The realization brought him to a dead stop. Ahead of him the rasa splashed on, pausing now and then to peer off to the left, as though looking for something.
The sea. What if the thing was bringing him Outside? Hobi put out one hand to steady himself against the wall. It sank into the luminous muck. When he drew it back in disgust his fingers glowed slightly, a rotten corpselike blue. He would die down here. Or, worse, he would live, become like this creature a mad thing living in the cracks between Araboth and Outside, like the ones who did not return from Æstival Tide; like all the half-human things that hung about the tattered edges of Araboth.
“Once-born.”
The rasa’s voice rose urgently. Hobi turned to look behind him. In the near distance the tunnel’s mouth gaped, black and cold—he could hear the wind hooting down after him. He turned back to where the rasa waited beside an opening. Dread seeped into him like the black water oozing up through his clothes. There was nothing to do but follow it. Perhaps Nasrani would worry about him; perhaps after a few days they would mount a search down here:
But tomorrow was Æstival Tide. Nothing would be done then, or for several weeks thereafter while Araboth’s inhabitants recovered from the timoria. He could only follow the rasa and hope to escape, or hope somehow to make his way Outside by the time the Lahatiel Gate opened. He rubbed his arms against the chill and continued down the tunnel.
The rasa waited for him at the opening. It stared at Hobi with its sunken eyes, then splashed its face with some of the fetid water pooled at their feet. “Greet your Mother,” it said. Reluctantly Hobi bent and flicked a few drops onto his cheeks.
“Now,” the rasa announced, and faster than Hobi would have thought possible it slipped through the doorway and out of sight. He followed, stumbling over a few broken steps. This passage led up. It was damp and narrow and utterly dark, save for two endless smears of phosphorescence that ran along each wall. When Hobi extended his hand he found the streaks were just at arm level. He drew his hand back uneasily, wiping it on his torn shirt. He didn’t want to think about what hands had been there before his.
From somewhere ahead of him echoed the soft splashing sound of the rasa’s footsteps. Every now and then it paused and called back to him in low urgent tones. Hobi stumbled after it in silence. His knees ached from the cold and from bumping into the wall as the stairway twisted upward.
“Hurry now! Mother won’t wait—”
It seemed they neared their destination. The rasa fell back to walk beside him, crowding Hobi so that he turned sideways to keep from breathing in its suffocating reek. Its long dank hair flapped in the boy’s face as it slouched along, its sharp nails leaving vivid green tracks on the walls.
“Here,” it panted, and stopped beside a narrow doorway. The rasa drummed softly on it with its nails, and the door swung inward.
“We are here,” it announced, and went inside. Following it Hobi gasped.
It was the chamber where Nasrani had taken him before; but it rippled with a light so brilliant Hobi had to cover his eyes. When he peered through his fingers he saw no candles, no lumieres or electric lanterns. But blue and yellow and green light flashed from the cabinets that hid Moghrebi and the Anodyne Physician, Maximillian Ur, and all the rest. Slowly Hobi dropped his hands from his face, and stared.
Nefertity’s case was open. Inside it the Beautiful One glowed, a thousand colors coruscating up and down her arms and along her cheeks, radiating out in bands of cobalt and viridian, yellow and gamboge and emerald.
“Mother,” the rasa whispered, and stepped forward. Hobi did not move.
The room wasn’t empty. Even with their backs to him he knew what they were. Rasas, a dozen of them, their bodies nearly luminous in the spectral light. Some could have been no more than children when they were regenerated. One had the proud carriage of an Orsina, despite skin soft and gray as wet paper. Like the one that had brought him here they wore only rotted shreds of clothing. Their staring green-shot eyes were fixed upon the nemosyne.
“Mother,” the rasa murmured. A few feet from Nefertity’s case it slowly lowered itself to a sitting position. “Mother, I have come, and brought you a once-born boy.”
Hobi stared at Nefertity, then slowly walked through the figures seated around her. None of them looked at him; it seemed they did not notice him at all, save perhaps as an unaccustomed warmth passing through the room. Their eyes stared unblinking at the light pulsating from the nemosyne, their soft fingers tapping upon the floor some arcane rhythm that he did not recognize. The rasa who had led him here called out to him, “She speaks. Sometimes she wakes like this, and tells us things. They are stories of the Last Days, they are Mother stories.” Then it too fell silent.
Hobi stopped in front of Nefertity. Her incandescent sarcophagus made a loud humming sound. Not the sound of a machine at rest, but more like the sound of someone, a woman in fact, singing softly to herself. Behind him in the clammy darkness he heard other things: voices whispering to themselves, fingers tapping their obscure tattoos. Hobi shaded his eyes as he stepped forward. The light streaming from the nemosyne made his head throb. It was she who was making the humming sound: and he realized now, now that he was near enough to touch her, that she spoke, chanted almost, and it was in time to this ancient litany that the corpses drummed their fingers—
“Yet sharper pain, more savage even, struck her heart: she withdrew from the company of the gods, she went to the cities of men and their grasslands, disguising her beauty for a long time. And no one who saw her recognized her, no man, no deep-girdled woman, no one…”
“Nefertity,” whispered Hobi. He stepped closer, stretched out his hand to touch her face. The light that had nearly blinded him grew less harsh. He could see once more the outlines of her cheekbones, the bright lines drawn under her closed eyes as though with kohl, her lips moving as they formed each word and the words spilled from her like grain.
“… They asked her, where are you from, old woman, you who are from another age? Why have you bypassed our city? There are women here who would befriend you. There are mothers and daughters who would share with you their ways.
And the goddess replied, ‘Hello, good children of the feminine sex, hello, mothers and daughters of the suffering earth. I greet you, whoever you are.’ ”
“Mother,” whispered the first rasa where it knelt before her.
“Mother,” murmured the others.
“Nefertity,” breathed Hobi, all his fear devoured by anguished longing.
Mother stories, he thought; and an image came to his mind: his own mother leaning over him in his bed, her hand cool and smelling of opium sugar as she stroked his cheek and murmured a story to him, a mother story, of course; and if Hobi had only known he might have realized it was one of the same stories that other lonely woman had told to her nemosyne daughter centuries before. Mother stories: a trick to wake the sleeping princess: and gently, tentatively, as Nefertity’s lips moved and her voice crooned on, telling its sleepwalker’s tale, Hobi leaned forward and kissed her golden mouth.