“Stop—” she gasped. The rickshaw shuddered to a halt. The driver turned to stare at her blankly, spat a wad of betel juice onto the pavement. “Just wait,” Ceryl choked, and opened the door.
Violet light spilled onto her, the perpetual dusk of the upper levels. She smelled the warm mist heavy with the scent of the sea Outside. Despite the thousands of filters humming and doing their best to dispel it, the smell and damp of the sea still got in. Lately it seemed inescapable. Those members of the pleasure cabinet who were more superstitious than Ceryl shook their heads and whispered about bad omens—strands of kelp found floating in filtration chambers, the odd bit of mussel shell clogging a drain. Certainly Ceryl had noticed the smell more lately, but she attributed that to the fact that Æstival Tide was less than a week away.
Now it was that smell that made her feel better. She breathed deeply, eyes closed. A vague impression of warmth and green flooded her, a memory of the sound of birds. She had seen the ocean, of course, ten years earlier at the last Æstival Tide, when they finally opened the Lahatiel Gate. The sight of that restless sea had terrified her, the closest she ever came to the holy terror of timoring. Ever since then she had wondered whether you would always feel like that, if you lived near it. Really lived near it—on real sand and smelling real air and tasting brackish water—and not within this unimaginably vast and intricate labyrinth of a city, dying beneath its domes between the blasted prairie and the threatening sea. Maybe, if she lived by the sea, she would not be plagued by nightmares and forced to spend much of her monthly salary on pantomancers, those quack dream-merchants.
Her cheeks grew cool with mist and she sighed, opening her eyes. The rickshaw had stopped at the outermost rim of the Thrones Level Grid. The avenue here was in blessedly good repair, the surface beneath her feet smooth and cool. Only, behind one of the rickshaw’s wheels, she noticed a crack in the pavement, like a thread of water running down the avenue.
“That’s odd,” she said aloud. The rickshaw driver cocked his head at her and shrugged.
“Something new,” he said, spitting a crimson mouthful of betel juice onto the ground. “Cracks. I had to repair a wheel bearing twice in three days.”
“Cracks,” Ceryl repeated softly, and stared down at the ground.
Behind her were the broken spires and crooked facades of Thrones’ residential neighborhoods. Like everything else on the upper levels of Araboth, these apartments were prefabricated by the Architects. Over the last few centuries the metal and plasteel structures had cracked and buckled under the weight of the levels above, until all of Thrones seemed to be caving in upon itself, albeit in a subdued, almost genteel manner. Although of course living quarters here were a vast improvement over the dayglo ghettos of Virtues, where the hermaphrodites lived, or the grim cubicles that housed the ’filers and media crews on Powers. At least on Thrones the roads had always been in good repair.
Ceryl sighed and rubbed her nose. A few yards in front of her, a shimmering heat fence crackled and sparked as moisture filtered down from the Quincunx Domes. Beyond the fence was nothing, a dizzying plunge to the next level, Dominations, and thence to Virtues, and Powers, and so on down to the lowest level of the crazily layered ziggurat that was Araboth. If one could see the city from above (but of course you could not, unless you were an Aviator), it would resemble a huge and living pagoda, its vaulted domes rearing above the nine levels like the chitinous shell of some monstrous arthropod. And Outside, the sea: smashing against the domes during the months-long storm season, whispering through the dreams of the Imperators’ children as they slept in their gilded beds on Cherubim.
It was only the Architects that protected them from the horrors of the sea and the world Outside. There, an earth seeded by centuries of radiation and viral rains had given birth to heteroclites and demons. Only the tireless Architects protected them from that. On the uppermost levels, Seraphim and Cherubim, the Ascendants’ robotic engineers constantly built and rebuilt Araboth’s pinnacles and spires and moats. You might wake one morning and find that the outside of your chambers had been gilded. Or there might be a new place of worship where last night there had been nothing: a shining new crucifix-speared mosque, wherein the Orsinate propitiated the horrors of the ravening world with offerings of prisoners taken in ceaseless raids against the Commonwealth.
Or, if you were unfortunate enough to live on the lower levels, you might find that in a single night the Architects had destroyed your ghetto on Powers. Or they might have torched a refinery on Archangels, immolating thousands of rasas as the Architects’ grinding machines leveled factories and apartment buildings made of polymer-strengthened paper. The next day perhaps an ice-blue lake would be there, with Orsinate bastards skimming across its surface in their azure gas-fired proas, while from its banks their replicant nursemaids stood guard with blank yet watchful eyes.
Or there might be nothing there at all, a smoking ruin such as Ceryl’s dead lover Giton Arrowsmith had found once, where his chambers had been. That was before Ceryl’s promotion to the pleasure cabinet. She had never thought she would look back with any fondness upon Giton’s fishy-smelling cubicle on Dominations; but here she was, tearfully nostalgic in front of a heat fence on Thrones. There was no reason for it, for any of it. There was absolutely no reasoning behind the Architects’ ceaseless construction and deconstruction of the city. Even the margravine Âziz admitted to that, and Sajur Panggang, the Architect Imperator who was supposed to monitor the great machines.
“We grew lazy and forgot how to program them,” he had told Ceryl once, and shrugged. “So now they program themselves. I, um, occasionally make suggestions to them, and if I’m fortunate, well, they listen to me.”
He was a small slender man, the Architect Imperator, with the large gentle eyes and strong chin of his Orsina cousins. Unlike his cousins, Sajur was gifted with a keen, if narrowly focused, intelligence. The Architects had designed most of the buildings in Araboth—for example, those dizzying residences on Cherubim that assumed such bizarrely baroque proportions that they could scarcely be looked at by a sane person, let alone lived in. But Sajur Panggang had created the Reception Areas, the labyrinthine prisons that supplied the vivariums on Dominations with food. And he had also designed many of Araboth’s hundreds of kerchief-sized parks, where the marvel of holographic landscaping made it seem that one gazed across a moor swept with lavender sage in bloom, or peered up at the unimaginably distant bulk of mountains with peaks so sharp they might have been cut from paper—which, in essence, they were.
“The Orsinas have never been known for their intellect,” Sajur had confessed to Ceryl. This was not long after his wife’s murder. Ceryl, recalling her own grief after Giton’s death, had expressed her sympathy for Sajur’s bereavement. “It’s a miracle it’s all still standing, really.”
He had cast an ironic glance at the ceiling, and stroked the elegant cobalt cylinder of a drafting mannequin. “A wonderful, wonderful miracle.” Ceryl recalled him enviously. She wished she could consider anything inside of Araboth a miracle. Because as she stared out at the heat fence sparking a few feet in front of her, the pale violet light that made everything look like its own shadow, Ceryl felt only despair.