Winterlong (45 page)

“Have you seen her? A girl who looks like ‘him, the very incarnation of the Gaping Lord, the good Dr. Silverthorn swore to me they were as alike as two drops of rain—”

The Paphians protested no, no, they had never seen her, never. Only the Saint-Alaban continued to stare back at me while the Aviator continued his tedious questioning.

Finally the Saint-Alaban called out, “I saw her. She is disguised as a boy, and names herself Aidan Arent. I thought she was
him
—”

He pointed at me, then continued, “She was with one of my bedcousins, Justice Saint-Alaban, a paillard who went among the Ascendants to betray us, may our Mother curse him!”

The Aviator nodded. “Where was she, my darling boy?”

The Saint-Alaban gave me a look of such hatred that I stared down at my hands, the stony lip of my sagittal gleaming pale violet.

“With a group of traveling Players performing at the House Illyria,” he said. “She appears in blasphemous garb. My people believe she impersonates the murderer Raphael Miramar. They will be at the Masque of Winterlong—” His voice shook with such fury that he could not go on.

The Aviator nodded again. “But I know all this already,” he said impatiently. “I want to find her
now. Where is she now?”

One of the boys from Persia cried out, “Can’t you see we don’t know? Let us go, we’ll help you, please—”

But already the Aviator had turned away, reaching for the book he had dropped when he’d begun his interrogation.

“… I am the bray of the brute in the night, whoever is deceived by me …”

Margalis Tast’annin, the Mad Aviator, lay upon a pallet at the back of the North Cloister facing me. At his feet sat the jackal Anku, still and white as a carven cenotaph. Even at that small distance I could not see them clearly through the roiling smoke and steam. Tast’annin’s voice alone possessed a physical immediacy and potency. It cut through the opium’s narcotic vapor, the thick stench of dread and hopelessness, so that even though I knew the man who lay there—knew every scar upon his body, knew the tenor of his groans as nightmares chased him, knew the place like a secret spring that bled slowly but ceaselessly, and the smell of his bloodstained raiment—even knowing all this I could sit here and imagine another man speaking in the gloom. A tall strong man with face unscarred and close-cropped wheaten hair, wearing metallic clothes that creaked, and smelling of scorched metal and ozone and (very faintly) of charred flesh.

“Lord Baal.”

With a start I realized he had been calling me for some moments. I raised my head, my hair spilling down my shoulders and tangling about the hempen cord I wore around my neck.

“Yes?” I looked past the Paphian boys to where the Aviator had raised himself to stare at me with those translucent eyes.

“… accept these offerings in your name …”

I dipped my head so as not to see them, or the firelight glinting off Oleander’s knife. But I heard their fast and shallow breathing, and smelled the ammoniac reek of their terror.

The Aviator finished. A moment in which I could hear only the murmur of rain and the Paphians’ choking breath. Then from opposite me came a soft command.

“Now, Oleander.”

Oleander inhaled loudly. I closed my eyes, but not before I saw the two boys from Persia clutch each other, weeping. I lowered my head, hunching my shoulders as though this time I might somehow drown out what happened next.

I heard Oleander rumbling with the knife and cursing. An aardman growled: one of the Paphians must have tried to break away. I tried to hear only my own breathing, my heart thumping counterpoint to the boys’ despair.

Suddenly Oleander cried out. A tearing sound and a scream; then the knife clattering to the floor, Oleander weeping as he retrieved it. I clenched my hands and squeezed my eyes more tightly, tried repeating loudly the words to the “Duties of Pleasure” and “Saint-Alaban’s Song.”

It was no use. Their screams and groans went on and on and on, for hours it seemed. Warmth spattered my bare legs and feet. Oleander sobbed and shouted, striking them again and again while I rocked back and forth on the marble bench, eyes shut tight.

Gradually their shrieks grew fainter, the bubbling sound of their breathing soft and labored. Something slippery brushed my leg, slid to the floor nearby. I heard Oleander panting, and the aardmen whimpering. I opened my eyes for an instant, saw blood pooled about my foot, blood sprayed in ribbons across the stone basin and the shapeless lumps strewn about the altar floor. The tip of a finger rolled beneath my boot, and a tuft of golden hair.

It took one of them a very long time to die. He made a choking sound, like someone swallowing syrup, then finally grew still. It was quiet, except for the sound of the other children crying and Oleander talking very slowly and calmly to himself, sentences I could not hear except for the words
save them
whispered repeatedly. I opened my eyes, saw my legs and thighs spattered with blood, smelled it like some warm tide spilling upon the altar. An aardman lapped noisily at the floor. On my wrist the sagittal burned a fierce and brilliant violet. I raised my hand slowly, the rays streaming from it to send ripples of light across the dim room. The lazars cried out, and Oleander tossed the knife across the room, then fell to his knees, retching. The Consolation of the Dead recited words I did not hear as I stared up to where the sagittal streaked the cloister’s shadowy vault with amethyst radiance, and the cold rain dripped upon my bloodstained hands.

T
HAT NIGHT OLEANDER CRIED
out in his sleep, thrashing so that his arm struck my cheek and woke me. “Shh—it’s a dream, Oleander, it’s just a dream.” I reached across the pallet to embrace him. From the corridor behind the iron gates of the Children’s Chapel echoed snores where an aardman lay guarding us. “No! Oh god, no—”

I covered his mouth. “Be quiet! You’ll wake Fury—” He fell silent then, clutching at me as though he would crawl inside my skin. But for many hours we lay awake, staring into the darkness that engulfed us, the darkness that was everywhere like a poison in the air;, knowing that the horror that awaited us upon waking was worse than any nightmare, and that it would never end.

“H
E WANTS YOU, RAPHAEL
. He is ringing the changes.”

In the darkness I could make out Oleander, frail and sallow as one of the few candles left guttering on the altar behind him. He cursed as he bumped against a chair, rubbing his arms to warm himself and finally standing atop the heap of pillows I had arranged next to my pallet. I blinked, sat up, and pulled my bedcovering—a woolen cloak taken from a dead Saint-Alaban—about my shoulders.

“So soon?” I coughed, shivering despite the cloak. From the number of candles that had burned out within the Children’s Chapel I guessed I had been asleep for two or three hours. I never slept through the night—or day—anymore. Margalis Tast’annin murdered sleep as efficiently as he did those captives he tirelessly questioned in his search for the empath Wendy Wanders.

My sister,
I thought.
That is why these others died, enslaved Curators and Paphians alike;
although mostly it was my own people who fell captive to their own faithless bedcousins.

“Hurry, Raphael,” urged Oleander through chattering teeth. He fell onto the pallet beside me. He wore only loose white trousers, tied about his thin waist with a length of rope. I hugged him close, wrapping my cloak about him and feeling the spars of his ribs as he trembled with fear and cold. “I hate it, I hate watching them die—”

“Shh …”I stroked his lank hair, his scarred shoulders with their raw fretwork where the Madman had lashed him days before. “Don’t cry, cousin, please don’t cry.”

He sniffled and buried his face in my shoulder. I moved my hand to guard him from my sagittal, though it slumbered now. Only my fear of the Aviator woke it—the Aviator knew this and delighted in it—and sometimes the sight of the dead lying pale as though sleeping in the nave.

A deep tolling note, far above us in the Gloria Belltower. A softer chime, an echo of the first; then silence. Oleander plucked at my arm. “Please, Raphael! Before he sends for others—”

I nodded, and groped on the floor until I found my boots. They were too big for me. Despite wrapping my feet in rags first, my ankles were scraped raw from wearing them and bled anew each day without healing. I blinked back tears of pain as I pulled them over my poor feet, waited for the throbbing to subside before standing to find my robe: a shapeless gray sack, long-sleeved and reaching below my knees, and with a motheaten hood. It was worn through at the elbows and unraveling at the cuffs, hideously ugly but the warmest thing I could find among the heaps of clothing torn from the dead and cast into piles about the nave. Each day the Aviator sent squalling groups of children to pick through these filthy remains, bringing to him and myself whatever seemed worth saving. Broken necklaces and armlets, dirty ribbons and brocade trim from Paphians’ robes; occasionally some shattered sliver of machinery, timepiece or spyglass or monitor, buried beneath mounds of Curators’ uniforms. The rest was burned, adding the stench of charred cloth to the reek that hung within the nave like a dense and poisonous fog. The hollow sound of children coughing was as ceaseless now as the winter wind howling in the broken west towers. This gray robe was the first and last prize I had found among the lazars’ rags, before the Aviator forbade me to show myself among them except at his command. Now I was consigned to this chamber, half prison and half sacrarium to the Gaping One.

With a sigh I motioned Oleander that I was ready. We walked through the Crypt Church, I hobbling and Oleander skipping beside me. He was barefoot and tried to keep his chilblained feet from touching the icy floor, hopping and swearing as though he walked on hot sand. We started up the passage leading to the Belltower. A solitary candle pressed into an alcove threw its wan light down the steps. As we walked there came another loud peal, cut short so that we both stopped to listen for the next sound. Oleander stared at me, looking very much like Dr. Silverthorn in the cloudy light, with his hollow eyes and sunken cheeks and nearly all his hair gone. I looked away from him, staring at the arched ceiling high above us as though I might see through it to the bay floor. From the heights of the Gloria Tower came a tiny sound, what might have been a bat squeaking, or a child’s wail. Then a soft thud. Oleander giggled nervously.

“Stop it!” I ordered, slapping him. He covered his mouth and ran a few steps ahead of me, his laughter turning to hiccuping gasps. I licked my finger, turned, and snuffed out the passage’s single candle. I scraped it from the stone and ate it, choking on the oily taste. Then I hurried to Oleander’s side.

At first glance the vast expanse of the Cathedral seemed empty, its bays and transepts filled only with clumps of debris and the fires burning untended among the huge columns and arches. The crackling flames and wind almost drowned out the other, softer sounds, choked coughing and, from some unimaginable space overhead, voices. Then the gray light filtering down through the great windows picked out the numbing details.

A white shape moaned and tossed its arm across what had seemed to be a rotting gourd or toadstool but was in fact a face. Dark forms laid like logs beside a dying bonfire were not logs at all but those who had died since dawn (not long past, to judge by the weak light), waiting their turn to be cast upon the smoking pyres. Many were the lazars Tast’annin had set to work outside: searching for the lost arsenal of the Ascendants, hacking at the frozen ground with whatever implements they could find—staves and stones, the remains of autovehicles—until they were felled by disease or exhaustion. Beside one of the immense columns holding up the Gloria Tower a pair of gargoyles had toppled. But these raised their grotesque heads as we approached, unfurling long pink tongues as they yawned and groaned a greeting.

“He waits, master,” one said to me. His tongue wrapped around the words so that I could scarcely understand him. He stared at Oleander through slanted eyes and then flopped back onto his haunches, scratching at his jaw with one of his gnarled hands. “Little master, he shouts.”

Oleander glared at me. “I told you we should hurry!”

The other aardman remained standing, attention fixed upon the column looming above us. I followed his gaze upward, to the tangled skein of ropes and boards and scaffolding that hung beneath the Cathedral bells. I could scarcely see them there in the ruined tower: figures no larger than the Angels and Saints who peered down at us with unwinking stone eyes. But the figures upon the scaffolding moved. I began to pick out individual voices from the faint garble that drifted down. Some cried or screamed or even laughed shrilly. Others begged, and I heard several voices singing tunelessly the words to “Saint-Alaban’s Song.”

And there was another voice, calm and soothing. Resonant, speaking slowly and with great clarity, with a pronounced drawl and accent unfamiliar to the City of Trees. The Consolation of the Dead was ringing the changes.

A shriek. The aardmen’s ears flattened against their skulls. They flinched, looking askance at me before pointing their long muzzles skyward again.

“He shouts.” The first aardman wriggled closer to me, pressing his great head against my thigh and growling. “He shouts, master.”

“I know, Fury,” I said, scratching the rough fur between his ears. “It’s all right.”

Fury continued to growl, nostrils flaring as he stared into the darkness above us. Oleander fidgeted by the door half-opened in the column, the sole entry to the Gloria Tower. “Raphael,” he said again.

“Be quiet,” I said. “I want to listen—”

If I squinted I could make them out in that dizzying space. Black figures that seemed to flail crazily as they walked across the few boards and rope bridges strung beneath the twenty-four bells, all that remained of the flooring that had rotted away in the past centuries. They clung desperately to a haphazard network of ropes, invisible from the nave.