But at last the whale grew still. The waves lapping against the tank’s lip subsided. “I must go now, little thing,” he crooned, rolling to gaze at her with one enormous liquid eye. “Reive, Reive Orsina. I was alone and you spoke to me. I was hungry and you fed me, Reive.”
The gynander shrugged, laughing in spite of herself. “You are always hungry, Zalophus!”
He drew up and back into the air until he smashed down into the water, then twisted and leaped once more, higher and higher, until his huge body blotted out the light and Reive stumbled backward.
“I will not forget!” he bellowed, and for the last time dived beneath the tank’s surface. Reive huddled against a wall, shaking, waiting for the water to grow still again. But Zalophus did not return, then or ever, to his prison beneath the Quincunx Domes.
“Reive.”
The dwarf had been repeating her name for some time now. Two guards in the Orsinate’s violet livery stood waiting behind the thick glass door, idly tapping slender cudgels against their palms. One of them stared at the gynander’s pale form with no less surprise than did the dwarf himself—Rudyard was suddenly petrified that Reive had died too. But finally she stirred and blinked, gazing blearily at the ruddy face hanging a few inches above hers.
“Reive, it’s time.”
“Time?” She sat up and looked around. The walls had changed color, from white to a glowering red. Ceryl’s corpse still lay sprawled in the corner. She turned quickly back to Rudyard. “ Time? ”
He crooked his thumb at the door. “Guards.” His voice was so low and hoarse she could not at first understand what he said. “For us, Reive. They’re taking us.”
“Taking us?” For a moment she thought of Zalophus, heard him booming Come with me, recalled the splinter of blue gleaming above the watergates. She thought of him repeating her name: Reive, Reive Orsina. She stood, ignoring Rudyard Planck patting her hand comfortingly. The cell door slid open onto the waiting guards. Reive shook her head, heedless of the blood dried on her scalp, the tendrils of hair left where the mullah had shaved her carelessly. She walked up to one of the guards and pointed to Ceryl.
“We want you to burn her properly. No medifacs. Have her pyre set on Dominations—”
The guard stared at her, eyes furrowed, and then started to grin. Reive looked at him coldly and said, “Dominations! Do you hear us? We are Reive Orsina, heir to the Orsinate! We want that woman given full obsequies and burned this morning. Before the Gate is opened.”
The guard looked startled, glanced at Reive and at Ceryl’s body and then at the other guard. Slowly they both nodded. Reive looked back at the dwarf staring openmouthed and said, “Come on, Rudyard. We don’t want to keep the margravines waiting.” The guards stood aside for him, then led them down the hall.
Nike Orsina stood staring at the corpse of her sister Shiyung. Of course, it wasn’t exactly a corpse, because the body that floated in the narrow steel vat was not precisely dead. Tubes ran from Shiyung’s nostrils and ears and anus, delicate wires had been fitted to her shaved skull and to her fingers. A corrugated black hose fed into her mouth; Nike could see it move very slightly, in and out, like a bellows. The body was immersed in a clear liquid that smelled like standing water, with a faint undertone of cabbages.
Nike wrinkled her nose and leaned away from the tank. It had been her own idea to come here, to the laboratory on Dominations where the rasas were rehabilitated. After she had left the Four Hundredth Room and returned to her own chambers she could not sleep. Sajur’s death had frightened her, and Âziz’s insane obstinacy in the face of so many terrible omens. The dream of the Green Country; the tremors that, since last evening, shook the entire city with alarming regularity; that uncanny morphodite. She kept seeing her, so young and thin, looking so much like Shiyung when she was a girl. How could anyone see her and not recognize her as an Orsina? Âziz believed that Nike did not notice things—Shiyung had thought so too, and Nasrani, before he was exiled—but Nike did notice, more than they knew. It was a common belief among morpha habitues that, far from numbing the senses, frequent—and in Nike’s case, nearly constant—use of the drug made it possible to see and sense things outside the perimeters of normal consciousness. Nike had discussed this with Shiyung once and her sister had agreed, stating that once while under the influence of kef she had watched Nasrani’s thoughts leaving his head, in the form of small orange globes. This had not been what Nike meant; but she recalled it now, gazing at Shiyung’s face beneath the vat’s bubbling surface.
The morphodite was Shiyung and Nasrani’s child, sole heir to the thirteenth Orsinate. The first heir in hundreds of years, if one believed the histories ’filed in spools on Powers Level. It was an abomination, of course, a natural child and a heteroclite; but it would be a greater abomination to kill it and have no living heir to the dynasty. Nasrani was exiled, Nike herself had never had any interest in governance, and the demands of despotism had driven Âziz quite mad. Of Shiyung nothing remained, certainly not within that empty carapace. Nike was sure of that. If anything, since the corpse had been given to the biotechnicians for regeneration, it looked less alive than anything Nike had ever seen. Its skin was soft and pulpy; a whitish fuzz grew from the corner of one eye. The fingers splayed open like a frog’s, moving back and forth as nucleic starter was pumped into the tank. It was grotesque, worse than the flayed smelting children of Archangels; worse than Shiyung’s most addled experiments at geneslaves. Another sign of Âziz’s madness: there was no way Shiyung’s rasa could be presented to the multitudes as Tast’annin had been. They would riot and kill the surviving margravines rather than have such a horrifying reminder of their beloved Shiyung stalking witlessly through the city. A sudden horror seized Nike: that this was how she would end up someday, a gormless thing resuscitated in the bowels of Araboth and then forgotten, left to wander the lower levels with all the other doomed and deathless toys of the Ascendants.
“No,” she whispered. She groped at the banks of switches on the wall beside her and turned back to the tank. The liquid churned inside it, flowing over the top and spilling through grates on the floor beneath. She muttered to herself, then closing her eyes she reached into the vat and grabbed the thick hose that covered the corpse’s mouth. Nike gasped—the flux was freezing cold, viscous; the hose heavier than she could have thought possible. She yanked it once, then again and again, until finally it slipped loose. Then, teeth chattering, she snatched her hands back and looked wildly about the room for something to dry them on. She found a biotech’s robe and wrapped her hands in that, and returned to the tank.
Shiyung’s corpse had risen as the liquid did, and now bumped against one edge of the vat. A milky ichor stained the nucleic starter around her mouth. Fine white threads of tissue streamed from her nostrils and a small hole above one eye. As Nike stared in horror the corpse’s eyelids rolled back, to show pale irises corrupted with tiny yellow spores. It gazed up at her, its pupils mere specks floating atop cloudy green yolks; then suddenly the eyes moved to stare at the side of its tank. Nike shrieked and stumbled backward. More and more starter poured onto the floor, and before she could do anything the corpse was falling as well, pushed by the weight of the liquid bubbling up from the vat.