was she who had actually been crucified, by her cousin-german Sejanus Orsina, nicknamed The Unruly. The twin statues made a stirring site, seeming to impale the very roof of Araboth, so near that Reive’s head pounded to look at it. By means of the Architects’ arcane machinery, spectral lightning lanced down from the domes to strike the winged figure and the smiling Prophet, sending waves of blue and violet rippling across the boulevard.

For the next hour Reive did nothing but watch the lightning play about the palace. She was afraid to go any nearer; afraid that some of the calm-looking men and women walking up and down the palace steps might actually be members of the Reception Committee alert to the presence of an uninvited guest. When she grew tired of standing she found a bench of hammered copper and sat there by herself, wishing that she had brought some mangoes with her.

That was Reive’s first day on Seraphim.

“No one questioned you?” Ceryl asked, astonished, when she returned that evening.

Reive shook her head. “No one paid any attention to us.”

“No sentries?”

“Only in the gravator, and it let us pass. They have fish there that will eat from your hands. But it is too bright, it gave us a headache.”

In spite of that she returned the next day. This time she remembered to bring mangoes, and a small bottle of aqua vitae she found in Ceryl’s liquor cabinet. Again the gravator sentry whispered, “Reive Orsina. Pass.” Again she was ignored by everyone, save a small girl walking with her replicant guardian. The child spat at Reive and made the sign against Ucalegon when she passed.

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.

Reive smiled shyly and shook her head. The galli shrugged and turned back to the waterpipe. The gynander felt a pang that they had not been more insistent—she could have been persuaded to join them. She wished she had been able to find Ceryl in the crowd. She wished she had stayed to talk with that other hermaphrodite, back by the gravator.

Everything here was overwhelming, almost frightening. She had been so young during last Æstival Tide, only four years old and still in the hermaphrodites’ creche on Virtues. All this clamor brought back her fear—the sight of the margravines, more beautiful and terrifying than she could imagine; the anticipation at the Lahatiel Gate, waiting for the huge doors to open onto the strand Outside; the charnel-house stench of the Compassionate Redeemer, masked by the smell of burning roses. She hugged her arms close to her chest and walked off by herself, staring at the palace gates.

From here she could pick out figures on the steps. Diplomats nodding coolly to each other. Emirate delators wringing their hands. Beside the lower entrances the Hierophantic Guard stood at attention, incense braziers burning at their feet. On an open colonnade near the main entrance, the Toxins Cabal had gathered to drink kehveh from tiny egg-shaped cups, pompous with their vocoders and lingua francas bleating and blinking. The pleasure cabinet spilled onto the patio, and Reive tried to spot Ceryl’s drab suit among the luminous gowns and greatcoats. Over all of it the eerie blue lightning flickered with the faintest crackling sound, as though someone tapped softly but insistently upon the domes arching overhead.

More and more people arrived. Diplomats and counselors and the entire Linguistics Cabal, myriad Orsinate bastards with their replicant guardians and court favorites in yellow mufti. Reive saw the dwarf Rudyard Planck at the very edge of the colonnade, shaking his head as a tall woman bent to whisper in his ear. Then suddenly a tinny fanfare blasted from the wireless speakers. Reive stood on tiptoe to see the Imperators parading from the palace gates. All seven of them, their yolk-yellow formal robes and scarlet sashes swaying about their legs. The last one, Sajur Panggang the Architect Imperator, wore a malachite band around his neck and emerald mourning bands on his wrists. They walked slowly to the front of the colonnade and stood there, acknowledging the cheers of the crowd with restrained nods.

It grew very quiet. The Toxins Cabal put down their little porcelain cups and stood in attentive silence. The members of the pleasure cabinet grew still, and turned their heads toward the main gate. Reive glanced back at the huge crowd gathered on the promenade. Banners hung limply above them, and thin streamers of dark smoke. Directly behind her the galli and Disciples and pontifices of Christ Cadillac seemed unusually alert, considering the abandoned hubble-bubbles and splintered remnants of candicaine pipettes that surrounded them.

Suddenly the air throbbed with a hollow wailing siren, as though the monstrous sculpture Mormo had been given voice. The echo died, then blared again. On the steps the diplomats and cabal members turned to the main gate, their faces taut. The crowd around Reive moved forward, but only a little; as though afraid to get too close to the palace. One of Blessed Narouz’s Disciples jostled the gynander. When she protested he looked down at her, then with a low cry moved away, making the ward against Ucalegon. As the siren wailed a third and final time, Reive hugged her arms close to her and wished she was back in her little room on Virtues.

Beneath the lapis-crowned arches of the main gate a woman stepped forward. She wore the dress leathers of an Aviator, crimson and black. Her sensory enhancer was pushed back onto her forehead like a crown. From her black-gloved hands rose a black standard, a huge triangular pennon emblazoned with a luminous silver moon. Across the moon was flung a pointed shape, like a spear or javelin, and flickering silver letters spelled out the motto of the defenders of the Ascendant Autocracy:

Oderint dum metuant

Let them hate, so long as they fear.

A moment later the Aviators marched through the gate.

Against the palace’s pale walls their gleaming leather jackets glowed deep crimson, like the inside of a beast’s mouth. The creak of their leathers echoed in the silence, a raw wind from the stars, and their metal-soled boots clashed like hail against the marble. From their brows their sensory enhancers rose like crowns of black glass and steel and sent darts of reflected lightning slashing through the air. The crowd gathered on the colonnade shrank from their approach, and Reive could hear all around her murmured imprecations to Blessed Narouz.

She shuddered. Without the enhancers to cover them, she could see what usually was hidden in those faces, something dreadful that the Aviators had glimpsed and now carried behind their eyes. Many of them were horribly scarred; but they refused surgery to correct their deformities, preferring to bear them into the fastnesses of space as grim reminders of their human origin. The bottom half of one woman’s face had been blown away. Steel and raw bone gaped beneath her upper jaw, and livid red tubes coiled about her neck. Her eyes as they gazed up at the NASNA standard were cold and dead as the dome’s false sky.

There were not many of the Aviators—Reive counted forty—but they seemed to fill the entire colonnade. The air that drifted down from them smelled of smoke and burning metal, and, very faintly, of charred meat.

Reive felt sick. She looked around to see if there was a way out of the crowd. Beside her two women from the Toxins Cabal whispered to each other. One of them caught Reive’s eye and stared back at her, the vocoder in her throat blinking yellow. She wore thigh-high boots of sullen yellow plasteen and a soiled fez. A grub-white puppet clung to her shoulder. It glared at the gynander, then very slowly opened its mouth to display a hideous pulpy throat.

Reive swallowed. But when the woman with the puppet continued to stare she took a deep breath, then asked, “What is it? What’s happening?”

“Don’t tell her, don’t tell her,” the puppet hissed.

“A promotion ceremony,” the woman replied. She gazed at Reive curiously, as though trying to recall where they might have met. The vocoder in her throat pulsed deep crimson as she slapped the puppet’s muzzle. “The new Aviator Imperator has been named by the Autocracy. The margravines are going to invest him.”

“A promotion,” Reive repeated, and looked away.

On the colonnade, the Aviator’s standard-bearer turned to face the main gate. Above the huge doorway graven letters began to glow, gold and then brilliant adamant, until the Ascendants’ motto shone out over the crowd like a fouga’s watchlights:

Let Us Raise A Somewhat Loftier Strain!

From the ground at Reive’s feet came a loud hiss. She gasped and stepped backward, then felt the chilly mist rising from enhancement ventricles in the pavement. A heavy sweet incense, like that used in the rites at Church Cadillac—myrrh, she thought at first, or pangloss. Laughter and curses as the narcotic fumes enveloped the crowd. Reive tried to hold her breath but gave up, gasping. The sweet scent burned the back of her throat, the chemicals flooding her system so quickly that her fingers felt numb and her eyes teared. But after a few breaths she felt amazingly elated; it was pangloss. All around her people beamed and nodded. The galli laughed and hugged each other. Even the dour Disciples of Blessed Narouz grinned and removed their fezes. Reive found herself beaming at the woman with the puppet, the puppet itself silenced by the euphoric incense but still glowering. When the gynander looked up again the crowd on the palace steps was cheering wildly.

Three figures strode across the plaza, tall and thin and wearing identical suits of video-gray sharkskin, severely cut. Conical crowns upon their foreheads made them seem even taller, crowns of gold bound with chrome and steel and embossed with the twin sigils of the Prophets Rayburn and Mudhowi Sirrúk. Reive screamed along with the rest of the mob, pumping her fists in the air. The scent of pangloss grew thicker as the crowd shouted three names, the voices of the Aviators ringing above the others until the domes thundered with the sound—

Shiyung and Nike and Âziz Orsina.

The Seraphim of Araboth: the Orsinate.

One by one the three sisters bowed, their crowns winking in the harsh light.

“Which one is—” Reive choked, grabbing the woman next to her; but then one of the figures on the plaza stepped forward, arms upraised. Sapphire lightning danced above her as she smiled.

“Shiyung!” the woman beside Reive screamed, the puppet whickering on her shoulder. “Shiyung!”

Reive nodded mutely. Of course. She should have recognized her from the nightly broadcasts—the ghee-yellow skin, the enormous slanted eyes, the mouth so thin and delicate that a particularly intricate form of calligraphy bore her name. Gazing upon her now, the gynander’s eyes filled with tears. She was so exquisitely beautiful, so good.

Shiyung Orsina. Not the ruler in name of Araboth, but the beloved of the people, the idol of the Aviators and the Children of Mercy, the lover of all those princes and women and soldiers whose ashes now mingled with the fine sandalwood powder she brushed upon her shoulders each evening, before she took into her bed the next of her countless lovers. She stood before them with her arms upheld triumphantly and let the lightning play in the air above her head, laughing as the crowd cheered her and the Aviators shouted “Shiyung!” until finally Âziz stepped forward and with a tight little smile took her sister’s hand. Nike remained a few feet away from them, gazing distractedly up at the domes. Âziz cleared her throat. Then,

“Greetings, Seraphim! Cherubim and Thrones and Dominations, Virtues and Powers and Principalities!”

Her heavily amplified voice rang out, and the cheering subsided.

“We are here today to celebrate a triumph—to celebrate two triumphs. One of them a military conquest, and the other a scientific victory, no less than a triumph over death itself.”

Her words were swallowed by a tremendous roar from the Aviators. Âziz looked startled and glanced at Shiyung. But her sister only smiled. Nike remained standing by herself, nodding thoughtfully.

“A triumph over death itself,” Âziz repeated. For an instant Reive thought she glowered at Shiyung; but then Âziz continued, “You will recall that, nearly a year ago, our military forces set out to retake the ancient capital from those barbarians who have held it from us for nearly four hundred years…”

Reive recalled no such thing. She had thought the last military expedition was to the Archipelago—or was it the desert?—but then janissary forces went out on maneuvers so often that she had lost count. As for the ancient capital, she could remember only vague rumors. A great weapons storehouse had been there once, but the entire city was guarded by monsters, feral mutated creatures far worse than anything the Ascendants had created in their laboratories.

But these, of course, were rumors. Now it seemed that Âziz was telling them the truth of the matter.

“… have always known the Capital City to be of unparalleled strategic importance, in addition to the ancient weapons holdings there. Now those weapons are ours: thanks, in large part to the bravery and cunning employed by someone who is well known to all of you.

“Single-handedly, this brilliant military hero entered that ghastly place, after his accompanying battalion was slain by traitors within the City itself.”

The gynander stood on tiptoe, striving vainly to see this military paragon. Âziz’s voice rang out like a clarion, so full of pride and wonder that Reive’s scalp prickled.

“There, in the ruins of the ancients, he feigned madness and battled hordes of ghouls—”

Âziz’s voice dropped, and she drew a shaking hand to her cheek—

“—there, he was slain by an assassin’s bullet.”

Âziz lowered her gaze. Behind her the other two margravines stood soberly, Nike staring blankly at the mob, Shiyung so pale beneath her conical crown that it seemed she might faint. In the long silence that followed, the Aviators stirred, their heads moving restively as though seeking the assassin within the crowd, and Reive cowered beneath their probing eyes.

At last Âziz raised her head again. “But we were not defeated. By sheerest fortune, a janissary troop and Aviator battalion had been dispatched from Araboth, and arrived just hours after our hero’s death. Our troops found no resistance from the cowards and monsters within the City. Those troops are there now, having found and restored the ancient armories and reclaimed the Capital as part of the Ascendant Empire.

“As for the man who made all of this possible— his tragedy has been turned into the greater victory. As you well know, my sister, the margravine Shiyung, has long toiled in the Chambers of Mercy, where she has made it her duty to learn all that our Sciences can teach her of the mysteries of life and death. As a new Capital will be born under the Ascendants’ rule, so from Shiyung’s hands a still greater hero has emerged, our new Aviator Imperator!”

At this a terrible wailing cry raked the air, as the Aviators shrieked and raised their black-clad hands, fingers curling and uncurling in their raptor’s salute while lightning flickered in the domes. For a full minute their outcry drowned all other sounds, until Reive felt deafened by it and covered her ears, staring at the ground and trying to keep from weeping with fright.

Then abruptly the Aviators were silenced. Reive looked up warily and saw that Âziz had stepped back on the platform, a helpless expression on her face. Shiyung paced forward, making calming motions toward the Aviators. She stopped and stood with her hands at her sides, her beautiful face lifted so that indigo shadows edged the planes of her cheeks and her eyes were lit by the lightning playing overhead. Behind her Nike and Âziz were silent.

It had grown so quiet that Reive could hear the breathing of everyone around her, the woman with her wheezing puppet, the nervous whispers of the galli. On the colonnade the Aviators slowly raised their fists. As though moving in a dream, one by one the margravines returned their salute, and turned to face the main gate.

In the great doorway behind them something appeared, a shadow that resolved into cadaverous figures framed by the gold and lapis columns. The figures paused in the doorway: six aardmen stooping beneath the burden of a long palanquin of jet and steel. About their necks gleamed the monitors that all the Orsinate’s personal geneslaves wore, thorns of steel and glittering ampules forming a corona about their anguished faces. Saliva fell from their muzzles in long streams. Even from the boulevard Reive could smell them, carrion and the acrid scent of chemicals draining from their sedative ampules, the cloying smell of the jasmine oil that had been laved onto their flanks. As they waited they tossed their heads, and one howled as the long barbs on its collar tore its neck. Then they stalked onto the plaza, their sloping shoulders raw beneath the palanquin’s weight. Reive could feel the woman next to her whispering an imprecation to Blessed Narouz, and somewhere in the crowd a man cried out as the aardmen staggered to the very edge of the raised colonnade.

The palanquin that they carried was tall, set with columns of metal wrapped with shining spikes that branched up like the limbs of a stricken tree. In the center of the litter stood a man. He held two of the columns for balance, and swayed as they bore him forward. Reive shook her head—was this a prisoner? Then she saw that he was not bound. What she had thought were cuffs about his wrists and ankles were actually some sort of enhancers. His face too was covered by a sensory enhancer, its blank black surface whipped with reflecting light. A tunic of crimson leather hung to his knees. One hand was sheathed in crimson leather, but the other was not. It was at that second hand that Reive stared, a hand so pale it had a greenish cast. It was large, with tapering fingers, the skin shiny as though it had been burned and the grafts had not taken well. Blue light winked from a ring as the man raised his hand to adjust his enhancer. He was a very tall man, but somewhat stooped, as though he had for a long time been trapped in some enclosed space. It was an Aviator’s enhancer that covered his face, and on his breast shone the Aviators’ blighted moon.

When they had reached the end of the plaza the aardmen halted. They lowered the palanquin clumsily, their huge-knuckled paws fumbling over its narrow struts and spars. The margravines watched in silence, though Shiyung’s eyes glittered and she smiled rapturously. Several children in the Orsinate’s cortege began to cry.

The aardmen crouched beside the litter and glared up at the man, their vestigial tails switching. He turned to face them, but it was impossible to see what he looked like, because of the enhancer covering his face. After a long moment he stepped to the ground. His legs moved stiffly, as though he were unaccustomed to walking. Reive wanted to look away but could not. A sibilant rush came from beneath her feet. The heady incense of pangloss faded; the ventricles began pumping a chill mist that smelled of ozone and adrenoleen. Reive’s heart pumped as well, louder and louder until she realized that she was shouting in time to its beat. When she looked around, her head ringing, everyone else was shouting as well.

Slowly the man paced the length of the plaza, until he stood before Shiyung Orsina. The crowd erupted into roars and cheers, and the Aviators began chanting a name.

Reive shivered. Every atom of her being pulsed and her mouth had opened to cry out, but now no sound came. She felt horrible, and deathly cold, as though she had been imprisoned within one of the cells where the rasas were regenerated. The adrenoleen made her eyes water. On the colonnade Shiyung cried aloud, her hands sweeping through the air. Reive could not hear her words but the margravine’s tone was exultant. As Shiyung laughed the light bounced from her crown in waves of gold and blue.

With short, jerky motions the Aviator greeted her, his fingers curling and opening in the Aviator’s salute. The cheers subsided as Shiyung straightened, her face suddenly composed into an austere mask. Clumsy as the aardmen, the Aviator fell to one knee, then rose, took her extended hand, and bent his masked head to mime kissing it.

At that Shiyung smiled—a radiant smile, a smile of utter triumph. She waited until he got to his feet again, then turned, presenting him first to her sisters, then to the other Aviators, and finally to the crowd. Through all the cheering, Reive still could not make out his name. Her head throbbed as though she had been bludgeoned. The woman beside her was weeping.

Shiyung turned to the Aviator, stood on tiptoe as though she were going to kiss him. Instead her white hands grasped the enhancer covering his face. With a swift motion she removed it and held it up for the crowd to see. Then she smashed the enhancer upon her knee. Eddies of blue sparks fell about her legs. Behind her the man’s head remained lowered as Shiyung dropped the shards of the broken mask and raised her white arms. She cried out again, her voice so thin and cruel that the gynander trembled.

An awful dread filled Reive, a sense of such horror and foreboding that not even the rush of adrenoleen could quell it. As the Aviator stepped forward, the remains of his enhancer crunched beneath his boots. Reive could hear the woman beside her whispering a name. When he reached the edge of the plaza the Aviator slowly raised his head.

His face was gone. In its place was a curved plate of red metal. Across its smooth surface reflected lightning streamed like blood. No mouth, no nose, earless, hairless; an unbroken plane of crimson metal, like the face of the most primitive kind of replicant. Only from within this mask two eyes glowed. Human eyes, so pale they were nearly transparent, as though every earthly thought and hope had been flushed from them. The mask was horrifying in its utter impassiveness, all the more so because of the dreadful orbs that stared out from it, like the eyes of a cadaver animated and made to look upon its image in a mirror. Beside Reive the woman babbled, and she heard other horrified voices—

“… a rasa! She made him a rasa!…”

“… died but rehabilitated him. In her labs—a game, just like a game to—”

“… revenge, she never forgave him for breaking with her and now look at him…”

Reive turned wild-eyed to the woman beside her—

“But who is he? Who did she do this to?”

—and the puppet shrieked a name,

“ Tast’annin, the Aviator Imperator Tast’annin! ”

Everywhere Reive heard the name taken up, the Aviators pounding their feet in unison and shouting until the very columns of the palace shuddered. Reive clutched the woman beside her to keep from being trampled in the crush of people seething forward to glimpse him—

Tast’annin: the Aviator Imperator Margalis Tast’annin.

The madman who had once been their greatest military commander; the Academy student who had been Shiyung’s lover and the victor of the Archipelago Conflict.

But his own recent history was a lie. He had been no hero in the Capital. Captured and tortured by that City’s keepers, he had been released, insane, and then had sought to betray his Ascendant masters by seizing the City for himself. He had died ignobly; but the rest at least was true—the Ascendant janissaries arrived to conquer a city already in flames, and had borne him back to Araboth as a prize for their mistress.

It was all a joke to her. Seeing the corpse of her lover brought to her on a stinking pallet—his head blackened with his own blood, brain tissue a gray lace across his shattered scalp—had she felt any sorrow, any remorse for him at all?

“Margalis,” she had whispered, and bent to touch the pulp of gray and white beneath his eye. “My dear Margalis.”

And she had laughed, softly at first, and then more loudly, until her serving girl had fled at the note, of venomous triumph in her voice.

Her vengeance had been carefully worked out. She had made him a rasa, a living corpse subject to her command—the ideal creature, she had thought, to be Military Imperator. Now Shiyung stepped back so that the Aviator Imperator could bow. His voice, heavily amplified and bloodless as a stone, echoed across the boulevard as he greeted the crowd. Beside him Shiyung stood straight and shining as a young girl, her sisters impassive behind her.

The crowd grew momentarily quiet, listening to the rasa’s hollow tones. Then, his brief salutation complete, the Aviator Imperator raised his empty face and gave Shiyung a final salute. His hand glowed white as a corpse-candle as it formed a raptor’s claws, while all of Seraphim roared.

Only Reive remained silent, staring frightened and confused at the figures on the colonnade.

Because she knew that it was impossible for any rasa to feel or express a human emotion, or retain anything but a fleeting memory of its former self.

But—somehow, impossibly—the eyes that stared at Shiyung from within this Aviator’s shining metal mask radiated an unmistakable and terrifying hatred.

Chapter 4 A DREAM IN THE WRONG CHAMBER

NASRANI ORSINA HAD DISAPPEARED . After Hobi stumbled from the gravator he’d turned to say something to his guide. But he saw only the gravator dropping, and a large pale hand waving from behind its sliver of amethyst window. In an instant that too fell from sight. The boy stared open-mouthed, his face reflected in the chromium awning above the gravator entrance. When the machine did not return, he shoved his hands in his pockets and dispiritedly walked home.

The dank air from the Undercity had saturated his clothes with the smells of mud and mildew. After the darkness of Angels the lights of Cherubim hurt his eyes, too bright and too many of them. He kept his head down and his eyes half-shut, ignoring the hissing of the ventricles at his feet, the distant booming sound of cheers from the level above. He was trying to remember everything about the nemosyne—her face; the feel of cool glass beneath his cheek; her faint ozone smell.

He did not notice the new posters tacked to the wall near his home. EMBRACE UCALEGON: WELCOME THE HEALING WIND! one said; and another DEATH TO THE HERETICAL TYRANTS! He did not notice where a glass brick had fallen from the base of one of the neighboring houses, or where a stream of water like a silvery filament trickled from the gap left in the wall.

Inside, the replicant Khum greeted him in a hollow voice, reminding him that he was supposed to attend an investiture on Seraphim. Hobi shook his head impatiently, waving the replicant away from him, and headed for his room. When he glanced back he saw that he’d tracked some black stuff across the chamber’s white-tiled floor. He stooped to touch it, raised his fingers and sniffed.

Earth. In the hallway’s glaring night-lights it looked very black and foul. He grimaced and wiped his fingers on his trousers.

“Clean this up, Khum,” he ordered, and went into the main room.

His father was not there. Sajur must have gone directly from the ceremony to whatever celebrations followed. In the hall behind Hobi, Khum stood obediently, his bronze muzzle raised as he intoned in his harsh voice, “Sajur Panggang has requested that you join him immediately in the Four Hundredth Room. Âziz Orsina has called an inquisition to celebrate the Investiture of the new Aviator Imperator.”

Hobi made a face.

“Fine.” He hurried down the hall.

But as he passed his father’s study he paused. For the first time in months, the door was ajar. Not only that, it had been propped open with a chunk of malachite. Hobi stared at the polished green stone, trying to figure out what obscure message it might hold for him. Then he entered the room.

It was as always; the Architects buzzing and clicking as glowing scrolls of numbers and architectural renderings moved across their screens. Beneath the mercury lamp on his father’s desk several spent ampules of amphaze were scattered. Hobi picked one up and sniffed it, then glanced at the monitor on the desk.

There was a message on the screen. The violet letters flickered the way they did when an urgent missive from the margravines was displayed; but there was no sign of the Orsinate’s emblem, no flowing script or crabbed hand to indicate Shiyung or Âziz’s signature. Only this, spelled out in capitals—

ONE TREMBLES TO THINK OF THAT MYSTERIOUS THING IN THE SOUL, WHICH SEEMS TO ACKNOWLEDGE NO HUMAN JURISDICTION BUT, IN SPITE OF THE INDIVIDUAL’S OWN INNOCENT SELF, WILL STILL DREAM HORRID DREAMS, AND MUTTER UNMENTIONABLE THOUGHTS.

“ Huh? ”

Hobi frowned, leaning forward until the letters blurred in front of him. He read it again, then a third time. He was reaching for the handles of the imprimatur to record it when the message disappeared, replaced by a violet string of numerals.

He swore, switched the imprimatur on anyway, but of course the message was lost. He tried to recall what it had said—something about dreams, horrible thoughts—and felt cold.

A warning—for his father? But there had been that open door.

From his father?

He cursed again, more loudly, and glanced at the other screens. He thought of what Nasrani had said of his own education—“ I had the finest tutors ”—and wished that he had learned to understand the meaningless figures and renderings that the Architects produced without end as they maintained the city.

But it was too late for that. He lingered another minute, tracing the edges of a monitor, then left.

Hobi’s bedroom was at the end of a long corridor, behind the bathing chamber and the rows of steel cabinets where the replicants recharged during their offtimes. It was a large bedroom, larger even than Sajur’s, but looked smaller because of the clutter. To reach his bed Hobi had to step over mounds of clothes and unwatched ’files, and pull aside a curtain of raw silk that drooped from the ceiling in silvery folds. Hobi hated seeing the walls or ceiling or floor of his chamber. He hated it because no sooner would he grow accustomed to a particularly nice line of molding, painted lemon-yellow perhaps, or an airy expanse of billowing muslin or a mosaic of black and white rubber on the floor; no sooner would he find himself waking and turning expectantly to gaze upon an ochre stucco wall but he would find that while he slept the silent and efficient Architects had changed it. Black industrial girders would have replaced the muslin (later bright orange bricks would replace the girders), the stucco had given way to a mirrored surface so sleek he half expected it to be wet, and instead of the rough but comforting sisal flooring his feet would fall upon fine soft sand.

“Can’t you stop it? Can’t you say something to them?” he had demanded of his father. But Sajur Panggang only shook his head, sighing.

“I don’t control the Architects, Hobi, you know that. I read them and keep them running, but they take care of themselves.”

Hobi would stalk off in a fury, to glare at the new walls of exposed artificial wood and dig through the sand to discover the naked flooring beneath (he never did). But gradually he did find a way to fight back. Gradually things began to fill Hobi’s room. Empty Amity decanters and bottles of wine, jacquard robes filched from his father’s closets, heaps of prosthetic arms bartered from a friend who knew a friend who knew a moujik, candle-ends, expired lumieres, broken light bulbs, computer circuitry, chessboards, empty candicaine pipettes and morpha tubes, tobacco tins and snuff envelopes, more pidgin-lettered posters torn from the walls outside (PRAY THE HEALING WIND! BLESSED NAROUZ SAVES!), ’files of military formations and the atrocities of the Archipelago Conflict and one (black market) ’file showing scenes of a place Outside called the Zaragoza Mountains.

All of it heaped around Hobi’s bed in an attempt to give some sense of permanence to the room. His mother had detested it, of course—

“Clean this up! It’s filthy, it will make you ill—”

But his mother was dead now, and his father had never (to his son’s knowledge) set foot inside the muddle that was Hobi’s room.

Hobi settled into it like a tapir in its lair. Lying in bed he would let one hand fall to rest upon a stack of ’files, or fondle the desiccated stalks of a tiny and utterly illegal bamboo he had tried to grow from a stolen cutting; and it would comfort him.

Now he kicked his way through the clothes and broken vials. Dead bamboo crackled beneath his foot. An immense book lay open on one side of the bed, an ancient atlas he’d stolen from his father’s library. Hobi shoved it onto the floor and flopped down on the bed, closing his eyes.

From somewhere far overhead he heard faint cheering, and smelled the faintest breath of the sea. He thought of the Undercity and Nasrani’s hidden children, of the festival a few days hence. He thought of the hole he had seen, that gaping mouth of the underworld; of his father hunched over the ancient monitors in his office. He thought of these things, and of the nemosyne. Slowly he brought his hand to his face and inhaled, breathing in the smell of that livid darkness, the unmistakable raw taint of earth.

The new Aviator Imperator had finished speaking. As the throng on the boulevard cheered and the assembled Aviators gave him a final salute, the rasa turned and walked stiffly back to his palanquin. Ceryl was close enough that she could hear the grating sound his legs made as he moved. The aardmen stumbled to their feet, waited until the Aviator had climbed back onto the palanquin before raising it once more. Then they all waited as the three margravines passed, Âziz first and then Nike and Shiyung last of all. As she walked by him the rasa raised his head and gazed at her, but Shiyung ignored him. The margravines disappeared inside the doors of the palace, the Imperators close behind them; then all the rest of the Orsinate’s entourage, cabals and cabinets and diplomats all crowding the entrance and talking excitedly. The aardmen remained standing beneath their heavy litter as though confused, growling softly as the last members of the Linguistics Cabal shoved their way inside.

On the colonnade Ceryl remained silent, staring at the aardmen. She was afraid to walk past them—not afraid of the aardmen, but of what they carried. She saw the rasa Aviator Imperator there upon the palanquin; but she remembered Margalis Tast’annin. Several years earlier, the supposed details of his affair with Shiyung had been broadcast nightly on the ’files. The official word was that the affair ended when Tast’annin was sent to the front to command the Archipelago Conflict; but a professional courtesan who had been an intimate of Shiyung’s told Ceryl that the break had been the Aviator’s desire, and not the margravine’s. His subsequent posting to the Archipelago had been intended as an exile of sorts, but of course he had triumphed there. Afterward there had been his long sojourn back on the HORUS stations, and then the disaster in the Capital.

He had been a handsome man, rumored to be brilliant and even charming. Certainly his arrogance matched that of the Orsinate. Seeing him now, all vestiges of his humanity gone save for his corpse’s hand and his revenant’s eyes, made Ceryl’s throat tighten with fear. This was what happened to those who fell out of favor with the margravines. She waited until almost all of the others had filed into the palace, waited for the aardmen to bear their terrible burden inside. But still they remained, snarling at each other, while the Aviator stood in silence, waiting.

And now Ceryl had no choice but to go: she was the last person on the colonnade, save for the Aviator and his bearers. She gave a little gasp and darted in front of them, head down. The aardmen’s snarls grew louder as she passed but she did not look up. She fairly ran to the gate.

Only when she reached the portal she stopped, her heart rocketing inside her chest. Very slowly she turned to look back.

Within his palanquin the Aviator stood, staring at her. For an instant his eyes met hers. As from some unfathomable depth she saw a spark within them, a brilliant flash of gray, then nothing but that dead gaze in its crimson metal cell.

Ceryl turned and staggered inside. The aardmen wailed as she fled.

The crowd on the boulevard began to break up.

“You’re a morphodite?”

The woman from the Toxins Cabal sounded doubtful. On her shoulder the puppet snorted, shaking its narrow head and sneezing. Cold air flowed up from the ventricles now, an astringent odor, not unpleasant. All around them people were stretching and rubbing their eyes.

“Yes,” Reive replied reluctantly. She didn’t feel like talking. Her ears still rang with the Aviators’ shouts and the harsh voice of the rasa. “We’re—we have a friend—just visiting—”

The woman continued to stare at her, her gaze darting from Reive’s breasts to her groin, then back to her face.

“But you are a morphodite?”

Reive glanced around nervously, thinking perhaps the woman was actually a member of the Reception Committee. But she continued to stare at Reive, so intently that the gynander finally realized she must be confused because Reive’s face was not hidden beneath the customary layers of thick bluish-tinged powder.

“Yes,” Reive replied, her own relief apparent when the woman brightened. “We are a gynander—visiting here, only visiting—”

“Who could care?” shrieked the puppet. The woman struck its nose and it slunk behind her neck. She turned back to Reive, adjusting her fez.

“I think I’ve been to one of your sayings,” she said. “When Nike Orsina had that nightmare about the runcible spoon—”

Reive shook her head. “We don’t think so.” She’d never attended an inquisition with the Orsinate, and started to say so when the woman cut her off.

“I’m certain of it. I had dreamed about a flying boat the night before,” she insisted. “Nike said it was a gorgeous dream, that was the word she used. We’re very close, Nike and I. All the margravines are my good friends, actually. I never miss one of their dream inquisitions.” She leaned forward, peering at Reive’s eyes, then made a little grimace of distaste. “Although I had forgotten about your—um— eyes. But I’m sure it was you.”

Without looking she reached for a tiny metal purse hung about her neck, the pleasure cabinet’s sigil dangling from it on a silver chain. She withdrew a long narrow card and shoved it into Reive’s hand. “Here: tonight in the Four Hundredth Room. Twenty-seven o’clock. Nike will remember, she’ll be pleased I found you. Bring a guest if you’d like—”

This last said airily, as though unknown hermaphrodites were always welcome in the Orsinate’s sanctum. Reive nodded stupidly and stared at the card.

Tatsun Frizer, it read in small neat letters printed on a thin sheet of allurian. When she tilted it the scowling image of Blessed Narouz appeared, his hawkish profile silhouetted against the flaming refineries of Archangels. She raised it to her face and sniffed: petroleum. She slipped the card into her pouch.

“This evening, then,” said Tatsun Frizer. She gave a last puzzled look at Reive’s face, then headed for the palace, her yellow boots making a slapping sound against the pavement, her puppet peering back at Reive and flicking its tongue licentiously.

The gynander stared after them, lifting her eyes to take in the sweeping columns, the lapis-crowned gates and golden statues surmounting it all. She took a lock of her hair and pulled it, until tears filled her eyes, just to make sure she was awake.

An invitation to a party given by the Orsinate! Let Drusilla hear about that !

She dismissed a fleeting thought for Ceryl and ran back to the gravator, heedless of how this might look to the few surly aristocrats still arguing over matters of protocol and invitations or the lack thereof. She dodged servers as they rolled about the boulevard, sweeping up ashes and broken pipettes, and at the gravator entrance bumped into the vicar of the Church of Christ Cadillac and didn’t even say Excuse Me. If only she could get back to Ceryl’s chambers, find some new clothes and be gone before Ceryl returned….

But when she reached her chambers, Ceryl was waiting.

“Where have you been?” she exploded. “I ran back here as soon as I could—”

Reive sank onto the divan. “We attended the Investiture,” she said sullenly. She raised her head, adding in a haughty tone, “We have been invited to a party this evening. With the Orsinate in the Four Hundredth Room.”

She dug into her pouch and held out the allurian calling card.

“Tatsun Frizer and the Orsinate and the Four Hundredth Room,” Ceryl read, disgusted. “Lovely.” She tossed the card onto the floor and stared at Reive coldly. “So you went to the Investiture.”

Reive nodded once, her mouth tight.

“And did you have a lovely time there? A wonderful time, watching the wonderful margravines parade their latest victim in front of the mob?” She spat the last word and crossed the room, yanked open a cabinet and poured herself a glass of brandy. Once back in her own chambers, her fear had disintegrated into anger. “They sicken me—it all sickens me. And three days from now is Æstival Tide and we get to watch some more torment, when they loose their damned monster onto the beach. Well, you know what? I’m sick of it, all of it. Sick, sick, sick.”

Reive huddled deeper into the divan and watched her through slitted eyes. It was very unwise for someone to talk like this. Ceryl seemed to read her mind: she turned and glared at her, downing another brandy. “Oh, pardon me. I forgot—bad form to talk treason in front of houseguests.”

She stared at the bottle on the counter, then poured another brandy and drank it. Afterward her tone was calmer, but her voice still shook as she spoke.

“Reive—I’m sorry. It’s just—I was worried, that’s all. It’s the time of year, it always puts me on edge. And—well, just thinking about the timoria. Do you have any idea how many people died ten years ago, during the last Æstival Tide? Do you?”

She began pacing the room and went on before Reive could answer. “Two thousand. Out of a total population of, say, twenty thousand. Several hundred trampled to death on the strand when the Gate is opened, another hundred fed to the Compassionate Redeemer for their pleasure. Then of course Shiyung ordered that boat race, and of course all the contestants drowned. A boat race! No one here has ever seen a boat in her life! And then the hecatombs, and the babies sacrificed—it’s madness, absolute madness!”

She stopped and stared at Reive. The gynander only shrugged, then reaching from the divan snatched back Tatsun Frizer’s card from the floor. Ceryl sighed, defeated.

“What am I doing, talking to you? Look at you—you’re just a—a child, really,” she said. She paused in front of the brandy bottle, then shoved it back into the cabinet. “Every ten years a few of us recall the last time, and maybe we get angry, or frightened, but nothing ever happens. Nothing ever changes. Four hundred years of Orsinas. I don’t suppose it will ever end. I guess I’d better decide what to wear to this evening’s atrocity.”

She disappeared into her bedroom, reappeared a moment later holding a long sleeveless tunic of brilliant jade-green satin. Reive’s mouth hung open in surprise, but Ceryl only shrugged and started across the room.

“Well, it’s the damn Feast of Fear, right? Might as well wear green.” She stopped abruptly and looked at the gynander. Her voice dropped.

“You won’t say anything, about—about my dream? Reive?”

Reive shook her head slowly. “We had forgotten about it,” she admitted. Ceryl smiled wryly.

“Well. That’s just as well.” She gazed with distaste at the tunic in her hands. “I guess if we’re going to make it by twenty-seven o’clock we’d better get dressed.” At Reive’s expression she added, “I can’t let you go alone. Whether or not Tatsun Frizer invited you. It would be like throwing a baby to the Redeemer.”

Reive nodded, tipping her head so that Ceryl wouldn’t see her smile, and reached for her cosmetics box.

By the time they reached Seraphim Level, Ceryl’s mood had shifted from aggrieved resignation to barely concealed anxiety. A dream inquisition in the Four Hundredth Room! That would mean all three margravines, and most of the pleasure cabinet, and she, Ceryl, having to convince them of the innocence and beauty and originality of some dream she’d never had. Not to mention carefully worded praise for the afternoon’s Investiture, and feigned delight at the pleasures of Æstival Tide still to come. Twice she had stopped, breathing deeply while reciting a calming verse a galli had taught her. She wondered what would happen if she just didn’t show up for the inquisition.

But then, of course, Reive would go on alone; and at that thought Ceryl’s breathing became a tortured gasp and she hurried after her companion.

Fortunately the gynander seemed subdued. Ceryl had watched, intrigued, as Reive carefully removed mascara and rouge and powder. She had never seen a hermaphrodite’s face unpainted; the effect was unsettling. Like most people, Ceryl thought of the hermaphrodites as she or her or sometimes it. But, as Reive blotted off the last traces of rouge, for the first time Ceryl noticed how strong her jaw was; how her mouth without its carmine pout was in fact thin, and might even seem cruel were it not for a certain perplexed twist of the lip. And her eyes, with no penciled brows arching above them, were, despite their color, quite gentle. She no longer had the childish mien associated with the hermaphrodites. Except for the lack of eyebrows and her rounded shoulders, she looked like a young man or thoughtful boy. In fact, she resembled one of the unsmiling busts of Orsina ancestors that lined the corridors of the Seraphim’s palace. Ceryl had nearly commented on this peculiar resemblance, but decided it would only make the gynander conceited. Instead she sat in silence while Reive painted her face chalk-white, with only a small green whorl upon each cheek as a token of Æstival Tide.

Now Ceryl wished she had said something. With her face dead-white save for those green spirals and her eyes and mouth unrouged, the gynander looked disturbingly corpselike. There was little foot traffic headed for the palace, and only a few rickshaws. In one of these another hermaphrodite sat giggling on the lap of a drunken diplomat, and stared back amazed as they passed. Ceryl glanced at Reive, but the gynander didn’t even look up as the rickshaw rattled by; only stared straight ahead with her cool emerald eyes.

The truth was, Reive was nervous, even frightened. Everything looked different than it had that afternoon. Servers had spent the last few hours adorning the boulevards for the upcoming festival. The water frothing in the fountains was now green, lit by hidden lanterns. Some of the sculptures had been replaced with bizarre representations of the world Outside—trees of steel and iron, grotesquely twisted and covered with thorns; huge skeletal figures of winged creatures with gaping mouths and dripping talons; naked figures of men and women cowering before the holographic image of an immense wave, its curling edge flecked with blood. There was the inevitable holo of the Compassionate Redeemer, its lamprey’s mouth opening and closing in eerie silence while the ventricles at its feet pumped out the choking scent of charred roses. And seeping into everything the smell of the sea, thick and rank and warm, growing heavier as the air pressure dropped Outside. Some of the other guests wore linen masks over their mouths. Reive regretted not having bought one for herself—the briny smell nearly choked her, like having viscous water poured into her nostrils. Silently she wandered along the boulevard, twisting her head to stare at the marvels the Orsinate had arranged for the festival.

But as they approached the palace Reive stopped, shaking her head in disbelief. Turning to Ceryl she cried, “What have they done?”

It seemed that all of Dominations Level had been moved up here. Scores of biotechnicians and aardmen were still at work, dragging huge cages from the freight gravators, swearing and shouting and snarling beneath the dim violet lights of Seraphim’s false evening. Trees—real trees, live trees engineered in the laboratories of Dominations—had been set in concrete tubs to form a sort of forest, palms and oaks and conifers lined up neatly in rows, but so close their limbs had tangled or, in some cases, broken off to fall in heaps on the pavement. Reive and Ceryl passed through them slowly, and drew closer to each other as they walked.

Because it was one thing to view these things in the brightly lit corridors and workrooms of Dominations, or shoved into the background of one of the dioramas where exhausted jackals and dire wolves panted on the cement floor. But to see them here, beneath the dim purple lamps in the domes above, with the humid breath of the unseen ocean thick in your lungs, the smell of the sea mingling with the ticklish scent of firs and the acrid musk of frightened animals—it suddenly made Seraphim Level seem endless.

Because, vast as it was, wherever you were inside of Araboth you knew that there was an end to it—that the Domes were there, hidden behind heat fences or murals or refinery smoke, but there, protecting you from the world Outside.

But the effect of these shrubs and trees and vines crowding the boulevard and the very steps of the Orsinate’s palace was perverse. Rather than make the place appear smaller, the shadows and rustlings and myriad smells made it all seem huge. Ceryl could no longer tell where the domes were, hidden behind tangled branches and leaves. Even the constant undercurrent of hisses from the ventricles, of the whir of servers out on errands, was drowned by a ceaseless soft stirring, as though some errant wind moved among the stolen forest.

Only the smell of the sea remained the same; and Reive shuddered, imagining it somewhere just out of sight, lapping against the gravator entrance or smashing through the bulwarks surrounding the refineries.

“This must be what timoring feels like,” she murmured. “If you do it right. Or what it’s really like, Outside…”

In the shadows they could glimpse other visitors, silent and subdued as Reive and Ceryl themselves, gazing at the eerie menagerie, the black trees shot with gold and violet where the faint light from the domes trickled through their branches. Once Reive stumbled, flailing as she grabbed at Ceryl’s hand—

“What—!”

The gynander’s eyes widened and Ceryl steadied herself against a tree. They could hear other voices crying out, and croaks and screams from the imprisoned animals, then ripples of nervous laughter.

Reive caught her breath, then said, “The ground! Did you feel it—it shook, it all shook —”

Ceryl bit her lip, waited until her breathing slowed. “It was the gravators,” she said at last. “Bringing all these cages up here—they’re so heavy—”

Reive stared at her as though she were mad. “The gravators? No, it is the Wind Outside—”

Ceryl grabbed the gynander and covered her mouth with her hand. “Stop it!” she hissed. “Do you want to cause a panic? Get us killed? ”

Reive glared at her, pulling at Ceryl’s hand. “We felt it! The storm, what Zalophus warned us of—”

“Reive,” pleaded Ceryl. She tipped her head to indicate where several members of the Toxins Cabal were talking animatedly and glancing at them. “Please—at least until we get back home this evening—”

Reive gave her a sulky look, but then she nodded. Ceryl took her hand and they walked more quickly toward the palace.

They stopped in front of a betulamia, a sentient tree whose slender branches plied the air gently, as though underwater. At its base squatted a square metal tub of mauve Catherine Wheel poppies. When Reive touched one, its gold-tipped petals contracted, then spat out a number of tiny bright red seeds that crackled and fizzed as they flew through the air. From within their cages gibbons howled and mandrills boomed, and somewhere out of sight one of the Children of Mercy shrieked with laughter as a dire wolf howled, a long anguished sound.

“Have they—have they brought them all here?” wondered Reive. She looked around, too embarrassed to admit what she was afraid of finding—Zalophus caged within one of those steel tanks, the Children of Mercy prodding him with their electrified lances.

“No,” Ceryl said. She plucked one of the spent poppy blossoms and gazed at it sadly. “Not everything—just some of them, who knows how they choose them—for the festival. I wasn’t up here for the last one, of course, but I’ve heard of things like this. It’s a—like one of the dioramas brought to life. For the Orsinate’s pleasure, and their guests. So they can pretend to cheat Death, and play at being Outside.”

Reive plucked a bit of tamarack and brushed her cheek with it, its bristles surprisingly soft and pungent. “Outside,” she whispered, and let the tamarack fall through her fingers to the ground. From behind them echoed a recording of the Compassionate Redeemer’s ululating cry.

“We’d better hurry,” Ceryl said without enthusiasm. As she walked, poppy seeds exploded beneath her feet, releasing their sulfurous smell. Reive followed, gazing wistfully behind them. The noise and scents from the menagerie faded as they approached the palace.

“What’s that?”

The gynander pointed to where a smear of white shimmered overhead, like a lantern reflected upon the convex surface of the domes.

Ceryl glanced up, then shrugged. “I don’t know. The moon?”

The moon. Reive tried to recall what the moon was: something to do with light. They were quite near the palace now, closer even than she had been at the Investiture. She smoothed her pantaloons, then rubbed her scalp anxiously. She wished she had brought some of her amber pomade when she’d left her own level. Ceryl’s clothes were so drab; but Reive had found a scarf of russet gossamer and tied it around her coiled hair, and dusted herself with silver ash until her skin had a dull gleam like pewter. Beside her Ceryl looked quite splendid. The jade-green tunic set off her pale skin, the brass-and-malachite fillet glinted from beneath her short glossy hair. Despite her fair hair and skin, her plebeian blue eyes, Ceryl was striking-looking. Reive could even imagine that someone might think her beautiful—not the Orsinate, however, whose tastes ran more toward the deliberately bizarre, even deformed. For a moment the gynander regretted not having worn more outlandish makeup, the better to impress the margravines; but now they had reached the very steps of the palace itself, and Ceryl was whispering nervously beside her.

“The sentries—”

Overhead several fougas circled lazily, their spotlights lancing the violet air with adamant. Glass bowls lit with rose-scented oil lined the entrance to the palace. The vicar of the Church of Christ Cadillac, resplendent in azure robes and chromium mitre, stood on the lowest step of the palace, a ritual urceole in her hands. As Reive and Ceryl passed she spattered them with seawater from the silver pitcher and murmured a ward against the world Outside. When Reive turned to stare at her she was jerked forward by Ceryl.

As they walked up the steps they were greeted by several guards in knee-length blousons of yolk-yellow linen, jade-green sashes across their breasts in honor of the festival. “Brave the Healing Wind,” one called out to Ceryl, and another smiled and winked at Reive. All the guards were human save the last, a forbidding scholiast with many-jointed arms and an eyeless face guarding the arch that led into the palace. Ceryl held up the Orsinate’s heraldic eye; the scholiast scanned it, then, “Ceryl Waxwing,” it whispered, and Ceryl passed through the high-arched doorway. Once on the other side she gazed back anxiously at Reive.

On the steps other guests paused to receive the vicar’s blessing. The fougas’ watchlights swept the boulevard. The gynander hesitated in front of the scholiast, then held out Tatsun Frizer’s card. The scholiast ignored it. Instead it took her hand and stretched out her palm, pricked it with a tiny needle that shot from its metal claw, humming as one of its optics scanned her face. A moment while it read her retinaprint and biogene.

“Reive Orsina,” it intoned, dropping her hand. She took one final look at the silent plaza and hurried inside.

Ceryl waited a few feet down the hall. She looked relieved as Reive ran up to her. “It didn’t question you?”

“No: it said our name, and then ‘Orsina’—”

“It must think you’re a special guest—which you are, I suppose. Well, we’ll see. It’s down this way….”

Inside, the palace was less imposing. The halls they hurried down were simple in appearance, almost utilitarian: faux marble floors and walls of a creamy white, with white arches and columns leading to this wing or another. Busts and holoimages of long-dead Orsinas gleamed or flickered in odd corners, but otherwise the hall was empty. Unseen scholiasts whispered the names of the different chambers—Toxins Cabal Salon, the Uropan Ambassador’s Suite, the Architect Imperator’s Drafting Room. As they passed this last door it opened, and a tall man and a dwarf emerged and followed them down the hall, whispering urgently. Ceryl’s hands went numb as she recognized Sajur Panggang, the Architect Imperator, and the puppeteer Rudyard Planck. Sajur walked slowly, his long legs slicing through the white hallways like well-oiled shears. Beside him Planck bounded like some macabre toy, brick-colored hair tossing, his tiny feet patting against the marble floor. Ceryl started walking faster, but behind her Reive paced oblivious, staring at the smooth arched ceiling and humming tunelessly to herself. When they reached the glass atrium with its garden of crystal orchids Ceryl hurried up the stairs, turning down this corridor and the next. Still Sajur and his grotesque companion followed them, until they all reached a dead end where a tall red-lacquered door stood open.

Ceryl hesitated, wondering if she and Reive could disappear inside before introductions became necessary. But it was too late.

“Serena, is it?” the Architect Imperator said kindly, making a steeple of his hands and bowing slightly.

“Ceryl Waxwing,” she replied, bowing in return. Sajur Panggang smiled and shrugged ruefully.

“My pardon—I am so very bad with names—my wife was the one who remembered—”

He grimaced apologetically and adjusted the emerald mourning cuffs on his wrists. Ceryl wished that she had worn something a little more ostentatious. The Architect Imperator had indulged his whimsy for archaic clothing with a plain black suit and narrow tie, a woolen muffler tied around his long neck and his black turban of office. An enormous and no doubt artificial tourmaline of very pale green winked from within the folds of black silk neatly wrapped about his brow. Beside him Rudyard Planck bobbed like one of his own ugly creations. He too had eccentric taste in clothes: beneath a thick wool cape his shirt had been torn to shreds and then repaired with brilliant green silk and green thread, a vulgar shade that did nothing to complement his tallowy complexion. Like Tatsun Frizer he followed the current fashion for exotic shoes, in Rudyard’s case heavy fleece-lined boots that came up to his thighs. Ceryl looked up to see Reive smiling at him and the puppeteer grinning back at her. Hastily she began introductions.

“Sajur, may I present Reive—”

She faltered, realizing she had no other name for the gynander. Reive ignored her and continued to gaze at the dwarf. Ceryl grit her teeth and said, “Reive, this is the Architect Imperator.”

The gynander only looked sideways and nodded. The Architect Imperator laughed, as Ceryl blushed and went on, “Rudyard, this is—”

“Oh, we’ve met, Waxwing, we’ve met—!”

“You have?” Ceryl stammered. “How? I mean—”

Gently Sajur Panggang took her by the elbow, murmuring, “Perhaps we shouldn’t block the doorway, Ceryl. May I escort you inside?”

Ceryl choked, shaking her head, then nodded furiously and let him lead her into the Four Hundredth Room. Behind her Rudyard Planck murmured what sounded like a suggestive remark, and the gynander giggled. She tried to look back at them, but the Architect Imperator’s grasp upon her arm was quite strong as he led her toward the center of the room.

She stumbled after him, glancing about discreetly to see who else was there. Tatsun Frizer, of course. The opera star Kai Kaeng. A number of thugs from the Reception Committee, trying to pretend they were guests and not security personnel. A false hermaphrodite with an open-front tunic, preening before the real thing. A tall Aviator wearing a floor-length coat of sable over his scarlet uniform, standing by himself with his back to the crowd. Another Aviator walked up beside him, hesitating before placing his hand on his arm. The first Aviator turned to him, facing Ceryl. His blank metal face reflected Ceryl’s own and his eyes stared out at her, raw and wet and the color of oysters.

“—didn’t realize Waxwing had such good taste as to adopt this lovely and clever young thing—”

Dully Ceryl nodded as the dwarf rattled on. The rasa continued to stare at her. She made a small nervous sound, then forced herself to look down at Rudyard Planck laughing as he twiddled one end of Reive’s scarf in his blunt fingers. When she glanced up a moment later, the rasa was walking toward Âziz.

“Excuse me—” murmured Sajur Panggang. “I’ll find you later, Rudyard. Ceryl—”

He was gone before Ceryl could say goodbye. She looked helplessly at the dwarf.

“What a charming young friend you have, Ceryl,” he croaked. He tugged at Reive’s scarf. “Although she might be chilly later. I hear Nike’s chosen a wintry theme for this evening. I trust you’ll be scrying for us tonight, my dear?” He reached up to trace Reive’s navel, drew away a finger frosted with silver ash. “I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure of hearing you before.”

“If we are asked.” Reive dipped her head modestly. Rudyard laughed and started toward the center of the room, taking Reive by the arm.

“Well, I certainly look forward to hearing you. Ceryl, may I get you a drink?”

Ceryl shook her head, following them. She inhaled, then sneezed. Lovey’s Prescient Chypre, Nike’s favorite scent this year, its overtones of frangipani and licorice so cloying it always made Cheryl’s head ache. She tried breathing through her mouth and elbowed past another actress, a wraithlike soprano with an eyepatch who was having her first success with the current vogue for sadist opera, with its graphic (and vulgar) depictions of the Third Shining, when the War between the celestial stations of HORUS and the Balkhash Commonwealth erupted into the holocaust that blasted the prairies into black adamant and destroyed the isthmus connecting the continent with its antipode.

“—then it was like the entire stage tilted, and of course I just went flying, I’ve never felt anything like it in my life, the whole place seemed to be moving, and all week I’ve had the most gruesome headache, and now of course they tell me Shiyung isn’t even going to be here tonight—”

The soprano turned to greet Ceryl, Lovey’s Prescient Chypre practically dripping from her bare shoulders. Ceryl smiled grimly and plowed on.

With a crowd inside it, the Four Hundredth Room seemed little different from any other place used for a dream inquisition, except for the wood-paneled walls. Ancient carpets on the floor, walls hung with aluminum tapestries, electric lights shining from within sconces shaped like cupped hands. A duo playing therimin and bass viola sat in a corner, nearly hidden by automotive statuary. In front of them a young galli in indigo robes and grass-green sash sang in a pure child’s voice an immeasurably ancient song—

“The keeper of the city keys Puts shutters on the dreams. I wait outside the pilgrim’s door with insufficient schemes.”

Ceryl pinched the bridge of her nose, wondering how Reive had disappeared so quickly. Someone handed the galli a wineglass; without stopping his song he smiled and bowed.

“The black queen chants the funeral march

The cracked brass bells will ring

To summon back the fire witch to the court of the Crimson King.”

“Ceryl. You made it.”

Ceryl started as Tatsun Frizer prowled up behind her, blessedly without her puppet.

“Y-yes.” She looked past Tatsun and spotted Reive on the other side of the room with Rudyard Planck. “Oh, damn—”

Tatsun followed her gaze and raised her eyebrows. Her vocoder blinked pale rose as she cooed, “That morph—she is a friend of yours?”

“The gynander? Yes—Reive, that’s her name— Reive! ”

From across the room Reive gave Ceryl a tiny wave. Rudyard Planck raised a glass half-full of virent Amity in a mocking toast.

“She’s very attractive,” said Tatsun. Ceryl looked up, surprised.

Tatsun sniffed. “Oh, don’t worry, I wouldn’t dream of stealing your little paramour. Excuse me—”

“She’s not —” Ceryl began heatedly, but Tatsun tossed her head and stalked off. For a few minutes Ceryl just stood there, watching as Rudyard offered Reive more Amity and the morphodite bowed gracefully as she accepted it. The last guests straggled in—two more actors from the pleasure cabinet, a diplomat leading an aardman on a silver chain, the usual hangers-on and uninvited guests, eager for the opportunity to ingratiate themselves with the Orsinate and so inadvertently increase their chances of dying at their hands. In the dim corner where the musical duo piped and droned, the margravine Âziz sat and drummed her fingers on her knees, looking uneasy, while at her shoulder the Aviator Imperator Tast’annin stood like a great hooded gyrfalcon, his black-gloved hands caressing the back of her chair.

At sight of him Ceryl froze. She realized he knew nothing, cared nothing, about her; indeed, knew it should be impossible for a rasa to truly care about anything. If he had seemed to stare before, surely it was because she had been standing next to Sajur Panggang. But still he terrified her. His gaze was more acute than any rasa’s she had ever seen, and his hands twisted menacingly within their leather gloves….

Ceryl hugged herself, pushing back a fear as strong as the one that came upon her during her nightmares of the Green Country. Of course it meant nothing—the rasa Imperator; this oddly self-composed gynander who had scryed her dream, taken over her life, and within days managed to get invited into the Orsinate’s sanctorum; Reive’s sudden and inappropriate friendship with the rakish Rudyard Planck; the reports of tremors and structural failures throughout the city.

And then there was her dream; and all of this on the eve of Æstival Tide itself. Even as she stood, her bare arms prickled with cold and fear, she could sense it all Out There, whatever It was—poisoned ocean, devouring sunlight, monstrous typhoon—gnawing at the Quincunx Domes, or else circling Araboth like one of the Orsinate’s regenerated thecodonts grown to massive size, seeking a way to grind the city between its Luciferian teeth.

I’m going mad, thought Ceryl. I should consult a seer; but then she recalled that the present bizarre confluence of events derived from her doing just that.

She bit her finger. Maybe she should leave, go back to her chambers, lock the doors and refuse to come out until Æstival Tide was over. Just leave, like that, and let Reive flounder through the evening as best she could.

But then from down the hall she heard Nike’s booming hoo-ha laugh. A moment later she listed into the room, followed by a rather worried-looking serving girl. Âziz started in her chair; the rasa withdrew his hands and stepped back silently, drawing his sable coat around him. Âziz stood and went to greet her sister. Ceryl took a deep breath, then quickly made her way to where a trio of young boys were pouring wine from glass kraters. She drank hers too fast, scanning the room for Reive and shivering. The dwarf had been right. It was starting to get cold—another chance for the margravines to show off. All around the room guests ostentatiously tugged at capes and mufflers, garments made from the pelts of suricatas and martens and lynx specially bred on Dominations for the pleasure cabinet. The smell of the sea, ever-present even in this sanctum, was overlaid with a sudden burst of scent—the odor of fir trees, so thick and so obviously chemical in origin that Ceryl’s throat burned. She swore beneath her breath and rubbed her bare arms. Now that Nike had arrived it would be ill-considered to be seen leaving the room, especially if one wasn’t properly dressed. She grit her teeth and wished she could find the gynander.

Too late she glimpsed Reive on a divan on the far side of the room, sitting between two other morphodites. One had painted her face in complex pyramidical patterns; the other had small darting piggish eyes within a geisha’s mask and wore a towering blond wig of corkscrew curls. Ceryl recognized her as a former favorite of Nike’s, now gone to fat.”

The blond morph lifted her head, the wig teetering on her brow, and stared at Ceryl. Echion, that was her name. As Ceryl watched, she leaned over Reive and whispered to her, still looking back at Ceryl, while Reive sipped at her wine and stared about the room with her long green eyes. Whatever Echion was saying seemed to dismay her somewhat. When Nike bounced past with Âziz, the two hermaphrodites looked up. After a long moment, Reive tore her gaze from the margravines and stared across the room at Ceryl. Ceryl motioned frantically for the gynander to join her, but instead Reive looked back at Echion. She glanced up once more at Nike and Âziz, then nodded slowly. Beside her Echion smiled.

That smile turned the wine to vinegar in Ceryl’s mouth. She put down her glass, and had started toward Reive when Âziz clapped her hands.

“Well! This is an exciting group—Kai Kaeng, you look so dashing!—”

The soprano with the eyepatch bowed and blushed.

“—and I know we are all honored to have our new Aviator Imperator with us this evening—”

Strained yet enthusiastic applause. The rasa bowed stiffly, ruddy light spilling from his face. Then Âziz was beckoning them all to come close, to form the customary circle so that the inquest could begin.

Ceryl made one last effort to get across the room to Reive. She pushed through the crowd, nodding coldly at Tatsun Frizer, when a small strong hand grabbed hers—

“Sit here with me, Ceryl,” Rudyard Planck rasped cheerfully. His blue eyes guttered as he tugged her toward the middle of the room. “Here, Tatsun, you too.”

“Oh, but—”

Tatsun Frizer laughed, her vocoder sparking green and yellow. “I know just how you feel,” she oozed, shaking a finger at Ceryl. “Morphodites are so fickle. Best surrender gracefully and scold her when you get home.” She settled beside Ceryl, pulling a heavy silken throw from a divan and draping it over her knees. “Isn’t this enchanting? I can’t imagine why Shiyung isn’t here. Nike said they were going to have it chilly here tonight, but I never dreamed… ”

Tatsun Frizer prattled on. Ceryl thought of snatching the throw from her lap. It was freezing now. On the other side of the circle, Nike sat resplendent in a fox-fur coat, the thick pelts flaming about her pallid face. Every few minutes she leaned over the serving girl, who would hand her a morpha tube or a small agate kef pipe. Next to her Âziz sat stiffly, two brilliant splotches, like crimson thumbprints, on her cheeks. The Aviator had removed his long sable coat and draped it about her shoulders. There was a spurting sound as more of the pine scent was pumped from hidden vents. The lights dimmed to a cool blue, and from the ceiling snow began to fall.

“Oh, great ,” Ceryl swore, shuddering. All around the circle people applauded and laughed delightedly, holding out their hands and exclaiming as the snow hissed against their skin.

Rudyard Planck patted her knee. “My dear, would you like my cape?”

Ceryl glanced down to see if he was joking, but the dwarf had already begun to peel off the heavy woolen garment. “No, no,” she said hastily, “thank you—”

“Just a taste of winter,” Âziz was saying. Beneath the Aviator’s sable coat, she wore only a simple gray tunic and trousers, her dark hair pulled back through a gold ring. “Once upon a time, this would have been the first day of summer, and I thought, Why not celebrate our freedom from the tyranny of the seasons?”

Beside her sister, Nike nodded happily, tapping her feet and waving her kef pipe. Âziz lifted her face so that the snow glistened on her brow. She stayed like that for a long moment, snow frosting her dark hair.

Then, “Enough,” she said softly. The snow stopped, a few last flakes falling as people murmured their disappointment. Warmer air flowed from the vents, and another heavy dose of Lovey’s Prescient Chypre. Ceryl tried her best not to gag. Beside her Tatsun breathed deeply, eyes closed, and murmured the seven names of Blessed Narouz.

“We have a number of interesting guests this evening,” announced Âziz. “Margalis Tast’annin, whom many of you already know of course.”

Faint applause. Rudyard Planck snorted softly.

“Sajur Panggang and his little friend Rudyard Planck…”

(A few snickers: Âziz’s dislike of the puppeteer was well known.)

“Kasim Havid, the ambassador from the Medaïn Desert…”

Kasim tried his best to smile; like the other ambassadors he had been hostage in Araboth for a dozen years or more.

“… even several guests who are strangers to my sister and myself.” Âziz’s voice rose sharply. Ceryl cowered, pulling Rudyard Planck’s cape up to her chest.

Nike beamed groggily around the circle as Âziz explained, “My sister’s trusted augur Echion has informed us that we have a new mantic here tonight, a visitor from the lower levels.”

Murmurings from the guests. An untried hermaphrodite was always a minor occasion. Ceryl shut her eyes. This was it, then. She thought of her dead lover Giton, of her failed effort at timoring. She should have been kinder to the morphodite; she should have killed her immediately.

But maybe this would be one of those inquisitions you heard about, where everything was wonderful, and Nike and Âziz would be so taken with Reive they would take her into their private cabal of mantics, and Ceryl could disappear on Dominations among the vivariums, this time forever. It was such a pleasant thought that she never wanted to open her eyes again, but of course she did. Rudyard Planck was staring at her, his blue eyes wide with concern. He cocked a thumb to where Reive crouched beside Echion, looking as though she wanted to bolt.

“She’s never been here before, has she?”

Ceryl nodded miserably at his hoarse whisper. The dwarf swore. “They’ll eat her alive. Who’s the fat toad with her?”

“Echion,” Ceryl whispered. The dwarf nodded.

“That’s right—damn her, one of Nike’s panderers—”

From across the circle came several indignant ssshhes. Âziz raised her head and frowned slightly. The dwarf fell silent.

Nike began speaking, her husky voice slurred.

“Delightful… see all these familiar faces… most important… dreams during this time…” Her head fell forward. At her side, the serving girl anxiously snapped a candicaine pipette in two and waved the pieces beneath the margravine’s nose. Nike started, let out a long whoosh of breath, and turned to her sister.

“Âziz?” Nike furrowed her brows. “Um—is there something…?”

Âziz sighed and let the Aviator’s heavy coat drop back from her shoulders. “As my sister was saying,” she began in a ritual fashion, “our dreams are especially important during Æstival Tide, when the world Outside encroaches so closely upon our own. We are blessed here in Araboth to have dream-mantics of great subtlety and perception, to help us chart those dangerous territories we sometimes plumb in our sleep.”

Nike nodded happily at her sister’s words. Âziz glanced at her and said, “Nike? Would you care to go first?”

“Me?” Nike tittered, then shook her head. “I am afraid—dreams—can’t recall—”

“Of course not, you sotty cow,” hissed Rudyard Planck. Ceryl stared fixedly at the margravines, ignoring angry stares and whispers of “Shame!” and “Heed the margravine!”

Âziz’s expression seemed to align her with the dwarf in this matter. She turned from Nike, just as Sajur Panggang suggested, “Perhaps the margravine Âziz would share with us her dreams?”

Âziz shook her head. Her face looked drawn as she said coldly, “I prefer to keep my dreams to myself for the moment.”

There was silence all around the circle.

Ceryl’s heart began to pound. This was the part of the inquisitions that she most hated. Either some eager volunteer would call out her dream—actors and artists in particular were prone to such reckless folly—or else the margravines would choose someone at random. Ceryl tried to compose her face into a disinterested mask, as if to show that her dreams were reassuringly commonplace. She let her eyes focus on Âziz’s left shoulder, to indicate she had nothing to hide from the margravines; but then, horrors! Âziz seemed to find this interesting. The margravine’s eyes narrowed, she leaned forward, staring directly at Ceryl, and said, “Now, you there—Shiyung’s healer—”

But then another voice sounded, softer than the margravine’s but no less commanding. “I would have my dream read.”

The voice was so low that for a moment the terrified Ceryl thought she had willed it into being; but then she saw Âziz turn slowly to the dark figure at her side.

“Of course, Margalis.”

The soft voice went on, “I’m not sure of the protocol, I’ve been away so long….”

He stood and walked to the center of the circle, which was not the Way it was done at all. But not even Âziz motioned for him to sit again; others in the circle bowed their heads or looked nervously at the margravines. Across the room Reive glanced around cautiously, unsure of what was happening.

Ceryl could not look away from the Aviator. Within his seamless face his eyes gaped black and ragged, the pale irises swallowed by the dim light. Ceryl swallowed, feeling faint. Rudyard Planck murmured something reassuring and squeezed her knee. More than anything, she wished not to hear this thing’s dream. But already the rasa was speaking.

“I dreamed I stood in a great pit…” he began. His voice was so low that everyone in the circle moved forward to hear him, as though huddling around a fire in the darkness. “It was night, and there were scorched clouds running through the sky. All around me were flames. At my feet were the bodies of children, contorted into horrible shapes—they were children I had slain—and the ruins of machinery. There was a wind blowing, a very cold wind. I could feel it picking through my clothes, it was the kind of wind that gets into your bones, and I felt it inside me, as though my ribs might crack from the cold.

“Then I looked up, and for a moment the clouds broke, and I could see the stars. Who knows?—perhaps I might have seen the pallid lights of HORUS, or the ruins of my own command station, if only I had known where to look. But it had been a very long time since I had seen the sky, and I no longer recalled the configurations of the stars. I gazed up there for a very long time.

“When I looked down again the bodies of the children seemed so small to me, so—fragile. And suddenly the horror of where and what I was overwhelmed me and I began to weep, knowing I had murdered them. And then I woke. And when I woke I wanted to weep still, but I could not. And that was when I knew it was only a dream. Because you see, I had dreamed that I was a man.

“And, of course, I am no longer a man. But when will I be rid of this dream?”

His voice rose when he began to speak of the stars, and when he said But when will I be rid of this dream? the words came in a sort of brazen shriek, like the clamor of some great engine grinding against stone. Ceryl shivered, while beside her Rudyard Planck covered his ears. Tatsun Frizer whispered the names of Blessed Narouz. Reive sat bolt upright, her eyes wide as though bewitched. Âziz stared resolutely at the floor.

Only Nike seemed unperturbed. Without a word she held out a hand to her white-faced serving girl, who gave her a candicaine pipette. The margravine snapped it and inhaled. She shook her head, as though snow still clung to her hair.

“Well, isn’t that interesting,” she began, when another voice cut her off.

“This is not a true dream,” the voice said, clear as a child’s.

Oh, god, no, thought Ceryl.

You never accused someone of lying at an inquisition.

Tatsun Frizer pawed at Ceryl’s knee. “Isn’t that your little friend? ” she whispered in disbelief. Ceryl pushed her away and watched, horrified, as the gynander walked into the circle.

“No?” The Aviator’s terrible eyes fixed on her.

“No,” replied Reive. Her hair had fallen to her shoulders in loose, oily-looking coils, and her cheeks were flushed. She looked like a demented child, not the mannered scryer one usually saw at inquisitions. Âziz raised her eyebrows, beckoning a serving boy to refill her wineglass, and leaned over to say something to Sajur Panggang. Echion smiled very slightly.

Please, please stop, Ceryl prayed. Very faintly she could hear Rudyard Planck whispering her name. She glanced at Nike, still holding the broken ends of her candicaine pipette. The margravine was staring at Reive entranced.

The gynander continued, her voice oddly toneless.

“It is not a true dream, because you are no longer a true man. It is the last memory of your last life. Somehow it has entered your regenerated consciousness. Because it is not a dream you will never be free of it.”

The Aviator stared at her, motionless. Finally his voice rang out, so loud and deep that Tatsun Frizer gave a little shriek.

“You are right! It is not really a dream, because I am no longer a man.” He nodded at Âziz and Nike. “This is a very clever creature you have here, Margravines. Perhaps it will scry your dreams for us?”

Âziz coughed, wiping her mouth with her hand and pushing away the serving boy as he offered her a towel. She nodded slowly, and stretched her long hands out toward Reive.

“Yes. Of course.” Her eyes narrowed. “My dreams of late have been so— unusual —that I did not trust them to our usual seers. But you appear to be a rather unusual mantic, strange child.”

Murmurings and excited glances from the crowd. Âziz smiled a twisted smile and crooked a finger at Reive. “Come here, then, child. What’s your name?”

Reive blinked and looked around the room, as though just waking up. She glanced back at Echion, who nodded, and then across the room at Ceryl, who pretended not to see her. Âziz watched her patiently, still moving her hands to beckon her closer. Warily Reive crossed the circle to stand before her.

“Our name is Reive.”

“Reive.”

Âziz drawled the syllable, wrinkling her nose. Relieved laughter from the circle. “Well, Reive. You’re quite a talented thing. I’m surprised we haven’t met before.”

She reached to touch the gynander’s chin, tilted it so that Reive gazed back at her. Âziz drew her breath in sharply.

“Your eyes.” Reive struggled to look away, but the margravine’s hand held tight to her. “Where did you get such eyes?”

Reive’s reply was so low it could scarcely be heard.

“We were born with them, Margravine.”

“Born with them?” snapped Âziz. She let go of the gynander and turned to her sister. “Gynanders are generated on Dominations! They never have such eyes—”

Nike nodded. She said thoughtfully, “Shiyung has eyes like that—”

“Enough!” Âziz’s voice cut her off. She turned back to Reive, regarding the gynander’s slim figure in its filmy costume. Raising her eyebrows Âziz reached to stroke the edge of Nike’s fur cape.

“Here, Reive—you look cold.”

Âziz tugged at the cape; it slid from Nike to the floor, where she pointed at it, staring all the while at Reive. At first the gynander did nothing; then with a slow nod she took the cape and wrapped it around her shoulders.

Âziz stared at her through slitted eyes. “Very striking. I have not seen you here on Seraphim before.”

“We have only been here this week.”

“Are you Echion’s guest?”

Reive looked uneasy, finally shook her head.

“No.”

All around the circle people were whispering and glancing at each other. Many of them were staring at Ceryl. She coughed and looked around the room fiercely, trying to avoid the gynander’s eyes. Now Reive was staring at her. The powder on one cheek had been smeared, so that the green whorl there looked like a bruise. Beside Ceryl, Rudyard Planck whispered, “Don’t worry, there’s help if you need it.”

“Come now, Reive, you must be somebody’s guest,” Âziz said sharply. “ I’m not angry, I’m sure you didn’t intend to insult our new Aviator Imperator, and I’m sure he doesn’t feel that way. Margalis?”

She glanced at the Aviator. He shook his head, but it was impossible to tell what the gesture meant. Âziz went on, nonplussed. “See?”

Reive pulled the furs tight across her chest. Suddenly she pointed.

“Her.”

Ceryl gasped. She had indicated Tatsun Frizer.

“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.

Chapter 5 THE RASA REPENTS

“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.

She was determined that no such thing would happen to Tast’annin. After the Archipelago Conflict there had been months of delicate surgery, that business with his ears for instance; but still there had been something they could never quite repair. A certain mental brittleness, a tendency to see patterns where there were none. As though he always heard a strange high-pitched sound the rest of them were deaf to, a sound that would gradually drive one quite insane.

This time he would not fail them. Shiyung had ordered the final conversion after the janissaries found his corpse in the abandoned capital. His activities there had been a sort of treason, of course. He had been betrayed by the Capital’s Governors, betrayed and then handed over to the half-human aardmen who had tortured him, unmanned him, but then, in a characteristic fit of pity, freed him. Once on his own again he had made his way to the ruins of one of the Capital’s great landmarks, an ancient and malign Cathedral. There he had planned to conquer the Capital for himself, seizing control of its ancient armories and enslaving its people.

But he had failed. Within hours of his defeat, Ascendant janissaries had captured the City and borne Tast’annin’s body back to Araboth, where his treason was revealed to the Orsinate.

A lesser man than Tast’annin would have remained dead, his body thrown before the Lahatiel Gate to be torn apart by the mob. But the Orsinate understood that treason itself was not necessarily a bad thing. It bespoke a certain amount of ambition, and vision, and the Orsinate recognized that vision at least was often in short supply among their staff. And then there was the matter of Tast’annin’s relations with Shiyung. Many years ago, of course, but even Âziz acceded that sentiment was not without its place in their (admittedly full) lives.

So Margalis Tast’annin was brought back to Araboth. Rather, his body was brought back; the process of retrieving Tast’annin was a longer one. This time there would be no chance of him succumbing to anything so rustic as a bullet or an aardman’s jaws. There would be no question of the frailty of the flesh, because there would be no flesh.

Very little, at least. The rasa’s degenerated form was hidden now in its metal sheath. They left him a hand—Nike’s idea, she was an admirer of the cinematic arts and had noticed this was a popular conceit in ancient films—and they left him his eyes, because Shiyung insisted. His mind of course remained his own, although the biotechs improved his aggression responses and enhanced his already acute intuitive skills. Only his memories were imperfect. Certain things he could not recall with any certainty as being dreams or actual events. He spoke, for instance, of the existence of dark gods as though such things were commonplace. But the Orsinate felt this was a trifling weakness in a military commander.

They might have reproduced his body, or given him another, younger one, instead of the metal shell that now sat watching the Architect Imperator drink rather more Amity than he should. But it had not been Shiyung’s idea to end the affair with Tast’annin. And with Shiyung, sentiment was not combined with a forgiving nature.

The Aviator Imperator lifted his head. The gassy blue lanterns sparked the mask’s smooth crimson surface with violet and ultramarine. “Never mind,” he replied to Sajur. “Perhaps it is not important.”

Sajur looked relieved. The Amity made it easier to imagine this was the old Tast’annin in the room with him, and not a corpse enhanced with liquid biocircuitry. “Would you like to watch some ’files? I’ve got last year’s graduation from the Academy, Salih Mukheyat gave the address. Or some of Nike’s collection. Let’s see—”

He jumped up and crossed to where a stack of ’files leaned against one of the Architect’s secondary monitors. “Let’s see. ‘The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum,’ that’s quite nice. Or ‘The Broken Will,’ Nike said that’s considered George Owlden’s masterpiece.” He rummaged through the ’files, holding each to his ear so it could whisper its title. “Hmm, ‘Khibel ab Mejnun,’ Khibel the Fool—”

“Thank you, Sajur. Not tonight.” The rasa stood, leather clothing skreeking against his metal limbs. “I will let you sleep.”

Sajur’s voice quavered a little, drunkenly. “Are you quite sure?”

Tast’annin shook his head. “Yes, Sajur. It is late, I’ll leave you with your ’files and—”

He inclined his head toward the crystal decanter winking in the dim light. “Another time, perhaps, we’ll watch ‘Khibel the Fool.’ ”

Sajur walked with him to the door. “I’m sorry Hobi wasn’t here to see you. Khum said he went out with—a guest—this afternoon. I know he wanted to offer his congratulations….”

“Give him my best.”

Tast’annin let the man hold the door for him. Outside, the deep indigo light that demarcated evening gleamed above the pagodas and spires of Cherubim. The rasa stared up to where the central Quincunx Dome curved, a great gleaming black hand cupped over the sleeping city. He raised his own hand in imitation, palm down, and turned away.

“Good night, Sajur.”

“Good night, Margalis,” the Architect Imperator called softly. He raised his hand in farewell, but the rasa did not look back.

Shiyung winced as the eyra screamed again. She had miscalculated something in the final stage of the great cat’s compressed gestation. When she pulled it from the vat the epidermal layer of its skull had not completely formed, and the pink skin had sloughed from it like icing from a too-warm cake. The creature lay at her feet, shrieking, while nucleic starter pooled around it. Delicately she lifted one foot and stepped over the steaming liquid, reached down and gently prodded its chin. Its screams became a dull moan, and then silence.

“Damn.”

It was the third one that day. Shiyung was impatient and had difficulty waiting the correct amount of time when indulging her hobby. Now she turned and walked to the door, sidestepping other damp places on the floor of her laboratory. “Me-suh,” she called softly. “Me-suh, I think I’m finished for today.”

Her replicant assistant appeared, a copper woman with snaky hair and a pronounced list to one side. Robotic engineering had been an earlier passion of Shiyung’s. “I’m going to try another breed of big cat tomorrow, Me-suh. Maybe a tiger. I think there’s something wrong with this strain.”

Me-suh bowed, her bad shoulder scraping the wall, and headed for the dead cougar. With a sigh Shiyung started upstairs.

The message chamber showed a call from Nike, her sister yawning as she mumbled something about a ruined inquisition. Shiyung grimaced and replayed it, then went through the other calls until she found one from Âziz.

“—thought I’d tell you first it’s nothing, absolutely nothing ,” Âziz’s aggrieved voice scraped through the air. “An idiot morphodite, she’s been detained of course, but of course there are all these rumors now, and then there was that explosion on Archangels, so I think we’d better—”

Shiyung rolled her eyes, switched off her sister’s peevish voice, and went into her bedroom. Another great cat, a caracal, sprawled upon the bed, like ghee poured upon the black coverlet. It meowed throatily when it saw Shiyung. Shiyung wrinkled her nose as she pushed it to the floor: really, she needed a less fulsome hobby. But the rewards of bioengineering were greater than those of robotics. She couldn’t control the actions of her great cats and half-human creations, and she derived a perverse satisfaction from that. As the youngest of the Orsinate, Shiyung had always prided herself on being unpredictable—refusing to use human servers; taking the side of the moujiks during the Medifac Insurgency when she was only nine years old; attending mass at the Church of Christ Cadillac and even driving one of their ancient vehicles into the flaming wall during the sect’s communion rites. In the last few months she had been fascinated by what she heard of an eerie new cult formed by the rasas, and she had even entertained thoughts of having another natural child. She would be more careful this time, and choose a father whose genotype was not so similar to hers. It was a shame that baby had been deformed, but at least the Children of Mercy had been glad to have it, if only for a little while.

It would be interesting, she thought, to have a living child. Children were so spontaneous. Her great cats and geneslaves were beautiful but lacked that element of uncertainty, their wild instincts bred out of them centuries before.

“Right, Bast?” she murmured, stroking the caracal’s proud jaw. Someone had told her once that she looked like a panther, a biotech she’d slept with during Æstival Tide.

“Green eyes and a cruel jaw and velvet hands,” the woman had whispered to her over a hubble-bubble on the beach. Shiyung had to look up the word and its image to see what a panther was, but after that she began toying with the genus Felidae in her laboratory. For a little while the biotech had assisted her, but then she’d grown rather too demanding and Shiyung had her put with the other Chosen during the Hecatombs.

But Shiyung’s passion for predators remained. She’d filled her chambers with caracals and ocelots and servals, and was disappointed when they didn’t kill the birds and squirrels she made for them. Then for a while she’d gone in for canines, jackals and fennecs and even an aardwolf, technically a different strain but so unusual. But the cats still offered the most visually pleasing effects, and recently she’d begun to try to revive their aggressive instincts, with mixed results.

“Ah, Bast,” whispered Shiyung, pulling the caracal back beside her. She reached for one of the camphor cigarettes kept in a silver holder at her bedside. As she lit it a bell chimed and the foyer scholiast’s voice echoed, “You have a visitor.”

Shiyung exhaled. The caracal sneezed and slid from the bed, taking the woolen comforters with her. “Who is it?”

“The Aviator Imperator Margalis Tast’annin.”

Shiyung smoked in silence for another minute. Finally she said, “Show him in, please.” She put out her cigarette and crossed to her armoire. She had just dropped her laboratory robes and stood before the mirror in a white silk chemise when Tast’annin appeared in the door.

“Forgive me, Margravine. I’ll wait until you’re dressed.”

Without glancing at him Shiyung pulled a flannel kimono from the wardrobe and shrugged into it. “Oh, please, Margalis, I think we’re past all that now. Especially now.”

She turned. She was alone with him for the first time since she’d pulled his brain from the crucible and begun the complicated procedure of bonding it to its metal form. He wore not the NASNA Aviator’s uniform but a simple robe of black jacquard. As he entered the room she glimpsed glints of white and crimson light glowing within the silken folds. “Thank you for seeing me, Shiyung.”

She sank into a chair near the curtained window and regarded him critically. It was unsettling to hear that hollow voice echoing from a mouthless mask. “It’s late, isn’t it? Although of course you don’t get tired now. Not that you ever slept very well.”

He shrugged. The robe rippled along his shoulders and she saw the sleek line of metal there, melting into the crimson curve of his neck. “Sleep. It’s interesting that you should mention sleep—may I sit?—because it is a dream that brought me here.”

“How interesting.” She motioned at the bed. The rasa sat. At his feet the caracal blinked, then growled softly, and Shiyung smiled with false ingenuousness. “I had no idea that rasas could dream.”

“Not my dream. Âziz’s.”

“Ah.” Shiyung made a chucking sound and the caracal curled at her side. “I heard about that. Âziz called me. Oh, Me-suh—”

The server appeared in the doorway. “Some iced vitro for me. Margalis?”

For a moment his translucent eyes flickered from gray to dark blue. He said, “No, thank you.”

“Of course, forgive me—you have no mouth.” Shiyung wrinkled her nose and covered her face, a naughty child stifling a laugh. When the server returned with the tumbler of blue ice she sipped it, staring at the rasa through slitted eyes. After a few minutes she leaned forward and asked conspiratorially, “So tell me, Margalis: what is it like? Is it different, really? Can you still feel things? I mean—”

She gestured at her thighs with one slender hand, pulled aside her kimono. “Like that, what’s it like now?”

A strained sound from the rasa; then, “Nothing. I feel nothing anymore. At least I don’t feel it physically. But of course I remember many things.”

Shiyung gave a small disappointed sigh and let her kimono drape back across her legs. She took another sip of her vitro. “It must be painful for you. Remembering things.”

Tast’annin tipped his head so that she saw the mask’s smooth contours, crimson threaded with silver in a pattern that appeared only when it caught the light at a certain angle. His eyes glowed dangerously. “It is worse than any torment I could have imagined,” he said at last.

For some minutes they sat without speaking. Shiyung sipped her drink. At her feet the caracal snored softly. The rasa seemed deep in thought, at least his posture assumed pensive lines as he stared at the floor with its simple grass carpeting. Finally he looked up. Tast’annin’s ice-pale eyes stared out at Shiyung as he said, “There was a hermaphrodite at the dream inquisition this evening. An interloper of some sort. She correctly scryed my dream—my “memory—and then Âziz asked her to read hers.”

“Yes. She told me.” Shiyung was bored. Her pleasure in Tast’annin’s plight had not been as acute as she had hoped. She felt neither glee nor the rarer thrill of remorse and pity; only a detached vicarious curiosity that Tast’annin seemed unlikely to indulge. “Âziz had a little fit and had her locked up.”

“I’d like to see her.”

Shiyung raised an eyebrow and finished her drink. The faintest note of something—pleading, maybe, or anger; it was so hard to tell when he had no face—had crept into the rasa’s nearly uninflected voice. “Âziz?”

“No. The hermaphrodite. The one she’s imprisoned.”

“Hmm.”

Shiyung set the tall tumbler on a night table and stood, stretching. Her kimono fell open on a swath of buttery skin and she did not bother to close it as she walked to the window. She was thinking again about the child she had given birth to fifteen years before. Another one of her whims. She and Nasrani had been sharing a bed, and she had decided it might be interesting to have a natural child. Only something had gone wrong—the physicians warned her about it, and with her dabbling in genetics she had known there was a chance of something like this. Too many Orsinas together over too many centuries. When the child was born she couldn’t bear to look at it, the tiny penis and behind it the pink vulva, and witch’s milk oozing from its breasts. The last report she’d had of it, from the Chambers of Mercy, was that it was a true hermaphrodite, the first to be born of natural parents in many years. She hadn’t bothered finding out the details of its final disposition.

Now, thinking of this morphodite who had so upset Âziz, she wondered what had happened to that other one. Perhaps it had been cruel of her to give it to the Chambers of Mercy. Perhaps—her heart beat a little faster at the thought—perhaps there were reparations to be made. Perhaps Blessed Narouz (or Christ Cadillac, or Prophet Rayburn) had sent this other morph just for this purpose, to permit her to make amends. It might be a noble thing for her to do, to save this gynander. Especially at Æstival Tide. Shiyung was very fond of doing noble things under the right, usually public, circumstances.

She pulled the draperies back, displaying a dizzying view of Araboth: the cobalt reaches of the dome above, indigo and rose-pink and viridian sweeps of light below, darkening from level to level, until at the very bottom an inky blue gleamed, as though reflecting back the fastnesses of Seraphim.

She looked up at the domes and pointed. “You can see the stars tonight. There—?”

Tast’annin stood and stepped beside her. He placed one hand on her shoulder. It was warm, warmer than any human hand would be, and vibrated so that her shoulder tensed beneath it. “Yes, those are stars. Some of them, at least. There, and—”

He pointed to the faint light salted across the dark curves of the dome. “There. That is Orion.”

“That star?”

“No. That set of stars. A constellation. The Hunter.”

“And that?” She pointed at a glorious sweep of color trailing from horizon to horizon. “The Milky Way?”

He made a small sound meant to be laughter. “That is the reflection of the palace lights in the dome.”

“Ah.”

Behind them the caracal continued to snore. Shiyung let the curtains fall back across the window and turned to Tast’annin. “Why do you want to see her, this hermaphrodite? Why didn’t you go to Âziz?”

The rasa shrugged. “I knew she would refuse me, at least tonight while she’s still angry. And who knows, tomorrow the hermaphrodite might be dead.”

Shiyung nodded thoughtfully. “Probably. Was she pretty?”

“Childish. But yes, she was attractive.”

Shiyung settled onto the bed and motioned for the rasa to join her. “But that’s not why you want to see her.”

“No,” he admitted. “It’s not. She said something tonight, about Âziz’s dream. She said it symbolized the Green Country.”

Shiyung was silent. She bunched up a corner of the woolen comforter and released it, glanced up to see the rasa staring at her with those eerie bright eyes.

“Well,” she said after a moment. “Rather careless on her part, I’d say. No wonder Âziz had her locked up.” She nibbled her lip thoughtfully. “I wonder why Âziz didn’t tell me. I mean when she called, she said the morph had been detained but she didn’t say why. So my sister has dreamed of the Green Country.”

She stood and paced the room, nudging the caracal as she passed it. It sat up, startled, then stretched and slunk beside its mistress.

The Green Country. Of all the superstitions that haunted the city, the most potent. Not even Âziz would have been able to keep from succumbing to some fear when she heard that particular twist given to her dream. It must have been a very stupid morphodite, to just spit out something like that. Very, very stupid.

Or—

And here Shiyung slowed her pace and stared at the mirror that hung across from her bed. A chrome crucifix dangled above it, with a tiny plastic automobile hanging from the cross’s horizontal bar. Beside this hung a polyimage of Blessed Narouz and a vial of petroleum, a moujik prayer wheel, and a plastic bas-relief of Nefer-ka’ ehlvi.

Or, thought Shiyung as she flicked the prayer wheel so that it spun with a loud whir, perhaps the morph has the true Sight. The Final Ascension had been predicted for centuries now, mostly by those who suffered under the tyranny of the Orsinate Ascendants. Recently there had been Signs that were difficult to ignore, even by an Orsina, and especially if one listened to those on the lower levels. The rasa cult, for instance—surely that was evidence of something, the dead seeking some kind of revelatory meaning in their hopeless, horrible existence. And these shakings and tremblings of the ground; and last night an explosion in one of the refineries. And of course the usual claims of publicity-seekers that they had heard the Redeemer waking early from its decade-long sleep, or seen the mad geneslave Zalophus flying like a fouga beneath the domes.

Her sisters scoffed at these tales—at least Âziz scoffed; Nike nodded absently and took more morpha—but Shiyung considered it a point of honor to pay attention to such things. No mongrel cult was too rabid for her to partake in its rites at least once; no moujik witch so deranged but that Shiyung wouldn’t take a vial of her spittle and carry it back to Seraphim to display on her wall or in one of her curio cabinets.

“Did she have a name, this morphodite? Do you remember what they called her?” She turned back to the rasa. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes glistened as she hurried to sit beside him.

Tast’annin nodded. “Reive.”

“Reive? Just that? No other name, no number?”

“Reive, that’s all she said. Very young and thin, with very black hair. I think she wore—”

“No, that’s all right, I can find her. Reive.” The caracal nudged her knee and Shiyung took its head between her palms and squeezed it absently, until it whined. “Me-suh! Come here, I need you to locate someone for me—”

The snaky-haired server creaked back into the room, its linen covering flapping across its copper torso. Shiyung explained, “A hermaphrodite named Reive, detained by the Reception Committee this evening. By my sister Âziz.”

“What crime, mistress?” Me-suh’s voice came out in a low croak.

“I have no idea. Sedition, probably. Or—well, I don’t know. There was a disturbance at that dream inquisition in the Four Hundredth Room. Run her name through the main file.”

The server nodded and creaked back out again. Shiyung tapped her foot on the floor and hummed to herself. After a few minutes Me-suh returned.

“She is on Cherubim, mistress. In the Howarth Reception Area.”

Shiyung clapped and plucked at Tast’annin’s sleeve excitedly. “Did you hear that? Howarth. That’s right below here, it will only take a few minutes—”

Howarth was where political prisoners were received.

She stood and went to the armoire, flung aside coats and robes and lumen-accented tunics until she found matching trousers and blouse of a deep burgundy shade. She dressed quickly, then pulled her dark hair back so that it fell in a shining line past her shoulders. Finally she tugged a dark hood around her face. Watching her the rasa’s eyes closed for a moment. When they opened again she stood by the door, waiting.

“All right, Margalis, we’ll go visit your little friend.”

He slipped beside her and the door hissed shut behind them. For a moment Shiyung looked at him with shining eyes.

“I stayed home this evening to work—everyone else is always sleeping this late. It’s nice to have company for a change.”

He stared at her without answering, and then followed her down the hall.

Centuries earlier, the tenth Orsinate dynasty had designed the Howarth Reception Area as quarters for political prisoners, men and women of considerable rank who surrendered or were captured during the unsettled months after the Third Shining.

None of the hostages ever returned to the Balkhash steppes or the jeweled shores of the Archipelago. A few of them eventually married into the Orsinate. Others became tutors, and a few even escaped to the lower levels. But most spent their lives and died in the Reception Area so that now, despite the quite-comfortable accommodations and the attentions of the Reception Committee, it was rumored to be haunted. Several guards claimed to have heard the click of mah-jongg tiles interspersed with soft laughter and the sound of something being poured onto the floor. Reive had only been there a few hours, but already she had seen the blue-tinged silhouette of a young man cross her room and pass through the wall, enter and cross again, as though pacing the outlines of a chamber that had long since been walled off from this one.

The Reception Committee treated her well, since she was a guest of Âziz Orsina. The margravine disdained vulgar privations—they weakened her guests, most of whom were destined for the private torture of timoring. And for successful timoring, one must have some reserve of strength to call upon. So the Reception Committee brought Reive yoghurt and brandied loquats, and a tiny roasted quail, and watched politely while she ate on her bed.

“You can go. We won’t kill ourself,” the gynander sniffed.

The two guards shrugged and smiled, opening their mouths to show where their tongues had been removed, then tugging amiably at the long yellow sashes that hung from their waists.

“Fine,” said Reive, and turning back to her quail ignored them.

A minute later the steel door opened and a tall hooded figure strode in, followed by another figure in a black silk robe.

“Thank you, but we’ll see to her now,” the first announced. At sight of the rasa, the guards nearly fell down in astonishment. When they heard Shiyung’s voice they bowed, grunting and pounding the floor with their palms, then fled. The figure in the silk robe closed the door after them, staring out through the metal grate into the hallway. Reive gazed up silently, her mouth full. She choked when she recognized Shiyung Orsina and the rasa Imperator.

“Aghh—” The remains of her quail fell onto the mattress. The margravine shook her head and put a finger to her lips. Then, smiling conspiratorially, she carefully removed the empty plates from the bed and sat beside Reive.

“We’re your friends, Reive,” said Shiyung. She turned to the rasa and beamed, but Tast’annin only stared at Reive with cold blue eyes. Shiyung shrugged and continued, “I understand there was some—confusion—at a dream inquisition this evening. But you can tell us what really happened.”

Reive swallowed, stammering, “We can?” She tried not to wince as the margravine put her arm around her and shook her gently. She smelled of nucleic starter and amber. Reive thought she looked less beautiful than she did on the ’files.

“You can,” the Aviator intoned.

Reive’s voice quivered as she gazed at the rasa. “You—we saw you this morning. The Investiture—and your dream—”

Tast’annin stared down at the morphodite. The Reception Committee had removed the smudged makeup from her face. With her blank, sharp features and her long legs swinging from the edge of the bed, she looked like an effeminate young boy. He had never understood the vogue for hermaphrodites, found them slightly repellant in fact, with their soft round faces and vapid eyes. But this one seemed more alert than most—flippant even, despite her obvious fear. He spoke to her gently enough.

“I am—I was—Margalis Tast’annin. A NASNA Aviator First Class, now Aviator Imperator to the Orsinate.”

Nodding, Reive turned to the margravine. “And you’re Shiyung.”

The margravine smiled, tossing her hair back so that Reive could see her earrings, solid gold and so heavy that her lobes had distended a full inch from wearing them. The letter O and the Eye of Horus: the Orsinate’s insignia. “That’s right.”

The young one, Reive thought. She wondered if those earrings hurt. The crazy one.

Shiyung looked at her expectantly, “We’d like to help you, Reive. Is there anything we can do to help you?” She put her finger to the gynander’s chin and tilted Reive’s face toward her.

“Is there more to eat?”

Surprised, Shiyung drew back. Tast’annin made a small noise that might be laughter. “Those quail aren’t very big,” Reive said defensively.

“Ye-es,” said Shiyung. She frowned. “But—well, I was thinking more along the lines of, Could we perhaps make you more comfortable? Somewhere else?” Her voice rose suggestively.

“The margravine would like to rescue you,” explained the rasa. “If you remain here her sister is likely to have you executed in the morning.”

“Oh!” Reive sat up very straight. “We didn’t know. We thought—” She gestured at the neatly appointed room with its comfortable chairs and oil paintings and elegant china. “We thought she had forgiven us.”

Shiyung narrowed her eyes. “You haven’t been among us for very long, have you, Reive?”

“N-no.” She flushed and toyed with her hair.

“But you’re a pantomancer, surely you are aware of the significance of a dream of the Green Country?”

The gynander nodded slowly.

“We’ve known that dream,” she said. She glanced at the rasa staring at her sideways, like the cormorant in Zalophus’s tank, his eyes glittering feverishly. She turned to Shiyung. “We have scryed it twice now.”

“ Twice? ”

Reive cowered on the bed. “Yes.” It was as Ceryl had warned her, she would be executed at once, or used as one of Âziz’s timorata —or, worst of all, given to the Compassionate Redeemer in the festival’s propitiary rites.

Shiyung turned to the rasa. “She says she’s scryed it twice.”

“So I heard.”

Shiyung clasped her elegant white hands, looking around the small room as though she expected it to disappear in a mist. “But—this is incredible! The same dream, that dream, twice? Margalis, this could—what does this mean? ”

Tast’annin shrugged, his kimono sliding to reveal the ribbed metal cage of his chest. “It could mean nothing. Or it could mean this morphodite is lying. Or it could be a harbinger of evil things not predicated by your Architects. What do you think it means?”

Shiyung bit her lip. “The ’file of Fasidin the Depraved says that to dream of the Green Country is to dream of the el-bajdia, the engulfing wilderness. It is a terrible omen.” She reached for the gynander and pulled her toward her and for the first time Reive clearly saw the margravine’s eyes: wide and childlike and an alarming shade of emerald. “Come, Reive—we’ll talk someplace safer.”

The gynander cast a final, longing look at her empty plate. “If anyone passes us you’re to keep your head down and say nothing,” whispered the margravine. The three of them left the Howarth Reception Area and hurried down the private gravator that would bring them to Shiyung’s chambers.

Shiyung’s quarters were larger than any Reive had ever seen, larger and hotter and filled with animals, great soft-bellied cats that skulked about the corners and seemed as intent as Reive upon finding something to eat. On the walls hung antique tapestries in somber shades of brownish-red, like dried blood or dung. The room smelled of sandalwood and damp fur, and a faint breeze blew down from vents in the ceiling.

“But why would you say these things about my sister?” Shiyung asked softly. She sat very close to the gynander and stroked her thigh absently as she spoke, tracing the imprint of a bruise on Reive’s white skin.

“Because it’s true,” Reive said sullenly for the tenth time. “We saw the Green Country in her dream. It is in her eyes as well, you have only to look to see it. Please, can we please have something to drink?”

Shiyung pursed her lips in annoyance, then clicked her fingers. Her server listed into the room, and the caracal moaned softly. “Me-suh, bring us some of that aquavit and whatever else there is—fruit or something.”

Frowning, the margravine stood and paced. Behind Reive stood the rasa, so silent that the gynander held her breath, to see if she could hear him breathing; but she heard nothing. His pale eyes glittered as he watched her, and it seemed that his irises bloomed a deeper blue as Shiyung grew more agitated.

The margravine stopped and gazed sharply at Reive.

“Now I can tell you, morphodite, that my sister Âziz would be the last person in Araboth to have that dream. Unlike me she has no interest whatsoever in theological matters, and she is not—shall we say—superstitious. Now I would have thought this was a more commonplace dream, an omen perhaps of unrest during the upcoming holiday. But I find it very interesting that you interpreted it so differently, especially on the eve of Æstival Tide. There are many interesting things about you. For instance, how is it that you came to this level without a sponsor? You were not on the guest list for that inquisition—”

“We were invited—” Reive tugged at the small mesh purse hanging about her waist and pulled out Tatsun Frizer’s allurian calling card. “See?”

Shiyung took the card and read it, then tossed it aside. “Frizer. She’s in Blessed Narouz’s Refinery. How do you know her?”

Reive started to explain about that morning: the walk along the boulevard, the Investiture, and the woman with the puppet who had given her the card. But as she started to speak Tast’annin’s face trapped her, like the black mirrors set by moujiks to capture the souls of the dead. “We—we don’t know,” she stammered.

“She will not harm you, Reive,” the rasa said softly. He moved closer to her and placed one gloved hand upon her knee. He stroked her leg gently, as Shiyung toyed with her caracal. “If what you said was true—if Âziz really did have a prophetic dream—why that is quite an unusual circumstance, and you must understand better than we do what that portends. Don’t you, Reive?”

His voice had grown soft, its monotone and the scent of sandalwood lulling her so that her eyelids drooped and she let herself sink backward into the pillows. She said nothing, her mouth shaping a silent O as the rasa continued.

“You read my dream without any difficulty—perhaps a rasa’s dreams are not so challenging as those others—and so now I will tell you something, Reive. I think you were right. I think Âziz did have the dream of the Green Country.”

Shiyung made a small noise, whether of disapproval or restrained excitement the gynander couldn’t tell. Tast’annin’s hand upon her thigh tightened, squeezing more and more forcefully until Reive cried out. But he did not seem to notice, only went on. speaking in his calm toneless voice.

“You must understand, I have seen before what happens when people do not pay attention to their dreams. Âziz and her clever siblings have been supporting research in distant places, facilities in the wilderness where it was thought safe to perform some rather cruel acts—upon children, among others. I daresay Shiyung has forgotten all about that little project of hers—”

Shiyung blinked her calm green eyes and shook her head. “Children? Which one was that?”

“The Human Engineering Laboratory, The Harrow Effect, that was what they called it. A method of inducing multiple personalities and then using the subjects in emotive engram therapy. Psychic vampires, capable of reading the emotions and memories of others. They would make ideal spies and terrorists for the Orsinate, perhaps even help them to escape their servitude to the Ascendant Autocracy. Only the subjects were so unstable that they often went mad and killed themselves, or induced suicide and madness in others.”

Shiyung furrowed her brow, her little mouth pursed into a frown. The rasa’s voice rose slightly.

“See, Reive! She doesn’t even remember. But I recall when Shiyung was so excited about the Harrow Effect that she couldn’t—well, she couldn’t do much of anything. She and her sisters had great plans—the Human Engineering Laboratory would be a testing ground, they would go on to have child farms where they would raise entire armies of disassociated terrorists, ready to kill and be killed without a single thought. Certainly without a single thought from the Orsinate. They would seize control once more of the ancient capital—ah, see, Reive, she remembers that part—and install a new Governor there, someone chosen expressly for that purpose from the highest ranks of the NASNA Academy. And of course, eventually the Orsinate would move there, at least one of them would—the youngest, perhaps, she was known for a certain recklessness that sometimes passed as foresight. She would not be afraid to go into the wilderness and live in the ruins, once the ruins had been cleaned up a bit—she may be feckless, but she is also a fastidious young woman.”

The rasa’s voice had grown quite loud. When he fell silent its echo filled the room like a bell clanging. Beneath his fingers dark welts had sprung up on Reive’s leg. She covered her face with her hands, biting her lip to keep from crying out again. Abruptly he let go of her. With a cry she backed away from him until she bumped into the wall.

From where she reclined against a stack of pillows, Shiyung stared at Tast’annin, her needle-thin eyebrows raised above guileless eyes. “I had forgotten about that project,” she said. “Whatever happened to those people?”

“They are all dead,” the rasa replied. Reive huddled against the wall, shivering. How could the margravine stand it, listening to it— him —talk like this? The sound of his voice was enough to drive Reive mad; and the way he looked at Shiyung… Reive crossed her hands across her chest and prayed the rasa would forget about her, forget she had ever come here.

The rasa crossed the room to stand above Shiyung. With one gloved hand he reached to caress her hair, letting it slide between his fingers in a long black stream. “Or most of them are, at any rate. A few escaped; at least one that I know of. It’s ironic, isn’t it? That little diversion of yours caused so much misery and destruction; and yet you don’t even remember it…”

Shiyung closed her eyes, arching her neck against the rasa’s hand. “I remember it now,” she said, her voice thick with a dreamy petulance. “I got the idea from the dream inquisitions, it all seemed to tie in somehow….”

The rasa stared at her with his bloodless gaze. “It does tie in,” he agreed. Shiyung’s hair gleamed within the fingers of his leather glove, jet against ebony. “I like it when things connect like that: I have a rather Jesuitical predilection for order. The Academy does that to one,” he added.

Shiyung gave a small sharp gasp. Not, as Reive first thought, because of what he had said, but because the rasa’s hand had moved slowly, almost lovingly, from her hair to her neck. His fingers lay across her throat, dull black against her moon-white skin.

“Margalis,” Shiyung choked. At first Reive thought she was teasing, but then she saw that one of the rasa’s hands had tightened around her throat; the other was pulling her up by her hair, until she staggered to her feet.

“Mar-ga-lis —” she said again, thickly, swallowing the name so that Reive could barely hear her.

“Wait—” the gynander said hoarsely, clutching her hands in her lap. “No—we—please, no —”

The rasa stood beside Shiyung now, like a shadowy figure manipulating a life-size puppet. With his gloved hand he tugged her head back, her hair flowing through his fingers like dark water. His other hand clenched her throat until a rivulet of blood sprang from between two metal fingers, sending a fine red spray upon his robes. The margravine’s eyes bulged, her mouth twisted as she stared at Reive, hands slapping frantically at the air. Reive fell back against the floor, gasping, and still it went on, the rasa tightening his grip upon Shiyung’s throat as he tugged slowly and steadily at her scalp.

And then, with a sound like shears cutting through very heavy cloth, he yanked sharply at her head. Reive shrieked and covered her mouth. The rasa let go of that cascade of ebony hair, pushed the head forward until it lolled crookedly upon one shoulder so that she stared dully at the gynander. The emerald irises were swallowed by watery red. A fine line of spit ran from the corner of her mouth to her chin, joined the thin stream of blood that trickled from between dark bruises upon her throat. Gently the rasa shook her by the shoulders; a sudden gout of blood poured from her mouth to splash his boots.

“There,” said the rasa. He pulled the corpse heavily across the room and propped it against some pillows. He moved Shiyung’s hands to her breast, then crouched to spread her hair in a jet fan across her shoulders. “You could almost imagine she is a real woman.”

The gynander clutched her stomach, Shiyung’s name catching in her throat. Shiyung’s caracal crossed the room, nosed at the corpse and growled plaintively. It grew unbearably hot. Sweat pooled beneath Reive’s breasts and trickled onto her stomach. There was a faint sound, like a far-off explosion. The tapestries on the wall shivered as though a figure moved behind them.

The rasa stood, his limbs creaking, and let one hand linger upon Shiyung’s cheek. Finally he said, “I must go now.”

Reive choked back a scream. “ Go? But where will you take us, what—”

“You must stay here.” As he stared down at her Reive saw her own face reflected in that horrible blank mask. “If you try to flee they will only find you that much sooner. Here you might have time to get something to eat.”

Reive’s teeth chattered so that she could barely speak. At her feet the caracal licked Shiyung’s eyes. “B-but if we stay they will blame us, they will think we killed her—”

The rasa shook his head. “You must admit, it does seem rather strange—your apocalyptic reading of Âziz’s dream and then your escape from the Reception Area, and whatever are you doing here in Shiyung’s chambers?”

Reive began to weep, as the rasa went on, “But they would not blame me, even if I stayed. Because, you see, a rasa has no volition of its own: no will to love, or hope, or seek vengeance. It would be impossible for me to kill the margravine, or anyone else.”

“But then how…?”

The Aviator Imperator gazed down at the shivering gynander, the corpse with its long black hair spilling onto the pillows. He raised one hand to his face, and by a trick of the light glancing from his sleek mask it seemed that he had a mouth, and that mouth smiled.

“But how could I kill her, when by my own admission such a thing is impossible?” He stepped over Shiyung’s body to the door and paused there, his blue eyes huge and brilliant. “Perhaps, after death, we are controlled by a will even stronger than our own.”

For a long moment his gaze lingered upon her.

“Dreams are dangerous things, Reive Orsina,” he said, and left her alone with the corpse of the margravine Shiyung.

Chapter 6 THE BEAUTIFUL ONE IS HERE

IN THE DARKNESS SHE sleeps. The darkness moves about her, touches her steel breasts, the chromium arc of her mouth, the downcurved lapis petals that are her eyelids. There is a secret to waking her, a little joke really, if only the darkness knew.

The woman had named her Nefertity, The Beautiful One Is Here; but the name could also be read as Great Fortune Comes, or again as I Am The Million Years, or even as The Beautiful Ones Are Here. She had not yet known great fortune, nor had she lasted a million years, at least not this shell of metal and plastic and shining magnetized wire. Had she remained outside as her siblings had, those other gilded husks wherein the dreams and memories of the Last Days had been encoded, she would have been lost like they were, or melted into streams of hissing metal and mercurial thought, the glories and songs and warnings of the fin de millénaire so much poisonous gas choking the fiery air.

But she was the Beautiful One. She was beloved: she had been saved. The woman had kept her in a stone-and-steel bunker with her, alone, while outside the years spun by in a silent fury and inside the woman’s hair grew white. The woman’s name was forgotten now; but once other women, a million women, five million, had known her name and sang it and tapped it out upon their monitors, upon their breasts, upon the sleeping faces of their daughters.

But the woman died four centuries before, of old age. One of the few women of her century to do so—many more succumbed to plague, or childbirth, or the gynocides, or were executed as political prisoners, or herded into research facilities where their wombs were used to give birth to the Ascendants’ nightmares.

And so now only Nefertity might recall the woman’s name; but the Beautiful One is sleeping. As she sleeps she dreams of the woman in the bunker, the woman eating krill paste and halvah with her fingers and afterward leaving a sweet smear across Nefertity’s mouth. In another time or place, mice or flies would then have crept across the nemosyne’s sticky mouth to feed; but the woman had long since eaten them. Decades passed and the woman lived on, alone in the bunker with her books and her ’files and the gorgeous machine she had stolen when the American Vatican fell to the recusants. And through all those after years she alone spoke to the Beautiful One, whispered her secrets, warned her of the enemy, shared with her ’files and books and paintings and programs and films and holos and songs. Into Nefertity’s cold and boundless heart the woman poured all her dreams and memories, like shining sand into a glittering pit; and Nefertity swallowed them all, she embraced them, she recalled them, she recorded them, she devoured them. The woman would die one day but Nefertity would not. Nefertity would remember, Nefertity would never ever forget.

And so the woman brought them on, raging as she strove against madness and age and illness, struggling to recall for the nemosyne’s databanks all those other women whose histories would otherwise be forgotten. The woman groaned and mumbled, dragging them by hair and breasts and hands, pummeling them as she tore volumes and photographs and tapes from her shelves, until one by one they all fell into the maw of the Beautiful One—

The Venus of Willendorf, the Animal Wife, the Bog Woman, the Iron Age Princess, Queen Hatshepsut, Cleopatra burning on the Nile, Nike headless and winged like dawn, Brisingamen wearing the rainbow’s ardor about her neck, Demeter’s tears burning grapes upon the vine, Sappho’s leap, George Sand’s trousers, Mary Godwin sneezing as she molded the new Prometheus from the Mediterranean mud, Judith and Salome carrying their lovers’ heads beneath plump arms, Garbo talking, Sarah Bernhardt sleeping in her coffin, Queen Victoria spinning in hers, Mary Pickford, Mary Quant, Mary Magdalene, Mary Queen of Scotts, Sei Shonagun, Lady Murasaki, Yll Peng-Si the Tyrant of the Mongolian Nuclear Republic, Sylvia Plath, Gracie Allen, Hedda Morestein, Anne Frank, Indira Gandhi, Fasa Manh-Tul, Kyra MacDougal, Gertrude Stein, Artemis, Astarte, Inanna, Kali, The Norns, The Fates, The Grey Sisters, the Supremes, Margaret Thatcher, Magda Kurtz, Lizzie Siddal, Kwan-Lin, Loretta Riding, Nefertity…

A thousand of them, a million—

And when she died the woman left the nemosyne in her case, and on the case a set of hieroglyphs spelling out her history, and instructions for her use, and beneath that the nemosyne’s name scratched into the plasteel shell—

NFRTI: Nefertity. I Am The Million.

The Beautiful Ones Are Here.

Hobi could not sleep. For hours he tossed in bed, listening for the sound of his father’s return from the dream inquisition, staring glassy-eyed at the mess surrounding him while he rubbed his feverish cheeks. He kept seeing that black pit in the Undercity, hearing the chilly voice of the Architects intoning There is a breach in the fundus of Angels as the monitors filled with glowing letters spelling out terrible warnings he could not understand.

But mostly, he thought of Nefertity. That was what filled his mind: the golden face of the sleeping nemosyne with the twisted hieroglyphs and archaic letters across her brow. The sharp nose, the arched cheekbones tipped with silver, the chin pointed but rounded at the end (like his own, if he had only known it) and chased with silver threads like water flowing across her crystal flesh. Most of all, her eyes. Slanted eyes, even as she slept he knew they were beautiful eyes, and trapped such strange things! What face had she looked on last? When she awoke now to see him, would she falter and perhaps cry out?

Hobi moaned and turned onto his back, threw his arm across his forehead as he stared at the ceiling. She was a replicant. Even when designed for sexual congress (and few of them were: there were other things for that, argalæ and aardmen and even, he had heard once to his disgust, rasas), even when created as robotic courtesans, replicants could not respond appropriately to their human partners, not really: because of course they were only machines. Beautiful machines, sleek and clean of line as dolphins, but no more capable of loving response than one of Shiyung Orsina’s mutated animals.

Hobi knew all this, of course. He had slept with boys, more often with girls; and with one of his human tutors he had visited a brothel on Principalities, and engaged a moujik woman. All of these experiences had been, if not precisely memorable, at least satisfactory. He knew from books and ’files that there was supposed to be some more severe level of attachment involved with other humans; all the great stories said so. But one didn’t see evidence of these attachments on the upper levels of Araboth. His father had been grief-stricken by his wife’s murder, but when she was alive he spent a good deal of time pursuing girl children and leaving her to the ministrations of her own cohort of artistic young men. To be sure, the affairs that convulsed Cherubim and Seraphim were nearly always between men and men, or men and women, or women and women. There had been Zubin Billimoria’s obsession with the rasa of a deformed moujik child, of course, but everyone agreed that his passion was sentimental to the point of grossness. And on the upper levels it was considered very gauche to tryst with androids.

Why then couldn’t Hobi forget Nefertity’s metal face, or the sound—a chime that seemed to have followed him back to Cherubim, he swore that thin silvery sound was what kept him from sleeping—he had heard when first he gazed upon her? The Beautiful One, Nasrani had called her; Nasrani the clockwork man.

Hobi closed his eyes and thought of the exile going from one cabinet to the next in his cyclorama, waking the Titanium Children and Maximillian Ur. He would find Nasrani and go with him to the Undercity, and find her once again. And somehow, somehow he would wake her.

He did not rise until the following evening. Red-eyed and smelling of brandy, he stumbled out to where his father sat in the dim main room, staring at a mercury lamp. Sajur wore the same black suit and turban he’d had on yesterday. He had removed his emerald mourning bands and lined them up neatly on the small table in front of him. His Imperator’s chain of office, with its golden crucifix and opaline eye, hung around the neck of the lantern.

“Good morning,” Hobi muttered. He sank onto a brocade pillow and called to Khum down the hall, “Kehveh please.”

Sajur Panggang reached out to the mercury lamp and touched its glass chimney, watching the silver liquid stream toward his hand. “ ‘Good evening’ is more like it. Are you ill?”

“A little.” Hobi shivered and pulled his robe tighter around him. With surprise he noted an empty decanter on the table by his father. Next to it was a crumpled sheet of allurian tissue from one of the computer imprimaturs, flickering gold and purple upon the marquetry tabletop. Âziz’s stationary. He’d last seen it after his mother’s death. “Has—did something happen?”

Sajur sat in silence for a few minutes, tapping the edge of the crucifix against the mercury glass and humming a tune that had been popular last Æstival Tide. Tomorrow the gamelan orchestras would be banging it out again, as the crowds waited for the Lahatiel Gate to swing open. Hobi cleared his throat and started to ask about the Investiture, but thought better of it.

At last the replicant Khum returned with a salver of kehveh. Sajur Panggang’s demitasse steamed at his elbow unnoticed. Hobi spooned sweetener into his and sipped it, eyeing his father uneasily. Outside, Cherubim’s residential canyons glowed crimson and gold, and the nuclear CLOCK read near midnought, but still Sajur had not switched on any lights save that single glimmering lamp.

Finally he turned to his son and said, “You weren’t at the dream inquisition.”

Hobi looked surprised. This wasn’t normally something his father would care about, certainly not enough to send him reaching for the Amity and sitting in the dark. “No. I’m sorry, I just—”

“There was a gynander there. A new one, someone from the lower levels. She served Âziz’s dream—”

He hesitated and stared at his son. Hobi suddenly felt cold. He had the terrible feeling that his father was going to announce, “—And I know where you went with Nasrani Orsina.”

Instead his father said, “And she said it was the dream of the Green Country.” He paused and turned again to gaze at the flowing interior of the mercury lamp. “Âziz Orsina: she said Âziz dreamed of the Green Country.”

Hobi swallowed his kehveh. Despite the sweetener it tasted bitter and he pushed the cup away. “The Green Country,” he repeated uneasily. “But— Âziz? The gynander must have been drunk.”

Sajur spread his hands as though warming them. Now it almost seemed that he was trying not to smile. “They had her imprisoned, of course. The morphodite. I wish they hadn’t, at least not yet. I—”

He looked up at his son. The lines around his eyes looked as though they had grown less taut since yesterday. “I would have liked to have spoken to her first. It’s—rather an unusual thing for a margravine to dream of, just days before Æstival Tide. Don’t you think?”

Now he really was smiling. Hobi looked away hastily and gulped his kehveh. The Green Country. He stared down at his demitasse, so that his father wouldn’t see his face. “How could she? Âziz, I mean—how could she have dreamed it? And—well, what happens now?”

“Now?” Sajur shrugged and held his empty cup up to the mercury lamp. The silvery light made the porcelain glow like melting ice. “I guess we wait and see if the story gets out to the ’files. There’ll be riots, if it does. The entire city is at fever pitch already, anticipating the festival. I’ve never seen anything like it, in other years. You’ve heard the rumors, of course.”

Hobi’s stomach knotted. “Rumors?”

“Yes. Some sort of tremors shaking the lower levels. One supposedly caused a refinery explosion on Archangels. I’ve heard they’ve even been reported up here.”

His father smiled, so unexpectedly that Hobi shivered. His father took no notice. With both hands he removed his turban, pausing to glance critically at the artificial tourmaline nearly buried within the folds of black silk. He removed the stone, dropping the turban, then carefully placed the tourmaline on the floor. Hobi watched him, too stunned to do more than stammer.

“The Green Country—that’s supposed to be a prophesy, right, a storm or something. The domes—the domes failing. Are we—are we safe here?” he babbled as his father stared ruminatively at the tourmaline.

Sajur shook his head. “Safe?” he repeated. “ Safe? ” He lifted his foot, then very slowly crushed the tourmaline beneath the sole of his boot. It made a grinding noise, then suddenly exploded into gray powder and flying chips of glass. The Architect Imperator raised his head.

“Of course we’re safe. The Architects monitor everything, and I monitor the Architects, and the Orsinate monitors me. How could anything possibly go wrong?”

He turned, reaching for the little gold crucifix that hung against the mercury glass lantern.

“Father—” Hobi choked; but Sajur ignored him. He smiled, wider and wider, tapping the crucifix against the glass until suddenly it shattered. Volatile spirits flamed up in a flash of silver and blue, and just as suddenly were gone. The crucifix lay in a hissing pool of liquid on the marquetry table.

Hobi stared at him, his heart throbbing so painfully that he thought he would faint, but his father did not look up or even move his hand from the caustic mess, only continued to smile and stare, until at last he said, “One trembles to think…”

From the room down the hall came the click and whir of the Architects where they had been left to their mœbius loops, abandoned to their terrible employment.

The Architect Imperator had gone quite mad.

In the vivarium Zalophus dreams. It is a dream of open seas, of waters full of leaping fish and creatures with claws strong enough to rip through the wings of any animal foolish enough to let its flight bring it within inches of the roiling surface. There are many of these animals in Zalophus’s dream, just as there are more fish here than he has ever glimpsed in all the centuries he has been imprisoned in the vivarium. The fish and the flying creatures spin and toss, and when Zalophus heaves himself through the air they fall into his gaping mouth. Then he smacks back into the ocean, and feels himself sink down, down, through the blue and churning water until it grows cooler around his huge body and he feels the current that will lead him back to them, back to those others like himself, his dark and massive sisters. He has lost them, the pod left behind as he chased a great eel through the arctic night. He has lost them and now, five hundred thousand years later, he is still searching for them.

But he has never really seen the open sea. Not this sea, at least; not this Zalophus. Through his dreams he sounds and bellows, and sometimes through his waking days as well, calling through the watergate to where the Gulf pounds against the silent shore that encircles Araboth. Come back, come back, he thunders; but his sisters do not hear him. It is as the gynander told him: they are millennia dead, and there are no others of their kin left to answer him.

Now something else shakes his sleeping as well, though this is harder for the zeuglodon to comprehend. Not the smell or taste or rush of water along his sides and fins but another thing, a smaller thing that is more frightening, because it has nothing to do with water at all.

It is a sound. It is a voice: a human voice. The great carnivore cannot understand what it is saying, but he knows it is speaking to him. It reminds him of the voice of the gynander who lured the siren into his tank one evening; or rather, the gynander’s voice reminds him of this other dream-voice, high and fluting and plaintive. It is a voice beseeching him. He understands that it is desperate, it is pleading, but he cannot understand what it is saying or what it wants. He cannot really understand its desperation, except insofar that it is a kind of hunger, a yearning akin to his own awful dreaming of the open sea. It cries and begs beneath the waves of that other, larger and less complicated mass of memory; it weeps and pleads without ceasing.

The voice maddens Zalophus. In his sleep he turns, scraping his head against the side of the tank, and moans so loudly that the walls of the vivarium shudder. But the voice does not sleep. It cannot sleep, because it is part of the oldest geneslave. It is the sliver of consciousness of the other thing that went into the creation of the sentient zeuglodon, the thing that had been a man before some researcher centuries before decided to make of it a new thing, a new creature. It moans and pummels inside of Zalophus as the whale moans and thrashes inside its prison; and like Zalophus it will never be free.

But now the dream of Zalophus changes. The sea falls away and suddenly there is another element all around him, the terrible air that he feels so briefly when he throws himself from the water and for a few seconds is surrounded by a vast glittering desert. Only now this other element is everywhere; and the whale moans in terror, because while the sea is still there it has changed. It is not the smooth unwavering field he flows through but something new, something brilliant that hurts him, slashes against his brain and stabs his puny eyes.

But even as Zalophus rolls over and over in his sleep, that other stab of memory, that tiny voice, welcomes this new and hurtful, thing: because what has frightened Zalophus is color, a rush of remembered blues and violets and golds and greens that the other thing, the thing that was once a man, recalls.

And the memory of the man rejoices. As suddenly as the terror flooded Zalophus, it is gone. The voice inside him is abruptly silenced. Across the glowing grid of the whale’s thoughts there rolls the image of a vast and shining plain, a surface smooth and gleaming and alive even though it is not the sea. It stretches forever, from one horizon to the next, an immensity of hills and fields and prairies and mountains gleaming beneath a sun that is not deadly, a sun that flickers not silver-gray but golden, where rains that are not poisonous sweep the blue-washed sky. Everywhere that plain shines and gleams in a way that baffles the zeuglodon. And if Zalophus had only understood what it was that he glimpsed, the sad monster would have known to name these colors, known to name them green; would have seen the silvery rains and known they were the massive storm system whorling above the western ocean, the storm that battered the coast year after year, growing stronger through the decades as the coast fell away like splintered shale; the storm they called Ucalegon.

Zalophus does not know this. But that other thing, that mote of human consciousness trapped within him— it sees and understands. Ucalegon the Prince of Storms is coming; Baratdaja the Healing Wind is shrieking northward across the peninsula. Beneath the domes of Araboth the Ascendants dream of blood and steel, the Architects of grids of light; but Outside the Green Country grows nearer. Somewhere within the ancient whale’s brain that jot of humanity sees the Green Country, and it understands and remembers. The tiny imprisoned voice exults, to have glimpsed it thus for one last moment; and then is forever silenced.

If Hobi had been a more patient young man, he might have waited for Nasrani Orsina to return. If he hadn’t been so frightened by his father’s madness, he might have recalled that it was unusual for more than a few days to pass without a visit from the exile. Nasrani and the Architect Imperator were both grand masters at the intricate and ancient word-game tanka, which involved creating an image in five words. Not surprisingly, Sajur Panggang was adept at verbal landscaping—

Sanguine tapestry,

moldering leaves:

Autime—

Never mind that he had never seen real leaves moldering anywhere, save within the vivarium. Nasrani did not share his friend’s sentimental disposition but preferred a type of verbal portraiture, often scabrous. For example,

Drooling imbecile,

his clothes

smell—

An unkind reference to a member of the Reception Committee who had annoyed Nasrani during his brief incarceration. Nothing save an event of truly calamitous proportions—say, the murder of one of Nasrani’s sisters—would have canceled the weekly tanka game, with its bursts of rude and delighted laughter and the scent of Amity heavy in the air. If Hobi had been a patient and prudent young man, he might have waited—although, as it turned out, he would have waited in vain.

But Hobi was not that sort of young man. In twelve hours Sajur Panggang had not moved from his chair by the ruined mercury lamp. The replicant Khum brought him tea and whiskey and cardamom-flavored cakes, but Sajur only sat, snoring loudly or else waking to finger Prophet Rayburn’s crucified image among the slivers of broken glass. He did not hear Hobi when the boy spoke to him; he did not fight when his son and the replicant tried to move him, only let his body grow slack and slumped back grinning in the chair. Hobi finally left him alone, sickened and terrified. He tried to tune into the ’files for news of the inquisition or reports of executions, but the ’files had been locked: the screens showed only the calm eyes of the Architects and the words Sorry out of service. Tomorrow it would be Æstival Tide; the ’files should be showing preparations for the Great Fear, the immense Lahatiel Gates being oiled and primed to open, the prostitutes and imperial courtesans and myriad cultists costumed in hideous array for the timoring rites and mad rush into the sea.

But without the ’files Hobi couldn’t see any of this. He felt like a prisoner, although he really was not—the doors were not locked, he could come and go as he pleased; but Hobi was afraid to leave. No one called; there were no visitors. Khum brought him lunch and poured endless glasses of brandy; his father snored and grinned, until Hobi thought he might go mad as well. Once the entire chamber trembled. The brandy in Hobi’s glass rocked back and forth, and one of Sajur’s holographic anaglyphs glittered into view and just as quickly sputtered into black again. Too stunned to move, Hobi waited for nearly an hour, certain that this was it: the breach he had seen on the monitors only a few weeks ago had finally spread to the very domes, and the entire city was going to come crashing down around him.

But nothing happened. Sajur did not speak, or seem to notice. There were no aftershocks, no emergency bulletins on the still-dead ’files. Nothing. Finally the boy got up and stumbled to his room. He reached beneath his bed and withdrew a small silver flask, the last of the Amity he had hidden away. He drank it, sitting on the floor and leaning with eyes closed against the bed.

So. His father had gone mad. Terrifying as the realization was, it was neither unusual nor even unexpected. Each year a score or so of the Orsinate’s inner cabal went insane, varying from Musach Alvin’s unsuccessful attempt at flying from a third-floor balcony to Shiyung Orsina’s increasingly ridiculous involvements with bizarre religious sects. As a blood relation of the Orsinas, Sajur Panggang was practically doomed by birth to some form of mental anomaly. Fortunately Hobi was too young to consider even momentarily the notion that he himself might be similarly affected one day.

What Hobi was more concerned about was the fact that the city was very probably falling into ruin, even as he gulped the last burning mouthful of Amity. In other circumstances he would have gone to his father for help. Now the only person he could think of turning to was Nasrani, but god knew where Nasrani was to be found. If he were to go to the margravines, they would either laugh at him or, worse, believe him; and upon discovering his father’s failure to halt the destruction, Hobi would no doubt be imprisoned and executed along with Sajur. One thing Hobi was certain of: the margravines would do nothing to aid the failing city or its people.

That was when he thought again of the Undercity, and Nasrani’s hidden children. The exile had said that the nemosynes knew things; that if only they could find a way to wake Nefertity, she might be able to help them relearn all the secrets lost to the centuries of the Long Night.

Hobi stood—unsteadily, the flask falling to the floor with a soft chink. He had that terrific clarity that Amity brings to an empty stomach and a head primed for dreaming. He knew what he must do. He had to find the nemosyne again; find Nasrani too, if he could, but Nefertity was most important. Just because Nasrani had never been able to wake her didn’t mean that Hobi couldn’t try. He was not unlettered in certain kinds of stories that his mother had been fond of, ancient tales that involved quests and tasks and very often the salvation of certain individuals, usually women, who through no fault of their own had come to be imprisoned in cells of glass or stone or even unfamiliar bodies. And while Hobi knew that Nefertity was no such thing, and the near-certain demise of Araboth a matter of considerable gravity, still he was rather a young boy, with a passionate (if shy) nature; and there had been all that Amity.

He dressed, choosing his clothes with care. A white shirt of heavy sueded silk that made his chestnut hair look darker, his fair skin even more pale. Moleskin trousers of a color so deep it could not (and was not) termed evergreen or viridian, even though there were forbidden hints of those shades in its nap. Hobi of course knew that they were green trousers, as did the furtive moujik tailor who had designed them for him for a timoring several months ago. He had planned to wear them when he joined his father and the margravines on the viewing platform for the opening of the Lahatiel Gate. Instead he would wear them for this final secret journey.

Because he was leaving; because there was really no reason for him to stay. His father was mad and would surely soon be dead, his mother was dead, indeed it seemed quite evident that soon everyone he knew, from that moujik tailor to the margravine Âziz, would be dead. If he could somehow find Nasrani, he would warn him and enlist him in his endeavor. But otherwise he had his mind made up:

He would go back to the Undercity, find the nemosyne, and if he could not wake her, he would carry her with him, until they found some way to escape the coming holocaust.

Some way to get Outside.

It felt strange to be taking the gravator alone. Even though he had been there once before, only days earlier, the trip to the Undercity had grown fixed in Hobi’s mind, as though it were a beloved memory from his childhood. The little fountain with its statue of the timorata bubbling spearmint water; the heavy crimson drapes; the grinding of its gears as the chamber dropped level after level through Araboth’s glowing spectrum—periwinkle, scarlet, violet, every possible shade of purple deepening to the eternal night of the Undercity—all these things had in the last few days knit themselves around the boy’s heart, so that now the touch of those drapes against his cheek, the slant of wine-colored light as they passed through Principalities—all had become entwined with the calm and frigid face of Nasrani’s sleeping nemosyne. The amorphous terrors that had paralyzed him were gone, now that he had left Cherubim.

The trip to the Undercity could have lasted forever but in fact was over in a very few minutes. He jumped when the gravator announced its arrival on Angels. The doors fanned open, and a rush of fetid air greeted him as he approached them. He waited for a long minute, until the gravator repeated its announcement, somewhat peevishly, and the doors started to creak shut once more. Before they could close on him he jumped outside.

Immediately darkness engulfed him like a freezing wind. Hobi clapped his hands to his pockets and cursed: he had forgotten a lumiere. He started to sprint back into the gravator, but groaning like an old server it already had begun its slow ascent. He swore again, desperately; then heard from somewhere nearby a rustling sound, too loud to be something stirred by one of the ventricles— were there vents down here? When he held his breath the noise stopped. Heart pounding he waited to hear it again. But now there was only silence.

He thought he remembered which way to go. To the right; and yes, he found a wall there, damp and foul-smelling. His feet sank into some soft cold stuff as he walked on, one hand always on the wall. He tripped over chunks of concrete and once or twice splashed through shallow puddles. Always he kept one hand on the wall—that way, he thought, he could find his way back.

Once he stumbled. His foot hung in the empty air for what seemed like minutes, as he cried out, flailing, certain that he had fallen into the abyss that was shattering the Undercity like a porcelain cup. But it was nothing, just a gap in the walkway. He waited a few minutes, panting, and went on.

After a while it began to seem that it was not so dark here as he had first thought. At first he thought his eyes played tricks on him, making it seem as though there was a dimly lit doorway here, a glowing heap of embers there. But soon he discovered that there really was light, of a sort. A few feet in front of him something glowed like the remains of a fire nearly dead. He stopped to look at it more closely, and then in a spurt of bravery decided to walk over and investigate. When he removed his hand from the wall he had a horrible feeling, a vertiginous sense that he was going to pitch into some bottomless void: The impulse to fall back against the wall was nearly irresistible, but he bit his lip and stepped forward.

It was not the ash-heap he had expected, but a pile of stones, or broken concrete. They glowed a faint and ruinous green, not a solid color but pocked with different shades, here nearly yellow, there with a bluish sheen. He thought of the corpse-candles that were used in the rites of the Chambers of Mercy, tapers made from the organs of rasas destroyed illegally for such purposes. Hobi bit his lip, then touched one of the stones. His hand came away wet, and it too glowed. There was a foul odor of putrescence. He recalled the stories he had heard of rasas down here, and shuddered; but surely not even rasas would venture to the Undercity.

He wiped his hand on his trousers, leaving a long streak that faded into the darkness after a few minutes. He looked around in a futile effort to get his bearings and for the first time noticed that there were other scattered heaps glowing in the distance.

“Damn,” he whispered. He glanced down at the pile at his feet. It struck him suddenly that it might not be the artless heap he had first supposed. He nudged it with his foot. It didn’t budge. When he looked up again it seemed that those other dim pyramids might be beacons of a sort, or markers; but he could discern no order among them, only scattered fragments of light, dull green or blue like the veins of an odorous cheese. It seemed that his eyes finally were adjusting to the darkness. He could perceive immense shadows that must be buildings, and smaller shapes that were the ruins of skyscrapers or maybe autovehicles. Dark as it was, some faint, almost imperceptible light trickled down from the levels above. His eyes aching, he turned and stumbled off once more.

As he picked his way back to the wall Hobi tried to imagine what would use such primitive means of illumination or navigation. He had grown up hearing stories about naughty children and recalcitrant servants who fell or were pushed from their warm havens on Cherubim, and tumbled to Araboth’s primeval footing so far below. In the stories the children did not die, as they surely would if they were to actually slip from behind the protective barricades that ran along the outermost perimeters of each level. In the stories the children eventually found themselves in the Undercity, and it had always seemed to Hobi that it would be infinitely preferable to die. Mutated monsters were supposed to live there, creatures carelessly disposed of by the bioresearchers or dilettantes like Shiyung Orsina. Aardmen with too many eyes; hydrapithecenes that somehow flourished out of water; morphodites so hideous that even the jaded appetites of the Orsinate and their cohort had no use for them. All of these things (and betulamiæ whose treelike trunks had sprouted feet, and argalæ that snapped and clawed at their patrons, and things that went unnamed because gazing at them you were struck speechless) ended down on Angels, there to breed in the unkempt earth and ruined skyscrapers and abandoned refineries. Hobi had never questioned the veracity of such tales. Aristocrat’s children did fall sometimes, which was a shame because there were always too few of them, and servants and other hapless persons did get pushed, more often than you’d think. It had just always seemed so impossibly far away. The Undercity might as well have been Outside.

But here he was, inching forward through the green-pocked darkness of the Undercity with some demented notion of going Outside, trying not to think of what might have gotten here before him. In the surrounding night he heard that faint susurrant noise, like water percolating through the ground or an animal moving among the glowing piles of rubbish. Beneath his hand the wall’s surface changed from something slick and steel-smooth to rough brick or stone, all of it thick with algae or moss that came away in heavy foul-smelling wads when he pulled his hand back. He breathed through his mouth now, wishing he’d brought something to cover his face; wishing he’d waited for Nasrani to show up again. But then he would recall his silent grinning father, and the face of Nefertity, the dull flickering of her glass and metal atomies; and that would make him move more quickly through the muck.

Beneath his hand the wall abruptly gave way. Hobi stopped, gasping for breath, then reached until he touched something metal. A heavy beard of mold and fungi hung from the corners of the door, just as he remembered it. He traced its outline until he found the small metal plate where Nasrani had inserted his key. He breathed deeply, leaned forward until his forehead touched the cold dank door, then pushed with all his might.

Nothing. It wouldn’t budge. He tried shoving against it with his shoulder, kicking it, pushing it again and again, until his clothes were soaked with mold and slime and he began to shiver from the chill. Finally he stopped, his head pounding with frustration. It had been madness for him to come here alone, no key, no lumiere, nothing. His eyes strained to make out anything of the door or what lay beyond it, but there was only darkness.

He stepped back and took one more deep breath. He stretched his hands out before him, lowered his head, and started to make one final lunge, when—

“ Mmmph! ” Hobi cried out. Something struck his back and he toppled, flailing helplessly at the rubble-strewn ground. A moment later and someone straddled him, someone large and heavy and reeking of decay. The smell made Hobi gag and he wept uncontrollably, his eyes streaming as its hands played across his face until they covered his mouth.

“Greet your Mother,” it said. Its voice was utterly toneless. A cold tongue snaked inside his ear, and icy hands pushed his face into the ground. “Greet your Mother, once-born.”

“Aaagh!” Hobi shut his mouth and struggled as the thing atop him pushed his face into the ground. The horrible thought seized him that it was his real mother the thing meant; that what he had watched burn at the Reisling Gallery a year before was not her corpse but “another’s, and this was all part of some awful plot against his family by the Orsinate.

“Your Mother,” it hissed again. It grabbed him by the hair and pulled him up, then jammed its fingers into his mouth to pry it open. Hobi retched at the touch of rot and slime on his tongue. “Show some respect for your Mother —”

This time when it slammed his face to the ground his mouth was open. He choked, tasting dirt. The thing relaxed its hold a little, and gasping and sputtering Hobi finally pushed it from him. It seemed to be satisfied; he heard it step back, its feet splashing fetid water on him.

“Wha—” Hobi began, sobbing with fear and disgust as he tried to see what it was that had struck him. The unseen creature made a gurgling noise and cut him off, its glottal voice slow and measured.

“No questions. How did you get here?”

Hobi pointed vaguely, wiping his mouth and spitting. Filth dripped into his eyes as he strained to see what was there. Something as tall as he was, but wraith-thin. He dimly made out long lank hair, glowing with the same greenish phosphorescence he’d seen on the little pyramids, and a fish-white face. Something about it, the hair perhaps, or its voice, made him think of it as female. Abruptly one hand struck out at him like a snake, grabbing his chin. Its fingers were long and had very sharp nails. They felt pulpy, and seemed reluctant to touch him.

“How did you get here?” it whispered, its nails digging into his skin. Hobi cried out as he felt blood trickling down his neck.

“The gravator—ow, I swear! the gravator —”

The thing gave a bubbling sigh. Its arm flopped to its side. “No respect for your Mother,” it murmured thickly, “no respect at all. What were you doing there?”

“I was—I was trying to get in,” Hobi coughed. “To see what’s inside.”

“How do you know what’s inside?”

It was just a few inches from his face. Its eyes were pale sacs flecked with green, sagging within hollows as though someone had scooped the flesh from its face. Hobi felt his insides bunch together.

A rasa. The stories were true: corpses walked in the Undercity.

When it spoke again he felt its breath against his cheek, cold and smelling of decay. “Are you one of the fallen?”

“ Fallen? ” Hobi’s voice quavered so that he marveled the thing could understand him. “No! I just—I just came to visit, that’s all.”

The rasa thought about this, then shook its head. Its skull bobbed precariously on its narrow neck.

“You came to see Mother?” it asked suspiciously. Hobi flinched as it stretched its hands to touch his face. He realized that it could not see well—not that anything could see well in that infernal void.

“ Mother? ” But they were getting nowhere like this, so he quickly added, “Yes. Of course, yes, that’s right. I came to see Mother.”

The rasa’s fingers flicked across his cheeks. It seemed satisfied by his answer, and drew back from him. “Come then,” it said, and turned away into the darkness.

For a moment Hobi thought of fleeing. But then he thought of what might happen if the rasa called others of its kind after him in pursuit. He groaned softly and followed it.

After a few minutes he could think of nothing but trying to keep from losing his way, as the rasa led him through black alleys and under moldering arches. There was a constant sound of water underfoot, as though just beneath the broken earth an underground stream ran along with them. The rasa moved quickly, in a sort of shambling crouch. It was surprisingly strong, pushing aside a great steel door that blocked entry to what appeared to Hobi to be nothing more than a huge pile of broken concrete and twisted metal beams. When Hobi tried to follow, he got wedged between the rubble. For a horrible moment he thought he was trapped, pinned between a huge girder and a half-fallen brick wall. But then he got through, his trousers ripping and his chest grazed by broken bricks as he slid after the rasa.

They were in a sort of tunnel, a clear space no wider than ten feet across. Perhaps because the tunnel was empty of wreckage, it felt more open than the noisome spaces outside. And it seemed brighter here, too. Hobi blinked, then rubbed his eyes. No: it really w as brighter. The tiled walls bulged outward, as though they were inside a huge culvert. Flowing from the curved ceiling to the floor were curtains of fungi, long beards forming glowing draperies that emitted enough light that Hobi could read broken letters set mosaic style into the wall.

“ ‘Ewage station’?” Hobi pronounced, trying to recall why this was familiar; but ahead of him the rasa waited impatiently. He hurried after it.

The tunnel was straight and seemed endless, though they didn’t go very far into it. After a few yards water started pooling up, growing deeper every few steps until it came to Hobi’s knees. He was shivering so much it was hard to walk. The rasa ’s sickly sweet odor had dissipated into another smell, no less choking to Hobi for all that it was more familiar. It was a scent that dredged up queer memories, the sort of dimly lit memories you have of things that happened when you were drunk or drugged or very young: and that was how he realized the smell had something to do with Æstival Tide. It filled his nose and throat and mouth like bad water. After a few minutes he realized that’s exactly what it was: water. They were in the ancient sewage tunnel Nasrani had told him about, the tunnel that led Outside. What Hobi smelled was the sea, unfiltered by the domes.

The realization brought him to a dead stop. Ahead of him the rasa splashed on, pausing now and then to peer off to the left, as though looking for something.

The sea. What if the thing was bringing him Outside? Hobi put out one hand to steady himself against the wall. It sank into the luminous muck. When he drew it back in disgust his fingers glowed slightly, a rotten corpselike blue. He would die down here. Or, worse, he would live, become like this creature a mad thing living in the cracks between Araboth and Outside, like the ones who did not return from Æstival Tide; like all the half-human things that hung about the tattered edges of Araboth.

“Once-born.”

The rasa’s voice rose urgently. Hobi turned to look behind him. In the near distance the tunnel’s mouth gaped, black and cold—he could hear the wind hooting down after him. He turned back to where the rasa waited beside an opening. Dread seeped into him like the black water oozing up through his clothes. There was nothing to do but follow it. Perhaps Nasrani would worry about him; perhaps after a few days they would mount a search down here:

But tomorrow was Æstival Tide. Nothing would be done then, or for several weeks thereafter while Araboth’s inhabitants recovered from the timoria. He could only follow the rasa and hope to escape, or hope somehow to make his way Outside by the time the Lahatiel Gate opened. He rubbed his arms against the chill and continued down the tunnel.

The rasa waited for him at the opening. It stared at Hobi with its sunken eyes, then splashed its face with some of the fetid water pooled at their feet. “Greet your Mother,” it said. Reluctantly Hobi bent and flicked a few drops onto his cheeks.

“Now,” the rasa announced, and faster than Hobi would have thought possible it slipped through the doorway and out of sight. He followed, stumbling over a few broken steps. This passage led up. It was damp and narrow and utterly dark, save for two endless smears of phosphorescence that ran along each wall. When Hobi extended his hand he found the streaks were just at arm level. He drew his hand back uneasily, wiping it on his torn shirt. He didn’t want to think about what hands had been there before his.

From somewhere ahead of him echoed the soft splashing sound of the rasa’s footsteps. Every now and then it paused and called back to him in low urgent tones. Hobi stumbled after it in silence. His knees ached from the cold and from bumping into the wall as the stairway twisted upward.

“Hurry now! Mother won’t wait—”

It seemed they neared their destination. The rasa fell back to walk beside him, crowding Hobi so that he turned sideways to keep from breathing in its suffocating reek. Its long dank hair flapped in the boy’s face as it slouched along, its sharp nails leaving vivid green tracks on the walls.

“Here,” it panted, and stopped beside a narrow doorway. The rasa drummed softly on it with its nails, and the door swung inward.

“We are here,” it announced, and went inside. Following it Hobi gasped.

It was the chamber where Nasrani had taken him before; but it rippled with a light so brilliant Hobi had to cover his eyes. When he peered through his fingers he saw no candles, no lumieres or electric lanterns. But blue and yellow and green light flashed from the cabinets that hid Moghrebi and the Anodyne Physician, Maximillian Ur, and all the rest. Slowly Hobi dropped his hands from his face, and stared.

Nefertity’s case was open. Inside it the Beautiful One glowed, a thousand colors coruscating up and down her arms and along her cheeks, radiating out in bands of cobalt and viridian, yellow and gamboge and emerald.

“Mother,” the rasa whispered, and stepped forward. Hobi did not move.

The room wasn’t empty. Even with their backs to him he knew what they were. Rasas, a dozen of them, their bodies nearly luminous in the spectral light. Some could have been no more than children when they were regenerated. One had the proud carriage of an Orsina, despite skin soft and gray as wet paper. Like the one that had brought him here they wore only rotted shreds of clothing. Their staring green-shot eyes were fixed upon the nemosyne.

“Mother,” the rasa murmured. A few feet from Nefertity’s case it slowly lowered itself to a sitting position. “Mother, I have come, and brought you a once-born boy.”

Hobi stared at Nefertity, then slowly walked through the figures seated around her. None of them looked at him; it seemed they did not notice him at all, save perhaps as an unaccustomed warmth passing through the room. Their eyes stared unblinking at the light pulsating from the nemosyne, their soft fingers tapping upon the floor some arcane rhythm that he did not recognize. The rasa who had led him here called out to him, “She speaks. Sometimes she wakes like this, and tells us things. They are stories of the Last Days, they are Mother stories.” Then it too fell silent.

Hobi stopped in front of Nefertity. Her incandescent sarcophagus made a loud humming sound. Not the sound of a machine at rest, but more like the sound of someone, a woman in fact, singing softly to herself. Behind him in the clammy darkness he heard other things: voices whispering to themselves, fingers tapping their obscure tattoos. Hobi shaded his eyes as he stepped forward. The light streaming from the nemosyne made his head throb. It was she who was making the humming sound: and he realized now, now that he was near enough to touch her, that she spoke, chanted almost, and it was in time to this ancient litany that the corpses drummed their fingers—

“Yet sharper pain, more savage even, struck her heart: she withdrew from the company of the gods, she went to the cities of men and their grasslands, disguising her beauty for a long time. And no one who saw her recognized her, no man, no deep-girdled woman, no one…”

“Nefertity,” whispered Hobi. He stepped closer, stretched out his hand to touch her face. The light that had nearly blinded him grew less harsh. He could see once more the outlines of her cheekbones, the bright lines drawn under her closed eyes as though with kohl, her lips moving as they formed each word and the words spilled from her like grain.

“… They asked her, where are you from, old woman, you who are from another age? Why have you bypassed our city? There are women here who would befriend you. There are mothers and daughters who would share with you their ways.

And the goddess replied, ‘Hello, good children of the feminine sex, hello, mothers and daughters of the suffering earth. I greet you, whoever you are.’ ”

“Mother,” whispered the first rasa where it knelt before her.

“Mother,” murmured the others.

“Nefertity,” breathed Hobi, all his fear devoured by anguished longing.

Mother stories, he thought; and an image came to his mind: his own mother leaning over him in his bed, her hand cool and smelling of opium sugar as she stroked his cheek and murmured a story to him, a mother story, of course; and if Hobi had only known he might have realized it was one of the same stories that other lonely woman had told to her nemosyne daughter centuries before. Mother stories: a trick to wake the sleeping princess: and gently, tentatively, as Nefertity’s lips moved and her voice crooned on, telling its sleepwalker’s tale, Hobi leaned forward and kissed her golden mouth.

“Ah,” sang the replicant. With a sound soft as a spider’s feet tickling across its web her eyes opened, and gazed out at Hobi: grass-green, emerald-green, green as the sea and the sirocco sky.

“Ah,” she repeated, a note like a door chiming open. From within its glowing sarcophagus her crystal hand moved, slowly, until it brushed his cheek.

“At last,” she murmured, blinking those emerald eyes.

“The Beautiful One Is Here.”

“Where is my Sister?”

The shock of seeing her move sent Hobi scuttering a few feet backward. Behind him the rasas had fallen silent.

“Where is my Sister?” the nemosyne said again. Now that she was fully awake her voice was surprisingly deep, and gentle—he had never heard a replicant with such a lovely voice. The door of her case clicked shut as she stepped forward, her legs moving smoothly and her head turning back and forth to survey the room. The light streaming from her faded until she shone pale white and yellow. The joints where her metal limbs met her torso gleamed blue, her eyes glowed that supernatural shade of green. She was like some beautiful toy, and in spite of his fear Hobi grinned to see her. A few feet from her cabinet she stopped and looked around, her gaze sweeping the room, taking in the darkened cabinets, the silent fearful rasas. She turned and pointed at Hobi.

“Where is my Sister?”

Hobi swallowed, unclenched his hands. His voice came out in a croak. “Who was your sister?”

Nefertity tipped her head. She was nearly a foot taller than Hobi. She stepped forward, reaching for him. At first he recoiled, then with shaking fingers reached to touch her hand. It felt as though mercury flowed inside it, something warm and heavy yet viscous. Her fingers closed around his and drew him toward her, until he could feel the air around her crackling.

She said gravely, “Sister Loretta Riding of the Order of Divine Compassion. I do not see her here.”

Hobi tried to pull his hand back but the nemosyne wouldn’t let go. This is it, he thought. Now my stupidity will be truly rewarded.

“I think she’s dead,” he said. “I—I’m sorry. It’s—it’s probably been a long time since you were with her.”

Slowly Nefertity released his hand and looked away. “Twenty-one fourteen,” she murmured. “Has it been long?”

He whistled, shaking his head. “God, yes!—it’s—it’s been very long.” He pulled the hair back from his face, trying not to look rattled. “Your sister—what was she? A scientist?”

“Loretta? No.” The deep whispery voice sounded infinitely sad. It had been centuries since the Ascendants lost the artistry to create things such as this, capable of such eloquence and mimed emotions. Hobi listened entranced as she went on.

“My Sister is— was —a cultural archivist backed by the American Vatican State. I was her lifetime project—the NFRTI, the National Feminist Recorded Technical Index. The entire archives of the Library of Congress’s Women’s Wing and the AVS’s feminist collective have been recorded in my files.” She hesitated. “But there were others like me—”

Her gaze swept the dim chamber and settled on the tall cabinet housing Maximillian Ur. She pointed, cocking her head toward Hobi. “They are here?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

Behind Hobi voices stirred, and he looked back. The first rasa had crept forward.

“Mother,” it whispered imploringly. “Mother, speak to us.”

Nefertity regarded it solemnly for a long moment. “I recognize that voice. This person activated the random memory chips,” she said at last. “At the sound of a human voice requesting me to speak, I am programmed to enter a random recitative mode. From my files—stories and poetry and plays.”

“But not interactive,” Hobi said slowly.

“No,” she replied. “But it is not difficult to access my interactive mode. Sister Loretta devised it that way, and all the women knew—”

Hobi nodded. “A kiss. Like in the story—she programmed you to respond to a kiss.”

Nefertity gazed at him and raised her hand. “That’s correct.”

He went on, excited, “And no one knew— That’s why Nasrani was so frustrated!” He stopped, suddenly embarrassed; wondering (as he was sure the nemosyne must be) how it was that someone as unworthy as himself had been so lucky when Nasrani after so many years had failed.

Nefertity touched Hobi’s cheek, staring at him with her cool jade eyes. “You started the interactive program again. You woke me: the kiss.” It might have been a reward, the way she pronounced the words.

“I didn’t know—I mean, I didn’t mean to—”

“Sister Loretta programmed it. It was a joke with her. She called me the Sleeping Beauty. The others, the military modules and the biological and archaeological nodes, all responded to more conventional commands.”

“But why? I mean, why did they make you? ”

“To save the records and stories; to make sure the stories and folktales would not be forgotten. Because of the Long Night; they feared a second Long Night. And so they made us.”

Nefertity crossed the room to Maximillian Ur, her long silver legs gleaming through the darkness. “Units for science, for agriculture, for the arts as well as the military. You have not found them?”

“No. Not that I’ve ever heard. You’re the only one. Nasrani—Nasrani Orsina—”

She touched Maximillian Ur’s case and glanced at the boy. “He is the new archivist?” Her tone was hopeful.

“No. Nasrani was the one who found you; at least he says he did.” Hobi glanced uneasily at the rasas crouching in the shadows. “I guess they found you, too.”

Nefertity shook her head, seeming not to have heard him. “But where are the others?”

She gazed down at the rasa, then back at Hobi. “Are you the new archivist? Sister Loretta said that help would eventually come. If it’s been so terribly long my files must be updated.”

A wave of sorrow swept over Hobi. “I—I don’t think there are any more archivists. Not in Araboth, at least.”

The nemosyne was silent. She stared at Maximillian Ur’s blank grimace behind its swollen glass. For several minutes the room was still, the boy and the rasas alike waiting anxiously as the nemosyne stood, the soft tchk of her circuitry the only sound.

At last she said, “There was another Long Night, wasn’t there? That is why Sister Loretta is gone. That is why there are no archivists left.”

Hobi nodded sadly. “There was another Long Night. And—and some other things happened too.”

“And they are lost, the others like me.” Her emerald orbs inside their eyesockets flickered with golden lightning. “They divided us among the remaining churches and governments and reservations, to be sure that some of us would survive. Some of us were imprinted with a program-memory of our archivist. I was—I am—Loretta Riding. But the others…”

Hobi would not have believed a replicant’s voice was capable of displaying such grief. He felt horrible now for waking her, and wondered if somehow he could manage to switch her off, return her to her sleeping state before Nasrani returned once more and saw her like this.

“Mother,” the rasa whispered. It slipped next to Hobi and raised its head, its ruined eyes wide and hopeful. “More stories now?”

Nefertity lowered her hand to touch its head. “Is this all that remains?” she asked Hobi. “The others like you—they are dead?”

“Oh, no! These are just— rasas. Regenerated corpses. You know,” he added lamely.

“Regenerated corpses,” the nemosyne repeated slowly. She looked past the rasa at the others in the darkness. “All of them? Dead? But that is a terrible thing to have done! Why have they come to me?”

Hobi shrugged. “Well, no—I mean, they’re not really dead, not anymore—” He looked at the floor, ashamed. “I’m not sure why they’re here, really.”

The nemosyne drew her hand back from the rasa. Her voice was cold. “What happened, then? Was it more bombs? Or the nuclear tides? What happened?”

Hobi felt hot, in spite of the dank room. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “No one knows.”

“Europe? Africa? The L-5 colonies?” The boy shook his head and shrugged. “All of it gone? You remember nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Where are we now?”

“Araboth. Araboth—it had another name once, that’s what Nasrani said. Texas.”

“Araboth.” Motes of light glittered in front of her face. “Texas. Not Chicago?”

The boy looked away, defeated. “I never heard of Chicago.”

“Mother,” the rasa interrupted, and tugged at her hand. “Tell us again. Stories. The Frankenstein monster.”

“Little Red-Hood,” whispered another.

“Amelia Earhart.”

“The Woman in the Moon.”

“Stories,” the nemosyne said slowly. She turned and walked to the center of the room. A slithering sound as the pallid forms followed her, staying just outside her nimbus of shimmering light. “I have been telling my stories to corpses.”

Her eyes flashed as she pointed again at Hobi. “You have forgotten all the rest of it. The cities, the space stations. The wars, the gynocides, the Bibliochlasm?”

Hobi bit his lip. Her words frightened him. These were forbidden things, things that had to do with the First Days, the lost days; things to do with Outside.

“Yes,” he admitted. He glanced about the room, trying to see where the door was, praying for Nasrani to appear, or for the nemosyne to be distracted long enough for him to escape. “Yes. We have forgotten all of it.”

Nefertity nodded. Her body pulsed a deeper blue now, and her voice had grown louder. “But there are women and men perhaps who might want to remember? Who might have need of me?”

Hobi swallowed nervously. “I don’t think so. I mean, it might be better if you just stayed here. At least until Nasrani comes back. He would know.”

“Please, Mother,” the rasa beseeched her. In the darkness its eyes were wide, almost childlike. “More stories. Please. We waited, we waited.”

The nemosyne gazed down at the rasa, at the other white soft figures crouched in the shadows. Her jadeite eyes glittered, and she nodded as she extended her arms.

“Yes,” she said, beckoning them to her. “Yes: come closer.”

The first rasa looked back at the others, then slowly they dragged themselves forward, until all huddled in a semicircle at the nemosyne’s feet.

“Yes,” whispered Nefertity. There was a loud humming; when she spoke again it was in a clear high voice, the voice Hobi had heard when first he entered the chamber. “Let the dead listen to me, and learn, and remember if no one else will—”

And she began to recite.

“I was, being human, born alone;

I am, being woman, hard beset;

I live by squeezing from a stone

The little nourishment I get.

In masks outrageous and austere

The years go by in single file;

But none has merited my fear,

And none has quite escaped my smile…

“Now I will tell you the story of ‘The Dreaming Child,’ by Isak Dinesen, the Baroness Blixen…”

As she spoke a single great sigh rippled through the dim chamber, soft and comforted as a child’s. But as Hobi gazed up at her it seemed to him that the nemosyne’s features looked less lovely than they had before; that within her crystal body her adamantine heart did not burn as steadily as when she had slept, and dreamed that Sister Loretta Riding was alive.

Chapter 7 IF YOU HAVE GHOSTS

SAJUR PANGGANG WAS ON Principalities when he heard the news of Shiyung’s murder.

“The margravine Shiyung,” a moujik guard told him, his face swollen from weeping. “How can this be, Your Grace, I cannot understand it….”

The Architect Imperator turned away, so that the guard would not see his expression. “The Prophets tell us that there is little we can truly understand, my brother,” he said softly, his mouth twisting into a smile. “Only the Architects can understand all, only the Architects….”

He left the guard sniveling on his watch and wandered along the Mulla Nasrudin Promenade. The stench of the medifacs was nearly overwhelming here, but the Architect Imperator seemed not to notice. He crossed the promenade heedless of the clots of offal beneath his feet, the clouds of mucid steam that belched from the grates beneath his velvet-soled boots. Those moujiks who saw him, in his black suit with his turban of office slightly askew, pressed their fists to their heads and bowed, and afterward marveled that the most powerful of the Imperators had been so moved by the margravine’s death that he ventured thus onto the hellish rim of Principalities, that his grief took him to the immensity of the Lahatiel Gate itself.

The truth was, the Architect Imperator had awakened some hours after his son’s departure, to a scene of quiet domestic wreckage—broken glass, empty bottles, the replicant Khum’s confusion at being left without commands. He had spent several minutes wandering around the house, not, as one might expect, checking the progress of the Architects but looking for a particular robe he had worn ten years before during Æstival Tide, a robe his wife Angelika had given him for the festival. He finally found it in the chamber that had been Angelika’s dressing room, the robe wrapped in tissue paper scented faintly of lavender. He put it on, smoothing the sumptuous folds of forest-green jacquard and striking poses in front of a tall mirror. He was mindful that the color made his pallor stand out rather too severely, and that in his present state—unshaven, hair awry, a streak of blood on his chin where he had rubbed it with his cut hand—he looked more than a trifle deranged. Then he set out for the gravator that would take him down to Principalities.

Beneath the Lahatiel Gate he finally paused. Hundreds of feet above him the barricade gleamed a blinding argent. Scaffolds swayed precariously where a few unfortunate moujiks still worked, polishing the steel ribs and spars in preparation for the timoria. But it was not the sight of the Gate that had drawn Sajur Panggang here, but what lay beneath it.

“Your Grace.”

Another moujik guard. This one obviously had not yet heard of Shiyung’s death. An obsequious smile creased his flat face, and he bowed so low that his stained violet sash trailed the ground. “Your servants are honored—”

“Yes, yes, thank you.” The Architect Imperator gave him a small smile and waggled his fingers. He looked distractedly about the cavernous space, and began walking toward a barred doorway to one side of the Gate. The guard’s face fell. He hurried after the slender man, pulling at his sash in dismay.

“Your Grace! It is not safe within there, it is too near the festival, it is starting to wake—”

The Architect Imperator turned to regard the moujik with bemused hauteur. “I know quite well the status of the Redeemer’s slumber,” he said, his voice mild. “I wish merely to inspect it, and make certain that the temperature of its chamber is not dropping too quickly. You have noticed some disturbances in the last few days?” This last with a slightly raised eyebrow.

“Why, yes, as a matter of fact, we were speaking of it yesterday—”

Sajur Panggang nodded, smiling that absently ironic smile, and walked on. “You might check the ’files,” he called back gently; “I believe there is unfortunate news regarding one of the margravines—”

There was no human guard at the door leading to the cage of the Compassionate Redeemer. Sentries from the lower levels had proved unreliable. They would succumb to morbid curiosity, their subsequent terror rendering them incapable of carrying out their duties. More often they simply refused to go near it. The ranks of Seraphim and Cherubim had slightly more fortitude in confronting the Redeemer, steeled by their long indulgences in timoring and the other rarefied abominations of the upper classes. But even they usually fell prey to an unanticipated sickening when, upon the occasion of the Great Fear or some reckless and spirited party-visit to the Redeemer’s pen, they peered through the tiny viewing-glass and glimpsed the monster in its suspended state.

No such qualms beset the Architect Imperator. He had grown inured to such horrors, as he had grown insensible of the reek of Principalities’ human smelting chambers and abattoirs. Now he simply peered into an opticon, permitting the Redeemer’s robotic sentry to scan his retinafile and pronounce his name with chilly efficiency. An instant later the gate clanged open and Sajur Panggang slipped inside, dabbing delicately at his forehead with a handkerchief.

A narrow hallway, dimly lit, led a few yards to where a single steel-and-glass chair stood before a small window. The chair creaked as Sajur settled into it, the cracked leather seat emitting a smell of dust and roses. Even from here he could feel the oppressive heat of the Redeemer’s cage. The glass window in front of him was so thick that he had to press his face against it to see anything, and even then it was with some difficulty that he made out the figure below. This was no failure of design on the part of the Architects. It was better for most visitors to doubt that they had had a clear glimpse of the cage’s inhabitant; better that they fall back, choking, when at Æstival Tide they saw the blind colossus lumber from its cell onto the summer sands.

Sajur had no such reticence about viewing the Compassionate Redeemer. Orsina blood ran in his veins, no matter how diffuse, and for centuries the Redeemer had been the Orsinate’s enfant gâté, their demonic familiar, the terrible rector presiding over the hecatombs every ten years, and in between times awakened every year or so and fed during public sacrifices. Sajur gazed upon it now with a sort of hunger, a yearning fired by a fraternal sympathy. Were they both not the Orsinate’s prisoners, toys kept hidden away until the perfect moment arrived, when their exquisite chains might be tweaked by their captors? This was what had brought him here, here at the end of all things: the desire to look for the last time upon another monster, and feel something like sympathy. He sighed, a sound of pure regret.

As if sensing him the Redeemer stirred. Its blind head snaked upward and twisted back and forth, trying to pinpoint him, then sank back to the stone floor. Sajur drew back, his heart racing. He had not thought it would be this far into its cycle, already roused from aestivation by the temperature dropping within its cell. In a few hours an inch of ice would have formed on the thick glass window; the Redeemer would be fully awake and making its obscene ululating cry. Gazing down upon the creature’s vast bulk the Architect Imperator allowed himself the luxury of a small grimace. It was truly an exquisite and hideous thing; as though by serving as the Orsinate’s lictor it had become the physical embodiment of all their transgressions. Body of an extinct saurian, an alioramus, gorgeously scaled in silvery-gold and green, its deceptively slender legs with their curving dewclaws powerful enough to sprint across the scar and disembowel a man before he had a chance to turn away. Its long graceful neck ended in the head of an olm, broad and flat and eyeless, the color of cream stirred with a petal of gentian, and feathered with an olm’s vestigial gills. Its yawning mouth was nearly perfectly circular, twice the height and breadth of a man. A lamprey’s mouth, ribboned with rose-pink flesh without and within—long venom-tipped tendrils that whipped at its prey and stunned it, and then twitched the stupefied unfortunates into its maw. Circular rows of triangular teeth lined the inside of its mouth, layer upon layer like a manticore’s, leading deep into its throat where hollow filaments fastened upon the body and sucked the nutriments from it. The Redeemer had no stomach proper. Digestion took place within those individual tubules and the drained bodies were excreted within a few minutes, slack and bloodless, bones crackled to bits. As Sajur Panggang stared, the fleshy tendrils dangling from the creature’s mouth quivered, lifted into the air like so many blind worms and writhed toward the wall where he sat. At the sight his nose prickled and he pulled back from the glass; too late he realized he should have worn a protective mask. An overpowering scent of myrrh and roses filled the tiny room, so warm and sweet it clouded the senses, made one only want to crawl toward whatever it was emitted that smell and drown luxuriously as the odor filled one’s nostrils.

Coughing, Sajur covered his mouth and stumbled from his chair. The Redeemer seemed to follow him, its head swaying as rose-pink tendrils weaved in front of him, tapped tentatively at the glass, and left carmine smears a few inches from where his head had been. The Architect Imperator lurched down the hallway and out into the shadow of the Lahatiel Gate, gasping as he slammed the door shut and not even pausing for the human sentry who ran up to him, white-faced and gibbering something about his health. He stumbled until he reached the Imperators’ gravator and punched in the grid code for the palace, and then collapsed.

“Orsina.”

The voice tore through his room as Nasrani Orsina cracked the door open. At first he had ignored the sentry’s announcement; then lay in bed trying to ignore the voice calling his name—softly at first, then louder and still louder, until Nasrani covered his ears and knelt on his bed, praying for it to stop.

But it did not stop. He finally crept from his room, more frightened now of what might happen if he did not answer it.

“Nasrani,” the voice cried. “I must see her.”

In the doorway in front of him stood the rasa. There was no breeze, of course, but still his black robe stirred so that Nasrani could see the outlines of his legs beneath the flowing silk. Legs far too slender to support that tall frame; too slender and too sharp—the edge of one metal joint had slashed the cloth.

“Margalis.” Nasrani tried to keep his voice steady, affecting an air of cheerful surprise. “It’s late. Or early,” he added, and rubbed his forehead.

Outside the window of his chamber on Coventry (the exiles’ wing, an adjunct to the main palace presently occupied only by Nasrani and the former ambassador from Antarctica, who spent her days snorting morpha and her evenings weeping over polyfiles of blue ice) the nuclear CLOCK read thirteen-five, too early by several hours for upper-level visitors. Nasrani coughed delicately. “Can we talk about this over kehveh a little later?”

“No.”

Tast’annin pushed aside Nasrani as he strode into the room, hard enough to send the exile careening against the wall. “You had her before I left. You have her now. If you don’t take me to her I will kill you.”

Nasrani slumped against the wall, trying to catch his breath. From the corner of his eye he watched the rasa stalk to the window, staring down to where the receding levels of Araboth gave way to the abyss that yawned beneath Archangels.

“What is it, Margalis?” he whispered. “What have you done?”

The rasa stared down at his metal hand. Without the glove it glittered brightly, a lethal sheen upon its fingertips. “I have killed your sister.”

Nasrani drew his breath in sharply. “Âziz?” He started for the window but the rasa’s gaze stopped him. Nasrani wrung the edge of his gown.

“No. Shiyung.”

Nasrani shook his head. “Impossible.”

“No: true. I snapped her neck and left her on the floor of her chambers. If they have not found her yet she is there still.”

Nasrani stared in disbelief. Shiyung dead. He remembered her as a child, skinny as a rail, shrieking with laughter as she tricked him into playing some impossible game with her. And then each night, the four of them sharing a bed, forgotten by their parents (they shared a mother and three fathers between them) as they lay side by side by side by side, Nasrani spinning tales into the darkness like a web to snare their nightmares. And, long after, just himself and Shiyung, another impossible game of hers, over too quickly.

And now she was dead.

Nasrani sobbed, an awful sound like laughter catching in his throat. The rasa stared unblinking, then said, “Tell me where you’ve hidden the nemosyne.”

Nasrani’s voice came out in a braying cough. “I knew you would.”

“The nemosyne, Nasrani.”

The exile tore at his face with his hands. “I told her when you broke with her, I told her you were a madman and she should have killed you then—”

“She was a fool not to.” The rasa turned once more to the window. “Or perhaps not. Perhaps even then she had this in store for me. I would rather have been dead. I wish I could die now.”

Suddenly he screamed, a thin, high shriek like a saw cutting through a sheet of tin. Nasrani trembled and fell back against the wall; but still the rasa wailed, longer than any human could have, until Nasrani clapped his hands to his ears and stumbled toward the door.

“No!”

The awful shriek turned into a shout. Nasrani staggered, reaching for the switch that would summon help from the palace. The rasa strode to his side and slashed at the wall. There was a flurry of sparks, the smell of melted plastic.

“No one will come help you, Nasrani.” His eyes swept over the cowering exile and he lifted his head disdainfully. “They will all be in Shiyung’s chambers by now, discovering the body. Perhaps Nike will think to call you….”

Smoke curled from the tips of the rasa’s fingers. He held them in front of his eyes, watching the thin gray trails turn to white and then disappear. The hollow voice cried, “You are all still children playing, aren’t you? You have your petty disagreements, you take sides and banish each other to your little rooms, but this is all just a game to you.” He turned and paced across the room, smashed his metal hand against the glass. A single crack flowed across the pane, like a flaw in the heart of a crystal. “All of this, this city and everything Outside—you mold it and burn it and twist it to your liking. People too: you contort us as though we were your friend Planck’s puppets, and then act surprised when we turn against you.”

Nasrani leaned against the wall. The rasa ’s anger seemed to calm him; if a dead Aviator could be undone by emotions, perhaps he could be undone, period. The color drained back into Nasrani’s face.

“They will regenerate her,” he said, groping in his pocket until he found a pipe and a leather pouch. He stuffed a wad of kef into the bowl, lit it, and inhaled noisily. After a minute he glanced up at the looming shadow.

“As a rasa ,” the dark figure said. “You would wish that on her? Your own sister?”

Nasrani’s hands trembled as he tapped kef ash onto the floor. “How did you—how could you?” Tears spilled from his eyes again. “A rasa —it’s impossible—”

“How did I kill her? Let us just say that I have not been myself lately.”

Nasrani sniffed. His rubbed his bloodshot eyes with an anguished expression. “Why do you want to see the nemosyne again?”

The rasa turned from the window. Below and all around them the daylights began streaming on, gold and blue and red, cascading down each level in sheets of light until the entire vast ziggurat shone and danced like a pyramid of blazing glass. For a few minutes they watched in silence.

Then, from the palace came a high piercing wail. Abruptly the daylights paled as overhead flames of white and blue swept the domes. Distress lights. Nasrani blanched. He had not seen them since the mass executions following the Archipelago Conflict.

The rasa said calmly, “You said that you believed the nemosyne knows things. Well, I have— seen things —that I would ask her about. You said that she had many secrets. Now I have secrets too.”

Nasrani joined him at the window, gazed up at the warning flares, the silhouettes of janissaries pouring like black water from their barracks.

“You really did it,” he said softly. He turned to the grim figure beside him. “You killed my sister. And now you want me to take you to the nemosyne.”

“Yes.” The rasa’s voice betrayed nothing of entreaty, but the pale eyes were clouded. “I must see her. I am—haunted by something. From before—from before I died. Someone. I want to question the nemosyne about her.”

“And Shiyung?” Nasrani fairly shrieked. “What of her? You kill the margravine—my sister! —and you expect me to lead you around now, do whatever you wish—”

“Yes,” the rasa said softly. From a pocket in its silken robe it withdrew a black kidskin glove and carefully pulled it over its shining metal hand. “I do. And you will do it, because you have no choice.”

Nasrani’s expression folded into defeat. He patted his pockets until he found his pipe again and smoked another bowl of kef. Outside the sirens wailed on; the distress lights arced back and forth across the domes. The rasa stood silently and waited, until Nasrani looked up and snapped, “I have never been able to speak with her. The interactive mode is dormant; she does nothing but go through her random access files and read from them. There is a way to activate that portion of her memory, though I have never learned it. But there are other things down there, I have seen them in the room with her—”

He laughed harshly. “Angels in the Undercity! I cannot speak to her, but those foul things cluster around her, and she hears them! And she speaks to them! Stories, poems—” His hands fluttered. “They call her Mother, and she answers. But she won’t respond to my questions. I have no reason to believe she will answer yours.”

The rasa only nodded. Nasrani suddenly turned away, his eyes watering. He ran a hand over his face. “You didn’t have to kill her,” he choked. The rasa tipped its head back so that the brilliant light outside the window flashed blindingly against its mask. “She could have left you dead but she didn’t, she—”

“I care nothing about your sister,” the rasa hissed. “I want the nemosyne. Which one is it? One of the military units? A meteorological display?”

Nasrani wiped his eyes, then suddenly laughed shrilly. “Is that what you think? That you’ll have another monster to command? No, Margalis! She’s useless, utterly useless—women’s stories and songs and bankrupt histories, that’s all she’s good for….”

“Then why do you hide her? Eh, Nasrani—”

He grabbed the man’s arm. Nasrani felt the metal claws beneath the thin sheath of leather, their grip tightening until he gasped and then moaned. A dark stain spread across his sleeve.

“I must see her.” Nasrani whimpered. The rasa’s touch was cold and foul as an open grave. “I need her to find the others, to see if any of the other units survived. I need them to track someone, someone Outside. Take me to her now —”

He shoved Nasrani from him. The man fell to his knees, groaning and trying to stanch the blood soaking his robe. “Yes,” he gasped. “I’ll take you, of course I’ll take you…”

The rasa nodded and extended his hand to help the man to his feet. “We will go then,” said the Aviator Imperator. His shadow filled the narrow doorway. “To the Undercity; to find the Mother of Angels.”

“Zalophus—oh, Zalophus, please —”

At the end of the zeuglodon’s tank the gynander stood, panting. She had run all the way here, past the first shift of biotechs and vivisectors on their way to the Chambers of Mercy, past the white masked guards who hurried from the gravator as she rushed past them on her way down to Dominations. They all seemed too intent on their own business to notice her; news of Shiyung’s murder had just reached the Orsinate’s security staff. For the moment she was safe.

It was all too much, as though Ceryl’s dream had grown to envelope the city and all within it; and Reive was in it, too, she could not escape no matter how quickly she fled. Only here did she feel she might somehow outrun it, that huge green serpent coiling about the domes and squeezing them until she could feel the floor beneath her buckling, the very walls bulging in upon her until she thought she would scream—

But that was just her heart pounding, her chest straining so that it felt as though stones bashed her insides. She stopped, panting, then began running again; because if she waited more than a moment, the Wave would overtake her.

Now Reive was in the main vivarium chamber, where biotechs padded on their morning rounds, drawing blood and brain tissue from the palingenic dolphins, checking the stress monitors on the gentle manatees, who wept like women when their calves were taken from them. A few of the workers eyed her curiously, but it was too early in the shift, there was too much to be done, to worry about a white-faced morphodite running aimlessly among the tanks.

“Oh, Zalophus, hurry, please—”

Her teeth chattered and she skipped from foot to foot like a child playing. “ Zalophus! ” she wailed.

An explosion; then a small island reared from the dark green surface. A single huge black eye stared at her, and teeth like a row of shinbones clashed as his voice boomed and filled the chamber.

“Oh, happy day, child of the morning, you have come to play with me?” Zalophus rolled onto his back, his huge fins splashing at the water so that a wave rolled over the side and soaked Reive.

“Zalophus,” she gasped, spluttering. “Oh, Zalophus, you must help us—”

“Of course,” the great whale crooned, “come here and I will sing to you, little thing, I will tell you about my sisters, and the icelands where they are waiting for us—”

“No, Zalophus! We need you, you must tell us where we can go to hide!”

Zalophus righted himself and stared at her with huge rolling eyes. “You have brought another siren,” he said hopefully. “That is so nice, sirens make such sweet companions.”

Reive shook her head, shivering. “No, we haven’t. Zalophus, they will kill us, they think we murdered the margravine.”

Zalophus snapped his jaw. “A margravine would be just as nice.”

“No! She’s not here, they—” Reive wrung her hands. “Zalophus, you know all the levels here, you’ve been beneath the domes. Tell us where we can go, where they won’t find us. Tell us, please—we will come back, we will sneak here at night and bring you whatever you want—”

Across the cavernous chamber a woman taking blood from a rorqual looked up and stared at Reive. Zalophus rolled over to shrewdly regard the gynander with his other eye. After a moment he said, “One of the margravines had a baby once. I heard them talking about it. A monster, a heteroclite. She sent it to the Chambers of Mercy; but the vivisectors did not kill it, they said it would bring ill luck. I remember, I heard them talking. I think you must be that monster. Come closer to me so that I can see you better.”

The gynander ignored him, then lowering her voice she took a step toward the tank. “Zalophus, the Aviator Imperator has gone mad. None of us will be safe, not even you. If you tell us of a safe place to hide for now we will find a way to free you—tomorrow, at Æstival Tide. We will find a way, we promise.”

Water raced down the zeuglodon’s snout as he raised his head to stare at her. “There is a way, little thing,” he groaned, a sound like crumbling stone. A summer smell filled the air. “Last night I dreamed of the other one, the little man they killed to make me. He told me that the world Outside is closer now, closer than it ever has been before. When I woke I sounded to the deepest depths and it is true, heteroclite child: the world is waking and moving in its sleep.”

Reive shook her head. “There’s no time,” she said desperately. “We have no time for your stories now, you must tell us of a way to escape.”

“Come with me.” Zalophus rose until his head hung above the dark water, a green-whorled sun blotting out the false daylight. “Come with me, little thing, and I will show you the new world. There is a crack where the water valves run into the Undercity. Each day it is widening. Soon it will be big enough for me to enter, and then I will find them, then my sisters will come to meet me—”

“There is no way out! You have no sisters!” Reive shouted. The woman bending over the rorqual looked over in alarm. “They have been dead for a million years! I hope you starve here—”

She turned and ran from the vivarium. The zeuglodon watched her leave, then rolled onto his back, sending another wave rushing from the tank onto the concrete floor. A moment later he disappeared, sounding the depths of his prison to where the chink in the walls was widening, and warm water poured in through a black mouth opening onto the world.

In a chamber on the vivarium level, Âziz Orsina sat gazing at the body of her sister Shiyung. Tubes and wires ran from the corpse to a series of vats and monitors, alembics and computers controlled by the Architects’ rehabilitation nexus. It would be days before Shiyung could be restored as a rasa, certainly not until after Æstival Tide. Âziz wondered what effect this would have on the lower levels. Shiyung had always been the favorite of the moujiks and the biotechs, as much for her prettiness and childish enthusiasms as for her occasional sallies down to visit the toilers in the refineries and the vivariums. It didn’t matter that Shiyung never did anything besides smile and share an occasional pappadam with carefully selected drones. The others, the rest of the work force, would see her in person and later that evening on the ’files and puppet shows. They would see her, forehead daubed with blue and black to show solidarity with the Church of Christ Cadillac, smiling as she ate fermented beans with the refineries’ human supervisors, the rasas in pale ranks behind her, and still later they would watch as, her lovely white face flushed with excitement, she torched the pyres for the public burnings.

How would they react to Shiyung as a rasa?

Âziz nibbled her fingernail and pushed her hair from her face. Beside her the biotechnician she’d chosen for the project watched nervously, making a great show of adjusting and readjusting the levels in the chemical bath that lapped at Shiyung’s pale form.

“You can’t do it any faster?” Âziz asked for the fourth time.

The biotech sighed, shaking his head. “We’re already losing some resolution on her now, Margravine, doing it this quickly.” He gestured vaguely at the tubes curling up from the tank and into the brightly lit reaches of the lab. “There’s going to be some failure as it is, with her long-term memory, and her—”

“I don’t care,” snapped Âziz. She stood and paced to the other side of the tank, staring at her sister’s white face. Already the skin had grown slack; Shiyung’s mouth had drooped into a grimacing leer. “The festival is tomorrow. I need her by then. I need something by then.”

The biotech opened his hands in a hopeless gesture. “Margravine, there’s no way—”

A rumbling shook the room, sending the lamps swinging wildly. Âziz started, grabbing the edge of a table until the shock subsided. She glared accusingly at the biotech. In the tank Shiyung’s corpse rocked back and forth, nucleic fluid sloshing onto the floor.

The biotech steadied himself, his face white. “That’s been happening lately,” he stammered. “We don’t know why—here and in some of the other labs near the rim—”

Âziz looked as though she would throttle him. She pointed at her sister’s neck, where a reddish bruise shaped like a half-moon creased the swollen flesh. “Do something about that,” she spat, and stalked off.

Back on Seraphim Âziz returned to the Four Hundredth Room. Nike lay on a divan, gazing at a polyfile projected onto the ceiling—another work of Karvo’s, one that drew quite wittily upon ancient ecclesiastical motifs. It showed three galli in red and yellow cassocks singing, the sweetness of their voices marred somewhat by their expressions, which were rapt with horror. A disembodied hand appeared and one by one slashed the throats of the galli with a bright blue scalpel. In the past Nike had found the work moving; but in the wake of Shiyung’s death it seemed rather hackneyed, sentimental in fact, and when Âziz entered the room she switched the sound off and turned to her, musing.

“I was thinking we should revoke Karvo’s privilege,” she said, gesturing at the ceiling.

Âziz nodded wearily. She crossed to the divan and sank onto it. “Petra,” she called. A yellow-haired girl appeared in the doorway. “Bring me some warmed valerian, please. I’ve got a terrible headache.”

After the girl left she turned to her sister. “He says he can’t do it any faster and we won’t have her before Æstival Tide. Well, not before it starts, at least. There’s some trouble with decay, memory loss, I don’t know.” She raised her hands hopelessly, dropped them into her lap as the yellow-haired girl returned with a steaming samovar and two porcelain cups. She placed them on a table and left. “Now if this had only happened to Nasrani, Shiyung could have done the regeneration herself.”

Nike nodded, still staring with a frown at the silent images flickering across the ceiling. The last galli had fallen, lying atop a white rug with his fellows, their blood and their bright cassocks lurid against the calm background. “I can’t believe I ever thought his work was subtle. I am going to revoke his privilege.”

Âziz made a disinterested noise, stirred her valerian and sipped it, wincing. “You know there’s going to be an uproar if she’s not there when we open the Gate. She’s too popular, especially these last few days. With all these reports of structural problems, she’s the only one of us they would trust—we’ve got to try to have her rasa on hand, something to make them believe she’s still alive, still there to sympathize with them. But news of the murder has already gotten out, and with all this other confusion…”

She closed her eyes and inhaled the steam. After a moment she said, “I just need a little time to think of something, something to distract them. I don’t want any riots this year, things are bad enough with these damn tremors and that fire yesterday. We need something. ” She looked thoughtfully down at her cup. “Perhaps we could forgive Nasrani.”

Nike clicked off the polyfile and stood. Yawning, she crossed the room to where her sister sat. “That would be nice. I wanted him at the next inquisition anyway.” She picked up her cup of valerian and stared at it, then cleared her throat and asked delicately, “You’ve taken care of them? The guests from last evening—”

Âziz shrugged. “I’ve ordered that they be rounded up. The Committee Head told me most of them are already in the Reception Area—”

“Sajur?” Nike raised an eyebrow.

Her sister shook her head impatiently. “We can’t detain Sajur. We’ve never arranged for his successor.” She tapped one front tooth with her fingernail and mused, “Although there is a woman, an ethical mathematician, who might be suitable….”

Nike nodded. “So we can’t detain Sajur. What about that woman, what’s her name—Waxwing. The biotech. The one we traced the morph back to?”

“She’s to be detained with all the rest. Friser, the Ambassador, Planck—Sajur’s going to be distressed about him.” Âziz finished her drink and put the empty cup on the tray, dipped her fingers into a small bowl of borage water and flicked them dry.

“Sajur.” Nike licked her lips and settled on the divan beside her sister. “What has he to say about all this? Have you seen him?”

“No; there’s no answer in his chambers. But what is there to say? An unknown morph, a murderous interloper from the lower levels, what else can one expect? We make some new appointments to the appropriate cabinets and as soon as possible call another inquisition. Perhaps tomorrow night, that would be appropriate….”

Nike drummed her fingers slowly on the edge of the brass divan. “But your dream.” Her dark eyes when she raised them to her sister were clouded. “The morph said—what if what she said were true?”

“The Green Country? The storms?” Âziz sniffed and poured some more valerian. Nike watched her, then pulled a morpha tube from her pocket, tipped its contents into her cup, and drank it in a gulp. “Sajur says it’s impossible for a storm of that magnitude to be undetected. The Architects, the weather stations… HORUS would have notified us of anything strange.”

Nike shook her head. Already her pupils dilated and her voice grew slurred. “But we lost the NASNA Prime station last fall, and the others in the Net took such a hard hit from the Commonwealth. We needed someone stronger up there to oversee the repairs. We never should have sent Margalis to the Capital,” she finished angrily. “He should have stayed on HORUS—”

“He would have been immolated with the rest of his substation if he had,” said Âziz; but her sister ranted on.

“… knew it was a mistake—that whole business with the Capital was a fiasco!”

“You went along with Shiyung at the time,” Âziz remarked dryly. “As I recall you agreed with Margalis that the old weapons centers should be reactivated. You seemed to think Shiyung would do a very good job of administering the place, once Margalis had taken over as Governor. You seemed quite eager, in fact, to have Shiyung gone from here.”

Nike sputtered but said nothing. There had been a brief resurgence of a petty childhood rivalry about the time of Tast’annin’s failed venture to the Capital. Finally she spat, “All the same! Personnel wasted on that instead of keeping up the celestial surveys—there could be a storm out there right now and we’d never know a thing—”

She stopped, and walked unsteadily to the window. Her voice shook as she went on. “The ’files said that a retaining wall on Virtues collapsed early this morning. The warning systems didn’t go off. The Architects did nothing —I accessed the scrolls from yesterday, they didn’t even record it.” She turned to her sister, her face suddenly pale. “Âziz, it’s like in the prophecies of Fasidim and the story of John Bingham’s wife. It’s—it’s the sort of thing they say will happen, before the city falls—”

Outside the distress lights still slashed the domes with white and blue. Three fougas rose from their hangars, trailing the long incantatory pennons advertising the start of Æstival Tide. Âziz raised her cup and smiled, but her eyes were bitter.

“Don’t be absurd,” she said. “A dream, it was only a dream.”

“ The dream—the morph said it was the dream of the Green Country! The Architects are failing us! What if—”

“Listen to you, Nike! You’re talking about Mrs. Bingham and listening to a hermaphrodite! I can’t believe this—you sound as crazy as Shiyung. There’ll be no need to regenerate her at all, just pop her crown on your soft little head!”

Nike bit her lip and stared at the floor. Her voice was whining. “But why, Âziz? Why would a morph kill her? How could she kill her? It doesn’t make sense. None of this makes sense. The Architects have blinked off, there’ve been reports of cracks in some of the vivariums, a tremor on Principalities. Malva Circutus from the Toxins Cabal told me that on every level below Thrones there’s been some kind of tremor, and now they’re saying it’s the storms coming. If the lower levels hear about your dream…”

Âziz glared at her, stood and walked to the window. For several minutes she watched the fougas drifting up and down, their turquoise banners rippling and snapping in the air rising from the refineries. Her mouth grew tight.

“They should be towing funerary pennons,” she said at last. Her head snapped up and her eyes blazed angrily. “I don’t know how or why that unfortunate morph did it, and I don’t care. Shiyung is dead, and we can’t let these other rumors go any further. We have to find the right way to deal with this before the Gate opens, or we’ll have a revolt on our hands. I want to see that morph now. And the one she’s been living with. Shiyung’s healer, Ceryl Waxwing.”

She pressed a button on the windowsill and summoned the yellow-haired serving girl. “Tell the Head of the Reception Committee to bring the gynander Reive here, and the biotech Ceryl Waxwing. And get some ’filers: I want ’filers here for the sentencing.”

She turned back to Nike. “The morph’s a political enemy. She murdered Shiyung. I don’t know how she escaped from her cell, or how she did it, but she did. And the other one’s a collaborator. We’ll ’file the sentencing and have it broadcast constantly until tomorrow: Shiyung’s murderers, political collaborators. If we can’t have Shiyung there when we open the Gate, we’ll have those two instead, as a designated sacrifice. And Nasrani—we’ll reinstate him. We’ll give them to the Compassionate Redeemer, have Nasrani perform the honors. If the crowd gets unruly we open the Gate before the appointed hour. That should satisfy the lower levels.” She bit her lip thoughtfully. “Maybe we won’t have to regenerate Shiyung after all.”

Nike ran a finger along the edge of the window. “But these rumors of structural damage—you don’t think we’ll be setting our own pyres if we go through with the festival, opening the Gate to Ucalegon?”

Âziz leaned against her sister. “It was only a dream Nike,” she whispered, stroking her hair. “And the Architects are guarding us. Nothing will happen, because it was just a dream.”

Nike sighed and nodded, her eyes heavy-lidded from the morpha. As the distress lights glowed beneath the central Quincunx Dome, she let her sister take her in her arms, and waited for the Reception Committee to arrive with their guests.

Ceryl Waxwing tapped her foot and stared anxiously out the window as Rudyard Planck poured himself another glass of brandy.

“There’s no point fretting about Reive, my friend,” the dwarf announced. He held his snifter up to the light and sipped from it, making admiring noises. “This is very fine, I believe this is one of the vats I had drawn myself, after the success of my Generation Twelve puppets. They’re probably going to send us all to the Reception Area—Âziz won’t stand for this business about her dream getting out—so you might as well have another glass of this wonderful stuff and enjoy it while you can. Though last time I visited the Reception Area they had some quite fine Amity—”

Ceryl had drawn her breath in sharply at the words Reception Area and now whirled furiously, as though to knock the snifter from Planck’s hand. But for some reason the sight of the red-haired dwarf perched atop the granite table, sipping brandy, stopped her.

“You’re probably right,” she sighed, defeated. She strode to the table and poured herself a glass. Her eyes watered as she swallowed it, and Rudyard Planck reached up to pat her thigh.

“There—have a bit more, don’t gulp it this time, and try to relax. There’s worse things than prison,” he added, eyeing his brandy doubtfully.

“What?” demanded Ceryl. Her hand shook as she unstoppered the decanter and filled her snifter again. “Dying? That might be worse.”

The dwarf shook his head, pursing his lips. In the confusion after Reive’s detention he had urged Ceryl to leave the Four Hundredth Room with him and return to her chambers. He glanced down at the table, where a polyfile showing a young boy pierced by myriad steel spikes hovered an inch above the granite surface.

“I see you indulge in timoring.” With a little moue of distaste he turned the dial at the base of the polyfile stand, so that the image flickered into random darts of light.

“Not really.” Ceryl shook her head wearily. “I tried once. It—it made me sick.”

The dwarf looked up at her and nodded approvingly. “I never could see the charm in it myself. A disgusting practice. This vogue for resurrecting ancient torments, pleasures of insane Roman emperors—madness, pure madness. Proof positive of the decadence of our times. Crimes against nature. I find them abhorrent. That’s why I’m rather unpopular around the pleasure cabinet.” He smiled wryly and turned back to Ceryl. “At least with dying one can always hope for rehabilitation, if you’re important enough to them. But once you’re in the Reception Area: well, usually you just stay there. Or else—”

His voice trailed off and he finished his brandy in thoughtful silence.

Or else they give you to the Compassionate Redeemer. That was what he was going to say, Ceryl knew that. She swallowed her brandy defiantly and poured herself a third glass. Rudyard Planck raised a small gingery eyebrow.

“That will make you sick, my friend. It’s a shame to waste good brandy—”

“I’m not wasting it,” Ceryl replied hotly. “You said to enjoy it. Well, I’m enjoying it. I’m having the time of my goddamn life. Reive’s been drinking it like—”

She stopped and drew her snifter under her chin. On the table beside a holograph Reive’s mysid drifted in its globe. Somehow they had never gotten around to finding a suitable hiding place for it. The sight of the tiny creature brought tears to her eyes.

“They’ll kill her, won’t they?” she said, almost in a whisper. “They won’t even try her probably, just—just execute her. She’s just a child, really. No more sense than—well, than that thing.”

She pointed at the mysid and wiped her eyes. “A gynander, there’ll be no reason to rehabilitate her. Not like—” She grimaced, gesturing at the door. “That one. You know. The new commander.”

“Tast’annin? The rasa? ” Rudyard frowned. “I hope not. I wouldn’t want one of my puppets to be rehabilitated if it meant that. No,” and he took a last sip. “I’m afraid our friend may soon be enjoying the most sublime timoring of all: with the Compassionate Redeemer.”

Ceryl’s breath froze in her chest as she recalled her own treacherous dream. “Will they question her?” she asked, trying to hold her hand steady as she placed her empty glass on the table.

“About you, you mean? I daresay they already know everything they want to know about you and your relationship with that unfortunate morph.” He sighed noisily and eased himself onto the floor. He ran a plump finger along one eyebrow and began to pace. “Rather presumptuous of her to read Âziz’s dream like that. Not to mention the Aviator Imperator’s.”

He stopped in front of the window, peering over the sill to watch a fouga nosing down through the blue air toward the sentry hangars.

“Why did they regenerate him?” Ceryl joined Rudyard, watching the dirigible on its long slow pass down this side of Cherubim.

“Our new commander? Surely you’ve heard that old gossip.”

The dwarf shook his finger at her, but his voice was kind. “Margalis Tast’annin was probably the most brilliant Aviator to come from the NASNA Academy in the last century. His mother was Penelope Métanira—you must have heard of her, the greatest mystical poet since Hanna Vollmann. I suppose that’s where he got this odd— way —of his. Rather a melancholy temperament for a military leader,” he mused. “There was a peculiar business at the Academy when he was there, another student’s death under mysterious circumstances. But our Margalis graduated with honors, did his time in the Provinces and the Medaïn Desert—but you must know some of this! He was an extraordinarily handsome young man, that golden hair and blue, blue eyes—I’ve seen the ’files—a hero of the Archipelago Conflict, and oh, what else? Single-handedly wiped out the Commonwealth’s submersible fleet; or that’s what they would have you believe.”

He gazed out the window, across the ultramarine fastnesses that hid the Palace. “After that he became quite enamored of Shiyung—of course you knew that, everyone did—and of course that ended, and he was practically exiled, sent to command the HORUS substations, and then Shiyung had that insane plan to retake the abandoned capital of the old United States, Âziz was the only one with any reason at all about that, and—”

At Ceryl’s raised eyebrow he sniffed, “Oh, of course: how could I possibly be privy to all this? My dear friend, if one must be a dog, then be a rich man’s dog. It helps that my mother was Angelika Panggang’s stepsister. Anyway—”

He stared moodily across the room at the door. “Anyway, his mission to the Capital failed. Failed dreadfully, despite all this fanfare about Triumph and Victory Is Ours. Some horrible mishmash of death-cults and geneslaves and vengeful barbarians. From what I heard, he was tortured; escaped; went mad. Set himself up as some sort of cannibal king presiding over barbaric rites. And then, of course, he died. And then, of course, he was regenerated.

“And for one of his nature… Well, Margalis Tast’annin has a sensitive, one might say almost a visionary, temperament for a military commander. And that makes him a very dangerous man. Made him a very dangerous man. Now I suppose he’s a very dangerous rasa. Mad as a rutting mandrill, crazy as Nasrani and the rest of them, but more, I would say, ascetic. Quite attractive, to a certain kind of person.”

He lowered his voice. “ I heard that when he broke with Shiyung she tried to kill herself. Raced toward the edge of a furnace during a refinery tour. Some moujik grabbed her at the last minute. That was when they sent him to HORUS.”

Ceryl turned her back to the window. “How horrible.”

She stalked to the table and slopped some more brandy into her snifter. “You know, they killed my lover. Giton Arrowsmith. Supposedly it was an accident but I think they wanted him dead. He was always too outspoken in his criticism of them.” She returned to the window, swaying a little as she peered down at Rudyard.

“Is that when you tried timoring? After he died?”

She sipped her drink, her eyes glazing over, and finally replied, “Yes. I wanted—I wanted to know something. About death. What it’s like.”

“And?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. They die, is all. They suffer, we watch.” She tipped her chin toward the door. “Like them. Nike and Shiyung and Âziz. We suffer and they watch.”

The dwarf nodded pensively. After a moment he sighed, and said, “Well, I’m sorry for your friend Reive. Sorry for myself, too,” he added, giving a sharp laugh. “I hoped to spend more time with her. I like morphodites.”

A soft sound at the door. Ceryl jumped, glanced down at the dwarf, her eyes wide and terrified.

“Ah, well,” murmured Rudyard Planck. He raised his glass mockingly as the door opened. A small figure darted into the room.

“Ceryl!”

Not the Reception Committee; not the inquisitors.

Reive.

Ceryl raced across the room, hugging the gynander and then dragging her into the bedchamber. “Reive! I thought they took you—”

“They did,” the gynander gasped. Rudyard Planck tiptoed to shut the front door and hurried after them.

“Âziz can’t have let you out,” he said flatly. “You escaped—?”

“The Aviator.” Reive trembled so that Ceryl held her tight, stroking her thin hair and murmuring wordlessly. “He came and Shiyung, Shiyung— Oh, Ceryl, we didn’t know where to hide, where else to go—”

From the next room came the hushed click of the door opening again, then the pad of feet across the floor.

“Reive Orsina. Ceryl Waxwing.”

Their shadows blotted out the light from the doorway. The Reception Committee, six of them in their dark suits and white linen shirts. Each carried, almost casually in a white-gloved hand, a slender electrified cudgel, and the man who had spoken waved a tiny canister of nervetorque. Reive began to sob.

“You won’t need that,” Rudyard Planck pronounced. He drained his snifter and replaced it fastidiously on a table, then walked up to the man with the nerve gas and gave him a little shove. “If you know who I am, then you know—”

“Shut up, Planck,” one of the others spat. She strode forward and glared down at the dwarf, then at Reive. She held up an allurian scroll, cleared her throat and read, “Reive Orsina, Ceryl Waxwing.” Pausing, she glanced balefully at the dwarf, then added, “Rudyard Planck. Âziz Orsina cordially invites you—”

Rudyard turned to stare at Reive. “Orsina, did she say? Reive Orsina?”

“Damn it, Planck!” The woman pushed him so that he tripped and fell against the granite table. When Ceryl gasped the woman whirled to face her. “You’re Waxwing? You’re wanted with the other one, for—” The woman turned to the man with the canister of nervetorque. “What was it?”

“Collusion,” he said, almost sadly. Ceryl was surprised to see that he had tears in his eyes.

“Collusion on what?” demanded Rudyard Planck breathlessly as he stood, rubbing his chin where blood welled from a gash as long as his finger.

“Murder,” the man said, and now he really did brush a tear from his cheek.

“Murder? But who—”

The woman cut Ceryl off by pushing her toward the door. “The assassination of Shiyung Orsina. Chain the morph while I get this one—”

As she struggled Ceryl twisted to see Reive staring bleakly as the man wrapped metal loops around her hand and neck. At her feet Rudyard Planck gazed at the gynander with an expression of nearly ecstatic disbelief. Then Reive turned to Ceryl and said, quite clearly, “The rasa —he believed me—it is Ucalegon—”

“But that’s impossible—how could she—” She turned to see the first guard with her cudgel poised above the mysid’s globe. “No! Leave that, it’s—”

As Ceryl flung herself at her the guard turned, her cudgel smashing through the air onto Ceryl’s head, again and again and again. Ceryl heard screaming, felt something snap inside her neck, like a bit of plastic cracked between the fingers. Then she felt nothing, only that same dreamy sense she had had in her dream, of the world falling endlessly away beneath her like tarmac beneath a rickshaw’s wheel, and before her a plain of exultant green.

It was late evening in Araboth. The Architects had finally switched off the distress lights. Faint music drifted down from Seraphim, snatches of songs popular during Æstival Tide in earlier decades. Fougas cruised through the periwinkle air towing pennons with the arcane sigils of the Feast of Fear—waves with ravening teeth, a bleeding sun. The Orsinate’s guard could already be seen, resplendent in their festival garb as they paraded around the palace, night-lights glinting off suits of shining yellow plasteel and leather face-masks. Pyres flickered around the rim of the upper levels, sending eddies of white smoke into the perfumed air as the Seraphim and Cherubim tossed intricately folded paper encised with prayers for the dead into the flames. On the lower levels a festival air prevailed as moujiks and morphodites, biotechs and ’filers, began preparing the feastday meals of sugared pumpkin seeds and cardamom custard, tripe soup and jellied krill and unripe peaches rolled in cayenne, and the nine-layered pilau known as Breath of the Redeemer, with its confits of tamarind and prickly pear, and the crisp-fried tentacles of sea-nettles. And on Archangels the enslaved rasas began their own somber rites, carrying the mummified remains of Blessed Narouz to a balustrade overlooking the Lahatiel Gate.

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.

The Reception Committee brought their new guests to the Four Hundredth Room. Theirs was not to be the first sentencing that evening. The other guests in attendance at the dream inquisition had all been sent to Principalities, as volunteer donors for the medifacs. Tatsun Frizer screamed and called upon Blessed Narouz, then fainted loudly, resulting in her being borne down immediately via vacuum capsule. As the Committee brought Ceryl and Reive and Rudyard Planck to the Four Hundredth Room they passed Echion in the hallway, shrieking as she was led to the special chamber where she would be administered excitatory hormones, the better to prepare her for her role in the Feast of Fear. When she saw her, Reive began to cry.

“Don’t worry,” soothed Rudyard Planck, ignoring the Reception Committee’s baleful glances as he gazed up at the gynander. “Sajur Panggang will be there and he’ll intervene for us. Tomorrow we’ll all be drinking sake with Nike on the beach—”

Reive nodded miserably as her guard tugged at the chain about her neck. Behind her, in the arms of two of the stronger Committee members, Ceryl moaned. Across her forehead a swollen purplish bruise showed where the cudgel had smashed against her; she had been unconscious ever since.

The Reception Committee shoved their way through a ’file crew crowded around the door to the Four Hundredth Room. Their monitors and catoptics were trained upon a small dais that had been rolled out for Nike and Âziz. The margravines sat in ornate chairs of bronze and steel, decorated with the automotive motifs the Orsinate was fond of. There were two other chairs, conspicuously empty, beside them. At Âziz’s feet crouched the yellow-haired serving girl Petra. The margravine stroked her hair absently, murmuring; but her face held a cold expression and her gaze lingered upon Reive. Beside her Nike yawned, her pupils dilated from morpha, and sucked at a bulb of kehveh. Both of them wore simple shifts of white linen and their conical crowns of office, and over these heavy capes of shining black and yellow rubber. Everyone looked miserably uncomfortable; the room was so hot that condensation trickled from the metal arms of the margravines’ chairs.

Once inside, the Reception Committee shuffled about, adjusting their ties and their guests’ chains and maneuvering to avoid the catoptics focused upon them. Âziz tapped one sandaled foot upon the marble floor and tugged at Petra’s hair until tears welled in the girl’s eyes. Another girl tiptoed about the perimeters of the chamber, adjusting the vents until jets of cool air hissed into the room.

The Head of the Reception Committee cleared his throat.

“May I introduce your guests,” he began. The catopticians turned, their machines whirring, and began to ’file the prisoners. They hastily switched their focus back to the dais as Âziz waved the Head away impatiently.

“I know who they are.” She stood and held her arm out. Petra wiped her eyes and assisted her from the dais. The catopticians scurried to ’file them, the crew leader speaking softly but excitedly into a vocoder as he followed the margravine across the room. Âziz shoved Petra away. She stopped in front of Rudyard Planck and peered down at him, frowning.

“Rudyard Planck. This is a surprise. Now, if your patron Sajur Panggang were here—”

The catopticians tripped over each other as she did a graceful turn, her long pale hand indicating the empty beds and divans at the far end of the room.

“—but, he is not.” Her tone as she turned back to the dwarf was questioning, but Rudyard only shook his head, his ruddy face gone quite pale.

“I—I don’t know where he is, Margravine, but there’s something you should know, surely we can wait a little longer—”

“We cannot,” snapped Âziz. On the dais Nike smiled absently and waved at the dwarf. The vents made a popping sound; the flow of cool air stopped, and a barely perceptible tremor shook the room. The two serving girls exchanged frightened looks.

Âziz strode to where Ceryl moaned in the guards’ arms. “What’s wrong with her? Is she ill?” She tipped Ceryl’s chin back with one finger. Ceryl groaned and her eyes rolled open, then closed again. Âziz dropped her finger; Ceryl’s head flopped against her chest. The margravine grimaced. “Wake her up, I want her to understand the terms of her sentencing.”

She turned to Reive. The gynander had composed herself, and stared back at the margravine with clear green eyes. She looked at Ceryl, limp in the arms of her guards, and blinked to keep the tears from spilling. She gazed back at the margravine. Hatred like a philter ran through her entire body, hot and strong. Very slowly, she smiled.

At that smile Âziz suddenly went cold.

Shiyung. She looks just like Shiyung.

She remembered her sister’s bastard, dead at birth… Or no—there had been something wrong, they had sent it down to the Chambers of Mercy because it was sick, there was something wrong with it, it—

It had been a hermaphrodite. Âziz caught her breath and gazed back at the gynander.

The Four Hundredth Room had grown very still. Reive could hear Rudyard Planck beside her, his breath coming in quick agitated gasps, and next to him Ceryl groaning as one of the Reception Committee pasted an amphaze tab to her temple. Alone on the dais Nike sucked noisily at her kehveh bulb, then dropped it to the floor and slumped back in her seat, eyes closed as she welcomed her morpha dreams. A few feet away the ‘filing machines whirred and clicked as Âziz stared at her prisoner, and the prisoner, her smile a rictus of pure loathing, stared back.

An odd feeling had come over Reive, a sort of vertigo; as though she leaned over the restraining wall that circled the palace and looked down upon the receding levels of Araboth to the lugubrious depths of the Undercity. At first the margravine’s face frightened her—like the rasa’s, utterly blank and unlined, as though no emotion had ever touched her deeply enough to leave a mark upon that white skin. But now something had changed. The margravine’s mouth remained set in that grim smile, but her eyes flickered with something else—fear, Reive realized.

She’s afraid of me …

And suddenly she thought of the sentry by the Seraphim’s gravator, scanning her retinafile and saying, Reive Orsina: pass. And the sentry at the palace reading her genotype: Reive Orsina. And the mad zeuglodon’s thick voice booming, One of the margravines had a baby once… I think you must be that monster ….

In the arms of his captors Rudyard Planck struggled. After a moment he gave up and sank to the floor, the cuffs biting his wrists as the guards tightened their hold on his chains. He winced. The floor of the Four Hundredth Room was warm—more than warm, hot. It would be just like Âziz to roast the place before a sentencing. But even the margravines looked uncomfortable. Could it be that this was an unanticipated change in temperature? Such a small thing; but it would fit into the complex and seemingly meaningless pattern he had seen these last few days, a pattern that seemed to be disclosing a single fact:

The margravines were no longer in control of the city.

Twisting around he stared up at Ceryl, her eyes huge and black from the amphaze, her expression witless. A single ’filer had his optics focused on her, and swiveled to get Planck looking at her. The dwarf mouthed an obscenity and turned away.

In front of him the margravine and Reive were still staring at each other. A sly curve had broadened Reive’s smile, and the dwarf noted suddenly that Âziz looked distinctly frightened. There was something odd about the whole scene, something weirdly familiar. He craned his neck, trying to see back to the dais where Nike still sat by herself, dreaming. Those two empty chairs: Shiyung would have been seated there, and once upon a time Nasrani as well….

It struck him then. Shiyung. The expression on Reive’s face was like that of the youngest Orsina—the same mocking smile, the same intense light in her eyes. And those eyes—she had green eyes, emerald-green eyes slanted as a cat’s, and she didn’t wear tinted lenses to disguise them.

Like Shiyung Orsina; like Nasrani.

“She’s one of them.” The words came out before he could stop them.

“Huh?”

Ceryl’s voice sounded sharp, but that was just the amphaze. She had no idea where she was. Several men and women in dark suits and narrow ties were supporting her; her head throbbed, but other than that she felt no pain. When she tried to move her hand it didn’t respond; it seemed she couldn’t move at all. She remembered something about a dwarf.

“… one of them! ” the voice whispered, more loudly this time. One of the Reception Committee kicked him, but the dwarf ignored her and hissed until Ceryl looked over at him, blinking.

“Damn it, look at her, Waxwing! Where the hell did you find her, she’s one of their bastards!”

Several ’filers had turned to check out this new confusion. Âziz shook her head, half hearing the whispered accusations behind her but too stunned by the thought of what this might mean: a true Orsina, the child of siblings as she and Shiyung and Nike and Nasrani had been: a true heir. In front of her the gynander gazed at her with Shiyung’s eyes in her pointed face, dirty hair uncoiled about her shoulders, small breasts and tattooed thighs and that tiny penis half-glimpsed inside her gossamer trousers. A morphodite, heir to the Holy City of the Americas. Âziz started to laugh.

“Well,” she said quickly, straightening herself and adjusting her conical crown so that the light flared from its twin crosses. “I wouldn’t have expected an assassin to scare easily.”

Clicks and whispers as the ’filers all turned to Âziz.

“Assassin, Margravine?” one called out from the back of the room.

Âziz nodded, her smile gone. Get this over with quickly, get them out of here and into the holding area by the Gate. “Early this morning,” she began, glancing back at Nike asleep on her throne; “ early this morning —”

Nike jumped, glanced around and nodded anxiously. Âziz gave her a curt look, then continued.

“Early this morning we discovered the body of our sister, Shiyung Orsina, in her private chambers in the Alkahest. She had been murdered, her neck snapped. The murderer and her accomplices have been detained—”

Gasps and a few angry shouts from the ’filers. Âziz swept her arm out toward Reive and Ceryl and Rudyard Planck, but looked over her shoulder and whispered to the head of the ’filer crew, “No names, no names.” Then, sternly and facing the optics, “These three are hereby sentenced for the murder of Shiyung Orsina, also for collusion, also treachery and theft—”

“We did not —” Rudyard Planck said hotly, before someone kicked him.

“Theft,” Âziz repeated. On her throne Nike adjusted her rubber cape and nodded. Âziz coughed, then said, “But even criminals and assassins may beg for forgiveness. We have heard their pleas; we will show them mercy, and allow them to save their eternal souls through the ministrations of the Compassionate Redeemer.”

Ceryl’s mouth twisted as she tried to gasp. Rudyard Planck shouted, “No!” The ’filer crews murmured excitedly. Only Reive continued to stare at Âziz with that same cold smile, although she grew pale and her hands trembled.

“There,” Âziz announced. She turned to the head of the ’filer crew and waved at him dismissively. “That’s it, that’s all, tell them to stop. Now.”

Muttering and staring balefully at the three prisoners, the ’filer crew started to leave. One spat at Reive as he passed her. Another stopped in front of Shiyung’s empty throne and held out her optic, before the crew head came after her, barking at her to leave. Âziz stared after them with a satisfied expression. Nike smiled and waved goodbye.

“Damn it, Âziz, you know we had nothing to do with this—” Rudyard Planck exploded, heedless of the guards tugging at his bonds. “That morph, you know who that morph is—”

Âziz turned to him, smiling; her eyes glittered as she said, “I do indeed: the murderer of our sister.”

“Couldn’t—done it,” said Ceryl. Her voice was thick, almost unintelligible. Âziz and Rudyard Planck both looked at her, surprised; her captors jerked her chain but still she went on. “Too small—look—her. Didn’t—hear she said— rasa, Aviator—where’s rasa?”

Âziz’s face grew tight but she said nothing. On the dais Nike sniffed and stood, grabbing the arms of her throne as she was unbalanced by the weight of her heavy rubber cape. “Where is Margalis?” she asked. An empty morpha tube rolled out from her feet and she giggled, then looked at her sister. “Âziz? We should tell him, because— you know.”

“It makes no difference what you do now.”

Reive’s voice came out clear and high as a child’s. One of her captors raised his hand to strike her, but Âziz shouted, “Enough!” and gestured for him to leave.

“Go, I want you all to go now! They are guests no longer, they are now prisoners of the city. I have summoned a guard from the Aviators—”

The Reception Committee looked aggrieved. “ Go ,” repeated the margravine fiercely, pointing at the door.

“She doesn’t seem too afraid of this murderer,” a guard muttered. On his way out he kicked Rudyard Planck. Âziz remained with her arm outstretched commandingly. From down the corridor echoed the clatter of boots on marble. The Reception Committee dropped their hold on the steel chains that bound their prisoners, adjusted their ties, and shuffled toward the door.

As she watched them leave, Reive cried out, “We know who we are! We know—”

Rudyard Planck looked at her, frightened. “You know—” he said, and stopped.

The gynander only tipped her chin and stared at Âziz through slitted eyes. “We know now. We have the Sight, we have seen what is to come. We may have scryed it, but it was your dream, Âziz.”

The margravine stepped forward until she stood in front of Reive. She bent to take the gynander’s face in her hands.

“You are a fool, whoever you are.” What little color was left in Reive’s face bled away and her gaze faltered; she looked like a child being punished. “There will be no storms, hermaphrodite, because we control the weather. We control everything in Araboth.”

She let go of the gynander and turned to stride across the room. She stopped in front of a tall column and gazed back at her sister. Nike looked confused, then raised a triumphant finger and pulled up the hood of her cape.

In the doorway several tall figures appeared, gleaming in their crimson leather uniforms. “Enter,” Âziz called out to them. She glanced at her prisoners, then back at the Aviators. “I was just telling them that there is nothing to fear from the weather—what’s a little rain?”

The margravine pressed a switch hidden behind the column and flicked her own hood over her head. A sound like flames licking at the walls; then a brackish scent filled the room. A moment later fine mist began to fall from tiny jets in the ceiling.

“See!” Âziz crowed. Nike adjusted her cape, holding out her hands to catch the moisture. “Nothing to fear from the weather, nothing at all!”

One of the Aviators stepped forward and raised her hands in salute. Rain caught in her silver hair and glittered like sun on steel. “Margravine—”

Âziz turned to her. “I want them in the holding area on Archangels. The prison by the Lahatiel Gate. They’re to speak to no one.”

“Yes, Margravine.” The Aviator gestured; the others followed her. But before they could reach the prisoners a tremor shook the room. Nike cried out and grabbed a chair. Glass tapers rattled in their sconces and one shattered as it struck the wall. For an instant the rain ceased; then there was a gurgling from overhead and it poured down heavier than before. Âziz’s mouth was set in a grim line as she pulled her cape about her shoulders. Only the Aviators seemed not to notice, their booted feet steady upon the marble floor, their eyes fixed on the margravines.

“Take them,” whispered Âziz.

Ceryl whimpered. Rudyard Planck’s ruddy face went white, and he struggled as the first Aviator lifted him in her arms like a child.

“No! Margravine, please, Sajur Panggang will tell you—”

Only Reive remained impassive, her smile gone, her dark lashes trembling above pale green eyes. “It is coming,” she whispered. She lifted her head to stare at Nike. The margravine clutched the edges of her cape and shivered in the chilly artificial rain. “There is nothing you can do now to stop it, it is—”

“ Now! ” shouted Âziz. “Have them shriven in preparation for their meeting with the Compassionate. Redeemer.”

“As you wish, Margravine.”

The leader of the Aviators stared at the dwarf still struggling in her arms, then with her head motioned to her followers. They stepped forward and not ungently took hold of Ceryl and Reive. “Please don’t fight,” one said. Ceryl collapsed against his chest. In her captor’s arms Reive turned to gaze at Âziz. The rain glistened against her breasts, where the ward against Ucalegon gleamed brilliant yellow and blue against her white skin.

“The Wave will take you all,” she said. Then they bore her from the Four Hundredth Room.

Silence for several minutes. “That’s it, then,” Âziz said at last. The door remained open; rain pattered against the walls and ran down through the little diamond-shaped grates set into the floor. Nike nodded, still steaming in her cape. Her sister began to pace, finally paused and tripped another hidden switch. The ocean-smelling rain tapped against the floor, then stopped. Warm air blew up through the grates. Sandalwood essence oozed down through ventricles in the ceiling. “There: all done.”

“What did she mean, ‘She’s one of them’?” Nike’s voice was still husky with morpha, but her eyes were brooding. She crossed the room to her sister and took her arm. “Âziz? What did she mean?”

Âziz turned away. “Nothing. They’re desperate, they were just talking.”

Nike shook her head. “No. I heard them. That morphodite—she looks like Shiyung. And Nasrani—she looks like both of them. She’s their child, isn’t she, the morphodite they were supposed to have killed—”

“What would you have done?” Âziz shook her arm free and glared at her sister. “I didn’t know, I had no more idea than you did, until today. She’s a bastard, and a monster—you saw her, a hermaphrodite! They would say it was an evil thing— if they knew. It’s best we do this, Nike, she should die before anyone else has a chance to learn about her.”

Nike hissed softly. “It is an evil thing, Âziz! That was a tremor just now, it’s as she said… She has the Sight, she scryed your dream—even if she did kill Shiyung—”

“She’s a scheming little morph, that’s all! How could she kill Shiyung?” Âziz laughed coldly. “You saw her, a skinny thing like that—”

Nike’s eyes widened. “Then who did?” Her cape squeaked as she hugged it close to her and suddenly her eyes widened. “Margalis! He did it—you knew it and—”

“ I will take care of Margalis. Shiyung was spending far too much time on the lower levels, Nike, you saw that. They were starting to think she belonged to them, and she was starting to believe it. It was time for a change, Nike. She’d been turning us against Nasrani. We need to speak with him now, it’s been too long. We can’t have these squabbles go on forever.” Âziz tossed her head, the black hood of her cape falling back onto her shoulders. “And Sajur, I want to see him as well, I think we should ask him about—”

“About what, Margravine?”

The two sisters whirled. In the doorway stood the Architect Imperator. He wore a morning suit of striped gray wool with a high white collar. The black turban of his office drooped over his forehead, but the Orsinate’s heraldic eye had been ripped away. In its place gleamed a brooch of Angelika’s, a glittering piece of ancient computer circuitry in clear plastic, set with zircons and emerald glass.

“Greetings, Nike.” He stumbled as he walked into the room. There was a small gash at the corner of his mouth where he had cut himself shaving, and blood spotted his white collar.

“Sajur!” Âziz frowned. Then she composed herself and walked to meet him. Behind her Nike stepped gingerly. A cloying steam rose about their feet, where the cold rain had pooled and was now heated by the vents. “I was going to call you—we need to discuss a few things. Tomorrow’s opening ceremony, for one—”

Sajur waved her away. Nike gasped: his white shirt-cuffs were soaked with blood, and blood dripped from his wrists to the slick floor. “No need, Margravine, no need at all. It doesn’t hurt, Nike, I drank quite a bit first, did a bit of morpha—”

He grinned, straightened himself unsteadily to face them. When he raised his hand to straighten his turban a long red smear marred the soft fine cotton. “I am performing my final duty to you, Âziz.” He covered his mouth as he coughed. There was more blood. “I have sabotaged the Architects. There is a chasm beneath us now, on Angels—a fissure the length of the Undercity. The domes are already starting to buckle under the stress. Tomorrow, when the Lahatiel Gate opens—”

He smiled and flicked his fingers, ffffttt! A fine spray of blood spattered the margravines’ black rubber capes. “You shouldn’t have killed Angelika, Âziz. It was ungrateful of you, after all I’ve done.”

His voice almost sounded pleading. “And she won’t let me sleep, Âziz, I see her at night, she comes to me…”

He choked. Blood splattered his trousers. “Don’t bother calling your damn Aviator watchdogs, I—” Shuddering, he crumpled to his knees. “—dying anyway.”

“The domes! The domes!” Nike shrieked. Âziz slapped her and turned back to the man slumped on the floor.

“How do we stop them, Sajur?” she shouted. “Dammit, tell me! The program, how do we revert the program?”

The Architect Imperator smiled and gazed at the ceiling. “Nothing to be done,” he murmured. “Set them and left them… strange things, uncontrollable—ideas of their own, now.”

His voice faded to a soft gurgle. The bloodstained turban slid from his forehead to the marble floor, and he rested his cheek upon it. For one last instant he stared up at them, his dark eyes glazing over. He whispered, “But you’ll see lots of weather, Âziz… bring an umbrella.” He closed his eyes and was still.

The two margravines stood staring at the corpse of the Architect Imperator. Then, “We’ll die! I told you, she was right, it’s all going to come down!” Nike screamed and whirled to run from the room. Before she reached the door her sister grabbed her.

“Don’t be an idiot! He’s lying, he was drunk and half-mad, Nike, listen to me, there is nothing to worry about! ”

There was a dull grinding overhead. The hissing of incense from the ventricles abruptly stopped. The smell of burning petroleum filled the air, and a sound like crackling paper. As the margravines slowly raised their heads, hail began to fall in the Four Hundredth Room.