Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

I return upstairs to finish my dinner without appetite. My words will worm their way into Glirastes’s brain. When I am finished with the meal, Exeter comes to the table. He looks at the bottle I brought up. “I trust your choice in wine was satisfactory?”

“It’s a stubborn vintage.”

“I have faith in it, dominus. And in your discerning taste. Perhaps a nightcap, of the fortifying variety?”

* * *

—

I wake in the night to hear the expected sound of bare feet in the hallway. There’s a peculiar wheezing sound from my arm where they injected me with anti-rads. My door opens and Glirastes stands in the doorway illuminated by the shadowy light of a green glowlamp. “The spike is frozen. To them, you’ll appear to be sleeping through the night. I want to show you something.”

The green light casts eerie shadows on the artifacts along the walls as Glirastes leads me down a dark hallway. Rain lashes the windows. Low thunder groans.

Glirastes stops at the end of a hall near a large wooden door with an old-fashioned lock. He searches a huge ring for the right key and unlocks it with a satisfying clunk. Lights blossom in the darkness, and I smile. The room is as delightful as in memory. Domed with a rendering of deep space. Books lining every wall. I remember the first he gave me: Silenius’s Meditations. Antiquated machines of distant ages stand covered in dust. He fusses over the dozen teacups scattered about the room. “Really should let the servants in here. But they may twist the wrong knob, then boom.” He slams a hand on the table. “All dead. Now, where did I put it? Ah. This way.” Behind a 3-D marble printer and a statue of himself with an absurdly generous phallus, he pulls back a canvas covering, unsettling a cloud of dust, to reveal a model of a sphere city as big as the two of us put together. Intricate parks and public buildings wind together, defying gravity as the surface of the city bends upside down on itself to create the spiral impression of a human eye. He waves his hand over the pupil, and the city begins to turn clockwise. He sits in a drawing chair to watch me walk around the model.

“It is…” I begin, and pretend I cannot find the right words. Of course I remember his favorite poems.

“It is what?” he asks in trepidation.

“Without flaw.”

“Use more sophisticated language.”

I reply:

“Cities and Thrones and Powers

Stand in Time’s eye,

Almost as long as flowers,

Which daily die:

But, as new buds put forth

To glad new men,

Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth,

The Cities rise again.”

“I missed you, lad.” He sighs back in his chair. “I haven’t had a good critic in years.”

“What is your city called?”

“Oculus.”

I circle the model. “I imagine it’s meant to be in orbit?”

“Yes! Or deep space. I knew you would understand.” He runs a finger down a central aerial boulevard. “It was my last commission before the Fall. Needless to say, there was not much demand for cities with personality after that.”

“Who commissioned it?”

“Regulus ag Sun, old uppity Quick himself. I sent him a finished model just like this one, but we never broke ground. It was to be my greatest work. One I’ll never see completed now. You might have noticed there is something whimsical about it.” He smiles. “He asked me to build a city for a child who had never seen anything else. Of course it was just an expression, but I took it to heart. I based it off of your eye, in fact. The only child to seldom annoy me. Of course I never had children. Didn’t have the time or the inclination, but I always assumed, vainly, that mine would be as curious as you were.”

He must be shaken deeply to presume to say that aloud to me.

It really is one of the most marvelous of his creations, this oculus. For all its grace, it speaks of wild, hopeful ambition.