The howling wind had risen to a shriek. She could not hear herself as she shouted the command, could not hear if the aircraft responded. But a moment later the Gryphon rose unsteadily on its jointed legs, the slender metal stairs descended, and she was climbing them, clinging to the narrow struts as the wind battered her. Then she was inside.
Gasping, she flung herself into the seat. The leather molded itself around her and she felt a prickling warmth as auxiliary enhancers sent a soft surge of endorphins and nutriments into her veins. She blinked, stared up to where the webs began to descend in a gray haze; shut her eyes as they touched her face and she could feel the strange patterns tracing themselves onto her cheeks, temples, the inside of her wrists.
OrsinaKesefNineTwelveCycloneSystemGradeOneRescueAdvisoryOverriddenUnitRecalledLockgridFiveLevelTwoWaitingWaitingWaiting…
Âziz cried out. Across her mind’s eye crimson lines formed an intricate crosshatch, a grid bisected with green and glowing blue spheres. She could hear the fluting voice of the thing called Kesef, the Gryphon that waited for her command; she could feel the ground shuddering beneath it. She clenched her mouth shut and tried to focus, concentrating until she brought up an image, the figure of an Aviator silhouetted against the domes of Araboth. Then she willed away the domes, tried to imagine what one of the frontier outposts might look like, ended up with the Aviator’s silhouette and a hazy blue background. Go there, she thought, then said the words aloud in a croak.
“Where they are—the Aviators—find them—” There was a crackle of static electricity, a blinding light outside and then a crash. She could feel the Gryphon fighting her, trying to override her command as it sent warning messages blaring through her mind—
CycloneTsunamiHurricaneGaleSamielDangerDangerDanger
—but she repeated her command, again and again, each time the image growing clearer in her mind, until finally with a shudder she felt the aircraft move around her. Then it was as though the flesh had been sheared from her face: all around her she felt the raw wind, the rain like razors slicing against her skin; but of course that was the Gryphon and not her, and it was the Gryphon’s voice keening like a brazen bell as it soared from the balcony, up and up into the whirling storm until she could feel nothing, not even the shafts of light spearing along its wings as the gale tossed it and the Gryphon fought to make its way inland, while the woman who had commanded it lay unconscious in its grasp, beset by evil dreams. She did not realize until later, when she woke, that she had unconsciously given the solitary figure of her voiceless command the stooped bearing and ruthless pale eyes of Margalis Tast’annin, the Aviator Imperator.
“They will all die,” Hobi said dully.
Beside him the nemosyne stood, silent. After a moment she nodded.
“It is a tsunami, a tidal wave. On the subcontinent they sometimes killed millions in a single night.”
Hobi shivered and drew away from her, until he brushed against the edge of the wall. They had found the ruins of a building, its top rounded and painted in flaking greens and yellows, the whole thing sunk like a culvert into the pebbly debris-strewn ground. The wind screamed down the opening and rain poured in, draining away down countless holes after it had soaked Hobi to the skin.
From here they could look off the eastern face of the tor, down onto the glassy surface of the Quincunx Domes. White foam churned at the edges of the city. The narrow sandy spit that had stood between Araboth and the open sea had long since been swallowed by engulfing waves. Flecks of black and gray scudded across the top of the receding water. With horror Hobi realized that these were people, the tiny figures of the revelers who had been released earlier when the Lahatiel Gate opened. He buried his face in his hands and turned away.
“I can’t bear it,” he whispered. Nefertity could not have heard him above the wailing wind, but she leaned over and touched him gently.
“Perhaps you can sleep, we will be safe here—”
“Sleep?” he yelled, striking at her with one hand. “How can I sleep, my father is down there, Nasrani, everyone—”
The nemosyne regarded him with cool aquamarine eyes. “It was an evil place,” she said at last. “It has happened before, that the wind has swallowed an evil place—
“All flesh died that moved upon the earth: all in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was on the dry land, died.
“But God said, I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.”
Her voice chimed above the cry of the wind, and Hobi turned to her and spat, “That’s another of your precious sacred stories? A broken promise?”
Nefertity tilted her head so that the rain struck sparks around her eyes. “A man wrote that,” she said. She pointed to the east. “Look, Hobi. If you can bring yourself to look—that is the fall of Araboth.”
He turned. Sky and ocean had become one vast unbroken plane of gray and green. In a froth of pounding waves the Quincunx Domes seemed to float, small and frail as bubbles of glass. A fouga, a tiny obloid that glowed bright blue through the silvered haze of rain, suddenly shot up from one bubble as though striving to free itself. An instant later it was gone. There was nothing else to indicate that anything had ever lived down there. The domes might have been the cast-off shell of some creature, a submarine eggsac washed onto a crumbling lee.
“There,” Nefertity murmured.
Midway between the shore and the horizon a swell black and viscous as oil detached itself from the rest of the ocean. Hobi strained to hear something, a rising shriek on the wind or perhaps a roar; but oddly it now seemed that the wind had died, and while the rain still ripped across the tor there was no other sound. Certainly nothing terrible enough to be the voice of that Wave. He shrank closer to the nemosyne, without thinking clutched at her as he watched it rise and grow larger and larger still, until it was so impossibly huge he cried out, thinking that it must tear away at the very foundation of the headland where they crouched.
But it did not: only gathered strength and power until now he could hear it, a noise like all the engines of Araboth screeching into life and he knew that he was hearing the voice of the Wave itself, the boundless throat of the sea shrieking havoc as it reared above the fragile domes, the ancient folly that was Araboth, and smashed it into oblivion.
He must have blacked out, because the next thing he knew he was skidding across the tor, broken glass and metal tearing through his clothes as Nefertity grabbed at him and he struck at her, shouting.
“Hobi, stop! There’s nothing you can do, it’s gone now, nothing—”
He ran to the edge of the plateau, where the rust-colored stream had swollen to a copper torrent plunging down the steep incline. It was like it had never been there at all. Far below, at the base of the tor, the ocean seethed in glass-green knots and coils. Of the domes of Araboth there was nothing, not a metal blade, not a fragment of shattered glass: nothing. Rain nearly blinded him and he wiped his eyes, squinting through the haze. Only a few minutes later, after Nefertity stood beside him steaming in the rain, did he see something, a long twisted bit of white that might have been part of one of the inner retaining walls, wash up on a narrow spar of beach below.