He finished awkwardly. The hands that rested on the edge of the library table across from him were encased in black leather gloves. On one finger a heavy ring winked in the light, a gold ring set with a blue stone and circled by letters spelling out NASNA. Sajur imagined that one of those hands lay quite calmly: the one with the Academy ring—a peaceful hand, a tamed hand in its steel and glass and plasteen sheath; while the other twitched restively. In truth both hands were as ominously still as the Aviator Imperator himself.
“My memories—my memories are incomplete,” the rasa said slowly. “The morphodite at this evening’s dream inquisition somehow saw the truth of what I told her—it was not a dream at all, but a fragment of my earlier life. I would ask her how she knew this. I would see if she could help me— remember —other things.”
His voice ended in a hollow whistling breath. Sajur knew that Shiyung had gone to great pains to revive Tast’annin’s voice, the long hypnotic drawl that could charm a rector at the Academy as easily as it could command a phalanx of Gryphons in maneuvers over the Medaïn Desert. But the man’s voice was gone. The empty sound that boomed at him now was as cold and dull as the voice of a Gryphon itself. The voice of something meant to obey, twisted within this tortured husk of a commander.
“I’m sorry, Margalis,” Sajur said gently.
On the divan the rasa that had been Margalis Tast’annin raised his empty face. He had been the Ascendants’ greatest soldier, the most brilliant student ever to graduate from the NASNA Academy. A tall, proud man, his shoulders stooped a little from having forever to look down upon those who answered to him. Sajur remembered him as a youth, reckless and with that sharp tongue ready to lash out at the slow, the unwitting, the men and women doomed by their birth on the wrong level in Araboth, the wrong creche in the desolate Outlands, to a lifetime of service to the Ascendants. Tast’annin had been a bold if frightening figure even then, with his gold-straw hair gone early to gray and his colorless eyes that reflected whatever the sky showed them—the sky that only the Aviators saw now, and the mongrel slaves bred to serve them.
That power to command remained in the hooded figure that sat and stared at Sajur Panggang. The metal mask hid what Shiyung had been unable to salvage from the decomposing corpse. Though there were the eyes, of course, she had managed to save the eyes. A whim of the youngest margravine who, while not truly soft-hearted, liked to be thought so. And perhaps she had believed it would somehow make him seem more human.
This final conversion had been her idea. Tast’annin had been rehabilitated before, of course, he was too valuable a commander to have blinded or lamed in battle. But each regeneration had left his mind frailer and more prone to madness—Sajur thought of a particular kind of dog that Shiyung had bred for several years, thirty generations compressed and refined in the nucleovats, until the elegant structure and slender muzzles she so loved had collapsed into whimpering heaps of bones slung in a sack of flesh, drooling and twitching at their mistress’s ankles.
She was determined that no such thing would happen to Tast’annin. After the Archipelago Conflict there had been months of delicate surgery, that business with his ears for instance; but still there had been something they could never quite repair. A certain mental brittleness, a tendency to see patterns where there were none. As though he always heard a strange high-pitched sound the rest of them were deaf to, a sound that would gradually drive one quite insane.
This time he would not fail them. Shiyung had ordered the final conversion after the janissaries found his corpse in the abandoned capital. His activities there had been a sort of treason, of course. He had been betrayed by the Capital’s Governors, betrayed and then handed over to the half-human aardmen who had tortured him, unmanned him, but then, in a characteristic fit of pity, freed him. Once on his own again he had made his way to the ruins of one of the Capital’s great landmarks, an ancient and malign Cathedral. There he had planned to conquer the Capital for himself, seizing control of its ancient armories and enslaving its people.
But he had failed. Within hours of his defeat, Ascendant janissaries had captured the City and borne Tast’annin’s body back to Araboth, where his treason was revealed to the Orsinate.
A lesser man than Tast’annin would have remained dead, his body thrown before the Lahatiel Gate to be torn apart by the mob. But the Orsinate understood that treason itself was not necessarily a bad thing. It bespoke a certain amount of ambition, and vision, and the Orsinate recognized that vision at least was often in short supply among their staff. And then there was the matter of Tast’annin’s relations with Shiyung. Many years ago, of course, but even Âziz acceded that sentiment was not without its place in their (admittedly full) lives.
So Margalis Tast’annin was brought back to Araboth. Rather, his body was brought back; the process of retrieving Tast’annin was a longer one. This time there would be no chance of him succumbing to anything so rustic as a bullet or an aardman’s jaws. There would be no question of the frailty of the flesh, because there would be no flesh.
Very little, at least. The rasa’s degenerated form was hidden now in its metal sheath. They left him a hand—Nike’s idea, she was an admirer of the cinematic arts and had noticed this was a popular conceit in ancient films—and they left him his eyes, because Shiyung insisted. His mind of course remained his own, although the biotechs improved his aggression responses and enhanced his already acute intuitive skills. Only his memories were imperfect. Certain things he could not recall with any certainty as being dreams or actual events. He spoke, for instance, of the existence of dark gods as though such things were commonplace. But the Orsinate felt this was a trifling weakness in a military commander.
They might have reproduced his body, or given him another, younger one, instead of the metal shell that now sat watching the Architect Imperator drink rather more Amity than he should. But it had not been Shiyung’s idea to end the affair with Tast’annin. And with Shiyung, sentiment was not combined with a forgiving nature.
The Aviator Imperator lifted his head. The gassy blue lanterns sparked the mask’s smooth crimson surface with violet and ultramarine. “Never mind,” he replied to Sajur. “Perhaps it is not important.”
Sajur looked relieved. The Amity made it easier to imagine this was the old Tast’annin in the room with him, and not a corpse enhanced with liquid biocircuitry. “Would you like to watch some ’files? I’ve got last year’s graduation from the Academy, Salih Mukheyat gave the address. Or some of Nike’s collection. Let’s see—”
He jumped up and crossed to where a stack of ’files leaned against one of the Architect’s secondary monitors. “Let’s see. ‘The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum,’ that’s quite nice. Or ‘The Broken Will,’ Nike said that’s considered George Owlden’s masterpiece.” He rummaged through the ’files, holding each to his ear so it could whisper its title. “Hmm, ‘Khibel ab Mejnun,’ Khibel the Fool—”
“Thank you, Sajur. Not tonight.” The rasa stood, leather clothing skreeking against his metal limbs. “I will let you sleep.”
Sajur’s voice quavered a little, drunkenly. “Are you quite sure?”
Tast’annin shook his head. “Yes, Sajur. It is late, I’ll leave you with your ’files and—”
He inclined his head toward the crystal decanter winking in the dim light. “Another time, perhaps, we’ll watch ‘Khibel the Fool.’ ”
Sajur walked with him to the door. “I’m sorry Hobi wasn’t here to see you. Khum said he went out with—a guest—this afternoon. I know he wanted to offer his congratulations….”