Reive found that now, slung over her guard like a naughty child, her terror had eased. A cool and resigned expectation replaced it. She recalled all she knew of the Compassionate Redeemer. Its image crudely drawn in hand-tinted images on long scrolls of rice paper; the many types of sacrificial incense that bore its name, from cheap acrid-smelling joss sticks and incense blocks to rose-stamped lozenges and those elaborate coils dusted with silver nitrate that fizzed and popped and sometimes badly burned the unwary. She was too young to remember much from the last Æstival Tide. She recalled only how she and the other morphodites from the Virtues creche were marched to the head of the Gate and made to sit in a relatively sheltered spot, where there was less chance of them being trampled or thrown down the steps in the festival frenzy. There she had sucked on a marzipan image of the monster, until its sweetness made her teeth hurt and she tossed it down the steps.
Now she turned her head so that the rough cloth of her guard’s uniform wouldn’t chafe so at her cheek. In the distance ahead of them a narrow orange rectangle grew larger and brighter as they approached it. Reive wished she had used her time in prison more wisely, and questioned Rudyard Planck about the protocol of offerings to the Redeemer. The rectangle blazed now, the Aviators’ silhouettes dead-black against it, and resolved into a great door that seemed to open onto a flaming pyre. One by one as they stepped through the doorway the Aviators were swallowed by the blaze. A few feet ahead of her Rudyard Planck raised one small pudgy hand in farewell as his guard carried him over the threshold. Then it was Reive’s turn. As she blinked and tried to shade her eyes from the incendiary light, she thought without irony how strange it was that she was embarking upon a very intense and personal experience of the Feast of Fear, and yet she was no longer afraid.
The Gryphons were housed on the same level as the Lahatiel Gate, on a long spur that hung above the sands below. A worn concrete walkway led to where the aircraft were lined up on a ledge overlooking nothing but endless blue: deep greenish-blue below, pale cloud-scarred blue above. Even with the filters the light was blinding, and Âziz bowed her head to keep from gazing out upon the sea.
It was one of the only parts of Araboth where the domes were clear enough to see through. This was to enable the Aviators to gauge the weather for themselves. A totally unnecessary precaution—a Gryphon had only to extend one of its filaments to measure wind velocity, barometric pressure, precipitation, radiation, atmospheric conditions ranging from the chance of hail to, the varying levels of hydrogen in the stratosphere, possible exposure to mutagens, presence of enemy airships or -craft, and evidence of radioactivity in the Null Zones. The Aviators, however, being proud to the point of hubris, claimed to be able to determine all of these things merely by gazing at the open air.
Âziz made no such claims upon the world Outside. The sight—the very thought —of the ocean looming outside the meniscus made her tremble. To counteract this weakness, on her way here she had pricked her throat with an ampule of andrenoleen. If she was going to travel as an Aviator travels, she would have to control her emotions. Now, as the drug took hold of her, she could feel the blood racing through her heart, and a fiery confidence replaced the fear that usually accompanied her few visits to the Aviators’ stronghold. With the Gryphons, it was most important not to be afraid. A few feet from where they stood she raised her head, teeth clenched so that a skeleton’s grin racked her thin face, and squinted through the brilliance at the aircraft.
There were twelve of them. Each faced the outside of the dome, where the translucent polymer was etched with spray and salt, and the outlines of the skygates glowed cobalt against the bright sky. Once there had been hundreds of these biotic aircraft, a fleet powerful enough to subdue entire continents. Over the centuries, provincial rebellions and incursions by the Emirate and Balkhash Commonwealth had destroyed many of them. The bibliochlasm alone had resulted in a score being torched like mayflies to burn in the skies above Memphis.
But most of the Gryphons had been destroyed since then. In the dark ages that followed the Third Shining, they were lost through the ignorance of pilots who were no longer properly instructed in the command of their skittish craft. Physically, the Gryphons were quite frail, no more than a skeleton and membrane containing the crystals and fluids necessary to establish the controlling link between pilot and craft, and carry the canisters of nerve gas or virus or mutagens dispatched in the Ascendants’ rains of terror. Not until the Second Ascension and the establishment of the NASNA Academy were the lost arts of biotic aviation restored. Then the first generation of Aviators were trained in the arcane methods of controlling fougas and aviettes and man-powered Condors, the solex-winged shuttles of HORUS and, most beautiful and lethal of all, the Ninth Generation Biotic Gryphons, all that remained of the imposing defense structure of the short-lived Military Republic of Wichita.
Of that squadron, only these twelve had survived. Formally, they belonged to the Ascendant Autocracy; but in truth each answered only to its Aviator—the dozen finest of the Ascendants’ troops. And while their pilots were faceless and nameless, grim histories hidden behind their sensory enhancers, the Gryphons were not. Skittish and deadly by turns, it was as though they absorbed into their very fabric—half biological material and half machine—the natures of the men and women who did not control them so much as give them impetus and inspiration for flight.
And so they had been given heroes’ names, and heroines’: Astraea and Zelus and Mjolnir, Argo and Kesef and Tyr, Chao-is and Cavas and Hekatus, Ygg and Nephele and Mrabet-ul-tan. And like heroes between their labors they waited in restless sleep, until Need came to wake them.
As Âziz approached the Gryphons stirred, swiveling on their slender metal-jointed legs until their sharp noses faced her. Filaments lifted from their foresections, silvery threads with a pale rosy blush where microscopic transmitting crystals coagulated in a nucleic broth. They wafted through the air above Âziz’s head like the nearly invisible tentacles of a seanettle, and for an instant she felt one brush her temple. From the front of the Gryphon nearest her an optic emerged on its long tether, and scanned her silently. She stopped, suddenly afraid.
Once when they were children Nasrani and Shiyung and an Orsina cousin had come here and entered one of the aircraft. Âziz had been with them. She was usually the bravest; but something about the Gryphons made her lose heart. At the last minute she refused to join the others as they crept into the cockpit. Instead she stood watching as first Shiyung’s and then Nasrani’s face appeared in the curved glass foresection of the craft, and as they waved at Âziz she yelled back, threatening to call their parents; but then Shiyung had fled shrieking from the craft. Nasrani and the feckless cousin had followed her a moment later, pale and shaken. Minutes later when they sat side by side in the gravator Nasrani giggled uncontrollably, exhilarated by the experience; but he never did tell her what had happened inside.
Now Âziz stood gazing up at the first Gryphon: a machine that resembled nothing so much as a huge and delicately appointed insect. Its sides were a silvery blue that would disappear when in flight; its solex wings were retracted, folded in upon themselves like a bat’s. She could hear the soft churning of its biogenic power supply, feeding from the narrow tanks behind its legs. As she stared at it the others moved closer to her, clicking loudly. Their legs scraped the concrete, their wings rustled with a papery sound that belied their strength. She smelled the ozone smell from their solex shields, the soupy odor of power supplies. In a minute they would circle her and she would lose her nerve. Abruptly she turned to the nearest one, raised her hand and cried aloud a single word command, a name. The other Gryphons did not stop, but the one she faced obediently bent its legs and lowered a small metal ladder for her to climb.