Icarus Descending

4 Seven Chimneys

“WENDY. WE ARE WAKING now….”

There is a face in the darkness above me. At first I cannot see whose it is, but I am certain it is Justice, my beloved Justice. I start to cry out for joy; but then somehow it comes back to me that Justice is dead, and that this must be that other Boy, the godling whose eyes followed me through dreams to my waking life, and seemingly beyond. And so I reach for him, thinking that somehow he knows where Justice lies now; but before my hands touch his, he is gone. As surely as Justice is dead, so is that other one, to me at least. Only in dreams now will he come to me, as he comes to all of us soon enough. My fingers graze the icy walls of the crude shelter where we have taken shelter, and weeping I start to wakefulness.

Miss Scarlet told me once of a man who said, “I never knew that grief felt so much like fear.” He wrote those words more than six hundred years ago. I wonder sometimes if grief itself has changed as the world has; if this man, were he alive today, would recognize grief, or fear, or love, any more than he would recognize the geneslaves for their humanity, or myself for whatever it is I am, for what I have become.

Almost nine months have passed since Justice died. It is only now, in the unearthly calm and darkness of this somber place, that I have found the strength or the desire to set down what has happened to me in that time. Three seasons have passed since then; perhaps the last bitter seasons the world will know. From Winterlong to a cheerless spring, and thence to summer and the verge of autumn: but an autumn that will bring no harvest to the world, no reapers save only that immense fiery scythe that is poised above us in the violet sky. I do not know if anyone will ever hear these words, or understand them; if anyone will remember me, Wendy Wanders, or understand why it is that I am compelled to leave my history here, when so many others have chosen silence or death. But I have survived madness and the prison of my own mind at HEL, rape and radiant ecstasy in the shadow of the Engulfed Cathedral. I will speak now, and tell of what befell myself and my friends after the carnage of the feast of Winterlong, and of those new terrors that have brought us here where the world waits to end.

The uncanny night of Winterlong gave over to a quick dawn, and then a long and cheerless winter’s day. For several hours we had walked in silence. Behind us Saint Alaban’s Hill fell into darkness, although we could still mark where flames touched the bright winter sky with red and black. That strange rapture that had overtaken me in the shadow of the Engulfed Cathedral stayed with me a long while. About us winter birds chirped—chickadees, juncos, cardinals igniting in fir trees—and sunlight glittered where ice had locked the empty branches of birch and oak. In my arms I carried Miss Scarlet, the talking chimpanzee who had been my friend and guide during the months since I had fled the Human Engineering Laboratory. From her slender black fingers trailed the ruined streamers of her festival finery. Every now and then I heard her whisper something—bits of verse, tag ends of her speech as Medea, the names of companions we had left dead in the City of Trees—but to me she said nothing. At my side strode the Zoologist Jane Alopex—brave Jane!—who had left behind her beloved animal charges, pacing within their ancient prisons in the shadow of Saint Alaban’s Hill. She was stooped with fatigue; her tall figure cast a longer shadow upon the frozen ground, and her straight brown hair was matted and stuck with twigs and dirt. She still fingered the pistol with which she had slain the Mad Aviator, and lifted her broad ruddy face to the cold sun as though its phantom warmth had brought that strange glow to her eyes; but I knew it was not so. We were enchanted, enthralled by the vision of a dark god dethroned back there upon Saint Alaban’s Hill; but even such wonders wither before freezing cold and hunger and grief.

It was Jane who spoke first.

“Wendy. Look.”

She took my arm and pointed behind us. In the near distance rose several hills, here and there streaked where light snow had gathered in dells and ravines. From the dark blur of trees that was the Narrow Forest rose the stained gray finger of the Obelisk, and behind it on Library Hill glinted the Capitol’s dome. Nearer to us was Saint Alaban’s Hill. In the fine clear light of morning the Cathedral seemed a stain upon it, and the smoke rising from its burning smutted the few clouds to umber.

But that was not what Jane meant for me to see.

“There,” she whispered. In my arms Miss Scarlet twisted, her long black fingers icy against my neck. “Above the Cathedral—”

At first I thought they were trails of smoke: threads of black and gray and silver, spiraling downward until they were lost in the haze surrounding the Cathedral. But then I saw the bright forms darting insectlike in the sky above them. Glinting gold and steely blue, invisible save when the sun struck their deltoid wings and for an instant they would blaze like dragonflies caught in a leaping flame.

“Gryphons,” I breathed. The biotic aircraft of the NASNA Aviators. I had never seen them before, save in videofiles of the ongoing wars between the Ascendants and the Balkhash Commonwealth.

“But what are they doing here?” Miss Scarlet clutched the tattered remnants of her cloak and hugged closer to me.

I shook my head, and Jane cursed.

“The Aviator,” she said. “He signaled them, somehow—”

“No.” The day’s cold swept over me as suddenly as though I had fallen into a freezing stream. I shuddered and stepped backward, until I stood in the shadow of a gnarled oak tree abutting the ruins of the old City Road. “He had no way of calling them. He wouldn’t have called them, I don’t think—”

Jane snorted and remained in the middle of the road. One hand closed tightly about her pistol. The other clenched angrily at her side. “There’s nothing he wouldn’t have done,” she spat. “Murdering children and spitting them like rabbits—”

“Stop!” cried Miss Scarlet. “Please, by the Goddess, don’t speak of him.” I could feel her hair bristling beneath her thin garments, and smell her fear—an animal’s raw terror, not a human’s.

“No,” I said slowly. The cold bark of the oak pressed against my back. “They came independently. They are looking for him—all this time went by, and they heard nothing from the City of Trees—”

At that moment a dull boom! echoed across the empty miles. Behind the Cathedral a ball of gold and crimson blossomed. Beneath our feet the ground trembled. In the afterglow a dozen Gryphons glittered like embers circling a bonfire.

“They’re attacking the City!” Jane gasped, and shoved her pistol back into her belt. “Look! There—fougas—”

Where she pointed I could see three of the Ascendants’ dirigibles cruising above Library Hill. Beneath them the air sparkled with an eerie pinkish gleam, as though the fougas were silver needles threading the hill with rain. To the east another ball of flame erupted, and the air shook thunderously.

Miss Scarlet began to weep. I found myself holding my breath, distant as the danger was. Because it was clear that the City was under attack. Fougas spreading the mutagenic rains of roses, and airships bombing the hills where the seven fair Paphian Houses had stood. And Gryphons! Never had I heard of Gryphons being used anywhere within the borders of the Northeastern American Republic. Jane stepped slowly across the road to join us, and together we watched without speaking, unable to move or do anything but huddle there in the shadow of the winter oak.

“They must have thought some powerful enemy was there, holding their Aviator Commander captive,” I said after a long while. “When he didn’t report back to them. They sent him to retake the City and reclaim the lost arsenals there, but when they heard nothing from him, they must have thought some great force lingered here through all these centuries—”

Miss Scarlet buried her face in my neck, shaking with sobs. Her small body contained such an immensity of emotion that she seemed frailer than she was; but in truth the horrors we had witnessed at Winterlong affected her more strongly than they did Jane and me. Though I wept as well, to think of that fair ruined City burning there before us, which had housed only gentle courtesans and the guardians of lost and useless knowledge. Only Jane remained silent, her face twisted into an unmoving mask of grief and rage. I knew she was thinking of her beloved animals at the Zoo, helpless in their cages as their Keepers fell before the Ascendant janissaries.

We might have stayed there until the early December twilight, had not a thrumming sound overhead sent a host of chickadees twittering past our tree. I crouched down against the bole, holding Miss Scarlet tight against the sudden flurry of dead leaves that flew up around us. Jane dropped beside me, drawing the hood of her coat about her face as if it could shield her. The sun seemed to shiver. Across the barren Earth a great shadow crept, so slowly that it seemed we were watching some small eclipse, as the cold yellow light was bitten back and a dead grayness spilled across the ground like poisonous ash. I hardly dared look up; but when I did, I saw a fouga, vast and black and nearly silent, passing overhead. It was near enough that I could make out small figures silhouetted against the windows of its gondola, and see its rearward propellers spinning in a pale blur. Across its bulk NASNA was spelled in grim red letters, and above them the Aviators’ sigil: a black arrow thrust before a blighted moon.

“Can they see us?” Miss Scarlet’s voice shrilled frantically. “Can they—”

“Shh!” Jane’s hand clapped across the chimpanzee’s mouth, and she pressed against me. So we waited, terrified that the dirigible would loose its viral rains upon us; but it did not. It moved quickly, as though to reach the City before nightfall. Its silvery bulk could be seen nosing slowly to the east, so low that I held my breath, waiting to hear the sound of branches scraping against its gondola. Finally it moved on past us. It seemed much longer before its shadow was gone, but little by little the darkness receded. The sun shone brightly as before, and we even heard faint dripping as the ice-bound trees relented; but the birds did not return.

We began walking again, following the old road west. At first we debated returning to the City of Trees. Our friends were there, Miss Scarlet argued, at least whoever among them had survived the slaughter at the festival of Winterlong. Jane said little, remembering the poor creatures at the Zoo, abandoned to starve or be captured by the janissaries, and then turned over to the Ascendants’ bioengineers.

“But if we go back, then we will be captured too,” I said dully. I was not really afraid, not anymore. Justice had been taken from me and I would never see him again, gone to that twilight kingdom where the Gaping One rules. Not even the thought of returning to the Human Engineering Laboratory was enough to pierce the shell of grief and horror that had grown up around me.

“But what’s the point of wandering like this in the wilderness?” Jane kicked at a heap of dead leaves. Behind her Miss Scarlet lifted her torn skirts and hurried through the brush. “We’ll starve, or freeze—”

I nodded glumly. Of all of us, only Jane with her heavy wool coat wore anything fit for traveling. Miss Scarlet and I shivered in the tattered remnants of the costumes we had donned for the feast of Winterlong. Miss Scarlet had the wits to grab a ragged cape from among the rubbish back at Saint Alaban’s Hill, but even so she often stumbled from exhaustion and had to be carried in turn by Jane and myself. I wore only my ripped tunic and trousers. My legs were so numb, I had almost ceased to feel the cold seeping into them.

We continued in silence for several minutes. Before us the sun hung low in the sky, promising early darkness. Finally Miss Scarlet sighed. “Wendy is right. I don’t know if I could bear to see the City in flames. But where will we go?”

There was no answer to this. What little I knew of the outside world came from seeing a few maps and atlases at HEL, but I recalled nothing of the unpopulated lands surrounding the ancient capital.

Still, “The road must lead somewhere,” I said. I pointed to where flames banked around livid clouds. “There may be Ascendant outposts here, or—”

“Very comforting,” grumbled Jane, but she hurried to catch up with me, Miss Scarlet clinging to her hand like a child.

The country we passed through was grim. Hundreds of years before, many people had lived here—too many, to judge by the ruins of huge bleak edifices that rose everywhere from among the stands of oak and maple and pale birch. Mile after mile they stretched, hedging the road like the walls of a prison. Time and the forest had tumbled many of the vast structures. What remained were the shattered remnants of steel-and-concrete blockades where men had been forced to live like bees in hives. None of the ivy-covered houses of the City, or the grand mansions where the Paphians had held court. Only these monstrous squares and the rubble of ancient highways, choked with rusted autovehicles and piles of glass overgrown with kudzu and Virginia creeper.

Through it all ran the road. It was not until the end of our long day’s walking that this narrowed, from a boulevard wide enough to hold many houses and countless vehicles, to a stretch where maybe six of us might have stood, hands linked, and covered it with only a few feet to spare. Before, the highway had often broken into great slabs of concrete and tarmac, leaving rifts difficult and dangerous to skirt. Now the road merely buckled with the shape of the land, or surrendered to small copses of trees.

Finally even these grim reminders of the earliest Ascendants began to disappear. The terrain grew hilly, which made walking more wearying. Without the huge buildings to protect us, the cold wind raved in our ears and sent the bare branches of trees rattling and snapping. We passed small patches of snow in tree-bound hollows the sun had not struck for many days. The clouds faded from gold to red to indigo.

“Can we stop somewhere?” Miss Scarlet asked, yellow teeth chattering. “Or should we walk all night?”

“You can’t walk all night, Scarlet, and I’m too tired to carry you.” Jane bent to scoop snow from beneath a stand of alders. At their base, water had pooled and frozen, and she cracked off pieces of ice and handed them to us. “God, I’m hungry. If I’d known this was ahead of us, I’d have eaten more at your damn feast.”

Miss Scarlet’s red-rimmed eyes watered as she sucked at the ice. My entire face ached from the cold: good in one way, because it kept me from feeling the pain of a long scar on my cheek, where a flaming brand had struck me the night before. As long as we were moving, I could ignore my exhaustion and hunger; but even stopping now, for a moment, I felt as though I might faint. I leaned against the tree, pressed the shard of ice to my cheek, and closed my eyes.

“Wendy!” cried Miss Scarlet. “My poor friend—”

Jane made an impatient sound at the chimpanzee’s outburst. I smiled and opened my eyes.

“I’ll be all right,” I said. I did not tell them that I saw my lover when I shut my eyes like that; nor that I welcomed the numbing exhaustion, because it kept me from recalling his face in death where he lay at the feet of my murderous twin, the courtesan Raphael Miramar. “Miss Scarlet’s right, we should try to find some place to sleep.”

So we started once more. I staggered forward, stumbling after the others as darkness fell. The wind still railed at the trees, but it had shifted and was less cold than it had been. As the cold eased, I could smell things again—rotting leaves, the dusty scent of old concrete; but mostly just the bleak sharp smell of a midwinter night. Jane had gathered up Miss Scarlet and wrapped the ends of her coat around her. I tried to hurry, my feet snagging on broken tarmac and old roots in the growing darkness. The thought of sleep and whatever evil dreams it might bring did not ease me at all.

We had not walked for long before we saw a building to the right of the road. Ancient brick and masonry, gnawed and tumbled by the elements; but in places the roof still held, and its four corners were sturdy against the wind. We squeezed through a collapsed door frame so narrow, I was afraid it would crash down onto us. Inside we bumped into old furniture and tripped over lumps of rotting cloth.

“If I had some matches or lucifer, we could burn this,” Jane lamented, shoving at an old table until it crashed against the wall.

“At least there’s no wind,” Miss Scarlet said, shivering. She began pulling at oddments of old cloth and drifts of leaves, until she had made a pallet big enough for all of us. We lay down, groaning and trying not to think about food: Jane and I front-to-front, with Miss Scarlet in the middle and Jane’s coat draped over most of us. So we slept, until the Boy came to me with his lovely face and revenant’s hands and drove my sleep away.

It was a dismal rising we had that morning. Miss Scarlet was so weakened by fatigue and hunger that she could not move. In my arms she felt like a dead thing already. It was all I could do not to close my eyes and huddle deeper into the well of rags that was our bed. Only Jane staggered to her feet, groaning and rubbing her hands, her breath pocking the darkness with gray.

“Damn! We’d better get moving—”

I lay there for several minutes, trying to will the day away. Finally I stumbled up and followed her outside, carrying Miss Scarlet. Without speaking, we headed back toward the road and started walking.

Within minutes the cold had eaten through my soles so that my feet burned. But a little longer and I could no longer feel them at all. Miss Scarlet dozed fitfully in my arms, or else stared up at me with a child’s blank, miserable eyes. Jane went on bravely ahead of us. I could hear her muttering and swearing to herself. It was only when she glanced back at me that I could see the fear and weariness that stained her face.

The wind had shifted again during the night. Now it was bitterly cold. The broken tarmac glittered painfully at our feet, and the harsh light made it too clear that there was nothing before us but endless miles of the old highway. Overhead hung cinerous gray clouds, the color of sloughed flesh, but the light was strong, with a relentless midwinter clarity that made my eyes ache. I gritted my teeth and hugged Miss Scarlet more tightly to my chest.

“Got to be something along here,” Jane muttered. We were taking turns wearing her coat. She stopped to drape it over my shoulders, pulling it carefully around Miss Scarlet. “Ascendants still use this road sometimes, there must be some kind of way-station somewhere—”

I nodded, too weary to argue. I was thinking that yesterday we should have turned back and retraced our steps to the City. Now it was too late. We would die long before the janissaries had the chance to capture us. Jane seemed to read my thoughts. Silently she turned away.

I don’t know how long we walked. Hours maybe, certainly all morning and perhaps well into afternoon. I began to see phantom shapes at the corner of my eyes, threads of white like worms wriggling through the air. It wasn’t until I bumped into Jane that I was shaken from my reverie and realized the truth of it.

“Snow,” I whispered. I turned one raw palm upward.

“Don’t stop.” She tugged at my arm. Miss Scarlet’s eyes opened and she stared up at us blearily.

“Is it a full house?” she asked. “Is it my cue?” Jane gave me a warning glance and pulled me after her.

That was the worst journey of all. Exhausted beyond belief, with no hope of finding warmth or shelter or food, and still fighting through the wind and cold with the snow whirling all about us. A few steps ahead of me trudged Jane, head bowed against the wind, her back and shoulders white. I still wore her coat but could feel no gratitude, nor resentment when she took it back again. I felt nothing but lancing cold. Once I stumbled and fell, and would have lain there until I died had Jane not come back for me. I could see no reason to go on: with Justice dead, and the City taken, and the three of us to perish in the wilderness after having endured so much. But Jane pulled me to my feet and slung one arm over my shoulder, yanking her coat around us and taking Scarlet from my arms. For a long wordless time we staggered on like that. If we traveled more than a mile or two, it was a miracle.

And then a miracle did occur. Miss Scarlet suddenly opened her eyes and raised her head, then weakly pulled at my sleeve.

“Wendy,” she croaked. “The fire—mind the fire—”

I coughed and glanced sideways at Jane, wondering how to deal with this new delirium. But Jane had stopped. Her coat slid from our shoulders to the ground, unheeded.

“Jane.” I shivered, terrified that madness had seized her as well. “Jane—”

“…fire,” murmured Miss Scarlet.

“She’s right,” said Jane. Her eyes were wide and she shook like a dog, snow flying from her arms and shoulders. “Wendy! Look—”

I thought she was crazy, pointing to where eddies of snow whipped through the trees. But then I took a few shambling steps forward, and the smell came to me, so acrid it made my throat burn. My eyes teared as I turned to Jane.

“Smoke! But where—”

She began running, sliding through the snow and once falling to her knees. I bent to retrieve the coat and tried to run after her, but it was like running in a dream: it seemed I scarcely moved. Within a few minutes I had lost sight of them. But then I could hear Miss Scarlet’s plaintive voice and Jane shouting hoarsely.

“Wendy! It’s a house, come on —”

I kicked through the snow, following the road where it made a sharp tack to the right; and there it was. A many-storied house like a child’s sickbed vision of Home. Tall, of ancient red brick that had paled to pink over the centuries, its ivied eaves now hoary and rattling in the wind. Several long narrow clapboard ells ran behind it, and the myriad windows in its brick face glowed as though they had been cut from sheets of brass. From its roof a number of chimneys thrust defiantly at the storm, and thick smoke poured cheerfully from several of these.

I stood dumbfounded. Jane had stopped too and was staring at a sign flapping from a tall iron post.

SEVEN CHIMNEYS FINE FOOD AND LODGING SINCE 1818

I started to laugh. Jane looked back at me, her red face cracked by a grin.

“Come on,” she yelled, and headed for the door.

“This is insane,” I said through chattering teeth as I followed her. It was a heavy oaken door with an ancient brass knocker shaped like a hand. When Jane let it fall against the wood, it scarcely made a sound. I looked around until I saw a doorbell and pressed it, my finger sticking to the metal. From inside echoed a shrill, unhappy buzzing. Jane stamped like an impatient horse and kicked at the door. From her arms Miss Scarlet stared up in confusion, asking after performance times, until Jane had to shush her. “Fine food and lodging would be wasted on us—” I added through chattering teeth. “If—”

“Shut up. Someone’s coming.”

The door swung open. Without waiting Jane swept inside, gasping with relief. I stood for another moment on the steps, until through the snow and steam I could make out a dark figure there in front of me, shaking its head and hastily motioning me inside.

I stumbled after Jane and heard the door slam shut behind me. A guttural shout; the figure seemed to be calling for help. The voice was hoarse and somehow familiar, but I could focus on little besides warmth and the carpet beneath my feet, thick and soft as hay, and the snow dripping in streams from my legs.

Whoever had opened the door cried out again, wordlessly. Another moment and I heard a second voice.

“What on earth is it, Fossa—Sweet Jesus! Giles, come here, hurry!—Fossa, help get them into the parlor—”

This second voice was commanding but anxious. I was absurdly grateful at how worried it sounded. Strong arms gathered me up as though I were a bundle of rags. Uncommonly strong arms; I felt coarse hair bristling against my cheek, and a dusty sweetish odor like dry leaves. Then I was dropped someplace where all was hot and bright. Someone peeled off my ragged clothes—

“Good Lord! It’s a girl—”

—and wrapped me in a heavy soft blanket. Dimly I could hear Jane choking out some sort of explanation—

“Lost—storm—soldiers in the City—”

But that commanding voice quieted her, soothing, “Not now, not now, sleep, child, sleep—”

And then Miss Scarlet piped up, her voice delirious with fear and cold.

“The Cathedral! Oh Goddess, save us!”

“Geneslave!” came a hoarse cry from the great figure that had carried me, and Miss Scarlet whimpered.

“Hush, Fossa—” the other voice rang out. The guttural voice grew still. “Don’t worry, little one, you’re safe here, just try to sleep—”

More soothing noises; and finally, blissful silence.

It was the pain that woke me: my hands and feet felt as though they were being sawn off. With a moan I opened my eyes and found myself lying on a long, low couch in front of a huge open hearth where a fire was blazing.

“Ah! Another sleeper awakes!”

I blinked, shading my face from the fire and coughing a little. The sweet scent of burning applewood filled my nose, and a gray scrim of smoke hung over everything—obviously the fireplace didn’t draw very well. But after a moment I could focus enough to see my surroundings.

We were in a large room, with paneled walls of real wood and much furniture, large and ancient but very worn. Heavy tables whose elaborately carved legs were mended with metal struts and joints; kilim-covered hassocks balanced precariously upon three legs; a cracked fire screen leaning against one wall and behind it the blank black face of a video monitor. In the corners lurked more ghostly furniture, covered with white sheets that age had darkened to the color of weak tea. There were many windows, reaching nearly to the ceiling. Outside the storm continued, snow battering against the glass. The casements shook as the wind rose and fell. Looking outside, I shivered, and tore my gaze back to the room.

Over the fireplace hung a huge painted canvas, as tall as I was, showing a scene in the Romantic style of the twenty-third century. Riders in black and scarlet leaned over the heads of their mounts, tugging at the reins as they urged the animals in pursuit of a lumbering figure that seemed half-man, half-ape. Behind them a lurid crimson sky had grayed to pink, aided no doubt by that poorly vented fireplace. It was a disturbing painting, though at first I couldn’t pin down why. I stared at it, still half-asleep; then with a start I sat up. I had suddenly focused on the images, realized that the creatures bearing those hunters were themselves half-human, their faces distorted by the bits in their mouths. The effect was grotesquely crude but effective: a primitive form of antigeneslave propaganda. I grimaced and looked away.

My gaze fell upon the mantel beneath the picture. It was of black marble, and studded with a number of whitish globes, a little larger than my two fists. I couldn’t make out what they were—stones, perhaps, or maybe some kind of pottery, pocked with holes and cracks as though they had been hastily repaired.

“You admire our artwork?” a voice asked kindly.

I turned. In the middle of the room a man lounged in an armchair. Beside him, in another, smaller chair, sat Miss Scarlet, a tartan blanket wrapped around her so that only her wrinkled face showed. Without her accustomed crinolines and bonnet, she looked more like a small wild creature than she ever had, except for the tiny glass balanced daintily in one small black paw.

“Wendy! Are you better? Jane is still asleep, over there behind you, and—Oh!— forgive me—”

This was to the man, who looked from me to the chimpanzee with calm bemusement. “This is Wendy Wanders,” she went on in her best formal tones. She lifted her head; the tartan fell back to reveal a short stiff mane of black fur. “Wendy, this is Giles.”

I sat up, pulling the blanket around me and feeling overly conscious of how naked I was beneath it. “Giles,” I said. “You are very— oh —”

I gasped and drew back onto the couch. On the floor at my feet something moved: such an immense thing that at first it had seemed just a grizzled blur, a carpet or another blanket strewn before the fire. Now it gave a weird ululating cry that I realized was a yawn, stretched, and stood.

It was an aardman. Nearly identical to the ones that had acted as my guards in the Engulfed Cathedral—that was why it had sounded, and smelled, familiar to me. Man-size, but with powerful forearms knotted with muscle beneath short bristling fur. Its face was a canine mask: blunt snout, heavy brow beneath which intelligent dark eyes regarded me unblinking. Atop its skull small pointed ears ticked forward, as though it strained to hear. Recalling how its fellows had bound me and brought me before the Aviator, I began to shiver uncontrollably.

The aardman stared at me with those fulvous eyes. I could smell it, a ripe musky scent seeming to grow heavier, thicker, until it would choke me. Seeing my fear, the aardman made a low sound, deep in its throat, then extended its bent-knuckled hands toward me.

“No harm,” it growled. I shuddered and drew back in my seat.

“He means he will do you no harm,” the man said softly. “His name is Fossa. He lives with us—not as a slave, but as a friend. Please don’t fear him.”

I glanced a little desperately at Miss Scarlet. In her tartan blanket and with that little glass balanced in her hand, she looked calm enough; but her black eyes betrayed her own unease. I turned back to the man.

“Who are you?”

He leaned forward in his chair. A middle-aged man of medium height, sturdy and with ash-blond hair that nearly hid the gray that streaked it near his temples. He had a fine-boned face with slanted blue eyes, a few of the dark spots that show where one has labored too long and unprotected beneath the poisonous sun. For all that, his face was curiously unlined. Indeed, there was about him an odd sort of youthfulness—his movements were quick and lithe, his voice strong and clear as a boy’s. Only his eyes and graying hair betrayed him. He wore trousers of archaic cut, of heavy checked wool, and a heavy woolen sweater. His hair was long and hung in a braid down his back. He smiled and raised three fingers to his mouth. “Greetings, cousin.”

“You’re a Paphian!” I had never seen a courtesan of his age before, except bent beneath the weight of a palanquin or begging before one of the seven Paphian Houses on the Hill Magdalena Ardent. “But—you’re old.”

He grinned. The aardman made a deep guttural sound that might have been laughter. When I tried to stammer an apology the man cut me off. “Please—it’s been twenty years since I left the City,” he began, when—

“Twenty- three,” interrupted another voice—that of the first man who had brought us inside. I turned to see a figure silhouetted in the doorway. “He was very good at his work, too. Lysandra Saint-Alaban nearly had a fit when I stole him away from them.”

A Saint-Alaban! That was the Paphian House of my lover Justice—

“You were—did you know—” I said, then stopped. Because of course he would not, if he had left there twenty-some years ago—a few years even before Justice was born.

“I am Trevor Mallory,” the second man announced. As he entered the room, the aardman’s body shook, and I saw where its vestigial tail twitched in anxious greeting. “I hope Giles and Fossa have made you comfortable?”

His drawling voice belied a formal air, in keeping with his clothing: a long haik of sueded leather, heavily embroidered and hung with tassels of yellow silk. I thought he might be some ten or fifteen years older than his companion, but as with Giles it was difficult to guess his age. His hair was white, cut very close to his head, and he had a fine-trimmed white beard. His skin was pink and unlined as a child’s. Gold and silver wires threaded his ears, and he wore a narrow silver enhancer across his eyes. A few feet from the fireplace he paused, removed the enhancer, and cleaned it with a slip of white cloth. A smooth membrane of flesh covered the sockets where his eyes should have been, pierced by two glittering optics that glowed bright blue. I stared at them, marveling. In the City of Trees, not even the Curators had prosthetics that could be said to work successfully. I hadn’t seen an enhancer of any sort since I fled HEL. Carefully he placed it back over his eyes.

“The heat fogs it up,” he said apologetically. “I’ve tried to get a new one, but you know how it is.”

From behind me came a faint rustling. I glanced back and saw Jane sitting up in another chair, clutching a heavy comforter to her breast. She stared wide-eyed at Trevor and Giles, then at the aardman, finally at me.

“Ah, here’s the last one,” Giles announced. A gust of wind rattled the windows, sending a whirl of smoke and ashes from the fireplace to fill the room. Fossa started, growling. Coughing, Giles crossed to the fire and prodded it with a rusted poker. The aardman watched him, then slowly settled back to the floor. He sat there, his legs drawn under him like a dog’s, but with head raised and his chin resting upon one large hand.

Trevor turned to me, his enhancer glinting softly in the firelight. “Would you like something hot to drink? Tea, or we could heat some wine. Or there’s brandy—not very good, but it doesn’t seem to have killed your friend yet.”

Miss Scarlet smiled somewhat nervously and raised her glass. “It’s very good, I recommend it.”

I asked for brandy. Giles passed me on his way to the liquor cabinet. The smell of his sweat cut through that of wood-smoke; but there was another scent as well, something like lemons but more pungent. In a moment it was gone, swallowed by the smoke.

Jane refused anything and asked after her clothes and pistol.

“They’re drying in the kitchen,” Trevor explained. “Your gun’s there, too—it’s safe, we’ve got quite enough of our own, thank you.”

Jane frowned but said nothing. Trevor yawned noisily, then settled into a large armchair near the fire. Its torn leather arms had been patched with plastic tape, but he fit comfortably in it and sighed as he leaned back, adjusting his enhancer. “Now: who goes first? You or us?”

“Oh, them, I think,” Giles said airily. He grinned and handed me a brandy snifter. I took a sip and winced. The liquor was raw but powerful, and had a pleasantly woodsy aftertaste. “We put it up ourselves, but that was before the grapes were blighted—what was it, ten years ago?—a viral strike right here, the very first if you can believe it, we’ve been so lucky. The animals were all right but the plants died. They’ve still never come back as they were before.” He turned to me, his blue eyes wide. “But you—where did you all come from?”

I hesitated, wondering if it was wise to betray our history. But it seemed we had no choice, and certainly our hosts appeared friendly. Even the aardman on the floor sat calmly, staring up at me with sharp foxy eyes.

So we told them, Miss Scarlet and I interrupting each other at first, Jane gradually cutting in with her own details of the fall of the City of Trees: the Mad Aviator who had commandeered the armory in the Cathedral; the bloody rituals he had devised there, setting up my twin, Raphael Miramar, as some kind of dark god; the murder of so many innocent Paphians and other revelers during the feast of Winterlong. And finally, what had seemed to be the revelation of some true god on Saint Alaban’s Hill, where the Aviator had died.

“We left the City then,” Miss Scarlet finished. She tilted her head and sighed. “We have no idea, really, what we left behind us. When we looked back, it seemed the City was in flames—”

“Ascendant janissaries,” Jane said darkly. Despite refusing the brandy, she had warmed enough to our hosts to move her chair closer to the little circle gathered in front of the fire. “We saw them—fougas and other airships. Gryphons, I think—Wendy recognized them from HEL—”

“HEL?” Giles said sharply. He and Trevor exchanged glances, and Fossa’s ears pricked up. “The Human Engineering Laboratory?”

I glared at Jane, then nodded reluctantly. The men looked at me with new interest, Giles frowning a little. When after a minute they still said nothing, I pulled the hair back from my temples to display the scars left from the experimental surgery I had been subjected to by Dr. Harrow.

“You were interned there?” Trevor asked. I knew there were no human eyes behind that enhancer, but still I could feel his gaze on me, a heat that was almost painful.

“Ye-es.”

Hesitantly, I explained something of my history to them. My autism and the terrible price I had paid for its “cure”; my participation as a subject in the so-called Harrow Effect. Emma Harrow had been my teacher at HEL. She had reclaimed my mind from the shadow-world of autism. She had also made me into a monster, one of a battalion of children whose minds were manipulated for the Ascendant Autocracy’s own ends. I spoke of Dr. Harrow’s dream research, her work in deliberately inducing multiple personalities in children, and how I had been used as a neural conduit through which patients relived certain traumas in hopes of overcoming their effects. But I said nothing of the suicides I had provoked in my patients. Nor did I mention Dr. Harrow’s suicide, or the demonic image of the Boy in the Tree, the hypostate I had somehow been imprinted with during Dr. Harrow’s own forbidden experiments with me. I did not know if they would believe me. I remembered Justice’s dubious expression when I first told him how the Boy had come to me: a sinister occult figure thousands of years old, the living dream-image of Death that haunted my dreams and waking alike, and which seemed to want to use me as a channel for loosing some ancient darkness upon the City.

But the Boy had fled me at the Engulfed Cathedral. I believed he was dead, if such a thing can die; or that he had returned to whatever infernal place had spawned him. I still did not understand that such dark gods do not die; that they only wait in the cold spaces between the stars, and take as hosts those beings, human or otherwise, who are careless enough to welcome them.

If only I had told Giles and Trevor then what I knew! But I was afraid and weary with grief, and anxious to end my tale. When at last I finished, the room remained silent for some time. Miss Scarlet sighed deeply. Curled in a chair beside her, Jane bit her fingernails and frowned at the aardman. A cold draft cut through the heavy air. The fire snapped; more smoke filled the room. Giles stood, coughing. He adjusted the damper, then poured himself another brandy.

Alone in his armchair, Trevor removed his enhancer and sat with his head tilted back. Set within the ruined hollows of his eyes, the two gleaming optics sent motes of blue flickering across the ceiling. He tapped the enhancer on the edge of his chair absently, his mouth set in a half-smile. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking, but there was something strange about that smile; something fanatical, almost demonic. I was grateful he had no human eyes. I don’t know if I could have borne gazing into them and seeing what fires lit his mind.

In front of the hearth the aardman Fossa yawned, long pink tongue unfurling, and covered his mouth with one great misshapen hand. Giles finished his brandy and set the empty glass on a table. Turning to his partner, he said, “Margalis Tast’annin. The one she calls the Aviator. It must be the same man.”

Trevor nodded, still silent. Fossa growled softly. The man leaned forward, replacing the enhancer and turning its blank gaze upon me.

“Well. This is all very interesting. You see, I have also had some experience in HEL.”

He laughed at my expression. “Oh yes! Other people besides you have escaped and lived to tell the tale. I was a neurosurgeon there for many years—their finest surgeon, if I may say so. As a matter of fact, I am quite familiar with what you refer to as the Harrow Effect. I was one of the researchers involved with the earliest stages of the project. This was many, many years before your time.”

“But—how could you?” I stammered. Trevor shook a finger at me and smiled.

“The world is smaller than you think, Wendy. Over the centuries so many people have died, and those of us who remain—well, if you achieve a certain level of proficiency, a certain radiance, if you will—why then, you will meet the others like yourself. Everything that rises must converge.”

He paused, his mouth twitching into an odd smile. “Oh, yes, I knew all about your project. Even before Emma Harrow and the other NASNA people were brought into it. I had left the facility, but they recalled me, to help screen possible subjects during the selection process. Then Emma and I had a falling out over her methodology.

“Good god! They were sending janissaries into the wilderness searching for likely children to kidnap. Buying them from prostitutes in the capital. Dragging infants from their mothers, dragging the mothers along too, when they could.” He scowled, and I sank a little deeper into my chair. “Like with the geneslaves—this horrible notion that everything in the world exists solely for the Autocracy’s pleasure. People and animals mere toys for them to take apart and reassemble at will! I’ve never gotten used to their research methods, and I’m too old now to change my ideas about things like that. I prefer trying to reverse the surgical efforts of the Ascendancy, or working with the brains of those who are peacefully deceased. So I— retired, for good—and returned here. My family home: over six hundred years worth of Mallorys have lived at Seven Chimneys.”

I shook my head. “But—that’s incredible! When were you at HEL?”

“A long time ago. Before you were born. I met Giles shortly after I left.”

“They let you go?”

Trevor smiled grimly. “Oh, they weren’t very happy about it. Researchers for the Autocracy are like military personnel; one doesn’t just quit.”

“They were afraid of him,” Giles broke in. “They didn’t dare try to make him stay—”

I glanced over at Jane and Miss Scarlet. The chimpanzee had crawled from her chair and into her old Keeper’s lap, and huddled there in her tartan like a child’s toy. “Why—why were they afraid of you?” she asked.

Trevor smiled at the quaver in Miss Scarlet’s voice. “I daresay some people were afraid of your friend Wendy here when she left,” he said lightly. As he turned toward me, a cobalt gleam escaped from beneath his enhancer’s silvery rim. It gave him the look of some ancient cycladic statue, with his eyeless face and smooth skin. “But I held a certain amount of—well, you might call it seniority—and I had contacts with the Prime Ascendancy in Wichita, and the peons at HEL didn’t really want to cross them. And you know, of course, that there was trouble at HEL—?”

I shrugged uneasily. “I knew the Ascendants took over for Dr. Harrow.”

“That’s right—but not for very long. The NASNA force brought geneslaves with them—some energumens, the usual contingent of sexslaves and aardmen. This started rumors at the facility, that the energumens were going to be used instead of human subjects, and that the remaining human subjects would be killed. The energumens rioted. Several empaths and even some of the staff fled, but many of them sided with the geneslaves. They were all executed when Ascendant troops were called in. Only a skeleton staff remains there now, under protection of a janissary guard.

“But you understand, this is merely a single indicator of the changes that are happening everywhere now. There have been other rebellions, in other facilities around the world. The Ascendants are losing control of their territories. Those who remain at places like the Human Engineering Laboratory are desperate to keep some semblance of order. At HEL I know they work to redeem the work begun by Emma Harrow and her associates.”

He fell silent. A brooding expression clouded his face. I leaned back, stunned. Energumens and geneslaves at HEL? I remembered my friend Anna, one of the other empaths who had fled into the City with Gligor and Dr. Silverthorn. Had she known of this rebellion? Is that why she had risked leaving HEL? I shifted in my chair and pulled my blanket close to me. The room was starting to take on the contours of a place in a nightmare. The backdrop of smoke and leaping flames; Trevor’s impassive face beneath its enhancer; the faces of my friends pinched with exhaustion. There was a strange dreamlike clarity to all of this; and to Giles’s peculiar calm, and the snow beating relentlessly at the windows, and Fossa crouched on his haunches like the effigy of some half-human god.

Miss Scarlet broke the silence, turning to Trevor and smiling anxiously. “And so you retired from medicine and started an inn,” she exclaimed. “How nice!”

Trevor looked surprised, then nodded. “Well, er, yes. Of course, that’s exactly what I did.”

Giles gazed fondly at his partner. “This place has been an inn forever,” he said. “It’s almost as though the Mallorys just pass through so there’ll be someone to keep it company. Sometimes I think the house would go on even if we weren’t here to mind things.”

“But who comes here?” Jane shook her head, pointing at the fireplace, the ancient but well-kept video monitor, the chairs and tables beneath their linen shrouds. “It just—well, it all seems out of place. You can’t get much traffic—even in the City we seldom saw visitors.”

Giles shrugged, but his mouth seemed drawn as he replied, “Oh, you would be surprised. Ascendants pass through here more often than you’d think—business with HEL, and there was some trade with the City.”

“Those soldiers, then,” said Jane. “The ones we saw as we were leaving the City. Did they—did they come from here?”

Trevor shook his head. “We don’t accommodate troops. Commanders stay here. Special Agents, Imperators. Ascendant Governors, if they have the need to.”

I shuddered. Had we walked into a trap, then—a house whose owners were in collusion with the very people we were trying to flee? Ascendant Governors. Commanders…

People like the Mad Aviator.

But then why had Trevor told us about the geneslave rebellion at HEL? If Trevor and Giles didn’t share our terror of the Ascendants, neither did they show any support for them. Trevor had worked at HEL, but he had disapproved of its methods and left. And I couldn’t believe that a Paphian—particularly a Saint-Alaban—would ever be in collusion with the Ascendants.

And then I remembered rumors I had heard about the Mad Aviator. It was my first day in the City of Trees. Justice and I were at the house of Lalagé Saint-Alaban; he was begging her for gossip, any news of what had befallen those in the City while he had been an Aide at HEL—

“There was trouble, Justice. A new Governor was sent here — but the Governors will never hear from him again… .”

That Governor had been Tast’annin. The Curators had learned of his coming, somehow, and had been ready to betray him when he arrived in the City. Who told them? I glanced at Giles, who leaned against the mantel with arms crossed, a thoughtful expression on his amiable face. Then I looked aside at Trevor Mallory, whose family had owned this inn for centuries. I’d seen nothing else standing between here and the City of Trees. Where else would Tast’annin have stayed?

I swallowed, my mouth dry. The thought that they had betrayed him was more unsettling than the notion that they had not. You would have to be very brave, or very powerful, to set yourself against the Ascendant Autocracy. You would have to be insane to go up against Margalis Tast’annin. I took a long sip from my brandy and stared at the floor.

“You knew Tast’annin,” I said at last.

Giles grimaced, baring his teeth like an animal. “It will be the best news we’ve had in a year if we knew him—if he’s really dead, as you say.” He glanced admiringly at Jane, who blushed and looked away.

“He’s dead,” Miss Scarlet said firmly. “Jane has a very good eye.”

I recalled the frequency with which Jane’s pistol misfired but refrained from commenting. “You said janissaries pass through here? On their way to the City?”

Our hosts exchanged a look. Fossa arched his long spine and straightened into the half-crouch that aardmen favor over standing upright. After a long moment Trevor admitted, “Yes. There was a satellite-tracking station near here once, two hundred years ago. It’s gone now but the road’s still there. There were underground bunkers as well, with enough room to house fifty or sixty Aviators. The Ascendants still utilize them sometimes, for training missions.”

“Or for planning an attack on the City of Trees,” said Jane.

Giles nodded.

“And the commanders—they stay here?” My voice sounded accusing.

Trevor shrugged. “We need to supplement what we can grow here for ourselves,” he said coolly, “What other traffic is there, these days? Once or twice a year they come through, give us enough in trade or currency—”

“And news,” cut in Giles.

“And news—enough to keep us going until the next time. For the rest, we trade with the towns to the west—”

“There are towns out here?” Now it was Miss Scarlet who interrupted, but Jane and I were no less amazed.

“Of course!” Giles laughed. “Did you think the world ended at the edge of your City?”

From Miss Scarlet’s expression it was clear that was exactly what she believed. I sat in embarrassed silence, but Jane said curtly, “Well, where does it end, then?”

Trevor looked from Jane to me, eyebrows raised, as if waiting for a joke to be revealed. Finally he said, “Well, it doesn’t. If you mean, Where do the people stop living —well, there are three settlements within a week’s travel from here. Less, if you can get your hands on an autovehicle or aviette.”

“People,” Miss Scarlet murmured, her black eyes huge. “I had no idea.”

“Sperryville and Luray and Cassandra,” said Giles. “There’s more, too, the farther west you go. In the mountains,” he added. “Very strange, those mountains. In Cassandra they live in caves.”

Jane sat up. “Caves! I’d like to see that.”

A low rumble escaped from Fossa. His amber eyes narrowed and for an instant he looked less canine, his mouth drawn into a grin. Then it passed, and his features settled back into their accustomed grimace.

“Not me,” shuddered Miss Scarlet. “We did Macbeth once, set in a sort of cave. It made me quite ill.”

“Cassandra,” I repeated. I frowned and looked at Miss Scarlet, who shook her head.

“I’m afraid it means nothing to me,” she said.

“Never heard of it,” said Jane.

Trevor stood and crossed to the fireplace. He rested his hands on the mantel and absently took one of those odd globes into his hands, caressing it as though he weighed its worth. Only when he turned back to us did I see that what he held was a human skull. On the shelf behind him its fellows stared with gaping eye sockets, as though suddenly betrayed. I was so startled that I spilled my drink.

“The town of Cassandra once housed a research facility,” Trevor pronounced in a deep voice, as though delivering a lecture. “Quite similar to HEL, as a matter of fact, but a much older compound, nestled out there in the mountains. Far enough from the capital that they could carry on their work without fear of contaminating the City’s population, but near enough to be considered part of the whole military-biological complex.”

“What—what did they do?” I stammered.

“Geneslaves. Cassandra was the first facility in North America to carry out bioengineering on a huge scale—for the purpose of pure research, I mean, not merely as a commercial or military venture. Some of the effects created there have never been duplicated.”

As he spoke, the aardman began to make a low noise deep in its throat. The flesh curled back from its mouth, showing sharp white teeth and blackish gums.

“Burdock,” he snarled.

Giles snapped something, a phrase I didn’t catch, and Fossa grew silent.

Trevor nodded. The firelight sliced through the crook of his arm to touch with dark gold the hollow eyes of the skull he cradled. “It was the home of Luther Burdock. His compound was there, near the caverns.”

He paused, as though waiting for me to show some recognition of the name. Outside, the storm sent branches scraping at the windows, and I could hear the wind screeching like a wild thing trapped in the chimney. I tore my gaze from Trevor’s face and shrugged.

“I’ve never heard of him.”

He turned to Miss Scarlet. “And you?” he asked softly. “Does the name mean nothing to you, Miss Scarlet?”

When I glanced at her, I gasped. The chimpanzee had reared up in Jane’s lap, her lips drawn back in a snarl. Her mane of stiff hair stood straight up, and even from where I sat, I could catch the ammoniac scent of her fear.

“Luther Burdock!” she hissed. Her long fingers flew to her throat and temples, clutching at the thick fur. Beneath the dark hair was a series of raised scars, where long ago Ascendant researchers at the Zoo had performed the experiments that left her with human speech and thought, but imprisoned within the body of a monkey. “His ’files, they made us watch his ’files—”

Her voice trailed off into wordless chatter. Fossa cocked his head and whined softly, and Jane hugged the chimpanzee close to her.

“Who is he?” I demanded. “Scarlet, tell me!”

Miss Scarlet shuddered, saying nothing, but Trevor nodded. “Geneslaves,” he said. He held the skull out at arm’s length, eyeing it critically as he added in a matter-of-fact tone, “They all know of him, somehow. Either they have seen ’files of him, or heard his name, or—”

I started to demand a better explanation than this, when Giles broke in smoothly.

“Perhaps this isn’t the time, Trevor. Perhaps we should show our guests to their rooms. I’ll start dinner.”

“No!” I said. “I think you should tell us—”

But Giles and Trevor had already started for the door.

“I’d like my clothes,” Jane called after them, her face pinched. “ And my weapon.”

“Of course, of course.” Giles paused beside his partner and took the skull from Trevor’s hand. “Marlena Hawksbill?” he asked, placing it back upon the mantel with its fellows.

“Sextus Burchard, I think,” said Trevor. In her little chair Miss Scarlet pulled the tartan more closely around her frail shoulders. Her rage had faded; once more she looked like some Ascendant child’s toy. I bit my lip, feeling an agony of sullen anger and dismay. I longed fiercely for those powers I had lost, the rage and strength that might have protected us, gone now, all gone….

“Come.” Giles walked to the door and paused, waiting for us. Jane stood and wrapped herself in her blanket like a cape, sweeping from the room with her head in the air. Miss Scarlet followed her more cautiously, almost fearfully. As she passed where he crouched upon the floor, the aardman Fossa stood. He stared down at Miss Scarlet with intelligent wolvish eyes. She stopped to stare back up at him. He was three times her size, graceless where she moved with the elegance of a courtesan; and yet—

And yet suddenly I could see the affinity between them, something older even than their bond as geneslaves. At HEL I had seen holofiles of cave paintings, eerie drawings from a site in Uropa that had been destroyed during the Third Shining. Tiny black mannikins flinging spears at fleeing ibex; crouched figures stalking something with bulging eyes and vestigial tail, something that looked very much like the aardman Fossa. I had paid little attention to those ’files—the paintings were gone, after all, turned to ash and steam along with all those other treasures from the Magdalenian epoch.

But now I felt as though one of those cave paintings had come to life and moved in the smoky firelight before me. Only Miss Scarlet held no weapon, and the creature that stared down at her was nodding slowly as it growled, “No harm—no harm—”

In the hallway Jane stared back impatiently.

“Come on, then,” she snapped. I rose and left the room, hugging my blanket tightly across my chest. Fossa padded after me, and Miss Scarlet beside him. As we walked down the hall, I was surprised to see that weak daylight now shone upon the frayed carpets. The shrieking wind had died away. Outside, it seemed, the storm had moved on. Inside Seven Chimneys I felt as though it had just begun.

We were given three adjoining rooms in the upper story of one of the long ells that extended from the back of the main house. Small rooms, probably not the finest at Seven Chimneys, but clean and comfortably furnished with tired furniture that looked accustomed to its surroundings. My chamber had a small fireplace—“A Jeffersonian fireplace,” Giles explained proudly; “this was part of Virginia once”—and overlooked sloping fields that in the distance surrendered to woodland, all now lost beneath the snow. Solar panels were fixed to the roof below amid a spiky array of antennae. I was surprised to see a video monitor beneath the window, small but with all its dials and screens intact. I pressed a switch, and waves of gray and white covered one screen. Hissing filled the air, but no images. After a moment I turned it off.

There were other odd things as well. A kinetic sculpture in the bathroom, showing a young man coyly disrobing and ducking into a spray of water. Talking books that whispered long-forgotten titles when I picked them up: Jane Eyre, Descent into Hell, Magya Pliys 754. There was even some kind of telefile, much larger and older than any I’d ever seen, but so shiny and clean, it seemed never to have been used. Its yellow plastic headpiece fit snugly over my temples. When I clicked it on, I heard faint music, all clicks and sirens and high-pitched voices. Warhola Amarosa, a late twenty-third-century castrato opera. Two summers ago Gilgor, one of the other empaths at HEL, had played it incessantly. I removed the headset and stared at it, frowning. Where was the transmission coming from? I knew that Curators used to broadcast to radio receivers within the City, but surely such transmissions had been curtailed by the occupation. Who would be broadcasting something as trivial as an opera if the City was under siege? But if the transmission didn’t originate in the City, where did it come from? Puzzled, I replaced the headset and explored the rest of the room.

Everything appeared to be of a similar vintage as the opera, perhaps one hundred fifty years old. I picked up a holo chip the size of a pebble and held it to my eye, saw a miniature and incredibly detailed landscape of sunset cliffs and azure sea, with archaic aviettes scuttling across the sky like beetles. There was a machine that played back a recording of Trevor and Giles arguing about house repairs, and a vocoder that, when I spoke into it, translated my words into Tagalog. I went from one corner of the room to the next, continually astounded to find objects so old that still worked, that hadn’t been destroyed or remanded by the Ascendants. The vocoders and ’files and machines all had the air of being stockpiled, as though Seven Chimneys were some sort of museum; and perhaps that was the truth of it. Perhaps Trevor Mallory’s family had somehow managed to keep all these things safe and hidden through the years. Or perhaps they kept them here expressly for those high-ranking Ascendants who visited once or twice a year. But that seemed unlikely. If these things were really intended for use by Ascendant guests, they wouldn’t be hidden in the back bedrooms. Still, who else would use such things?

In the City I had seen how the Curators managed their collections of ancient objects, archaic computers and navigation systems and engines jumbled up with sarcophagi and the petrified remains of ancient archosaurs and other extinct creatures. Everything treasured and catalogued and studied, but all with their original uses forgotten or perverted over the centuries. Even items that had been in common use at HEL—’file chips, torchieres, simple prosthetics—were in the City used primarily as ornaments by Paphians, or battered among the Curators as mere oddments.

Yet here in the wilderness two solitary men had retained the use of a telefile—and the fact that it picked up transmissions meant that somebody else had one, too. I frowned, flicking at a robotic monad the size of my little finger. It buzzed and retreated back onto the shelf it shared with toothbrushes and empty morpha tins. Suddenly I felt exhausted. The first stirrings of the grief I had held in check began to creep through the crumbling layers of my fatigue. I turned to dress for dinner.

My clothes were laid out on the spindle-bed, dry now if no cleaner or warmer than they had been. But beside them were other garments. A blouse of thick buttery suede, trimmed with bone-and-glass buttons; a long flowing skirt of some kind of jacquard, crimson and deep blue and shot with gold thread. There were high woolen boots, too, with heavy leather soles, knit in an intricate pattern of red and green and white. I sat for a long time, holding the blouse and stroking it. I thought of Justice: how I always had traveled with him disguised as a boy; how it had been months and months since I had worn woman’s clothing—not since leaving HEL. I picked up the torn tunic I had worn at Winterlong and brought it to my face, smelling ashes and blood and smoke. Without warning, grief overwhelmed me: like nausea, waves of it so powerful, I could scarcely breathe. I fell onto the bed and sobbed, until sorrow gave way to rage and I ripped the tunic end to end, clawing at my face and then burying it in a pillow so that I could scream without being heard, over and over and over again.

A name: Justice. And another—

Aidan.

The name I had used in the City of Trees. But Justice was dead now, buried somewhere in the bowels of the Engulfed Cathedral along with Anna and Dr. Silverthom and all those other victims of the Mad Aviator. All of them dead, or imprisoned, except for myself and my two companions. But I felt as though I alone had survived, Wendy Wanders, Subject 117; no longer lovely or powerful, no longer safe within the citadel my mind had erected around itself since my tormented childhood.

Alone, alone, alone!

I wanted to shriek, recalling the Cathedral in flames, and the City itself like some lovely canvas, curled and blackened, burning, burning. All of it gone; all of them, even the Mad Aviator, dead.

But then I remembered what Giles had said.

“It will be the best news we’ve had in a year if we knew him — if he’s really dead, as you say.”

I shivered, pulling the suede blouse to my chest. Impossible, of course. I had seen the Aviator fall, his face torn away by the impact from Jane’s pistol. And yet, and yet…

Grief turned to terror at the thought of Margalis Tast’annin, still alive somewhere; still searching for me. I forced myself to focus on something else—the kinetic sculpture’s monotonous dishabille, the clicks and whines from the castrato aria; my own voice chanting in another language.

And finally grief and terror gave way to a numbness, an utter exhaustion that was like a sort of joy. My head ached from crying, but the tears were gone now. Carefully I placed the suede blouse back upon the bed. Then I gathered my old clothes and brought them to the tiny fireplace. Piece by piece I fed them to the flames: trousers, blouse, belt, scarves. Thick foul smoke filled the room as the cloth danced upon the metal hearth, but I didn’t care. I waited until the flames died back, then, heedless of the pain, stuck my hand beneath the grate and drew back fingers smeared with hot ashes. When I rubbed them on my face, they tasted bitter and burned my tongue; but all I could think of was Justice burning, all I could wish was that these had been his ashes, that I might somehow have tasted his death.

It was Jane who found me there a little later. Naked, staring into the little fire grate like a dull child, my mouth smeared black, my hands filthy.

“Wendy,” she said gently. I wouldn’t look at her, but I could hear the heartbreak in her voice. “Oh, Wendy—”

She pulled me gently to my feet and helped me into the bathroom. There she washed my face and hands, dabbed at the wound on my cheek, and brought me the new clothes from the bed. Like a patient child she dressed me, saying little, rinsing my hair until it was free of soot and blood. Then she kissed me, her mouth lingering on my cheek, her lips parting the slightest bit so that I could feel her warm breath. When she lowered her face to kiss my hands, I saw the tears in her eyes.

“Oh, Wendy,” she whispered. I shut my eyes and breathed deeply, tried to bring up some image that might ease the pounding in my head; but found nothing but Justice’s face, pale and lifeless where he lay on the Cathedral’s stone floor.

“Go, please,” I said hoarsely. Jane’s hands slid from mine. I could hear her crossing the room, hear her pause at the door where I imagined her looking back at me, her brown eyes bright with tears. Then the door opened and shut, and I was alone once more.

Not long after that someone tapped gently at my door. “Dinner soon,” Trevor’s soft drawl came to me. “We’ll be downstairs.” I heard him pass to the next room and call to Miss Scarlet. I waited until his soft tread echoed on the steps again. Then, sighing, I walked to the mirror that hung near the door.

The new clothes did not suit me at all. Part of it was their anachronistic cut. No one wore skirts much anymore, neither men nor women. These obviously had been made for a woman, someone my own height but with wide hips and heavy breasts, the kind of woman the Paphians might name margravine at one of their masques. They were not clothes that became me. In my boy’s attire I had always looked beautiful, a tall, slender youth with tawny hair and gray eyes, too serious, perhaps, but with a softness about my mouth that had made me popular with my Paphian audiences.

All that was gone now. The Aviator’s words came back to me, when he had imprisoned me at the Cathedral—

“Not so pretty as you were, Wendy Wanders …”

And it was true. My singed hair hung raggedly around my face; my face itself was gaunt and gray save where my cheek had been seared, and that livid scar glowed like the impression of some deathly kiss. My eyes were swollen, but that seemed almost a mercy—who could bear to look into those eyes now, that had seen such things? The blouse and skirt hung limply on me, neither too large nor too small but just wrong —clothes made for another kind of life than mine. Already I regretted burning my other things. I raised my hand to cover the reflection of my face, when another knock came at the door.

“Wendy?”

Miss Scarlet’s voice, hesitant and worried.

“I’m coming.” I turned, walking clumsily with the long skirts billowing about my bare legs. I refused to wear those woolen boots. They made me think of moujiks, sour-faced Balkhash peasants straining over their fields of soy and triticale.

“Dinner smells good, at least,” Miss Scarlet said as I joined her in the hall. Her voice had a sharp, forced brightness. I nodded silently, refusing to meet her eyes, and she tried another tack.

“There was a telefile in my room. And a dumbwaiter. And some kind of imaging mirror that showed what my insides looked like. What’s your room like?”

I shrugged. Miss Scarlet pursed her lips. “At least they gave you new clothes.”

I gave up and smiled wanly. “You, too.” It was impossible for me to be unkind to Miss Scarlet for long.

She ducked her head and did a little pirouette on the bare pine floor. Her clothes had obviously been made for a child, a boy probably—cheap cotton trousers and a too-small tunic that Miss Scarlet had belted with a remnant of her Winterlong finery. It was odd to see her dressed like that, with none of the elegance she usually affected. The tunic’s arms were too short, and her hands bristled at the end of them, thick with dark fur, her palms the color of an old-fashioned pencil eraser.

“Your shoes didn’t fit?” she asked. “Neither did mine—”

She stretched out one foot until her long toes curled around the banister at the head of the stairs. She looked over her shoulder at me and grinned, and for an instant I thought she was going to swing down, hand over hand. Instead she waited patiently until I reached the steps, and walked demurely at my side.

In the main corridor we found Jane. She had changed back into her own clothes, which looked so travel-worn and stained, I asked if she hadn’t been given new ones.

“I feel more comfortable this way,” she announced. “Look at these.” She pointed at the water-stained plaster wall where two paintings hung, side by side.

Flight! was the caption on one of them. It showed a terrified black-skinned woman clutching a bundle and stumbling down the embankment of a wide, furiously boiling river. At her heels a ravening mass of hounds slavered and howled, and in the background I could barely discern the hulking figure of a white man with a face as hideous as the hounds’. Upon closer investigation, the bundle the woman hugged to her proved to be an infant. It was a very old print, nearly as old as the house, I would guess, and like much else at Seven Chimneys could easily have belonged in one of the Curator’s museums.

The other picture was not nearly so old—three hundred years, perhaps. It was a holofile, set in a round frame of gold chromium brushed so that it had a rough veneer like wood. The ’file showed a dark landscape done in swirling blues and violets, a landscape thick with trees and watched over by a shining quarter-moon. As I stared at it, clouds passed across the moon’s face, turning the shadows beneath into slashes of black and indigo. But then the clouds moved on; the moon glowed brighter, revealing a scene much like that in the other painting. Only instead of hounds, there was a brace of aardmen, silvery monitors winking around their necks as they pursued something down a sharp incline into a ravine. I had to peer more closely to see what they hunted: a figure like a very tall man, but with a childish face and huge, heavily muscled arms that ended in disproportionately large hands.

“Ugh,” I said, drawing back. At my side Miss Scarlet craned her neck, trying vainly to make out what I saw. “Don’t,” I warned, pushing her gently down the hall in front of me. “It will spoil your appetite.”

“Flight to the Ford,” the ’file whispered its title as we hurried past. Jane followed us with a rigid smile on her pale face.

“There seems to be a kind of theme here,” she said, fixing me with a fierce look. Before she could go on, Trevor appeared in a doorway ahead of us.

“Very nice,” he said. He looked at Miss Scarlet and me and murmured approvingly. He had changed into a kimono, a blue so deep, it was almost black. With his enhancer and his sharp features and silvery hair, he looked more like an elegant replicant than a human host. “Please, please come in,” he urged.

It was a splendid room; even Jane drew her breath in sharply as we entered. A rich burgundy-colored paper stamped with golden poppies covered the walls. In places mildew had eaten away at the pattern, but that only made it seem lovelier, more of a miracle that it had survived so long. A huge Oriental rug covered the floor, woven with plumes and arabesques of blue and gold. The edges had worn so that you could see the carpet’s weft, and beneath it the wooden floorboards shining with oil. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, some of its crystals missing. Thick red candles burned in empty sockets that had once held electric bulbs, and the wax dripped to congeal on a table that could have seated twenty, though only six places were set. I was wondering who the sixth could be when Fossa entered from another doorway. He walked in that mincing way that aardmen have, and I was surprised to see jewels glinting from his thick wrists—heavy bands of steel burnished to a glossy finish, set with amethysts and the holo-projecting lozenges called hyalines.

“Fossa—” Trevor indicated a seat, an elongated divan piled with pillows. The aardman hunched his shoulders, murmuring something unintelligible. He settled into the chair, his long legs drawn up beside him. I started when Trevor gently prodded my shoulder.

“Please, Wendy—” He pointed to a chair opposite Fossa. “Be seated.”

It was a strange meal. Giles and Trevor sat at opposite ends of the long table, with Miss Scarlet and me on one side and Jane and Fossa across from us. Above our heads the candles in the chandelier stayed lit, despite the tiny electric lights glowing from recesses in the walls behind us. Lakes of molten wax continued to spread across the scarred tabletop. In the background soft music played. I recognized the repetitive chiming voices, broken by bass notes like snarls. “The Eleusinian Chorus” by Marriette Greeves, something else familiar to me from HEL. A faint perfume of almond blossom filled the air, and wisps of smoke bore various smells from the kitchen—a pungent note of rosemary, the mellow scents of cumin and fenugreek and roasting garlic.

“You will try our wine, of course.” Trevor broke the uneasy silence, one eyebrow raised above the shining arc of his enhancer. Giles smiled and turned in his seat, beckoning to someone in the kitchen. A moment later a server appeared, the first I had seen since we arrived. It was far older than those we had used at HEL, walking on stiff steel legs jointed backward like those of a heron. Its metal torso gleamed. The black grid of its face had been painstakingly covered with an overlay of lenticular leaf that showed a soothing pattern of soft greens and blues, an effect reassuring to those aristocrats who had used the first-generation servers, and preferred this abstract effect to a crude effort at replicating a human face.

“Wine please, Mazda,” Giles ordered.

“Yes, master,” the server hissed, and crane-stepped back into the kitchen.

Trevor and Giles tried to draw us into conversation, but Jane was too wary and I was too exhausted to say much. Miss Scarlet and Fossa carried on a heated discussion of medical practices and ancient cinema. The aardman had adjusted the hyalines on his wrists so that blurred projected images appeared at the end of each of his thick, knobby paws—crude holos of a pair of perfect, milk-white hands with tapering fingers set with many rings, glowing with that slightly blurred aura that surrounds cheap, Archipelago-made hyalines. The projected hands moved perfectly with Fossa’s own. As he and Miss Scarlet spoke, I watched him, his hulking figure bent over the table, lifting his fork and knife with those ridiculously delicate fingers and bringing the food to his gnarled face. I stared fascinated, until Miss Scarlet shot me a disapproving glance and I turned back to my meal.

The food was odd, too. Not the wine, an earthy cabernet served in goblets of that mouth-blown violet glass made by abos in Wyalong—Trevor must have a fine cellar, with such crystal to match it. But after a sweet, soft white goat cheese served with lovage and rue (fresh herbs! in winter!) the server brought in platters that steamed and gave forth a heady, musky scent.

“Wendy.” Giles nodded at Mazda to indicate it should serve me first. “Please, help yourself—”

With steady, gleaming hands the server ladled out a dark broth. Small round objects swam in a rich sauce, heavily scented of juniper berries. I stared doubtfully at my plate as the replicant continued around the table, then passed back into the kitchen for the next course and began the whole process again.

“What—what are they?” I asked at last, poking at my plate with a knife.

“Mushrooms,” said Trevor. His enhancer sent lavender ripples dancing from his wineglass as he held it to the light.

“Mushrooms?” said Jane.

“Mushrooms,” Miss Scarlet repeated avidly from where she balanced on a stack of books atop her chair. “How lovely!”

There were mushrooms in sauce; an aspic of tiny pink mushrooms like the tips of one’s fingers; a tray of what appeared to be slices of bread, but which were actually great round crescents of the sort of fungus one finds growing on trees. Across the table Jane gulped her wine and picked at several mushrooms stuffed with garlic and herbs, while next to her Fossa ate greedily, as did Trevor and Giles. I nibbled tentatively at one breadlike wheel and found it very bland. Still, I couldn’t quite bring myself to clean my plate, and like Jane I drank a lot of wine.

“They’re the only plants not affected by the mutagens,” Trevor explained between mouthfuls. “Everything else—corn, tomatoes, beans—we harvest half what we once did. Come winter we’re pretty much reduced to living on whatever herbs we can grow in the greenhouse. And even those don’t do very well in natural light—too much from the high end of the spectrum. So it’s gotten difficult to put things up. The tubers don’t keep the way they used to, and with the fruits we’re pretty much limited to eating them as fast as they fall from the trees—they practically spoil overnight.

“But not the fungi. We tested them; for some reason they don’t retain toxins the way that plants do. Of course, I mean the ones that aren’t poisonous to begin with.”

I put down my fork and motioned for Mazda to pour me more wine. I was thinking of those skulls above the fireplace.

“We believe it’s because they grow so quickly,” Trevor went on. “The spores actually mutate faster than the mutagens, and after a few generations there’s no trace of the psychoactive agents at all. And mushrooms grow like—well, like mushrooms—so now they seem to have thrown off the viruses completely. We hope.”

Giles nodded. “We cultivate these, of course. Had to, in order to have anything to eat in winter.”

“So you live on mushrooms? Jane picked mistrustfully at her plate.

“Oh, we have some stores of dried beans, lentil flour, things like that. And some very good chutney I put up last year—the chile and spices keep the pears from turning. But in the last few years our produce just hasn’t been very good. Once the soil is contaminated…”

Giles sighed and shook his head. “It didn’t used to be like this. Now we have to trade for much of our food from the mountain people—venison and root vegetables, mostly. And of course all sorts of things come from Cassandra.”

When I looked at him questioningly, Trevor broke in. “It’s always been difficult for the fougas to maneuver out there, in the mountains. You would be surprised—there are places in the Blue Ridge where the viral rains have never fallen.”

“And the wine?” I raised my glass. “It’s very good—”

“That comes from Cassandra, by way of the Ascendants,” Trevor said. “May I toast our guests?” Candlelight sent motes of gold and black dancing across his enhancer, and he smiled.

Dessert was a custard fragrant with rose water—apparently the mutagens had spared some chickens and a cow, or else our hosts had stores of ersatz food in their pantry. But by then I was too tired to do more than poke at my bowl with a long-handled silver spoon.

Shortly afterward we went up to bed. Giles bade us good night and retired to the kitchen, but Trevor accompanied us to our rooms. More than once he had to help Jane up the steps. She had steadfastly refused to eat much, and the wine had affected her more than it did Miss Scarlet or myself.

“Night,” she said thickly at the door to her room. She regarded me through slitted eyes before adding, “Ge’ some other clothes,” and ducking out of sight.

A few steps more to Miss Scarlet’s room, where she turned to our host. “I have not had such a fine meal in many months, Sieur. You are a most gracious innkeeper, to serve impecunious guests with such courtesy.”

Trevor looked down at her, amused, and gave a little bow. “Our pleasure. We like to help those less fortunate, when we can.”

Miss Scarlet reached up to pat my leg as she went inside. “Sleep well, Wendy,” she called softly.

Trevor went before me to the next door, waving his hand in front of light-plates so that the hallway dimmed. I followed him into my room, still uneasy and feeling a little drunk myself. Someone had put more wood on the fire. Trevor bent to poke it, sending sparks flying into the room, and threw on another log. Then he crossed to the window, checking the casement to make sure it was closed and clucking his tongue at how heavily the snow lay upon the roof.

“Would you like some different clothes?” He turned back to me, his enhancer catching the light from the fireplace and streaking his face with gold. “I’ll be glad to get you more—”

I shrugged. There was that odd smell again: not unpleasant but so strange, like lemons buried in the earth. “Clothes? Well, yes. If you have them. I—I’m not accustomed to things like this. Skirts—” I almost told him how I had traveled so long disguised as a boy, but instead explained lamely, “An actor—actress—you know—and skirts are clumsy for traveling—”

Trevor smiled. “Of course. You should have said something. Your friend Jane—your lover?”

“No!” I hadn’t meant my voice to sound so sharp. I sat abruptly on the edge of the bed, blinking to keep tears from my eyes. “No. My lover was killed two days ago, at the feast of Winterlong. He was a Paphian, a Saint-Alaban….”

Trevor’s voice was kind. “I didn’t know. Forgive me—it must have been terrible for you—”

I remained silent, willing him to leave. After a moment he said, “The clothes you’re wearing—they belonged to my daughter. But there are others here somewhere. I’ll find them and lay them out for you tomorrow.”

I bunched the bed quilt between my fingers. “Your daughter?”

“Yes: Cadence. She lives in Cassandra, but I’ve still got many of her things here. I’m afraid they’re not very fashionable. She’s a bit older than you—”

Laughter crept into his voice as he added, “ Much older, as a matter of fact. But her clothes seem to fit, even if the style isn’t what you’re accustomed to.”

“I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful,” I said stiffly. He crossed the room to leave, and I started to rise.

“Please,” he said motioning for me to sit. He stood in the open doorway, his strong, youthful hands incongruous with that white beard and hair. “I know you must find this all a little strange, Wendy,” he said gently. He tilted his head so that blue light leaked from beneath his enhancer. “But you’re safe here—probably safer than you’d be anywhere right now.”

I tried to keep my voice from sounding cold as I replied, “It’s just that such kindness to complete strangers—it’s unusual, that’s all.”

He laughed again, softly. “Giles and I are very unusual people, my friend. We’ve entertained refugees here before; I’m sure we will again. But you have nothing to fear while you’re under this roof. In more than six hundred years no harm has ever come to a guest of the Mallorys. Not unless provoked…”

He inclined his head and left, the door clicking softly behind him. And despite my weariness and the wine buzzing inside my head, I lay awake for some time afterward, staring at the shadows cast by leaping flames while I pondered his last words and what he meant by them.

I woke late the next morning. The wind raged at the eaves as though it would tear the shingles off. During the night, someone had come in to put more wood on the fire, so that the room was very warm. Smoke flurried from the fireplace, and the sun shone blindingly through battlements of icicles around the windows. A clock beside the bed read half past ten. I felt more clearheaded than I deserved, considering how much wine I’d had at dinner. For a long while I lay there, staring at the tin ceiling and counting the stenciled grape vines circling the walls.

When I finally got out of bed, I found more clothes had been piled neatly on a chair by the door. As Trevor had warned, they were shockingly out of date—some of them reminded me of the costumes we used at the Theater, nearly a century old, nylon threads fraying, patched with much newer fabric. Only these clothes were in much better condition than our costumes. Many seemed almost new, only the faded scarlet of a brocade robe or a string of shattered lumens hinting at their age. I dressed quickly, pulling on heavy blue canvas trousers and a pullover of nubby brown wool. When I went downstairs, I met Giles in the hallway, wearing a heavy shearling coat, his cheeks ruddy with cold.

“Good choice!” He beamed, plucking at my sweater. “That’s from our sheep, that wool—”

I followed him into the kitchen. A very old wood-burning cook stove stood against one crumbling brick wall, a cheerful thing with green enameled doors and a rusted kettle steaming softly atop it. Breakfast, thank god, was a meal not totally reliant upon fungus. There were eggs kept warm in a tiny glass oven (another curious relic), and some kind of mutton sausage, its gamy taste mitigated by juniper berries. And tea—real tea, nearly black from sitting in its pot on the woodstove for most of the morning—and grainy honey dipped from a cracked glass bowl.

“No, the sheep do very well. The animals weren’t taken by the virus at all,” Giles explained, as though taking up the thread of a conversation we’d begun just minutes before. He sat across from me at the battered table, reached into a pocket, and withdrew a small paper package. “Cigarette?”

“Where did you get those ” I hadn’t smoked a tobacco cigarette since I’d been at HEL. In the City of the Trees, the Paphians had hinted darkly that the tobacco trade was dead, killed by the Ascendants. Giles pushed the package across to me.

“Cassandra.” He leaned over to the woodstove and lit his cigarette, inhaling deeply. “Cadence sends them to us.”

“But—I haven’t seen one for months. I heard the crop failed.”

Giles nodded. “That would be the party line. The Ascendants tried to take over the farms in Cassandra—this was about a year ago—but things just don’t work like that in the mountains. So the trade dried up, for the Ascendants at least. Most of it goes west now, over the mountains and north to the United Provinces. And of course we get our share, and keep them on hand for guests.”

“Your Cassandra sounds like an interesting place.”

Giles tipped his head back, blinking thoughtfully. There was something studied about his expression, as though he were playing at a casual manner. “Oh, it is, it is. They have some interesting beliefs—salvation, great destinies, things like that. Remarkable, er, people there. Not much like us, to tell you the truth. Very interested in, um, religion, and—well, I guess you could call it politics. In taking a sort of—er, a global view of things. You might enjoy talking to them some time. If ever you go there, I mean. Quite an interesting place, oh yes.”

I stared at him blankly. He drew on his cigarette, looked around before continuing in a conspiratorial whisper. “Cassandra’s the center for all these changes, you understand. There’s a—they have a sort of replicant there, a marvelous thing they found hidden in one of the caverns. It can send and receive messages from HORUS, it advises them—”

“Who?” I asked, exasperated. “ Who does it advise?”

Giles looked surprised. “Well, everyone. I mean, anyone who’s interested in what’s going on.” His eyebrows arched dramatically, and he fixed me with a knowing look, as though I too were expected to know whatever the hell was going on. “You know, Dr. Burdock and all the rest…”

He spoke the name with reverence. I sipped at my tea, and after a moment asked rather crossly, “It sounds like this Dr. Burdock made quite an impression there. If they’re still talking about him four hundred years later. What happened to him?”

Giles’s good-natured face puckered into a frown, and his gaze flickered uneasily from me to the floor. “He was a victim of one of the fundamentalist Ascensions,” he said at last.

“And this replicant that can communicate with HORUS—” I had only ever heard vague rumors about the ancient network of space stations, where political refugees were supposed to have fled and founded the first Ascendant Autocracy centuries before. “What’s it doing there? It doesn’t sound like these people have much use for the Ascendants.”

But now Giles decided he’d said enough. “There are some strange old things in Cassandra. And here, too. Trevor is only one of them.”

He laughed softly, almost to himself, and ground out his cigarette in a small brass dish. So that would be all the explanation I got, at least for now. I stretched my hand across the scarred old table and picked up the cigarette pack. It was made of thin, pulpy gray paper with a logo stamped on it in bleeding red ink. The logo showed the image of a pyramid with an eye inside, surmounted by a star or sun. Beneath it was a single word spelled out in strange characters.

Iχαpυσ

I pointed at the unknown word. “What’s that mean?” Giles only shrugged and looked away. I took a cigarette from the packet. It was needle thin and hand rolled, and tasted sweet.

“They cure them with hashish and honey,” said Giles. He poured himself some tea and took a sip. I started to ask him again about the symbols, the eye in the pyramid, the foreign word, but before I could speak, he pushed away his cup and stood. “Well, I better get back out there. Miss Scarlet’s in the barn, trying her best to keep out of the way. Your friend Jane is helping me with the cows. She’s a wonder with animals.”

I smiled. “She was a Zoologist in the City.”

“That’s what she said. Well, she’ll earn her keep here, that’s for sure.” Grinning, he slapped the table in farewell. So I had the kitchen to myself—very pleasant, with the sun streaming through the high windows and the mingled scents of my hashish cigarette and the fruitwood burning in the woodstove. I thought about what Giles had told me, marveling. A place in the mountains where people did not live in fear of the Ascendants. A replicant that could talk to the fabled HORUS colonies. And this peculiar Dr. Burdock, who seemed somewhere between saint and demon. I tried to recall if Dr. Harrow had ever spoken of him at HEL. But I drew up nothing, and wished again I’d paid more attention when Dr. Harrow was trying to teach me about the history of our world.

I finished my cigarette and put together breakfast from the things kept warm in that magical little glass oven. I ate eggs and sausage and a kind of crumbly green cheese, took a few bites of the breadlike bracket fungi and drank my tea. The hashish left me feeling pleasantly muddled. It reminded me of mornings at the Human Engineering Laboratory, where we young empaths were given every luxury and no one would disturb our meals if we wished to eat alone. That was before Justice and I fled HEL; before my brain had sprouted new neutral pathways that allowed me to feel emotions as others did. Now, for the first time I found myself missing the regime at HEL. It had seemed like—it was —a prison, especially during the last weeks of my tenure there; but how much calmer that life seemed than the one I had now.

And suddenly Justice’s face appeared before me. I closed my eyes, trying to will away the surge of grief, wishing I could once again be the detached creature Dr. Harrow had used and discarded; but it was too late. I had no visions left. Now, when I tasted my own tears, or Miss Scarlet’s or Jane’s, there was only bitterness on my tongue. It seemed to me that it was a terrible price I had paid for my brief time with Justice. Once I would have raged over my unhappiness, but even rage was gone from me now. So I sat, the sunny morning gone cold about me, and drank my tepid tea alone.

From somewhere in the house a clock bonged the noon hour. I stood and began pushing dishes around on the counter, wondering if I should go find my friends in the barn.

“Ah! You’re awake.”

Turning, I saw Trevor in yet another doorway—it seemed every hall led to the kitchen in this house. He wore faded old clothes and carried a basket filled with more mushrooms. “Come with me,” he called, smiling and beckoning me toward him. He started back down the corridor. I looked around, half-hoping for someone else to appear; then with a shrug I followed him.

The hallway was narrow and dark, windowless, barely wide enough for two to walk abreast. On the walls hung rows of flaking canvases and flickering holofiles, more of the crude artwork that I had seen last night in the main hallway. Each one depicted some theme of cruelty, to humans or geneslaves: energumens howling at the touch of a sonic probe, men chained to the deck of a wooden ship, gaunt women huddled in the shadow of a vast shining aircraft. As I passed, the ’files whispered their titles to me: The Last of Home, Captivity, Bound for Stemville, Luther Burdock’s Children. I wanted to avert my eyes but could not. Vulgar as they were, the images were compelling, pathetic monsters and cruel masters doomed to play out their terrible drama in this forgotten place.

“Underground Railway,” Trevor said, his soft drawl magnified in the long hallway. “My family has been part of it for six hundred years.”

Underground Railway? I shook my head, but of course he couldn’t see me in the dark. Before I could ask him to explain, he halted. He fiddled with a catch in the wall, and a door sagged open.

“Careful. It’s steep down here—”

There was no handrail. I walked with both hands outstretched to touch the walls, afraid I’d fall on top of him. No lamps hung here, but an eerie violet glow poured through the darkness below. At the bottom Trevor waited for me.

“This is where we do most of our farming,” he said, ducking to avoid a beam.

I followed him into a cavernous space, chilly and dank and smelling of earth and soft rot. Walls formed of immense flagstones rose about us. In the center of the basement a huge double archway of brick supported the ceiling.

“Central fireplace.” Trevor slapped it, his hand leaving a damp mark on the masonry. “Mid-eighteenth century. Some of the same masons who did Monticello did this. Hasn’t moved an inch in six centuries.”

The room felt older far than that. I could imagine it being built a thousand years before, the stonemasons slipping on the clayey ground as they dragged their stone and bricks in, hod after hod. Beneath my feet the earth was smooth but uneven, as though carved of ice. Along the walls makeshift shelves held stacks of greenglass bottles, winking in the dimness like spiders’ eyes.

“It’s a little slick here, so be careful,” warned Trevor. He moved easily, walking between the brick arches to where the lavender glow deepened. Following him, I blinked, stopped once to rub my eyes. The light had a peculiar fuzzy quality; the edges of things disappeared, so that I bumped into one end of the archway and grazed my knuckles.

“Here—” Trevor reached back and took my hand, pulled me gently after him. “It’s hard, until you get used to it.”

We stood in a vast open area behind the second arch. From the ceiling hung lamps of all shapes and sizes, a jumble of lights that made my head ache. Ultraviolet tubes, deep purple growthlights, aquamarine diatom lanterns, kerosene lamps giving off a foul smell. Beneath them stretched row after row of narrow tables, piled high with what looked like rubbish. Twisted piles of sticks, rotting logs, shallow trays gleaming as though they held stagnant water. The stench of rot was heavier here, but as we approached the tables, another smell masked it. A thick earthy odor, sweetish and not unpleasant, but containing a range of other smells—vanilla, spoiled meat, the rich scent of bittersweet chocolate.

“This is our little farm,” Trevor said proudly. He stopped in front of a table, bent, and picked up a half-sprung willow basket from the floor beneath it. “Some of them need strong light, others don’t. And you can see how many different growth mediums we use.”

That was what the rubbish was: fodder for thousands of mushrooms growing in the dark. I stepped after him, blinking as the light eased from blinding ultraviolet to soft green. There were tables stacked with decaying logs, sorted by type—oak here, birch there, a thicket of slender alder wands heaped on a rusted water-filled tray. From every pile sprang mushrooms, like villages built upon the ruins of ancient capitals. Fungi like frail coral, deep scarlet and palest yellow; common white toadstools; puffballs the size of a man’s head. Trevor gathered some of these, his basket filled after he had pulled only four from their soft humus bed. He paused to pluck tiny red buttons from a grassy heap, tasting them thoughtfully before turning to a row of metal trays filled with what looked like fresh manure, smelling strongly of warm grass and sun.

“Psilocybin,” he explained, holding up a little brown cap flecked with dull green. Its gills had turned bright blue where he had bruised them. “You’d be surprised what the Ascendants trade for these.”

We wandered through the maze of tables, Trevor filling baskets only to leave them, seemingly forgotten, on the ground. At first the basement had appeared endless, but now I could see that we were approaching its far wall. The lights were dimmer here, mostly ultraviolet tubes that set the mushrooms and other fungus aglow with radiant colors beneath them. I hugged my arms to my chest, feeling the clammy air like a damp hand sliding beneath my sweater.

“ Now. ”

Trevor’s voice came softly in my ear. I started, turned to see him walking past me, past the last glowing fresco of deep violet and blue and orange beds. At the end of the basement stood an enormous glittering table that stretched from wall to wall. As I drew nearer, I saw it was made of steel, like those surgical stages used at HEL. Something was laid across it. More piles of logs, I thought at first—birch, probably, because they were so pale, and striated with darker markings. A very faint radiance hung above them, a silvery phosphorescence that shimmered slightly when Trevor bent his head over what lay there. I crept up behind him and stopped.

Fungus delicate as grasses sprouted from the logs, giving off a pale-green glow like mist. Some had minute fronds, covered with tiny projecting spines so that they resembled velvety ferns. Others swelled to club-shaped bulbs shining with some viscous substance, their bulbous protuberances a deep red. As Trevor moved above them, white threads like smoke streaked the air. A sharp lemony smell mingled with the scent of damp earth and decay.

“ Amanita cerebrimus, ” he murmured. And as he dipped his head to examine one of the growths, I saw for the first time exactly what lay upon the tables.

Corpses. Lined up head to toe, their arms stretched at their sides with palms opening upward as though to catch some lost rays of sunlight. Their chest cavities had been opened, their ribs neatly spread to show where their inner organs had been. Hearts, lungs, spleen; all traces of veins or musculature had been covered with the feathery mushrooms climbing over the smooth white bone like moss. I drew back horrified, but Trevor pulled me toward him, gently but with irresistible strength.

“Don’t be afraid,” he whispered. The orbs beneath his enhancer sent twin shafts of cobalt lancing through the emerald mist. “We didn’t kill them, Wendy. They have been here for a very long time—years and years and years, some of them. The fungus preserves them. And the cold, of course.”

He frowned and bent over one, prodding it with a long finger. “Ah, yes, Catharine Fong. We worked together for many years, before she died during a bombing by the Commonwealth. A wound in the chest, very clean, no damage to the brain whatsoever. It hardly even bled.”

I tried to run, but Trevor was too strong. He pulled me closer, until I stood above the cadaver’s head. The flesh had been eaten away until only a bare skull remained, pure white and innocent as an egg. As I watched, Trevor bent and moved a flap of bone above the eyes, like a tiny trapdoor, then opened the entire skull as though peeling an orange.

Her brain was still inside. Crinkled and pale gray, and nearly white in spots, like beech bark. Hundreds of tiny star-shaped protrusions covered it, yellow and pale ivory, ranging from the size of a teardrop to some bigger than an egg. Trevor picked one and rolled it between his fingers, releasing a sharp, almost oily smell. Lemons, and the scent of fresh earth.

“I spent fifty years working on this project,” he said dreamily. He pinched the mushroom between his fingers and brought it to his mouth, biting it crisply in two. “We started in Rochester, and when they burned Rochester, we started all over again in Warrenton. Fifty years, and that was just the beginning…”

He held out the other half of the mushroom to me. I shook my head, clutching the edge of the steel table—anything to keep from crying out and turning to run. Trevor tilted his head, surprised at my refusal, and went on.

“It was a fluke. As a boy I had been intrigued by reading about the early research of Burdock and then Oona Wang, primitive compared to what they did later but quite fascinating in its way, a shame it’s been overshadowed by Burdock’s more sensational work. I was trying to find some way of splicing ovarian tissue with Mitrula abietis, something that would allow us to regenerate human cells using water and algae as a medium. Then that laboratory was gassed. When I returned several months later, I found the first strains growing there—one of the technicians hadn’t escaped, and the spores found their way to his corpse. The citrusy smell made me curious—usually those things smell awful, as I’m sure you’ve noticed—and when I examined more closely, I couldn’t believe what I saw.”

His eyebrows arched above the enhancer as he popped the rest of the mushroom into his mouth. “It took forever. Decades. By then I was supposed to be working on other projects—the Ascendants have never understood how painstaking the true scientific process is—and so I had to continue my own work privately. And, of course, I couldn’t just kill people to have a steady supply of corpses. Although that’s how they would have done it,” he added, shaking his head.

“Gradually I isolated the one strain, the cerebrimus, and found the ideal mating of spores and medium. And after some more time, the decaying process of the corpses themselves slowed. If you look, you’ll see that some of them are remarkably preserved.”

I looked where he gestured at the last cadaver, lying with the soles of its feet pressed against the slick stone walls. Its flesh was pale but with a rosy flush, not puckered or mottled as some of the others were.

I reached out to touch it, then snatched my hand away. “But—how did you—”

Trevor shrugged, as though the answer were obvious. “DNA,” he said in his honeyed drawl. “The spores produce molecules that imitate those in human DNA, so successfully that they can fuse with them, and producing the same bends and cricks that cause human genes to mature. They repeated this process, over thousands and thousands of generations as I refined them.

“Human DNA is programmed to decay after a certain number of years. But these fungi cause mutations in the strands: when you eat one, it produces a sort of chemical explosion in your brain; and after the smoke clears, your DNA has basically reset itself. It’s no longer programmed to die. This is no instant immortality, nothing as banal as that; but the rate of aging is slowed considerably. The really miraculous aspect of all this is that the brain cells themselves actually regenerate; and that of course is an effect the Ascendants have been looking for all along, with their geneslaves and other horrors.”

He paused, staring raptly into the dimness, then added, “And of course, it has had some very interesting applications for some of the geneslaves. The energumens, for one. They have been engineered to have such fleeting life spans; but these could change all that.”

Turning, he swept one arm out toward the banks of rotting logs piled high with their soft and luminous fruits. “I have made other discoveries as well,” he said proudly. “All here, all by myself. Mushrooms that look like psilocybin and have the same initial reactions; but which cause a slow, debilitating madness, and ultimately death. And my Amanita dacryion, my little cups of tears—they taste heavenly, but after a meal you are filled with such sorrow that all hope flees, and all desire to live.”

“But why?” I said, a little desperately. “Why all these—these things ?”

Trevor’s hand dropped to his side. “Because we have enemies, Wendy. Very powerful enemies. We have learned to fight with whatever weapons we can.”

And then another thought came to me. I shivered, recalling his words earlier, and asked in a low voice, “How long has it been?”

He looked puzzled. “How long?”

I pointed at the corpses. “You said they’ve been here a very long time— how long?”

Trevor tapped a finger to his lips, leaning against the table so that his shadow cut through the green mist. “Oh—let’s see—ninety years for Antonin, I think. A little more than that for Catharine.”

“And upstairs—on the mantel, those skulls—”

He brightened, as though suddenly seeing the logic behind my questions. “Oh, those were some of the first ones. I brought them here with me—misplaced sentiment, I suppose. Giles finds them morbid.”

“And you,” I whispered. “How old are you?”

He smiled and plucked another of the star-shaped growths from the table. “I’ll give you a hint. I was born in the Free State of Virginia, three years before the Third Shining.”

The Third Shining. Nearly two hundred years before.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. When I opened them, he was still facing me, chewing calmly, his enhancer a silver crescent across his face. “Why are you telling me this?”

He shrugged, still smiling. “Because you and your friends will be with us for several months—at least until March, when the roads will be more easily traveled. And because I have learned from experience that guests here become curious, over time, and it is more expedient to explain certain things truthfully to those who can bear the knowledge—to those who might perhaps benefit from learning new things. And because I think that we share a common enemy, you and I. You know what it is like to have been enslaved, to have been a pawn in the hands of the Ascendants. Someone with your history, with your powers—you might well benefit from what we have learned—”

I shook my head fiercely. “I have no enemies—”

Again that raised eyebrow. “No? And what of Margalis Tast’annin?”

“He was a madman—I knew nothing of him before we were captured—and besides, he’s dead now.”

Trevor’s voice rang out eerily in the dimness. “But what he stands for is not dead! The strength and horror of NASNA and the Ascendant Autocracy are not dead! They still breed geneslaves in their laboratories and cells. Everywhere on Earth humanity has become a tyrant, bending animals and children and heteroclites to their will. And not only within the Ascendant Autocracy: the Balkhash Commonwealth is no better, and some believe that the Habilis Emirate is worse.”

I shivered. I had never had any interest in talk of this sort. At HEL, Dr. Harrow had tried in vain to educate her empaths in politics. I retained only a vague memory of multicolored images on glowing mapscreens, their borders swelling and retreating, amoebalike, as each day brought subtle and evanescent political changes to the continents depicted there. “I know nothing of this,” I insisted.

“You should learn, then!” Trevor’s hand slapped down upon the edge of a table. “Six hundred years ago there was a war here—a different kind of war, a ground war. They fought because men enslaved other men, bartered and sold them like animals. It was an abomination to man and nature, and the world never recovered from it. Even a hundred fifty years later it was still reeling from the horrors of slavery—and then the First Shining came and they were all wiped away.”

I looked away from the glare of his enhancer. “But there are no slaves now.”

“Aren’t there?” Trevor whipped the enhancer from his face, so that the piercing light from his optics lit our corner of the room. “What were you at HEL, Wendy? What was Fossa? What was Miss Scarlet? And these are only the geneslaves! What of the moujik peasants from the Commonwealth, and the child farms on Kalimantan?”

I shook my head stubbornly. “I know nothing of this, nothing! And my friends know less—in the City they live simply, for pleasure only, or for knowledge—”

“In the City they live for nothing now!” cried Trevor. “Ascendant janissaries from Araboth and Vancouver have occupied it. If any of your friends survived the initial attacks, they are prisoners—slaves or worse. Your lover was one of the fortunate ones, to have died before they arrived. You of all people should know what happens when the Ascendants seize control.” I said nothing, only stared numbly into the misty phosphorescence swirling about him.

He was right: in the days following Dr. Harrow’s suicide, Ascendant personnel had swarmed into the Human Engineering Laboratory. They had murdered many of the other empaths and surely would have killed me as well, after subjecting me to more of their “research.” I thought of the paintings and ’files hanging in the corridors upstairs; of the scars upon Miss Scarlet’s throat; of Fossa, and the other aardmen who had given obeisance to the Aviator in the Cathedral. I thought of Justice dead; of countless others in the City of Trees, bound to steel gurneys with their heads shaved as mine had been, screaming as their minds were taken from them.

At last I said slowly, “I think I understand what you are telling me. But if you’re part of some—some rebellion, some resistance movement—there’s nothing I can do to help you. My usefulness as an empath has ended. My friends are as you see them: an educated geneslave who performs as an actress and a girl who’s good with animals. That’s all.”

“Ah, but your powers might come back,” Trevor said, an edge of excitement in his voice. “I know a great deal about these things—the proper stimulation, with drugs and psychotropic chemicals; even natural adrenaline could do it….”

“No!” My shout sent a lantern swinging above us. “I am not going to be used like that again, not for anything—especially not for some fucking geneslave riot —”

Trevor dipped his head so that the light from his optics swept across the floor. His mouth was tight, his voice cold.

“This is not a riot, Wendy. Nor is it some hastily planned rebellion. Some of us have been working toward this for our entire lives—a means of undoing the wrongs wrought over the centuries by the tyrants, a union of mankind and geneslaves—

“An Alliance. ”

He paused dramatically, then swept his hand up to indicate the rafters overhead, the many stories beyond. “We are part of an ancient tradition here at Seven Chimneys. We are a halfway house, a way-station for those fleeing the Ascendants. There were many places like this, once; Seven Chimneys is one of the last.

“The Underground Railway, they called it during the North American Civil War. It was the Sanctuary Movement later, and The Havens during the Long Night of the First Ascension.” Blue light streamed from his face as he threw his head back and his voice rang out. My own voice broke like a boy’s when I spoke.

“Who do you shelter?”

In a swift motion he clapped the enhancer back over his eyes. The brilliant blue rays of the optics were extinguished; now I had to squint through the shadows to see him. “Geneslaves. Fossa was one of the first. He has remained here with us, to help reassure others that they will not be betrayed. There have been many others: aardmen fleeing the City, argalæ kept as prostitutes by Ascendant troops, salamanders from the mines. And energumens, of course; and people like yourself. Oh, yes—we have taken in several escapees from HEL over the years. Not many, because not many survived long enough to reach us, but more than you might think. I was very impressed to see what Emma had done with them—her reasons were heinous, of course, but the results were very interesting. An entire cohort of adolescent psychic terrorists. They would have been very useful during wartime.”

I bit my lip, not sure whether to believe him. But there had been unexplained disappearances at HEL from time to time—the empath Sarah Jabera was one, and a young telepath named Isaac Dunstan. I had always assumed they were suicides—there were always suicides at HEL—or else that they had been captured or killed by the fougas.

“I still don’t know why you are telling me this.” I spoke slowly, trying to choose words that would not offend him, or endanger me and my friends. “I can’t help you—especially with geneslaves.”

Trevor leaned so close that I could smell the bitter scent of lemons on his breath. “Oh, but you could!—we all could, if only enough of us would side with them, rise to overthrow the Autocracy! Already there have been riots in some of the HORUS colonies. The energumens and cacodemons have attempted coups on several stations. Just a week ago we heard of aardmen at a logging camp in the United Provinces—they slayed their supervisors and escaped into the Hudson Bay Territory. And there will be others, too, now that the geneslaves have started to throw off the tyranny of their human masters.”

I tried to turn away, but Trevor clutched at my arm. “There will be war soon, Wendy: a different kind of war, a revolution from within! In some places it has already begun. There is a great purge coming, the beginning of a new age!

“But I am not alone in seeing this, Wendy—there are others, wiser and older than I am, who have seen into the future of our planet! They can read the skies as people once read books, and they have told me what is written there. A terrible secret, one that will irrevocably change our world. But some of us will be strong enough, wise enough, to learn from what is to come—and we will triumph! We will remake the world! We will bring about a true Final Ascension, one that will not thrive on slavery and barbaric despotism. One that will not be built on the bodies of slaves, human or otherwise.”

I stared at him in disbelief, thinking of the ghoulish aardmen in the City, the diseased lazars and sentient trees and other mutated creatures that had deviled me since my escape from HEL. What insane rebels would ever ally themselves with them ?

Trevor pushed me away impatiently. “You don’t believe me? But you know it’s true! You have seen them, who hasn’t? Millions of creatures—living things, sentient things, creatures that can weep when their young are torn from them and creatures that will never give birth—made by humans to serve as slaves, discarded or murdered after they have been used! We brought them into the world, but it is a world some of them can barely survive in, they have been so carefully manipulated to exist only in those cracks and dark corners where the Ascendants want them to live and die while serving them. Rendered sterile by the tyrants; given life spans a fraction of ours; seizing the young of those who are permitted to give birth…

“If the geneslaves were all freed tomorrow, it would still be a hundred years, a thousand years, before we could ever make amends for the horrors they have endured at our hands. Only if we join with them to make war upon the tyrants; only if someday, perhaps, our blood mingles with theirs: then we may begin to expiate the suffering we have brought upon the world.”

”They may have suffered, but I have never harmed one,” I cried, feeling besieged. “I flee them when I can—they are monstrous things, they are monsters….”

Trevor shook his head. “No more than you are. You are one of them, Wendy Wanders. I can see it in you: you are not as other people. Perhaps you never were. And to the Ascendants you are less than human.”

“No!” I shouted. “I never was, never —it’s over now, there is nothing left —”

My hands flew to my head, covering my ears. I could feel the scars there at my temples, the nodes that had slowly healed even as my ability to tap into the thoughts and dreams of others had faded. I wanted to scream, to lash out at him as I had done with others before; but it was true, my powers were gone now. There was nothing left.

“ You are left, Wendy.” I shuddered at how calm he sounded. “You know I speak the truth. You are not like the rest of us, not like Jane or your Paphian lover. You and Miss Scarlet have more in common than they do; you and Fossa.”

I shook my head furiously, thinking of the aardman—his gnarled face, those curved yellow teeth and the tail like a fleshy whip between his hind legs.

“No.”

“ Yes. Admit it to yourself, Wendy: you belong with us, with all of us who are fighting the tyrants. It is a war against humanity; but you know that you are not truly human. Help us, Wendy. Join us.”

“ No! ”

Trevor laughed softly. Behind him the rows of glowing corpses seemed to shiver in the ghostly light. He leaned forward, with one finger brushed the hair from my temple and probed the raised lip of skin there.

“Emma Harrow did this?” he murmured. At his touch a small fiery explosion went off inside my skull. I gasped, closing my eyes against the pain. “I would have proceeded differently—no scars, nothing to show that you had ever been touched….”

I moaned, stiffening as his other hand slowly closed around my wrist. His words echoed in my mind—

… very useful during wartime…

“It’s gone, my powers are gone!” I cried frantically. His grip tightened as I tried to pull away. “I—I went without my medication for too long—the visions left me, it’s gone now, whatever power I had is gone—”

Trevor shook his head, his voice soothing. “That doesn’t matter, Wendy. I told you, I am a very fine surgeon. Nothing matters, except that we understand each other.”

Abruptly he let go of me. I staggered back, my hands flailing as I tried to find something to use as a weapon; but Trevor only laughed, as though I had been frightened by some shadow on the wall of a sunny room.

“But we have a long time to learn how to do that, don’t we?” he said. “All winter, in fact. And I’m certain that you will come to see how worthy our cause is.”

He bent and began picking up empty baskets, stacking them inside one another. “Would you mind handing me that?” he asked lightly.

I stared at him warily, but he only continued to gather his things. Indeed, he seemed to have forgotten me. Finally I looked to where he had pointed and saw a willow basket, its contents lost in shadow. As I leaned down to pick it up, I heard him turn and walk back toward the steps.

“A remarkable theoretician, Emma Harrow.” His voice rang faintly in the dank air as he began to climb the stairs. “But a rather clumsy surgeon.”

I waited until I heard the door creak open upstairs. Then I followed him, the basket clutched between my cold fingers. It wasn’t until I reached the top step that I glanced down to see what I held—

A skull.

A human skull with a number of small perfectly round holes bored into it. Between the holes words had been scratched into the flaking bone, and a crude image. Tiny cracks radiated from the letters like tears.

EMMA WYSTAN HARROW

Sic semper tyrannus

The Alliance was not subtle in its methods. With a cry I dropped the basket and fled to my room.