“You told me when you discovered it that the nemosyne had been linked with an archaic religion.”
Nasrani nodded. “Yes, that’s right. The American Catholic Church. Mostly women—she had been programmed by a woman, her files are mostly women’s histories, mystical nonsense. She would be of no use to you, Margalis.”
The rasa shook his head, gazed at where the light streamed onto the sand. “Oh, but she would be,” he said. “You see, I saw something very interesting in the Capital. I saw a new religion being created—or, rather, a very old one being resurrected. It was an— unusual —experience. And I also found the ancient weapons storehouses there. Had I not been killed in such an untimely fashion, why I might have resurrected them as well.
“And later, when I found myself back among the Seraphim, well I thought of you, Nasrani, I remembered how excited you were with your metal woman. You invited me, once long ago, to go with you to see her—in a weak moment, of course, you might not even remember. I think we were drinking Amity with your sister Shiyung, and after she had left us you were feeling rather grand. I refused, because I wanted to follow Shiyung—”
A break in his voice. Nasrani flinched and started shuffling forward again, wishing he had said nothing.
“—but now I wish I had accepted your kind invitation. So think of it this way, Nasrani—it is a few years later, but what’s a few years between old friends?”
Nasrani tried to twist his grimace into a smile. A moment later he felt the rasa beside him again, his heat also seeming to dissipate as they left the Undercity behind them.
“There is another reason,” Tast’annin said after a few minutes. “Manning Tabor at the Academy used to talk about the nemosyne network. He claimed to have deciphered computer programs, records that revealed where the original units had been deployed. I scoffed at him then, but now I realize he must have been right. He said there were military units still active in the United Provinces, and one or two that were rumored to have been captured by the Commonwealth after the Second Ascension. There was a master unit that controlled all of them, or could control them all if it was activated. The Military Tactical Target Retrievals Network. Your sister consulted Tabor at length about it. She thought it might be located in the ancient arsenal in the old capital. That was why she sent me there. I searched for it but I found nothing, there was no indication that it had ever been there.
“But I think that your nemosyne might have knowledge of this unit, if the nemosynes were truly linked at some point. If you could activate your nemosyne to search for them, you could locate the other existing units anywhere in the world. One could control them—control the military forces they control.”
Nasrani’s head ached; he scarcely focused on Tast’annin’s words. He stared at his feet, shading his streaming eyes with his hand. A few feet in front of them the sand glittered dazzlingly white. Brilliant blue light danced at the edges of his vision.
“What difference does that make, if Araboth is falling around us?” he shouted above the din of the waves. “If you’ve killed Shiyung, and the rest of us are going to die anyway? What possible difference could it make for you to find this master nemosyne?”
He stopped, swaying, and with one hand clutched his stomach. Nausea gripped him; he hardly had the strength to look at the rasa stopped beside him. “Margalis!” he pleaded. “Don’t—you can’t leave me like this, you can’t go—you’ll die out there—” He sank to the ground, fingers scrabbling at the sand.
The rasa ’s glittering blue eyes regarded him with utter contempt. “Ah, Nasrani,” the Aviator Imperator pronounced. His voice rang dispassionately as he walked away. “Now I see that you truly are an Orsina: that is, an utter fool.”
He left the exile kneeling in the entrance to the tunnel, and stepped out into the sunlight.
Hobi screamed, his voice torn from him and flung into the wind that came flying across the water. Overhead other things screamed as well, scraps of cloud or perhaps the raging tips of waves thrown against the sky. It was not until Nefertity knelt beside him and laved his forehead with water, until he dared open his eyes again, that he looked up into the sky and recognized those shrieking rags as birds.
“Hobi—Hobi, it’s all right, it’s only the sea—”
He tried to hear something else; strained to catch beneath the ceaseless chant of the waves another song—the grinding of the Gate as it opened, the screams of the crowd spilling down the steps onto the thirsting sand; the long moaning wail of the Redeemer awakened from its year-long sleep. But there was only this horrible sound, gentler now than it had been when it echoed through the tunnel but no less terrifying, and stabbed with the harsh cries of the gulls.
“Hobi, please. Open your eyes and try to stand—we have to leave this place, we are too near the water. A storm is building, we must go to higher ground.”
He coughed, pushed her hands away, and finally sat up. When he opened his eyes the light was so painful that he cried out again, would have buried his face in his hands except that Nefertity took him and pulled him close to her, until feeling her cold steel enveloping him he took a deep breath and nodded.
“All right—I’m all right,” he whispered. He wanted never to move from her, the chill kiss of smooth metal and glass upon his cheeks and arms. But she pulled away from him. He stared down at the sand beneath him, every shade of brown and white, pinked with broken cowries and wing shells and crescents of green and brown glass. A tiny object like the limb of one of Nasrani’s emerald monads glistened beside his ankle. He picked it up and stared at it, still not daring to raise his face to the sun. It was the leg of some small creature, jointed like a server’s leg, but hollow and light as a straw and ending in a tiny flattened fin. It came to him suddenly that it was the leg of a crustacean, like one of the crayfish or prawns he had often eaten at banquets on Seraphim. A real animal, one that had never seen the inside of a vivarium tank. Something that swam in the water flowing and receding a few yards from where he crouched, and hunted there for creatures even smaller than itself. Hobi let the leg slip from his fingers to the sand, and leaning forward he vomited upon it.
Afterward he felt better. Nefertity had stood so that her shadow blotted the sun from his face, and waited silently for him to rise. He did so, his arms flailing at the air until the nemosyne caught him.
“I can’t—it’s too big—”
She waited until he grew calm again. The water pulsed relentlessly against the shoreline, stretched out before them without end: blue, green, white. He did not think he could stand to gaze upon it, it seemed so raw; but he forced himself to look. Just for an instant. Then he turned and stared down the beach, to where the Quincunx Domes rose shimmering above the sea.
“God—look at them!”
He shook his head and took a step away from the nemosyne. During the last Æstival Tide he was always conscious of the city behind him, but then it had seemed more like a solid wall, a buffer between sea and sky, too huge for any detail beyond the black maw of the Redeemer’s cage and the lapis-crowned figures of the Orsinate waving from their balcony. From here the domes looked both smaller and more impressive. He could see the two domes nearest him, and rearing above them the central Quincunx Dome, glittering with a dark greenish cast, pocked everywhere with irregular black indentations. A large curved rectangle in the central dome would be one of the skygates. As he stared it began to grow darker at one end, and a minute later a fouga rose from it, small and delicate as a bubble in a water-pipe, and trailing festival pennons like colored threads in the breeze.