“But you told me it is Æstival Tide now, Hobi. You said that at Æstival Tide it is safe to go Outside and look upon the sun. You said the feast began at dawn, whenever dawn was. So you will be protected.”
She turned to gaze at the tunnel’s mouth, and Hobi looked up at her in despair. Shafts of golden light made it impossible to see anything except for her silhouette; but for the first time it seemed that it was a woman’s profile he saw there, the sharp edges and silver lines of her cheeks and jaw softened by the sun. Even her eyes grew softer, darker, their eerie glow melted to a gentler green. She was so beautiful that for a moment his fear trickled away.
“Æstival Tide,” he whispered. He had forgotten what day it was. It seemed weeks since he had told her about the Feast of Fear, but of course it had only been yesterday. The nemosyne turned to gaze back down at him, and as the shadows once more struck her face the vision of a woman was gone.
“Perhaps once we get Outside we will be able to see your friends, and you can find your way back inside your city.”
Hobi nodded. His fingers relaxed and he sighed, let his hands drop to feel the cool sand. This is what he had wanted to do, after all. Have an adventure. Find the nemosyne and leave the city. It seemed like a child’s dream now, stupid and dangerous; but he had done it nonetheless, and in a way it was something to take pride in. And surely nothing was irrevocable—even now, revelers would be gathered beneath the Lahatiel Gate, and he could find someone there to help him, Nasrani or even one of the margravines. He pushed himself up, brushing sand from his trousers.
“All right. Nasrani will be there, and my father—”
Though in his heart he knew that his father would not be there, at least not with the margravines upon their viewing platform. “Let’s go,” he ended hoarsely, following Nefertity. And with each step that brought him closer to the sunlight his dread grew, until he stood within the tunnel’s very mouth, blinded and battered by a hot fecund wind; and crying out, he fell to his knees, bringing his arm up against his eyes to protect him from the horror of the world Outside.
Tast’annin never tired, but there were moments when Nasrani was certain that he had fallen asleep, and walked dreaming with that fiery angel at his side. Once he woke to find himself in the rasa ’s arms, being carried through a passageway where water gushed from a break in the wall and swirled about the rasa ’s knees.
“Please, I can walk,” he protested weakly; but the Aviator shook his head.
“It is too strong. The current would sweep you away.”
So Nasrani clung to him like a child. He gritted his teeth against the heat radiating from the rasa, burning through his damp clothes until they steamed and filled his nostrils with the smell of sweat. At last the water fell behind them. The tunnel began a slight incline, and the rasa paused to let Nasrani clamber from his arms, puffing and wiping his face with his soiled handkerchief.
“Are you sure this is the right way?” he demanded, hurrying after the dimly glowing form.
“It is the only way now.” The Aviator Imperator’s voice drifted back, echoing sharply. “And even here the walls are failing. Soon the entire Undercity will collapse, and then one by one all the upper levels will fall.”
Nasrani’s breath came in short gasps. He felt an anxious jab at his heart, and patted his greatcoat vainly, looking for a morpha tube. “But why?”
His tone sounded shrill and whining. He paused to catch his breath, then called again, trying to sound calm. “Why, Margalis? Why destroy the city? Who would do this? Who could do this?”
“Why?” The rasa’s voice sounded almost amused, and he halted, turning to wait for Nasrani to catch up with him. “Because it is an abomination. Because it should never have been created in the first place.”
Nasrani put out a hand to steady himself against the tunnel wall. By the rasa’s dull crimson glow he could see another crack forming, spinning out across the concrete like a spider’s thread thrown against the air. “Don’t be absurd, Margalis,” he said testily. Exhaustion and hopelessness had nearly driven out his fear of the Aviator Imperator. “No one would have survived Outside all these years—the domes were our salvation—”
“The Orsinate should never have been saved. Better for all of us if they had died four hundred years ago. As to who could destroy the city…”
Tast’annin shrugged. Dark lines shadowed his face, and he looked away, down the length of the tunnel. “I would destroy it, had I the power to,” he said softly. “All of them: I would see all of them dead.”
Nasrani shuddered, ran a hand across his brow. “We’ll see ourselves dead soon enough, if we don’t find our way back to a gravator.”
The Aviator started walking again. “You’re a fool, Nasrani. I told you, Araboth is collapsing. Soon the Undercity will be buried, and Archangels, and the medifacs, all the way up to your precious Seraphim. If this passage doesn’t lead us out somehow, you will die here.”
Nasrani nodded curtly but said nothing. I will die here, he thought, but what of you? Can the dead die twice? Do the dead dream? He gave a bitter laugh, and the rasa turned to stare at him with its coldly human eyes.
“You are not afraid. That is good.” He pointed down the length of the tunnel. Very far away a pinpoint of light showed in the spiraling void, so small it might have been something Nasrani imagined, drawn from the darkness like a minnow from black water. “I think that is where the tunnel ends. I can hear them, down there—”
Tast’annin cocked his head. Nasrani could hear nothing save the hiss and roar that had grown gradually louder the farther they went. “Yes,” the Aviator said at last. “It is the end. They have left us at last, they have escaped from Araboth.”
“Escaped,” Nasrani murmured. A warm wind chased down the passage and dried the hair on his neck. “So will we escape, to go mad or be consumed by the sun.”
“The sun is not poisonous. You know that, Nasrani, you have been Outside.”
Nasrani shook his head. “Only for a few hours…”
He shuddered at the memory. “It smelled—it smelled of water, and something else. I don’t know what. A horrible smell.” He pinched his nose, squinted at the fleck of light far ahead.
“Things growing.” The rasa’s face leered back at him. “That is what you smelled, Nasrani. Milkweed and cholla and evening primrose, huisache and mesquite and rugosa roses. You will smell them again, soon.”
The thought made Nasrani’s stomach churn. He stumbled on in silence, the tunnel’s cracked cement floor giving way to sand beneath him. In the distance the light grew larger, until the rasa’s shadow staggered on the ground in front of Nasrani and his own shadow danced across the broken walls. The unbearable heat gradually became bearable—a different sort of heat, less painfully intense, wind-borne and salt-scented.
The Aviator Imperator continued tirelessly. If anything, his steps hastened as they grew closer to the end of the passage. Nasrani watched him with a sort of detached curiosity, as one might regard a replicant performing a difficult task.
Finally he called out, “Why do you want to see her? Why is it so important to you?”
The rasa did not slow his steps, but when Nasrani called out again he stopped and turned to him.
“Why?” Nasrani ended, a little brokenly. He looked up at the rasa, then shrugged and gave him a hopeless smile. Aqua light washed over them from the tunnel opening, shot with gold and darker green. Without the thrash of the festival drums, the clamor of the gamelan at the Lahatiel Gate to mute it, the sound of the pounding waves was brutally loud. Nasrani’s ears hurt and he rubbed them fitfully.