That was Reive’s first day on Seraphim.
“No one questioned you?” Ceryl asked, astonished, when she returned that evening.
Reive shook her head. “No one paid any attention to us.”
“No sentries?”
“Only in the gravator, and it let us pass. They have fish there that will eat from your hands. But it is too bright, it gave us a headache.”
In spite of that she returned the next day. This time she remembered to bring mangoes, and a small bottle of aqua vitae she found in Ceryl’s liquor cabinet. Again the gravator sentry whispered, “Reive Orsina. Pass.” Again she was ignored by everyone, save a small girl walking with her replicant guardian. The child spat at Reive and made the sign against Ucalegon when she passed.
When Reive awoke the third morning, Ceryl was already dressed, in a severe suit of black satin with tiny buttons of green jade down the front. Upon her brow she wore a brass and malachite fillet, her sole concession to the upcoming festival.
The somber clothes matched her mood. When Reive yelled to one of the servers to bring her kehveh and fruit, Ceryl hushed her impatiently.
“I’ll probably be late today,” she said, rifling through a stack of credit disks and several invitations on parchment and allurian cards. “There’s a ceremony I have to attend. There’ll be some kind of reception afterward, and Shiyung always gets a headache after a party.”
“Can we go with you?” Reive pulled a sheet close about her and cocked her head. “It’s nearly Æstival Tide, no one will notice us—”
“No!” Ceryl shoved credit disks and cards into a pocket. “It’s too dangerous, Reive. It’s a military ceremony, the margravines will be there. You’d be bored. And look, there’s ’files here neither of us has ever seen, and—”
Reive glowered. Ceryl hesitated, then said, “And I’ll get you an invitation to something—something special, I promise.”
Reive glared as Ceryl hurried out the door. For a few minutes the gynander lay on the divan, staring balefully at the ceiling. A military ceremony, with the margravines. The Feast of Fear was practically here already, and Ceryl wanted to keep her imprisoned. She sulked for a quarter hour, then throwing the sheets on the floor she slid from the divan. She dressed quickly, painting her face cursorily and braiding her hair into a single long plait. She thought of leaving Ceryl a disdainful note, something along the lines of See You At The Palace, but decided against it. She was in such a hurry that she forgot to take anything to eat or drink.
There was not much of a crowd at the gravators that morning. Many of the cabinet members had finally obtained their invitations and found temporary lodgings as palace guests, or within one of the Imperators’ elaborate pagodas. The few aristocrats Reive saw this morning were on foot. Most rickshaw drivers refused to work this close to the feast; they had already retired to their own ritual preparations below. The remaining cabinet members milled about rather desperately, their snatches of conversation shrill—
“… said she loved the work I’d done on the hecatombs ten years ago and of course there’d be a seat for me—”
“—stole it right out of my hands!”
“… so I explained then that I wasn’t actually a Disciple, only curious, but you know how they are…”
This subdued mood extended to their passage into the gravator. Reive even got a seat this time; but she had grown so blasé that she sat with her eyes closed, humming to herself.
The trip went quickly. There was little conversation, no proselytizing priests or disciples. The fretful cabinet members eyed Reive distrustfully where she sat alone on a marble bench. When the gravator finally stopped they stood aside fastidiously and permitted her to leave first. Reive mistook their caution for respect. She did not notice how one of them made the sign against Ucalegon as she passed, or how another pointed furtively at her eyes.
Outside, Reive was startled to see the same sort of crowd that she usually found below during one of the lesser festivals. Men selling pappadams and fried cuttlefish, girls sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of steaming pots of black tea and kehveh. Several grubby-looking moujik children wearing discarded janissary’s uniforms were hawking banners, black and red and with the toothed wave that symbolized Ucalegon blocked on them in vivid green. There were galli from the Daughters of Graves dispensing prayer wheels and blessings for a small fee, and one of the white-skirted Disciples of Blessed Narouz’s Refinery shouting in the ’filers’ dialect, seemingly to himself. A solitary Aviator stood broodingly, the sleek black mask of her sensory enhancer covering her face as the crowd parted around her, priests and diplomats alike falling silent in her shadow. Someone had set up a little stall selling figures of the Compassionate Redeemer made of marzipan, its evil spade-shaped head and gaping mouth bright pink, its long saurian’s tail dusted with golden flecks of opium sugar. With a start Reive recognized a hermaphrodite from Virtues, a pasty-faced morph who had never been very popular either with clients or her own kind. Pushing aside a plump galli, Reive hurried away before she could be seen, head bowed as she stared resolutely at her feet.
She ended up on an unfamiliar spur of the main boulevard. There were no strollers here, not even any of the omnipresent replicants walking the countless Orsina bastards. But the boulevard did not seem empty. Sculptures lined the broad avenue, stasis anaglyphs executed by the adolescent prodigy Karvo Solicitas. Their subject matter was uniformly morbid, scenes of executions and torment, the sort of thing made popular during the current regime. Reive stared at them bemused and walked on. In the distance the palace glowed white and gold in the simulated sunlight. She squinted, trying to see if the ceremony had started yet.
“You find Karvo’s work dull?” a voice croaked beside her.
Reive jumped and looked around nervously, seeing nobody. Finally she glanced down. A very small man, a dwarf actually, stood gazing up at her with mild round eyes of a vivid, childlike blue.
“Um—yes, we, uh—” she said, glancing back uneasily at the sculptures. “Very dull!”
“I’ve always found him insipid myself,” the dwarf confided. He gazed up at her as though she had said something quite insightful. “This whole mania for torture: idiotic, don’t you think? The banality of evil and all that.” He began to walk with a peculiar rolling gait toward the next little square, looking back at her expectantly.
“Yes, of course,” she said, and followed him.
“Now this at least demonstrates a more mature grasp of the sculptor’s art,” the dwarf said thoughtfully. He pointed to three monolithic pandoramas, multidimensional images of men and women illuminated in ghastly greens and blues. As they watched the huge shapes moved with painful slowness, contorting themselves in baroque and tormented poses.
At the last image the dwarf halted. The moving figures froze, then one groaned the name of the piece.
“ Mormo ,” it said, and resumed its posturing.
“ Mormo ,” the dwarf repeated, as though Reive might not have heard. “Late Kendall Browning—one of his last, as a matter of fact, before that tragedy with the poisoned apples. Always unwise to eat fruit with the Orsinate. Now I think that Mormo approaches the truly horrifying, not just the horrible. Don’t you agree?”
Reive grimaced. The pandorama showed the gigantic figure of a man devouring another, smaller man whose piteous screams were blunted by the sound of the giant’s teeth cracking his ribs. Time had caused the pandorama to suffer some fallout, so that the image fizzed and popped and every few moments the sound faded. Reive quickly looked away, and caught the dwarf staring at her with an intense expression shaded with something like approval.