Æstival Tide

Chapter 8 SHADOWS OF THE THIRD SHINING

THE DOORS OPENED ONTO the Undercity. “I’ve forgotten my lumiere,” Nasrani said. He leaned against the wall of the gravator, cradling his bleeding hand, and looked as if he were about to faint.

“There will be no need,” the Aviator replied. “Give me your hand.”

Nasrani shook his head and started for the door. “No, please—” he stammered. “I’m all right, I can see fine—”

The Aviator stepped beside him. His hand when it enveloped Nasrani’s was warm, then hot, so hot that the exile cried aloud. There was a small hissing sound, like a fly caught in flame, and the stink of burning cloth. The exile choked, reeling backward, but the Aviator caught him. When Nasrani looked down at his hand, the bleeding had stopped and the skin glowed a translucent red.

“We will have no need of light,” said the Aviator. As the doors began to slide shut again he grabbed them and pushed them apart. The wood and metal buckled and bulged outward. Nasrani covered his face as splinters of glass and wood flew everywhere.

“Don’t!—you’re destroying it, we won’t be able to return—”

Metal gears shrieked and ground futilely against each other; then there was silence. Tast’annin stepped into the darkness. When he turned to face Nasrani the exile caught his breath. The rasa glowed softly, a dull crimson glow like the Flames of the Eternal in Blessed Narouz’s Refinery.

“Do not be afraid,” he said, his voice echoing in the void of Angels. “Come, Nasrani.”

The exile stumbled after him, stammering, “You ruined it—the other gravators—wait—”

“There will be no need,” the rasa repeated. Above him reared the immense shadows of the Undercity, the faint and distant glimmerings of blue and gold and crimson where the refineries and medifacs burned far overhead. From beneath their feet rose a heavy smell, an odor as of things newly exhumed from the earth. Nasrani gagged and covered his mouth with his sleeve. The rasa waited for him, a ruby taper burning in the endless night.

“Where is she?” he asked after a little while. “I will go before you if you tell me the way.”

Nasrani coughed, nodding. “Augh—that smell! I will show you, this way—”

He began to feel his way very slowly, the rasa beside him silent, his feet making almost no sound upon the broken earth. The labyrinth of walls and buildings the exile had used before to guide him had changed. Smooth surfaces crumbled beneath his outstretched hands, great blocks of metal and concrete sheared away at his touch, plummeting into unseen chasms just a few feet from where they walked. Nasrani trembled and chattered to himself, stopping to stare about him in wonder, as though he’d forgotten where he was. More than once the rasa’s hand roused him, so hot that it singed his torn shirt.

“Something has happened—something terrible has happened,” Nasrani said again and again. The ground felt different than it had on his earlier visits—soft and friable, as though it had been churned by the passage of an immense nematode. Into this raw earth the remains of familiar buildings had been swallowed, and other things disgorged. A huge smooth dome of glass, miraculously unbroken. Beneath it rows of emaciated human figures embraced blocks of steel, their empty eyesockets staring up at Nasrani and Tast’annin as they passed. Wrecked autovehicles and boats bulged from the ground, their hulls scorched and fused together to form one great misshapen machine. Where before there had been only a smooth expanse of dead earth and concrete now erupted a heap of broken forms of wood and metal. From them spilled bones, bones and skulls and sleeves of deep blue and scarlet, trimmed with metal brocade. The rasa paused to stare at them. Where his hand brushed the edge of one uniform a tiny spiral of smoke rose, and a crackling sound.

Nasrani stopped and gazed overhead. An eerie red glow suffused the darkness. In the distance clouds of black smoke seemed to billow and rise, obscuring the silhouette of the monstrous ziggurat looming above them. An uneven but ceaseless current of sound swelled beneath it all, a rush like running water, punctuated by soft retort’s and sudden explosive roars, as of huge buildings being pried apart and thrown to the ground. Beneath his heavy clothes the exile sweated and shivered; his wounded shoulder ached and his hand throbbed almost unbearably. He wiped his face, squinting as he struggled to see something of the rest of Araboth—flames leaping from the refineries on Archangels, and a white pulse that might have been distress lights from Seraphim. And closer he saw other flames, and pallid greenish globes that bobbed in the distance but never seemed to grow any nearer. Another smell choked him, along with the fetid reek of decay; a smell of burning, of acrid chemicals and gas. He coughed and stumbled, and nearly fell into a narrow crevasse that slit the earth at his feet like a razor tearing through skin. When the rasa’s hand touched his shoulder he jerked back. It was burning hot, as though it had been cast into a furnace.

And suddenly Nasrani realized that was exactly what had happened. The Undercity was burning. The rasa’s metal form was heating like an ingot thrust into the heart of a forge. Nasrani stopped, weaving in the near darkness.

“I can’t—we can’t go on,” he gasped. His eyes were wild. “Margalis—the Undercity is burning, if we go on we’ll die from the heat. I don’t understand,” he whimpered.

“Look.” The exile shrank as the rasa gripped his shoulder with one fiery hand. “Can you see—there, at the base of that shattered pyramid?”

Nasrani swallowed. He nodded, peering where the rasa pointed. “Yes,” he whispered. “I see, Margalis, but—what is it?”

The rasa’s eyes glowed, brighter and brighter until they were like two holes of flame. In the distance they heard a hollow rasping. “It is a rift, a chasm at the bottom of the city. See—? Boiling up there, that is water, it is the sea coming in from Outside. That smooth wall behind it is one of the conduits that supplies the vivariums. The fulciment of the entire city is rupturing.”

Nasrani stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“There!”

The Aviator pointed at the pyramid, gleaming dull gold in the murk. The steady rasping grew louder and louder, until suddenly a terrific crack rent the air. For an instant the pyramid flamed brilliant white; then like a heap of ashes it collapsed and sank all at once into the darkness.

“How can it—” Nasrani staggered forward as the rasa shoved him.

“We have no time!” Tast’annin cried harshly. “We must find her quickly, the city is falling around us—”

Nasrani stumbled and halted, hugging on to a broken steel post. “Margalis—Margalis, please, listen to me. I don’t know where we are. It’s changed—if what you’ve said is true, if the city is collapsing around us—it’s all different. The landmarks are gone—there used to be an alley, there, and a, a sort of archway—”

Tast’annin looked over his shoulder, nodding. “It is still there. See—the arch has fallen, it is caught on that narrow landing—”

Nasrani shielded his eyes, then exclaimed, “It is! I see it—the doorway is still there, behind it—”

He picked his way through the rubble, the rasa at his side like a flickering crimson shadow. Every few minutes the ground beneath them shuddered, and once where Nasrani’s foot had been a moment before a fissure tore the earth apart with a noise like rending cloth. Nasrani shouted and nearly fell; but the rasa caught him, and then he was running the last few yards to collapse within the ruined doorway.

“My keys—I forgot the keys,” he gasped after a moment. The stone and metalwork felt wet beneath his fingers. His trousers were soaked. Warm water streamed from a crack above his head, spilling onto the ground and running off into the rift spreading slowly across the earth. Tast’annin stood above him and shook his head.

“We won’t need them. This is the entrance?”

At Nasrani’s nod he raised his arms and took hold of the broken edges of a lintel. The door crashed inward. Silence, broken only by the gurgle of water.

“Where is she?” The Aviator’s harsh voice hung in the empty air. Nasrani got to his feet and followed him into the room, shaking his head in disbelief.

At one end of the room the ceiling had caved in. Beneath twisted spars of steel and piles of plaster he saw Maximillian Ur’s cabinet, smashed into a heap of wood and glass. A few feet away the replicant’s bladed arm twitched rhythmically, its fingers curling and uncurling around a shard of metal.

“No,” Nasrani whispered. “My children—no—”

Slowly he circled the room, the ruined cabinets and crumpled banners adrift in pools of black water. In one corner the shattered body of the Anodyne Physician sat upright, her head askew, one side of her torso crushed so that her ruined circuitry glittered coldly, a frozen explosion of glass and wire. “No known remedy,” her clear voice repeated over and over. “No known remedy, no known remedy…”

Weeping, Nasrani stooped over her, yanked a golden filament. The Physician’s head rolled into her lap and she was silent.

“All my children?” he murmured, and turned to where a girder had fallen and covered Moghrebi’s gilded case. His voice rose to a shriek. “ All? ”

In the middle of the room a pile of wreckage hid where the Titanium Children had slept, where Apulieus had laughed and the Mechanical Baboon chattered with her brazen cubs. There was nothing left. Only, pinned beneath a corroded metal beam, something stirred and moaned piteously.

“Yes?” Nasrani cried, hurrying to kneel beside it, but then drew back. “Aaah—the miserable thing!” he spat.

It was a rasa, or had been—its arm had been sheared from its body and lay beside its shoulder. There was no blood, only a watery ammoniac fluid. The creature murmured to itself. It could not lift its pale head, only twist to gaze at Nasrani with one bleary eye. The man grimaced and turned away. The other eye bulged from its socket, black and swollen as a grape. It stank of ammonia.

“Mother,” it whispered. “Mother, please—”

Nasrani looked back down. “Mother? The nemosyne—is she here? Did she escape?”

The rasa moved its head feebly. “Mother is gone—the once-born took her, gone, gone. Please…”

Nasrani stood and wiped his hands in disgust. The thing mewled, trying to move. The rasa crossed the room, pushing Nasrani away, and knelt beside it.

“Which way?” he asked. His voice was almost gentle.

The rasa stared at him, then whispered, “There is another door—a tunnel—”

Tast’annin glanced over his shoulder, turned back to the creature silent now, twisting feebly beneath the weight of the twisted beam. He stretched out his metal hand until it covered the rasa’s face, then with a quick motion snapped its head back, severing the spine. The rasa twitched and was still. Nasrani made a hoarse sound and looked away. The Aviator stood, gazing down at the wretched corpse.

“It said she escaped. It said she went into the tunnel,” he said at last.

Nasrani stared at him dumbly, shaking his head. His face was streaked with tears. “All of them,” he said again.

“No.” The rasa shook his shoulder and pointed. “There is an opening. A tunnel, it said.”

“But she couldn’t—how could she? She has never moved, she never woke for me—”

Tast’annin pulled him through the wreckage.

“Then she has awakened for someone else,” he said, and ducking beneath a broken column he entered the passage.

It happened almost before Hobi realized it. His ears popped; one of the rasas swiveled its head to stare at the ceiling. Nefertity continued to recite in her clear child’s voice the story she had begun many hours before—

“ ‘… Were you ever happy, when you were a man, since you left the womb, unless you were trying to get back into it?’ and she gave me a virgin’s look of disdain.

“ ‘Will I be happy now I am a woman?’ I demanded.

“ ‘Oh, no!’ she said and laughed. ‘Of course not! Not until we all live in a happy world!’ ”

Hobi yawned, as much because his ears ached as because of boredom. The nemosyne had been reciting from her memory ’files, stories and poems she chose seemingly at random. This was how she had enthralled the fallen rasas, those poor creatures starved for any kind of companionship, even the chilly voice of a nemosyne chanting oddments of useless data.

At first he had thought he could listen to Nefertity speak forever. Now he knew that even wonderful things—maybe especially wonderful things—are best enjoyed in small doses. All around him the rasas sat in perfect silence, unmoving, their glowing eyes fixed on the shining figure in front of them. Hobi scratched his nose, thinking that perhaps he might take a walk, just across the room of course. He had just started to his feet, his legs prickling from having been still for so long, when suddenly the floor tilted beneath him.

“Wha—” the boy cried, and was knocked to his knees. There was a horrible crashing noise, hollow hooting cries from the rasas. The candles went flying; burning wax spattered his face and then it was dark, except for Nefertity’s cool blue glow.

“Mother—” someone whispered, and said no more.

“Perhaps I will continue this later,” Nefertity pronounced softly. But Hobi could no longer see her. Something heavy struck his head, knocking him to the floor. For a moment he thought he had been blinded.

“Nefertity,” he choked. His arm hurt when he raised it, but he could raise it, and now when he moved his head he could see, too.

The ceiling had fallen in upon the room. The replicants in their cabinets, the rasas who had been listening to Nefertity: all were buried beneath twisted beams and plasterboard and heaps of rubbish that seemed to smoke, but that was just the dust and plaster. A few feet away he saw the rasa that had brought him here, pinned beneath a girder. Across the room the Anodyne Physician’s case had been shattered and she was speaking solemnly to herself.

“Oh, my god,” Hobi whispered. He stumbled to his feet, biting his lip against the pain, and tried to get his balance without touching anything. He was afraid that if he breathed too deeply the whole room would disintegrate around him. The ceiling was completely gone. Where it had been were only the exposed guts of the ancient building, a horrible mass of wires and steel beams and metal joists, writhing and rippling as though made of windblown silk. “He did it, he really did it….”

“Who did it?”

Hobi turned to see Nefertity, standing calmly amid the ruins like a shining beacon of glass. On the floor beside her two rasas lay side by side, faces white as plaster save where greenish fluid trickled from one’s mouth, giving her a grotesque harlequin’s smile.

“My father,” Hobi said, dazed. He stepped toward the nemosyne, abruptly stopped. The floor shook ominously beneath him, and eddies of fine dust cascaded down from the broken ceiling. He froze, gazing desperately at the nemosyne only a few feet away.

“I can’t move.” His voice cracked; dust in his throat made it hurt to speak. “It will all come down—my father did this, he programmed the Architects to destroy the city—”

“How do you know this?”

“I overheard them.” He was practically babbling now. “A few days ago—in his study. They said there was a—a breach, somewhere down here. I didn’t understand…. He was indoctrinating the program, he ordered them to do this—”

The nemosyne stared at him, her emerald eyes serene. Pale blue light pulsed about her hand as she raised it and reached for him. “I will go with you, Hobi. Let us leave this place now.”

He stared at her in disbelief. “Go? We can’t go —it’s falling to pieces around us—”

A distant explosion. The room shook again, and one of the rasas whispered a name. Nefertity looked down at the broken creature, then back at Hobi, her hand still extended toward him. “We can leave the city,” she insisted gently. “Perhaps we will find the others of my kind, Outside.”

Hobi swallowed, shut his eyes, and breathed deeply. He thought of the tunnel that had brought him here, the overpowering smell of brackish water. He remembered how only a day before he had dreamed of this, madly: to find the nemosyne again and leave Araboth, venture Outside and die there if needs be.

“Hobi.” Nefertity’s voice was soft. He opened his eyes to see her in front of him, her crystalline hand upon his shoulder. “Hobi, it’s time.”

And at that word time he heard it again—the same sweet high chiming that had rung in his ears the first time he saw her. He nodded dumbly, glancing around until he saw the door at the far end of the room, the entrance to the tunnel. Part of the wall had collapsed beside it, the door itself hung open; but he could see the faint green glow of phosphorescence inside, hear the distant purling of water.

“That way,” he croaked. He began to pick his way through the rubble, stepping over an unmoving rasa and averting his eyes from the sight of the Titanium Children crushed and splintered into arrows of golden glass. Beside him Nefertity walked in a nimbus of azure light, her hand upon his shoulder firm and cool. Once the floor shifted beneath them, sliding so suddenly that Hobi cried out and nearly fell. But the nemosyne caught him, and as in a dream he walked the last few steps until they stood within the doorway.

Nefertity’s hand slipped from him and her voice came soft in his ear. “Do you know the way?”

Hobi shook his head. “No. But I think the tunnel leads out—at least once it did, it was a sewage tunnel. I think it might lead to the sea.”

“Ah.” She stepped before him into the gloom.

For a moment the boy remained, and gazed back into the room: the banners torn and furled about broken beams, the pale, nearly luminous bodies half-buried beneath the rubble, and Nasrani’s ancient toys shattered where they had been sleeping.

“No known remedy,” the Anodyne Physician murmured. In the darkness a rasa whispered, and something moved, slithering across the floor. Hobi bit his lip, and turned to where Nefertity waited for him.

“This way?” she asked.

He nodded: there was no other way to go.

They walked in the eerie darkness, Hobi running his hand against the damp wall and Nefertity gliding noiselessly beside him. Her aura deepened from azure to cobalt and then faded to a pale sapphire, barely enough light to see by; but her adamant heart shone brilliantly, a golden orb flashing in the darkness. The tunnel pressed close around them, dank and cold. Hobi’s feet slipped through shallow water, and he heard water rushing very near to them, as though an adjoining tunnel served as a conduit or sluiceway. Other sounds echoed from far away: soft roars and crashes, sudden cracks and booms. And always the sound of water, seeming to grow louder now, as though the sluiceway had opened onto a river. Hobi hugged his hands in his armpits, shivering, his jaw clenched, but after they had been traveling a little while he relaxed. He was cold, true, his feet nearly numb from sloshing through chilly stagnant water; and he had seen what no one else in Araboth had, the breach in Angels that would send the whole thing crashing down in a day or two.

But oddly enough he was no longer afraid. He almost felt elated, if it hadn’t been that his feet were damn near frozen he might have run down the narrow passageway instead of slogging through the muck.

“You are tired,” Nefertity said. They had come to where the passage opened onto the larger tunnel. Hobi leaned against the archway, panting.

“Tired?” He looked up into those huge depthless eyes, the silvery whorls and deltas of her face. Suddenly he grinned. “No, I’m not tired—just trying to figure out which way to go.”

She nodded. Splinters of gold and green flecked the air about her face, and without thinking Hobi reached to touch her cheek. It grew warm beneath his fingertips. When he drew his hand back the imprint of his fingers remained, azure petals glowing against her quicksilver skin, then slowly faded.

How can she be so beautiful? he thought. His chest felt tight with a longing so intense it made him dizzy. Something warm brushed his forehead. He blinked, saw the nemosyne staring at him, her eyes wide, reflecting nothing, her voice sweet and heartless as a bird’s.

“Do you know the way?”

He started to say no, then stopped and nodded.

“Down there,” he said, and pointed away from the direction he had first come with the rasa. “I don’t know where it goes, but that way leads back to the Undercity, the gravator—” They started to walk once more.

For a long time they went without talking. The sound of rushing water grew louder, the water splashing about their feet rose higher, until it reached the tops of Hobi’s knees. Around Nefertity the water glowed. When Hobi looked down he could see tiny shapes darting about her legs, tiny black fish like feathers streaming through the water as they followed her. He could no longer hear the boom and crash of the Undercity’s foundation shifting. He could no longer hear anything but water. It didn’t seem quite so dark. Algae and fungi still blotched the curved walls above the waterline but did not glow, only covered the ancient tile like a dark stain. The air was warmer here, too. It flowed through invisible vents and stirred Hobi’s long hair matted on his neck, and carried with it the overwhelming reek of the sea.

And, absurdly, as that smell grew stronger, he grew more frightened. A few feet in front of him Nefertity moved effortlessly, the water streaming from her silvery thighs. As though sensing his fear she turned to look back. Hobi coughed, wiping his face with his wet sleeve and trying to compose himself. He asked, “What was she like? The woman who made you?”

The nemosyne waited until he caught up with her. “She did not make me. Others made me; she programmed me. She was my archivist.”

“Loretta?”

She nodded. The water had grown shallow again, and the nemosyne stooped to gaze into it, where a black mass pooled like ink around her glittering feet. She dipped her hand into the water and brought it up full of tiny wriggling shapes, let them slide between her fingers back into the shallows. “They will die if they keep following me,” she said, gazing ahead. “Up there the water stops—”

Hobi squinted and sloshed on. Nefertity followed.

“Loretta Riding,” she said after a minute. “She was a Sister, a member of the American Catholic Church.” She tilted her head toward Hobi. “You know who they are?”

He shrugged. “I’ve heard of them. Heretics, like the rest of them—they were purged after the Third Shining.”

Nefertity said nothing. Her shimmering heart dulled to bronze as she walked, the water about her feet in small pools now that reflected her pale blue form.

“Purged,” she said at last. Hobi nodded, embarrassed. “You killed them, then?”

“ I didn’t kill them!” His voice rose sharply and he blushed. “I mean, none of us did, really—this was hundreds of years ago. It was Prophet Rayburn—well, his father, actually—Roland Orsina—and the Tel Âl ibn Waba, the Prince of the Plague. You know. The first Ascendants. The Chosen.”

Nefertity stopped. “The Chosen.”

Her voice suddenly did not sound so calm. A deeper tone cut into it, more like a woman’s voice than a replicant’s. When Hobi looked at her he saw that the emerald had drained from her eyes. Now they glowed dead white, like the eyes of a rasa just pulled from its tank.

“The Chosen: you mean the recusants, don’t you? The zealots who survived the Second Ascension?”

Hobi started to agree, but the nemosyne cut him off. Her voice was husky with anger. Loretta Riding’s voice, he realized suddenly—one of Nefertity’s programs had been encoded with the dead woman’s persona, like the palinmplants that gave some rasas the memories of their earlier lives.

“The Chosen! They murdered children so that only they would survive, did you know that? In Meritor, Nebraska, where they’d sent them to be away from the cities, to be safe from the plague. Loretta was there, she’d volunteered to set up a folklife program recording the children’s accounts of the Holocaust. She left one day to come back to Evanston and the following week it happened. The Chosen came. They slaughtered the children and their teachers, and then they commandeered the Children’s Encampment and moved in with their own children and their drudges, their deacons and their mullahs. They claimed that their prophets predicted a Second Ascension, and they were right, of course; but is that any reason to butcher children like sheep?”

The husky voice grew quite shrill. Hobi shook his head anxiously.

“No—no, of course not—” he stammered. The nemosyne stared at him, through him; she had become something quite different from the beautiful automaton he had first glimpsed in Nasrani’s hidden room. Tongues of light rose and flickered from her shoulders and her arms. Her body glowed a fierce cobalt, like an android’s cooling in its adamant saggar. He had to look away from her, away from that face like a burning torch, those white-hot eyes piercing the dim tunnel.

She said, “That was why she went into hiding, with me—in one of the bunkers they built after the First Ascension. She shouldn’t have taken me with her, of course—I belonged to the Church—but by then everything was falling apart again. She moved her entire library into that little place. Books, videos, films, syntheses; and of course she had me, I’d recorded over ten thousand hours of material by then. And for the rest of her life she read to me, and recorded what remained. Her books, mostly, and her memories. What she recalled of the world before the First Ascension, and just after. She never went outside again.”

Hobi’s feet ached from the cold. He wanted to start moving again. He wanted to run. The nemosyne was silent. Slowly her eyes cooled, until they shone a very pale green, and the angry blue drained from her limbs and torso. She could have been a reflection on the surface of the water, a rivulet of light.

Hobi shivered, rubbed his prickling arms and was absurdly grateful that he could feel them. He asked, “What happened? In the end, I mean. How did she die?”

As she replied Nefertity’s voice was a woman’s voice, weary and sad. “She was not a young woman when we entered the bunker. She was old, and she grew very old. For some years I cared for her, when she could no longer move easily. I prepared food from what remained in her stores, and purified the water she obtained from her ground still, and carried her when she could no longer walk; but she grew more and more forgetful, and finally one day she must have commanded me to sleep. Perhaps she knew she was going to die soon, and wanted to spare me—although of course it would only seem that I grieved, and if there was no one else there to see me, why then what would it matter? A robot alone in a steel bunker, mourning her dead mistress—but it must have seemed too much like one of her old stories, the idea must have saddened her. She was the kindest and wisest of women, Sister Loretta. Some people said she was a saint—a real saint, not one of those cowards who waited until the bibliochlasm and what came after, before they grew bold enough to speak against the Ascendants—and before we went into hiding there was much talk of canonizing her among the women of the Church.

“Those were dark days, after the Second Ascension and the Third Shining. In the west they hunted women down like horses and bred them, until they saw the monsters they gave birth to. Then they just killed them, or used them in their experiments. That was when they started breeding the geneslaves. You told me there are geneslaves everywhere now. Well, then the notion was a new and monstrous thing. Loretta organized a movement against it, and the women tried to stop it. And failed, of course; I can see now that they failed.”

Again she was silent; if she had been a real woman he thought she would have sighed, or wept. Finally she said, “That was why she became so obsessed with me, with the project. ‘We cannot forget,’ she told me, ‘but we are human and we will forget—but not you, Nefertity, never you—’ ”

Her voice grew soft, almost a whisper, and she chanted,

“Let the stars

Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric

Atoms that cripple drip

Into the terrible well.

You are the one

Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.”

She was silent. Almost Hobi could have seen her, then, standing before her inhuman muse: a white-haired woman, thin and strong as a steel wand, with eyes blue and raging and a voice scraped raw from reading, her knuckles swollen from the ceaseless effort of turning pages, turning dials, turning history into myth and myth into a woman who would not die, would not fail her, would not forget.

“A saint,” he whispered, and Nefertity slowly nodded.

“But even saints die,” she said at last. “And to spare me from witnessing that, Loretta ordered me to sleep; and so I slept. For centuries, I slept. Then someone found the bunker, I suppose, and took me from it. I do not remember. By then they had forgotten about the nemosynes; they had lost the means to wake me, or even the desire. If what you told me is true, they must have brought me a very great way, and then forgotten me, for me to end up in this place. But again, I cannot remember. My files have been disturbed, my random memories were accessed. But they never woke me: in all these years and years, Hobi, only you came to wake me.”

She raised her hand, cool and heavy as glass, and placed it upon his. She said no more.

Hobi stared at her, embarrassed and awed and ashamed. This lovely thing, this creature of light and steel, woven with the memories of a dead Saint and the dreams of a million dead women: how could she have come to him, how was it he had been the one to call her from the darkness after all this time? The thought terrified him; suddenly Nefertity terrified him. What was she, really, this robot that was centuries old, this thing that had called him and his people murderers, monsters?

“You don’t believe me.” Nefertity’s voice was soft as her hand slid from his shoulder.

“No! I do, of course I do—”

He turned so quickly he nearly slipped and fell into a shallow pool at her feet. “It’s just—well, it’s so strange, I can’t understand it all. You’re so strange.” He shrugged, and looked away. “I—I don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t know what will happen, when we get Outside. If we get outside.”

Nefertity nodded. “We should continue. Until we find the way out; we should go on.” Her voice was cool and uninflected once more. When she began to walk again it was with an android’s detached and fluid grace. “Shall I tell you some more stories, while we walk?”

Hobi followed her numbly. “Yes, please,” he said.

“ I know nothing, (the nemosyne chanted), I am a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper, an unhatched egg. I have not yet become a woman…”

Her words echoed gently in the darkness. Behind them, the tunnel receded into gray haze pocked green and yellow where phosphorescent algae glimmered. Ahead of them stretched pure night. The sound of rushing water had died. In its place Hobi heard a faint and regular booming, and felt the tunnel’s floor quivering beneath his feet. More explosions, he thought at first, but as the air grew warmer and more humid and the smell of salt ripened with other things —soft decay, the fetor of green strands rotting on old wood—Hobi knew that they were, at last, approaching the bottommost rim of the Quincunx Domes, the edge of the world, Araboth’s very brink.

They were coming to the end of all things. They were coming to the sea.

Chapter 9 BENEATH THE LAHATIEL GATE

THEY WERE BROUGHT TO THE prison on Archangels—a true prison, not the last refuge of unfortunate diplomats or Orsinate appointees fallen out of favor. Their cell was small but clean. The Architects modeled it after the oubliettes the Ascendants had developed after the First Shining, when it was important to detain political prisoners but equally important to keep them alive, in the face of radiation sickness and plague and the various viral strains decimating the continents. The translucent walls glowed soft white, as did the floor and ceiling, a color that made your eyes ache. After a short while even closing your eyes did no good: pallid amoebic shapes drifted across the inner field of vision like parasites afloat in the orb’s humors. Reive had heard of a particularly nasty torment engineered by the Orsinate—a strain of bacterium was furtively injected into the eyes and temples, which then induced a softening of the brain into fatty matter within a few hours. It was better not to close your eyes, to go blind staring at the gently pulsing walls, than to wonder whether such an entozoan was probing your consciousness.

There were no chairs or beds. The floors and walls radiated heat, not an intense heat but unrelenting. Whenever Reive tried to lie down she felt as though she were being slowly parched upon a grill, and Rudyard Planck skipped back and forth across the cell hissing to himself, his face bright red and his palms glistening with sweat. Only Ceryl seemed unaffected. The amphaze given her in the Four Hundredth Room had done nothing except to rouse her for a brief while, before she subsided back into moaning and twitching restlessly in a corner. The bruise on her forehead had swelled and bulged slightly, a deep purplish-red. When Rudyard very gently touched it, it felt hot, and Ceryl cried out, her eyes rolling open for an instant to stare at him in horror.

“She will die if she is not treated,” the dwarf said, looking up at Reive. Ceryl’s head dropped back onto her chest. From the other side of the cell, a few feet away, the gynander stared at him dumbly. “Her brain is swelling and that bump has gotten infected.”

He crossed the room to a glass door facing a bank of tall cylinders filled with dark fluid, within which swam the prison’s aurible monitors, hand-sized, flat yellowish forms like paramecia or spermatozoa.

“She is dying!” he shouted at them, his hands leaving a smear on the thick glass as he pounded it. “Damn it, call someone, a healer, for god’s sake—”

One of the cylinders blinked dull red, warningly; but nothing else happened. Abruptly the dwarf turned away, and began to hop across the cell again as though nothing had happened.

“She’s going to die,” whispered Reive. Her pale face was flushed. The mullah who had shriven them had also shaved her head, in deference to her being a hermaphrodite, and with cauterizing needles had drawn an intricate ward upon her scalp, an open hand with a mouth gaping in its palm. The mullah’s excitement over shriving a morphodite had been too much: his hands shook and he climaxed while tattooing her. Now the assassin’s ward bled steadily, the gaping mouth oozing a watery discharge that steamed when it dripped onto the floor. “She will be fortunate if she dies before Ucalegon devours us all.” Then she bowed her head and wept.

The dwarf stopped hopping long enough to give her a shrewd look. His red hair stuck up in damp tufts like a basilisk’s cockscomb. But before he could agree with her Ceryl moaned again. The dwarf turned to stare at her pityingly.

“It would be better if she died now,” he murmured. He moved his hand in a gentle gesture above Ceryl’s head, reluctant to touch her and cause her further pain. Reive nodded, clasping her arms about her chest. The mullah had taken her clothes, her scarf and jewelry, and she had been given a linen shift to wear, grass-green and of coarse weave. It itched terribly in the heat. “But I can’t kill her. Could you?”

The gynander shook her head and looked away. Rudyard Planck bowed, tears filling his eyes. “This is terrible—to leave her in such pain like this until tomorrow….”

“Better that than be given to the Redeemer.”

The dwarf said nothing. Since they had been taken from the Four Hundredth Room neither he nor Reive had mentioned the Compassionate Redeemer, although the mullah who had shriven them spoke of little else. After his impulsive ejaculation he had left the shriving chamber for several minutes. He returned wearing a fresh robe and carrying a polemnoscope that he unfolded and directed toward the wall.

“This was during the Tenth Dynasty,” he announced. Ceryl lay unconscious on a gurney by the door. The subdued Rudyard Planck sat next to her, his wrists chafing in their chains. From where she was strapped onto a cold steel table Reive craned her neck to watch great blobby images dance across the wall, obscuring a mosaic that showed Mudhowi Sirrúk wearing an Aviator’s leathers and extrasolar enhancer. The mullah went on, “If you look closely you can see Nasrani Orsina in the corner there, waving, beneath the Redeemer’s hind legs.”

The polemnoscope hummed loudly. Suddenly the images came into sharp focus. Reive tried to turn away. Cursing, Rudyard Planck threatened to have the mullah castigated by the Architect Imperator.

“The Architect Imperator would not object,” the mullah remarked blandly. “We met in a bhang-parlor once, and he confided to me that he had always been fond of that year’s gala. Now, this was just ten years ago. There—where the Redeemer is crouching, you can just make out that face—well, it was a face—that was Grishkin Matamora. You know, the arsonist—”

And so on. Afterward neither Rudyard Planck nor Reive had referred to the mullah’s diversion. In earlier years each had glimpsed the Compassionate Redeemer during Æstival Tide—Planck from one of the Orsinate’s formal viewing gondolas, four-year-old Reive from a great distance, where she huddled on the strand barely two feet from the Lahatiel Gate, afraid to venture farther Outside. Neither cared to discuss the fact that along with the failing Ceryl, they were to be given to the Redeemer as a special sacrifice.

The cell’s white walls did not dim as evening approached. They only knew it was evening when a human guard appeared, bearing a tray set with three globes of nutriment. Finally exhausted by her pacing, Reive leaned against one wall, wiping the sweat from her face and watching it steam from her palm. In her corner Ceryl lay, silent and unmoving. Reive could not bear to look at her; the thought of her dying filled her with a terrible sadness, but also with a rage so intense she thought she might go mad, or harm her surviving cellmate in her fury. When the guard arrived only Rudyard hurried to the glass wall, waving frantically as she slid the tray into their cell. But the guard tipped her head so that he could see where her ears had been sliced off and replaced with flat blue auricular disks, and opened her mouth to display a gray tongue split neatly in two like an eel’s belly. The dwarf turned away, discouraged.

They drank the nutriments, grimacing at the strong fishy taste. A few minutes after they were finished the empty globes collapsed and melted into small puddles, and eventually evaporated. Reive tried to get Ceryl to drink as well but the woman only moaned and twisted her head. She would not open her eyes. The swelling on her head had turned nearly black, and Reive trembled as she held Ceryl’s head in her arms.

“I would be very surprised if she lived until dawn.” The nutriment had revived Rudyard Planck. He leaned on the wall across from Reive and tilted his head at Ceryl. “Though she’ll be the lucky one if that’s the case.”

“Yes.” The gynander sighed, blinking back tears. Gently she lay Ceryl back upon the floor, after carefully wiping the sweat from her face. She glanced down at the still-full globe in her hands. Impulsively held it out to the dwarf.

“Here—we are not thirsty anymore.”

Rudyard Planck blinked, startled. “What? Oh, no—please—” He waved his small hands, his face turning an even brighter red. “I’m much smaller than you. Please—drink it, Reive.”

“Please—”

The dwarf saw the pleading in her eyes, the need to do this one small good thing. He took the globe and drained it.

Reive crossed the room and leaned against the warm wall. She closed her eyes, trying to recall something pleasant: the smell of sandalwood in Ceryl’s chambers, the taste of krill paste, the sight of her mysid floating in its glass jar. If only she could be free again, she would make offerings to all the gods; she would join Blessed Narouz’s Refinery and never venture to the upper levels again.

The dwarf watched her, one hand shading his brow to keep the sweat from running into his eyes.

“I think you really are their child,” he said after some time. Reive made no move to show she’d heard him. “Shiyung and Nasrani’s. When I first met you, by the Karvo sculptures—do you remember?”

Reive’s eyes opened, two alarming stabs of green in the opalescent light.

“Even then it seemed to me you looked familiar, although of course I didn’t piece it together. Who even knew, who would remember, after all these years—how long is it?” He stared at her intently. “How old are you?”

“Fourteen years,” she finally pronounced. The dwarf nodded.

“That would be exactly right. The same year the Archipelago Conflict began. Shiyung and Nasrani opposed it; that’s how they found themselves together, I imagine, siding against Nike and Âziz. The year they sent Margalis Tast’annin to Kutaraja on his first command, the year the first HORUS installation failed.”

He began to chew his thumb. “That was a bad year.” He sounded depressed.

Reive stared at him impassively. “We are their only child,” she said. “They should be happy to have found us.”

Rudyard snorted. “Not likely! Âziz thinks she will live forever—she will live forever, unless someone poisons her, or Margalis strangles her as well. In three hundred years there has not been a single peaceful succession by an Orsina. Too many bastards, too many feeble-minded children. A true heir by brother and sister—even a hermaphrodite—that would be too dangerous. Better to have Nike stupefied with morpha and Shiyung as a rasa and Nasrani exiled; or better yet, Nasrani brought back into the fold now that Shiyung’s been clipped. Âziz would never let you live. She would never let anyone live who knew about you.”

The thought seemed to depress him further. He sank to the floor and stared at his feet. A bad smell hung about the cell, as of pork left uncooked for several days. Ceryl lay stretched upon the floor now. Her breathing had grown so soft that Reive could no longer hear her. She crept to Ceryl’s side and cocked her head, listening.

“She’s dead.”

The dwarf nodded without looking up. The gynander prodded the woman gently. The body felt rigid. When she picked up one of Ceryl’s arms and then dropped it, it thumped loudly against the floor.

“We should call someone—she was kind to us, and we never thanked her—”

Reive began to cry, crouching back and staring at the glass wall where the aurible monitors undulated through their viscous element. Rudyard Planck gazed at the corpse and then at Reive, wide-eyed, an expression that might have been gratitude as much as despair.

“She alone has escaped,” he said softly. “Be grateful, little Reive, she has escaped—perhaps she will bless us, wherever she is—”

He shut his eyes and began to recite the Orison Acherontic of Christ Cadillac, pausing for good measure to invoke Blessed Narouz as well as the Prophets Rayburn and Mudhowi Sirrúk. When he finished they sat in silence, the only sounds their labored breathing and the nearly inaudible tick of the monitors outside the cell.

Reive slept and dreamed. At least, she thought it must be a dream. She knew that the uncomfortable parameters of their cell were designed to make sleep impossible; but how else to explain that she was once more hurrying down the corridor to the oceanic vivarium, her bare feet stinging where they slapped the cool floor?

“Zalophus!”

Even as she called out she knew that it made no sound. There was no ripple in her throat to form the name, the white-clad Children of Mercy did not turn to see who it was that shouted by the zeuglodon’s tank.

But Zalophus heard. The enormous head reared from the dark water and gazed at her, plankton streaming from his teeth.

“Little thing,” he roared. Reive marveled that the Children of Mercy didn’t hear him, either. “You have returned! Come with me now, quickly! The gates are opening at last!”

Water sluiced across her feet as he rolled onto his back, flippers waving. Reive shook her head.

“We can’t go with you, Zalophus. We would drown.”

The whale moaned and dived beneath the surface. A minute later he reappeared, spray frothing from his blowhole. “Come with me, human child,” he sang, and shivering, Reive felt the sound within her bones. “Come with me, or else you will die— Ucalegon the Prince of Storms flies across the seas, he is coming to ravish his bride, even now the city quakes to think of him! Come with me, we will join my sisters and witness the holy act!”

Reive looked away to stare at the watergates hung with shining banners, the gaudy flags and pennons of Æstival Tide. Already the offertory pyres had been lit. The air was thick with the scent of myrrh and the scorched smell of the gilt papers covered with the names of the recently dead, long narrow scrolls tossed onto the pyres by the followers of Christ Cadillac. Beyond a narrow gap at the top of one of the huge barricades she glimpsed something shining, a sliver of light the color of Rudyard Planck’s eyes. That is the sky, she thought. When we next wake they will open the Lahatiel Gate for the Redeemer, and then we will see the sky for the last time.

“We cannot go,” she said, turning back to him. “We are to be given to the Compassionate Redeemer. Besides, you would only eat us.”

Zalophus groaned, shaking his great head. “The Redeemer! So cruel, a thing without a mind, without a thought, nothing but teeth and bowels! It has no heart and so no true hunger! Ah, Reive, it is a sin, to treat you thus!” And Zalophus raced about his prison, churning the water into green froth and roaring so that Reive clapped her hands over her ears.

But at last the whale grew still. The waves lapping against the tank’s lip subsided. “I must go now, little thing,” he crooned, rolling to gaze at her with one enormous liquid eye. “Reive, Reive Orsina. I was alone and you spoke to me. I was hungry and you fed me, Reive.”

The gynander shrugged, laughing in spite of herself. “You are always hungry, Zalophus!”

He drew up and back into the air until he smashed down into the water, then twisted and leaped once more, higher and higher, until his huge body blotted out the light and Reive stumbled backward.

“I will not forget!” he bellowed, and for the last time dived beneath the tank’s surface. Reive huddled against a wall, shaking, waiting for the water to grow still again. But Zalophus did not return, then or ever, to his prison beneath the Quincunx Domes.

“Reive.”

The dwarf had been repeating her name for some time now. Two guards in the Orsinate’s violet livery stood waiting behind the thick glass door, idly tapping slender cudgels against their palms. One of them stared at the gynander’s pale form with no less surprise than did the dwarf himself—Rudyard was suddenly petrified that Reive had died too. But finally she stirred and blinked, gazing blearily at the ruddy face hanging a few inches above hers.

“Reive, it’s time.”

“Time?” She sat up and looked around. The walls had changed color, from white to a glowering red. Ceryl’s corpse still lay sprawled in the corner. She turned quickly back to Rudyard. “ Time? ”

He crooked his thumb at the door. “Guards.” His voice was so low and hoarse she could not at first understand what he said. “For us, Reive. They’re taking us.”

“Taking us?” For a moment she thought of Zalophus, heard him booming Come with me, recalled the splinter of blue gleaming above the watergates. She thought of him repeating her name: Reive, Reive Orsina. She stood, ignoring Rudyard Planck patting her hand comfortingly. The cell door slid open onto the waiting guards. Reive shook her head, heedless of the blood dried on her scalp, the tendrils of hair left where the mullah had shaved her carelessly. She walked up to one of the guards and pointed to Ceryl.

“We want you to burn her properly. No medifacs. Have her pyre set on Dominations—”

The guard stared at her, eyes furrowed, and then started to grin. Reive looked at him coldly and said, “Dominations! Do you hear us? We are Reive Orsina, heir to the Orsinate! We want that woman given full obsequies and burned this morning. Before the Gate is opened.”

The guard looked startled, glanced at Reive and at Ceryl’s body and then at the other guard. Slowly they both nodded. Reive looked back at the dwarf staring openmouthed and said, “Come on, Rudyard. We don’t want to keep the margravines waiting.” The guards stood aside for him, then led them down the hall.

Nike Orsina stood staring at the corpse of her sister Shiyung. Of course, it wasn’t exactly a corpse, because the body that floated in the narrow steel vat was not precisely dead. Tubes ran from Shiyung’s nostrils and ears and anus, delicate wires had been fitted to her shaved skull and to her fingers. A corrugated black hose fed into her mouth; Nike could see it move very slightly, in and out, like a bellows. The body was immersed in a clear liquid that smelled like standing water, with a faint undertone of cabbages.

Nike wrinkled her nose and leaned away from the tank. It had been her own idea to come here, to the laboratory on Dominations where the rasas were rehabilitated. After she had left the Four Hundredth Room and returned to her own chambers she could not sleep. Sajur’s death had frightened her, and Âziz’s insane obstinacy in the face of so many terrible omens. The dream of the Green Country; the tremors that, since last evening, shook the entire city with alarming regularity; that uncanny morphodite. She kept seeing her, so young and thin, looking so much like Shiyung when she was a girl. How could anyone see her and not recognize her as an Orsina? Âziz believed that Nike did not notice things—Shiyung had thought so too, and Nasrani, before he was exiled—but Nike did notice, more than they knew. It was a common belief among morpha habitues that, far from numbing the senses, frequent—and in Nike’s case, nearly constant—use of the drug made it possible to see and sense things outside the perimeters of normal consciousness. Nike had discussed this with Shiyung once and her sister had agreed, stating that once while under the influence of kef she had watched Nasrani’s thoughts leaving his head, in the form of small orange globes. This had not been what Nike meant; but she recalled it now, gazing at Shiyung’s face beneath the vat’s bubbling surface.

The morphodite was Shiyung and Nasrani’s child, sole heir to the thirteenth Orsinate. The first heir in hundreds of years, if one believed the histories ’filed in spools on Powers Level. It was an abomination, of course, a natural child and a heteroclite; but it would be a greater abomination to kill it and have no living heir to the dynasty. Nasrani was exiled, Nike herself had never had any interest in governance, and the demands of despotism had driven Âziz quite mad. Of Shiyung nothing remained, certainly not within that empty carapace. Nike was sure of that. If anything, since the corpse had been given to the biotechnicians for regeneration, it looked less alive than anything Nike had ever seen. Its skin was soft and pulpy; a whitish fuzz grew from the corner of one eye. The fingers splayed open like a frog’s, moving back and forth as nucleic starter was pumped into the tank. It was grotesque, worse than the flayed smelting children of Archangels; worse than Shiyung’s most addled experiments at geneslaves. Another sign of Âziz’s madness: there was no way Shiyung’s rasa could be presented to the multitudes as Tast’annin had been. They would riot and kill the surviving margravines rather than have such a horrifying reminder of their beloved Shiyung stalking witlessly through the city. A sudden horror seized Nike: that this was how she would end up someday, a gormless thing resuscitated in the bowels of Araboth and then forgotten, left to wander the lower levels with all the other doomed and deathless toys of the Ascendants.

“No,” she whispered. She groped at the banks of switches on the wall beside her and turned back to the tank. The liquid churned inside it, flowing over the top and spilling through grates on the floor beneath. She muttered to herself, then closing her eyes she reached into the vat and grabbed the thick hose that covered the corpse’s mouth. Nike gasped—the flux was freezing cold, viscous; the hose heavier than she could have thought possible. She yanked it once, then again and again, until finally it slipped loose. Then, teeth chattering, she snatched her hands back and looked wildly about the room for something to dry them on. She found a biotech’s robe and wrapped her hands in that, and returned to the tank.

Shiyung’s corpse had risen as the liquid did, and now bumped against one edge of the vat. A milky ichor stained the nucleic starter around her mouth. Fine white threads of tissue streamed from her nostrils and a small hole above one eye. As Nike stared in horror the corpse’s eyelids rolled back, to show pale irises corrupted with tiny yellow spores. It gazed up at her, its pupils mere specks floating atop cloudy green yolks; then suddenly the eyes moved to stare at the side of its tank. Nike shrieked and stumbled backward. More and more starter poured onto the floor, and before she could do anything the corpse was falling as well, pushed by the weight of the liquid bubbling up from the vat.

Nike screamed. The corpse flopped onto its side but otherwise did not move. Its flabby white limbs sprawled across the grates. Its head faced Nike; its eyes remained open, staring blindly at her. A tiny pink delta of flesh, like a kitten’s tongue, protruded from one corner of its mouth. Nike turned and fled, shouting at a startled biotech in the hallway to seal the laboratory until she gave further orders. It was not until she reached the Seraphim’s gravator that she stopped, panting, and tipped the contents of a morpha tube between her trembling lips.

Originally, the Lahatiel Gate was to serve in emergencies only. In the event of holocaust or direct attack by the Commonwealth, the entire population of Araboth could be funneled through the immense steel mouth and evacuated onto the shore outside. An intricate system of gravators fed onto the eastern rim of Archangels where the Gate loomed, arching up and up into the darkness, its ribs and spikes entwined with bas-relief images of ancient janissaries and war machinery, flames and floodwaters, and above all of it the Ascendants’ motto picked out in letters of bronze and jet. When the Gate was open, one could see immediately outside of it a sweeping promenade that led down to the beach, copper pilasters and brazen steps long since tarnished to a moldering green and swept with sand. The sand itself was a different color here than that just a few yards away—dark, almost blackish. It always felt damp, and stained one’s bare feet a rusty color, and it did not glitter in the sun as the sand did elsewhere. It might have been as the moujiks said, that the earth could not swallow so much blood.

From where she stood on the Orsinate’s viewing platform, Âziz would in a few hours be able to look through that gate and down those sweeping steps to the beach, to the pale turquoise water swelling beyond. She would never have admitted it to her sisters or brother, but sometimes she wished she just could open the Gate and gaze out at that calm expanse of white and green and gold. It was a terrible weakness on her part, Âziz knew that. It distracted her, kept her from focusing on the business of ruling the city and dispatching the Aviators on their endless missions against the Balkhash Commonwealth and the Håbilis Emirate. Instead, over the years she had grown increasingly obsessed with her climatic chambers, the engines and programs that allowed her to create rain within the Four Hundredth Room, snow and sleet and even, by means of a series of brilliant lamps, a modest simulation of sunlight. And it was this obsession that had become the chink in her consciousness whereby the dream of the Green Country had burrowed, to haunt her restive nights and now stalk her even during Araboth’s false daylight.

She thought of all of these things as she watched the moujik crews finish polishing the Lahatiel Gate’s elaborate finials and hydrolically charged hinges. In a few hours they would gather here, all the levels of Araboth. As she was each Æstival Tide, she would be struck by how few of them there were, really. Perhaps ten thousand living humans in a city that had been designed to hold a million. And how many of that ten thousand were moujiks, tainted blood? Or sterile marabous like the morphodites? Add another thousand or so rasas , and the more intelligent of the geneslaves, and it still was not enough of a population to warrant the effort and energy expended by the Architects to maintain the Quincunx Domes.

Not to mention the energies of the woman who ruled it. Âziz drew one cool white hand across her brow, and sighed. Each year there were the usual complaints from the cabinets, overeducated anthropologists and demographers who claimed the hecatombs of Æstival Tide were no longer justified. What had begun in the years following the Third Shining as a method of population control, combining elements of both circus and sacristy, had over the centuries degenerated into the timoria, the Feast of Fear. Even with the rasas toiling in the infernal flames and darkness of the refineries, there was scarcely enough of a human work force left to perform those services that were beyond the nearly omniscient powers of the Architects. And so learned persons suggested that it would be better for the city, Better For The People, if the feast was annulled, or its nature altered. There was even talk of doing away with the Redeemer—its terrible appetite could scarcely afford to be whetted on those rare occasions when it was roused from its nearly endless slumber. It was a grotesque pet, really, nothing more; the margravines themselves loathed it and always had, but it belonged to the Orsinate, had been their charge through the centuries like the city itself, and Âziz could not truly imagine destroying it, no more than she could imagine a ten-year cycle without its Æstival Tide.

Because the Feast of Fear was more than an occasion for mere torment and bloodshed, sacral madness and terror. Without the overwhelming anxieties engendered by this brief glimpse of the world Outside, combined with the threat of the Compassionate Redeemer, what was there to keep the people of Araboth from rioting, even from attempting to flee the domes? The Orsinate had very carefully created the machinery of superstition and sacrifice, twisted scientific faith and religious belief in their powers to rule the city. They knew that the Architects were the true powers behind Araboth. Without them the air processors would fail. The tiny but deadly storms that sometimes erupted in the uppermost reaches of the domes would not be dispersed; the water filters would rust and decay. The surgical interventions that provided safe if unnatural childbirth and the rasas’ morbid nativities would become impossible. The Redeemer in its carefully monitored hibernation would wake and sing its demented aria; the geneslaves would turn upon their creators. And finally the domes themselves would crumble and collapse, exposing the city’s vulnerable heart to the firestorms and viral rains that raged Outside.

It was unthinkable, of course. Since the First Ascension there had been how many celebrations—forty? forty-three?—a small number, really. If each feast had been an individual, why there would scarcely be enough of them to fill a room! But they were precious individuals, like the margravines themselves, and their fates were not to be decided by monkish social scientists and religious fanatics.

Âziz gripped the edge of the balustrade in front of her. Far below the viewing platform she could sense a rumbling, not another tremor but the Redeemer turning in its waning sleep. Already the smell of singed roses sweetened the medifac’s noisome air, and Âziz fought the urge to go down to the creature’s cell. Soon enough, soon enough its scent would change, when, hunger appeased at last, it crept back into its cell, and the odor of burning roses faded into that of lilies (said to be the favorite of the Ascendant who had created the monster).

But Âziz’s concerns were not with the Redeemer. She was thinking of what Sajur Panggang had said before he died: that he had programmed the destruction of the city. That, like their Imperator, the Architects had at last turned against the Orsinate; and—like his—that betrayal would be their last.

It did not seem possible. For nearly five centuries the city had stood, impervious to the buffets of gales and waves Outside. Why, not even a drop of rain had ever made its way beneath the Quincunx Domes—

Though it seemed perhaps that was to change. From the floor far beneath her echoed the crash of something falling. A moujik cried out; the viewing balcony shook, and flakes of metal drifted past her. In the uneven light spilling from lanterns high overhead the flakes looked green. They fell in a slow unbroken rain upon Âziz’s head.

Sudden tears seared the margravine’s eyes. She bowed, pressed her head against her hands. It could happen, of course. Sajur was certainly dead, and frightful events had shaken them all in the last few days. There were precedents for this sort of thing— Pompeii choked by Vesuvius, Hiroshima a cindery shadow against the distant mountains, San Francisco swallowed by the no-longer pacific ocean. Cries echoed from far below her, and she clutched the balustrade as it swung, as beneath her feet the flooring whipped as though it were a carpet being shaken. After a moment it subsided, only to tremble again; and at this Âziz wept.

To think these were its final hours: the Holy City of the Americas, the last place upon the continent where the glories of Science still held thrall. She bowed her head against her hands and cried softly, thinking of all that would disappear forever, if Araboth fell.

But after a little while she stopped. She couldn’t afford to waste time like this, sobbing like her sister Shiyung after the execution of one of her lovers. Wiping her eyes, she left, hurried past the Redeemer’s cell and toward the gravator that would bring her to Seraphim’s hangars, where the Aviators guarded their fougas and Gryphons.

Not all the glories of the Orsinate would perish with their city.

Before her imprisonment, Reive had never been on Principalities—she didn’t count the brief excursion from the Virtues gravator to the Lahatiel Gate at Æstival Tide. The level’s very name had always been enough to make her shiver, with its intimations of the Emirate’s ruling legions imprisoned to languish in the fiery darkness. Now she and Rudyard Planck were hurried past tall grim buildings of blackened limestone, quarried when Araboth was still being built by masons recruited from the Eastern Provinces of Colorado and Nevada, the huge stone blocks then dragged up to Level Three by android slaves and work teams from the Emirate. The sight of those windowless fortresses was even worse than the imagining of them. Millions of fossil shells and crinoids were embedded in the limestone, smutted by centuries of smoke rising from the refineries and the caustic airs released by the medifacs themselves. Beneath her feet the ground was cold stone, and there too she saw the imprints of shells and soft tubes, things like ferns and creatures that were all vertebrae or carapace. Reive shuddered, wondering if that was what the ocean was like, Outside, teeming with these worms and larval things, and seashells like eyes closing upon the eternal twilight. In front of her Rudyard Planck ignored the buildings. He padded after their guards in his soft-soled boots and stared resolutely at the ground. The sound of their passage was swallowed by the roar of the medifac engines, their relentless thud-thud broken by the occasional shrieks of steam escaping from a huge valve. Several times deafening reports shook the entire level, and bits of rubble came crashing down from far overhead, spraying them with dust and grit. The floor would shake, and once Reive screamed as an entire huge block of stone reared up from the ground, shearing through a wooden building as though it were made of rice paper. Through the resulting gap in the floor flames streamed upward, and even their guards shouted and fled, dragging Reive and Rudyard after them.

At least, she thought, at least Ceryl was spared this.

Finally they reached the end of the medifacs, the last long low buildings with their hook-hung scaffoldings like gallows thrust against the gray walls. There were greasy black stains on the ground near the railing, where heaps of rubble were dusted with black ash. Tremors continued to shake the entire level, and faint cries and shrieks followed each round of explosions. A little ways down the hallway she glimpsed people milling about the dark entrances of a number of gravators.

Another smell permeated the air here. Roses, thought Reive, but something else as well—like the faint odor of carrion that rose from Zalophus’s tank, or the scent of corruption that hung about a chamber where timoring had recently taken place. She felt a powerful urge to run away, to find the source of that smell for herself—and that was when she recalled the Compassionate Redeemer.

They were nearing its cage. She had managed to avoid thinking of it—easy enough when it seemed at any moment they might be killed by falling stone, or swallowed by some gaping rift. But now they were very close to their final destination, and the thought of what awaited them there made her shudder.

There really was no way out. They really were going to die. She thought of all the tales she had ever heard about the Redeemer, about executions, about Æstival Tide. She felt light-headed, almost giddy: to think that her life had come to this! A month ago she was wandering the halls of Dominations, thinking about scrounging a meal; now she was herself to be offered to the Redeemer as the festival sacrifice. She scratched her head, feeling where the mullah had nicked her scalp. She felt a wave of sorrow for Rudyard Planck, plodding along a few feet ahead of her, his collar pulled up so that tufts of red hair sprouted from it. He was innocent, really; if only she hadn’t met him that day in the sculpture garden!

But then another explosion rocked the city, and she thought of Ceryl’s dream, of the margravine’s and her own; and she knew that there was no escape now, for any of them. Only Zalophus—perhaps he at last had found a way out. Her eyes watered and she sniffed loudly. She thought of running away—it couldn’t possibly be any worse, to die now rather than an hour later—but then she heard a guard shouting at her.

“Hurry up,” he cried, grabbing her arm. “The margravines will be waiting and they can’t begin until you get there.”

They had reached the gravators. Reive craned her neck to see above the heads of the guards pressing close to her, protecting her from the people spilling from the gravators as the doors opened. ’Filers from Powers, heads bowed beneath the weight of their equipment; biotechs from the vivariums in their yolk-yellow smocks, trimmed with green ribbons for the festival. Low-level diplomats and cabal members, trying not to look put out that they had to travel this way, rather than on the Orsinate’s private conveyances. Gynanders and marabous and slack-lipped mantics stepped from Virtues, blinking in the gloom. And, walking slowly through the crowd, rasas from Archangels, silent and pale, their hollow eyes glowing in the dusky light. All of them touched with green: ivy and leaves plastered to hats and vocoders, robes and trousers specially tailored with emerald brocade or grass-green trim, deep green stripes showing against the black uniforms of the Reception Committee. Even the rasas wore bits of finery, remnants of their earlier lives—jade beads rattling around one’s neck, a pale scarf fluttering from another. Reive cried out softly and buried her face in the guard’s shoulder, her small hands clutching at his back. She did not see, therefore, the doors that opened before them—great narrow bronze doors, inlaid with steel studs and spikes and guarded by a phalanx of Aviators.

Rudyard Planck was not so easily disturbed by the crowd, and so he did see the doors, though not for the first time. As an intimate of Sajur Panggang’s he had been this way a decade earlier—although the thought of what waited there made him want to hide his head as well. As the doors swung open the guards padded in, carrying Reive and Rudyard. The Aviators turned and followed them, into a long corridor with walls and floor and ceiling of copper-colored metal, hung with electrified green-glass lanterns that shone like the eyes of great malign insects. Joss sticks were set into small brass burners, gray streams of rose scent snaking through the air. Some of the Aviators stopped and turned their hands in the smoke, raising their enhancers to rub it onto their cheeks. As they passed beneath the electric lanterns Reive heard a faint high buzzing sound, a monotonous counterpoint to the even crack of the Aviators’ boots upon the floor. Perhaps inspired by the funereal atmosphere, Rudyard Planck began very softly to recite the Orison Acherontic. Reive could feel the floor trembling beneath the feet of her guard. Once or twice the electric lanterns flickered, but there was nothing else to hint that the Architects after their long servitude were failing their masters.

Reive found that now, slung over her guard like a naughty child, her terror had eased. A cool and resigned expectation replaced it. She recalled all she knew of the Compassionate Redeemer. Its image crudely drawn in hand-tinted images on long scrolls of rice paper; the many types of sacrificial incense that bore its name, from cheap acrid-smelling joss sticks and incense blocks to rose-stamped lozenges and those elaborate coils dusted with silver nitrate that fizzed and popped and sometimes badly burned the unwary. She was too young to remember much from the last Æstival Tide. She recalled only how she and the other morphodites from the Virtues creche were marched to the head of the Gate and made to sit in a relatively sheltered spot, where there was less chance of them being trampled or thrown down the steps in the festival frenzy. There she had sucked on a marzipan image of the monster, until its sweetness made her teeth hurt and she tossed it down the steps.

Now she turned her head so that the rough cloth of her guard’s uniform wouldn’t chafe so at her cheek. In the distance ahead of them a narrow orange rectangle grew larger and brighter as they approached it. Reive wished she had used her time in prison more wisely, and questioned Rudyard Planck about the protocol of offerings to the Redeemer. The rectangle blazed now, the Aviators’ silhouettes dead-black against it, and resolved into a great door that seemed to open onto a flaming pyre. One by one as they stepped through the doorway the Aviators were swallowed by the blaze. A few feet ahead of her Rudyard Planck raised one small pudgy hand in farewell as his guard carried him over the threshold. Then it was Reive’s turn. As she blinked and tried to shade her eyes from the incendiary light, she thought without irony how strange it was that she was embarking upon a very intense and personal experience of the Feast of Fear, and yet she was no longer afraid.

The Gryphons were housed on the same level as the Lahatiel Gate, on a long spur that hung above the sands below. A worn concrete walkway led to where the aircraft were lined up on a ledge overlooking nothing but endless blue: deep greenish-blue below, pale cloud-scarred blue above. Even with the filters the light was blinding, and Âziz bowed her head to keep from gazing out upon the sea.

It was one of the only parts of Araboth where the domes were clear enough to see through. This was to enable the Aviators to gauge the weather for themselves. A totally unnecessary precaution—a Gryphon had only to extend one of its filaments to measure wind velocity, barometric pressure, precipitation, radiation, atmospheric conditions ranging from the chance of hail to, the varying levels of hydrogen in the stratosphere, possible exposure to mutagens, presence of enemy airships or -craft, and evidence of radioactivity in the Null Zones. The Aviators, however, being proud to the point of hubris, claimed to be able to determine all of these things merely by gazing at the open air.

Âziz made no such claims upon the world Outside. The sight—the very thought —of the ocean looming outside the meniscus made her tremble. To counteract this weakness, on her way here she had pricked her throat with an ampule of andrenoleen. If she was going to travel as an Aviator travels, she would have to control her emotions. Now, as the drug took hold of her, she could feel the blood racing through her heart, and a fiery confidence replaced the fear that usually accompanied her few visits to the Aviators’ stronghold. With the Gryphons, it was most important not to be afraid. A few feet from where they stood she raised her head, teeth clenched so that a skeleton’s grin racked her thin face, and squinted through the brilliance at the aircraft.

There were twelve of them. Each faced the outside of the dome, where the translucent polymer was etched with spray and salt, and the outlines of the skygates glowed cobalt against the bright sky. Once there had been hundreds of these biotic aircraft, a fleet powerful enough to subdue entire continents. Over the centuries, provincial rebellions and incursions by the Emirate and Balkhash Commonwealth had destroyed many of them. The bibliochlasm alone had resulted in a score being torched like mayflies to burn in the skies above Memphis.

But most of the Gryphons had been destroyed since then. In the dark ages that followed the Third Shining, they were lost through the ignorance of pilots who were no longer properly instructed in the command of their skittish craft. Physically, the Gryphons were quite frail, no more than a skeleton and membrane containing the crystals and fluids necessary to establish the controlling link between pilot and craft, and carry the canisters of nerve gas or virus or mutagens dispatched in the Ascendants’ rains of terror. Not until the Second Ascension and the establishment of the NASNA Academy were the lost arts of biotic aviation restored. Then the first generation of Aviators were trained in the arcane methods of controlling fougas and aviettes and man-powered Condors, the solex-winged shuttles of HORUS and, most beautiful and lethal of all, the Ninth Generation Biotic Gryphons, all that remained of the imposing defense structure of the short-lived Military Republic of Wichita.

Of that squadron, only these twelve had survived. Formally, they belonged to the Ascendant Autocracy; but in truth each answered only to its Aviator—the dozen finest of the Ascendants’ troops. And while their pilots were faceless and nameless, grim histories hidden behind their sensory enhancers, the Gryphons were not. Skittish and deadly by turns, it was as though they absorbed into their very fabric—half biological material and half machine—the natures of the men and women who did not control them so much as give them impetus and inspiration for flight.

And so they had been given heroes’ names, and heroines’: Astraea and Zelus and Mjolnir, Argo and Kesef and Tyr, Chao-is and Cavas and Hekatus, Ygg and Nephele and Mrabet-ul-tan. And like heroes between their labors they waited in restless sleep, until Need came to wake them.

As Âziz approached the Gryphons stirred, swiveling on their slender metal-jointed legs until their sharp noses faced her. Filaments lifted from their foresections, silvery threads with a pale rosy blush where microscopic transmitting crystals coagulated in a nucleic broth. They wafted through the air above Âziz’s head like the nearly invisible tentacles of a seanettle, and for an instant she felt one brush her temple. From the front of the Gryphon nearest her an optic emerged on its long tether, and scanned her silently. She stopped, suddenly afraid.

Once when they were children Nasrani and Shiyung and an Orsina cousin had come here and entered one of the aircraft. Âziz had been with them. She was usually the bravest; but something about the Gryphons made her lose heart. At the last minute she refused to join the others as they crept into the cockpit. Instead she stood watching as first Shiyung’s and then Nasrani’s face appeared in the curved glass foresection of the craft, and as they waved at Âziz she yelled back, threatening to call their parents; but then Shiyung had fled shrieking from the craft. Nasrani and the feckless cousin had followed her a moment later, pale and shaken. Minutes later when they sat side by side in the gravator Nasrani giggled uncontrollably, exhilarated by the experience; but he never did tell her what had happened inside.

Now Âziz stood gazing up at the first Gryphon: a machine that resembled nothing so much as a huge and delicately appointed insect. Its sides were a silvery blue that would disappear when in flight; its solex wings were retracted, folded in upon themselves like a bat’s. She could hear the soft churning of its biogenic power supply, feeding from the narrow tanks behind its legs. As she stared at it the others moved closer to her, clicking loudly. Their legs scraped the concrete, their wings rustled with a papery sound that belied their strength. She smelled the ozone smell from their solex shields, the soupy odor of power supplies. In a minute they would circle her and she would lose her nerve. Abruptly she turned to the nearest one, raised her hand and cried aloud a single word command, a name. The other Gryphons did not stop, but the one she faced obediently bent its legs and lowered a small metal ladder for her to climb.

Once inside she realized she should never have used the ampule. She felt as though her heart would explode inside her; she knew her contact with the Gryphon would be affected by the drug. But she couldn’t waste time now. Outside the ledge shook precariously from another tremor, even as she crouched to sit in the cockpit and the other Gryphons clicked noisily, their legs moving up and down as they sought to keep their balance.

Inside there was barely enough room for the standard crew of three. She took the pilot’s seat, cradled in warm leather as it folded about her. In front of her the windshield curved above the Gryphon’s pointed nose. A simple array of instruments was set beneath the window—visual altimeter, old-fashioned computer astrolabe, a line of blinking green lights. The color of the lights seemed an evil omen to Âziz, but she refused to contemplate that either. Instead she pulled her hair from her face, stared at the ceiling with its shining meshwork like webs of frozen rain, and commanded the Gryphon to join her.

She winced as a web floated down to cover her face. It felt cool and slightly moist, and her cheeks and temples prickled as it settled there. Her nostrils filled with the smell of ozone, so strong that she sneezed. Other webs descended to touch her wrists and throat. If she had been an Aviator wearing proper flight attire they would have affixed themselves to her genitals and thighs as well, so that every gesture, every throb of need or desire, would feed back into the craft’s control system, and the Gryphon would calculate all of this in a nanosecond before responding to any command.

If Âziz had been properly interfaced with her craft, it probably would not have responded to her at all; would have dismissed her as not being flight-ready. But Âziz had come armed with a few purloined commands, and these the Gryphon did not refuse.

A moment when Âziz knew nothing. There was a rushing in her head that grew to a roar, then faded. She had a nearly uncontrollable impulse to flee, but thought of Nasrani— he would not have fled!—and grit her teeth. Then,

OrsinaGoAltitudeDestinationTimeFlightNexusKesefOhFourNineteenHoursKesefWaitingWaitingWaiting

She cringed, pressing herself deeper into her seat’s leather folds. Blood filled her mouth where she had bitten the inside of her cheek. The barrage of words and commands continued, along with a stream of images burning across her mind’s eye: clouds, a slash of ocean, flames, and a face black behind its enhancer. Kesef was the Gryphon’s name; the unknown words cues for flight setup and takeoff. Âziz’s mind reeled as the Gryphon began another query loop—

KesefOrsinaLevelTwoWindsFiftythreeKnotsSoutheastSolarActivityRangeOhSevenOhDangerousCraftAlertKesefWaitingWaitingWaiting

An impossibly blue sky filled her mind, fringed with green that reminded her of her dream. Her mouth filled with the muddy taste of nucleic fluid, her eyes burned from trying to focus on the incomprehensibly alien presence she was linked with. Without realizing it her hands clawed at her face, and she felt part of the web tear beneath her fingers, fragile as silk, and felt the Gryphon’s voice grow dimmer. She would go mad if she stayed like this—

She groped at her side until she found a pocket, slid her fingers inside, and drew out a morpha tab. An instant later and she had slapped it clumsily onto her wrist, ripping a piece of the web. The image of green mountains grew faint, then a moment later flared back again. Another moment and she felt the morpha’s first warm calm waves lapping at her spine; a minute later and she could breathe easily once more.

“Kesef.”

She pronounced the name thickly, was rewarded with a spurt of pleasure that nearly overwhelmed the morpha. She knew it wasn’t necessary to speak commands aloud, but when she tried to think them the Gryphon’s presence overwhelmed her.

“Kesef—I need—meet you—hour’s time by Lahatiel Gate—east face—tell no one—”

The shining vision of mountains vanished. After a moment she saw the Lahatiel Gate, the eastern face where a small balcony jutted above the beach, barely large enough for a Gryphon to land. She focused on the image, concentrating until she felt Kesef’s response—

OrsinaKesefOhFiveSeventeenLockgridFiveLevelTwoSecurePathZeroClearedKesefNextCommand

“That’s all!—”

Âziz gasped, tried to clear her mind of the Lahatiel Gate, flashed for a second upon the Compassionate Redeemer pacing in its cage, bit her lip, thought of nothing but blackness, whispered aloud, “Finished— finished—done—”

Her mind went blank. A jolt as she felt the seat gently pushing at her; she had been unconscious. She blinked her eyes open to see the web wafting up from her face, the others floating toward the ceiling like a fine gray mist. Her cheeks felt warm and stung as though she had been slapped. Outside grayish sunlight slanted in long bars across the ground. As she clambered from the Gryphon, struggling with the ladder as her legs wobbled on its narrow steps, the other crafts once more sent their filaments through the warm air to dart about her face. She swiped at them feebly, her head still thick from morpha, and staggered to the gravator that would bring her to the Lahatiel Gate. She did not look back to see the Gryphon Kesef unfurl its great shining wings, raising them in arcs of ebon-gold and green to feel the morning sun.

All things considered, there had been worse things than Reive’s own execution. That dinner party on Thrones, for instance, when a ’filer had gotten into an argument with a member of the Toxins Cabal, over the relative virtues of vivarium-raised fugu opposed to oleander shoots as a means of poisoning a guest. Or the unfortunate dream inquisition when Shiyung Orsina commanded the marabou Scintilla Foot, who was lame and had very poor vision besides, to dance the morgavella on a splintered-crystal tabletop. Or the time she’d gotten lost on Powers and gone for three days without eating.

Actually—they had left the coppery passageway and seemed to be finally arriving at the Lahatiel Gate, and she had had a good deal of time in which to reflect—the only really terrible part had been their journey through the medifacs. Even prison had not been so bad—uncomfortable but not unbearable. Except of course for Ceryl—with a pang Reive recalled her friend’s face bruised and shining with sweat, and felt once again the tears welling inside her; but she consoled herself by thinking how Ceryl had never really been happy, even her pleasant chambers and her position in the Orsinate’s pleasure cabinet had failed to ease her melancholy dissatisfaction with the world.

As if echoing her thoughts a rumble shook the passage, followed by a loud crash. In front of her the dwarf staggered, caught himself, and glanced back in concern at Reive. They were both walking now. Their guards had walked a few feet in front of them; it was obvious their prisoners would not escape. Reive raised a hand reassuringly to Planck and continued onward. She peered about curiously, wondering exactly where they were, and if Ceryl had ever been here. It was blessedly cooler, that was one good thing. She tugged at the front of her linen smock, feeling the sweat dry between her breasts.

“Are we near the Gate?” she whispered. The dwarf stopped to wait for her. His guard trudged on, kicking at drifts of desiccated rose petals and orris root that had been strewn along the ground.

“This is the Path of Atonement,” the dwarf said dryly. The guards glared back at his sarcastic tone, but the dwarf only stared at them with cold blue eyes. “That gateway back there, with the lashes on the doors, that was the Expiation Perron, and in a little while we’ll be at the Narthex of the Redeemer. And that— ”

He paused dramatically to clear his throat and eye the guards with disdain. “ That is where we will meet with the margravines.”

Reive nodded, anxious to seem as though she understood any of this. Rudyard’s words were unfamiliar to her—perron? narthex?—but the thought of seeing the Orsinate again was somewhat stimulating. She knew she should be terrified, at the very least more than apprehensive about her part in the upcoming ritual. But the truth was that everything about the Seraphim fascinated Reive, and horrible as the Orsinate were the margravines held her spellbound. The Compassionate Redeemer was another matter, of course; but then she knew little enough about it. Perhaps it would turn out not to be so horrible. Perhaps Âziz would have a change of heart, and adopt her as the Orsinate’s proper heir….

Such dreamy thoughts—abetted by the narcotic fumes rising from vents in the floor, and intended to calm sacrificial victims traveling to the Narthex—made the gynander lose track of time. More than once Rudyard stopped, staring wearily at his feet; once Reive distinctly heard him mutter something about the inferiority of ostrich leather when wet. The attendant group of Aviators who had preceded them had long since disappeared in the sloping corridors. Reive found herself admiring the artwork covering the high curved walls, scenes painted in metallic colors showing penitents in dark suits and white shirts bowed before tall figures wearing the conical crowns of the Orsinate.

“We really didn’t kill Shiyung,” she said as to herself. She paused to examine a lapis-crowned figure at the end of one panel. It gesticulated frantically at the Redeemer with one hand and made the ward against Ucalegon with the other. She sought vainly for some familial resemblance to the present Orsinate, but found nothing remarkable. “We saw him do it—the rasa. ”

“I know.” Rudyard Planck’s tone was weary, but as he stopped to wait for Reive to catch up with him his eyes were kind. “You don’t seem capable of that sort of thing. Which makes it all the stranger that you’re a pure Orsina. Assuming, of course, that you are.”

Reive shrugged. Their guards had stopped a few yards ahead, beneath a great archway that led into an open area where several brightly clad people were milling about, occasionally peeking expectantly down the Path of Atonement as though waiting for guests. Reive turned, craning her neck to determine who else was following them. She saw nobody. It was not until she and Rudyard stood within the arch, and she could see the excited expressions on the other faces, that Reive realized the anticipated guests were themselves.

“Well!” A tall woman strode toward them, hands clasped, her wrists tinkling with bracelets of tiny glass and silver bells. She had an aquiline nose and cheeks scarified with exquisitely delicate wards against the Healing Wind. “We were afraid something had happened to you!”

She wore long white robes trimmed with gold and green, and a tall chromium mitre that marked her as Archbishop of the Church of Christ Cadillac.

“I will be performing the ceremony this morning,” she explained, waving her hands in a manner suggesting she was blessing them. “Others will assist me—the mullah Alfreize Neybah and High Sister Katherine Mullany—but I’ll be reading your last rites and so on and assisting at the autopsy afterward. If there is one,” she ended with an apologetic smile.

Behind her stalked another, very tall woman in a pale fern-colored jumpsuit, faded and spotted with age but of very fine cut. She looked embarrassed to be wearing green. Reive recognized her as one of the members of the Committee for Ecclesiastical Freedom and Punitive Delight, often to be seen on the ’files.

“The margravines will be glad to know you’re here—the ceremony can begin now, we haven’t found Nasrani but he’ll just be sorry he was late, that’s all,” the second woman said breathlessly. She frowned a little as she looked down at Rudyard’s soiled clothes, then shaking her head turned to Reive.

“This is an immense honor, young person,” she said. She smiled approvingly at the gynander’s shaven skull. “For you, for all of us—there hasn’t been a morphodite offering since Sylvia Orsina’s time. We are all so grateful that we’ve lived to see it—not that any of us wanted to lose Shiyung,” she added hastily as the Archbishop’s long nose began to twitch.

“I think the margravines are growing impatient,” she said, coughing gently. The floor shook again and a fine rain of dust and debris fell from the steel rafters. The Archbishop grimaced and readjusted her mitre, revealing a red line where it pressed cruelly into her skin. “This way, please.”

Reive straightened herself, brushing grit from her scalp, and tried not to look pleased by the Archbishop’s deference. Glancing at Rudyard she saw he was staring sullenly at the Archbishop’s back, but when he saw her looking he gave her a brave smile.

They followed the Archbishop and the other woman, who turned out to be a precentor and quite beside herself at the honor she was to be accorded in chanting the Redeemer’s hyperdulia prior to its release. There were other ecclesiastical types roaming about—several mullahs in moss-green turbans, more representatives of the Church of Christ Cadillac, a number of galli from the Daughters of Graves, even a few of the Orsinate’s own Saints, parading about on stilts and wearing bright green masks of the Redeemer, as well as the entire membership of the Chambers of Mercy. But despite the crowd the space seemed empty and hushed, the stilts making even tick-ticks upon the floor, the other participants whispering as they looked over at Reive and Rudyard and the Archbishop. As they entered the Narthex, with its bronze arches and golden fanlights glowing high overhead and the stench of burnt roses ineffectually masked by clouds of frankincense and steaming bowls of galingale, Reive glimpsed the Quir, the leader of the Daughters of Graves, peering from behind the portable aluminum screens that protected him from impious eyes. When Reive turned to stare he winked at her and waved.

“We’ve never been here before,” she admitted, whispering to the dwarf beside her. The Archbishop had stopped to confer with one of the Orsinate’s personal hagiographers, who waved a vocoder in an agitated fashion.

Rudyard Planck looked up, his blue eyes sad. “I’m sorry you’ve lived to see it now, Reive. It’s not a very happy place, at least not from our perspective.”

“You’ve been here before?”

He nodded, patting an unruly auburn tuft of hair back into place and then straightening his cuffs. “Oh, yes. Once every ten years, and then of course there was the year their parents died—”

He flicked his fingers toward another doorway that Reive assumed must lead to where the margravines waited. “There were two major sacrifices that year. Of course we’re seldom so fortunate that a successful assassination falls upon the eve of Æstival Tide.”

“No,” Reive agreed wistfully. The word sacrifice made her feel unhappy again. She rubbed her bare scalp gingerly, wincing. “They won’t change their minds?” There was not much hope in her voice.

“God, no.” Rudyard smiled at the Archbishop staring back at them. To Reive it looked like he was baring his teeth. “That would mean they were capable of mercy, and there has not been an Orsina capable of that since Simon ez-Zeyma had his twin sons smothered rather than watch them die of the plague.”

“But Shiyung—”

“Shiyung was capricious and anxious to be disassociated from her sisters,” Rudyard said sternly. “Not always a bad thing but certainly not admirable in itself, and certainly not to be confused with mercy. For example, I observed once when she had the eyeteeth yanked from—”

But the Archbishop had turned and was now quite openly frowning at them.

“— must go, discuss this further at the moon viewing tonight on the Fourteenth Promenade,” Reive heard her say to the hagiographer. “Forgive me,” she announced loudly to Reive and Rudyard in tones that made it clear who she thought should be apologizing. At her side the precentor nodded anxiously. “The scribe was inquiring after your lineage. I told him it was immaterial and any genetic anomalies, apart of course from the obvious ones, would no doubt turn up in the autopsy, if of course they’re able to perform one.”

Rudyard bared his teeth again, this time in a manner less suggestive of goodwill. “I still believe that if you contacted Sajur Panggang—”

“Oh!” The precentor looked startled, then smoothed the folds of her jumpsuit and gazed at the floor. “The Architect Imperator is dead. Didn’t you hear? A suicide. He died right in front of the margravines.”

Rudyard Planck’s mouth drooped open and he blinked. “Sajur? But he would never—I can’t imagine—”

Another tremor shook the level. Reive gasped and Rudyard took her arm. The Archbishop and the precentor stared at each other, the Archbishop’s eyebrows raised in concern but not alarm.

“Now that may have something to do with Panggang’s departure,” she announced, turning and heading for a doorway clustered with softly chattering people. “Something else that will come out in an autopsy, no doubt. Now!”

She clapped her hands, the sound echoing like a crash through the Narthex. Several people gathered by the door jumped and looked around nervously. At sight of the Archbishop and her companions they turned and, whispering, walked into the next chamber.

“Good morning!” the Archbishop boomed. “Sister Katherine—”

A plump figure wearing the dark spectacles and green mourning dress of the Daughters of Graves stepped forward, pressing fist to chin in greeting. He was heavily scented with attar-of-roses. “Your Eminence,” he said in a soft high voice, raising his hood to show a round face whitened with maquillage. “We have been waiting.”

The Archbishop returned his greeting respectfully, then swept her arm out to indicate Reive. “The prisoners are here. You may report to the margravines and tell them we are on our way in.”

The galli turned to Reive. He raised his dark spectacles to reveal a pair of bright black eyes, and gazed at her with a near-worshipful expression.

“A true hermaphrodite,” he murmured, shaking his head. “We are so blessed, this offering will no doubt subdue the tumult in the earth….”

His voice trailed off as the walls around them trembled, and he raised his eyes to the Archbishop. “There is talk among the lower levels of fleeing the city when the Gate opens,” he confided. “A residential neighborhood on Powers collapsed two hours ago. They say two hundred died, and more would have been killed had they not already left for the Lahatiel Gate.”

“Mmm.” The Archbishop looked about distractedly. At her feet Rudyard Planck stared up at the galli, and suddenly asked, “Do you think I could have a drink? Some brandy or Amity?”

The galli looked surprised, glancing down at Rudyard for the first time. “Oh! The other prisoner, of course. Yes, I think I could get you a drink. I’ll go tell them you’ve arrived.”

He walked off in a haze of scent. After conferring for a moment with the precentor, the Archbishop turned to the prisoners and gestured toward the door. “Please,” she suggested, and waited for them to pass.

As she stumbled through the door Reive blinked at the sudden brightness and turned to Rudyard. “Is this—?”

He nodded, stepped close enough to take her hand. Behind them the Archbishop and precentor walked slowly, talking in quiet tones. “This is the Narthex proper,” the dwarf explained, waving his plump hand to indicate the rows of bronze columns, chalked with dust and verdigris, leading to a sort of balcony where a small crowd waited. “We’re almost directly above the Redeemer’s pen here, and that viewing balcony overlooks the Gate. When it opens you’ll get quite an impressive view of the sea.”

Reive gazed openmouthed at the ceiling, so high overhead that it hurt to crane her neck. Huge skylights of some tawny glass let in golden light that flowed in glossy waves down the columns and across the copper floor. It was by far the most beautiful place she had ever seen, more beautiful even than the most elaborate vivarium dioramas. Rudyard looked at her rapt expression and smiled gently.

“It is an honor, in a way,” he said, and sighed. “I’ve only been here a few times before—twice in that one year—and so I never had the chance to grow tired of it. And you don’t see the same faces here, either. Mostly religious types that the Orsinate can’t be bothered with more than once a decade. Like them—” He hooked a thumb in the direction of the two walking behind them, the Archbishop’s robes rustling against the floor. “If it wasn’t for the circumstances you might enjoy it.”

Reive nodded. As they grew nearer to the balcony a wind rose, warm and strong enough to send Reive’s linen shift flapping. The dwarf explained, “They’ll be starting to depressurize the area around the Gate. I heard that one year they forgot, and when they opened it hundreds of people were sucked down the steps. Quite a happy occasion for the Redeemer.”

“ Now —”

The Archbishop’s voice sounded unnaturally loud. The prisoners stopped, and Rudyard squeezed the gynander’s hand. “I’m sorry we didn’t have more time to talk about pleasant things,” he said sadly.

Reive gazed at him, her own sorrow suddenly so great she didn’t think she could bear it. She wanted to give him something, something to thank him for being her friend, however briefly.

“Our own dreams,” she said of a sudden. She drew him to her face, close enough that she could whisper in his small pink ear. “We have dreamed of this thing, of the Green Country, and Zalophus told us that the city is falling. But there is something else—”

She barely had time to finish before the Archbishop was there behind them, motioning for them to hurry through the portal.

“—this thing, Rudyard Planck, and it is very strange: in all of this we did not dream of our own death.”

On the balcony that was the Narthex of the Redeemer stood the surviving female members of the Orsinate, surrounded by high-ranking members of the clergy and one or two diplomats. A score of Aviators ranged silently along the balcony rail, their dark masks winking in the golden light. Alone among those gathered here they wore no green, only their same somber uniforms of shining black and crimson leather. There were fewer guests than usual—Shiyung’s murder had cast a pall over the festivities—and the destructive tremors that had racked the city for the last thirty-six hours had quelled some long-planned parties, though others were just getting under way on the upper levels. Âziz wore full Æstival regalia—lapis crown, emerald robes encrusted with metal pointelles and star-shaped cutouts, high collar spiked with stiff hollow skewers of gold and green and sapphire-blue. Stunning raiment, created for the margravines of the Fifth Dynasty, when tailoring briefly eclipsed all other interests in the palace. The vestments were all but un-wearable, and indeed Nike had refused to garb herself in anything more striking than a plain black suit, which admittedly set off her pallor and her crown to good effect. For the last Feast of Fear Shiyung had also forsworn the traditional garb, but Âziz felt that this was a mistake: the populace set great store by appearances and ritual. So after leaving the Gryphons she had spent the best part of an hour being fitted by her handmaid. She had also been careful to wear beneath it all a sturdy catsuit and boots. Since there had never been any need to travel outside the palace she had no traveling bags, but assumed the Gryphon would quickly enough bring her to the safety of one of the nearer Aviator command posts, where she could better equip herself and make plans for outfitting the Orsinate in exile.

Beside her, Nike stared out over the balcony at the throng gathering below. She was unusually silent. Âziz attributed this to morpha, and in fact Nike had swallowed so many vials that her tongue was blue and she had difficulty speaking. But the truth was she had not recovered from freeing Shiyung’s corpse from the regeneration tank. For hours now all she had been able to see, floating between her inner eye and the ghostly shapes of things in the real world around her, was that bloated face and its ghastly staring eyes. And she was unable to stop brooding about the gynander. She was certain it was a thing of ill omen, but whether it would be worse to kill it or let it live, she couldn’t decide. Probably Âziz was right, and the ritual sacrifice to the Redeemer would both propitiate the storm and rid Araboth of an unlucky heteroclite. But still, the gynander was a true Orsina, with as much pure blood as Nike herself; and there were no other heirs. With the entire city shaking all around them like a jelly, it was hard to believe that anything good would come of whatever was to be enacted.

From below came a long wailing cry like that of the muzzein, taken up by the thousands of people gathered at the foot of the Lahatiel Gate. The Redeemer had stirred to full wakefulness. Braziers and incense burners circled the perimeter of the Narthex, sending up spirals of blue and white smoke, and the air was so thick with the smell of joss that Nike breathed through a handkerchief. The Quir had seated himself with two retainers and all three of them hunched over a hubble-bubble, inhaling through long transparent tubes and growing red-faced and giddy in the process. In spite of these precautions the Redeemer’s scent perfumed the air, stronger now and with overtones of ylang-ylang and that civet rumored to drive pregnant women mad. The guards patrolling the crowd were having difficulty keeping people from storming the entry to the Redeemer’s cage. Nike was terrified that one of the nearly continuous shocks battering the levels would send the walls toppling, and free the Redeemer to run amok.

“We should begin,” she said anxiously, raising her handkerchief to talk.

Âziz nodded crossly, grimacing as one of the spikes on her collar poked her neck. “Well, we can’t very well start without the sacrifice, and they’ve only just arrived—”

She pointed to the door. The gynander and the dwarf stood there. With her head shaven and her green shift flapping loosely about her legs, Reive looked like some bizarre overgrown infant. From here the wards tattooed upon her scalp stood out boldly, although the blood made them look crude. A sudden chill swept Âziz. She recalled her dream, the gynander’s high voice as she scryed it and her wide clear eyes, green as shallow water. Perhaps this was not a good thing.

Of course she knew that Reive had not really murdered Shiyung. Even now, Âziz could grant her a reprieve, and condemn the dwarf as sole perpetuator of the crime. But that still left the matter of the gynander’s lineage—a true Orsina, even the less sophisticated scanners had been able to deduct that from her genotype. If Nasrani had been here, Âziz might have conferred with him. But god only knew where her brother had gone—to a party with his crude friends, no doubt. But she didn’t need to consult with Nasrani to know that it was too dangerous to introduce a new, unknown heir to the palace. There would be fawning admirers, and clever cabal members, and ambitious courtesans, all eager to educate a young morphodite and explain to her the many reasons it would be necessary to eliminate her aunts. Especially once word of Âziz’s disastrous dream got out; especially now that the Architect Imperator was dead, and the city falling to bits without him.

No. The sacrifice must take place. The crowd would demand it, and the clergy. Âziz felt distinctly uncomfortable around the latter. She lacked Shiyung’s facile enthusiasms for the new and strange, her unabashed delight in the bizarre rituals that made life on the lower levels bearable to those who lived there. To Âziz, the avatars of the city’s main religious orders—the castrati of the Daughters of Graves, Blessed Narouz’s penitents, even the traditionally stable Church of Christ Cadillac and the Seraphim’s own Saints—all were unhappy reminders of the world’s dark and superstitious past, before the First Ascension began the long centuries of purgative destruction that not only made the sterile domes of Araboth possible but absolutely necessary. Âziz had no religious feelings whatsoever. For her, Æstival Tide was a practical matter, a means of both controlling and satisfying the crowd’s appetite for mayhem; nothing more.

And see where it had brought them. She ticked away a thought, to be mulled over later, in the Gryphon. Wherever she settled next, there would be no festivals.

From across the balcony she saw the Archbishop of Christ Cadillac staring at her expectantly, her lips moving. Next to her the Quir giggled over his hubble-bubble and beckoned several of the Daughters of Graves to join him. Someone had given the dwarf something to drink, and surely that was not permitted? Âziz turned away, annoyed, to gaze down upon the crowd. She wished Shiyung were here. Âziz had never performed the opening ceremonies without her. The balcony shook ominously as she leaned over it, trying to escape the haze of incense. From below a cheer rippled through the throng, and she heard her name chanted.

“Well,” she said hoarsely, turning back and nodding at the Archbishop. “I guess we should begin.”

“Excellent brandy!” Rudyard Planck coughed, as the plump galli poured him another glass from a small flask he had hidden within his robes. “Can this possibly be Roseblood 402?”

The galli nodded, pleased. Rudyard Planck beamed and raised his glass to him. When he saw the Archbishop descending upon him he gulped the rest and hurriedly returned it to the eunuch.

“You’re supposed to be fasting,” scolded the Archbishop. “Where’s the hermaphrodite?”

Reive had tried to edge toward the balcony, to see what was beneath them; but the sight of the Aviators there like so many grim statues frightened her. She ended up near the Quir, momentarily forgotten.

“Greetings, little sacrificial sisterling,” lisped the Quir. He pulled the hookah’s tube from his mouth with a pop. His aluminum shields had been arranged carefully around him, so that his narrow face grinned at her from every direction. “Have some kef, holiest of hapless children.”

“I don’t think it’s allowed,” Reive said, eyeing the hookah doubtfully.

The Quir raised one dyed eyebrow and gazed at the Archbishop glaring down at Rudyard Planck. “If you’ll forgive what is most certainly an unintentioned slur, you and your companion are both rather small to be offered to our most Compassionate Redeemer. Not to mention your stature would seem to have made it a most challenging experience to garrote the unfortunate margravine. How did you do it?” He lowered his voice and leaned toward her conspiratorially.

“We didn’t,” Reive replied anxiously. “Is this it? Are they really going to kill us?”

For a moment the Quir sucked noisily at his pipe, his eyes watering. Then he coughed and said, “Literature pertaining to the rites of propitiation for Ucalegon and Baratdaja state that an unworthy sacrifice is not a satisfactory sacrifice. An innocent person convicted of a heinous crime, such as a margravine’s murder, would no doubt rouse the storm to fury rather than placate it.”

The Quir paused to readjust one of his aluminum screens, smiling at his reflection and displaying two rows of evenly filed teeth. He arched his eyebrows and tilted his head, so that his reflection stared directly at Reive with an expression of gross complicity.

“The Redeemer has no eyes and so must locate its prey by means of its body heat,” he murmured, as though recalling a favored recipe. “A creature without much body mass might successfully avoid capture long enough for the crowd to demand to be released upon the strand, whereupon the Redeemer would be distracted. I have always disliked the margravines, and felt Shiyung to be a dilettante of the first water. Whoever killed her did a favor to those of us who are true believers. May the Great Mother watch over you and protect you in the hours to come. I believe the Archbishop is here.”

His reflection dipped out of sight in a blur of indigo. He raised his hands in a conciliatory gesture, just as the Archbishop appeared behind Reive.

“Come,” she commanded, taking Reive by the hand and leading her to the edge of the balcony. When the flooring trembled she paused, breathing loudly through her nose, but only for a moment. “We are ready to begin.”

Rudyard Planck was waiting at the edge of the balcony, his face a little ruddier than it had been and his eyes brighter.

“I always said that I could die happy if I’d tasted Roseblood 402,” he announced as the Archbishop approached. He sounded rather drunk. “The irony of this would not have been wasted on my dear friend Sajur Panggang, so recently deceased. He would say that a life nobly lived allows no worthy desire to go untasted.”

Reive nodded, wondering at the lack of such savory moments in her own brief career. It had grown uncomfortably hot, and her shift had rubbed her small breasts till they burned. The Archbishop joined Âziz and Nike. The margravine looked distinctly unhappy. She adjusted her mitre and whisked a handkerchief across her cheeks. Then she clapped her hands and the precentor stepped forward, followed by three of the Daughters of Graves. Beside them Âziz shook her head, glaring at Nike. She raised her arms and walked to the end of the balcony. A roar as the crowd saw her.

From where she stood Reive could finally look down upon them. Thousands of people, a tide of green seething back and forth like water sloshing in a tank. When it surged forward, the throng reached almost to the foot of the Lahatiel Gate itself, where a wedge of dour Aviators stood. And now Reive saw that there was a narrow spindly stairway winding down from this balcony to the Gate, a stairway with a worn railing and uneven treads. It began only a few feet from where she stood, and was cordoned off with a heavy velvet rope of deep forest-green, much worn about the middle.

“—when she’s finished speaking you may begin the hyperdulia,” the Archbishop instructed the precentor in a loud whisper. They stood directly behind Âziz and the frowning Nike, and the Archbishop gazed coolly down at the crowd. She did not smile.

Abruptly Âziz dropped her arms commandingly. The crowd grew quieter. There were isolated shouts of “Where is Shiyung!” and “Avenge the margravine — Bring the Healing Wind!” When two Aviators stalked menacingly from their posts, the vast chamber grew eerily and abruptly silent. Âziz adjusted the coder at her throat and began to speak.

“We are today, as we have done many times before, opening the Gate of Araboth to the world Outside,” she began, her amplified voice tinny and shrill. It cracked when she said the word Outside. “As our founding Saints have advised, we will gaze upon the horrors of that world, and as they did, we will turn our backs upon it, and not look upon it again for another decade.”

Scattered applause and cries. Âziz looked a little more confident.

“We will also perform the rites of propitiation against the howling storms that would destroy us, were it not for the vigilance of the Architects. And our sacrifices this year will be dear ones: they have already cost us the life of our sister, our beloved Shiyung.”

Screams at this, and wailing, and many voices imitating the ululating cries of the Redeemer. And then suddenly, beneath all of this came another noise, low at first, then growing louder until it drowned the other sounds. A deep and mournful wail that grew into a shriek, a moaning aria of loss and bereavement and hunger: the song of the Compassionate Redeemer.

Âziz was silent, listening with the others. Alone in that great empty space the Redeemer sang, and she felt the floor beneath her shiver, not from a distant explosion but from the weight of the Redeemer itself as it pressed against the walls of its prison and begged for release. It was a monstrous thing, so hideous to look upon that its creator had gone mad and then been murdered by his own assistant; but it had a human voice, and its sobbing song made it seem that it had human hungers as well.

Tears filled Âziz’s eyes, and she turned to take her sister’s hand. Reive and Rudyard Planck huddled together, the dwarf stroking her broken scalp and murmuring gently. And then a high whining sound filled the air, like the endless note of a tuning fork, so piercing that Reive backed away from Rudyard and stared upward, covering her ears.

The ceiling was moving. So far above her that it was nothing but a silver-gray Crosshatch of steel and glass, shimmering through the smoke like a meditation pattern on a ‘filing screen. The Redeemer’s song wailed on and on, joining with that other piercing note. As Reive stared, a silvery mote like a splinter moved above her; a moment and it had become a steel beam, twisted loose from its joinings and falling, falling, until she watched breathlessly as it passed within a few feet of the balcony with a deep whistle. It fell so slowly that Reive marked where it sliced through the pall of smoke that had drifted from the balcony to hang above the crowd. A moment later it smashed there. There followed screams so anguished she closed her eyes. Still more agonized shrieks, and howls like those of tortured animals, louder and louder until the gynander realized that this was it, the beginning of the Great Fear—the mob had already given itself over to terror. She stumbled to the balcony and gazed down.

The crowd had broken up. The huge beam lay like a silver arrow across fully a third of the floor. Figures squirmed beneath it, and the bronze floor deepened to ruddy gold beneath them. From the corridors streamed more Aviators, and moujiks in green eager even now to transport the corpses to the medifacs.

Beside her the dwarf whispered to himself, his eyes closed in prayer. Reive looked up to see Âziz staring white-faced down at the carnage. Beside her Nike was yelling, her face crimson, but Âziz turned and slapped her.

“Now!” she shouted at the Archbishop. “Do it now! ”

The Archbishop turned and called angrily to the precentor, who stepped forward and shakily began to sing the hyperdulia.

Another explosion. Only dust and scattered debris fell this time, but the crowd surged forward to the Gate. On the Narthex the clergy’s frightened voices joined the others as they struggled to leave the platform. Âziz bit her lip so that bright blood pocked it, then cried, “Enough!” She shoved her way through galli and distracted diplomats until she stood next to Reive and Rudyard.

“Go now,” she ordered, pointing to the rickety stairway. She grabbed the velvet rope and tore it off, then pushed Reive onto the first step. “To the bottom, just go—I don’t care what you do next—”

Reive stumbled, looking back terrified at the dwarf. When he nodded she began to walk very slowly down, step by step.

On the platform Rudyard Planck straightened and brushed flecks of dust from his clothes. At Âziz’s hysterical prodding he raised his head and looked at her disdainfully.

“There is no need for that,” he announced. He took a step, stumbled—the entire balcony was weaving drunkenly from side to side—grabbed the handrail and began to descend a few feet behind the gynander.

As Reive walked the crowd grew quieter, and the sounds of explosions and falling debris seemed to fade. At first the stairway moved so that she clutched the railing, fearful of being pitched from it, but after a few minutes it grew relatively still, only swaying a little from her own weight and that of the dwarf. When she glanced back at the balcony it had also stopped moving. Some of the Orsinate’s party seemed to have gotten their courage back. She saw a nervous g alli and the precentor and Archbishop peering down at her, and behind them Âziz and Nike arguing. As she paused Rudyard Planck walked carefully until he stood beside her on the narrow stairway.

“Where does it go?” she asked; although she could see quite clearly that it led to the Gate.

“It’s for the sacrificial victims.” He grabbed her hand and squeezed it quickly; his was freezing cold. “In years past they sometimes had the hecatombs descend it. It’s amazing it still stands. It’s so they can all see us. The Gate opens, and we go out first, and then they free the Redeemer….”

It did not take very long to reach the end. As they descended the smell of the crowd grew heavier, sweat and perfumes, the odor of petroleum that hung about the Archangels in the refineries, and the metallic scent of blood. Overpowering all of it was the stench of the Redeemer, so intense down here that Reive breathed through her mouth. There was no longer any temptation in the smell: it sickened her, and she almost longed for the Gate to open so that it might disperse.

And then Rudyard was at the bottom, his face very pale, and he turned to help her down the last two steps. As she walked onto the smooth bronze floor before the Gate she felt the silence behind her like a wall, pressing so close that she thought she’d scream. When she looked at the Narthex balcony it was so small and so far away that her nausea grew even stronger. She reached for Rudyard and clung to him, and together they gazed up at the Lahatiel Gate.

It rose, up and up and up, a great bronze wall so smooth and dark it seemed impossible there could be a seam anywhere upon its surface. But then it moved; almost imperceptibly it shuddered as though buffeted from outside by a terrific wind. Reive suddenly thought of Ucalegon, the monstrous storm, and how even now it might be tearing at the outside of the domes. A shaft of pure terror raced through her. The Redeemer at least was something from within the domes, something engineered by the Ascendants and protected for all these years by the Architects. But a storm? She could not even imagine it, only recall the shape of the wards traced upon her breasts and scalp, slender lines coiling in upon themselves, and a wave ringed with teeth. She should have gone with Zalophus, even if it meant being devoured by him; even if it had only been a dream.

She started to step backward, was thinking of trying to flee into the crowd, when from within the breathless silence came a tiny sound, like a child crying. Reive stopped, Rudyard’s hand tight about her own, and listened as the sobbing went on, so faint and heartbreaking that she wept herself to hear it, and heard thousands of other voices catching and crying softly behind her. A gust of warm air brought another rush of the scent of burning roses. Reive raised her head, wiping her eyes to look upon the huge doors before her.

It was as if those moaning sobs were tearing the Lahatiel Gate apart. Reive’s breath caught in her throat. A thread of light appeared, the color of pewter, unraveling from the very top and center of the Gate until it reached the floor. As she stared the thread glowed from dull silver to gold, and then to an angry crimson; widened to a band of streaming red that raced up what had seemed to be a solid wall. The band grew wider, the light fell in a shining band upon the floor and flowed until it met her feet. Reive cried out and stumbled backward.

“What is it?” Her voice was hoarse, scarcely louder than that gentle persistent weeping. “Rudyard, what is it?”

The fiery stream continued to widen, and now the Lahatiel Gate itself was so brilliant she could not have borne to look upon it. It was as though the wall were aflame; but while warm air flowed all around her it was not hot enough for a bonfire. The sobbing moan grew louder, rising to a steady wail that was almost a roar. Behind her the crowd moved, she could hear other voices murmuring, calling out, rising in a steady torrent that at any moment would break and roll forward, to meet that terrifying wall of light.

Because the Lahatiel Gate was gone now: a wall of flaming colors rose where it had been. And of course this was not a wall. It was Outside, it was the World come pounding at the doors of the city.

“ No! ”

Crying out, she tripped, and felt more than heard the throbbing voice of the Redeemer burst into full cry. When she stumbled to her feet again it stood there before her.

It was a moment until she could even see it, she had been so blinded by that irruption of sunlight. And when she did make out its features—spade-shaped head upon long swaying neck, weakened forelegs, tail making a skreeking noise as it switched back and forth above a gaping hole that had opened in the floor—when she did discern that this was, indeed, the Compassionate Redeemer looming above her, she was more terrified for the crowd immediately behind it than for herself. That was before she realized the Aviators had erected an obfuscating field between the Redeemer and the mob. Reive could see them as through a yellow mist, and hear them, quite clearly, as could the Redeemer and the dwarf. But for the moment they were safe where they grimaced and yelled behind the transparent wall.

And Reive, of course, was not.

“Run!” Rudyard shrieked. She could barely see him, a small greenish blur darting behind her. She fell as he grabbed her, then staggered to her feet again. A long wailing cry followed them as she ran, the dwarf at her side, and stumbled down the steps.

“Try to keep down—can’t keep the crowd back forever—doesn’t take much to satisfy it—try to keep down —” he gasped, and Reive tried her best, yelping when she tripped and fell down a few steps. All around her roared a wind, so loud it almost drowned out the wails of the Redeemer. Spray whipped her face as they half ran, half fell down the last few steps, and then Rudyard was dragging her across something soft and hot.

“No—” She staggered to a halt, yanking her arm from the dwarf, and looked back. The Redeemer still stood on the topmost step, its neck glowing rose-pink against the darkness within the domes. That was what struck Reive—how it seemed to be utterly black in there, so dark that she wondered how she had been able to see at all. Shaking, she turned away. And stopped.

Everywhere was a howling emptiness, a rage of color and light that pounded against her. Above them rose the Quincunx Domes of Araboth, so huge they loomed like an immense silvery cloud. The limestone steps from the Lahatiel Gate ran down to the beach like milk poured from an inverted bowl. Waves of sand ripped across the narrow strand, slashing her cheeks and scalp. Beyond the beach was water, heaving in great sheets onto the beach, white and green and a blue that was nearly sable. She cupped her hands around her eyes to protect them from flying sand and turning tried to see where the ocean ended and the sky began, finally decided the sky must be that paler expanse of gray and steely blue. Directly overhead it was the color of Zalophus’s eyes. On the farthest rim of the world, where it swelled against the sea, it was dead black.

“Reive!”

Rudyard’s voice floated to her. She turned slowly, feeling as though she were asleep or already dead. A hot wind raked her scalp, bringing with it the faintest scent of salt roses. The dwarf stood several yards down the strand, an impossibly tiny figure against all that thrashing gray and white. He had cut himself when he fell. Where he clutched his wrist, grimacing, blood glowed ember-bright. His voice drifted toward her in broken gasps.

“Don’t stand still—it will find you— keep moving— ”

Choking, she turned and ran, her bare feet dragging through the sand. She headed for the water, a few yards away. When she looked back she saw the Redeemer gingerly creeping down the steps, head weaving back and forth, long scarlet tongues trailing from its mouth. She turned away and continued toward the water, clutching her side where it ached from running. Her mouth was dry and sour; she stopped to cup her hands in the foaming water around her ankles. When she brought it to her mouth it tasted bitter and warm as bile, and she spat it out again.

“ Reive …”

The dwarf’s voice sounded even fainter now. Wiping her mouth she turned, saw that he had straggled back across the beach, heading for the foot of the steps.

“Rudyard. No. ”

She ran toward him, though it felt as though the sand sucked at her feet with each step. Once she tripped and slashed her thigh on a broken shell. She saw what he meant to do: put himself between her and the Redeemer, lure it to him and give her time to escape. When the dwarf saw her running toward him he shouted frantically, waving her back; but Reive could think of nothing now, she was like a kite cut loose in the wind. The thought of being alone on that strand terrified her; the sight of the waves crashing behind her, that inky stain on the horizon spreading beneath the sky: all of it numbed her so that she could scarcely move. She wanted only to feel something solid against her skin, metal or carven stone or glass, anything but this awful shifting world. She thought she would rather die than endure this horror, but then she saw Rudyard Planck.

He had reached the base of the steps, and stood there forlornly, nursing his bleeding wrist. On the steps above him, perhaps two thirds of the way down, the Redeemer swept its head back and forth. The suckers streaming from its mouth whistled through the air, and its wail had deepened to a low, questioning moan.

The dwarf looked up, craning his neck. When he saw how near the creature was he cried out and fell backward, catching himself on the edge of a step. As Reive raced up beside him she glanced aside and saw the blood spilled across the sand, a broken line that ended at the dwarf’s feet.

“Don’t be an idiot,” he gasped. She smacked him when he tried to fight her off, grabbed him—he was heavier than she’d thought—and pulled him onto her back.

“Hang on,” she said, coughing, bent nearly to the ground. The Redeemer’s cloying scent filled her nostrils like perfumed water and she could see its shadow slicing through the brightness behind her as she tottered toward the waves. Rudyard yelled something in her ear but she couldn’t hear him. She had some vague notion that if she could only reach the water, they could somehow find safety.

Her back ached beneath the dwarf’s weight and her feet slipped on the wet sand, so that over and over she fell, struggled back up, and stumbled forward a few more steps. Looking behind her, she saw the Redeemer stopped at the bottom of the stairs where Rudyard had been, its long suckers touching the steps and sand and then plying questioningly at the air. At the top of the broad steps, within the shadow of the Lahatiel Gate, she could just make out whitish shapes, like teeth in a great dark mouth. The figures of those waiting inside, she realized. They were pressing forward, the oriels must have been removed or else extended to allow the crowd to move farther out, until they nearly crossed into the light. Above the city clouds whipped in gray and white streams, reflected in the domes’ smooth glassy surface; but the sky immediately above Reive was dark green. Funnels of sand churned up the steps, the wind made a steady keen whining in her ears, drowning out nearly every other sound. All this she knew in one quick flash; then she was staggering on again, the dwarf clinging to her fiercely as he gasped, “Down—let me down! ” while behind them the Redeemer shambled across the sand, moaning softly to itself.

They were at the edge of the beach now. It looked solid enough, with just a few inches of foam sluicing across the sand, and then angry blue-black water like molten glass. Reive paused, shifting so that the dwarf could clamber a few inches higher on her shoulders. The wind was so strong it seemed to suck the very breath from her mouth, and she turned sideways to gulp in deep shuddering gasps. For a moment she knew nothing but an overwhelming happiness, to be still and have her lungs full of air again, and to have spray and not sand pelting her cheeks. Then: “Reive—the waves, be careful!”

Something kicked her stomach and she went flying. The dwarf tumbled into the surf. Head over heels she rolled, shrieking in pain as her arm was wrenched, then gagging as water filled her mouth and nose and eyes. She was catapulted headfirst into the sand; something slammed against her side and she felt as though her head were being torn from her shoulders. Then just as suddenly it all stopped. She was sitting up, covered with sand and sea wrack, water streaming across her lap while the wind howled in her ears. Not five feet in front of her the Redeemer crouched over the body of the dwarf.

“No!”

It seemed not to hear her scream, but then she flung herself at it, coughing and weeping as she battered its sides and kicked at its hind legs. The creature raised its head, the long tendrils whipping through the air until they found her. She felt something slash across her scalp, a fiery burning on one cheek. But she had distracted it; as she stumbled backward into the water it followed her. A wave bore Rudyard Planck’s body a few feet inward onto the sand, then swept it out to sea once more.

Another wave knocked her down, though this time she saw it coming from the corner of her eye and she flung herself against the sand, so that it passed over her. A moment later she surfaced, gagging and shaking water from her eyes. Her shift clung to her like seaweed. A few feet to the right the Redeemer reared above her, its long neck swaying as though confused. Reive crouched on her hands and knees, coughing and weeping. She started to crawl away from it, but the waves came on and again she went under, and again surfaced, choking.

There was a roaring everywhere, as of some immense machine bearing down upon the strand. And now rain began to fall—it must be rain, great sheets of water pounding against the ocean and striking her slantwise on the chest. Reive tottered to her feet, swaying as she tried to keep her balance. She was so exhausted that she couldn’t walk. The wind was so strong it nearly beat her back into the surf; she bent against it and took a few shambling sideways steps toward the shore. She could just make out a small form creeping across the sand, nearly lost beneath clouds of spray and whirling foam.

Even as Reive inched toward shore, the Redeemer followed her, but more slowly. It seemed confused: the wind tore at its searching tendrils so that it shrieked as in pain, and its blind head arched back and forth, back and forth, as it sought to find Reive in the fray. And still it wept, an endless moan of hunger and frustration, and crept closer to the struggling gynander.

And then, from somewhere in the furious sea behind her came an answering echo to that cry. Startled, the Redeemer fell silent. The challenging roar came again. Reive turned, too stupefied to flee, trying to shield her eyes from the driving rain. Another wave knocked her so that she stumbled back a step. When she got her balance she squinted until she could see a dark form in the distance, cutting through the water like a piece of the blackened horizon cast adrift. As she watched she heard another roar, and the figure churned closer.

The Redeemer answered it, its wail louder this time and more angry. The wind threw back a sobbing moan. The Redeemer’s head pointed out to sea, twitching on its snakelike neck as though sensing something there. As Reive watched it began to walk into the water, the waves breasting against it until it was swimming, its powerful back legs kicking and its tail trailing straight behind it.

It had forgotten her. At the realization Reive began to cry. Hugging her arms she floundered through the water, knee-deep now and swirling hungrily about her legs. Somehow she made it to shore. She turned and looked back out to sea.

The Redeemer had stopped, not more than a hundred yards from where she stood. Dark waves battered at its sides, and once it dipped beneath the surface, then rose again a few yards to the left. Reive could just make out its wail above the wind, a shrill cry now and fearful. A deeper note called back to it, louder even than the gale. Reive struggled to see what was out there amid the black and churning waves, the water driving down in glassy sheets. Still the Redeemer struggled through the water, its song curdled with rage and terror.

And then a wave like a mountain erupted above the Redeemer, a wave that somehow separated from the sea until it hung in the air above the other creature’s questing form. Reive heard a booming roar that all but deafened her, and from the shore another sound, a scream that seemed to split the world in two as she dropped to her knees in disbelief.

Zalophus.

Even from where she crouched she could hear the report as the leviathan crashed back into the waves, and somewhere behind her a voice that she knew dully must be Rudyard’s. But Reive could only stare at the water, her hands digging into the sand heedless of stones and shells that cut her fingers until they bled, the rain streaming down her cheeks as she repeated the name over and over again.

Zalophus.

He had not lied. The city was falling.

And there had been a way out.

As the storm raged overhead she watched the two of them struggling in the waves, the great whale roaring gleefully as the Redeemer howled and shrieked, and its song was more awful than anything Reive had ever heard; and more marvelous too. Because it was dying; she could see that it was dying. Its tail thrashed helplessly against the waves and its slender neck wove back and forth as the great zeuglodon threw itself upon its flanks, tearing at it in an ecstasy of hunger and fury. Blinding light flickered on the horizon, and a grave rumbling that would have terrified Reive had she been capable of knowing fear. But now only wonder kept her there, kneeling rapt in the sand while the waves stormed about her and she stared out to sea.

Against the viridian sky the Redeemer’s scaled body gleamed faintly, crimson and jet. It flailed helplessly and seemed to be trying to turn, to swim back to shore; but all around it the water boiled eerily white and yellow, while that other immense shadow flowed through the frothing waves, leaping so that it hung like a great black tear against the sky. She could hear the whale shouting to itself, its voice wild and jubilant as it tore at its prey and the Redeemer’s screams grew higher and more frantic. Behind her she could dimly make out other cries, human voices shrieking in horror and disbelief, but when she turned she could barely see the domes through the heavy clouds of spray slamming into shore.

“Reive—Reive, we’ve got to find someplace, someplace—”

A small hand tugged at the slack wet folds of her shift and she looked up to see Rudyard Planck, soaked and bruised but with eyes feverishly bright.

“Hurricane!” He coughed, bending over as water dribbled from his mouth. “Might escape—go inland— run —”

She shook her head, turned back to look out to sea. The roar of the storm drowned all other sounds and the glaucous air was nearly too heavy to peer through; but she could just make out a slender silhouette moving convulsively in the murk, and then a darker shadow rising from the sea to engulf it. For an instant she thought she heard a voice bellowing joyfully in the maelstrom, a sound like singing from the waves; her own name carried faint as a whisper from the frenzied throat of Ucalegon.

Chapter 10 THE WOMAN AT THE END OF THE WORLD

IN THE DARKNESS AHEAD of them Hobi saw a curl of light, at first so insubstantial it might have been a mote dancing in his eye. But after a few minutes the speck grew to a flickering wisp of green flame, and then to a tear in the black fabric all around them; and finally it became a jagged hole that grew larger and larger as they approached.

Hobi thought he might never forget what that hole looked like. His first sight of anything other than darkness, after so many hours of trudging through the tunnel. Sometimes he closed his eyes to see if there was any difference between what he saw then and what he glimpsed when they were open. There was not, really. Nefertity’s cool blue gleam had faded, until only her eyes glowed, silvery green like a cat’s. She had finished reciting the long story she’d begun back in the chamber with the replicants. Hobi was unhappy with the way it had ended, and since then they both walked without speaking—though he wondered if they would be able to hear each other if they did try to talk. In the distance the sound of explosions continued, but too far away now for him to feel them rock the passage. The rhythmic throb of the ocean roared and shushed, echoing through the tunnel like the breathing of a leviathan. Without meaning to Hobi had begun walking in time with that relentless beat, his feet thudding against the ground. Something softer now beneath his boots—he had paused once, and stooped to find sand, sifting cool and dry as ashes between his fingers.

The air had changed too. A strong wind blew through the tunnel. As they grew nearer to the opening Hobi saw that what made the light appear to flicker were numerous fluid shapes moving back and forth across the entrance, like pennons snapping in the wind. He hesitated, let Nefertity continue on ahead of him.

For hours he had prayed for some kind of light, for an end to this night journey. Now that they were nearly there he was overwhelmed by a terror so strong that his hands shook uncontrollably, and he half crouched, grabbing his knees and squeezing until his fingers grew steady again.

“I can’t, I can’t,” he whispered. The wind pouring through the passage was warm almost hot; still he shivered, drew his hands up, and clasped them around his neck. His hair had matted in heavy clumps against his shoulders. He thought of turning and fleeing back down the tunnel, of leaving the nemosyne to wander out there alone. He knew he would never be able to find his way back again; knew that, even if he did, he might find nothing but ruins, all of Araboth wrecked as Nasrani’s secret chamber had been.

But he could not go on. How could he go Outside, knowing what he did: that to do so would make him go mad, that he would be crushed beneath the waves of light and sound waiting out there? The hot smell of the wind sickened him, thick as it was with other things—brine and dead fish and a sweet fragrance like roses. “I can’t,” he whimpered again, and sank onto the sand.

“Hobi.”

He looked up to see Nefertity. The light weaving down from the end of the tunnel touched her with gold and green. Her fingers as they brushed his cheek were cool. “Hobi, we are almost there. Outside. We will be free.”

“ Free. ” He shook his head. “I can’t, Nefertity, I can’t! I’ll die out there—”

“But why? I detect little radiation, certainly not enough to kill you. And there seems to be lush vegetation at the mouth of the tunnel, so the earth is not contaminated—”

“No!” He drew his knees up and covered his head with his hands. “You go—I would rather die here, or go back—”

Nefertity’s eyes glittered and she shook her head. “I have seen this before. With Loretta. Too much time alone, inside. It makes human beings go mad.”

Hobi gave another croaking laugh. “You’ve got it all wrong—it’s that, there—Outside— that’s what drives us mad. That’s why the domes protect us, why we never go out except at Æstival Tide—”

“But you told me it is Æstival Tide now, Hobi. You said that at Æstival Tide it is safe to go Outside and look upon the sun. You said the feast began at dawn, whenever dawn was. So you will be protected.”

She turned to gaze at the tunnel’s mouth, and Hobi looked up at her in despair. Shafts of golden light made it impossible to see anything except for her silhouette; but for the first time it seemed that it was a woman’s profile he saw there, the sharp edges and silver lines of her cheeks and jaw softened by the sun. Even her eyes grew softer, darker, their eerie glow melted to a gentler green. She was so beautiful that for a moment his fear trickled away.

“Æstival Tide,” he whispered. He had forgotten what day it was. It seemed weeks since he had told her about the Feast of Fear, but of course it had only been yesterday. The nemosyne turned to gaze back down at him, and as the shadows once more struck her face the vision of a woman was gone.

“Perhaps once we get Outside we will be able to see your friends, and you can find your way back inside your city.”

Hobi nodded. His fingers relaxed and he sighed, let his hands drop to feel the cool sand. This is what he had wanted to do, after all. Have an adventure. Find the nemosyne and leave the city. It seemed like a child’s dream now, stupid and dangerous; but he had done it nonetheless, and in a way it was something to take pride in. And surely nothing was irrevocable—even now, revelers would be gathered beneath the Lahatiel Gate, and he could find someone there to help him, Nasrani or even one of the margravines. He pushed himself up, brushing sand from his trousers.

“All right. Nasrani will be there, and my father—”

Though in his heart he knew that his father would not be there, at least not with the margravines upon their viewing platform. “Let’s go,” he ended hoarsely, following Nefertity. And with each step that brought him closer to the sunlight his dread grew, until he stood within the tunnel’s very mouth, blinded and battered by a hot fecund wind; and crying out, he fell to his knees, bringing his arm up against his eyes to protect him from the horror of the world Outside.

Tast’annin never tired, but there were moments when Nasrani was certain that he had fallen asleep, and walked dreaming with that fiery angel at his side. Once he woke to find himself in the rasa ’s arms, being carried through a passageway where water gushed from a break in the wall and swirled about the rasa ’s knees.

“Please, I can walk,” he protested weakly; but the Aviator shook his head.

“It is too strong. The current would sweep you away.”

So Nasrani clung to him like a child. He gritted his teeth against the heat radiating from the rasa, burning through his damp clothes until they steamed and filled his nostrils with the smell of sweat. At last the water fell behind them. The tunnel began a slight incline, and the rasa paused to let Nasrani clamber from his arms, puffing and wiping his face with his soiled handkerchief.

“Are you sure this is the right way?” he demanded, hurrying after the dimly glowing form.

“It is the only way now.” The Aviator Imperator’s voice drifted back, echoing sharply. “And even here the walls are failing. Soon the entire Undercity will collapse, and then one by one all the upper levels will fall.”

Nasrani’s breath came in short gasps. He felt an anxious jab at his heart, and patted his greatcoat vainly, looking for a morpha tube. “But why?”

His tone sounded shrill and whining. He paused to catch his breath, then called again, trying to sound calm. “Why, Margalis? Why destroy the city? Who would do this? Who could do this?”

“Why?” The rasa’s voice sounded almost amused, and he halted, turning to wait for Nasrani to catch up with him. “Because it is an abomination. Because it should never have been created in the first place.”

Nasrani put out a hand to steady himself against the tunnel wall. By the rasa’s dull crimson glow he could see another crack forming, spinning out across the concrete like a spider’s thread thrown against the air. “Don’t be absurd, Margalis,” he said testily. Exhaustion and hopelessness had nearly driven out his fear of the Aviator Imperator. “No one would have survived Outside all these years—the domes were our salvation—”

“The Orsinate should never have been saved. Better for all of us if they had died four hundred years ago. As to who could destroy the city…”

Tast’annin shrugged. Dark lines shadowed his face, and he looked away, down the length of the tunnel. “I would destroy it, had I the power to,” he said softly. “All of them: I would see all of them dead.”

Nasrani shuddered, ran a hand across his brow. “We’ll see ourselves dead soon enough, if we don’t find our way back to a gravator.”

The Aviator started walking again. “You’re a fool, Nasrani. I told you, Araboth is collapsing. Soon the Undercity will be buried, and Archangels, and the medifacs, all the way up to your precious Seraphim. If this passage doesn’t lead us out somehow, you will die here.”

Nasrani nodded curtly but said nothing. I will die here, he thought, but what of you? Can the dead die twice? Do the dead dream? He gave a bitter laugh, and the rasa turned to stare at him with its coldly human eyes.

“You are not afraid. That is good.” He pointed down the length of the tunnel. Very far away a pinpoint of light showed in the spiraling void, so small it might have been something Nasrani imagined, drawn from the darkness like a minnow from black water. “I think that is where the tunnel ends. I can hear them, down there—”

Tast’annin cocked his head. Nasrani could hear nothing save the hiss and roar that had grown gradually louder the farther they went. “Yes,” the Aviator said at last. “It is the end. They have left us at last, they have escaped from Araboth.”

“Escaped,” Nasrani murmured. A warm wind chased down the passage and dried the hair on his neck. “So will we escape, to go mad or be consumed by the sun.”

“The sun is not poisonous. You know that, Nasrani, you have been Outside.”

Nasrani shook his head. “Only for a few hours…”

He shuddered at the memory. “It smelled—it smelled of water, and something else. I don’t know what. A horrible smell.” He pinched his nose, squinted at the fleck of light far ahead.

“Things growing.” The rasa’s face leered back at him. “That is what you smelled, Nasrani. Milkweed and cholla and evening primrose, huisache and mesquite and rugosa roses. You will smell them again, soon.”

The thought made Nasrani’s stomach churn. He stumbled on in silence, the tunnel’s cracked cement floor giving way to sand beneath him. In the distance the light grew larger, until the rasa’s shadow staggered on the ground in front of Nasrani and his own shadow danced across the broken walls. The unbearable heat gradually became bearable—a different sort of heat, less painfully intense, wind-borne and salt-scented.

The Aviator Imperator continued tirelessly. If anything, his steps hastened as they grew closer to the end of the passage. Nasrani watched him with a sort of detached curiosity, as one might regard a replicant performing a difficult task.

Finally he called out, “Why do you want to see her? Why is it so important to you?”

The rasa did not slow his steps, but when Nasrani called out again he stopped and turned to him.

“Why?” Nasrani ended, a little brokenly. He looked up at the rasa, then shrugged and gave him a hopeless smile. Aqua light washed over them from the tunnel opening, shot with gold and darker green. Without the thrash of the festival drums, the clamor of the gamelan at the Lahatiel Gate to mute it, the sound of the pounding waves was brutally loud. Nasrani’s ears hurt and he rubbed them fitfully.

“You told me when you discovered it that the nemosyne had been linked with an archaic religion.”

Nasrani nodded. “Yes, that’s right. The American Catholic Church. Mostly women—she had been programmed by a woman, her files are mostly women’s histories, mystical nonsense. She would be of no use to you, Margalis.”

The rasa shook his head, gazed at where the light streamed onto the sand. “Oh, but she would be,” he said. “You see, I saw something very interesting in the Capital. I saw a new religion being created—or, rather, a very old one being resurrected. It was an— unusual —experience. And I also found the ancient weapons storehouses there. Had I not been killed in such an untimely fashion, why I might have resurrected them as well.

“And later, when I found myself back among the Seraphim, well I thought of you, Nasrani, I remembered how excited you were with your metal woman. You invited me, once long ago, to go with you to see her—in a weak moment, of course, you might not even remember. I think we were drinking Amity with your sister Shiyung, and after she had left us you were feeling rather grand. I refused, because I wanted to follow Shiyung—”

A break in his voice. Nasrani flinched and started shuffling forward again, wishing he had said nothing.

“—but now I wish I had accepted your kind invitation. So think of it this way, Nasrani—it is a few years later, but what’s a few years between old friends?”

Nasrani tried to twist his grimace into a smile. A moment later he felt the rasa beside him again, his heat also seeming to dissipate as they left the Undercity behind them.

“There is another reason,” Tast’annin said after a few minutes. “Manning Tabor at the Academy used to talk about the nemosyne network. He claimed to have deciphered computer programs, records that revealed where the original units had been deployed. I scoffed at him then, but now I realize he must have been right. He said there were military units still active in the United Provinces, and one or two that were rumored to have been captured by the Commonwealth after the Second Ascension. There was a master unit that controlled all of them, or could control them all if it was activated. The Military Tactical Target Retrievals Network. Your sister consulted Tabor at length about it. She thought it might be located in the ancient arsenal in the old capital. That was why she sent me there. I searched for it but I found nothing, there was no indication that it had ever been there.

“But I think that your nemosyne might have knowledge of this unit, if the nemosynes were truly linked at some point. If you could activate your nemosyne to search for them, you could locate the other existing units anywhere in the world. One could control them—control the military forces they control.”

Nasrani’s head ached; he scarcely focused on Tast’annin’s words. He stared at his feet, shading his streaming eyes with his hand. A few feet in front of them the sand glittered dazzlingly white. Brilliant blue light danced at the edges of his vision.

“What difference does that make, if Araboth is falling around us?” he shouted above the din of the waves. “If you’ve killed Shiyung, and the rest of us are going to die anyway? What possible difference could it make for you to find this master nemosyne?”

He stopped, swaying, and with one hand clutched his stomach. Nausea gripped him; he hardly had the strength to look at the rasa stopped beside him. “Margalis!” he pleaded. “Don’t—you can’t leave me like this, you can’t go—you’ll die out there—” He sank to the ground, fingers scrabbling at the sand.

The rasa ’s glittering blue eyes regarded him with utter contempt. “Ah, Nasrani,” the Aviator Imperator pronounced. His voice rang dispassionately as he walked away. “Now I see that you truly are an Orsina: that is, an utter fool.”

He left the exile kneeling in the entrance to the tunnel, and stepped out into the sunlight.

Hobi screamed, his voice torn from him and flung into the wind that came flying across the water. Overhead other things screamed as well, scraps of cloud or perhaps the raging tips of waves thrown against the sky. It was not until Nefertity knelt beside him and laved his forehead with water, until he dared open his eyes again, that he looked up into the sky and recognized those shrieking rags as birds.

“Hobi—Hobi, it’s all right, it’s only the sea—”

He tried to hear something else; strained to catch beneath the ceaseless chant of the waves another song—the grinding of the Gate as it opened, the screams of the crowd spilling down the steps onto the thirsting sand; the long moaning wail of the Redeemer awakened from its year-long sleep. But there was only this horrible sound, gentler now than it had been when it echoed through the tunnel but no less terrifying, and stabbed with the harsh cries of the gulls.

“Hobi, please. Open your eyes and try to stand—we have to leave this place, we are too near the water. A storm is building, we must go to higher ground.”

He coughed, pushed her hands away, and finally sat up. When he opened his eyes the light was so painful that he cried out again, would have buried his face in his hands except that Nefertity took him and pulled him close to her, until feeling her cold steel enveloping him he took a deep breath and nodded.

“All right—I’m all right,” he whispered. He wanted never to move from her, the chill kiss of smooth metal and glass upon his cheeks and arms. But she pulled away from him. He stared down at the sand beneath him, every shade of brown and white, pinked with broken cowries and wing shells and crescents of green and brown glass. A tiny object like the limb of one of Nasrani’s emerald monads glistened beside his ankle. He picked it up and stared at it, still not daring to raise his face to the sun. It was the leg of some small creature, jointed like a server’s leg, but hollow and light as a straw and ending in a tiny flattened fin. It came to him suddenly that it was the leg of a crustacean, like one of the crayfish or prawns he had often eaten at banquets on Seraphim. A real animal, one that had never seen the inside of a vivarium tank. Something that swam in the water flowing and receding a few yards from where he crouched, and hunted there for creatures even smaller than itself. Hobi let the leg slip from his fingers to the sand, and leaning forward he vomited upon it.

Afterward he felt better. Nefertity had stood so that her shadow blotted the sun from his face, and waited silently for him to rise. He did so, his arms flailing at the air until the nemosyne caught him.

“I can’t—it’s too big—”

She waited until he grew calm again. The water pulsed relentlessly against the shoreline, stretched out before them without end: blue, green, white. He did not think he could stand to gaze upon it, it seemed so raw; but he forced himself to look. Just for an instant. Then he turned and stared down the beach, to where the Quincunx Domes rose shimmering above the sea.

“God—look at them!”

He shook his head and took a step away from the nemosyne. During the last Æstival Tide he was always conscious of the city behind him, but then it had seemed more like a solid wall, a buffer between sea and sky, too huge for any detail beyond the black maw of the Redeemer’s cage and the lapis-crowned figures of the Orsinate waving from their balcony. From here the domes looked both smaller and more impressive. He could see the two domes nearest him, and rearing above them the central Quincunx Dome, glittering with a dark greenish cast, pocked everywhere with irregular black indentations. A large curved rectangle in the central dome would be one of the skygates. As he stared it began to grow darker at one end, and a minute later a fouga rose from it, small and delicate as a bubble in a water-pipe, and trailing festival pennons like colored threads in the breeze.

“Hobi.”

He looked back, startled. He had forgotten the nemosyne, forgotten where he was. An awful vertigo as he tried to focus on her amid all that gold and blue; then, amazingly, he found that he could do it. He could look at her, he could even walk back, dizzy but no longer nauseated.

“Hobi, look at the horizon.”

He looked behind him. He hadn’t noticed before the jagged green shapes spurting everywhere opposite the sea. Trees, he realized, trees and bushes. But then Nefertity took his hand and pulled him, gently, toward her.

“No, not there—the other way, the horizon, see? That line at the end of the ocean.”

He turned obediently and looked where she pointed. At the rim of the world, above the unbroken line of blue and turquoise water, seethed a blurry darkness, immense as the sea itself. The whitish sky ended abruptly where it met this livid wall. He remembered looking through ’files in his father’s library, hearing one of his friends describe a trompe l’oeil garden he had once visited on the vivarium level, and what he saw shimmering there.

Mountains, he thought in amazement. He turned to Nefertity. “Mountains!”

She shook her head. “No. Clouds, Hobi, it’s a storm—”

“Clouds?”

It was the first time he had ever spoken the word aloud, and he said it again, staring at the line of black and gray advancing steadily above the waves.

Clouds. A storm. Just as the moujiks had always predicted. Ucalegon, Prince of Storms. The Wave will take you.

Suddenly he laughed, laughed until he had to stoop, holding his ribs as the air swam about him, white and gold and green. He laughed so long and so hard that Nefertity’s eyes darkened from jade to emerald, and her body glowed in alarm as she plucked his sleeve and called out to him fruitlessly. Finally she grabbed his arm and started dragging him down the beach, the two of them stumbling through the sand. And still Hobi turned to stare back at the ocean and what loomed above it, that cinereous wall more massive than the domes, more massive than anything he could ever have imagined; he stared at it and laughed on and on and on, and the gulls banked above them, keening in the wind.

When they reached the edge of the beach he finally calmed down. Here trailers of greenery laced the sand, vines overgrown with flat yellow flowers that smelled sweet and whose hearts hid creamy spiders like pearls. Hobi took off his boots and socks, wincing at how hot it was. After a few minutes he pulled them back on again, swearing as he picked sand-spurs from his soles. Nothing grew on the stretch of sand between Araboth and the sea, but where the sand ended the jungle began. He had never before seen anything like this tangle of jade and brown and yellow, moving in the stiff wind, and the bursts of crimson and iridescent blue exploding from it as they approached.

“Those are birds,” Nefertity explained. She sounded rueful. “If I were a zoological unit, I would know their names.”

Hobi nodded. Already he recalled his other self—the self that had nearly been incapable of leaving the tunnel, the self that had crouched retching upon the sand—as he recalled his mother; someone precious but irredeemably lost. The air was so choked with smells that breathing was like eating—great gulps of roses and brine, a scent like carrion that turned out to be the fragrance of trumpet-shaped blossoms twining round a tree; the smell of the tree itself, heady with leaves and the spiciness of its decaying bark. He slashed at a branch with his hand, sending up a cloud of black and golden wings like sparks. Butterflies, he knew that from the vivariums. Birds and butterflies, and a dead crab’s leg. He would have rushed headlong into the thicket if Nefertity hadn’t stopped him.

“Higher ground, Hobi.”

He turned to her, aggravated. “How do you know all this? ‘Higher ground,’ ‘It’s a storm’?”

Her wide eyes gazed at him unblinkingly. The soft whir of circuitry echoed the waves behind them. “Loretta. Before our exile I went with her when she traveled, and she always spoke to me. And I know from my programmed histories. If we are where you say we are, that is a part of the country that was plagued with hurricanes long ago. After the Shining of the Second Ascension the weather patterns changed, and it was besieged by tidal waves.”

She pointed, far above them and inland, where a shadow rose in an uneven cusp against the blue sky. “There—that is high ground. We should try to go there. If we walk along the shore we may find a path inland, or running water. The woods here are too overgrown for us to pass through safely.”

Hobi fell silent, nodding, and trudged after her along the strand. His first ecstatic joy was fading. Hunger and thirst made his head ache. The sun beat down on him like a block of stone. Bits of old stories came back to him, of ghouls that lived Outside, the remnants of men who had been stricken by the mutagenic rains. The thought made him hurry behind Nefertity.

Once, he stopped and looked back down the beach. It seemed they had been walking for hours, but the gleaming curves of the domes seemed no more distant than they had before. Only the shape of the shoreline had changed, and the dark silhouette of the storm clouds. They filled most of the sky above the ocean now. The wind blew stiffly in from the sea. Great sheets of sand tore past him, tearing at his mouth and eyes and seeming to burn through his clothes.

He raised his hands to shield his face as he looked out to sea. The waves had grown bigger. They smashed against the beach, sending up plumes of froth and a dark spray of sand and broken shells. The wind had a different smell now, too. Different from the cleansing scent of the ocean, almost stagnant, as though from somewhere far away the clouds had sucked up fetid pools and carried them here. Even the air seemed heavy and moist. Hobi spat to get the taste of salt and grit from his mouth. The sun bulged from the clouds, luminous, faintly green. When he turned back to follow Nefertity he saw that the jungle of trees and cactus growing along the shore glowed with an eerie yellow light. Shells crunched beneath his feet. The bigger conches cast strange shadows across the sand, and his steps disturbed small things that raced to burrow into the scar.

It must have been several hours since they first peered Outside. The tor that was their destination no longer seemed so far away. Overhead the gulls had grown all but silent, wheeling fretfully and occasionally diving into the waves. From the trees came a constant rush of wings. He looked up to see dark shapes arrowing against the sky, heading inland. Once or twice he halted and tried to make out some sound from the direction of Araboth, but there was nothing, only the pounding waves, and the wind stinging his ears.

When he looked up he saw that Nefertity had stopped to wait for him. The ground at her feet was brighter than it was elsewhere. As he approached he saw that water poured in a narrow stream from the woods down to the sea. He ran the last few yards, stumbling to his knees in the shallow water and drinking greedily. Then he lay on his back, letting the stream pour over him until his clothes were soaked and his sunburned face soothed. He stood, flinging back his long hair so that it hung heavy and wet on his neck.

“We can follow this,” Nefertity said. She pointed to where the woods opened up on either side of the stream, vine-hung trees and rosebushes giving way to cactus and small gnarled trees covered with papery, dull-orange flowers. “It might lead us up to that hill. At least we will be inland when the storm hits. If we hurry.”

He glanced back at the domes of Araboth. They reflected the darkening sky, the sun a white blister on the curved surface. He knew now that he would never go back. Something inside of him had broken, a connection that had once tethered him to his parents, his dead mother and mad father, but now was gone. He felt fairly certain that he would die out here, and sooner rather than later; but if what the nemosyne said was true, if the city really was crumbling, then he would have died anyway. At least now he had seen the city from Outside, a sight only the Aviators had ever glimpsed from their Gryphons; and he had walked with a nemosyne, a creation from the First Days, and heard her speak with the voice of a woman centuries dead. Not even Shiyung Orsina had ever done all these things; not even Nasrani. His exhaustion eased somewhat at the thought. He started walking up the middle of the streambed, the wind sending his damp clothes flapping against his feverish body.

The stream coursed through a ravine that grew deeper and narrower the farther up they climbed. Nefertity walked alongside it, picking her way faultlessly among rocks and shattered blocks of limestone that seemed to be the remains of some huge building. Eventually Hobi had to clamber from the stream and join her. While shallow, the water flowed faster here, and it grew more difficult to keep his footing on the moss-covered stones. The sun passed fitfully in and out of the clouds, clouds so dark that the light seemed more like that inside the domes. The spindly trees cast shadows of an inky blackness against the green sky. As he stumbled through prickly pear and thorny underbrush birds flew up in a flurry of squeaks and trills, and once he nearly stepped on a fistful of yellow bees clustered on a rotting log, too lethargic to fly or sting him.

Nefertity cautioned him against speaking—“You will grow too tired, we must reach higher ground before the winds strike.” His head and body had resolved into one great pulsing ache. Several times he paused to lean over the ravine and drink, and pull bright red fruit from the prickly pears—not as sweet as those grown inside the vivariums, but something at least to fill his stomach.

“Hobi—look—”

He turned from where he crouched beside a cactus knobbed with fruit. Nefertity had disappeared. The monotonous vista of twisted greenery and dun-colored thornbushes stopped abruptly a few hundred feet in front of him. He stood, catching his trousers on a cactus spike, and pulled away heedless of the tear on one leg. His ears hurt from the wind battering at them. When he looked behind him he could see nothing but a dense web of green and brown. Ahead of him the trees fell back, so that it was mostly cactus and spare brush that had been tortured into anguished shapes by the relentless wind.

“Hobi, here—it’s the top of a hill, there’s something here—”

He hurried after her, sliding through a loose scree of pale limestone. He fell once, cutting his hand on something. When he drew his bloody fingers back he found a wedge of metal buried in the dry soil, bright blue and yellow, with teeth painted on it. It glowed eerily in the aqueous light, and Hobi shivered as he tossed it away.

In a few minutes he reached the top of the promontory. The wind was so loud that he covered his ears. When he tried to stand he nearly fell over, buffeted by air blasting warm and strong as from a huge oven.

Nothing grew here. He stood at the edge of a flat plateau that stretched perhaps a mile across, rimmed with stunted cactus and a few sturdy mesquite. Odd shapes littered the barren landscape, some of them big as houses, others smaller, like toppled statuary. Through it all the stream ran, a dull thread nearly invisible beneath the lowering sky.

“What is it?” Hobi shouted, but the wind ripped his words into a whisper. He turned to look behind him.

Under a range of black and umber clouds roiled the sea, so distant that he gasped to think they had climbed this high. From here all of Araboth could be seen, rising straight above the sand on a peninsula barely large enough to contain it. The small lip of sand beneath the Lahatiel Gate glittered in the ominous light, and glints of blue and gold flickered from the spires of the Gate itself. But elsewhere there was scarcely enough sand to keep the water from lashing at the foot of the domes. Even knowing nothing of its history, Hobi realized that it could not always have been like this. Erosion, or some natural disaster unmarked inside the domes, must have gnawed away at the sands surrounding the city. Otherwise how could it have been built there, with the waves coursing so near its fundament? An awful vertigo seized him—to think he had lived there all these years with the ocean lapping right there, with nothing but that fragile shell to protect him, and the vigilance of the Architects. He swayed, and would have fallen but for a cold hand clenching about his elbow.

“Hobi, come with me. There is shelter here.”

Reluctantly he let her drag him away, his eyes fixed upon the vision of the domes like five clouded eyes set into the sand, the water churning around them and casting up long streamers of white and green beneath a somber sky.

The wind howled so loudly that they did not try to speak. An overpowering reek filled his nostrils, like water clogged with blossoms. Even with Nefertity gripping his arm he stumbled—the ground was uneven, covered with sharp stones that cut through the soft soles of his boots. But when he looked down he saw that they were not stones, but bits of metal and glass, some of them worn smooth but others sharp and rusted as though just torn from some huge machine. And they were all brilliantly colored, red and yellow and green and blue and orange, and striped or spotted or laced with intricate designs. He saw fragments of words spun across sheets of metal or plastic sticking up from the ground like severed limbs. ILLER, they read, or DOL, or ING. A scalloped yellow plate, a sort of canopy twice his height, rose from where it was half-buried in the ground, and flapped in the wind.

It shouted in bold red-and-yellow letters.

Other things lay sprawled on the stony ground. Hollow images of creatures many times the size of a man, their huge misshapen ears cracked and bent, bulbous noses knocked awry or sometimes buried next to their crushed heads. Centuries of neglect on the exposed tor had caused their paint to ripple and crack, flaking venomous chips of acid-green and candied blue onto the scarred earth. And everywhere were the remains of machines, huge blackened metal arms shooting up from beneath heaps of rubble, flattened engines and broken domes of glass, a gigantic skeletal wheel rising against the turbulent sky like a charred and deadly moon.

Hobi stopped. His voice croaked thin and shrill above the wind.

“Where are we?”

Nefertity shook her head. Her translucent body glowed dull cobalt, its shining spindles and circuits shuttling back and forth inside her chest. “I don’t know,” she said after a moment. “The ruins of something—a funfair, I think.”

“A what?” Hobi yanked his arm from her and clasped himself. In a way this was worse than first seeing the world Outside alone: because that at least he had been prepared for, that was a nightmare he had fought and thrashed through all his life. But this? It was grotesque, all those inhuman faces with their lumpy grins, random letters like shrapnel flung against the desolate earth, immense scorpions of blackened steel crushing one another beneath the weight of a huge fallen tower. And through it all the stream coursing in its rust-colored bed. His stomach knotted to think he had drunk from it before.

“ ‘Fun,’ ” Nefertity quoted softly. She pointed at the broken canopy. Her voice shifted into its crystalline recitative mode.

“Roundabout, coconut shies, big wheels, swingboats, rock stalls, all the fun of the fair. Midget pantechnicons bearing such legends as: ‘Loades of Fun, Fun on Tour,’ etc. You press the time-switch; the lights go on; everything clicks into motion. Then stops. Until you press the switch again.”

She stopped. The wind rushing through the broken chambers of a small building made a howling sound.

“It’s making me sick,” said Hobi, shouting to be heard above the wind. “Who would do this?”

Nefertity’s eyes glittered, but her voice was calm. “People long ago,” she said. “After the Second Shining, perhaps even earlier than that. They liked to go to the seashore. Loretta used to like it, she told me. They built things there—pleasure cities. I think this was one of them.”

Pleasure cities. Hobi remembered what Nasrani had told him about the city that had stood here once. Wealthy people, slave traders, gamblers. They might have climbed here, where they could look down upon the sea, and thrown their hours and their money to the ravening winds.

But he couldn’t imagine who would have derived pleasure from this —these broken statues, and machines whose use could never have been anything but obscure. It was worse even than the Orsinate’s dream inquisitions. He shivered, his teeth chattering. A whistling sound echoed across the tor, once and again, and again, then small reports that grew louder. Hobi cried out. Something struck his neck, then his face, and he drew away his hand to find it wet.

“It’s started.”

Nefertity turned back toward the ocean. A solid black line seemed to shimmer only inches above the edge of the promontory. Clouds of silver shook through the air—rain, Hobi realized, this was rain! —and a distant crashing echoed the wind screaming across the tor. In this sudden twilight Nefertity was a silvery blue beacon in the center of the world, calm and implacable as the rain lashed about her. As Hobi huddled beside her he thought he could see something out on the outermost edge of the horizon, a rent in the disturbed surface of the great ocean—something black and huge, as though the rim of the world had suddenly plunged into an abyss. He pointed at it. The rain struck him so hard that his face felt as though he had been slapped.

“I do not know,” said Nefertity. Rain streamed down her body in fiery runnels. “But we should find shelter.”

“ I know what it is,” the boy said slowly. As they watched the black bulge on the horizon grew even huger, and moved across the lashing gray sea, heading toward the shore. Hobi felt dizzy, almost speechless as he realized what it was that ripped across the ocean toward Araboth.

He said, choking, “I saw it—in a, a ’file once, about the Third Ascension. A kind of wave—like what you said before, the kind of wave that came after the Second Shining.”

“Tsunami,” the nemosyne whispered. “A tidal wave.”

He nodded, staring numbly at the black ridge, the massive plateau of water rising to crush the sands below. “It’s really come, Nefertity.” He knew she could not hear him above the wind, he could no longer hear himself, but he went on anyway. “Like they always said—”

“Ucalegon.”

Nasrani had turned and fled after the rasa left him, back up the tunnel until the sand slithered beneath his feet and shallow water lapped at his soles. His breathing roared in his ears, and another sound, faint but unceasing. The pale green light that had filled the passage near the tunnel’s mouth had faded until it was nearly too dark for him to see. That was what finally stopped him.

He stood in the middle of the tunnel, swaying back and forth. He could once again hear the murmurous explosions that rocked the Undercity, and feel the ground tremble. For the hundredth time his hands patted futilely at his greatcoat, trouser pockets, boots, searching for something, anything—empty morpha tubes, paper wrappings, ashes, lint. Nothing. He had found it all hours before, chewed it or spun it to grit between his fingers and then flicked it into the darkness. There was nothing left now, not in his pockets, not anywhere. If he went any farther back into the Undercity he would find the tunnel blocked, or be crushed by the walls caving in. Slowly he turned, and began to walk back toward where the passage opened onto the shore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 11 UCALEGON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your Grace, Your Grace—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We must—go somewhere—” Nike gasped. “Rooms—my rooms—”

“Don’t be a fool,” the Quir shouted. From his toneless voice she realized he too must have been partially deafened when the domes gave way. “It’s like this everywhere—”

He fumbled at his waist, withdrawing a wire reticule. He pulled out a vial of petroleum that he opened and pressed to his fingertips. Angrily he flicked petroleum in Nike’s direction.

“Your sister Âziz is an evil horrible woman,” he spat. “It was her dream of the Green Country that opened the way to this disaster.”

He pointed through a gap, to where Nike could see a swollen black hump on the horizon. As she gazed at it, the dark mass grew. It was a moment before she realized that it was not really growing larger. It was growing nearer.

“We could find the morphodite and make amends,” she gasped, brushing a droplet of petroleum from her cheek. “Some sort of inaugural ceremony, this evening perhaps—”

The Quir raised his face to hers. His bulging eyes were very bright. “Don’t be absurd. The domes have failed us. Within the hour we will all be dead.”

Nike nodded, sickened, and looked out to sea again. Behind them another explosion tore through the city.

“Some of us have readied ourselves for this day,” he said. He raised one hand, his azure sleeve flapping around his wrist, and beckoned to one of his followers. “I have not until today been among his faithful, but it’s never too late for converts. Even at the end of all things, Blessed Narouz was able to wrest a shred of meaning from disaster. It was he who said, ‘It is never too late, and there will always be enough to go around.’ ”

He paused reflectively. His voice had grown hoarse from shouting, and when he spoke again it was nearly in a whisper. “He was speaking of petroleum, of course, and of course he was wrong,” he added. “There never is enough, and this time it really is too late. Although certain of Blessed Narouz’s rites will prove useful to us now. Goodbye, Margravine.” He raised both hands and shouted something Nike couldn’t understand. As she turned to see who he called to she glimpsed five or six people in indigo and green, their robes soaked and filthy with sand and oil. Some of them were in the alcove with them; others forced their way through the gaps in the wall, yelling. Several carried torches that sputtered in the rain. There was an overpowering stink of petrol and smoke. Nike started to protest, to suggest that they retire to the Four Hundredth Room to discuss the possibility of canonizing Reive Orsina, but then the ground beneath her buckled and she fell to her knees. The Quir shouted again, louder this time, and as Nike tried to get to her feet she saw one of his followers heaving a plastic bucket at her face. She screamed as it sloshed over her, burning her cheeks and hands as she scrabbled at the steps, and screamed again as one of the brands was thrust at her and the galli fell back, chanting and shrieking. Very dimly above the thunderous roar of flame and wind she could hear the Quir’s voice, quite calm now, reciting the Ethyl Spiritus even as the waters rose about his ankles and then his thighs and finally engulfed him. By the time the rushing waves claimed her body there was really nothing that remained of her, save blackened bones and a twisted cone of metal wrapped about with greasy rags, and a charred morpha tube bobbing in the turbulent sea.

Âziz was surprised at how easy it was to reach the Gryphon. She fled as the first explosions swept the area beneath the Lahatiel Gate, just as Reive and Rudyard Planck were staggering along the beach with the Compassionate Redeemer behind them. Already she could tell that it had all gone wrong—Nike’s refusal to wear proper Æstival attire, the blatant rudeness of the Archbishop and precentor, that storm raging Outside when there should have been the more restrained horror of a still blue sea and little waves lapping at the sand. Instead, the Lahatiel Gate had opened upon Ucalegon itself, and there was no way the Orsinate could pretend to have anticipated that. Not even the thin bands of sunlight slicing through the clouds, not even the sight of the Compassionate Redeemer nosing along the beach could placate Araboth’s populace, once they had glimpsed that storm raised like a gigantic fist ready to crush the Quincunx Domes. There was no Scream, none of the orderly chaos of the Great Fear; only a few moments of stunned murmuring before the throng broke into shrieks and enraged shouts and turned to flee back into the city.

Âziz gazed out at the storm, the wind tearing at her crown so that it tipped over one eye. Nasrani was right, the bastard, she thought. She straightened the crown and turned, slipped through the diminishing crowd on the Narthex balcony to a small plain door nearly hidden behind a line of toppled columns. A steady grinding thunder rang out, as joists and beams collapsed and storage vats burst into flame on the refineries level. For an instant it was all nearly too much. Âziz’s head roared and she would have given herself over to the Fear like everyone else; but then her hand found the little doorknob, the metal warm beneath her palm, and without thinking she ran into the passageway and let the door slam behind her.

Inside it was hot but blessedly quiet, the stillness broken only by muted roars and the groan of the wind raging at the Lahatiel Gate. An unblinking line of dim yellow lights ran along the tunnel floor and Âziz followed these, her booted feet slapping against the ground and her breath coming in loud spurts. After a few minutes the yellow lights grew brighter and a soft voice intoned, “Privileged area, please stop.” She stopped, gasping as the sentry pierced her hand, and whispered, “Âziz Orsina. Pass.”

Before her the door slid back to reveal another balcony, semicircular, its floor inlaid with garish mosaics. It seemed to jut out into the very heart of the storm, buckling and swaying as though made of corrugated leather. A sonic fence should have surrounded it, but the power must have failed—there was no warning hum, no flicker of blue light to indicate where the fence ended. If she wasn’t careful she might plunge hundreds of feet into the crashing sea.

But Âziz was very careful. In the center of the balcony the Gryphon Kesef waited, its wings tucked tightly against its sides, its nose drawn in as it crouched against the floor. Rain gusted in sheets across the open space, dashing against the Gryphon’s legs. As the margravine crept onto the balcony her boots crunched against something solid; glancing down, she saw the surface pied with hailstones like rice pearls. She cursed, sliding on the ice; caught herself and inched forward again. In a few minutes she had reached the Gryphon.

The howling wind had risen to a shriek. She could not hear herself as she shouted the command, could not hear if the aircraft responded. But a moment later the Gryphon rose unsteadily on its jointed legs, the slender metal stairs descended, and she was climbing them, clinging to the narrow struts as the wind battered her. Then she was inside.

Gasping, she flung herself into the seat. The leather molded itself around her and she felt a prickling warmth as auxiliary enhancers sent a soft surge of endorphins and nutriments into her veins. She blinked, stared up to where the webs began to descend in a gray haze; shut her eyes as they touched her face and she could feel the strange patterns tracing themselves onto her cheeks, temples, the inside of her wrists.

OrsinaKesefNineTwelveCycloneSystemGradeOneRescueAdvisoryOverriddenUnitRecalledLockgridFiveLevelTwoWaitingWaitingWaiting…

Âziz cried out. Across her mind’s eye crimson lines formed an intricate crosshatch, a grid bisected with green and glowing blue spheres. She could hear the fluting voice of the thing called Kesef, the Gryphon that waited for her command; she could feel the ground shuddering beneath it. She clenched her mouth shut and tried to focus, concentrating until she brought up an image, the figure of an Aviator silhouetted against the domes of Araboth. Then she willed away the domes, tried to imagine what one of the frontier outposts might look like, ended up with the Aviator’s silhouette and a hazy blue background. Go there, she thought, then said the words aloud in a croak.

“Where they are—the Aviators—find them—” There was a crackle of static electricity, a blinding light outside and then a crash. She could feel the Gryphon fighting her, trying to override her command as it sent warning messages blaring through her mind—

CycloneTsunamiHurricaneGaleSamielDangerDangerDanger

—but she repeated her command, again and again, each time the image growing clearer in her mind, until finally with a shudder she felt the aircraft move around her. Then it was as though the flesh had been sheared from her face: all around her she felt the raw wind, the rain like razors slicing against her skin; but of course that was the Gryphon and not her, and it was the Gryphon’s voice keening like a brazen bell as it soared from the balcony, up and up into the whirling storm until she could feel nothing, not even the shafts of light spearing along its wings as the gale tossed it and the Gryphon fought to make its way inland, while the woman who had commanded it lay unconscious in its grasp, beset by evil dreams. She did not realize until later, when she woke, that she had unconsciously given the solitary figure of her voiceless command the stooped bearing and ruthless pale eyes of Margalis Tast’annin, the Aviator Imperator.

“They will all die,” Hobi said dully.

Beside him the nemosyne stood, silent. After a moment she nodded.

“It is a tsunami, a tidal wave. On the subcontinent they sometimes killed millions in a single night.”

Hobi shivered and drew away from her, until he brushed against the edge of the wall. They had found the ruins of a building, its top rounded and painted in flaking greens and yellows, the whole thing sunk like a culvert into the pebbly debris-strewn ground. The wind screamed down the opening and rain poured in, draining away down countless holes after it had soaked Hobi to the skin.

From here they could look off the eastern face of the tor, down onto the glassy surface of the Quincunx Domes. White foam churned at the edges of the city. The narrow sandy spit that had stood between Araboth and the open sea had long since been swallowed by engulfing waves. Flecks of black and gray scudded across the top of the receding water. With horror Hobi realized that these were people, the tiny figures of the revelers who had been released earlier when the Lahatiel Gate opened. He buried his face in his hands and turned away.

“I can’t bear it,” he whispered. Nefertity could not have heard him above the wailing wind, but she leaned over and touched him gently.

“Perhaps you can sleep, we will be safe here—”

“Sleep?” he yelled, striking at her with one hand. “How can I sleep, my father is down there, Nasrani, everyone—”

The nemosyne regarded him with cool aquamarine eyes. “It was an evil place,” she said at last. “It has happened before, that the wind has swallowed an evil place—

“All flesh died that moved upon the earth: all in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was on the dry land, died.

“But God said, I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.”

Her voice chimed above the cry of the wind, and Hobi turned to her and spat, “That’s another of your precious sacred stories? A broken promise?”

Nefertity tilted her head so that the rain struck sparks around her eyes. “A man wrote that,” she said. She pointed to the east. “Look, Hobi. If you can bring yourself to look—that is the fall of Araboth.”

He turned. Sky and ocean had become one vast unbroken plane of gray and green. In a froth of pounding waves the Quincunx Domes seemed to float, small and frail as bubbles of glass. A fouga, a tiny obloid that glowed bright blue through the silvered haze of rain, suddenly shot up from one bubble as though striving to free itself. An instant later it was gone. There was nothing else to indicate that anything had ever lived down there. The domes might have been the cast-off shell of some creature, a submarine eggsac washed onto a crumbling lee.

“There,” Nefertity murmured.

Midway between the shore and the horizon a swell black and viscous as oil detached itself from the rest of the ocean. Hobi strained to hear something, a rising shriek on the wind or perhaps a roar; but oddly it now seemed that the wind had died, and while the rain still ripped across the tor there was no other sound. Certainly nothing terrible enough to be the voice of that Wave. He shrank closer to the nemosyne, without thinking clutched at her as he watched it rise and grow larger and larger still, until it was so impossibly huge he cried out, thinking that it must tear away at the very foundation of the headland where they crouched.

But it did not: only gathered strength and power until now he could hear it, a noise like all the engines of Araboth screeching into life and he knew that he was hearing the voice of the Wave itself, the boundless throat of the sea shrieking havoc as it reared above the fragile domes, the ancient folly that was Araboth, and smashed it into oblivion.

He must have blacked out, because the next thing he knew he was skidding across the tor, broken glass and metal tearing through his clothes as Nefertity grabbed at him and he struck at her, shouting.

“Hobi, stop! There’s nothing you can do, it’s gone now, nothing—”

He ran to the edge of the plateau, where the rust-colored stream had swollen to a copper torrent plunging down the steep incline. It was like it had never been there at all. Far below, at the base of the tor, the ocean seethed in glass-green knots and coils. Of the domes of Araboth there was nothing, not a metal blade, not a fragment of shattered glass: nothing. Rain nearly blinded him and he wiped his eyes, squinting through the haze. Only a few minutes later, after Nefertity stood beside him steaming in the rain, did he see something, a long twisted bit of white that might have been part of one of the inner retaining walls, wash up on a narrow spar of beach below.

“It is finished.”

He raised his head. Beside him Nefertity stared down at the angry waters, her beautiful face calm and cold as the image on a sarcophagus. Fury surged inside of him and almost he sprang at her; but then she was shaking her head, and her voice sounded strange.

“Hobi. Hobi—we’re not alone.”

He looked where she pointed, to where the stream disappeared downhill. He blinked and wiped his eyes again, not certain if he was imagining it; but no, there was something there, a figure—and behind it many figures—the first one tall and wearing crimson leathers. An Aviator, wearing an enhancer, his face covered with a scarlet metal mask that gleamed in the rain like a warning flare. Behind him trudged sullen forms in robes and janissaries’ uniforms and the pleasure cabinet’s rosy silks, only their festival scarves of green were torn and stained, and their faces too seemed to have been wiped away by the storm.

“ Rasas ,” the boy breathed. His teeth chattered as he realized that the one leading them was a rasa as well. He would have run but Nefertity held him. The figures paced slowly up the hill, heedless of the rain streaming around them and the gale tearing at their clothes. Their leader walked the last few steps until he stood upon the plateau. When he raised his eyes to meet Hobi’s the boy saw that he was what remained of the Aviator Imperator.

“Commandant Tast’annin,” he gasped. He thought he might be sick.

“Horemhob Panggang,” the rasa said in a low voice. He turned his gaze to Nefertity. “You have her. The nemosyne. Nasrani’s metal woman.”

Hobi nodded dumbly. Behind the Aviator the other rasas had stopped. They stood, shuffling and silent. The rain where it struck some of them seemed to leave a soft impression on their skin.

“Yes,” the boy whispered at last. He coughed, tried to make his voice louder but succeeded only in raising it to a croak. “Nefertity—that’s her name—”

“Nefertity,” the Aviator repeated. He stepped forward, until he stood directly in front of the nemosyne.

“Commandant,” Nefertity said, her voice cool and uninflected. Her eyes and throat began to glow deep blue.

“I heard much about you, many years ago, from my friend Nasrani Orsina,” the rasa went on. “He said you were more beautiful than any real woman he had ever known, excepting of course his youngest sister. At the time I did not believe him. I see now he was right.”

He bowed, the rain spilling from the cusps of his leather jacket.

The nemosyne stared at him, her gaze implacable, almost cruel. “I think it is a pity you did not perish with the rest of your people down there,” she said, gesturing to where Araboth lay somewhere beneath the sea’s flow. Her voice had the husky, drawling edge of Loretta Riding’s.

“Oh, but I have already given one life to those people,” the Aviator replied, raising his head and glancing back at the waiting figures behind him. “As have these others. Araboth’s forgotten ones, The Fallen—Hobi knows about them, don’t you, Hobi? Forgetful revenants, corpses who stray away from their prams when their nannies aren’t looking. Military commanders who don’t linger long enough in the beds of imperious mistresses.”

The nemosyne stared at him before replying coolly. “Let us go free. Let the boy go, at least—there may be others who survived, let him go and see if he can find them.”

The Aviator swept his arms out, sending up a plume of silver spray from his jacket. “I won’t harm him. His father was a friend of mine, once. And I have had enough of killing, for a little while.” He gestured at the other rasas. “They were in the Undercity—they were following you, the light you shed as you passed through the tunnel. They followed me, and I followed you. We made it halfway up the hill before the gale struck. They are all that escaped from the city.”

He laughed mirthlessly, light glinting from his black teeth. Behind him the rustling of the waiting rasas grew louder. The rain was slowing. Overhead the clouds lightened to the color of verdigris, and on the eastern horizon sunlight darted from gaps in the clouds.

“I am not a military nemosyne,” Nefertity said, her voice harsh. “I belonged to the radical wing of the American Vatican. I am a folklore unit. I am useless to you. Let me go.”

The Aviator shook his head. “No. You can link with the others—you were all designed to interface with each other.”

“The others are gone.”

“I believe they still exist.” He stepped closer to her, took her gleaming metal hand in his dark and sanguine one. “Shiyung believed that as well, that’s why she sent me to the Capital. The Military Tactical Targets Retrieval Network. It is somewhere out there still. HORUS was receiving random transmissions from it, before the raid by the Commonwealth destroyed their satellites.”

Nefertity’s eyes darkened to cobalt. Hobi could smell something faint and metallic, like ozone, as she withdrew her hand from the Aviator’s.

“Metatron,” she said, and recoiled. “The primary military unit—that’s what they called it. Loretta said it was destroyed when Wichita fell.”

“I think it is still there. Somewhere. It broadcasts on a shortwave radio frequency. If we were to find an area where the airwaves were not contaminated, we might be able to find its range. You might be able to find it.”

The rasa’s hollow voice had grown low, almost wheedling. Hobi started to back away from him, when suddenly the Aviator’s hand shot out and grabbed him.

“Aaagh!” The boy yelled and tried to pull away, then stumbled to the ground. The rasa ’s hand cut into his flesh like ice.

“Let go of him,” Nefertity commanded. Her entire body blazed, the mist around her glittered blue and green and gold. Behind the Aviator the other rasas murmured and crept forward; some of them fell to their knees. “He is innocent, let him go.”

“Come with me, then,” said the Aviator. “Else I will kill him—and you will be responsible.”

Nefertity was silent. At the Aviator’s feet Hobi writhed, his arm held taut in the rasa ’s grip as a single long tear of blood ran from wrist to elbow.

Nefertity looked down at Hobi, her eyes glittering. “Let him go,” she cried. “Yes, I will go with you.” Anger flared in her voice. “But how dare you harm him, how can you break the laws that bound you from harming your creators—”

The rasa grinned horribly, the splintered light making a tortured skull of his goblin face. “I am not truly a rasa, Mistress Nemosyne, nor am I human. Nothing commands me but myself, and, perhaps—”

He raised his hands, letting go of Hobi so that the boy collapsed, moaning, at his feet. For an instant a shaft of sunlight struck the Aviator, setting his crimson jacket aflame. His pale eyes were lost in shadow as he cried out words the boy did not understand. Then the sun was gone, the rain hissed once more upon the broken ground.

“Master—”

A thin voice called from behind the rasa. Hobi looked up. In the gray-green sky something glimmered, a spark that seemed to flicker more brightly and grow larger, until he saw that it was an aircraft of some kind, and as it plummeted toward them he made out the unearthly grace of one of the Ascendant’s Gryphons.

“Kesef!” The Aviator’s voice rose in command. Abruptly the Gryphon’s wings folded back and it plunged to earth like a javelin. Hobi cried out; but at the last second the Gryphon hovered, seemed to stutter in the air; and then its six jointed legs descended, followed a moment later by a folding stair delicate as a gentleman’s fan.

“What—” Hobi began, turning to Nefertity; but before he could speak something fell from the aircraft’s belly. A tangle of arms and legs on the silver stairs, resolved into a single person struggling with some sort of ornate costume rife with spikes and lumens. A moment later and the stranger was on her feet, tearing at her face as though something clung there. When she turned, shaking rain from her cheeks, he saw that it was Âziz Orsina.

“Margravine!” Hobi exclaimed, and would have run to her if the rasa had not stopped him.

“Help, dammit, is this the frontier? Have we reached a substation?” The margravine tore the last bit of her Æstival garb from her and flung it to the ground, then turned and kicked furiously at one of the Gryphon’s legs. “Where are we, dammit?”

From the rasas waiting on the hillside came a low sound, a sound that became a hiss. Âziz turned, startled. “Oh! Oh— ”

Looking back, she saw Hobi and the nemosyne and the Aviator Imperator. She bit her lip, rubbed her chin, and then tossed her head back defiantly.

“Margalis! I might have thought you’d find a way out! Well, come on, then, you know the way—where’s the nearest substation, we’ve got to get out of here—”

Behind her the hissing grew louder. Hobi shrank closer to Nefertity, as slowly the rasas began to creep the last few feet up the hill to where the margravine stood, glaring at Tast’annin.

“—this bloody thing doesn’t listen at all, I thought they were supposed to respond to direct emotive input, let’s go now while the storm’s let up—”

Tast’annin shook his head. “I don’t think so, Âziz,” he murmured. Her eyes blazed and she took a step toward him, was stopped by a hand on her shoulder. “I think some of your— people —have need of you….”

Behind her the rasas had gathered, crooning and sighing and mumbling among themselves as they surrounded the margravine. Âziz saw them and gave a small cry, tried to push her way through them but was borne off, as first one and then another grabbed her, handing her over their heads until finally she disappeared in a weaving thicket of white arms and hands and mouths.

Hobi looked away, covering his eyes. Âziz’s shrieks grew louder, were nearly drowned by the sound of tearing and many soft voices crooning to themselves. The boy crouched against the nemosyne, weeping.

“It’s all right, Hobi, it’s all right,” she said gently, stooping over him. Above her the Aviator Imperator stood, brooding in the gathering dusk. She raised her face to his and said, “We must find others for him. Other people. Otherwise he will go mad. I’ve seen it happen before,” she ended sadly.

The Aviator nodded. “We will find them. There is a girl, a girl I left for dead in the Capital—she knows things, she can deal death with her mind. I would find her.”

“Nothing but death,” the nemosyne said bitterly, hugging the weeping boy to her. “You have seen where it brought them, and still you would have nothing but death.”

The Aviator shrugged. “I have questions, that’s all.” He turned to the Gryphon and lay his hand upon the edge of its steps. When he glanced back at Nefertity a spare ray of light glinted in his pale eyes. “I have always tried to keep an open mind about these things.”

The nemosyne said nothing. She waited until he climbed into the aircraft, then murmured, “Hobi, it’s all right now. We will go from here, we will find another place….”

Hobi shuddered, wiped his eyes, and looked up at her. “I’m ready,” he said at last, his voice hoarse. He looked over his shoulder, to where the eastern horizon was banded with streamers of gold and violet and red.

“It’s over,” said Nefertity. “The storm is gone, it’s passed over us now. That’s the sky, the sun breaking through—”

The boy looked in the other direction, down the hill. He could just make out shadowy figures moving in the distance, and hear scuffling noises in the brush. Before he could turn away a voice called down from the Gryphon.

“Come now—it’s ready, I had to clear away the mess she’d made, but there’s room now for both of you—”

The boy stood, wincing at how much his legs ached. Gingerly he touched the raw gash on his arm where the Aviator had cut him. “Is it safe?”

Nefertity shook her head. “What is ‘safe,’ now? It’s not safe to stay here alone; it’s not safe to have him murder you.” She walked stiffly to the stairway, turned to Hobi, and bowed slightly. “I thank you anyway, Hobi, for waking me. It’s better not to sleep, I think.” Without saying more they climbed into the Gryphon.

He had always thought it would be exciting to fly in one of the Aviator’s biotic craft; but then he had thought it would be exciting to see clouds, too, and mountains. Now Hobi knew that one grew accustomed to things Outside very quickly.

He felt queasy at first, as the Gryphon accelerated impossibly fast and burst into the air like a flame. There was only one biotic hookup, for Tast’annin. Hobi and Nefertity sat in two narrow seats behind him, and peered out a series of round windows at the tor receding beneath them in a rush of gray and brown. Then the Gryphon banked and shot out over the ocean, seeming to bounce across cusps of air like a rickshaw over uneven transway. Hobi bit his thumb and hummed nervously. After a minute or two he felt easier, and leaned closer to the windows.

Below them the ocean purled almost gently against sheer rock, all that could be seen of the precipice that had once sheltered Araboth. Of the domes he could see nothing; only a few bits of flotsam floating in the dark water. As they skimmed above the coast the rock gave way to sandy beach, nearly as smooth as the water itself. There was nothing here either, save for uprooted trees, a torn length of white cloth wrapped around a spar, two sodden bags that almost looked like bodies…

“Hey!”

Hobi yelled so loudly he was surprised the Gryphon didn’t halt, the way a rickshaw would. The Aviator scarcely stirred where he reclined in front of them, only raised a single finger warningly.

“Hey,” Hobi repeated, a little desperately now, “I think those are people there—”

Beside him Nefertity leaned to gaze out her window, then without a word placed her hand upon the Aviator’s shoulder. Abruptly he sat up, glanced down at the beach, then back at Hobi. Still saying nothing he settled back into his seat; but the Gryphon immediately began to descend.

Hobi held his breath, waiting for the jolt when it landed; but he felt nothing, was stunned when the floor slid sideways beneath his feet and the airy steps unfolded. “Wait here,” the Aviator commanded, and climbed out.

Hobi crossed and uncrossed his legs. A gust of warm air shot up from the opening in the craft. If he slanted his head just right he could see one of the Aviator’s booted feet and what might have been the ragged hem of a linen garment. Then abruptly the Aviator’s grim form filled the opening. Hobi crouched back as the rasa climbed inside, carrying something in his arms. The nemosyne slid from her seat onto the floor, folding her long legs under her.

“Move,” the Aviator said sharply, shaking his head at Hobi. The boy hunched into a corner beside Nefertity. The rasa lay a slight figure on the seat where Hobi had been, then silently turned and went back outside. He returned after another minute, this time with an even smaller form that he set in Nefertity’s seat. Without another word he slipped back into his place. The steps slid up and disappeared. With a heart-stopping rush they were airborne again.

When Hobi was sure the Aviator was linked with the Gryphon he leaned forward. In his seat lay a slender figure. At first he thought it was a boy, a boy with shaven head; then with a grimace he drew back.

A gynander. She was breathing heavily, with a slight rattle in her chest. As he watched she suddenly turned to one side and vomited a great quantity of water onto the floor.

Hobi leaned back hastily and turned to the other figure. A dwarf. With a spurt of elation he recognized him—Rudyard Planck, a friend of his father’s.

“Rudyard!” he cried, pummeling the back of the seat. The Gryphon swooped in a long slow arc and he fell back. “Rudyard, it’s me, Hobi—”

The dwarf stirred, groaning. Beside him the gynander whimpered, then suddenly shot up.

“Where are we—we don’t know, let us go, please—”

Hobi fell silent, noticing her green eyes widen with terror as they took in the cramped curve of the aircraft, the dwarf coughing beside her, the nemosyne glowing like a corpse-candle in the back of the craft. Finally he said, “You’re safe—whoever you are. At least as safe as we are.” His tone sounded defeated, and he pointed to the rasa, motionless in the front seat. “That’s the Aviator—this is his Gryphon, there’s no way out. I’m Hobi, that’s Nefertity—”

The nemosyne nodded.

“—and I know Rudyard Planck, I think, and who are you?” He tried to sound polite.

The gynander shook her head. “We are Reive,” she announced, coughing and wiping seawater from her chin. “Reive Orsina.”

“Orsina?” Hobi sucked his breath in, then said, “I thought they were all dead.”

“We are alive.”

Hobi groaned: it was too much to ask of him, really, to survive a typhoon and then be polite to a lying morphodite. He closed his eyes, pretending he was asleep.

But in a few seconds he opened them again. The gynander was sitting with her face pressed against one small round window, staring transfixed at the ocean below and paying no attention to him whatsoever.

“Hobi Panggang,” the dwarf said hoarsely, as though noticing him for the first time. “Bel’s balls, you look just like your father after a toot.” He reached out and prodded Hobi uncertainly with a damp finger. “Sorry to hear about that, Hobi, very sorry.” He turned to the nemosyne and said, “Rudyard Planck, odd circumstances.”

“Nefertity,” the nemosyne replied softly.

“Huh?” Hobi shook his head and wriggled across the crowded floor until he was beside the gynander. “What’s out there, can you see something?”

Reive nodded, so excited the words caught in her throat. Her finger stabbed the gritty window specked with salt and dirt, and pointed to the luminous sea below. Hobi rubbed his eyes, looked down and then behind him.

Through the small windows on the other side of the Gryphon he could glimpse green, shivering blades of green and blue as they soared above the coast and the setting sun speared the sides of the craft. Then, looking back through the window where Reive pointed he could see the ocean, so tranquil now that it all seemed a dream—Ucalegon, Araboth, the evil margravines, his father and mother and Nasrani, everything but that endless sweep of turquoise a dark and fitful dream from which he had just awakened. He might almost fall asleep again, now, with his head resting against the cool glass, only someone was jostling his elbow and crying in a shrill voice, “Look! Look!— ”

—and pointing to where something moved through the gentle swells, something that even from here he could see was ponderously huge and dark. Only there wasn’t just one; there were four of them, and they seemed to be playing, great clumsy things somehow taking to the air of this new green world just as he was, twisting in impossible arabesques as they swam in and out and between each other—

“—he was right,” Reive was babbling as the Gryphon banked to the west and she craned her neck to see the last of them, four vast creatures leaping and crashing back into the sea with a bellow they could hear even from this distance; “he said they were waiting for him, he said his sisters would come and they did, oh, they did! ”

And wondering, Hobi pressed his face close to hers against the glass, watching the great whales until they were gone, swallowed like the rest by the sea.