In a few minutes they had reached their destination. Reive was expecting something—music, an announcement—but the doors only slid open and everybody walked out, with a little less shoving than on the lower levels but a few more sidelong glances. The Disciple of Blessed Narouz tried to push a flyer into her hand as he left, Blessed Narouz’s swarthy face scowling and gesturing from its surface, but Reive hurried past him.
At the apex of Araboth’s ziggurat, Seraphim was the smallest of the city’s levels—though still vast—and more wonderful than Reive could ever have imagined. She blinked, stumbling as she tried to find a place to stand and gape. Brilliant light filled the air, a light that was truly golden. Looking up she saw huge curved banks of lamps set within the domes, so near that the reflections of things on Seraphim could be seen faintly, like flaws in glass. A faint tinkling sound filled the air, ambient music commissioned from one of the countless artists the Orsinate retained as permanent guests of the Reception Committee. A heady, complex smell wafted up from vents in the walkway—lavender essence and amber musk, an underlying note of oranges and the faintest wisp of opium smoke. Reive stood a few feet from the gravator, trying to catch her breath. After several minutes she felt even more dazed, and happier than she had ever been in her life.
“Are you engaged, holy child?” A soft voice crooned beside her. Reive started, looking up into the violet eyes of the galli, the eunuch who had been in the gravator a few minutes before. His hair was dyed the same shade of deep blue as his robes, his palms stained red.
“Oh! Ye-es, yes, we are meeting someone—” She rubbed her eyes as though she had just awakened, then stared perturbed at the kohl smudged on her hand.
“Ah.” The galli nodded, his high voice betraying a giggle. “I understand. You are here for purely social reasons.”
He smiled kindly, then taking Reive’s arm pointed to where a path of stones and glass laid in an intricate mosaic twisted into the distance. He lowered his voice to a shrill whisper and said, “Many people find the Walk of Memorable Incidents to be an instructive way to begin their visit here.”
Reive stammered her thanks, but the galli only placed a finger to his rouged lips, murmuring, “Keep your eyes lowered here, holy child. Remember our margravines are sensitive to eyes like yours—”
He drew up his blue robes and raised one hand, exposing a scarlet palm. “May you come safely through the Feast of Fear,” he said, and walked off.
Reive waved at him limply. Her exhilaration began to fade. She yawned. A heavy tiredness seeped into her, like smoking kef or inhaling fine incense at one of the better sort of dream inquisitions. She started in the direction the galli had pointed and began to wander along the Walk of Memorable Incidents. Apart from several scenes depicting carnage from the Commonwealth and the Håbilis Emirate, the most memorable image on the mosaic path showed Roland Orsina embracing Melissa Sirrúk, his wife and partner in founding the Orsinate dynasty. Reive kept her head down, absorbed in the bright pictures. After a few yards the mosaic depicted another scene, this one of Sirrúk’s funeral pyre, the masses mourning her bizarre and untimely death by choking on a whole pear. A few feet farther on Melissa’s first successor appeared, her face picked out in chips of chalcedony and tourmaline, but by then Reive had lost interest in the path.
There was so much more to see. All of Seraphim was laid out atop a pavement of smooth marble, with pathways like brightly colored channels sweeping through it. Here and there were grids of intricate geometric shapes, blue and yellow and purple tiles, or expanses of highly polished stone, agate and obsidian and tiger’s eye, white jade and rounded steps of soft cinnabar. Sculptures from the Orsinate’s famed collection were everywhere, and fountains spewing jets of scented water into pools where pop-eyed koi swam languidly, waiting to be fed. In the distance Reive saw men and women in beautifully tailored cutaway suits and robes of silk jacquard. They seemed to stalk about purposefully, like figures in a puppet opera. Compared to the rancid air and garish neon of Virtues Level it was all quite stunning, miraculous in fact. She marveled that Ceryl ever returned to Dominations.
But after a little while Reive slowed her walking. The daylights hurt her eyes. Brilliant reflections bounced from the polished walkways, too bright and too hot. When she stopped to admire one of the fountains, its scent seemed harsh, the smell of jasmine cut with an unpleasant chemical odor. The ambient music grew annoying as well. Reive found herself missing the sudden shrieks and whistles that greeted her when she visited Dominations, the brackish smell of the oceanic tanks and Zalophus’s bellowing. Even the koi, with their golden scales and extravagantly furbelowed fins, seemed demanding, rushing to nibble at her fingers dangling in the water.
She was thinking that perhaps she might return to the gravator, when a long electrified wail drowned out the plashing fountains. It was a sound Reive recognized from the evening ’files: the signal for the arrival of new prisoners. She looked around and saw that most of the other strollers were pointing in the direction of the siren. They gathered in small excited groups, then began walking more quickly, all heading for what seemed to be a broad white avenue. Reive flicked one of the greedy koi from her hand and hurried after the crowd.
At first she kept her eyes downcast, remembering the galli’s advice. But it soon became apparent that no one was paying Reive the slightest attention, and so she looked around.
The boulevard was wide, nearly as wide as whole residential blocks on some of the lower levels, and made of a false marble cool and smooth and golden-veined as the real thing. Vents in the pavement released the scents of lemon and frangipani. But beneath the strong citrusy tang was another odor—the smell of the sea, stronger here than it ever was below, even in the vivariums. For a moment Reive shut her eyes, trying to imagine herself back on Dominations. When she opened them again she stopped in amazement.
Once Reive had met a poet from the pleasure cabinet who carried with him a beautiful piece of ephemera, a pagoda of brass and bamboo that housed a copper-jointed cricket that sang like a lark. That cricket-house had been a model of the building that loomed before her now. Gates of gold and vermillion and lapis rose behind snowy arches. Huge winged telamons upheld each of the palace’s nine levels. From every corner spun glittering spires of blue and gold, so long and fine and shining it was a wonder they did not dissolve into mist. At its very peak, seemingly, inches from the central of the Quincunx Domes, two statues soared. The first was of gold, a winged figure holding a trumpet. It had been salvaged from the Orsinate’s ancestral city after the Long Night. Beside it reared a second statue, the golden crucifix upon which Prophet Rayburn hung, smiling beatifically. Reive had always been confused by this symbol, since it was well known that Prophet Rayburn had been garroted by his own daughter Livia, and it was she who had actually been crucified, by her cousin-german Sejanus Orsina, nicknamed The Unruly. The twin statues made a stirring site, seeming to impale the very roof of Araboth, so near that Reive’s head pounded to look at it. By means of the Architects’ arcane machinery, spectral lightning lanced down from the domes to strike the winged figure and the smiling Prophet, sending waves of blue and violet rippling across the boulevard.
For the next hour Reive did nothing but watch the lightning play about the palace. She was afraid to go any nearer; afraid that some of the calm-looking men and women walking up and down the palace steps might actually be members of the Reception Committee alert to the presence of an uninvited guest. When she grew tired of standing she found a bench of hammered copper and sat there by herself, wishing that she had brought some mangoes with her.