“This was during the Tenth Dynasty,” he announced. Ceryl lay unconscious on a gurney by the door. The subdued Rudyard Planck sat next to her, his wrists chafing in their chains. From where she was strapped onto a cold steel table Reive craned her neck to watch great blobby images dance across the wall, obscuring a mosaic that showed Mudhowi Sirrúk wearing an Aviator’s leathers and extrasolar enhancer. The mullah went on, “If you look closely you can see Nasrani Orsina in the corner there, waving, beneath the Redeemer’s hind legs.”
The polemnoscope hummed loudly. Suddenly the images came into sharp focus. Reive tried to turn away. Cursing, Rudyard Planck threatened to have the mullah castigated by the Architect Imperator.
“The Architect Imperator would not object,” the mullah remarked blandly. “We met in a bhang-parlor once, and he confided to me that he had always been fond of that year’s gala. Now, this was just ten years ago. There—where the Redeemer is crouching, you can just make out that face—well, it was a face—that was Grishkin Matamora. You know, the arsonist—”
And so on. Afterward neither Rudyard Planck nor Reive had referred to the mullah’s diversion. In earlier years each had glimpsed the Compassionate Redeemer during Æstival Tide—Planck from one of the Orsinate’s formal viewing gondolas, four-year-old Reive from a great distance, where she huddled on the strand barely two feet from the Lahatiel Gate, afraid to venture farther Outside. Neither cared to discuss the fact that along with the failing Ceryl, they were to be given to the Redeemer as a special sacrifice.
The cell’s white walls did not dim as evening approached. They only knew it was evening when a human guard appeared, bearing a tray set with three globes of nutriment. Finally exhausted by her pacing, Reive leaned against one wall, wiping the sweat from her face and watching it steam from her palm. In her corner Ceryl lay, silent and unmoving. Reive could not bear to look at her; the thought of her dying filled her with a terrible sadness, but also with a rage so intense she thought she might go mad, or harm her surviving cellmate in her fury. When the guard arrived only Rudyard hurried to the glass wall, waving frantically as she slid the tray into their cell. But the guard tipped her head so that he could see where her ears had been sliced off and replaced with flat blue auricular disks, and opened her mouth to display a gray tongue split neatly in two like an eel’s belly. The dwarf turned away, discouraged.
They drank the nutriments, grimacing at the strong fishy taste. A few minutes after they were finished the empty globes collapsed and melted into small puddles, and eventually evaporated. Reive tried to get Ceryl to drink as well but the woman only moaned and twisted her head. She would not open her eyes. The swelling on her head had turned nearly black, and Reive trembled as she held Ceryl’s head in her arms.
“I would be very surprised if she lived until dawn.” The nutriment had revived Rudyard Planck. He leaned on the wall across from Reive and tilted his head at Ceryl. “Though she’ll be the lucky one if that’s the case.”
“Yes.” The gynander sighed, blinking back tears. Gently she lay Ceryl back upon the floor, after carefully wiping the sweat from her face. She glanced down at the still-full globe in her hands. Impulsively held it out to the dwarf.
“Here—we are not thirsty anymore.”
Rudyard Planck blinked, startled. “What? Oh, no—please—” He waved his small hands, his face turning an even brighter red. “I’m much smaller than you. Please—drink it, Reive.”
“Please—”
The dwarf saw the pleading in her eyes, the need to do this one small good thing. He took the globe and drained it.
Reive crossed the room and leaned against the warm wall. She closed her eyes, trying to recall something pleasant: the smell of sandalwood in Ceryl’s chambers, the taste of krill paste, the sight of her mysid floating in its glass jar. If only she could be free again, she would make offerings to all the gods; she would join Blessed Narouz’s Refinery and never venture to the upper levels again.
The dwarf watched her, one hand shading his brow to keep the sweat from running into his eyes.
“I think you really are their child,” he said after some time. Reive made no move to show she’d heard him. “Shiyung and Nasrani’s. When I first met you, by the Karvo sculptures—do you remember?”
Reive’s eyes opened, two alarming stabs of green in the opalescent light.
“Even then it seemed to me you looked familiar, although of course I didn’t piece it together. Who even knew, who would remember, after all these years—how long is it?” He stared at her intently. “How old are you?”
“Fourteen years,” she finally pronounced. The dwarf nodded.
“That would be exactly right. The same year the Archipelago Conflict began. Shiyung and Nasrani opposed it; that’s how they found themselves together, I imagine, siding against Nike and ziz. The year they sent Margalis Tast’annin to Kutaraja on his first command, the year the first HORUS installation failed.”
He began to chew his thumb. “That was a bad year.” He sounded depressed.
Reive stared at him impassively. “We are their only child,” she said. “They should be happy to have found us.”
Rudyard snorted. “Not likely! ziz thinks she will live forever—she will live forever, unless someone poisons her, or Margalis strangles her as well. In three hundred years there has not been a single peaceful succession by an Orsina. Too many bastards, too many feeble-minded children. A true heir by brother and sister—even a hermaphrodite—that would be too dangerous. Better to have Nike stupefied with morpha and Shiyung as a rasa and Nasrani exiled; or better yet, Nasrani brought back into the fold now that Shiyung’s been clipped. ziz would never let you live. She would never let anyone live who knew about you.”
The thought seemed to depress him further. He sank to the floor and stared at his feet. A bad smell hung about the cell, as of pork left uncooked for several days. Ceryl lay stretched upon the floor now. Her breathing had grown so soft that Reive could no longer hear her. She crept to Ceryl’s side and cocked her head, listening.
“She’s dead.”
The dwarf nodded without looking up. The gynander prodded the woman gently. The body felt rigid. When she picked up one of Ceryl’s arms and then dropped it, it thumped loudly against the floor.
“We should call someone—she was kind to us, and we never thanked her—”
Reive began to cry, crouching back and staring at the glass wall where the aurible monitors undulated through their viscous element. Rudyard Planck gazed at the corpse and then at Reive, wide-eyed, an expression that might have been gratitude as much as despair.
“She alone has escaped,” he said softly. “Be grateful, little Reive, she has escaped—perhaps she will bless us, wherever she is—”
He shut his eyes and began to recite the Orison Acherontic of Christ Cadillac, pausing for good measure to invoke Blessed Narouz as well as the Prophets Rayburn and Mudhowi Sirrúk. When he finished they sat in silence, the only sounds their labored breathing and the nearly inaudible tick of the monitors outside the cell.
Reive slept and dreamed. At least, she thought it must be a dream. She knew that the uncomfortable parameters of their cell were designed to make sleep impossible; but how else to explain that she was once more hurrying down the corridor to the oceanic vivarium, her bare feet stinging where they slapped the cool floor?
“Zalophus!”
Even as she called out she knew that it made no sound. There was no ripple in her throat to form the name, the white-clad Children of Mercy did not turn to see who it was that shouted by the zeuglodon’s tank.
But Zalophus heard. The enormous head reared from the dark water and gazed at her, plankton streaming from his teeth.
“Little thing,” he roared. Reive marveled that the Children of Mercy didn’t hear him, either. “You have returned! Come with me now, quickly! The gates are opening at last!”
Water sluiced across her feet as he rolled onto his back, flippers waving. Reive shook her head
.
“We can’t go with you, Zalophus. We would drown.”
The whale moaned and dived beneath the surface. A minute later he reappeared, spray frothing from his blowhole. “Come with me, human child,” he sang, and shivering, Reive felt the sound within her bones. “Come with me, or else you will die— Ucalegon the Prince of Storms flies across the seas, he is coming to ravish his bride, even now the city quakes to think of him! Come with me, we will join my sisters and witness the holy act!”
Reive looked away to stare at the watergates hung with shining banners, the gaudy flags and pennons of Æstival Tide. Already the offertory pyres had been lit. The air was thick with the scent of myrrh and the scorched smell of the gilt papers covered with the names of the recently dead, long narrow scrolls tossed onto the pyres by the followers of Christ Cadillac. Beyond a narrow gap at the top of one of the huge barricades she glimpsed something shining, a sliver of light the color of Rudyard Planck’s eyes. That is the sky, she thought. When we next wake they will open the Lahatiel Gate for the Redeemer, and then we will see the sky for the last time.
“We cannot go,” she said, turning back to him. “We are to be given to the Compassionate Redeemer. Besides, you would only eat us.”
Zalophus groaned, shaking his great head. “The Redeemer! So cruel, a thing without a mind, without a thought, nothing but teeth and bowels! It has no heart and so no true hunger! Ah, Reive, it is a sin, to treat you thus!” And Zalophus raced about his prison, churning the water into green froth and roaring so that Reive clapped her hands over her ears.
But at last the whale grew still. The waves lapping against the tank’s lip subsided. “I must go now, little thing,” he crooned, rolling to gaze at her with one enormous liquid eye. “Reive, Reive Orsina. I was alone and you spoke to me. I was hungry and you fed me, Reive.”
The gynander shrugged, laughing in spite of herself. “You are always hungry, Zalophus!”
He drew up and back into the air until he smashed down into the water, then twisted and leaped once more, higher and higher, until his huge body blotted out the light and Reive stumbled backward.
“I will not forget!” he bellowed, and for the last time dived beneath the tank’s surface. Reive huddled against a wall, shaking, waiting for the water to grow still again. But Zalophus did not return, then or ever, to his prison beneath the Quincunx Domes.
“Reive.”
The dwarf had been repeating her name for some time now. Two guards in the Orsinate’s violet livery stood waiting behind the thick glass door, idly tapping slender cudgels against their palms. One of them stared at the gynander’s pale form with no less surprise than did the dwarf himself—Rudyard was suddenly petrified that Reive had died too. But finally she stirred and blinked, gazing blearily at the ruddy face hanging a few inches above hers.
“Reive, it’s time.”
“Time?” She sat up and looked around. The walls had changed color, from white to a glowering red. Ceryl’s corpse still lay sprawled in the corner. She turned quickly back to Rudyard. “ Time? ”
He crooked his thumb at the door. “Guards.” His voice was so low and hoarse she could not at first understand what he said. “For us, Reive. They’re taking us.”
“Taking us?” For a moment she thought of Zalophus, heard him booming Come with me, recalled the splinter of blue gleaming above the watergates. She thought of him repeating her name: Reive, Reive Orsina. She stood, ignoring Rudyard Planck patting her hand comfortingly. The cell door slid open onto the waiting guards. Reive shook her head, heedless of the blood dried on her scalp, the tendrils of hair left where the mullah had shaved her carelessly. She walked up to one of the guards and pointed to Ceryl.
“We want you to burn her properly. No medifacs. Have her pyre set on Dominations—”
The guard stared at her, eyes furrowed, and then started to grin. Reive looked at him coldly and said, “Dominations! Do you hear us? We are Reive Orsina, heir to the Orsinate! We want that woman given full obsequies and burned this morning. Before the Gate is opened.”
The guard looked startled, glanced at Reive and at Ceryl’s body and then at the other guard. Slowly they both nodded. Reive looked back at the dwarf staring openmouthed and said, “Come on, Rudyard. We don’t want to keep the margravines waiting.” The guards stood aside for him, then led them down the hall.
Nike Orsina stood staring at the corpse of her sister Shiyung. Of course, it wasn’t exactly a corpse, because the body that floated in the narrow steel vat was not precisely dead. Tubes ran from Shiyung’s nostrils and ears and anus, delicate wires had been fitted to her shaved skull and to her fingers. A corrugated black hose fed into her mouth; Nike could see it move very slightly, in and out, like a bellows. The body was immersed in a clear liquid that smelled like standing water, with a faint undertone of cabbages.
Nike wrinkled her nose and leaned away from the tank. It had been her own idea to come here, to the laboratory on Dominations where the rasas were rehabilitated. After she had left the Four Hundredth Room and returned to her own chambers she could not sleep. Sajur’s death had frightened her, and ziz’s insane obstinacy in the face of so many terrible omens. The dream of the Green Country; the tremors that, since last evening, shook the entire city with alarming regularity; that uncanny morphodite. She kept seeing her, so young and thin, looking so much like Shiyung when she was a girl. How could anyone see her and not recognize her as an Orsina? ziz believed that Nike did not notice things—Shiyung had thought so too, and Nasrani, before he was exiled—but Nike did notice, more than they knew. It was a common belief among morpha habitues that, far from numbing the senses, frequent—and in Nike’s case, nearly constant—use of the drug made it possible to see and sense things outside the perimeters of normal consciousness. Nike had discussed this with Shiyung once and her sister had agreed, stating that once while under the influence of kef she had watched Nasrani’s thoughts leaving his head, in the form of small orange globes. This had not been what Nike meant; but she recalled it now, gazing at Shiyung’s face beneath the vat’s bubbling surface.
The morphodite was Shiyung and Nasrani’s child, sole heir to the thirteenth Orsinate. The first heir in hundreds of years, if one believed the histories ’filed in spools on Powers Level. It was an abomination, of course, a natural child and a heteroclite; but it would be a greater abomination to kill it and have no living heir to the dynasty. Nasrani was exiled, Nike herself had never had any interest in governance, and the demands of despotism had driven ziz quite mad. Of Shiyung nothing remained, certainly not within that empty carapace. Nike was sure of that. If anything, since the corpse had been given to the biotechnicians for regeneration, it looked less alive than anything Nike had ever seen. Its skin was soft and pulpy; a whitish fuzz grew from the corner of one eye. The fingers splayed open like a frog’s, moving back and forth as nucleic starter was pumped into the tank. It was grotesque, worse than the flayed smelting children of Archangels; worse than Shiyung’s most addled experiments at geneslaves. Another sign of ziz’s madness: there was no way Shiyung’s rasa could be presented to the multitudes as Tast’annin had been. They would riot and kill the surviving margravines rather than have such a horrifying reminder of their beloved Shiyung stalking witlessly through the city. A sudden horror seized Nike: that this was how she would end up someday, a gormless thing resuscitated in the bowels of Araboth and then forgotten, left to wander the lower levels with all the other doomed and deathless toys of the Ascendants.
“No,” she whispered. She groped at the banks of switches on the wall beside her and turned back to the tank. The liquid churned inside it, flowing over the top and spilling through grates on the floor beneath. She muttered to herself, then closing her eyes she reached into the vat and grabbed the thick hose that covered the corpse’s mouth. Nike gasped—the flux was freezing cold, viscous; the hose heavier than she could have thought possible. She yanked it once, then again and again, until finally it slipped loose. Then, teeth chattering
, she snatched her hands back and looked wildly about the room for something to dry them on. She found a biotech’s robe and wrapped her hands in that, and returned to the tank.
Shiyung’s corpse had risen as the liquid did, and now bumped against one edge of the vat. A milky ichor stained the nucleic starter around her mouth. Fine white threads of tissue streamed from her nostrils and a small hole above one eye. As Nike stared in horror the corpse’s eyelids rolled back, to show pale irises corrupted with tiny yellow spores. It gazed up at her, its pupils mere specks floating atop cloudy green yolks; then suddenly the eyes moved to stare at the side of its tank. Nike shrieked and stumbled backward. More and more starter poured onto the floor, and before she could do anything the corpse was falling as well, pushed by the weight of the liquid bubbling up from the vat.
Nike screamed. The corpse flopped onto its side but otherwise did not move. Its flabby white limbs sprawled across the grates. Its head faced Nike; its eyes remained open, staring blindly at her. A tiny pink delta of flesh, like a kitten’s tongue, protruded from one corner of its mouth. Nike turned and fled, shouting at a startled biotech in the hallway to seal the laboratory until she gave further orders. It was not until she reached the Seraphim’s gravator that she stopped, panting, and tipped the contents of a morpha tube between her trembling lips.
Originally, the Lahatiel Gate was to serve in emergencies only. In the event of holocaust or direct attack by the Commonwealth, the entire population of Araboth could be funneled through the immense steel mouth and evacuated onto the shore outside. An intricate system of gravators fed onto the eastern rim of Archangels where the Gate loomed, arching up and up into the darkness, its ribs and spikes entwined with bas-relief images of ancient janissaries and war machinery, flames and floodwaters, and above all of it the Ascendants’ motto picked out in letters of bronze and jet. When the Gate was open, one could see immediately outside of it a sweeping promenade that led down to the beach, copper pilasters and brazen steps long since tarnished to a moldering green and swept with sand. The sand itself was a different color here than that just a few yards away—dark, almost blackish. It always felt damp, and stained one’s bare feet a rusty color, and it did not glitter in the sun as the sand did elsewhere. It might have been as the moujiks said, that the earth could not swallow so much blood.
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