Aestival Tide Read Free Page B

perpetual dusk of the upper levels. She smelled the warm mist heavy with the scent of the sea Outside. Despite the thousands of filters humming and doing their best to dispel it, the smell and damp of the sea still got in. Lately it seemed inescapable. Those members of the pleasure cabinet who were more superstitious than Ceryl shook their heads and whispered about bad omens—strands of kelp found floating in filtration chambers, the odd bit of mussel shell clogging a drain. Certainly Ceryl had noticed the smell more lately, but she attributed that to the fact that Æstival Tide was less than a week away.
    Now it was that smell that made her feel better. She breathed deeply, eyes closed. A vague impression of warmth and green flooded her, a memory of the sound of birds. She had seen the ocean, of course, ten years earlier at the last Æstival Tide, when they finally opened the Lahatiel Gate. The sight of that restless sea had terrified her, the closest she ever came to the holy terror of timoring. Ever since then she had wondered whether you would always feel like that, if you lived near it. Really lived near it—on real sand and smelling real air and tasting brackish water—and not within this unimaginably vast and intricate labyrinth of a city, dying beneath its domes between the blasted prairie and the threatening sea. Maybe, if she lived by the sea, she would not be plagued by nightmares and forced to spend much of her monthly salary on pantomancers, those quack dream-merchants.
    Her cheeks grew cool with mist and she sighed, opening her eyes. The rickshaw had stopped at the outermost rim of the Thrones Level Grid. The avenue here was in blessedly good repair, the surface beneath her feet smooth and cool. Only, behind one of the rickshaw’s wheels, she noticed a crack in the pavement, like a thread of water running down the avenue.
    â€œThat’s odd,” she said aloud. The rickshaw driver cocked his head at her and shrugged.
    â€œSomething new,” he said, spitting a crimson mouthful of betel juice onto the ground. “Cracks. I had to repair a wheel bearing twice in three days.”
    â€œCracks,” Ceryl repeated softly, and stared down at the ground.
    Behind her were the broken spires and crooked facades of Thrones’ residential neighborhoods. Like everything else on the upper levels of Araboth, these apartments were prefabricated by the Architects. Over the last few centuries the metal and plasteel structures had cracked and buckled under the weight of the levels above, until all of Thrones seemed to be caving in upon itself, albeit in a subdued, almost genteel manner. Although of course living quarters here were a vast improvement over the dayglo ghettos of Virtues, where the hermaphrodites lived, or the grim cubicles that housed the ’filers and media crews on Powers. At least on Thrones the roads had always been in good repair.
    Ceryl sighed and rubbed her nose. A few yards in front of her, a shimmering heat fence crackled and sparked as moisture filtered down from the Quincunx Domes. Beyond the fence was nothing, a dizzying plunge to the next level, Dominations, and thence to Virtues, and Powers, and so on down to the lowest level of the crazily layered ziggurat that was Araboth. If one could see the city from above (but of course you could not, unless you were an Aviator), it would resemble a huge and living pagoda, its vaulted domes rearing above the nine levels like the chitinous shell of some monstrous arthropod. And Outside, the sea: smashing against the domes during the months-long storm season, whispering through the dreams of the Imperators’ children as they slept in their gilded beds on Cherubim.
    It was only the Architects that protected them from the horrors of the sea and the world Outside. There, an earth seeded by centuries of radiation and viral rains had given birth to heteroclites and demons. Only the tireless Architects protected them from that.