“No! I do, of course I do—”
He turned so quickly he nearly slipped and fell into a shallow pool at her feet. “It’s just—well, it’s so strange, I can’t understand it all. You’re so strange.” He shrugged, and looked away. “I—I don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t know what will happen, when we get Outside. If we get outside.”
Nefertity nodded. “We should continue. Until we find the way out; we should go on.” Her voice was cool and uninflected once more. When she began to walk again it was with an android’s detached and fluid grace. “Shall I tell you some more stories, while we walk?”
Hobi followed her numbly. “Yes, please,” he said.
“ I know nothing, (the nemosyne chanted), I am a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper, an unhatched egg. I have not yet become a woman…”
Her words echoed gently in the darkness. Behind them, the tunnel receded into gray haze pocked green and yellow where phosphorescent algae glimmered. Ahead of them stretched pure night. The sound of rushing water had died. In its place Hobi heard a faint and regular booming, and felt the tunnel’s floor quivering beneath his feet. More explosions, he thought at first, but as the air grew warmer and more humid and the smell of salt ripened with other things —soft decay, the fetor of green strands rotting on old wood—Hobi knew that they were, at last, approaching the bottommost rim of the Quincunx Domes, the edge of the world, Araboth’s very brink.
They were coming to the end of all things. They were coming to the sea.
Chapter 9
BENEATH THE LAHATIEL GATE
THEY WERE BROUGHT TO THE prison on Archangels—a true prison, not the last refuge of unfortunate diplomats or Orsinate appointees fallen out of favor. Their cell was small but clean. The Architects modeled it after the oubliettes the Ascendants had developed after the First Shining, when it was important to detain political prisoners but equally important to keep them alive, in the face of radiation sickness and plague and the various viral strains decimating the continents. The translucent walls glowed soft white, as did the floor and ceiling, a color that made your eyes ache. After a short while even closing your eyes did no good: pallid amoebic shapes drifted across the inner field of vision like parasites afloat in the orb’s humors. Reive had heard of a particularly nasty torment engineered by the Orsinate—a strain of bacterium was furtively injected into the eyes and temples, which then induced a softening of the brain into fatty matter within a few hours. It was better not to close your eyes, to go blind staring at the gently pulsing walls, than to wonder whether such an entozoan was probing your consciousness.
There were no chairs or beds. The floors and walls radiated heat, not an intense heat but unrelenting. Whenever Reive tried to lie down she felt as though she were being slowly parched upon a grill, and Rudyard Planck skipped back and forth across the cell hissing to himself, his face bright red and his palms glistening with sweat. Only Ceryl seemed unaffected. The amphaze given her in the Four Hundredth Room had done nothing except to rouse her for a brief while, before she subsided back into moaning and twitching restlessly in a corner. The bruise on her forehead had swelled and bulged slightly, a deep purplish-red. When Rudyard very gently touched it, it felt hot, and Ceryl cried out, her eyes rolling open for an instant to stare at him in horror.
“She will die if she is not treated,” the dwarf said, looking up at Reive. Ceryl’s head dropped back onto her chest. From the other side of the cell, a few feet away, the gynander stared at him dumbly. “Her brain is swelling and that bump has gotten infected.”
He crossed the room to a glass door facing a bank of tall cylinders filled with dark fluid, within which swam the prison’s aurible monitors, hand-sized, flat yellowish forms like paramecia or spermatozoa.
“She is dying!” he shouted at them, his hands leaving a smear on the thick glass as he pounded it. “Damn it, call someone, a healer, for god’s sake—”
One of the cylinders blinked dull red, warningly; but nothing else happened. Abruptly the dwarf turned away, and began to hop across the cell again as though nothing had happened.
“She’s going to die,” whispered Reive. Her pale face was flushed. The mullah who had shriven them had also shaved her head, in deference to her being a hermaphrodite, and with cauterizing needles had drawn an intricate ward upon her scalp, an open hand with a mouth gaping in its palm. The mullah’s excitement over shriving a morphodite had been too much: his hands shook and he climaxed while tattooing her. Now the assassin’s ward bled steadily, the gaping mouth oozing a watery discharge that steamed when it dripped onto the floor. “She will be fortunate if she dies before Ucalegon devours us all.” Then she bowed her head and wept.
The dwarf stopped hopping long enough to give her a shrewd look. His red hair stuck up in damp tufts like a basilisk’s cockscomb. But before he could agree with her Ceryl moaned again. The dwarf turned to stare at her pityingly.
“It would be better if she died now,” he murmured. He moved his hand in a gentle gesture above Ceryl’s head, reluctant to touch her and cause her further pain. Reive nodded, clasping her arms about her chest. The mullah had taken her clothes, her scarf and jewelry, and she had been given a linen shift to wear, grass-green and of coarse weave. It itched terribly in the heat. “But I can’t kill her. Could you?”
The gynander shook her head and looked away. Rudyard Planck bowed, tears filling his eyes. “This is terrible—to leave her in such pain like this until tomorrow….”
“Better that than be given to the Redeemer.”
The dwarf said nothing. Since they had been taken from the Four Hundredth Room neither he nor Reive had mentioned the Compassionate Redeemer, although the mullah who had shriven them spoke of little else. After his impulsive ejaculation he had left the shriving chamber for several minutes. He returned wearing a fresh robe and carrying a polemnoscope that he unfolded and directed toward the wall.
“This was during the Tenth Dynasty,” he announced. Ceryl lay unconscious on a gurney by the door. The subdued Rudyard Planck sat next to her, his wrists chafing in their chains. From where she was strapped onto a cold steel table Reive craned her neck to watch great blobby images dance across the wall, obscuring a mosaic that showed Mudhowi Sirrúk wearing an Aviator’s leathers and extrasolar enhancer. The mullah went on, “If you look closely you can see Nasrani Orsina in the corner there, waving, beneath the Redeemer’s hind legs.”
The polemnoscope hummed loudly. Suddenly the images came into sharp focus. Reive tried to turn away. Cursing, Rudyard Planck threatened to have the mullah castigated by the Architect Imperator.
“The Architect Imperator would not object,” the mullah remarked blandly. “We met in a bhang-parlor once, and he confided to me that he had always been fond of that year’s gala. Now, this was just ten years ago. There—where the Redeemer is crouching, you can just make out that face—well, it was a face—that was Grishkin Matamora. You know, the arsonist—”
And so on. Afterward neither Rudyard Planck nor Reive had referred to the mullah’s diversion. In earlier years each had glimpsed the Compassionate Redeemer during Æstival Tide—Planck from one of the Orsinate’s formal viewing gondolas, four-year-old Reive from a great distance, where she huddled on the strand barely two feet from the Lahatiel Gate, afraid to venture farther Outside. Neither cared to discuss the fact that along with the failing Ceryl, they were to be given to the Redeemer as a special sacrifice.
The cell’s white walls did not dim as evening approached. They only knew it was evening when a human guard appeared, bearing a tray set with three globes of nutriment. Finally exhausted by her pacing, Reive leaned against one wall, wiping the sweat from her face and watching it steam from her palm. In her corner Ceryl lay, silent and unmoving. Reive could not bear to look at her; the thought of her dying filled her with a terrible sadness, but also with a rage so intense she thought she might go mad, or harm her surviving cellmate in her fury. When the guard arrived only Rudyard hurried to the glass wall, waving frantically as she slid the tray into their cell. But the guard tipped her head so that he could see where her ears had been sliced off and replaced with flat blue auricular disks, and opened her mouth to display a gray tongue split neatly in two like an eel’s belly. The dwarf turned away, discouraged.