Aestival Tide (40 page)

To think these were its final hours: the Holy City of the Americas, the last place upon the continent where the glories of Science still held thrall. She bowed her head against her hands and cried softly, thinking of all that would disappear forever, if Araboth fell.

But after a little while she stopped. She couldn't afford to waste time like this, sobbing like her sister Shiyung after the execution of one of her lovers. Wiping her eyes, she left, hurried past the Redeemer's cell and toward the gravator that would bring her to Seraphim's hangars, where the Aviators guarded their fougas and Gryphons.

Not all the glories of the Orsinate would perish with their city.

Before her imprisonment, Reive had never been on Principalities—she didn't count the brief excursion from the Virtues gravator to the Lahatiel Gate at Æstival Tide. The level's very name had always been enough to make her shiver, with its intimations of the Emirate's ruling legions imprisoned to languish in the fiery darkness. Now she and Rudyard Planck were hurried past tall grim buildings of blackened limestone, quarried when Araboth was still being built by masons recruited from the Eastern Provinces of Colorado and Nevada, the huge stone blocks then dragged up to Level Three by android slaves and work teams from the Emirate. The sight of those windowless fortresses was even worse than the imagining of them. Millions of fossil shells and crinoids were embedded in the limestone, smutted by centuries of smoke rising from the refineries and the caustic airs released by the medifacs themselves. Beneath her feet the ground was cold stone, and there too she saw the imprints of shells and soft tubes, things like ferns and creatures that were all vertebrae or carapace. Reive shuddered, wondering if that was what the ocean was like, Outside, teeming with these worms and larval things, and seashells like eyes closing upon the eternal twilight. In front of her Rudyard Planck ignored the buildings. He padded after their guards in his soft-soled boots and stared resolutely at the ground. The sound of their passage was swallowed by the roar of the medifac engines, their relentless
thud-thud
broken by the occasional shrieks of steam escaping from a huge valve. Several times deafening reports shook the entire level, and bits of rubble came crashing down from far overhead, spraying them with dust and grit. The floor would shake, and once Reive screamed as an entire huge block of stone reared up from the ground, shearing through a wooden building as though it were made of rice paper. Through the resulting gap in the floor flames streamed upward, and even their guards shouted and fled, dragging Reive and Rudyard after them.

At least,
she thought,
at least Ceryl was spared this.

Finally they reached the end of the medifacs, the last long low buildings with their hook-hung scaffoldings like gallows thrust against the gray walls. There were greasy black stains on the ground near the railing, where heaps of rubble were dusted with black ash. Tremors continued to shake the entire level, and faint cries and shrieks followed each round of explosions. A little ways down the hallway she glimpsed people milling about the dark entrances of a number of gravators.

Another smell permeated the air here. Roses, thought Reive, but something else as well—like the faint odor of carrion that rose from Zalophus's tank, or the scent of corruption that hung about a chamber where timoring had recently taken place. She felt a powerful urge to run away, to find the source of that smell for herself—and that was when she recalled the Compassionate Redeemer.

They were nearing its cage. She had managed to avoid thinking of it—easy enough when it seemed at any moment they might be killed by falling stone, or swallowed by some gaping rift. But now they were very close to their final destination, and the thought of what awaited them there made her shudder.

There really was no way out. They really were going to die. She thought of all the tales she had ever heard about the Redeemer, about executions, about Æstival Tide. She felt light-headed, almost giddy: to think that her life had come to this! A month ago she was wandering the halls of Dominations, thinking about scrounging a meal; now she was herself to be offered to the Redeemer as the festival sacrifice. She scratched her head, feeling where the mullah had nicked her scalp. She felt a wave of sorrow for Rudyard Planck, plodding along a few feet ahead of her, his collar pulled up so that tufts of red hair sprouted from it. He was innocent, really; if only she hadn't met him that day in the sculpture garden!

But then another explosion rocked the city, and she thought of Ceryl's dream, of the margravine's and her own; and she knew that there was no escape now, for any of them. Only Zalophus—perhaps he at last had found a way out. Her eyes watered and she sniffed loudly. She thought of running away—it couldn't possibly be any worse, to die now rather than an hour later—but then she heard a guard shouting at her.

“Hurry up,” he cried, grabbing her arm. “The margravines will be waiting and they can't begin until you get there.”

They had reached the gravators. Reive craned her neck to see above the heads of the guards pressing close to her, protecting her from the people spilling from the gravators as the doors opened. 'Filers from Powers, heads bowed beneath the weight of their equipment; biotechs from the vivariums in their yolk-yellow smocks, trimmed with green ribbons for the festival. Low-level diplomats and cabal members, trying not to look put out that they had to travel this way, rather than on the Orsinate's private conveyances. Gynanders and marabous and slack-lipped mantics stepped from Virtues, blinking in the gloom. And, walking slowly through the crowd,
rasas
from Archangels, silent and pale, their hollow eyes glowing in the dusky light. All of them touched with green: ivy and leaves plastered to hats and vocoders, robes and trousers specially tailored with emerald brocade or grass-green trim, deep green stripes showing against the black uniforms of the Reception Committee. Even the
rasas
wore bits of finery, remnants of their earlier lives—jade beads rattling around one's neck, a pale scarf fluttering from another. Reive cried out softly and buried her face in the guard's shoulder, her small hands clutching at his back. She did not see, therefore, the doors that opened before them—great narrow bronze doors, inlaid with steel studs and spikes and guarded by a phalanx of Aviators.

Rudyard Planck was not so easily disturbed by the crowd, and so he
did
see the doors, though not for the first time. As an intimate of Sajur Panggang's he had been this way a decade earlier—although the thought of what waited there made him want to hide his head as well. As the doors swung open the guards padded in, carrying Reive and Rudyard. The Aviators turned and followed them, into a long corridor with walls and floor and ceiling of copper-colored metal, hung with electrified green-glass lanterns that shone like the eyes of great malign insects. Joss sticks were set into small brass burners, gray streams of rose scent snaking through the air. Some of the Aviators stopped and turned their hands in the smoke, raising their enhancers to rub it onto their cheeks. As they passed beneath the electric lanterns Reive heard a faint high buzzing sound, a monotonous counterpoint to the even crack of the Aviators' boots upon the floor. Perhaps inspired by the funereal atmosphere, Rudyard Planck began very softly to recite the
Orison Acherontic.
Reive could feel the floor trembling beneath the feet of her guard. Once or twice the electric lanterns flickered, but there was nothing else to hint that the Architects after their long servitude were failing their masters.

Reive found that now, slung over her guard like a naughty child, her terror had eased. A cool and resigned expectation replaced it. She recalled all she knew of the Compassionate Redeemer. Its image crudely drawn in hand-tinted images on long scrolls of rice paper; the many types of sacrificial incense that bore its name, from cheap acrid-smelling joss sticks and incense blocks to rose-stamped lozenges and those elaborate coils dusted with silver nitrate that fizzed and popped and sometimes badly burned the unwary. She was too young to remember much from the last Æstival Tide. She recalled only how she and the other morphodites from the Virtues creche were marched to the head of the Gate and made to sit in a relatively sheltered spot, where there was less chance of them being trampled or thrown down the steps in the festival frenzy. There she had sucked on a marzipan image of the monster, until its sweetness made her teeth hurt and she tossed it down the steps.

Now she turned her head so that the rough cloth of her guard's uniform wouldn't chafe so at her cheek. In the distance ahead of them a narrow orange rectangle grew larger and brighter as they approached it. Reive wished she had used her time in prison more wisely, and questioned Rudyard Planck about the protocol of offerings to the Redeemer. The rectangle blazed now, the Aviators' silhouettes dead-black against it, and resolved into a great door that seemed to open onto a flaming pyre. One by one as they stepped through the doorway the Aviators were swallowed by the blaze. A few feet ahead of her Rudyard Planck raised one small pudgy hand in farewell as his guard carried him over the threshold. Then it was Reive's turn. As she blinked and tried to shade her eyes from the incendiary light, she thought without irony how strange it was that she was embarking upon a very intense and personal experience of the Feast of Fear, and yet she was no longer afraid.

The Gryphons were housed on the same level as the Lahatiel Gate, on a long spur that hung above the sands below. A worn concrete walkway led to where the aircraft were lined up on a ledge overlooking nothing but endless blue: deep greenish-blue below, pale cloud-scarred blue above. Even with the filters the light was blinding, and Âziz bowed her head to keep from gazing out upon the sea.

It was one of the only parts of Araboth where the domes were clear enough to see through. This was to enable the Aviators to gauge the weather for themselves. A totally unnecessary precaution—a Gryphon had only to extend one of its filaments to measure wind velocity, barometric pressure, precipitation, radiation, atmospheric conditions ranging from the chance of hail to, the varying levels of hydrogen in the stratosphere, possible exposure to mutagens, presence of enemy airships or -craft, and evidence of radioactivity in the Null Zones. The Aviators, however, being proud to the point of hubris, claimed to be able to determine all of these things merely by gazing at the open air.

Âziz made no such claims upon the world Outside. The sight—the very
thought
—of the ocean looming outside the meniscus made her tremble. To counteract this weakness, on her way here she had pricked her throat with an ampule of andrenoleen. If she was going to travel as an Aviator travels, she would have to control her emotions. Now, as the drug took hold of her, she could feel the blood racing through her heart, and a fiery confidence replaced the fear that usually accompanied her few visits to the Aviators' stronghold. With the Gryphons, it was most important not to be afraid. A few feet from where they stood she raised her head, teeth clenched so that a skeleton's grin racked her thin face, and squinted through the brilliance at the aircraft.

There were twelve of them. Each faced the outside of the dome, where the translucent polymer was etched with spray and salt, and the outlines of the skygates glowed cobalt against the bright sky. Once there had been hundreds of these biotic aircraft, a fleet powerful enough to subdue entire continents. Over the centuries, provincial rebellions and incursions by the Emirate and Balkhash Commonwealth had destroyed many of them. The bibliochlasm alone had resulted in a score being torched like mayflies to burn in the skies above Memphis.

But most of the Gryphons had been destroyed since then. In the dark ages that followed the Third Shining, they were lost through the ignorance of pilots who were no longer properly instructed in the command of their skittish craft. Physically, the Gryphons were quite frail, no more than a skeleton and membrane containing the crystals and fluids necessary to establish the controlling link between pilot and craft, and carry the canisters of nerve gas or virus or mutagens dispatched in the Ascendants' rains of terror. Not until the Second Ascension and the establishment of the NASNA Academy were the lost arts of biotic aviation restored. Then the first generation of Aviators were trained in the arcane methods of controlling fougas and aviettes and man-powered Condors, the solex-winged shuttles of HORUS and, most beautiful and lethal of all, the Ninth Generation Biotic Gryphons, all that remained of the imposing defense structure of the short-lived Military Republic of Wichita.

Of that squadron, only these twelve had survived. Formally, they belonged to the Ascendant Autocracy; but in truth each answered only to its Aviator—the dozen finest of the Ascendants' troops. And while their pilots were faceless and nameless, grim histories hidden behind their sensory enhancers, the Gryphons were not. Skittish and deadly by turns, it was as though they absorbed into their very fabric—half biological material and half machine—the natures of the men and women who did not control them so much as give them impetus and inspiration for flight.

And so they had been given heroes' names, and heroines': Astraea and Zelus and Mjolnir, Argo and Kesef and Tyr, Chao-is and Cavas and Hekatus, Ygg and Nephele and Mrabet-ul-tan. And like heroes between their labors they waited in restless sleep, until Need came to wake them.

As Âziz approached the Gryphons stirred, swiveling on their slender metal-jointed legs until their sharp noses faced her. Filaments lifted from their foresections, silvery threads with a pale rosy blush where microscopic transmitting crystals coagulated in a nucleic broth. They wafted through the air above Âziz's head like the nearly invisible tentacles of a seanettle, and for an instant she felt one brush her temple. From the front of the Gryphon nearest her an optic emerged on its long tether, and scanned her silently. She stopped, suddenly afraid.