From where she reclined against a stack of pillows, Shiyung stared at Tast’annin, her needle-thin eyebrows raised above guileless eyes. “I had forgotten about that project,” she said. “Whatever happened to those people?”
“They are all dead,” the rasa replied. Reive huddled against the wall, shivering. How could the margravine stand it, listening to it— him —talk like this? The sound of his voice was enough to drive Reive mad; and the way he looked at Shiyung… Reive crossed her hands across her chest and prayed the rasa would forget about her, forget she had ever come here.
The rasa crossed the room to stand above Shiyung. With one gloved hand he reached to caress her hair, letting it slide between his fingers in a long black stream. “Or most of them are, at any rate. A few escaped; at least one that I know of. It’s ironic, isn’t it? That little diversion of yours caused so much misery and destruction; and yet you don’t even remember it…”
Shiyung closed her eyes, arching her neck against the rasa’s hand. “I remember it now,” she said, her voice thick with a dreamy petulance. “I got the idea from the dream inquisitions, it all seemed to tie in somehow….”
The rasa stared at her with his bloodless gaze. “It does tie in,” he agreed. Shiyung’s hair gleamed within the fingers of his leather glove, jet against ebony. “I like it when things connect like that: I have a rather Jesuitical predilection for order. The Academy does that to one,” he added.
Shiyung gave a small sharp gasp. Not, as Reive first thought, because of what he had said, but because the rasa’s hand had moved slowly, almost lovingly, from her hair to her neck. His fingers lay across her throat, dull black against her moon-white skin.
“Margalis,” Shiyung choked. At first Reive thought she was teasing, but then she saw that one of the rasa’s hands had tightened around her throat; the other was pulling her up by her hair, until she staggered to her feet.
“Mar-ga-lis —” she said again, thickly, swallowing the name so that Reive could barely hear her.
“Wait—” the gynander said hoarsely, clutching her hands in her lap. “No—we—please, no —”
The rasa stood beside Shiyung now, like a shadowy figure manipulating a life-size puppet. With his gloved hand he tugged her head back, her hair flowing through his fingers like dark water. His other hand clenched her throat until a rivulet of blood sprang from between two metal fingers, sending a fine red spray upon his robes. The margravine’s eyes bulged, her mouth twisted as she stared at Reive, hands slapping frantically at the air. Reive fell back against the floor, gasping, and still it went on, the rasa tightening his grip upon Shiyung’s throat as he tugged slowly and steadily at her scalp.
And then, with a sound like shears cutting through very heavy cloth, he yanked sharply at her head. Reive shrieked and covered her mouth. The rasa let go of that cascade of ebony hair, pushed the head forward until it lolled crookedly upon one shoulder so that she stared dully at the gynander. The emerald irises were swallowed by watery red. A fine line of spit ran from the corner of her mouth to her chin, joined the thin stream of blood that trickled from between dark bruises upon her throat. Gently the rasa shook her by the shoulders; a sudden gout of blood poured from her mouth to splash his boots.
“There,” said the rasa. He pulled the corpse heavily across the room and propped it against some pillows. He moved Shiyung’s hands to her breast, then crouched to spread her hair in a jet fan across her shoulders. “You could almost imagine she is a real woman.”
The gynander clutched her stomach, Shiyung’s name catching in her throat. Shiyung’s caracal crossed the room, nosed at the corpse and growled plaintively. It grew unbearably hot. Sweat pooled beneath Reive’s breasts and trickled onto her stomach. There was a faint sound, like a far-off explosion. The tapestries on the wall shivered as though a figure moved behind them.
The rasa stood, his limbs creaking, and let one hand linger upon Shiyung’s cheek. Finally he said, “I must go now.”
Reive choked back a scream. “ Go? But where will you take us, what—”
“You must stay here.” As he stared down at her Reive saw her own face reflected in that horrible blank mask. “If you try to flee they will only find you that much sooner. Here you might have time to get something to eat.”
Reive’s teeth chattered so that she could barely speak. At her feet the caracal licked Shiyung’s eyes. “B-but if we stay they will blame us, they will think we killed her—”
The rasa shook his head. “You must admit, it does seem rather strange—your apocalyptic reading of Âziz’s dream and then your escape from the Reception Area, and whatever are you doing here in Shiyung’s chambers?”
Reive began to weep, as the rasa went on, “But they would not blame me, even if I stayed. Because, you see, a rasa has no volition of its own: no will to love, or hope, or seek vengeance. It would be impossible for me to kill the margravine, or anyone else.”
“But then how…?”
The Aviator Imperator gazed down at the shivering gynander, the corpse with its long black hair spilling onto the pillows. He raised one hand to his face, and by a trick of the light glancing from his sleek mask it seemed that he had a mouth, and that mouth smiled.
“But how could I kill her, when by my own admission such a thing is impossible?” He stepped over Shiyung’s body to the door and paused there, his blue eyes huge and brilliant. “Perhaps, after death, we are controlled by a will even stronger than our own.”
For a long moment his gaze lingered upon her.
“Dreams are dangerous things, Reive Orsina,” he said, and left her alone with the corpse of the margravine Shiyung.
Chapter 6
THE BEAUTIFUL ONE IS HERE
IN THE DARKNESS SHE sleeps. The darkness moves about her, touches her steel breasts, the chromium arc of her mouth, the downcurved lapis petals that are her eyelids. There is a secret to waking her, a little joke really, if only the darkness knew.
The woman had named her Nefertity, The Beautiful One Is Here; but the name could also be read as Great Fortune Comes, or again as I Am The Million Years, or even as The Beautiful Ones Are Here. She had not yet known great fortune, nor had she lasted a million years, at least not this shell of metal and plastic and shining magnetized wire. Had she remained outside as her siblings had, those other gilded husks wherein the dreams and memories of the Last Days had been encoded, she would have been lost like they were, or melted into streams of hissing metal and mercurial thought, the glories and songs and warnings of the fin de millénaire so much poisonous gas choking the fiery air.
But she was the Beautiful One. She was beloved: she had been saved. The woman had kept her in a stone-and-steel bunker with her, alone, while outside the years spun by in a silent fury and inside the woman’s hair grew white. The woman’s name was forgotten now; but once other women, a million women, five million, had known her name and sang it and tapped it out upon their monitors, upon their breasts, upon the sleeping faces of their daughters.