Aestival Tide (6 page)

A moment later she stopped at the edge of the pool. A heat fence separated her from its occupant. The gynander whistled softly to herself, shading her eyes against the growth lights. When she inhaled, waves of warm scent washed over her: salt and sea lavender, coconut oil and almond flower, an underlying musk like semen. She shut her eyes. It made her think of the long slant of beach outside the city, the rust-colored sand and impossibly blue water that she had seen only once before at Æstival Tide, ten years earlier when she was a very small child. There was a smell like burning roses and she could hear the Daughters of Graves singing, see the Orsinate standing stiffly on their viewing platform, tossing ginger blossoms and the dried leaves of sweet cicely onto the crowd below.

Her hands had already begun to stretch through the heat fence when a deep voice crooned, “You'll harm yourself, human child. Come here to this side, where it's open—”

Reive gasped. Her hands stung where the fence had burned them.

“Zalophus!” She tried to keep her voice from shaking, tried to smile.

In the dark water in front of her he hung suspended. All she could see was his head, like one of the gargoyles upon the facade of the Church of Christ Cadillac. Huge, grotesquely pitted and scarred by centuries of bashing against the concrete walls of his prison, his blunt snout ended in a mouth that held white teeth longer than her hand. A long furrow ran the length of his skull, hiding his blowhole. A flap of warted skin folded back from it when he breached. To either side of that knobbed dome glittered his eyes. Eyes larger than Reive's clenched fists, liquid eyes, eyes so dark it was impossible to tell what color they were, if they had a color at all. They stared at her calmly; at least she supposed it was calmly—his eyes revealed nothing, just as his voice seldom changed. So deep a voice that it seemed he moved other creatures to his will by speaking, his voice alone manipulating their frailer skeletons. But Reive believed there was something else at work there as well, some subtle telepathy by which he bent the waves of air and water and made of them a web to snare the careless.

Ancient Zalophus, sweet-voiced Zalophus: Zalophus the ever-hungry.

“There was a siren here this morning,” the great cetacean boomed. Reive stepped back and covered her ears. “She wept, remembering when the seas were full of her kind, and men worshipped them and made them offerings of stillborn children.”

“She lied,” said Reive, dropping her hands. “The seas were never full of them, they were engineered here a hundred years ago. They have never seen open water.”

“So sad, she was so sad,” Zalophus moaned, sending up a plume of dark green spray. “I ate her.”

Reive laughed, covering her mouth. Zalophus stared at her with huge unblinking eyes. Then, without warning he breached. With a cry Reive stumbled backward. For an instant she glimpsed the rest of him, long body like a whale's, but with narrower fins and tail, great pits gouged in his rubbery flesh by the crab-sized sea lice that scurried frantically across his back as he crashed into the water. The cormorant shrieked and flapped into the air. A headier smell overwhelmed Zalophus's sweet scent, brackish, the odor of rotting fish. He disappeared beneath the surface, the water boiling and clouded where he had been. She could just make out his form far below, like a cavern in the deep water.

“Damn!” Reive glared at the cormorant eyeing her balefully from its new perch. He might stay submerged for hours now. “Zalophus,” she cried; then more loudly,
“Zalophus!”

Nothing happened. The surface of the pool grew calm. Very faintly she could hear clickings and a deep brooding moan as the monstrous creature called out to sea, the constant and futile effort he had engaged in for centuries, seeking others of his kind.

But there were no others. There really never had been. He was the first of the hydrapithecenes, the very first of all the geneslaves bioengineered during the Second Ascension; the most grotesque of all the Ascendants' creations, and the most useless. The aardmen had been engineered as slaves, combining canine servility with human cunning and cruelty. They were guardians and gladiators, fighting human men and women for the pleasure of the Orsinate, who loved to gamble. Of the other geneslaves, the swanlike argalæ had been bred for their beauty: limbs so long and slender they snapped during lovemaking, breasts that were never meant to suckle, feeble wings that would never take flight. They had a mad witless gaze, shallow rib cages that barely contained their lungs, tiny white teeth useless for anything but lovebites. Once Reive had accidently killed one, during an orgy in Âziz's private chambers. She had wept, because the argalæ were beautiful: the Ascendants' opium dream of the ideal partner, slender and childlike and utterly dispensable. And the
rasas
were simply a solution to the problem of Araboth's dwindling population. Too many centuries of inbreeding on the upper levels; too many genetic mutations among the slaves brought back from the wars. So within their cruel alembics the Orsinate distilled a life essence, and with it infused the corpses carried daily into the Chambers of Mercy by yellow-robed coenobites. Thus the Orsinate could continue to vent their murderous caprices upon Araboth's human population, and still be certain of a stable work force.

But Zalophus? Zalophus was the folly of those who had hoped to create the ultimate affront to the hated world Outside. Using human cranial matter and cellular tissue from the preserved carcass of a zeuglodon, an Eocene whale found in the channels of the Empire's northernmost reach, they had engineered Zalophus. A sentient carnivorous whale, his fellows extinct for æons, kept alive for these hundreds of years by the ministrations of the Architects and their human disciples. Among all the creations of the Ascendants, he was the most grotesque and feared; save only for the Compassionate Redeemer, which lay mired in its decade-long sleep until awakened for Æstival Tide.

Like the rest of the Orsinate's menagerie, Zalophus languished forgotten until Nike or Âziz or—more likely—Shiyung recalled him. Then the margravines might troop down to Dominations, party entourage in tow and stoned on negus or lucifer, to toy with the great sad-eyed monster. They would command him to call forth his memories of the First Days, the flames of the Biblioclasm, the silent holocaust of the Third Shining. Or Shiyung might ask his advice on some difficult piece of gene-splicing, or beg him to tell her of the chilly Eocene seas where he had preyed on eels the size of fougas.

Reive had been at one of these reckless gatherings. Alone among the drunken guests, she had been touched by the plight of the captive monster. Since then she came here often. Zalophus terrified her. She knew he was half-mad from the ages of his incarceration and would devour her as easily as speak to her. But still she came.

“Zalophus,” she called softly to the still water. A whale louse lay on its back at her feet, twitching its scorpion head. Reive kicked it into the pool. “Zalophus!”

His head erupted so near to her that she screamed and tripped as she scurried away. “Zalophus—”

“She was
sad,”
he repeated. The tolling voice was immeasurably sorrowful. “So sad.”

Reive stared at him warily. “We are bored, Zalophus. Do you have any news? Do you have a dream for us?”

Zalophus rolled onto his side so that one eye glared up at her. Water poured smooth as oil across his gray flank. “You are the one brought me the bird girl.”

“Reive. That's right.”

“Reive.” One immense flipper slapped the surface, sent up a fountain high as her head. “Bring me another one. I had not tasted that before.”

Reive shrugged. “We will try. Can you tell us a dream?”

The bloated body righted itself, the huge head turned to regard her with what might have been construed as longing, or even sorrow, in a less horrible form. “A dream? I have nothing but dreams now, in my sleep I hear the icelands moving, I hear my sisters calling and the winds gathering for the great storm, I hear the voice of Ucalegon shouting in its sleep…”

Reive stepped back, uneasy.

“…in the Undercity the rift is widening, soon it will breach the open sea and I will be free! but only come with me now, human child, come with me and prise the gates open, free me—”

Reive shook her head, frightened to see the water roiling about the huge thing, the madness bleeding into his black and empty eyes. “We can't,” she stammered.

Zalophus raised his head so that she could see his long jaw, the row of spike teeth where parasites raced to feed upon shreds of flesh and dripping strings of plankton.

“Free me!” he bellowed. From across the vivarium came high-pitched shrieks and whistles as the dolphins raced terrified about their tanks. “Soon the fissure will spread and my sisters will come for me, they are waiting in the icelands, they are waiting waiting waiting,
FREE ME!”

The voice exploded in a screaming howl. Crying out, Reive fell back as he leaped, fins cutting long troughs through the water, the great body blotting out the light so that she saw only his skull silhouetted there, the prow of his jaw, the cruel mouth grinding as he fell and bellowing crashed into the pool. A wave rushed onto the walkway and she fled, while behind her the last zeuglodon roared and wept.

In the chambers of the Architect Imperator sat Nasrani Orsina and Horemhob Panggang. They were waiting for Hobi's father to return from a meeting with Shiyung Orsina and the imperious Âziz.

“I'm sorry he's not here to see you,” said Hobi. He felt distinctly uneasy entertaining the exiled Nasrani alone. This close to Æstival Tide, one always sensed that something terrible might happen. Ten years ago, when he was only seven, Hobi had watched horrified as Âziz sentenced a boy his own age to death for crying during a purification ceremony. “But I'm sure he'll be here soon.”

He offered Nasrani another pickled apricot. “I think he's gone to the ceremony at the palace. The—” He put the tray onto the floor and frowned. “The what-is-it, the Investiture.”

“Mmph,” replied Nasrani Orsina. At the word
investiture
he winced. He lay on a stack of pillows stiff with brocade and metallic trim. Not especially comfortable but sumptuous to look upon, the decor was in keeping with Sajur Panggang's architectural theories. He took another apricot and drained a glass of Amity-in-Occis, a rare and powerful liqueur distilled from kelp and wormwood. “Eee s'a vern guh, Hobi.”

Hobi (correctly) interpreted this to mean that the Orsina in exile found the potent fruit to be very good. “Thank you.” He nodded politely. Like his father he was small and slender, but more muscular. His mother had been a cousin-german of the Orsinate. From her Hobi had inherited slanted eyes of an amber color and the surprising delicacy of his features—a strong chin that still seemed childishly rounded beneath Hobi's recent attempts at a beard, high cheekbones, and long hair the color of the oak—real oak—paneling of the sitting room. “My father is very fond of them—I think they were something Mother liked.”

Nasrani nodded. “Do you miss her?” He sipped his liqueur, gazing at Hobi through slitted eyes. He was not unaware that the two of them were related: it was the eyes, mostly, that showed it. Tiger's eyes, like Shiyung's. She was the beauty of the family, and Nasrani had always thought it a pity that she had no living heirs. There had been a child, once.
His
child, he was certain; but the baby had been monstrous—a morphodite, Shiyung whispered to him months afterward. But that had been a long time ago. If the child had lived it would be nearly as old as Hobi now. Nasrani sighed and finished his Amity. The boy looked younger than the last time he'd seen him. He supposed the scrabbly beard did that. Nasrani smiled and said gently, “Your mother was a fascinating woman, Hobi.”

With a clumsy shrug Hobi reached for the decanter. “Yes. My father misses her horribly, I know.”

Nasrani nodded. Angelika Panggang had been poisoned last spring by a woman in the Toxins Cabal. A tiny venomous frog, sleekly orange as its innocent brethren and served with flaming raisins to Angelika after her morning sauna. The taster had looked on bemused as Angelika had a seizure. Later she claimed she thought her mistress was exercising, and was acquitted by the Orsinate. Because of her husband's prominence, and her own relation to the Orsinate, Angelika was given a pyre with full funeral honors, including the sacrifice of her entire personal staff. The rumor was that her death had been a warning to her husband, whose predilection for very young girls had embroiled him in an affair with Âziz Orsina's favorite bedmaid. The bedmaid, too, ended up in a fiery eclipse, but that was some months later.

Since his wife's death the Architect Imperator had grown introspective. His attention had turned to arcane matters: divination by means of broken glass; a penchant for the nearly unlistenable form of sadist opera known as
Fasa;
an inexplicable fondness for the company of Rudyard Plank, the dwarf whose legendary bad taste had made him a favorite of the margravine Nike. Sajur had also developed a burning hatred for the Orsinate, and a taste for flouting it—for example, in his weekly
tanka
games with Nasrani Orsina, the infamous margravin now exiled (for a failed assassination attempt upon his sister Âziz) from the Orsinate's Level.

Several more minutes passed. Nasrani fiddled with the glass buttons of his crimson greatcoat and drank another tumbler of Amity in thoughtful silence. Hobi was surprised the exile did not yet appear drunk, but experience had taught him that Amity caught up with everyone, sooner or later. The thought troubled the boy and he gnawed at a fingernail.

The decanter was nearly empty. Nasrani stared at it with bemused affection, as though regarding a beloved but naughty child. Hobi leaned forward to press a button beneath the table. A moment later a replicant appeared, ram-headed and wearing the same long linen shift and trousers that Hobi did.