February 08, 2016

PodCastle 402: Opals and Clay (Artemis Rising)

40 minutes

* Author : Nino Cipri

* Narrator : The Word Whore

* Host : Aliette de Bodard

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

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PodCastle 402: Opals and Clay (Artemis Rising) is a PodCastle original.

Rated PG.

Welcome to Artemis Rising II!

Opals and Clay

by Nino Cipri

“I’ll need you to oversee the shipment coming in today,” Lady Adina told me at her breakfast. “The household finally allocated us a clay serva, and it’ll be arriving with the other goods.”

Adina took her meals in her study, which was the only spacious room in the aquaplex, with tall ceilings and curved walls. My mistress ate by the large, convex window that looked into the water, shaped like a fish’s eye, created by embedding glass into a lattice of metal. It gave a view that only fish—and my dead ancestors—had seen: the forest of kelp that grew amid the crumbled walls and columns of the destroyed city of Tenitha.

“Yes, Lady,” I said. She finished her porridge and pushed the empty bowl towards me. She toyed with a small plate of figs as I collected her empty dishes to take to the kitchen.

“Ola?” Adina called, as I turned to go.

On mornings like this, the room was lit by the cool, diffuse light that filtered down from the surface of the water. It threw Adina’s face into softer, kinder focus: smoothing out the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, the sharp lines of her jaw and nose.

She held out the figs to me. She must have seen me eyeing them; after six years, she knew that I often ate whatever she left on her plate. The servants’ meals only stretched so far.

“Take them,” she said, smiling kindly. “You’ll miss lunch if the shipment is late.”

The D’Amara household was famous for its feats of engineering—they built the floating bridges between the towers of Harapiri’s university, and the aqueducts in the mountain mines. The aquaplex was Lady Adina’s life work; designed to study and excavate the submerged ruins of Tenitha, whose riches had outstripped Harapiri’s before its destruction, before the great sea serpent we were named for toppled us into the water.

From the cliffs above, I could barely see the shimmering white stones of Tenitha beneath the waves. Adina’s aquaplex was easily visible, a squat building of dark steel jutting out from the cliffs and descending into the water, like a monster emerging from the water to attack the land.

Still sweating from the long climb up the slippery limestone stairs, I looked down on it. In a moment of recklessness, I spat over the edge of jagged cliffs, though the wind carried it away before it could reach the black metal of the roof. I watched the waves, feeling that recklessness drain out of me, then sat beneath a gnarled olive tree to wait.

The merchants arrived in the heat of noon, and I heard the braying of their donkeys long before they came into view. I slid the knife and hunk of stone I’d been carving into a fold in my tunic and stood up, shielding my eyes from the sun. The clay serva brought up the rear. It was tall and thin, with a frayed linen robe that covered its terracotta limbs. Like all servae, a burnished metal plate covered the lower half of its face; this one was stamped with the chevrons and spiral of the D’Amara household—the same emblem that was tattooed on the back of my hands. The pale opals in its eyes and fingertips gleamed in the sun.

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