Aestival Tide (49 page)

“We must—go somewhere—” Nike gasped. “Rooms—my rooms—”

“Don't be a fool,” the Quir shouted. From his toneless voice she realized he too must have been partially deafened when the domes gave way. “It's like this everywhere—”

He fumbled at his waist, withdrawing a wire reticule. He pulled out a vial of petroleum that he opened and pressed to his fingertips. Angrily he flicked petroleum in Nike's direction.

“Your sister Âziz is an evil horrible woman,” he spat. “It was her dream of the Green Country that opened the way to this disaster.”

He pointed through a gap, to where Nike could see a swollen black hump on the horizon. As she gazed at it, the dark mass grew. It was a moment before she realized that it was not really growing larger. It was growing
nearer.

“We could find the morphodite and make amends,” she gasped, brushing a droplet of petroleum from her cheek. “Some sort of inaugural ceremony, this evening perhaps—”

The Quir raised his face to hers. His bulging eyes were very bright. “Don't be absurd. The domes have failed us. Within the hour we will all be dead.”

Nike nodded, sickened, and looked out to sea again. Behind them another explosion tore through the city.

“Some of us have readied ourselves for this day,” he said. He raised one hand, his azure sleeve flapping around his wrist, and beckoned to one of his followers. “I have not until today been among his faithful, but it's never too late for converts. Even at the end of all things, Blessed Narouz was able to wrest a shred of meaning from disaster. It was he who said, ‘It is never too late, and there will always be enough to go around.' ”

He paused reflectively. His voice had grown hoarse from shouting, and when he spoke again it was nearly in a whisper. “He was speaking of petroleum, of course, and of course he was wrong,” he added. “There never is enough, and this time it really is too late. Although certain of Blessed Narouz's rites will prove useful to us now. Goodbye, Margravine.” He raised both hands and shouted something Nike couldn't understand. As she turned to see who he called to she glimpsed five or six people in indigo and green, their robes soaked and filthy with sand and oil. Some of them were in the alcove with them; others forced their way through the gaps in the wall, yelling. Several carried torches that sputtered in the rain. There was an overpowering stink of petrol and smoke. Nike started to protest, to suggest that they retire to the Four Hundredth Room to discuss the possibility of canonizing Reive Orsina, but then the ground beneath her buckled and she fell to her knees. The Quir shouted again, louder this time, and as Nike tried to get to her feet she saw one of his followers heaving a plastic bucket at her face. She screamed as it sloshed over her, burning her cheeks and hands as she scrabbled at the steps, and screamed again as one of the brands was thrust at her and the
galli
fell back, chanting and shrieking. Very dimly above the thunderous roar of flame and wind she could hear the Quir's voice, quite calm now, reciting the
Ethyl Spiritus
even as the waters rose about his ankles and then his thighs and finally engulfed him. By the time the rushing waves claimed her body there was really nothing that remained of her, save blackened bones and a twisted cone of metal wrapped about with greasy rags, and a charred morpha tube bobbing in the turbulent sea.

Âziz was surprised at how easy it was to reach the Gryphon. She fled as the first explosions swept the area beneath the Lahatiel Gate, just as Reive and Rudyard Planck were staggering along the beach with the Compassionate Redeemer behind them. Already she could tell that it had all gone wrong—Nike's refusal to wear proper Æstival attire, the blatant rudeness of the Archbishop and precentor, that storm raging Outside when there should have been the more restrained horror of a still blue sea and little waves lapping at the sand. Instead, the Lahatiel Gate had opened upon Ucalegon itself, and there was no way the Orsinate could pretend to have anticipated
that.
Not even the thin bands of sunlight slicing through the clouds, not even the sight of the Compassionate Redeemer nosing along the beach could placate Araboth's populace, once they had glimpsed that storm raised like a gigantic fist ready to crush the Quincunx Domes. There was no Scream, none of the orderly chaos of the Great Fear; only a few moments of stunned murmuring before the throng broke into shrieks and enraged shouts and turned to flee back into the city.

Âziz gazed out at the storm, the wind tearing at her crown so that it tipped over one eye.
Nasrani was right, the bastard,
she thought. She straightened the crown and turned, slipped through the diminishing crowd on the Narthex balcony to a small plain door nearly hidden behind a line of toppled columns. A steady grinding thunder rang out, as joists and beams collapsed and storage vats burst into flame on the refineries level. For an instant it was all nearly too much. Âziz's head roared and she would have given herself over to the Fear like everyone else; but then her hand found the little doorknob, the metal warm beneath her palm, and without thinking she ran into the passageway and let the door slam behind her.

Inside it was hot but blessedly quiet, the stillness broken only by muted roars and the groan of the wind raging at the Lahatiel Gate. An unblinking line of dim yellow lights ran along the tunnel floor and Âziz followed these, her booted feet slapping against the ground and her breath coming in loud spurts. After a few minutes the yellow lights grew brighter and a soft voice intoned, “Privileged area, please stop.” She stopped, gasping as the sentry pierced her hand, and whispered, “Âziz Orsina. Pass.”

Before her the door slid back to reveal another balcony, semicircular, its floor inlaid with garish mosaics. It seemed to jut out into the very heart of the storm, buckling and swaying as though made of corrugated leather. A sonic fence should have surrounded it, but the power must have failed—there was no warning hum, no flicker of blue light to indicate where the fence ended. If she wasn't careful she might plunge hundreds of feet into the crashing sea.

But Âziz was very careful. In the center of the balcony the Gryphon Kesef waited, its wings tucked tightly against its sides, its nose drawn in as it crouched against the floor. Rain gusted in sheets across the open space, dashing against the Gryphon's legs. As the margravine crept onto the balcony her boots crunched against something solid; glancing down, she saw the surface pied with hailstones like rice pearls. She cursed, sliding on the ice; caught herself and inched forward again. In a few minutes she had reached the Gryphon.

The howling wind had risen to a shriek. She could not hear herself as she shouted the command, could not hear if the aircraft responded. But a moment later the Gryphon rose unsteadily on its jointed legs, the slender metal stairs descended, and she was climbing them, clinging to the narrow struts as the wind battered her. Then she was inside.

Gasping, she flung herself into the seat. The leather molded itself around her and she felt a prickling warmth as auxiliary enhancers sent a soft surge of endorphins and nutriments into her veins. She blinked, stared up to where the webs began to descend in a gray haze; shut her eyes as they touched her face and she could feel the strange patterns tracing themselves onto her cheeks, temples, the inside of her wrists.

OrsinaKesefNineTwelveCycloneSystemGradeOne­RescueAdvisoryOverriddenUnitRecalledLockgrid­FiveLevelTwoWaitingWaitingWaiting…

Âziz cried out. Across her mind's eye crimson lines formed an intricate crosshatch, a grid bisected with green and glowing blue spheres. She could hear the fluting voice of the thing called Kesef, the Gryphon that waited for her command; she could feel the ground shuddering beneath it. She clenched her mouth shut and tried to focus, concentrating until she brought up an image, the figure of an Aviator silhouetted against the domes of Araboth. Then she willed away the domes, tried to imagine what one of the frontier outposts might look like, ended up with the Aviator's silhouette and a hazy blue background.
Go there,
she thought, then said the words aloud in a croak.

“Where they are—the Aviators—find them—” There was a crackle of static electricity, a blinding light outside and then a crash. She could feel the Gryphon fighting her, trying to override her command as it sent warning messages blaring through her mind—

CycloneTsunamiHurricane­GaleSamielDangerDangerDanger

—but she repeated her command, again and again, each time the image growing clearer in her mind, until finally with a shudder she felt the aircraft move around her. Then it was as though the flesh had been sheared from her face: all around her she felt the raw wind, the rain like razors slicing against her skin; but of course that was the Gryphon and not her, and it was the Gryphon's voice keening like a brazen bell as it soared from the balcony, up and up into the whirling storm until she could feel nothing, not even the shafts of light spearing along its wings as the gale tossed it and the Gryphon fought to make its way inland, while the woman who had commanded it lay unconscious in its grasp, beset by evil dreams. She did not realize until later, when she woke, that she had unconsciously given the solitary figure of her voiceless command the stooped bearing and ruthless pale eyes of Margalis Tast'annin, the Aviator Imperator.

“They will all die,” Hobi said dully.

Beside him the nemosyne stood, silent. After a moment she nodded.

“It is a tsunami, a tidal wave. On the subcontinent they sometimes killed millions in a single night.”

Hobi shivered and drew away from her, until he brushed against the edge of the wall. They had found the ruins of a building, its top rounded and painted in flaking greens and yellows, the whole thing sunk like a culvert into the pebbly debris-strewn ground. The wind screamed down the opening and rain poured in, draining away down countless holes after it had soaked Hobi to the skin.

From here they could look off the eastern face of the tor, down onto the glassy surface of the Quincunx Domes. White foam churned at the edges of the city. The narrow sandy spit that had stood between Araboth and the open sea had long since been swallowed by engulfing waves. Flecks of black and gray scudded across the top of the receding water. With horror Hobi realized that these were people, the tiny figures of the revelers who had been released earlier when the Lahatiel Gate opened. He buried his face in his hands and turned away.

“I can't bear it,” he whispered. Nefertity could not have heard him above the wailing wind, but she leaned over and touched him gently.

“Perhaps you can sleep, we will be safe here—”

“Sleep?” he yelled, striking at her with one hand. “How can I sleep, my father is down there, Nasrani, everyone—”

The nemosyne regarded him with cool aquamarine eyes. “It was an evil place,” she said at last. “It has happened before, that the wind has swallowed an evil place—

“All flesh died that moved upon the earth: all in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was on the dry land, died.

“But God said, I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.”

Her voice chimed above the cry of the wind, and Hobi turned to her and spat, “That's another of your precious sacred stories? A broken promise?”

Nefertity tilted her head so that the rain struck sparks around her eyes. “A man wrote that,” she said. She pointed to the east. “Look, Hobi. If you can bring yourself to look—that is the fall of Araboth.”

He turned. Sky and ocean had become one vast unbroken plane of gray and green. In a froth of pounding waves the Quincunx Domes seemed to float, small and frail as bubbles of glass. A fouga, a tiny obloid that glowed bright blue through the silvered haze of rain, suddenly shot up from one bubble as though striving to free itself. An instant later it was gone. There was nothing else to indicate that anything had ever lived down there. The domes might have been the cast-off shell of some creature, a submarine eggsac washed onto a crumbling lee.

“There,” Nefertity murmured.

Midway between the shore and the horizon a swell black and viscous as oil detached itself from the rest of the ocean. Hobi strained to hear something, a rising shriek on the wind or perhaps a roar; but oddly it now seemed that the wind had died, and while the rain still ripped across the tor there was no other sound. Certainly nothing terrible enough to be the voice of that Wave. He shrank closer to the nemosyne, without thinking clutched at her as he watched it rise and grow larger and larger still, until it was so impossibly huge he cried out, thinking that it must tear away at the very foundation of the headland where they crouched.

But it did not: only gathered strength and power until now he
could
hear it, a noise like all the engines of Araboth screeching into life and he knew that he was hearing the voice of the Wave itself, the boundless throat of the sea shrieking havoc as it reared above the fragile domes, the ancient folly that was Araboth, and smashed it into oblivion.

He must have blacked out, because the next thing he knew he was skidding across the tor, broken glass and metal tearing through his clothes as Nefertity grabbed at him and he struck at her, shouting.

“Hobi, stop! There's nothing you can do, it's gone now, nothing—”

He ran to the edge of the plateau, where the rust-colored stream had swollen to a copper torrent plunging down the steep incline. It was like it had never been there at all. Far below, at the base of the tor, the ocean seethed in glass-green knots and coils. Of the domes of Araboth there was nothing, not a metal blade, not a fragment of shattered glass: nothing. Rain nearly blinded him and he wiped his eyes, squinting through the haze. Only a few minutes later, after Nefertity stood beside him steaming in the rain, did he see something, a long twisted bit of white that might have been part of one of the inner retaining walls, wash up on a narrow spar of beach below.