“But that’s impossible—how could she—” She turned to see the first guard with her cudgel poised above the mysid’s globe. “No! Leave that, it’s—”
As Ceryl flung herself at her the guard turned, her cudgel smashing through the air onto Ceryl’s head, again and again and again. Ceryl heard screaming, felt something snap inside her neck, like a bit of plastic cracked between the fingers. Then she felt nothing, only that same dreamy sense she had had in her dream, of the world falling endlessly away beneath her like tarmac beneath a rickshaw’s wheel, and before her a plain of exultant green.
It was late evening in Araboth. The Architects had finally switched off the distress lights. Faint music drifted down from Seraphim, snatches of songs popular during Æstival Tide in earlier decades. Fougas cruised through the periwinkle air towing pennons with the arcane sigils of the Feast of Fear—waves with ravening teeth, a bleeding sun. The Orsinate’s guard could already be seen, resplendent in their festival garb as they paraded around the palace, night-lights glinting off suits of shining yellow plasteel and leather face-masks. Pyres flickered around the rim of the upper levels, sending eddies of white smoke into the perfumed air as the Seraphim and Cherubim tossed intricately folded paper encised with prayers for the dead into the flames. On the lower levels a festival air prevailed as moujiks and morphodites, biotechs and ’filers, began preparing the feastday meals of sugared pumpkin seeds and cardamom custard, tripe soup and jellied krill and unripe peaches rolled in cayenne, and the nine-layered pilau known as Breath of the Redeemer, with its confits of tamarind and prickly pear, and the crisp-fried tentacles of sea-nettles. And on Archangels the enslaved rasas began their own somber rites, carrying the mummified remains of Blessed Narouz to a balustrade overlooking the Lahatiel Gate.
A few people wondered that such preparations for the festival would be carried out following the death of a margravine. Many more still had not heard the news of Shiyung’s death. It seemed the evening ’file broadcasts had been interrupted by one of the tremors shaking the lower levels. Still, there were rumors among the Toxins Cabal on Thrones, and even in one of the ’filers’ pods on Powers, that there had been an assassination attempt of some kind. The Aviators had mutinied, under the command of the corpse that was their leader. Âziz had stabbed her sister Shiyung. Nasrani Orsina had killed all three margravines, serving them shark poached in a broth of speckled-fly mushrooms.
Nasrani Orsina had done no such thing. Clad in blue and gold robes and wearing the heavy conical crown of the Orsinate, as the nuclear CLOCK clanged the evening hour he hurried to the small gravator that serviced Coventry wing. Behind him the rasa moved silently, like a great dark insect on hinged steel legs, black robes flapping about him like wings and only his eyes betraying the man within.
“Embrace the Fear that feeds us.” The robotic sentry whispered the traditional Æstival Tide greeting as Nasrani waited impatiently for it to scan him. “Nasrani Orsina. Pass.” A moment longer while it read the rasa’s cold blue eyes, then, “Margalis Tast’annin. Pass.”
Inside tiny red lights blinked across the ceiling. There were no views of the lower levels as this gravator dropped, only the chill black walls of its shaft and occasional glimpses of flickering lights and the leaping flames of the refineries. Nasrani settled into one of the cramped seats (no extraneous comforts for exiles) and gingerly rubbed his bandaged arm. The rasa stood beside him, staring out the narrow window.
Finally Nasrani spoke. “They’ll find you, you know. If you go back with me now I’ll argue for you—”
“They won’t.” The rasa’s voice might have come from the sentry’s black cylinder. “They think the gynander did it. The one at the inquisition; the one who scryed Âziz’s dream.”
Nasrani let his breath out and shrugged, defeated. “Yes, I heard about her. Âziz told me: she said it was—” He looked at the floor. For an instant Shiyung’s image hung there before him, her long legs cool against his, her green eyes laughing as she drew him closer. He cleared his throat. “She said it was the dream of the Green Country.”
“Yes. That is one reason why I want to see the nemosyne.”
Nasrani plucked at a thread on his robes. He sighed and removed his crown, wiping his forehead where sweat had beaded beneath its weight. He tried to smile. “Still the inquiring skeptic, Margalis?”
The rasa turned to Nasrani. His eerie mask reflected the exile’s face, distorted so that it was as though Nasrani gazed upon his own skeletal image, all hollow eyes and grinning fleshless mouth. He shuddered and looked away.
The rasa said, “I have seen things you would not believe, Nasrani Orsina: the fruits of your family’s poisonous tree. Now I have become one of those rotting fruits. And so, it seems, will your sister Shiyung. Your ancestors invented the timoring after the Architects shared with you their secrets for rehabilitating corpses, so that you could indulge your passion for death without having to die yourselves. Although you do die eventually, don’t you? Even the Orsinate dies, although you are scarcely more than ghosts yourselves, your blood has grown so sick and weak…”
He took Nasrani’s hand. The exile gasped as he felt the steel fingers slice through the soft leather glove, the metal biting into his own palm until he cried out and looked down to see blood staining black leather and spilling onto the floor.
“Oh, but, Nasrani,” the Aviator said as he tightened his grip upon the exile’s bleeding hand, “Nasrani, Nasrani…” as though nothing had happened, as though Nasrani were beside him at a dream inquisition, and not inside a gravator plummeting to the Undercity.
And suddenly that hollow voice took on a new tenor, a tone that was bright with wonder; and Nasrani looked up, terrified at what this might mean, that a rasa ’s voice should sound so human. “While I was out in the world I saw things that would take your breath away, things that even an Orsina would find sublime. Children —”
And here his voice dropped to a whisper, a hiss that made Nasrani’s hair stand on end—
“I saw children butcher each other like animals, because your viral rains had turned them into ravening beasts. I took counsel from a cadaver, a hollow skull who spoke more wisely than ever your diplomats and cabinet did. And I saw a girl who could kill with her mind; and now who among your family can do that?”
Abruptly the rasa dropped Nasrani’s bleeding hand. The exile snatched it away, moaning beneath his breath as he wrapped it in a handkerchief. He blinked away tears, then forced a smile. “Now, Margalis,” he began, trying to sound composed, “you know that we have scientists and researchers who—”
“Science?” The rasa turned to him, his eyes scorched pits in his empty face. “ Science? You do not understand! I helped bring a god to birth in that accursed City, and all your science was for nothing there! What has your science done, but scald the earth and poison the seas, make howling beasts and tormented scarecrows of men and children and devise new ways to torture them, all for the pleasure of a family of inbred aristocrats! Did your science give my body back to me, my life and heart and soul? No! It twists everything, it can only hold up a charred skeleton to the image of the live thing it once was. But—”
His voice grew softer, and his hands as they groped the air were more graceful than any rasa’s Nasrani had ever seen. “But I have glimpsed something stronger than your science, children lovelier than your most precious timorata: a boy who embraced Death and his sister, who defeated It. They had no need of laboratories or Architects or gabbling aristocrats.”