Slowly the man paced the length of the plaza, until he stood before Shiyung Orsina. The crowd erupted into roars and cheers, and the Aviators began chanting a name.
Reive shivered. Every atom of her being pulsed and her mouth had opened to cry out, but now no sound came. She felt horrible, and deathly cold, as though she had been imprisoned within one of the cells where the rasas were regenerated. The adrenoleen made her eyes water. On the colonnade Shiyung cried aloud, her hands sweeping through the air. Reive could not hear her words but the margravine’s tone was exultant. As Shiyung laughed the light bounced from her crown in waves of gold and blue.
With short, jerky motions the Aviator greeted her, his fingers curling and opening in the Aviator’s salute. The cheers subsided as Shiyung straightened, her face suddenly composed into an austere mask. Clumsy as the aardmen, the Aviator fell to one knee, then rose, took her extended hand, and bent his masked head to mime kissing it.
At that Shiyung smiled—a radiant smile, a smile of utter triumph. She waited until he got to his feet again, then turned, presenting him first to her sisters, then to the other Aviators, and finally to the crowd. Through all the cheering, Reive still could not make out his name. Her head throbbed as though she had been bludgeoned. The woman beside her was weeping.
Shiyung turned to the Aviator, stood on tiptoe as though she were going to kiss him. Instead her white hands grasped the enhancer covering his face. With a swift motion she removed it and held it up for the crowd to see. Then she smashed the enhancer upon her knee. Eddies of blue sparks fell about her legs. Behind her the man’s head remained lowered as Shiyung dropped the shards of the broken mask and raised her white arms. She cried out again, her voice so thin and cruel that the gynander trembled.
An awful dread filled Reive, a sense of such horror and foreboding that not even the rush of adrenoleen could quell it. As the Aviator stepped forward, the remains of his enhancer crunched beneath his boots. Reive could hear the woman beside her whispering a name. When he reached the edge of the plaza the Aviator slowly raised his head.
His face was gone. In its place was a curved plate of red metal. Across its smooth surface reflected lightning streamed like blood. No mouth, no nose, earless, hairless; an unbroken plane of crimson metal, like the face of the most primitive kind of replicant. Only from within this mask two eyes glowed. Human eyes, so pale they were nearly transparent, as though every earthly thought and hope had been flushed from them. The mask was horrifying in its utter impassiveness, all the more so because of the dreadful orbs that stared out from it, like the eyes of a cadaver animated and made to look upon its image in a mirror. Beside Reive the woman babbled, and she heard other horrified voices—
“… a rasa! She made him a rasa!…”
“… died but rehabilitated him. In her labs—a game, just like a game to—”
“… revenge, she never forgave him for breaking with her and now look at him…”
Reive turned wild-eyed to the woman beside her—
“But who is he? Who did she do this to?”
—and the puppet shrieked a name,
“ Tast’annin, the Aviator Imperator Tast’annin! ”
Everywhere Reive heard the name taken up, the Aviators pounding their feet in unison and shouting until the very columns of the palace shuddered. Reive clutched the woman beside her to keep from being trampled in the crush of people seething forward to glimpse him—
Tast’annin: the Aviator Imperator Margalis Tast’annin.
The madman who had once been their greatest military commander; the Academy student who had been Shiyung’s lover and the victor of the Archipelago Conflict.
But his own recent history was a lie. He had been no hero in the Capital. Captured and tortured by that City’s keepers, he had been released, insane, and then had sought to betray his Ascendant masters by seizing the City for himself. He had died ignobly; but the rest at least was true—the Ascendant janissaries arrived to conquer a city already in flames, and had borne him back to Araboth as a prize for their mistress.
It was all a joke to her. Seeing the corpse of her lover brought to her on a stinking pallet—his head blackened with his own blood, brain tissue a gray lace across his shattered scalp—had she felt any sorrow, any remorse for him at all?
“Margalis,” she had whispered, and bent to touch the pulp of gray and white beneath his eye. “My dear Margalis.”
And she had laughed, softly at first, and then more loudly, until her serving girl had fled at the note, of venomous triumph in her voice.
Her vengeance had been carefully worked out. She had made him a rasa, a living corpse subject to her command—the ideal creature, she had thought, to be Military Imperator. Now Shiyung stepped back so that the Aviator Imperator could bow. His voice, heavily amplified and bloodless as a stone, echoed across the boulevard as he greeted the crowd. Beside him Shiyung stood straight and shining as a young girl, her sisters impassive behind her.
The crowd grew momentarily quiet, listening to the rasa’s hollow tones. Then, his brief salutation complete, the Aviator Imperator raised his empty face and gave Shiyung a final salute. His hand glowed white as a corpse-candle as it formed a raptor’s claws, while all of Seraphim roared.
Only Reive remained silent, staring frightened and confused at the figures on the colonnade.
Because she knew that it was impossible for any rasa to feel or express a human emotion, or retain anything but a fleeting memory of its former self.
But—somehow, impossibly—the eyes that stared at Shiyung from within this Aviator’s shining metal mask radiated an unmistakable and terrifying hatred.
Chapter 4
A DREAM IN THE WRONG CHAMBER
NASRANI ORSINA HAD DISAPPEARED . After Hobi stumbled from the gravator he’d turned to say something to his guide. But he saw only the gravator dropping, and a large pale hand waving from behind its sliver of amethyst window. In an instant that too fell from sight. The boy stared open-mouthed, his face reflected in the chromium awning above the gravator entrance. When the machine did not return, he shoved his hands in his pockets and dispiritedly walked home.
The dank air from the Undercity had saturated his clothes with the smells of mud and mildew. After the darkness of Angels the lights of Cherubim hurt his eyes, too bright and too many of them. He kept his head down and his eyes half-shut, ignoring the hissing of the ventricles at his feet, the distant booming sound of cheers from the level above. He was trying to remember everything about the nemosyne—her face; the feel of cool glass beneath his cheek; her faint ozone smell.
He did not notice the new posters tacked to the wall near his home. EMBRACE UCALEGON: WELCOME THE HEALING WIND! one said; and another DEATH TO THE HERETICAL TYRANTS! He did not notice where a glass brick had fallen from the base of one of the neighboring houses, or where a stream of water like a silvery filament trickled from the gap left in the wall.
Inside, the replicant Khum greeted him in a hollow voice, reminding him that he was supposed to attend an investiture on Seraphim. Hobi shook his head impatiently, waving the replicant away from him, and headed for his room. When he glanced back he saw that he’d tracked some black stuff across the chamber’s white-tiled floor. He stooped to touch it, raised his fingers and sniffed.
Earth. In the hallway’s glaring night-lights it looked very black and foul. He grimaced and wiped his fingers on his trousers.