To think these were its final hours: the Holy City of the Americas, the last place upon the continent where the glories of Science still held thrall. She bowed her head against her hands and cried softly, thinking of all that would disappear forever, if Araboth fell.
But after a little while she stopped. She couldn’t afford to waste time like this, sobbing like her sister Shiyung after the execution of one of her lovers. Wiping her eyes, she left, hurried past the Redeemer’s cell and toward the gravator that would bring her to Seraphim’s hangars, where the Aviators guarded their fougas and Gryphons.
Not all the glories of the Orsinate would perish with their city.
Before her imprisonment, Reive had never been on Principalities—she didn’t count the brief excursion from the Virtues gravator to the Lahatiel Gate at Æstival Tide. The level’s very name had always been enough to make her shiver, with its intimations of the Emirate’s ruling legions imprisoned to languish in the fiery darkness. Now she and Rudyard Planck were hurried past tall grim buildings of blackened limestone, quarried when Araboth was still being built by masons recruited from the Eastern Provinces of Colorado and Nevada, the huge stone blocks then dragged up to Level Three by android slaves and work teams from the Emirate. The sight of those windowless fortresses was even worse than the imagining of them. Millions of fossil shells and crinoids were embedded in the limestone, smutted by centuries of smoke rising from the refineries and the caustic airs released by the medifacs themselves. Beneath her feet the ground was cold stone, and there too she saw the imprints of shells and soft tubes, things like ferns and creatures that were all vertebrae or carapace. Reive shuddered, wondering if that was what the ocean was like, Outside, teeming with these worms and larval things, and seashells like eyes closing upon the eternal twilight. In front of her Rudyard Planck ignored the buildings. He padded after their guards in his soft-soled boots and stared resolutely at the ground. The sound of their passage was swallowed by the roar of the medifac engines, their relentless thud-thud broken by the occasional shrieks of steam escaping from a huge valve. Several times deafening reports shook the entire level, and bits of rubble came crashing down from far overhead, spraying them with dust and grit. The floor would shake, and once Reive screamed as an entire huge block of stone reared up from the ground, shearing through a wooden building as though it were made of rice paper. Through the resulting gap in the floor flames streamed upward, and even their guards shouted and fled, dragging Reive and Rudyard after them.
At least, she thought, at least Ceryl was spared this.
Finally they reached the end of the medifacs, the last long low buildings with their hook-hung scaffoldings like gallows thrust against the gray walls. There were greasy black stains on the ground near the railing, where heaps of rubble were dusted with black ash. Tremors continued to shake the entire level, and faint cries and shrieks followed each round of explosions. A little ways down the hallway she glimpsed people milling about the dark entrances of a number of gravators.
Another smell permeated the air here. Roses, thought Reive, but something else as well—like the faint odor of carrion that rose from Zalophus’s tank, or the scent of corruption that hung about a chamber where timoring had recently taken place. She felt a powerful urge to run away, to find the source of that smell for herself—and that was when she recalled the Compassionate Redeemer.
They were nearing its cage. She had managed to avoid thinking of it—easy enough when it seemed at any moment they might be killed by falling stone, or swallowed by some gaping rift. But now they were very close to their final destination, and the thought of what awaited them there made her shudder.
There really was no way out. They really were going to die. She thought of all the tales she had ever heard about the Redeemer, about executions, about Æstival Tide. She felt light-headed, almost giddy: to think that her life had come to this! A month ago she was wandering the halls of Dominations, thinking about scrounging a meal; now she was herself to be offered to the Redeemer as the festival sacrifice. She scratched her head, feeling where the mullah had nicked her scalp. She felt a wave of sorrow for Rudyard Planck, plodding along a few feet ahead of her, his collar pulled up so that tufts of red hair sprouted from it. He was innocent, really; if only she hadn’t met him that day in the sculpture garden!
But then another explosion rocked the city, and she thought of Ceryl’s dream, of the margravine’s and her own; and she knew that there was no escape now, for any of them. Only Zalophus—perhaps he at last had found a way out. Her eyes watered and she sniffed loudly. She thought of running away—it couldn’t possibly be any worse, to die now rather than an hour later—but then she heard a guard shouting at her.
“Hurry up,” he cried, grabbing her arm. “The margravines will be waiting and they can’t begin until you get there.”
They had reached the gravators. Reive craned her neck to see above the heads of the guards pressing close to her, protecting her from the people spilling from the gravators as the doors opened. ’Filers from Powers, heads bowed beneath the weight of their equipment; biotechs from the vivariums in their yolk-yellow smocks, trimmed with green ribbons for the festival. Low-level diplomats and cabal members, trying not to look put out that they had to travel this way, rather than on the Orsinate’s private conveyances. Gynanders and marabous and slack-lipped mantics stepped from Virtues, blinking in the gloom. And, walking slowly through the crowd, rasas from Archangels, silent and pale, their hollow eyes glowing in the dusky light. All of them touched with green: ivy and leaves plastered to hats and vocoders, robes and trousers specially tailored with emerald brocade or grass-green trim, deep green stripes showing against the black uniforms of the Reception Committee. Even the rasas wore bits of finery, remnants of their earlier lives—jade beads rattling around one’s neck, a pale scarf fluttering from another. Reive cried out softly and buried her face in the guard’s shoulder, her small hands clutching at his back. She did not see, therefore, the doors that opened before them—great narrow bronze doors, inlaid with steel studs and spikes and guarded by a phalanx of Aviators.
Rudyard Planck was not so easily disturbed by the crowd, and so he did see the doors, though not for the first time. As an intimate of Sajur Panggang’s he had been this way a decade earlier—although the thought of what waited there made him want to hide his head as well. As the doors swung open the guards padded in, carrying Reive and Rudyard. The Aviators turned and followed them, into a long corridor with walls and floor and ceiling of copper-colored metal, hung with electrified green-glass lanterns that shone like the eyes of great malign insects. Joss sticks were set into small brass burners, gray streams of rose scent snaking through the air. Some of the Aviators stopped and turned their hands in the smoke, raising their enhancers to rub it onto their cheeks. As they passed beneath the electric lanterns Reive heard a faint high buzzing sound, a monotonous counterpoint to the even crack of the Aviators’ boots upon the floor. Perhaps inspired by the funereal atmosphere, Rudyard Planck began very softly to recite the Orison Acherontic. Reive could feel the floor trembling beneath the feet of her guard. Once or twice the electric lanterns flickered, but there was nothing else to hint that the Architects after their long servitude were failing their masters.