“There is something you didn’t tell me,” she said angrily. Her face was bright pink and shining with sweat. She looked terrified. “This morphodite you chose for the sacrifice, what’s her name, Reed—”
“Reive,” Nike corrected her. She patted her cheeks with her handkerchief and looked about distractedly for her sister.
“Reive,” the Archbishop went on. “She’s innocent!” She inclined her head toward the group still leaning over the balustrade, calling excitedly to unseen people below as a hapless servant tried to hold a sheet of plastic over their heads. Shrieks and laughter as the balcony shuddered and debris hailed down from the ceiling. “The Quir says she told him she was innocent. Someone else says your sister acted in collusion with the Aviator Imperator to murder Shiyung, and falsely accused this mantic. To deliberately enact the rite of propitiation with such a sacrifice—”
She stopped, breathless, and stared out to sea. Nike stepped beside her, wiping rain from her nose and squinting as she tried once again to pick out the Redeemer’s small shadow amid all that gray and silver. Black clouds moved so quickly overhead that she could imagine the howling wind was the sound of their passing. She could barely make out a dark shape leaping dolphin-wise upon the horizon before it was swallowed by immense waves.
“Zalophus,” she said, turning to the precentor and shaking her head. The Archbishop stared at her as though she were mad. “The whale: a very archaic geneslave, its name is Zalophus. I can’t imagine how it escaped.”
“The entire city is collapsing!” exploded the precentor, ignoring the Archbishop’s disapproving gaze. “You’ve brought this upon us, you and your sisters—”
Nike made some vague ttt-ttt sounds and flapped her hands in the precentor’s face. “My sister is a fool,” she said with surprising vehemence, and poked the Archbishop with one wet finger. “Actually, they’re both fools, but at least Shiyung is a dead fool. Âziz is the one you want to talk to about all this, Your Eminence. Not only was that morphodite innocent, she was Shiyung and Nasrani’s child. My sister wanted her dead. If you can find a ’file crew you might question her about it. Also about the death of Sajur Panggang, who claimed that the domes are collapsing. Please excuse me.”
The Archbishop and the precentor fell back, dumbfounded, as Nike pushed her way past them. On the balustrade behind her triumphant cheers arose as the Quir’s aluminum shades were hoisted above the small crowd and the rain sluiced off in shining sheets.
“May Day, May Day,” Nike muttered to herself. It was something she had heard once in a cinema show about explosions on large ships. The floor shook and she steadied herself against a column, reached into a pocket and emptied a morpha tube into her mouth. She waited a moment and tapped an amphaze ampule to her throat for good measure, then closed her eyes and grimaced, waiting for the burst of clearheadedness to come. Her back molars tingled and her mouth went dry. For what seemed like a very long time there was a shrill buzzing in her ears and a popping sound. When she opened her eyes she saw that the column she had been leaning against had toppled. She looked over to see if Âziz was with the group on the balustrade and saw that the balustrade too was gone, sheared away as though it had been a bit of unwanted furze on a topiary sculpture.
“This is very bad,” Nike said thickly. The high-pitched buzzing turned out to be screams, an unrelenting series of shrieks and moans that seemed to come from everywhere, above and beneath and to every side of the margravine. She started to take a step past the fallen column, her legs moving with unnatural slowness, and almost immediately stopped. There were people pinned beneath the column, some of them still moving and at least one of them screaming so loudly that Nike’s hair stood on end. When she glanced down at her feet she saw that the pointed toes of her boots were splashed with blood and what at first looked like grass. Nike made a small unhappy noise and stumbled backward. Her siblings’ many complaints about her intemperance finally seemed to be not entirely unwarranted. She wished she had not taken so much morpha.
“Your Grace, Your Grace—”
She turned unsteadily, her eyes tearing. Smoke was billowing up from somewhere, not the sweet-scented smoke of Æstival incense but black oily clouds with a horrible chemical tang. She could scarcely make out the small plump figure of the Quir, one half of his pallid face covered in blood as though sloppily rouged.
“ Yes? ” she heard herself asking politely, but the Quir had grabbed her hand and was dragging her after him as though she had refused to acknowledge him. And indeed, when, coughing, she brought her hand to her mouth, she could feel her jaws tightly clenched, and could hear a droning humming noise that she realized, with embarrassment, that she herself was making.
“Your Grace, here, may be safer, you took a bad hit back there—”
She let her hand fall back to her side and saw that it was bright red; from the handkerchief dangling between her fingers dripped large spots of blood. She started to say something to the Quir, ask him what exactly it was the morphodite had said to him about her innocence. But then they were struggling down a long stairway, the Quir pushing bodies from their path, some limp but others lively enough to shout or howl as they tumbled from the steps. It was not until they reached the bottom that Nike could catch her breath and look around, and see that the Quir had brought her to the very mouth of the Lahatiel Gate itself.
“My sister,” she gasped, pulling away from the Quir’s surprisingly strong grasp and striving to peer through the haze of smoke and rain that clouded everything. “Âziz—”
It was not what she had meant to say, she had meant to thank him—she had some vague idea that his intent in bringing her here was to save her—but suddenly all she could think about was Âziz, and how if there was any way out of this hellish morass, Âziz was sure to know of it. But the Quir’s expression as he stared back at her was not precisely that of a person, even the leader of a young and disagreeable cult, who had gone to some trouble to save the margravine of the Holy City of the Americas.
“Your sister has fled,” said the Quir. For the first time Nike noticed that his large eyes, red-rimmed and slightly protuberant from smoking kef, were keen and, possessing of a certain malevolent intelligence. He brushed a tear of blood from one cheek, leaving a brownish smear. His voice rose as he strove to be heard above the shrieking wind. “As soon as I set eyes upon that child I saw Nasrani in her, strong as steel. If I had known sooner I would have taken her in myself. We have seen now where your carelessness has led. The Compassionate Redeemer is dead, and the Healing Wind is upon us.”
He gestured angrily. To Nike it seemed that he pointed where the Lahatiel Gate was flung open, one of its immense steel doors as carefully askew as a bedroom screen. The steps leading down to the beach were mobbed with people, screaming, fighting, trapped between the collapse of Araboth above and behind them and the oncoming tide before.
“The Wind,” Nike repeated in a childish voice. She lifted her head, as though to see the Healing Wind coiling in the air above her; but what she saw was far worse.
In the uppermost reaches of Araboth, where for time immemorial the domes had cast their bluish light—periwinkle, cobalt, violet, but always blue—there where they had always curved protectively above the twinkling city, a hole had rent the sky.
It was the sky. Steel-gray, slashed with a dull poisonous green, a jagged gash larger than the Gate itself gaped within the domes, a hole larger than the palace, larger than anything Nike could imagine—