Aestival Tide (50 page)

“It is finished.”

He raised his head. Beside him Nefertity stared down at the angry waters, her beautiful face calm and cold as the image on a sarcophagus. Fury surged inside of him and almost he sprang at her; but then she was shaking her head, and her voice sounded strange.

“Hobi. Hobi—we're not alone.”

He looked where she pointed, to where the stream disappeared downhill. He blinked and wiped his eyes again, not certain if he was imagining it; but no, there was something there, a figure—and behind it many figures—the first one tall and wearing crimson leathers. An Aviator, wearing an enhancer, his face covered with a scarlet metal mask that gleamed in the rain like a warning flare. Behind him trudged sullen forms in robes and janissaries' uniforms and the pleasure cabinet's rosy silks, only their festival scarves of green were torn and stained, and their faces too seemed to have been wiped away by the storm.

“
Rasas
,” the boy breathed. His teeth chattered as he realized that the one leading them was a
rasa
as well. He would have run but Nefertity held him. The figures paced slowly up the hill, heedless of the rain streaming around them and the gale tearing at their clothes. Their leader walked the last few steps until he stood upon the plateau. When he raised his eyes to meet Hobi's the boy saw that he was what remained of the Aviator Imperator.

“Commandant Tast'annin,” he gasped. He thought he might be sick.

“Horemhob Panggang,” the
rasa
said in a low voice. He turned his gaze to Nefertity. “You have her. The nemosyne. Nasrani's metal woman.”

Hobi nodded dumbly. Behind the Aviator the other
rasas
had stopped. They stood, shuffling and silent. The rain where it struck some of them seemed to leave a soft impression on their skin.

“Yes,” the boy whispered at last. He coughed, tried to make his voice louder but succeeded only in raising it to a croak. “Nefertity—that's her name—”

“Nefertity,” the Aviator repeated. He stepped forward, until he stood directly in front of the nemosyne.

“Commandant,” Nefertity said, her voice cool and uninflected. Her eyes and throat began to glow deep blue.

“I heard much about you, many years ago, from my friend Nasrani Orsina,” the
rasa
went on. “He said you were more beautiful than any real woman he had ever known, excepting of course his youngest sister. At the time I did not believe him. I see now he was right.”

He bowed, the rain spilling from the cusps of his leather jacket.

The nemosyne stared at him, her gaze implacable, almost cruel. “I think it is a pity you did not perish with the rest of your people down there,” she said, gesturing to where Araboth lay somewhere beneath the sea's flow. Her voice had the husky, drawling edge of Loretta Riding's.

“Oh, but I have already given one life to those people,” the Aviator replied, raising his head and glancing back at the waiting figures behind him. “As have these others. Araboth's forgotten ones, The Fallen—Hobi knows about them, don't you, Hobi? Forgetful revenants, corpses who stray away from their prams when their nannies aren't looking. Military commanders who don't linger long enough in the beds of imperious mistresses.”

The nemosyne stared at him before replying coolly. “Let us go free. Let the boy go, at least—there may be others who survived, let him go and see if he can find them.”

The Aviator swept his arms out, sending up a plume of silver spray from his jacket. “I won't harm him. His father was a friend of mine, once. And I have had enough of killing, for a little while.” He gestured at the other
rasas.
“They were in the Undercity—they were following you, the light you shed as you passed through the tunnel. They followed me, and I followed you. We made it halfway up the hill before the gale struck. They are all that escaped from the city.”

He laughed mirthlessly, light glinting from his black teeth. Behind him the rustling of the waiting
rasas
grew louder. The rain was slowing. Overhead the clouds lightened to the color of verdigris, and on the eastern horizon sunlight darted from gaps in the clouds.

“I am not a military nemosyne,” Nefertity said, her voice harsh. “I belonged to the radical wing of the American Vatican. I am a folklore unit. I am useless to you. Let me go.”

The Aviator shook his head. “No. You can link with the others—you were all designed to interface with each other.”

“The others are gone.”

“I believe they still exist.” He stepped closer to her, took her gleaming metal hand in his dark and sanguine one. “Shiyung believed that as well, that's why she sent me to the Capital. The Military Tactical Targets Retrieval Network. It is somewhere out there still. HORUS was receiving random transmissions from it, before the raid by the Commonwealth destroyed their satellites.”

Nefertity's eyes darkened to cobalt. Hobi could smell something faint and metallic, like ozone, as she withdrew her hand from the Aviator's.

“Metatron,” she said, and recoiled. “The primary military unit—that's what they called it. Loretta said it was destroyed when Wichita fell.”

“I think it is still there. Somewhere. It broadcasts on a shortwave radio frequency. If we were to find an area where the airwaves were not contaminated, we might be able to find its range.
You
might be able to find it.”

The
rasa's
hollow voice had grown low, almost wheedling. Hobi started to back away from him, when suddenly the Aviator's hand shot out and grabbed him.

“Aaagh!” The boy yelled and tried to pull away, then stumbled to the ground. The
rasa
's hand cut into his flesh like ice.

“Let go of him,” Nefertity commanded. Her entire body blazed, the mist around her glittered blue and green and gold. Behind the Aviator the other
rasas
murmured and crept forward; some of them fell to their knees. “He is innocent, let him go.”

“Come with me, then,” said the Aviator. “Else I will kill him—and you will be responsible.”

Nefertity was silent. At the Aviator's feet Hobi writhed, his arm held taut in the
rasa
's grip as a single long tear of blood ran from wrist to elbow.

Nefertity looked down at Hobi, her eyes glittering. “Let him go,” she cried. “Yes, I will go with you.” Anger flared in her voice. “But how dare
you
harm him, how can
you
break the laws that bound you from harming your creators—”

The
rasa
grinned horribly, the splintered light making a tortured skull of his goblin face. “I am not truly a
rasa,
Mistress Nemosyne, nor am I human. Nothing commands me but myself, and, perhaps—”

He raised his hands, letting go of Hobi so that the boy collapsed, moaning, at his feet. For an instant a shaft of sunlight struck the Aviator, setting his crimson jacket aflame. His pale eyes were lost in shadow as he cried out words the boy did not understand. Then the sun was gone, the rain hissed once more upon the broken ground.

“Master—”

A thin voice called from behind the
rasa.
Hobi looked up. In the gray-green sky something glimmered, a spark that seemed to flicker more brightly and grow larger, until he saw that it was an aircraft of some kind, and as it plummeted toward them he made out the unearthly grace of one of the Ascendant's Gryphons.

“Kesef!” The Aviator's voice rose in command. Abruptly the Gryphon's wings folded back and it plunged to earth like a javelin. Hobi cried out; but at the last second the Gryphon hovered, seemed to stutter in the air; and then its six jointed legs descended, followed a moment later by a folding stair delicate as a gentleman's fan.

“What—” Hobi began, turning to Nefertity; but before he could speak something fell from the aircraft's belly. A tangle of arms and legs on the silver stairs, resolved into a single person struggling with some sort of ornate costume rife with spikes and lumens. A moment later and the stranger was on her feet, tearing at her face as though something clung there. When she turned, shaking rain from her cheeks, he saw that it was Âziz Orsina.

“Margravine!” Hobi exclaimed, and would have run to her if the
rasa
had not stopped him.

“Help, dammit, is this the frontier? Have we reached a substation?” The margravine tore the last bit of her Æstival garb from her and flung it to the ground, then turned and kicked furiously at one of the Gryphon's legs. “Where
are
we, dammit?”

From the
rasas
waiting on the hillside came a low sound, a sound that became a hiss. Âziz turned, startled. “Oh!
Oh—
”

Looking back, she saw Hobi and the nemosyne and the Aviator Imperator. She bit her lip, rubbed her chin, and then tossed her head back defiantly.

“Margalis! I might have thought
you'd
find a way out! Well, come on, then, you know the way—where's the nearest substation, we've got to get out of here—”

Behind her the hissing grew louder. Hobi shrank closer to Nefertity, as slowly the
rasas
began to creep the last few feet up the hill to where the margravine stood, glaring at Tast'annin.

“—this bloody thing doesn't listen at
all,
I thought they were supposed to respond to direct emotive input, let's go
now
while the storm's let up—”

Tast'annin shook his head. “I don't think so, Âziz,” he murmured. Her eyes blazed and she took a step toward him, was stopped by a hand on her shoulder. “I think some of your—
people
—have need of you….”

Behind her the
rasas
had gathered, crooning and sighing and mumbling among themselves as they surrounded the margravine. Âziz saw them and gave a small cry, tried to push her way through them but was borne off, as first one and then another grabbed her, handing her over their heads until finally she disappeared in a weaving thicket of white arms and hands and mouths.

Hobi looked away, covering his eyes. Âziz's shrieks grew louder, were nearly drowned by the sound of tearing and many soft voices crooning to themselves. The boy crouched against the nemosyne, weeping.

“It's all right, Hobi, it's all right,” she said gently, stooping over him. Above her the Aviator Imperator stood, brooding in the gathering dusk. She raised her face to his and said, “We must find others for him. Other people. Otherwise he will go mad. I've seen it happen before,” she ended sadly.

The Aviator nodded. “We will find them. There is a girl, a girl I left for dead in the Capital—she knows things, she can deal death with her mind. I would find her.”

“Nothing but death,” the nemosyne said bitterly, hugging the weeping boy to her. “You have seen where it brought them, and still you would have nothing but death.”

The Aviator shrugged. “I have questions, that's all.” He turned to the Gryphon and lay his hand upon the edge of its steps. When he glanced back at Nefertity a spare ray of light glinted in his pale eyes. “I have always tried to keep an open mind about these things.”

The nemosyne said nothing. She waited until he climbed into the aircraft, then murmured, “Hobi, it's all right now. We will go from here, we will find another place….”

Hobi shuddered, wiped his eyes, and looked up at her. “I'm ready,” he said at last, his voice hoarse. He looked over his shoulder, to where the eastern horizon was banded with streamers of gold and violet and red.

“It's over,” said Nefertity. “The storm is gone, it's passed over us now. That's the sky, the sun breaking through—”

The boy looked in the other direction, down the hill. He could just make out shadowy figures moving in the distance, and hear scuffling noises in the brush. Before he could turn away a voice called down from the Gryphon.

“Come now—it's ready, I had to clear away the mess she'd made, but there's room now for both of you—”

The boy stood, wincing at how much his legs ached. Gingerly he touched the raw gash on his arm where the Aviator had cut him. “Is it safe?”

Nefertity shook her head. “What is ‘safe,' now? It's not safe to stay here alone; it's not safe to have him murder you.” She walked stiffly to the stairway, turned to Hobi, and bowed slightly. “I thank you anyway, Hobi, for waking me. It's better not to sleep, I think.” Without saying more they climbed into the Gryphon.

He had always thought it would be exciting to fly in one of the Aviator's biotic craft; but then he had thought it would be exciting to see clouds, too, and mountains. Now Hobi knew that one grew accustomed to things Outside very quickly.

He felt queasy at first, as the Gryphon accelerated impossibly fast and burst into the air like a flame. There was only one biotic hookup, for Tast'annin. Hobi and Nefertity sat in two narrow seats behind him, and peered out a series of round windows at the tor receding beneath them in a rush of gray and brown. Then the Gryphon banked and shot out over the ocean, seeming to bounce across cusps of air like a rickshaw over uneven transway. Hobi bit his thumb and hummed nervously. After a minute or two he felt easier, and leaned closer to the windows.

Below them the ocean purled almost gently against sheer rock, all that could be seen of the precipice that had once sheltered Araboth. Of the domes he could see nothing; only a few bits of flotsam floating in the dark water. As they skimmed above the coast the rock gave way to sandy beach, nearly as smooth as the water itself. There was nothing here either, save for uprooted trees, a torn length of white cloth wrapped around a spar, two sodden bags that almost looked like bodies…

“Hey!”

Hobi yelled so loudly he was surprised the Gryphon didn't halt, the way a rickshaw would. The Aviator scarcely stirred where he reclined in front of them, only raised a single finger warningly.

“Hey,” Hobi repeated, a little desperately now, “I think those are
people
there—”