Æstival Tide w-2

by Elizabeth Hand

  A few people wondered that such preparations for the festival would be carried out following the death of a margravine. Many more still had not heard the news of Shiyung’s death. It seemed the evening ’file broadcasts had been interrupted by one of the tremors shaking the lower levels. Still, there were rumors among the Toxins Cabal on Thrones, and even in one of the ’filers’ pods on Powers, that there had been an assassination attempt of some kind. The Aviators had mutinied, under the command of the corpse that was their leader. ziz had stabbed her sister Shiyung. Nasrani Orsina had killed all three margravines, serving them shark poached in a broth of speckled-fly mushrooms.

  Nasrani Orsina had done no such thing. Clad in blue and gold robes and wearing the heavy conical crown of the Orsinate, as the nuclear CLOCK clanged the evening hour he hurried to the small gravator that serviced Coventry wing. Behind him the rasa moved silently, like a great dark insect on hinged steel legs, black robes flapping about him like wings and only his eyes betraying the man within.

  “Embrace the Fear that feeds us.” The robotic sentry whispered the traditional Æstival Tide greeting as Nasrani waited impatiently for it to scan him. “Nasrani Orsina. Pass.” A moment longer while it read the rasa’s cold blue eyes, then, “Margalis Tast’annin. Pass.”

  Inside tiny red lights blinked across the ceiling. There were no views of the lower levels as this gravator dropped, only the chill black walls of its shaft and occasional glimpses of flickering lights and the leaping flames of the refineries. Nasrani settled into one of the cramped seats (no extraneous comforts for exiles) and gingerly rubbed his bandaged arm. The rasa stood beside him, staring out the narrow window.

  Finally Nasrani spoke. “They’ll find you, you know. If you go back with me now I’ll argue for you—”

  “They won’t.” The rasa’s voice might have come from the sentry’s black cylinder. “They think the gynander did it. The one at the inquisition; the one who scryed ziz’s dream.”

  Nasrani let his breath out and shrugged, defeated. “Yes, I heard about her. ziz told me: she said it was—” He looked at the floor. For an instant Shiyung’s image hung there before him, her long legs cool against his, her green eyes laughing as she drew him closer. He cleared his throat. “She said it was the dream of the Green Country.”

  “Yes. That is one reason why I want to see the nemosyne.”

  Nasrani plucked at a thread on his robes. He sighed and removed his crown, wiping his forehead where sweat had beaded beneath its weight. He tried to smile. “Still the inquiring skeptic, Margalis?”

  The rasa turned to Nasrani. His eerie mask reflected the exile’s face, distorted so that it was as though Nasrani gazed upon his own skeletal image, all hollow eyes and grinning fleshless mouth. He shuddered and looked away.

  The rasa said, “I have seen things you would not believe, Nasrani Orsina: the fruits of your family’s poisonous tree. Now I have become one of those rotting fruits. And so, it seems, will your sister Shiyung. Your ancestors invented the timoring after the Architects shared with you their secrets for rehabilitating corpses, so that you could indulge your passion for death without having to die yourselves. Although you do die eventually, don’t you? Even the Orsinate dies, although you are scarcely more than ghosts yourselves, your blood has grown so sick and weak…”

  He took Nasrani’s hand. The exile gasped as he felt the steel fingers slice through the soft leather glove, the metal biting into his own palm until he cried out and looked down to see blood staining black leather and spilling onto the floor.

  “Oh, but, Nasrani,” the Aviator said as he tightened his grip upon the exile’s bleeding hand, “Nasrani, Nasrani…” as though nothing had happened, as though Nasrani were beside him at a dream inquisition, and not inside a gravator plummeting to the Undercity.

  And suddenly that hollow voice took on a new tenor, a tone that was bright with wonder; and Nasrani looked up, terrified at what this might mean, that a rasa ’s voice should sound so human. “While I was out in the world I saw things that would take your breath away, things that even an Orsina would find sublime. Children —”

  And here his voice dropped to a whisper, a hiss that made Nasrani’s hair stand on end—

  “I saw children butcher each other like animals, because your viral rains had turned them into ravening beasts. I took counsel from a cadaver, a hollow skull who spoke more wisely than ever your diplomats and cabinet did. And I saw a girl who could kill with her mind; and now who among your family can do that?”

  Abruptly the rasa dropped Nasrani’s bleeding hand. The exile snatched it away, moaning beneath his breath as he wrapped it in a handkerchief. He blinked away tears, then forced a smile. “Now, Margalis,” he began, trying to sound composed, “you know that we have scientists and researchers who—”

  “Science?” The rasa turned to him, his eyes scorched pits in his empty face. “ Science? You do not understand! I helped bring a god to birth in that accursed City, and all your science was for nothing there! What has your science done, but scald the earth and poison the seas, make howling beasts and tormented scarecrows of men and children and devise new ways to torture them, all for the pleasure of a family of inbred aristocrats! Did your science give my body back to me, my life and heart and soul? No! It twists everything, it can only hold up a charred skeleton to the image of the live thing it once was. But—”

  His voice grew softer, and his hands as they groped the air were more graceful than any rasa’s Nasrani had ever seen. “But I have glimpsed something stronger than your science, children lovelier than your most precious timorata: a boy who embraced Death and his sister, who defeated It. They had no need of laboratories or Architects or gabbling aristocrats.”

  “In the Capital?” Nasrani breathed. The gravator jerked, throwing him against the wall, then dropped another level. “You saw this in the Capital?”

  The rasa nodded. “Yes: the place they called the City of Trees. Those two children were stronger even than I was, at the end: else they would have died, and I would not.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “I do not know.” The rasa stared out the window, to where violet lights bored through the murk of Principalities. “When your sisters did not hear from me for many months they feared—rightly—their plans had gone wrong, and sent their own janissaries to seize the City. Their troops arrived mere hours after my death. All I have learned since my— recovery —has been chaos and lies. But I do not believe those children are dead.”

  His pale eyes flickered and he looked out the window, as though seeing something besides the grim substrata of Araboth. “I know she at least is not,” he murmured a moment later. “That girl is bound to me now, somehow, through my death perhaps. She is alive still, I know she is. I do not sleep now, it is all like a constant dreaming and I see her, she is out there, somewhere, and I must find her.”

  He leaned forward and placed his hands conspiratorially upon Nasrani’s knee. The slashed remnant of one black glove fell to the floor as the rasa gazed into the exile’s eyes and Nasrani gasped.

  Because now it was no trick of the light that made him imagine features upon that sleek black mask. Somehow—whether by some perversion of the biotechnician’s rehabilitative work or through the will of the Aviator Imperator himself—through some macabre machination the cold smooth metal had begun to form itself back into the semblance of a man. Like hot tar that bubbles and can be stretched and pulled about, the crimson mask rippled, seethed, was still. As Nasrani watched in horror a mouth appeared, the metal seeming to ooze as it outlined thin lips and shining black teeth that clashed as the rasa stared at him, grinning.

  “What is it, Nasrani? ‘Bad Science’?”

  “N-no—” the exile stammered. On his knees the rasa ’s fingers twitched. He glanced down to see that its steel fingers had cut through the fabric of his trousers as though it had been paper. He looked up to see the smooth planes of the rasa’s mask protrude and sink as cheekbones appeared, a j
aw, a pointed chin—the perfect simulacrum of the face of Margalis Tast’annin, cast in liquid flame. Eyes bulged beneath sharp metal brows; a metal blade protruded and shaped itself into a nose like a kite’s bill.

  “Do you think your sister would love me now, Orsina?” the rasa whispered. “Or—I forgot, she is a corpse too, of course she would love the dead—”

  Crying out, Nasrani pushed him away and scrambled to his feet, his crown rolling across the floor.

  “Sentry!” he shouted, yanking at the gold cord by the gravator door. But before he could touch it the r asa had sheared the cord in two, and grabbed him by the throat with his other, human hand.

  “No, Nasrani,” he said, and drew the man back down beside him. Nasrani whimpered. The Aviator dabbed at his bleeding hand, then with a smile withdrew his finger and traced the outline of Nasrani’s babbling mouth in blood. “I still need you. To find the nemosyne. And then—and then I think I will need you to help me leave Araboth for good.”

  Nasrani cried out. “Leave the domes! I can’t—we could never—”

  The Aviator grinned. Blood trickled from his lip, and a silvery tongue like a steel serpent darted out to flick it away. “But we must. I was too hasty up there; they will realize soon that the gynander did not kill her. I should have brought her with me. She knows things. When I told her my dream, she recognized in it the germ of a memory that haunts me. There is much I could learn from her, I think.” He fell silent and stared broodingly out the window.

  “From a morph?” Nasrani’s voice was shrill. “They’re all quacks, those pantomancers, quacks or half mad—”

  “Not this one. She has the Sight. ziz was frightened enough by what she said to have her imprisoned. I freed her, but then I lost my head….”

  The rasa’s voice faded. In the silence Nasrani could hear faint wails and the roar of the Architects’ Conciliatory Engines grinding through the dim avenues of Archangels. The gravator slowed, then picked up speed again.

  Nasrani licked his lips and said, “My sisters don’t believe in the predictions of pantomancers. At least ziz does not. She fears treason, that’s all. She is a fool. They are all fools.” He bent to pick up the Orsinate’s crown. His bleeding hand left sullen streaks across its lapis sides. “The gynander is right: Ucalegon will destroy us.”

  “Then you believe her.”

  “I know that on my brief forays Outside I saw things that my sisters would deny were possible.” His voice rose angrily. “I could have helped them, and their precious Architects: but they didn’t believe me. It should have been enough, that I went Out, and made it back inside—”

  “We are here.” The gravator lurched to a stop. As the door jerked open the rasa turned to Nasrani. “If you try to betray me I will kill you here, and do such things to you afterward that you will beg to be recast as a rasa.” Without a word Nasrani nodded and followed him outside.

  The Architect Imperator sat watching the fougas outside his window, the bright banners with their weeping sun and devouring wave. He had returned from his encounter with the Compassionate Redeemer, his raucous laughter rousing his idle replicant; and then spoken with the Architects. The breach had spread to the intake valves beneath the Gate on Archangels; the sump pumps on Angels had been crushed beneath the weight of the ocean as it flooded the first tier of the filtration system. One of the Architects had run a meteorological survey and it was as he had hoped, one of the scores of storms that battered the coast each summer was building to the east. By the following day, Æstival Tide, the winds Outside would be strong enough to rip the hair from a man’s head. When they opened the gate to free the Compassionate Redeemer and loose the throngs upon the beach to watch, the change in pressure would be enough to send fault lines rippling through the domes like fire through straw.

  The Architect Imperator turned from the window and walked to the wall. He pressed a switch hidden beneath an oil portrait of his dead wife. A sweet smell filled the room, a smell of orange-flower and jasmine. There was the sound of soft laughter.

  In the middle of the room darts of light flickered, red and green and gold, then slowly coalesced into the image of a woman sitting on a white high-backed chair. She was laughing, her gray eyes flashed mockingly, and though no sound came from her mouth as she spoke, he could still hear her saying, “By the time you need this you’ll be so old you won’t be able to see it clearly.”

  Of course he was not that old at all, and she had been only a few months older than the polyfiled image when they’d murdered her. Without taking his eyes from the image he reached and switched it off.

  He would go and tell them now, he decided. It would be the final commission of his duties. As he gathered his things he thought, briefly, of his son, and wondered where he had been these last few days. From his pocket he withdrew a small piece of paper neatly lettered with green ink, and with a tiny silver butane lighter he set it aflame and watched it turn to white ash. Then he walked down the hall to where the cylinders and monitors hummed contentedly to themselves. His last words to the Architects were a series of commands, and a final order to destroy all records of Araboth’s construction.

  After he left the fougas drifted out of sight. The empty room grew dark and the smell of burned paper gradually faded away, though the scent of orangeflower and jasmine lingered a little longer.

  The Reception Committee brought their new guests to the Four Hundredth Room. Theirs was not to be the first sentencing that evening. The other guests in attendance at the dream inquisition had all been sent to Principalities, as volunteer donors for the medifacs. Tatsun Frizer screamed and called upon Blessed Narouz, then fainted loudly, resulting in her being borne down immediately via vacuum capsule. As the Committee brought Ceryl and Reive and Rudyard Planck to the Four Hundredth Room they passed Echion in the hallway, shrieking as she was led to the special chamber where she would be administered excitatory hormones, the better to prepare her for her role in the Feast of Fear. When she saw her, Reive began to cry.

  “Don’t worry,” soothed Rudyard Planck, ignoring the Reception Committee’s baleful glances as he gazed up at the gynander. “Sajur Panggang will be there and he’ll intervene for us. Tomorrow we’ll all be drinking sake with Nike on the beach—”

  Reive nodded miserably as her guard tugged at the chain about her neck. Behind her, in the arms of two of the stronger Committee members, Ceryl moaned. Across her forehead a swollen purplish bruise showed where the cudgel had smashed against her; she had been unconscious ever since.

  The Reception Committee shoved their way through a ’file crew crowded around the door to the Four Hundredth Room. Their monitors and catoptics were trained upon a small dais that had been rolled out for Nike and ziz. The margravines sat in ornate chairs of bronze and steel, decorated with the automotive motifs the Orsinate was fond of. There were two other chairs, conspicuously empty, beside them. At ziz’s feet crouched the yellow-haired serving girl Petra. The margravine stroked her hair absently, murmuring; but her face held a cold expression and her gaze lingered upon Reive. Beside her Nike yawned, her pupils dilated from morpha, and sucked at a bulb of kehveh. Both of them wore simple shifts of white linen and their conical crowns of office, and over these heavy capes of shining black and yellow rubber. Everyone looked miserably uncomfortable; the room was so hot that condensation trickled from the metal arms of the margravines’ chairs.

  Once inside, the Reception Committee shuffled about, adjusting their ties and their guests’ chains and maneuvering to avoid the catoptics focused upon them. ziz tapped one sandaled foot upon the marble floor and tugged at Petra’s hair until tears welled in the girl’s eyes. Another girl tiptoed about the perimeters of the chamber, adjusting the vents until jets of cool air hissed into the room.

  The Head of the Reception Committee cleared his throat.

  “May I introduce your guests,” he began. The catopticians turned, their machines whirring, and began to ’file the prisoners. They hastily switched their focus back to
the dais as ziz waved the Head away impatiently.

  “I know who they are.” She stood and held her arm out. Petra wiped her eyes and assisted her from the dais. The catopticians scurried to ’file them, the crew leader speaking softly but excitedly into a vocoder as he followed the margravine across the room. ziz shoved Petra away. She stopped in front of Rudyard Planck and peered down at him, frowning.

  “Rudyard Planck. This is a surprise. Now, if your patron Sajur Panggang were here—”

  The catopticians tripped over each other as she did a graceful turn, her long pale hand indicating the empty beds and divans at the far end of the room.

  “—but, he is not.” Her tone as she turned back to the dwarf was questioning, but Rudyard only shook his head, his ruddy face gone quite pale.

  “I—I don’t know where he is, Margravine, but there’s something you should know, surely we can wait a little longer—”

  “We cannot,” snapped ziz. On the dais Nike smiled absently and waved at the dwarf. The vents made a popping sound; the flow of cool air stopped, and a barely perceptible tremor shook the room. The two serving girls exchanged frightened looks.