Winterlong (48 page)

I knew then that he meant to destroy us as that other small world, his world, had been destroyed. He only knew how to do one thing, you see, he only understood one thing. That was why the image of the Hanged Boy appealed to him; that was why he searched obsessively for a girl who could deal death with her mind.

But that day I still retained some hope of salvation, of the supremacy of a gentle goddess I had never really believed in. I had not yet grasped that the Aviator’s truth might be the only truth worth knowing; and so that smile filled me with more horror than the sight of him sacrificing the children in the cloister or Gloria Tower ever had.

“There is an arsenal here,” he said. “On the hillside beneath the Cathedral. A stockpile of weaponry
NASNA
put there two hundred years ago. One of my duties as Governor was to set up a janissary outpost here.”

He chewed his lip. “Of course there is no reason whatsoever to guard it now: there’s no one left to guard. There’s no reason for anything, really.”

“But we are here,” I protested. “And the Curators—”

“But they’re all dead, darling boy. All of them. No one could possibly have survived.”

Oleander stared at the Aviator, puzzled. “They aren’t dead. I know they’re not de—”

The Aviator struck him, so hard that Oleander’s lip split and blood sprayed my cheek as the boy sprawled backward. Tast’annin never even looked at him. He continued to stare at me, his smile frozen, and reached for my robe to wipe the blood from his hand.

“They are all dead,” he repeated. “If anyone survived the rebel strike they will have killed them by now. There is no one left to answer to, dearest child; no one except me.”

I sat rigidly, waiting for him to strike me or continue with this disordered talk. But he said nothing, only stared at me with that ghastly fixed grin. I stared back, afraid to look away lest he kill me, until my eyes swam and all I saw was his idiot grimace floating in the gloom like a disembodied skull.

Gradually his consciousness seemed to waver. His pupils shrank until they all but disappeared in his watery eyes. He continued to gaze vacantly into the darkness. I glanced at Oleander, sniffling quietly as he nursed his bleeding lip. When after some time it was obvious that the Aviator would say no more, indeed that he had entered some kind of trance, I quickly and quietly fled the Chapel, abandoning poor Oleander to stand watch over the Madman.

I
HAD NO CLEAR
idea as to where I was going, only that I wanted to get as far from Tast’annin as I could. I dared not leave the Cathedral. No one would have stopped me, no one would have dared; but the landscape of this part of the City itself was threat enough to keep me here.

It was winter now. Snow had drifted through the holes in the Cathedral roof to form shallow gray banks. In places the children had sculpted figures from it, men and women and animals—aardmen?—blackened with soot and melted into grotesque shapes. As I wandered I could look out windows and see the City dusted with white, the distant river sheathed in gray ice beneath a new moon’s feeble gleaming. Only the ashen slope in front of the Cathedral was untouched by snow. Whatever poisons had leached into the earth there melted it so that the ground remained black as rotten ice, dotted with the corpses of those fallen prey to the parasitic trees. Not even the ravens crying in the frigid air would light upon the Cathedral grounds. I would not venture there.

So I wandered through the twisting halls and bays of the ancient Church, and thought how strange it was that every path in the City seemed to lead here: how the corridors in the House Miramar and the other Paphian Houses had brought me to the labyrinthine passages of the Museum of Natural History, and from there I had lost myself in the Narrow Forest, and the House High Brazil, until finally the tortuous path had led me to Saint-Alaban’s Hill. Like the whorls and swirls upon my sagittal, dizzying complexity in such a small thing; and how much more complicated were the windings and turnings of the City of Trees—a place that was only one of the world’s besieged sectors, if I was to believe Dr. Silverthorn.

It was night when the Aviator had summoned me to him. It was night still. I was beginning to think that perhaps the Madman was right. Maybe the very nature of the world itself had changed to accommodate the coming of the Gaping One, and there would never be another bright dawn. Certainly I could scarcely recall the last time I had seen the sun: when we fled the Butterfly Ball, perhaps.

I leaned upon a parapet overlooking the nave. Nothing moved down there save the smoke from a half-dozen feeble bonfires left untended through the night. Despite the raiding parties that returned daily with captives, mostly Paphian children, it seemed to me that the number of those who dwelled within the Cathedral grew fewer and fewer each day. Those who did not succumb to disease were slaughtered by the Aviator. A fetid smell hung in the frigid air, the smell of blood and decay, of bodies lying unburned and unburied outside the Cathedral walls. I shivered, sighted a figure nosing among the still forms below. An aardman, starving as we all were, searching for food.

I turned away. I wished I had not left Oleander behind; wished I had been able to do something to save the Persian malefeant, the Illyrian boys, or even the Saint-Alaban. But the Aviator’s strength lay in this, his power to command. It was as Dr. Silverthorn had said. One must serve somebody, and only Margalis Tast’annin remained to command. I was not a fighter. My only power had been to inspire worship through my beauty. I took my place here passively as I had upon the Hill Magdalena Ardent, receiving whatever the Aviator offered me: a rain of blood instead of petals, curses and imprecations instead of lustful glances, a hempen cord rubbing raw against my neck instead of flowers upon my brow. I tugged uneasily at the rope. He had knotted it so tightly that I would have to cut it off; but Tast’annin guarded his weapons carefully, and Oleander had refused when I asked him to remove it.

I heard a small sound down the corridor. Perhaps an aardman had crept upstairs, thinking me an unsuspecting lazar and hoping to surprise me. I moved so that the moonlight shining through a window revealed who I was.

But the figure stepping from the shadows was not an aardman.

“Hallo, Wendy.”

My hair stood on end at the husky voice and the name it spoke. Backing against the parapet, I pulled my hood about my face. She stood in a small bay flanked by twin Angels of pocked stone, a wiry girl peering at me amused.

“Don’t worry,” she said airily. “He’s forgotten all about me. After Dr. Silverthorn died, I guess. Nobody cares, nobody remembers about Anna. Nobody misses Andrew but me.”

She stepped into the corridor. It was the girl I had seen in the Gloria Tower a few days before, the blond girl who had winked at me. Now I could see that her smile was the only fair thing that remained of her face. She was gruesomely scarred.

“Who are you?” I said, trying to sound bold.

“Who am
I?”
she retorted mockingly. “Who are
you?”

“I am Raphael Miramar.” When she made no move to come any nearer I let my hood droop back and peered at her. “But you think I am Wendy Wanders.”

She shrugged. “Maybe. Dr. Silverthorn told me about you.
He
turned out to be a nice Doctor after all, didn’t he? He tried to save Gligor—”

Suddenly she doubled over, racked by a fit of coughing. When she raised her face again tears streaked it, and when she brushed them away blood smeared her cheeks. The rain of roses had left suppurating wounds across her face and arms and legs, any place that had not been protected by her short tunic. “You were smart to leave when you did,” she said hoarsely. “They killed all the rest of us.”

“What is your name?” I asked. I tried to imagine what she had looked like before the rain of roses, this Ascendant girl, but it was impossible to tell. Her skin had cracked and blackened like scorched bark; flesh hung in tiny curls from her arms. Only her eyes still shone with sharp intelligence within her ravaged face.

“Anna,” she said. A flash of white as she smiled again. “I had a brother too, you know. An independent personality. Andrew. They fed him to the
NET
. I’m alone now, Wendy.”

I nodded. She seemed harmless, and I was lonely. “Yes. I’m alone too, Anna.”

She coughed again, covering her mouth with her hand, then gazed surprised at the film of blood upon her fingers. When she looked up her eyes were unfocused, her words slurred.

“I was looking for you, Wendy. To warn you: he means to capture you. They will kill you just like Andrew and Gligor, just like me …”

She took a step, weaving as though drunk. Then she stopped. With a smile she stuck her hand into a pocket. I drew my breath sharply: I had misjudged, she had a weapon hidden there. I glanced around to see how I might escape, but when I looked back she held her hands out to me one at a time, chanting in a hoarse childish voice:

“Now: this is for me, and this is for you.”

There was no weapon. One raw palm held a slender cobalt capsule, its casing dull as though she had carried it for a long time. In the other was some bit of gaudery, cloth or feathers mashed flat and pickled with dirt. As I stared uncomprehending she pushed her hand closer to me, the one holding the filthy cloth.

“Take it,” she urged.

Gingerly I picked it up, held it at arm’s length. A narrow headband made of feathers, matted together with grime and all but colorless.

“Andrew and I made it for you after you left,” she said softly. “After they killed him I finished it. That was why I followed Dr. Silverthorn and Gligor. I was afraid they’d forget to give it to you.”

I stared at it numbly, this pathetic bit of frippery.

“Don’t you like it?” she asked with a twinge of anxiety.

I nodded. “You came all the way here just to give this to her?”

She shrugged. “They would have killed me anyway,” she said. “Silverthorn was mad at first, but then he didn’t have much time to stay mad, did he? And I remembered how much you liked the other one.”

She smiled then, a smile of ineffable sweetness. “It’s funny, after Andrew died I felt so horrible, but it was different than before, when we tapped them. I wanted to ask you about that, and about that Boy you showed me—”

A spasm shook her. She waved her empty hand across her face, then looked down at the capsule in her other hand as though she had forgotten it. “But I guess I won’t have time now.”

Before I could stop her she tossed the capsule into her mouth, making a wry face. She waited a moment, then shook her head apologetically.

“I was the one who betrayed you to the Aviator, Wendy. I was still mad at you. One of the blond children told me about the masque at Winterlong. I was the one who told the Madman. I’m sorry now. I felt bad afterward, that’s why I wanted to warn you, to give you a chance to escape.”

She hiccuped, then grimaced. “Dr. Silverthorn told me it would taste awful, and he was right: it does. Augh. Well, I was afraid I’d never see you again, Wendy. I’m glad I was able to give you your bandeau—”

Turning, she took a few steps, then stumbled and fell, suddenly hidden in the shadows of the bay.

“Wait, Anna!” I cried. I shoved the headband into a pocket and rushed after her. I knelt at her side, turning her body so that she faced me. Moonlight fell from a window in the granite wall above us, a thread of fine white light across her face.

But it was not the face I had seen an instant before. As I held her the broken skin rippled and then grew smooth and pale, her eyes blinked open and stared up at me with an expression of faint derision.

“Franca!” I cried.

She pulled herself up and shook her head, the hair whipping across her face no longer tawny but silver-fair. The eyes staring at me from behind that gossamer cloud were green as unripe apples.

I staggered back. Without thinking I crossed my hands in front of me, but He only laughed.

“Raphael Miramar!” He scolded. He reached for the rope about my neck and tweaked it teasingly, pulling me near Him. “You saw how little protection that afforded the Saint-Alaban in the cloister.”

I dropped my hands. “But you were not in the cloister,” I stammered.

“Oh, but I was,” He replied. He looked at the bit of rope, let go of it and settled back upon His heels. He seemed heedless of the freezing stone floor, for all that He was naked as an egg. “I am with you always, Raphael. With all of them: Franca and Anna and Dr. Silverthorn, Margalis and Oleander and yes, your little friend Fancy—”

“Fancy? She is alive, you know where she is?”

I tried to grab Him, torn between rage and hope, between wanting to rend Him or embrace Him if what He said was true. But as my hand closed about His a burning pain shot through it. I snatched it back.

“Not yet, Raphael,” the Boy murmured, a note of menace in his voice. “You should wait until you are invited. Soon enough, darling boy, soon enough.”

His tone had deepened to the Aviator’s soft drawl. I looked up, then stumbled to my feet. Because the Aviator stood there, staring down at me with pale mad eyes.

“Did you kill her?” he asked. He stooped, took Anna’s corpse by the hair and yanked it so that her head lolled backward, gazing at him blindly. I stared in disbelief, then glanced around the tiny bay. Her scars were unhealed, and she was certainly dead. And the alcove was empty, the Boy gone. The chink in the wall showed a fingerlength of pale gray, bright enough that I knew it must be morning.

He let go of the girl. Her body fell back to the floor with a thud. He stood, continuing to stare at me with that knowing smile, his eye bulging.

“Your little friend,” he said. “Fancy.”

I felt as though he had driven a knife through my stomach. “Yes,” I said at last.

The Consolation of the Dead extended his hand, took the end of the cord about my neck and tugged it.

“Come,” he said, as though promising wonderful things. “She is in the cloister, waiting to see you again.”

Without a word I rose and followed him.