He dressed, choosing his clothes with care. A white shirt of heavy sueded silk that made his chestnut hair look darker, his fair skin even more pale. Moleskin trousers of a color so deep it could not (and was not) termed evergreen or viridian, even though there were forbidden hints of those shades in its nap. Hobi of course knew that they were green trousers, as did the furtive moujik tailor who had designed them for him for a timoring several months ago. He had planned to wear them when he joined his father and the margravines on the viewing platform for the opening of the Lahatiel Gate. Instead he would wear them for this final secret journey.
Because he was leaving; because there was really no reason for him to stay. His father was mad and would surely soon be dead, his mother was dead, indeed it seemed quite evident that soon everyone he knew, from that moujik tailor to the margravine Âziz, would be dead. If he could somehow find Nasrani, he would warn him and enlist him in his endeavor. But otherwise he had his mind made up:
He would go back to the Undercity, find the nemosyne, and if he could not wake her, he would carry her with him, until they found some way to escape the coming holocaust.
Some way to get Outside.
It felt strange to be taking the gravator alone. Even though he had been there once before, only days earlier, the trip to the Undercity had grown fixed in Hobi’s mind, as though it were a beloved memory from his childhood. The little fountain with its statue of the timorata bubbling spearmint water; the heavy crimson drapes; the grinding of its gears as the chamber dropped level after level through Araboth’s glowing spectrum—periwinkle, scarlet, violet, every possible shade of purple deepening to the eternal night of the Undercity—all these things had in the last few days knit themselves around the boy’s heart, so that now the touch of those drapes against his cheek, the slant of wine-colored light as they passed through Principalities—all had become entwined with the calm and frigid face of Nasrani’s sleeping nemosyne. The amorphous terrors that had paralyzed him were gone, now that he had left Cherubim.
The trip to the Undercity could have lasted forever but in fact was over in a very few minutes. He jumped when the gravator announced its arrival on Angels. The doors fanned open, and a rush of fetid air greeted him as he approached them. He waited for a long minute, until the gravator repeated its announcement, somewhat peevishly, and the doors started to creak shut once more. Before they could close on him he jumped outside.
Immediately darkness engulfed him like a freezing wind. Hobi clapped his hands to his pockets and cursed: he had forgotten a lumiere. He started to sprint back into the gravator, but groaning like an old server it already had begun its slow ascent. He swore again, desperately; then heard from somewhere nearby a rustling sound, too loud to be something stirred by one of the ventricles— were there vents down here? When he held his breath the noise stopped. Heart pounding he waited to hear it again. But now there was only silence.
He thought he remembered which way to go. To the right; and yes, he found a wall there, damp and foul-smelling. His feet sank into some soft cold stuff as he walked on, one hand always on the wall. He tripped over chunks of concrete and once or twice splashed through shallow puddles. Always he kept one hand on the wall—that way, he thought, he could find his way back.
Once he stumbled. His foot hung in the empty air for what seemed like minutes, as he cried out, flailing, certain that he had fallen into the abyss that was shattering the Undercity like a porcelain cup. But it was nothing, just a gap in the walkway. He waited a few minutes, panting, and went on.
After a while it began to seem that it was not so dark here as he had first thought. At first he thought his eyes played tricks on him, making it seem as though there was a dimly lit doorway here, a glowing heap of embers there. But soon he discovered that there really was light, of a sort. A few feet in front of him something glowed like the remains of a fire nearly dead. He stopped to look at it more closely, and then in a spurt of bravery decided to walk over and investigate. When he removed his hand from the wall he had a horrible feeling, a vertiginous sense that he was going to pitch into some bottomless void: The impulse to fall back against the wall was nearly irresistible, but he bit his lip and stepped forward.
It was not the ash-heap he had expected, but a pile of stones, or broken concrete. They glowed a faint and ruinous green, not a solid color but pocked with different shades, here nearly yellow, there with a bluish sheen. He thought of the corpse-candles that were used in the rites of the Chambers of Mercy, tapers made from the organs of rasas destroyed illegally for such purposes. Hobi bit his lip, then touched one of the stones. His hand came away wet, and it too glowed. There was a foul odor of putrescence. He recalled the stories he had heard of rasas down here, and shuddered; but surely not even rasas would venture to the Undercity.
He wiped his hand on his trousers, leaving a long streak that faded into the darkness after a few minutes. He looked around in a futile effort to get his bearings and for the first time noticed that there were other scattered heaps glowing in the distance.
“Damn,” he whispered. He glanced down at the pile at his feet. It struck him suddenly that it might not be the artless heap he had first supposed. He nudged it with his foot. It didn’t budge. When he looked up again it seemed that those other dim pyramids might be beacons of a sort, or markers; but he could discern no order among them, only scattered fragments of light, dull green or blue like the veins of an odorous cheese. It seemed that his eyes finally were adjusting to the darkness. He could perceive immense shadows that must be buildings, and smaller shapes that were the ruins of skyscrapers or maybe autovehicles. Dark as it was, some faint, almost imperceptible light trickled down from the levels above. His eyes aching, he turned and stumbled off once more.
As he picked his way back to the wall Hobi tried to imagine what would use such primitive means of illumination or navigation. He had grown up hearing stories about naughty children and recalcitrant servants who fell or were pushed from their warm havens on Cherubim, and tumbled to Araboth’s primeval footing so far below. In the stories the children did not die, as they surely would if they were to actually slip from behind the protective barricades that ran along the outermost perimeters of each level. In the stories the children eventually found themselves in the Undercity, and it had always seemed to Hobi that it would be infinitely preferable to die. Mutated monsters were supposed to live there, creatures carelessly disposed of by the bioresearchers or dilettantes like Shiyung Orsina. Aardmen with too many eyes; hydrapithecenes that somehow flourished out of water; morphodites so hideous that even the jaded appetites of the Orsinate and their cohort had no use for them. All of these things (and betulamiæ whose treelike trunks had sprouted feet, and argalæ that snapped and clawed at their patrons, and things that went unnamed because gazing at them you were struck speechless) ended down on Angels, there to breed in the unkempt earth and ruined skyscrapers and abandoned refineries. Hobi had never questioned the veracity of such tales. Aristocrat’s children did fall sometimes, which was a shame because there were always too few of them, and servants and other hapless persons did get pushed, more often than you’d think. It had just always seemed so impossibly far away. The Undercity might as well have been Outside.