Winterlong (50 page)

“‘The Curators taught me,’ he said. That nasty voice, for all that he was quite handsome. ‘These books came from the Museum of Natural History, they gave them to me when I exorcised the Hall of Archosaurs after Nopcsa’s murder.’ I glanced at some of them—you know how I love to read—but they were mostly very old textbooks, natural-history books I suppose. He chose one at random, then flipped through it and selected phrases—quite aimlessly,
I
thought.

“This is what he gave me.”

She took a rolled-up bit of parchment from her reticule, unfolded it, and began to read.

“‘… the traces of the existence of a body … as to the succession of life upon the earth … the course of nature will be a continuous and uninterrupted one … an interminable vista is opened out for the future … the central fire and the rain from heaven … all traces of organic remains become annihilated … the ancient peace once more came to reign upon the earth.’”

She finished, stared down at the parchment, and then rolled it up and replaced it, closing her reticule with a snap that made me jump. Then she folded her paws upon her lap.

“That is what he told me,” she said. “That, and to beware of the Masque Winterlong. ‘The Masque of the Gaping One,’ he called it. He said
he
would not be in attendance.”

“He sounds quite intelligent for a pantomancer and a fraud,” said Jane Alopex. “I think you’re mad to go there tomorrow, Scarlet. And you too, Wendy, after you’ve been warned that the lazars plan an attack.”

I shrugged. “Anna was—she was never very reliable, actually.” I spread my hands in front of the stove. “And really, what else are we to do? The whole City can’t hide forever, and you said yourself we have no weapons to fight back with.”

Jane said nothing, only turned to stare out the window until Miss Scarlet crept into her lap and engaged her in more cheerful conversation.

So we passed our last night in the theater. The four of us talked until a few hours before dawn, recalling the glories of past performances, giddy sleepless nights of rehearsals and the triumphant applause that followed. We fed the little woodstove with sticks of applewood until first Justice and then Jane nodded off, leaving Miss Scarlet and I watching the embers turn gray and cold.

“There was something else, Wendy.”

I started, bumping my chin against Justice’s shoulder. I had almost fallen asleep.

“What, Miss Scarlet?” I mumbled, sitting up.

“What he told me. The pantomancer; there was more that I didn’t tell them.”

She tilted her head to where Justice slept beside me and Jane snored stretched out upon the floor, her traveling cloak rumpled beneath her. Miss Scarlet smiled wistfully. She had removed the lace mobcap she wore to cover her nearly hairless skull, the coarse ridge of fur that bristled across her head. Her paws kneaded restively at her throat.

“I—I asked him what he saw for me, if he saw anything.” She glanced to make sure the others were really asleep. “I wanted to know whether—well, you know. If it
was
to happen, if there really is a Magdalene—whether She might make me truly human. He put down the book and closed his eyes, and sat for a long time, so long I thought he had fallen asleep. I decided he’d forgotten me, and started to go, to find the rest of you, when he suddenly threw back his head.

“‘Nothing!’ he exclaimed. He looked quite alarmed. ‘I see nothing in this City of a talking chimpanzee, nor of your companion Aidan Arent, nor his Paphian leman. Nothing, nothing at all; but of this I will say no more.’“

She was silent then. The snow rattled against the windows. Jane’s snores mingled with Justice’s gentler breathing. After a few minutes Miss Scarlet crept from her hassock to Jane’s side, and curled in the crook of her arm to sleep.

A pantechnicon from the House Saint-Alaban arrived the next afternoon. The Players embarked, Jane Alopex riding beside us on Sallymae, her pistol hanging from her waist. Darkness crept across the City, the Narrow Forest’s shadowy fingers groping across the Museums and up Library Hill, to fall just short of the white lawn where sheep no longer grazed. The solitary young shepherd still stood guard there, silent and watchful, his round face more inched than it had been in the autumn. He watched us pass without a word. Only when the pantechnicon clattered around the curve and began the long slide down Deeping Avenue he raised his hand and called out:

“The Magdalene guard you through Winterlong.”

I stood in the back of the wagon and waved, clutching my cape against the bitter wind, and stared until I saw him no more. ‘

The Saint-Alaban elders driving the pantechnicon were well fortified with apricot negus and a steaming tin of hot whiskey that they shared with Toby and the others. Faces hardened or bodies too frail to barter with the City, still they were good-natured, not resentful as were so many P’aphian elders. I sat a little apart from them all. Even Justice’s company seemed too much for me this afternoon. I smiled wanly as they raised their tumblers to salute me.

“Hang the boy and raise the girl, Arent!”

“We’ll break the old whore Winter’s back, eh Aidan?”

Then they burst into one of the lewder choruses of Saint Alaban’s Song, stopping often to repeat the words for the benefit of Jane Alopex.

As we turned from the Deeping Avenue toward the Hill Magdalena Ardent, Curators poured from the Museums. Black-clad, brown-clad, they carried tall poles each topped with an animal’s skull, whipped by ribbons of green and due and red. In front of the Museum of Natural History a small group gathered around the slender figure of the new Regent, Clara Brown, and struggled to hoist the immense beribboned skull of an archosaur upon their shoulders. The other Curators stopped to help them, then swept them along in the growing crowd that trailed us. They greeted us boisterously, tromping through the snow and raising their skull-topped icons, tugging the ribbons so that the skulls’ jaws clattered as they fell in behind us in a long parade.

At last we mounted the Hill Magdalena Ardent and came to the House Saint-Alaban.

“Sweet Mother, look at them all!” Fabian stumbled against me as the wagon bounced up the icy drive. “The whole City must be here—”

“There’s less of the whole City than there used to be,’ one of the Saint-Alaban elders intoned, then hiccuped “The other Houses decided to throw their luck with us tonight. They’ll all be there …”

He swayed, grabbed a passing pole so that its skeletal embellishment clacked mournfully. Justice crossed to the back of the wagon to join me.

“Did you hear that, Wendy? The whole City here! That’s never happened, especially at Saint-Alaban! It really
is
like the old stories—”

I nodded, took his hand and squeezed it. I felt as though every nerve in my body was firing at once. Bright images flared in my mind as the Curators and Paphians shouted—

“hang the boy and raise the girl

‘til Winterlong is broken!”

—figures resplendent as though painted on glass. Aidai Harrow; Emma Harrow in the Home Room, flinging ; broken hibiscus blossom into my lap; the Paphian child Fancy standing on tiptoe to embrace Raphael Miramar, hi face flushed as he gathers her to his breast, as he turns to me and it is my own face there, my arms enfolding the child. Sorrow pierces me and I feel my knees buckle. Darkness whirls behind my eyes. Justice catches me before can fall.

“Wendy—”

I lift my head and see him, his blue eyes worried. Behind him stands Toby Rhymer staring at me, his hand tight about a mug of steaming wine. He says nothing but continues to stare. I know then that he heard Justice name me, that he has suspected for some time and now he knows. Slowly a smile creeps across’ his face as he raises the glass his eyes glittering.

“Through Winterlong, Wendy Wanders,” he murmurs and drains the mug. He turns to gaze at the House before us, Paphians like brilliant pennons waving from the step and balconies and snowdrifted terraces of Saint-Alaban.

Adonia Saint-Alaban, the suzein of the House, greeted us as we clambered from the pantechnicon.

“Through Winterlong, cousins,” she called as she descended the main stairway to the drive. She wore a long tunic of scarlet cloth worked with green thread. Even in mourning, the Paphians would be fashionable. She was older than most of the other suzeins, older than any Paphian I had ever seen. Small and plump, she was still beautiful, with the same slanted blue eyes that marked Justice and Lalage and others of the House Saint-Alaban. On each high cheekbone a crescent moon was tattooed in red and violet ink. She chanted her words in a voice raspy from ears of smoking kef and opium.

“Justice, my dear cousin,
everyone
is waiting to see you!” he made him the Paphians’ beck, then kissed him. Behind her, Paphians radiant in gold and crimson and blue swarmed down the steps to join the crowd outside. Some of them began lugging props and baskets of costumes from the pantechnicon. Others brought steaming bowls of wine and whiskey to the Curators, and then helped them carry their macabre standards inside. Still others greeted the players, bowing to Toby and kissing Miss Scarlet’s gloved paws. Before I could rejoin Justice several of his bedcousins lifted him onto their shoulders. Laughing resignedly, he waved to me as they bore him up the steps. After greeting Toby and Miss Scarlet, Adonia Saint-Alaban took me by the arm and led me indoors.

“Dear Sieur Aidan, our House is honored to have you here, tonight of all nights.” She leaned against my shoulder, her tongue flicking unsettlingly close to my ear. I smiled uneasily, tossing back the folds of my heavy cape.

“What a lovely costume!” she exclaimed, admiring my boots and crimson tunic. Her eyes lingered on the ornament I wore around my neck, a gift from Justice: a necklace of gold worked to resemble vines and trumpet-shaped flowers like lilies, traded from the Historians.

I nodded my thanks. “Your bedcousin Justice helped me with it,” I said. We paused at a set of massive wooden doors flung open to reveal the Great Hall. I blinked at the sudden blaze of candles and gaslights, huge cylinders of glass and metal suspended from the ceiling by chains and so dazzling that I had to look away for a moment.

“At Winterlong we set the night on fire to keep the Gaping One at bay,” said Adonia, smiling. Her eyes darted across the sweep of marble, as though to make sure there was no corner left unlit.

I wished for a shred of darkness: my eyes ached at so much radiance. Hundreds of revelers moved across a floor of polished marble, blazing nearly as brilliantly as the chandeliers overhead. The masquers seemed to course through a forest of flame. Evergreens were everywhere trees that would have dwarfed the theater but here made copses of green and silver, their boughs so heavy beneath dripping candles that I marveled they did not break. Beside each one stood a Saint-Alaban child, clad in shifts of diaphanous yellow so that their slender forms were silhouetted in the candlelight. The children held salvers of water, and laughed and sprayed one another until their costumes hung wet and limp. I wondered aloud at this unreliable method of firefighting.

“Oh, there’s never any problem,” Adonia assured me “The candles are set far beneath the leaves, and beside the trees were all cut this morning. Green wood shouldn’t burn.”

A young boy from Illyria sidled beside her. A wreath of pine cones crowned his black curls. “The masquers from Illyria want to know where their seats are during dinner, he said.

Adonia’s hand fluttered before her face. “Oh! I forgot and put them with that spado from Persia—well, come quick, Hilary, you can help—”

Her fingers brushed my mouth and she kissed me fleetingly, so that I had a quick taste of the raw fear beneath her coy posings. Then she was gone, the spangled hem of her tunic lost among the masked harlequins and columbine and mock-Raphaels milling about the room.

I looked around at the trees like waterfalls of fire, the white smoke curled beneath the domed ceiling high above me. I inhaled the heady scent of evergreens, fir resin, and the hundreds of red roses the Botanists had brought from their greenhouses and piled beside the tinkling fountains where the children refilled their salvers.

She is afraid,
I thought.
She is thinking of the lazars and the Madman in the Cathedral.

I glanced at those around me: Persian dominatrices with tattooed eyelids; three swaggering boys from Miramar; an Illyrian gynander swathed cap-a-pie in ropes of emerald feathers woven to look like verdant leaves. Did they know the lazars had planned an attack this evening? If so, why were they here?

Why was
I
here?

I grabbed a passing girl, a Saint-Alaban with chalk-white face and eyes painted to resemble holly leaves. She went with me laughing, but her smile died when she saw who held her.

“Greetings, cousin,” she said gravely. “You honor me, Sieur Aidan.”

“What is your name?” I pulled her into a small alcove where a fountain bubbled gaily, hidden behind sheaves of dark-green holly and magnolia leaves. She trembled in my arms. “I will not harm you—”

“I know.” Her pupils had dilated with fear, but she did not resist as I drew her face to mine. “Tansy. Tansy Saint-Alaban. I was paired with your consort Justice last year at the Glorious Fourth.”

“Tansy,” I repeated. I would tap her, learn what it was that made her come tonight and perhaps face her death. “Kiss me, Tansy.”

She turned her face from me. I could see tears in her cornflower eyes.

“Why are you afraid, Tansy?” I asked, taking her chin and forcing her to look at me. “I am Aidan Arent, a Player. You’ve seen me?”

“Yes,” she answered, her voice scarcely audible above the fountain. “At the Chrysanthemum Carnival at Illyria.”

“Then why are you afraid of me? Why are you here if you are so afraid?”

She gave me a look of such sadness that I let her go. “This is my House,” she pronounced with dignity. “In ‘The Duties of Pleasure’ it says that great sorrow will come to it, but also that a Saint-Alaban will be the one to wake the Magdalene from Her long sleep. We believe that the Final Ascension is coming, now. We believe it will begin at Winterlong. So we are afraid, all of us upon the Hill; but we will not run away. Too many of us are already dead, and what good will it do to flee and join our cousins who have gone to serve the Lord of Dogs?”