In the center of the room Reive seemed to sway a little. With one finger she touched her temple, then sneezed and looked around, blinking. Âziz gazed at her through slitted eyes and continued.
“And then I was standing at a window in the gondola. In front of us the domes seemed to be cracking. For a minute I thought they were shattering, but then I realized it was just the skygates opening. The fouga started up through them. I was afraid for a moment, because I had never been Outside—I never have been Outside—but then I was excited, to think of what I’d see there—”
Ceryl choked. Her whole body felt as though it had been grasped by giant pincers. She hunched forward, gripping her knees, her face absolutely white.
Rudyard Planck tilted his head. “Are you all right?” he whispered. “You look sick—come, I’ll help you outside—”
“No,” said Ceryl. Dimly she could hear the margravine, going on and on, a voice she knew she would never stop hearing, ever—
“Ceryl?”
—because all of this, now, was like a dream—
“ Ceryl? ”
—and she had to see how it came out.
“Oh, my god,” whispered Tatsun Erizer. “The margravine’s gone mad…”
From the expressions of others in the circle, she was not the only one who thought so; but Ceryl could only hear Âziz—
“… the fouga going higher and higher. And when I looked down, I saw this—this crack in the ground beneath the domes—and I knew in a moment I would see something, something—”
A rush of images in Ceryl’s mind: the bluish lights of the vivarium; the shadows of the trees on the boulevard; her lover Giton’s face beside hers in bed and then Reive in that same bed, Reive there now with her green eyes glowing…
“… and I knew if I looked out the window I’d see—”
Âziz hesitated. The room was deathly silent as the margravine reached for another handful of white powder. Nike stirred, looking around in vain for her serving girl, who had crept to the door. Ceryl tried to count the number of steps it would take to join her. Rudyard Planck pointed a thumb at Reive and whispered, “Waxwing, I think maybe your friend is getting a little too—”
“I knew ,” Âziz repeated more loudly, her face flushed, “if I looked out the window, I would see—”
“ The Green Country ,” Reive announced in a voice shrill as a kite’s.
All around her was a sudden sharp intake of breath, as though the Four Hundredth Room had become a wheezing bellows.
“The what? ”
Âziz’s hand had stopped in midair above the raku bowl. White powder sifted from her fingers as she stared at Reive.
“The what?” Âziz said again.
Oh, Reive, no, thought Ceryl.
“Oh, dear,” said the dwarf.
Ceryl gazed at the gynander. Dimly she could see dark-clad figures rushing from hidden doorways of the Four Hundredth Room, hear voices and someone beside her frantically repeating her own name. A woman was shouting. She remembered a plain of endless verdure, and that sense of exhilaration, of doors opening everywhere…
“The Green Country,” repeated Reive.
She turned her pinched face to gaze one final moment at Ceryl, a look of love and triumph and utter hopelessness. From across the room the rasa stared at her, his gloved hands clenching and unclenching. Âziz was screaming something to the dark figures swarming like fire ants around the gynander’s slender form, their prods and whips singing. And then Reive was gone, a prisoner of the Reception Committee.
Chapter 5
THE RASA REPENTS
“I MUST SEE HER.” SAJUR Panggang nodded wearily. In the library across from him sat Margalis Tast’annin, a friend very long ago when they were both young and students at the NASNA Academy. Their friendship had long since ended, weakened by the wearying decades of Sajur’s rise in Araboth and Margalis’s decline into obsession and then madness as he became the most powerful military commander on the continent. Sajur had always assumed Margalis would die a violent and terrible death. Now it seemed that even death was not enough to destroy him, at least not as long as Shiyung Orsina was alive. The Architect Imperator leaned back in his favorite chair, an oaken Morris chair grown black and hard as ebony with the centuries, and tapped his chin with one long finger.
He had left the Four Hundredth Room immediately after the gynander’s revelation. Not a prudent move on his part; but he had been overcome by his own reaction to Âziz’s dream. That part about the crack in the Undercity—at once he felt elation and a sort of greed. To think of the margravine being foolish enough to admit to such a dream! It was too perfect. In Araboth’s enclosed world, such fears worked like a virus, seeping into the populace and spreading until others would be felled by that same nightmare of the Undercity crumbling and the dome caving inward like a bad fruit.
There were already fearful rumors everywhere. Every level of the city had felt the tremors that now shook Araboth four or five times a day. Early this morning there had been reports of a conflagration on Archangels, with hundreds of rasas immolated in moments as one of the refineries blew. The resulting shock waves had been felt as high as Thrones Level, and here on Cherubim a greasy pall hung in the air, a smell like rancid oil and rotting cloth.
And now news of Âziz’s dream would spread throughout the city. The Architect Imperator smiled at the thought. A margravine having an apocalyptic dream on the very eve of the Feast of Fear! If only his sisters hadn’t exiled Nasrani. He was the only one who had anything like a sense of diplomacy, and of course his youth had been spent in training as an Architect. But Nasrani was lost to his arcane longings as meanwhile the city was slowly being teased open, rivet by rivet, fiber by fiber, the joists and beams and hidden underpinnings of Angels painstakingly prised apart like the corpse of an aardman within the Chambers of Mercy. And all the while the margravines fretted over half-baked plots and imaginary threats by bastard pretenders to the Orsinate dynasty.
None of them would ever know the truth, because no one but Sajur communicated with the Architects, and not even Sajur ever ventured to the Undercity. He glanced up at the rasa sitting across from him and shook his head very slightly.
“I understand, Margalis. Really I do. But, well, you must see how it is right now. Âziz is in a state over this, I know it seems petty to you but they get worked up over these things. She takes her dreams very seriously—”
The rasa’s harsh voice cut him off. “Oh, but so do I, Sajur. So do I. That is why I would like to see the hermaphrodite.”
Sajur reached for his glass. He stared into the emerald liquid, nodding as though he were trying to think of a way to arrange such a meeting; but in truth it could not be done. For the sake of their dead friendship he wished he could help Margalis; wished he could do something as simple as offer him some of this very fine Amity, or show him the new wind-chamber he had installed in Angelika’s old dressing room. But these things were lost on a rasa. Sajur sipped his Amity and sighed.
“I wish I could. But it would do no good for me to intercede for you—Hell’s teeth, Margalis, you’re their chief of staff now! You know what it’s like. They listen to no one except each other. Once the Reception Committee’s taken someone, well it’s all over. And Âziz has made up her mind about this. Sedition, treason, the old sad song. And, well, it’s just a morphodite after all, not worth dirtying your hands—”