Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) (23 page)

Nor was this
inhalation
. It
was
drinking, and devouring. It was
thievery
. And truth.

Only then—
then
—did the angel abruptly stir—move—begin to resist him. Too late. They were linked. He could not stop now, even if he had meant to. For all these years of waiting had formed him to this split second. Made him so hungry and thirsty, so desperately empty—a vacuum, which by mere pressure of its vacancy,
would be filled
.

Picaro was a bottomless vent into which the brightness of the angel was
sucked
down.

Breathing in and in and
in
—

Picaro felt it fill him. He was the vessel. He drank the sea, and the whirlwind.

The flaming airiness of it was spangling and kindling through every vein, artery, nerve, channel. He felt his organs catch colorless fire and burn, painless, black as his outer skin. Felt his inner self, of which most was almost the same material as the angel’s own, grabbing and pulling and swallowing down and down and down—
Greedy. Hungry. Famished. Fill me to the brim
.

Picaro heard himself far off, the music he now made, as he died, as the demon that was an angel, and his brother, and the end of everything, was dragged and drawn and poured and trapped fast inside him.

It had itself made him vigorous enough to do this. (It, and She.) It had meant them to be one. But never in this way.

How small it was, the angel.

It was only like—

A man—

Full
.

Picaro dropped backward.

He lay on the checkered floor of the gallery. He was saturate of nebulae, a nova. It was possible to see this, and the fires, behind his open eyes. The s’tha, snapped in two, lay over him. He was dead.

Cloudio del Nero, naked and fair as a statue from the dawn of Venus, still leaned, staring, staring, trying to pull back into himself—
itself
—the radiant immanence Picaro had, by a fellatio of the soul,
sucked
away.

Cloudio was taller than any man. He was like the sculpted god Apollo from Aquilla, (patron of birds, inventor of music) upon whose marble face a mask had once been modeled. The very mask that, when Cloudio once wore it, ruined and murdered him—

Picaro’s lips had remained slightly parted.

A glimmer, like lit smoke, pierced out between them. And flew up.

It was a bird, which had come from Picaro.

It was a magpie.

Black and white, black head and body and wings, white-collared at the neck and white-fringed at the wings’ edges, and wounded white across the breast.

It flung itself straight into the face of the statue which was a man, which was not a man, which was an elemental demon-angel, which was the Beast, World’s End.

The magpie slapped full against the face of the angel, and as it did so, all its black and white changed places on it, its beaked head, its long-feathered tail, the out-fanned wings.

It was no longer a magpie stuck against the face of an angel.

It was the
Apollo mask
—the half-mask, with the noble brows, the thick attached hair, the classical nose, all the black of ink, and the white of snow.

Picaro’s magpie had become the alchemical mask that had destroyed Cloudio del Nero in the Year of God 1701.

An angel built of flesh—and the flesh
remembering
—

The fair statue wailed.

It tore at the mask. Which would not come loose.

Ran across the parapet on human naked feet. Hurled itself off, off into air, as once into a deep canal. It fell. It fell. Screaming. Flightless.

It fell
.

And when it hit the water and the stone beneath, it broke into a thousand fragments.

And the light—

In the lower gallery, Jula felt the phantoms of swords, trident-points, knife, pass through her. Unhurtful, unreal. The four aggressors disappeared.

She saw instead the lightning-bolt that hurtled by.

The Tower juddered.

Beneath, (the base of the Tower, the lowest chakra, cleansing and release) Flayd opened his eyes. He had missed the light but he too felt the impact, and saw the second lightning-splash. And then, a light beyond all light—

He did not get up, knowing it was redundant.

Across the City swelled one incandescent shriek. Million upon million voices—

And then Venus, all Venus, burst like a star inside an eggshell, and the eggshell too, her poreless, impenetrable dome, (a goblet of Venus crystal) blew inward, outward, with a sound so immense it was entirely silent. And through the shattering of all things, the
toylike, shaken, pretty sparkle, the sea fell in. Falling, falling.

And soft as a flower head, the City separated to petals and fell also, upward, into the abyss of the waters.

P
ICARO
…

The water closing over my head, my body—I seemed to see through a bulb of obscure glass. And in that fashion I beheld the church of Maka Selena pass, drifting away, and then I saw the bottom of the lagoon … all at once I felt I need no longer suffer this, and felt myself let go …

Like a ruined pile of brushwood, trodden on, the mess of sails, brave flags, crests, burning, burning, on a water poison green and streaked with oil and fire. Loose spars and floating corpses. And men swimming or going under … mortal voices …

Like the Flood. The City looking up. Safe under the sea for ever. Streets and domes, towers and squares. The boats grounded. The beautiful faces under green drifting layers, a paving of lilies, or masks. All struggle done …

I
T WAS A SEA OF
glass mingled with fire.

Under the light morning sky of the upper world, a sky unbroken and whole, seamed only with delicate cirrus clouds.

Everywhere on the water, wreckage, breakage. And glass, fractured glass, and islands of fire.

The dead went idly by. Their faces scanned, with no anxiety, the real heaven, which was blue.

Some kilometers off, a host of subvenerines, stabilized and mostly intact, were rising up through the surface, with their cargoes of animals and personnel.

There were other survivors. They held to unintended rafts of furniture, wood, sails, carpets, pillars, pipework—Some were in a bad way. Others seemingly untouched.

Here, there was scarcely a noise anywhere.

High up, up in the real, blue, unharmed and now unthreatened sky, real black gulls circled, calling crankily, disturbed by this strange upheaval of the ocean. And on the distant sweep of the mainland, sirens now were beginning to hoot, and a swarm of VLOs just now cumbersomely lifting.

As yet, perhaps,
they
had no notion of the magnitude of the catastrophe. (None, of what it might have come to.) Bizarre forces had somehow kept the event localized. No quake had rocked the mainland, no tidal wave had cast itself across the shore. That they had not was inexplicable. Given the scope of the disaster, nothing—no one—should have survived the dome, or its upper environs. And yet.

Jula and Flayd, unscathed, as others were, save by the smallest nicks and abrasions, sat together on one of the endless, crowded, improvised boats. (It had no motor, let alone CX. The passengers, those that could, took turns rowing, using any oar-like flotsam.)

Picaro watched Jula and Flayd a brief while. He took in their speechless communication, the way the faint morning wind combed out Jula’s wet blonde hair. Picaro saw that Jula and Flayd were crying. In silence. Like many hundred others.

For a moment then, he wished he might have gone to them and spoken.

But the moment didn’t last. It never does. It never must.

He went from them less visible or felt than the breeze. Curiously, however, when this happened, Jula turned her head and gazed after him. He noted that. Her eyes on his, as he moved away inside the unseen door. Her eyes, peacock-colored, vivid blue and green, were the last he saw of the world he left.

“Look,” Jula said. She leaned a little from the boat. A dove, dead, the color of pearls, lay on the water. She took it up in her palm and held it there.

Flayd wiped his hand over his face. Then, an after-thought, jettisoned the computer wafer (useless) of codes and keys over the side. “I guess they couldn’t send all those birds up in time. Like the people—down there.” He stared at the dove in Jula’s palm. At the epicenter of the cataclysm, they had been, like heroes in all myths, flung clear. Only he couldn’t remember much about it. And Picaro hadn’t come up with them. Picaro was—
down there
, under the sea. Down where the drowned City was and all the rest.

“They’ll build the damn place over,” he said to Jula. “I guess they will.”

“Yes,” Jula said. “We always rebuild. Even ourselves.” She held out the broken dove, “Even this will rebuild itself. All things, always.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “you and Picaro—I’m sorry.”

Jula laid the dove gently down again into the cradle of the sea.

The pale wind was freshening. They rowed towards the shore.

“Tanith Lee is an elegant, ironic stylist … one
of our very best authors.” —
Locus

VENUS PRESERVED

T
HE
S
ECRET
B
OOKS OF
V
ENUS
B
OOK
IV

T
ANITH
L
EE

The thrilling conclusion to Tanith Lee’s compelling Secret Books of Venus quartet,
Venus Preserved
is set centuries into the future in the undersea city of Venus (Lee’s brilliantly re-imagined alternate Venice), the site of a macabre experiment to bring two lost souls back to life. Salvaged from beneath the sea and rebuilt under a dome, Venus itself has been resurrected with a vast network of advanced computers that regulate weather, noise, and the most precious undersea commodity of all—air.

When the experiment goes awry, claiming several lives, the questions abound: Was it merely an accident? Computer failure? Or has an airborne virus been unleashed? Or is there an even more sinister danger afoot, a force from beyond that threatens the survival of Venus itself? To answer these questions, a traveler from the surface is forced to confront mysteries in his own past and to reveal the connection that ties him to the unavenged spirits wreaking havoc on the doomed city.

Tanith Lee
has written more than fifty novels and short story collections, among them the best-selling
Flat Earth
series. She is the author of another Overlook fantasy series,
The Secret Books of Paradys
, as well as
Mortal Suns
. She has won the World Fantasy Award numerous times as well as the August Derleth Award.