Nefertity’s eyes glittered, but her voice was calm. “People long ago,” she said. “After the Second Shining, perhaps even earlier than that. They liked to go to the seashore. Loretta used to like it, she told me. They built things there—pleasure cities. I think this was one of them.”
Pleasure cities. Hobi remembered what Nasrani had told him about the city that had stood here once. Wealthy people, slave traders, gamblers. They might have climbed here, where they could look down upon the sea, and thrown their hours and their money to the ravening winds.
But he couldn’t imagine who would have derived pleasure from this —these broken statues, and machines whose use could never have been anything but obscure. It was worse even than the Orsinate’s dream inquisitions. He shivered, his teeth chattering. A whistling sound echoed across the tor, once and again, and again, then small reports that grew louder. Hobi cried out. Something struck his neck, then his face, and he drew away his hand to find it wet.
“It’s started.”
Nefertity turned back toward the ocean. A solid black line seemed to shimmer only inches above the edge of the promontory. Clouds of silver shook through the air—rain, Hobi realized, this was rain! —and a distant crashing echoed the wind screaming across the tor. In this sudden twilight Nefertity was a silvery blue beacon in the center of the world, calm and implacable as the rain lashed about her. As Hobi huddled beside her he thought he could see something out on the outermost edge of the horizon, a rent in the disturbed surface of the great ocean—something black and huge, as though the rim of the world had suddenly plunged into an abyss. He pointed at it. The rain struck him so hard that his face felt as though he had been slapped.
“I do not know,” said Nefertity. Rain streamed down her body in fiery runnels. “But we should find shelter.”
“ I know what it is,” the boy said slowly. As they watched the black bulge on the horizon grew even huger, and moved across the lashing gray sea, heading toward the shore. Hobi felt dizzy, almost speechless as he realized what it was that ripped across the ocean toward Araboth.
He said, choking, “I saw it—in a, a ’file once, about the Third Ascension. A kind of wave—like what you said before, the kind of wave that came after the Second Shining.”
“Tsunami,” the nemosyne whispered. “A tidal wave.”
He nodded, staring numbly at the black ridge, the massive plateau of water rising to crush the sands below. “It’s really come, Nefertity.” He knew she could not hear him above the wind, he could no longer hear himself, but he went on anyway. “Like they always said—”
“Ucalegon.”
Nasrani had turned and fled after the rasa left him, back up the tunnel until the sand slithered beneath his feet and shallow water lapped at his soles. His breathing roared in his ears, and another sound, faint but unceasing. The pale green light that had filled the passage near the tunnel’s mouth had faded until it was nearly too dark for him to see. That was what finally stopped him.
He stood in the middle of the tunnel, swaying back and forth. He could once again hear the murmurous explosions that rocked the Undercity, and feel the ground tremble. For the hundredth time his hands patted futilely at his greatcoat, trouser pockets, boots, searching for something, anything—empty morpha tubes, paper wrappings, ashes, lint. Nothing. He had found it all hours before, chewed it or spun it to grit between his fingers and then flicked it into the darkness. There was nothing left now, not in his pockets, not anywhere. If he went any farther back into the Undercity he would find the tunnel blocked, or be crushed by the walls caving in. Slowly he turned, and began to walk back toward where the passage opened onto the shore.
It was some time before he realized that it should not be this dark. In the distance the tunnel’s mouth gaped, no bigger than the end of his thumb. Light trickled from the opening, but it was fainter than before, and had a greenish cast. His legs felt numb from walking. To either side the walls of the tunnel seemed to glow faintly. There was a strong smell of dead fish.
From the corners of his eye he glimpsed small shadows flickering against the tunnel walls. When he stopped he saw that it was only a trick of the feeble light. There were no real shadows, only dark blotches on the tiles. He rubbed his eyes, then stepped toward the wall. There was something odd about it, something he hadn’t noticed before, when he had been so intent upon listening to Tast’annin ranting on and on. His foot caught on something, and he kicked away a soft object. There was enough light for him to see it was some kind of clothing, a bundle of dark blue cloth that hit the sand with a soft thud. He turned from it, knelt and ran his fingers across the wall’s broken tile, heedless of the dank mold catching under his nails.
There were words there, written in a script all but erased by time. Words and crudely drawn pictures. Nasrani snatched his hand back when he saw that he had smeared the images, patches of ruddy clay and something black like charcoal clotted across his palm. He drew back a little, squinting as he tried to read in the watery light.
The letters slanted down and disappeared into the sand etching the wall’s bottom edge. Behind him he could hear a faint whistling sound. Very slowly he lifted his eyes, and saw it drawn above the broken lettering. A shape like a coiled spring etched upon the tile, opening into a fluid line that circled something meant to be a hill, he thought, a hill dark with small shapes that might have been people, or houses. Above it spear-shaped missiles, wavering lines to indicate flames, a horrible thing meant to be a human face, but veined with glistening tendrils of mildew. Beneath the spiral was a carefully drawn curl, opening into a hand with fingers splayed, like the claws of a stooping raptor.
“ ‘ The Wave is come ,’ ” Nasrani breathed. He traced the air above the image, leaned forward until his cheek pressed against the moist wall, and closed his eyes. Teeth had been drawn jaggedly in the mouth of the wave, teeth and a tongue that unfurled until it reached the smooth base of the hillside.
Behind him the whistling grew louder, was swallowed into a gurgling roar. Too late he turned and tried to run. But it was already there, it had found him as it would find his sisters and all the others who waited for it, arrogant or fearful or unknowing. Just as they had always said, as had been predicted for a hundred years, as it had come centuries before and would come again to claim the city they had been proud and foolish enough to build within its path. He tripped in the darkness and fell, and as he slumped to the ground he heard it, a million feet pounding up the twisted passageway, its voice a roar that deafened him, winding and turning until it found him crouched beneath its image and crushed him there, while all about the stones shrieked and tumbled into sand.
“Ucalegon,” he whispered. The wave devoured him.
Chapter 11
UCALEGON
IT WAS DIFFICULT TO see what was happening from the viewing platform in the Narthex.
“Is that some kind of fish? ” asked Nike, incredulous. Rain blew in sharp cold gusts up from the open Gate. She shivered, wishing she’d worn a rain cape or something warmer than her thin silk suit.
At her side the precentor, still upset that her rendition of the hyperdulia had been interrupted, stood smoking a camphor cigarette and gazing out to sea with an unfocused, rather sour expression.
“Someone over there yelled it was that thing you keep down on Dominations. The whale.” She flicked her cigarette ash in the direction of a group huddled at the edge of the balustrade, primarily intimates of the Quir who seemed giddy from kef and champagne. The chromium mitre of the Archbishop of the Church of Christ Cadillac rose above the little crowd, a somber note amid the doomsday revelry. A moment later, the Archbishop detached herself from the gathering and hurried to Nike’s side.