There was a dull grinding overhead. The hissing of incense from the ventricles abruptly stopped. The smell of burning petroleum filled the air, and a sound like crackling paper. As the margravines slowly raised their heads, hail began to fall in the Four Hundredth Room.
Book Two THE FEAST OF FEAR
Chapter 8
SHADOWS OF THE THIRD SHINING
THE DOORS OPENED ONTO the Undercity. “I’ve forgotten my lumiere,” Nasrani said. He leaned against the wall of the gravator, cradling his bleeding hand, and looked as if he were about to faint.
“There will be no need,” the Aviator replied. “Give me your hand.”
Nasrani shook his head and started for the door. “No, please—” he stammered. “I’m all right, I can see fine—”
The Aviator stepped beside him. His hand when it enveloped Nasrani’s was warm, then hot, so hot that the exile cried aloud. There was a small hissing sound, like a fly caught in flame, and the stink of burning cloth. The exile choked, reeling backward, but the Aviator caught him. When Nasrani looked down at his hand, the bleeding had stopped and the skin glowed a translucent red.
“We will have no need of light,” said the Aviator. As the doors began to slide shut again he grabbed them and pushed them apart. The wood and metal buckled and bulged outward. Nasrani covered his face as splinters of glass and wood flew everywhere.
“Don’t!—you’re destroying it, we won’t be able to return—”
Metal gears shrieked and ground futilely against each other; then there was silence. Tast’annin stepped into the darkness. When he turned to face Nasrani the exile caught his breath. The rasa glowed softly, a dull crimson glow like the Flames of the Eternal in Blessed Narouz’s Refinery.
“Do not be afraid,” he said, his voice echoing in the void of Angels. “Come, Nasrani.”
The exile stumbled after him, stammering, “You ruined it—the other gravators—wait—”
“There will be no need,” the rasa repeated. Above him reared the immense shadows of the Undercity, the faint and distant glimmerings of blue and gold and crimson where the refineries and medifacs burned far overhead. From beneath their feet rose a heavy smell, an odor as of things newly exhumed from the earth. Nasrani gagged and covered his mouth with his sleeve. The rasa waited for him, a ruby taper burning in the endless night.
“Where is she?” he asked after a little while. “I will go before you if you tell me the way.”
Nasrani coughed, nodding. “Augh—that smell! I will show you, this way—”
He began to feel his way very slowly, the rasa beside him silent, his feet making almost no sound upon the broken earth. The labyrinth of walls and buildings the exile had used before to guide him had changed. Smooth surfaces crumbled beneath his outstretched hands, great blocks of metal and concrete sheared away at his touch, plummeting into unseen chasms just a few feet from where they walked. Nasrani trembled and chattered to himself, stopping to stare about him in wonder, as though he’d forgotten where he was. More than once the rasa’s hand roused him, so hot that it singed his torn shirt.
“Something has happened—something terrible has happened,” Nasrani said again and again. The ground felt different than it had on his earlier visits—soft and friable, as though it had been churned by the passage of an immense nematode. Into this raw earth the remains of familiar buildings had been swallowed, and other things disgorged. A huge smooth dome of glass, miraculously unbroken. Beneath it rows of emaciated human figures embraced blocks of steel, their empty eyesockets staring up at Nasrani and Tast’annin as they passed. Wrecked autovehicles and boats bulged from the ground, their hulls scorched and fused together to form one great misshapen machine. Where before there had been only a smooth expanse of dead earth and concrete now erupted a heap of broken forms of wood and metal. From them spilled bones, bones and skulls and sleeves of deep blue and scarlet, trimmed with metal brocade. The rasa paused to stare at them. Where his hand brushed the edge of one uniform a tiny spiral of smoke rose, and a crackling sound.
Nasrani stopped and gazed overhead. An eerie red glow suffused the darkness. In the distance clouds of black smoke seemed to billow and rise, obscuring the silhouette of the monstrous ziggurat looming above them. An uneven but ceaseless current of sound swelled beneath it all, a rush like running water, punctuated by soft retort’s and sudden explosive roars, as of huge buildings being pried apart and thrown to the ground. Beneath his heavy clothes the exile sweated and shivered; his wounded shoulder ached and his hand throbbed almost unbearably. He wiped his face, squinting as he struggled to see something of the rest of Araboth—flames leaping from the refineries on Archangels, and a white pulse that might have been distress lights from Seraphim. And closer he saw other flames, and pallid greenish globes that bobbed in the distance but never seemed to grow any nearer. Another smell choked him, along with the fetid reek of decay; a smell of burning, of acrid chemicals and gas. He coughed and stumbled, and nearly fell into a narrow crevasse that slit the earth at his feet like a razor tearing through skin. When the rasa’s hand touched his shoulder he jerked back. It was burning hot, as though it had been cast into a furnace.
And suddenly Nasrani realized that was exactly what had happened. The Undercity was burning. The rasa’s metal form was heating like an ingot thrust into the heart of a forge. Nasrani stopped, weaving in the near darkness.
“I can’t—we can’t go on,” he gasped. His eyes were wild. “Margalis—the Undercity is burning, if we go on we’ll die from the heat. I don’t understand,” he whimpered.
“Look.” The exile shrank as the rasa gripped his shoulder with one fiery hand. “Can you see—there, at the base of that shattered pyramid?”
Nasrani swallowed. He nodded, peering where the rasa pointed. “Yes,” he whispered. “I see, Margalis, but—what is it?”
The rasa’s eyes glowed, brighter and brighter until they were like two holes of flame. In the distance they heard a hollow rasping. “It is a rift, a chasm at the bottom of the city. See—? Boiling up there, that is water, it is the sea coming in from Outside. That smooth wall behind it is one of the conduits that supplies the vivariums. The fulciment of the entire city is rupturing.”
Nasrani stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“There!”
The Aviator pointed at the pyramid, gleaming dull gold in the murk. The steady rasping grew louder and louder, until suddenly a terrific crack rent the air. For an instant the pyramid flamed brilliant white; then like a heap of ashes it collapsed and sank all at once into the darkness.
“How can it—” Nasrani staggered forward as the rasa shoved him.
“We have no time!” Tast’annin cried harshly. “We must find her quickly, the city is falling around us—”
Nasrani stumbled and halted, hugging on to a broken steel post. “Margalis—Margalis, please, listen to me. I don’t know where we are. It’s changed—if what you’ve said is true, if the city is collapsing around us—it’s all different. The landmarks are gone—there used to be an alley, there, and a, a sort of archway—”
Tast’annin looked over his shoulder, nodding. “It is still there. See—the arch has fallen, it is caught on that narrow landing—”
Nasrani shielded his eyes, then exclaimed, “It is! I see it—the doorway is still there, behind it—”