The Architect Imperator turned to regard the moujik with bemused hauteur. “I know quite well the status of the Redeemer’s slumber,” he said, his voice mild. “I wish merely to inspect it, and make certain that the temperature of its chamber is not dropping too quickly. You have noticed some disturbances in the last few days?” This last with a slightly raised eyebrow.
“Why, yes, as a matter of fact, we were speaking of it yesterday—”
Sajur Panggang nodded, smiling that absently ironic smile, and walked on. “You might check the ’files,” he called back gently; “I believe there is unfortunate news regarding one of the margravines—”
There was no human guard at the door leading to the cage of the Compassionate Redeemer. Sentries from the lower levels had proved unreliable. They would succumb to morbid curiosity, their subsequent terror rendering them incapable of carrying out their duties. More often they simply refused to go near it. The ranks of Seraphim and Cherubim had slightly more fortitude in confronting the Redeemer, steeled by their long indulgences in timoring and the other rarefied abominations of the upper classes. But even they usually fell prey to an unanticipated sickening when, upon the occasion of the Great Fear or some reckless and spirited party-visit to the Redeemer’s pen, they peered through the tiny viewing-glass and glimpsed the monster in its suspended state.
No such qualms beset the Architect Imperator. He had grown inured to such horrors, as he had grown insensible of the reek of Principalities’ human smelting chambers and abattoirs. Now he simply peered into an opticon, permitting the Redeemer’s robotic sentry to scan his retinafile and pronounce his name with chilly efficiency. An instant later the gate clanged open and Sajur Panggang slipped inside, dabbing delicately at his forehead with a handkerchief.
A narrow hallway, dimly lit, led a few yards to where a single steel-and-glass chair stood before a small window. The chair creaked as Sajur settled into it, the cracked leather seat emitting a smell of dust and roses. Even from here he could feel the oppressive heat of the Redeemer’s cage. The glass window in front of him was so thick that he had to press his face against it to see anything, and even then it was with some difficulty that he made out the figure below. This was no failure of design on the part of the Architects. It was better for most visitors to doubt that they had had a clear glimpse of the cage’s inhabitant; better that they fall back, choking, when at Æstival Tide they saw the blind colossus lumber from its cell onto the summer sands.
Sajur had no such reticence about viewing the Compassionate Redeemer. Orsina blood ran in his veins, no matter how diffuse, and for centuries the Redeemer had been the Orsinate’s enfant gâté, their demonic familiar, the terrible rector presiding over the hecatombs every ten years, and in between times awakened every year or so and fed during public sacrifices. Sajur gazed upon it now with a sort of hunger, a yearning fired by a fraternal sympathy. Were they both not the Orsinate’s prisoners, toys kept hidden away until the perfect moment arrived, when their exquisite chains might be tweaked by their captors? This was what had brought him here, here at the end of all things: the desire to look for the last time upon another monster, and feel something like sympathy. He sighed, a sound of pure regret.
As if sensing him the Redeemer stirred. Its blind head snaked upward and twisted back and forth, trying to pinpoint him, then sank back to the stone floor. Sajur drew back, his heart racing. He had not thought it would be this far into its cycle, already roused from aestivation by the temperature dropping within its cell. In a few hours an inch of ice would have formed on the thick glass window; the Redeemer would be fully awake and making its obscene ululating cry. Gazing down upon the creature’s vast bulk the Architect Imperator allowed himself the luxury of a small grimace. It was truly an exquisite and hideous thing; as though by serving as the Orsinate’s lictor it had become the physical embodiment of all their transgressions. Body of an extinct saurian, an alioramus, gorgeously scaled in silvery-gold and green, its deceptively slender legs with their curving dewclaws powerful enough to sprint across the scar and disembowel a man before he had a chance to turn away. Its long graceful neck ended in the head of an olm, broad and flat and eyeless, the color of cream stirred with a petal of gentian, and feathered with an olm’s vestigial gills. Its yawning mouth was nearly perfectly circular, twice the height and breadth of a man. A lamprey’s mouth, ribboned with rose-pink flesh without and within—long venom-tipped tendrils that whipped at its prey and stunned it, and then twitched the stupefied unfortunates into its maw. Circular rows of triangular teeth lined the inside of its mouth, layer upon layer like a manticore’s, leading deep into its throat where hollow filaments fastened upon the body and sucked the nutriments from it. The Redeemer had no stomach proper. Digestion took place within those individual tubules and the drained bodies were excreted within a few minutes, slack and bloodless, bones crackled to bits. As Sajur Panggang stared, the fleshy tendrils dangling from the creature’s mouth quivered, lifted into the air like so many blind worms and writhed toward the wall where he sat. At the sight his nose prickled and he pulled back from the glass; too late he realized he should have worn a protective mask. An overpowering scent of myrrh and roses filled the tiny room, so warm and sweet it clouded the senses, made one only want to crawl toward whatever it was emitted that smell and drown luxuriously as the odor filled one’s nostrils.
Coughing, Sajur covered his mouth and stumbled from his chair. The Redeemer seemed to follow him, its head swaying as rose-pink tendrils weaved in front of him, tapped tentatively at the glass, and left carmine smears a few inches from where his head had been. The Architect Imperator lurched down the hallway and out into the shadow of the Lahatiel Gate, gasping as he slammed the door shut and not even pausing for the human sentry who ran up to him, white-faced and gibbering something about his health. He stumbled until he reached the Imperators’ gravator and punched in the grid code for the palace, and then collapsed.
“Orsina.”
The voice tore through his room as Nasrani Orsina cracked the door open. At first he had ignored the sentry’s announcement; then lay in bed trying to ignore the voice calling his name—softly at first, then louder and still louder, until Nasrani covered his ears and knelt on his bed, praying for it to stop.
But it did not stop. He finally crept from his room, more frightened now of what might happen if he did not answer it.
“Nasrani,” the voice cried. “I must see her.”
In the doorway in front of him stood the rasa. There was no breeze, of course, but still his black robe stirred so that Nasrani could see the outlines of his legs beneath the flowing silk. Legs far too slender to support that tall frame; too slender and too sharp—the edge of one metal joint had slashed the cloth.
“Margalis.” Nasrani tried to keep his voice steady, affecting an air of cheerful surprise. “It’s late. Or early,” he added, and rubbed his forehead.
Outside the window of his chamber on Coventry (the exiles’ wing, an adjunct to the main palace presently occupied only by Nasrani and the former ambassador from Antarctica, who spent her days snorting morpha and her evenings weeping over polyfiles of blue ice) the nuclear CLOCK read thirteen-five, too early by several hours for upper-level visitors. Nasrani coughed delicately. “Can we talk about this over kehveh a little later?”
“No.”
Tast’annin pushed aside Nasrani as he strode into the room, hard enough to send the exile careening against the wall. “You had her before I left. You have her now. If you don’t take me to her I will kill you.”