The Future Is Blue

Flame, Pearl, Mother, Autumn, Virgin, Sword, Kiss, Blood, Heart, and Grave

ONCE, IN A walled country that was neither Poland nor Hungary nor Serbia nor Romania, though in various centuries, claimed, invaded, abandoned, repudiated, and finally, its very name and historicity redacted by all four, a child was born into a particularly withered, lightning-scarred branch of the royal line with a certain deformity. That, in and of itself, was not unusual, not then and not there; around this time all children of the nobility of ———— were born with some malformation or another. A recent son had emerged from a baroness with a speckled cochin’s wing in place of his left arm. The daughter of a favored underpope faced her baptism with the slitted eyes of a cat and seven long black fingers on each hand. A pair of ducal twins were presented to the court made of solid silver, their faces engraved with a pattern of rue and musk rose popular at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor. The crown prince himself had been born quite dead, without heartbeat or breath, covered in veins of green and purple and scarlet corruption like a weeping mushroom, yet he walked and talked and recited the apocrypha as well as an abbot by the age of four. It had gone on for so long that healthy children were considered undesirable as mates and apprentices, as they were unlikely to progress much socially with their unsettling two eyes, ten fingers, unblemished skin, and luxurious teeth. In the beginning, the defects of the upper classes had been carefully recorded in illuminated books of heritable traits, but by the time this tale broke its mother’s pelvis in half hurling itself into the cauldron of the living, the particulars of these anatomical splendors were no more interesting to the intelligentsia than the exact number of apples required for the St. Barrow’s Eve pyre.

The whole situation was pronounced by the local college of stylites to be a cosmological punishment for the foundational sin of this little kingdom of wheat and walls and waxbeans and white grapes, namely, that an ancient king had held the cold and empty jaw of famine in his hand and, without feeling, ordered the wholesale slaughter of every living songbird within the walls of ————, in order to preserve the harvest. However, stylites are rather high-strung and paranoid as a people; the natural result of living on top of a bony spire of rock and professionally contemplating the universe while standing on one foot and suffering the verbal abuse of the masses. They had gotten rather in the habit of blaming nearly everything on this convenient infamy rather than any current policy of the government for which they might be censured, or any scientific theory which might, may such horrors never be visited on us or anyone we know, be proven incorrect in the future. The past, like God, is changeless and unmovable, and therefore it is safe. Only the eaters of flesh had been spared, the hawks and the ravens and the owls and the petrels. The king sent out his personal guard in their finest armor, black of plate and splendid of feather and elaborate of all imaginable decoration, to put the eaters of seed to the sword. This the knights did with great and solemn ceremony, donning judiciary wigs over their helmets and trying, with witnesses summoned from farms and mills and bakeries, each sparrow, finch, thrush, nightingale, and starling for high treason, burglary, and crimes against the crown before carrying out their sentences beneath a tight, grey, unraining sky. The queen caused the gargantuan royal oven to be moved into the common square and stoked to a rage. It burned hot at its work for sixteen days on end, roasting the bodies of the condemned. These were then distributed as equally as possible among the starving population and devoured meat, talon, bone, and spleen beneath maroon silk canopies raised up by the daughters of the noble houses, in order that God and all his angels should not see what they had done, for in those innocent days it was believed that silk alone could not be penetrated by the eye of the divine, originating as it did in the belly of a foul and creeping worm from the unreachable east, where devils play dice with the damned, and maroon was the color of hopelessness. It is for the memory of this that all common families in the country of ———— wear the surnames of songbirds who perished, and noble families bear the names of the birds of prey who lived and were not perturbed.

The symbol of the house into which the certain child I have mentioned was born was the bittern, an eater of fish. The progenitor of her family had been a strange and off-putting man, addicted to the drinking of milk as miserably as most folk in ———— are to the drinking of a particular sour cherry death-in-a-glass. He crept through the fields at night, suckling at udders that did not belong to him, scooping cream from the mouths of calves and cheesemakers’ daughters alike, savaged about the shoulders and haunches by shepherds and wolves alike, hated by constables and chatelains alike. Because of this habit he grew very tall and stout and quick and clever and his skin grew so bright and clear you could see it from the moon, instead of paunched and sallow like the drinkers of cherries, and his hair grew so long and thick that he cut off locks of it, tied them with stalks of lavender and chives, and sold them as cures for baldness until he became a reasonably wealthy man. It was this dairy-fattened brain that conceived the idea of encircling ———— and all her many cities with a grand wall in the shape, like the country itself, of a blown tulip, so that more men could devote themselves to the making of yogurt and buttercreams and fat babies and fatter poetry than waiting for the next Mongol invasion with the mix of anxiety and boredom that comprise the traditional yeast for the rough bread of a military coup. He did not build the wall, of course, nor did he draw designs for it, nor did he even contribute a stitch of silver to its funding, but in the days when songbirds still whistled in the walnut trees, the world was kind and lovely and eccentric, and the idea of a thing was considered to be the fact of it. And so this unrepentant calcium-thief received a rarefied title and married the slim, solemn, sloe-eyed daughter of a lord who, years later, betrayed the king over a black rose and a green sword, and took the throne for a fortnight, during which time he set down thirteen laws so simple, elegant, and easy to obey that lawyers in neighboring countries died in the night of existential palsy. The new king granted women and foreigners the right to own property and receive income, removed the injunction against men of learning dissecting corpses for the purposes of academic study, placed all fools, jesters, witches, and whores under the crown’s protection and immune from all prosecutions, forgave the debts of the proletariat, but not the aristocracy, reformed the tax code into a system so exquisite it could be expressed only as poetry, wrote a meritocratic exam designed to bring talented commoners into government service, provided for the future education of each child born within the walls of ———— via wholesale liquidation of the Crown’s personal stock of sapphires, ordered seven diabolists of seven different schools to determine some means on earth or below it of preserving his laws in every cranny of the kingdom for seven hundred years, and, once that time had passed, at least safe from invaders with a scion of his house on the throne, before being poisoned by so many nobles at once that he simply exploded over the blancmange he so greatly preferred for his nightly dessert.

Whether, as the stylites insisted, as retribution for such libertine governance on the part of King Blancmange, or, as the cheesemakers gloated, for the guzzling of so much illicit milk on the part of Lord Cowsuck, the Bittern line never again produced more than one child in a generation, and that always a girl, not even after the bonfire of the songbirds, when they were given the crest of the fish-eating bittern to wear in shame for all time, not even once the fact of their being technically within the line of succession had been forgotten by all except the more discerning and scholarly voles in the palace walls, two of the stylites, and by something neither a vole nor a stylite that lived in the granary, not even when the certain child I have mentioned was born with a tower in the place of her torso, all the way to the cleft where a woman becomes a world to the cleft where a throat becomes an intellect, and tore her mother in half with the bricks of her birthing, and called Vnuk, and left alone in her father’s arms while the stars rained stitches of silver into a room hot and sour with death, its floor carpeted in blood and its ceilings chandeliered in blood and its lock so full of clotting that no one could get in for the three days it took to summon the royal locksmith from his pilgrimage, all the while the infant cried and cried for milk that, though it belonged to her, would never come.

THE SMARTEST, THOUGH never the wisest, yet almost certainly the most intolerable man ever born in the universe was named Chancel upon his birth in the village of Nyolc, and Chancel the Sophist upon his adulthood in the grand metropolis of Öt. Like all his people, he was stout, short, and agoraphobic, with a color to him like the flesh of hen-of-the-wood mushrooms, eyes like the bottoms of long-dry wells, and little enough jawline to speak of. By the time he could walk, the boy had already read every book in his village synagogue three times and spoiled the endings, not to mention the middles and beginnings, for everyone else. When the rag-and-bone man came calling with his birch-wheel cart down the thin dirt roads, the thick pastoral sunlight, for which Nyolc is so famous among painters and poets, pooled so heavily in his eyes that he did not notice one of the bundles of rags was rather heavy, and noisy, and squirmy, and named Chancel, until he was halfway down the mountain path to Öt and stuck in a snowstorm. Having no other idea what to do with objects, the rag-and-bone man sold Chancel, along with several yards of muslin and wool shearings as well as four deer femurs and a boiled rabbit skeleton, to an Öttian jewel-thief, for burglary was in those days the most fashionable occupation of Öt, and its various techniques the city’s most valuable export.

By the age of four, Chancel had stolen the Thirteen Treasures of the Common Man from the oligarchs of Öt (these being the first stone knife, the first arrowhead, the sternum of the first mastodon felled by mortal hand, the first woven basket, the first necklace, the charred ashes of the lightning-blasted tree that first revealed the logic of fire, the first wheel, three fossilized berries from the first plant used to narcotic effect, the first snowshoes, the stone on which the first abstracted writing was scribbled, the skull of the first person intentionally murdered, the first leash used on the first tamed wolf, and the first water jug) and used the sternum and the writing stone to keep his table from wobbling. Before the age of six he had married and divorced twice, the second time to the idea of a woman who had not yet been born, of which he grew tired, for it would not stop nagging him. At seven, Chancel had received his doctorate in both alchemy and astrology, having cured Sagittarianism to the satisfaction of his dissertation committee. Shortly thereafter, Chancel the Sophist married for the third time, a young and quite deaf tinker named Clerestory, perhaps the only one who could ever truly give her husband the ultimate expression of love: never once telling him to stop talking or she would scream. Thus finally settled in a house on the high street, an untroubled lady, and absolutely no friends at all, Chancel the Sophist, at nine years old, began work on writing the Amaranthine Bible. On his deathbed, one of his devoted followers asked why he had called it so. The sage Chancel coughed into his hand and answered: amaranthine sounds properly occult and mysterious. I wouldn’t have sold half so many copies of the Sorry, All the Paper in the Shops Was a Bit Green, It Was a Dry Year in the Forests of Tíz I Guess Bible.

This sort of very unsatisfactory thing was why Chancel only had acolytes and wives, not friends or companions. While he lived, whether or not the Amaranthine Bible was mean to be taken literally or was, in point of fact, the longest and least funny joke ever told by man or beast or man about a beast, was a subject of much debate. If Chancel were a comedian, even a dreadful one, he and his interminable shaggy dog story would be protected under the laws of the poor exploded king. If he were, however, practicing divine revelation on a freelance basis, both he and his book ought probably to be boilt for blasphemy. Death, however, has a way of making religion out of bad books. Death, and enough time.

Those were not, however, his last words. In the last breath of his life, the great man looked out the window of his house onto the wide, dark streets of Öt, breathed in the scent of broiling sausage and old rainwater and rich women’s perfume, and whispered to the sternum of the first slaughtered mastodon: from the time of my youth I have dreamt of a wall I have never seen, the color of ginseng root, with moss growing upon the towers of it like snow, and little red flowers among the moss like blood. Do you think, perhaps, before the sun, and before the stone, before even the paprikas, there was this dream? I wish I had a whiskey, damn everything to hell.

This was in reference to the most oft-repeated passage of the Amaranthine Bible: In the beginning of the world, only three things existed: the stone beneath our feet, the sun above our heads, and paprikas. When questioned, as he often was, as to how paprikas could exist before chickens, cows for the necessary sour cream, and hot red peppers growing in good brown earth, he answered: Does not the mortar come before the house? Do not the birch trees come before the wooden wheel? Do not the parts come before the wholes? So doth the parts that comprise a paprikas, before the wholes from whence they came. Whereupon his questioners walked away, initially satisfied, only to turn back in consternation and find Chancel having run off whilst their back was turned. Even in death, Chancel could find no comfort in anything he did not write himself.

Perhaps the oddest thing in the whole long life of the cleverest man ever born in the universe was that he was right. He would never know it, except in the way men like Chancel always know they are right, without any real reason to think so. One moment the world did not exist. The next, there was stone, veined and cold. The next, there was a golden pearl hanging in the sky dripping life like organ meat hung up to cure. And the next, the very next moment, there was, upon the stone and beneath the sun, a white and purple porcelain bowl full of steaming paprikas, long before anyone existed to eat it.

Chancel the Sophist would not live nearly long enough to meet the beginning of this tale which is named Vnuk, nor even seize with his own eyes the River Sz or Ognisko Square. But his grandson and granddaughter, who happened to be twins and therefore twice as bad and twice as good as their famous ancestor, would.

THE DIABOLIST WHO came to examine Vnuk and record her into the books of peerage, once she had lived through a few poxes and bad winters and seemed destined to survive at least the immediate future, despite having no visible heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, or liver, was known as Archfiend the Lesser. He was called this despite being a rather nice man with a closely-trimmed beard who hated clutter and bad manners but loved injured animals, stained glass windows, watercress soup with dollops of sour cream, going to bed early, and had been compelled to hide, from childhood, his passion for embroidery. Men of his profession were imagined to commit pyrotechnical sins of wrath and adultery and ambition, nothing so vile and degenerate as enjoying the work and company of women. Nevertheless, after the explosion of King Blancmange, the bishopry of ———— compelled all diabolists to take names that plainly and obviously announced their profession, so that no child might be seduced into thinking they were upstanding, jovial, worthy men they might want to grow up to be, like Istevan or Konrad or Milosh down the way. It was devoutly hoped that the occupation would shortly die out, and whatever the deconstructed king had done to ensure the longevity of his laws would be unspooled like so much loudly-colored thread and everyone could breathe a sigh of joy and release and go back to patting down the poor for pennies and tossing their extraneous daughters in the river like they’d always done.

It did not have the intended effect. In fact, Archfiend the Lesser had been followed to the palace grounds from his cottage, over the Gyöngy Bridge on the River Sz, through the comedians’ district and Slatterncourt Row, past dismemberers taking elk and boar and lion apart like puzzles previously solved by God, through wide open nearly cosmopolitan Ognisko Square in the sun, by a veritable totentanz of children of every economic class and level of nutrition begging him to take them on as his apprentices, despite his protestations that diabolist was just a word, not to be taken literally any more than an alewife was actually married to a barrel of black beer, his knowledge of demons merely academic, not practical in the least, his work almost entirely medical, astrological, or algebraic, and the most dangerous thing he’d ever done had been to set the crown a sensible budget when he was a young and reckless man.

The diabolist found Vnuk dressed in a gown of yellow and green chevrons trimmed in badger tails that buttoned all the way up to the tip of her chin. She sat, with a posture that could make a man believe in God, on a chair with a blue velvet cushion whose ivory back was carved to imitate the arches of the cathedral visible just outside the window of their allotted chambers, for at that time all members of the aristocracy lived within the walls of the palace and not on their own estates, where they could neither be trusted nor protected from the approaching army—and, one way or another, on horse or on foot, from the north or the west or the south, there was always an approaching army. It was what came of being situated so pleasantly as ————, between mountains, seas, generous growing seasons, and cross-hatching trade routes. The present horde, the king had shared in confidence, rode basilisks into battle, shot angels from the sky and cut them into rations for the infantry, spoke the language of silkworms, and was commanded by a woman-general without any single physical flaw. Why risk bodily autonomy on even the possibility of basilisks? And so they came into the fold, and were given rooms and gardens and plate in perfect proportion to what they had possessed out there in the sun-drenched lands beneath the wall, arrayed in just the same configuration, so that each lord retained his neighbors, and the palace became a microcosm of the kingdom itself.

“May I?” asked Archfiend the Lesser, reaching for the freshwater pearl buttons of Vnuk’s gown with some hesitation of virtue.

“Of course, of course,” snapped Vnuk’s father, waving his broad hand in the air. Lord Bittern wore his cynicism in his beard and his grief in his belly, as though he could give birth to it one day, and finally be rid of the thing. His coat-of-rank strained at its clasps, its velvet stretched, only just able to keep all that sadness in one place. “I shouldn’t think a man of your profession would be so bloody ecclesiastical. She has no shame, nor should you. I have a furious faith in searching out some slovenly little goodness in all hideous things, and in my personal tragedy it is this: My daughter alone is exempt from the sins of the primeval female. She has no stink of Eve about her, no inch of the Magdalene. You will find nothing to tempt the flesh beneath that dress. If not for the sniffing and clucking of your sort, I would let her run naked. She prefers it, you know. Her innocence is that extreme.”

“It’s all right,” Vnuk whispered softly. “I don’t mind. The crown prince already kissed my belfry, so you can’t shock me. He said I had to let him, because, while the people are free of will and movement, all buildings in the kingdom belong to him. He said if I did not let him, he would charge me rent.”

Archfiend the Lesser undressed the child and could not think of one single reason that his hands should tremble as they did, with each pearl button, with each dark flash of the body beneath. He harbored no clandestine love for children as some men of his profession did, nor did nakedness of any sort move him half so much as a perfect passage of Greek. And yet he trembled.

“This will require a new categorization,” said Archfiend the Lesser, very handsomely lit by shafts of late sunlight slashing through the room. He flipped through the pages of his book, illuminated with oxblood and emerald headers that read: Animalia, Missing or Additional Parts, Mineral Contamination, Disorders of the Blood, Skin, or Hair, Disorders of Doubling or Tripling, Disorders of Selfhood, and wrote, somewhat experimentally: Architectural.

Vnuk watched him calmly as he wrote, her badger-lined gown laid open, her hands folded calmly in her lap, just below the great door of her tower. Although she, without a doubt, had bricks and mortar and portcullises and doors and windows where she should have had blood and skin and a chest and a stomach, she was an unsettlingly beautiful child. Her hair was dark, dark blue, the color of a whale’s shadow, but the viscount’s daughter had braids of such pure, hot light that they sheared them into two hundred lanterns at the beginning of winter every year. Her eyes were enormous, knowing, black as the inside of a winecask, with a pinprick of silver at the bottom of each iris like a tiny star, but the queen had no eyes at all and a pangolin’s tail so long it curled three times around the throne. Archfiend the Lesser had himself been born with three faces, the extraneous two clutched one in each fist as he entered the world. He kept them nowadays carefully rolled in a surveyor’s tube, and wore one for prayer, one for work, and one for passion, though having never experienced the third of these, he had yet to see the world through that last face.

The child lifted her chin in an attitude of arrogant wisdom, but this was all due to the architecture of the tower. Vnuk could no more slouch than Archfiend the Lesser could fly without weeks of prayer and study. Her skin shone with all the milk-fed clarity of her cow-besotted ancestor, and where it joined the bricks of her chest, the seam was no seam at all, flesh simply flowed into stone as smoothly and naturally as earth slopes into a river. The architecture of Vnuk was an upset and flustered thing, a runaway cathedral caught out between the Gothic and the Baroque, having stolen significantly from the Romanesque, the Russian Revival, late Byzantine, and the Early Grand Duchy school of Finland. The materials of her were, at the extremities, ashen skin, thin meat, thick hair, long bone, the usual nacre of nail, and in the trunk, a kind of strange brick so smooth and without pock it might have been a flow of lava cooled by a sudden sea. Most of this brick was black, but here and there, the tower of her glinted: a red slab, a blue stone, a green or violet trio of blocks, like any child’s moles or freckles or portwine stains.

Vnuk possessed thirteen black-bricked levels from pelvis to jawline, terminating in an octagonal market cross at the crest of her collarbone, cradling her skull as a finial at the joining of eight flying buttresses so cluttered with dark croquets they looked like the legs of a great and sinister insect, and where the hollow of her throat should have been, that part of the body which all in the country of ———— agreed was the most beautiful, rode a solemn silver silent bell. Each floor of her body was a pitched aesthetic and winnerless battle of ribbed vaults, secretive alcoves, long graceful galleries, nave arcades whose arches within arches within arches bristled with primeval faces and keystones wrought from unpolished gems, columns and capitals in every style painted in Turkish geometric patterns, French florals, Greek mosaics. Her ribcage unfolded into cloister walks and delicate balustrades whose railings curled like jet lily-vines, gargoyles and grotesques peering round every corner, and a multitude of mullioned windows, lancet, trefoil, reticulated tracery, Lucarne windows, rose windows, splayed and dormer windows, some as large as crabapples, some so tiny no human hand could open them without shattering them like ice over shallows, some papered, some crystal, some fitted with stained glass so fine that in later years, the glaziers of that country would take the name of their guild from Vnuk and make of her an informal patron saint. A wooden door of petrified grey walnut rode low in her belly, hinged in fresh iron, undecorated, dry as gasping, its slats born half-splintered. A scent emerged from the dark slats and gangplanks of her chest, a scent like African violets boiling in seawater.

The royal architects, an occult and unpleasable lot, would ultimately declare the whole effect rather an unsightly mess, and express a hope that, perhaps, at the onset of puberty, the poor benighted child might develop some unity of style.

Archfiend the Lesser put his thumb at the base of her chin and lifted slightly, peering through the dark archways to the other side of the room. He lifted his eyes; the buttresses flowed up into the skin of her face, and all else beneath the jawbone was smooth, flat, featureless skin, like a theatrical prop of a skull, unconnected to any part of the body. She should not have been able to speak or walk or live at all, her head having no method by which to discuss action or inaction with her limbs, and yet Vnuk was Vnuk, the fact of her in itself already proven. Archfiend the Lesser felt the great business of his life settle upon him. Presumably, behind these many doors and windows and arches, further cells and chambers and passageways lay as hidden and unseeable as the flora of the gut, connected by staircases of black proportions beyond mortal calculation, be their mathematics heavenly or infernal. A certainty set up its business in the base of his brain, that if he could know the map of her interior, he could know the map of everything.

The diabolist put his ink-stained hand on the stone of her chest. He meant to ask the same questions he asked of all the nobly deformed children he had examined in his life: does it hurt when I do this, or perhaps this, can you count to ten, is your eyesight improved by this lens of glass or that, what can you do that I cannot, can you imagine for me a machine that might ease some little annoyance of your life in this body, even if it seems absurd and impossible? He did mean to. But what came to his lips unwilled was instead a crime, a humiliation, a horror not his to commit—the great question asked of all diabolists on their first day of their enclosure, when they are still only boys trying to look up the infinite skirt of the universe, a question which is itself an initiation, the beginning of knowledge.

“What is the name of the Devil, my child?”

On the eleventh level of Vnuk, in the eighth lancet window, a soft light came on, the color of turmeric.

IN OCTOBER, THE trees in the city of Tizenkét do not lose their leaves. Instead, a slick of blue-white fire licks along their bark and their branches, sketching an arboreal outline in a crackling ghostmoon flame. The aqueducts run green and hot, as sharp-bubbled as champagne, and no one can drink from them until the season is past. The University Proctors once commissioned a study to explain why no one could get a decent glass of water for weeks on end every year, (was civilization itself in vain?), and even brought Chancel the Sophist on a significant salary to answer for this phenomena. The scholars could not agree between three theories—that some sort of clam was deep in its mating season upstream, that people really ought to stop pouring the more liquid of their rubbish into the river, or that the masters of hell were offended by the indomitable virtue of the citizenry—and the group disbanded after one of the Clamites stabbed one of the Rubbishers between the eyes. Chancel ignored the aqueduct completely, and claimed to discern a pattern in the crackling of the blue-white light in the trees, but when pressed for a translation by the Dean of Linguistics, the great man blushed and said only that he was angry with himself for never thinking that the universe itself might also know lustful thoughts.

That was where the matter rested for many hundreds of years. It is a fact simply accepted that in Tizenkét, October is for beer and palinka and slivovitz and kefir, not water.

But October was also the time of the festival of St. Gremory-on-the-Stair, when the people poured out of their tall, narrow houses in the very corners of the night, chisels and buckets and knives and spiles and sewing needles and picnic blankets and wine bottles in all their merry hands. Look, there go Baldachin and Oriel, the best of friends since their seventh breaths, one a gravedigger like her father, eight months gone with her latest babe, the other a midwife like her mother, barren as sand in a glass, death and life, holding hands and drinking from the same bottle of yellow wine, wearing camels’ skulls tangled in wild speckled mushrooms and monkshood and maroon silk ribbons on their heads. Their grandmothers made them those Gremory caps, and in each knot there was both love and a grand, luxurious irritation with the youth of the world. They will lay out their down-stuffed blankets on the cobblestone streets with their neighbors, where all carriages, horses, and carts have been banned for the night. They will sing the old thirteen-part songs as they light their camel-tallow candles, as big around as a strong man’s ankle, and paint the little ones faces to look like wild camels and dragons, draft ponies and intricate glittering machines, all to commemorate the coming of St. Gremory when the world was new. Gablet the Fool will stare longingly at Baldachin, wishing the small soul in her nest were his, its future face his right to paint in the colors of a celestial camel, and braising in his bitterness, juggle cutting implements for coins. He is in secret the richest man in Tizenkét, all in small coins hidden away in his cellar and never let out to breathe.

The feast blazes in the alleys and closes and on the high street, too, there is food enough for all and sandwiches in the morning. Here and there among the quilted blankets burns paraffin-soaked effigies of the Patron Saint of Man Civilized, woven in crosshatches of black barley and white gentian, crowned in geometric sulfur crystal, and his eyes, repeated up and down the boulevards like a stutter in the long poem of of autumn, are always knobs of old brown bone. All down the public ways work-wizened grandafathers tell the tale as it was put down by Cinquefoil the Rhymer in the age between bronze hammers and iron, of how, before either of those could be imagined to hide in the earth, when the people were mute and stupid and more kin to the insects than to the angels, a man came among them as tall as the morning, with the head of a camel, the wings of a dragon, and the legs of a draft horse, and taught them all things which could be made and not birthed, which he called by the name of technology and by the name of civilization, and this was St. Gremory. He helped them to gather the Thirteen Treasures of the Common Man, he taught them to decorate themselves with stones, he taught them fire and cookery and how to safeguard against plagues of earthquakes, he taught them agriculture and the founding of cities, he taught them to enjoy the company of others, to ferment vegetation and to devise games. And in exchange for all of this, for modernity entire, St. Gremory asked simply that a few certain laws be obeyed, and even that only for a term of seven hundred years, until he returned among their number to see what they had made of themselves.

The first commandment of St. Gremory, the only one most people cared much about, was this: “This world is yours to use, to consume and to devour and to delight in. Seize it, take what you will from it and of it, and like the maggot upon the carcass, know no part of guilt. All things great and small are yours to command, and it is a sin to waste their value. Go forth and exhaust this universe, wring from it every last seep of strength which is yours by right, and you will know the weight of blessings. But if I return to find one stone unmolested, unknown, unhollowed, my displeasure will be the fission of atoms.”

When the hundred and eleven clocks in Grisaille Spire chime eleven minutes after one in the morning, the moment when St. Gremory descended his mountain stair and began the tocking of history, the people of Tizenkét will let out a great wail and cry and drive their chisels and their knives and their spiles and their corkscrews into the black cobblestones with all their strength, prying up flakes and shards and chunks of stone, cramming them into their mouths like soft, fatty meat, grinning in holy transport as the dust runs down their chins like juice, and in her hunger and her satiation, Gablet the Fool will see at last that the midwife’s daughter Oriel had hoarded beauty in her left profile and not her right, just as he had hoarded his small coins in his cellar and not his purse.

Seven hundred years has long come and gone in Tizenkét.

THE CHILDHOOD OF Vnuk was a hall of strange turnings, and to the right was always the wildness of the little furred boar, and to the left was always the illness of the orphaned lamb. The monstrous children of the nobility ran rude and unruled through the palace, accepting no governance for themselves but a kindly anarchy. They tumbled through the grounds as they would have through the unfenced lands of their fathers, climbing through windows like manor doors, down passageways like rows of turnips planted for fall, up and down stairs like larch trees, stumbling into servants’ quarters as into the fields of tenant farmers, hunting tomcats and kitchen rats and speckled doves down the arcades and courtyards with the solemnity they would have given to the stalking of stags in the shaded parks of their inheritances. To them, the palace was the world and the world was the palace. They did not even dream of those grand estates their parents abandoned for the safety of the king’s eye on them. Yet the whole arrangement was so scaled to life that if you set down any boy or girl of that time on the thick seedy grass of the homes they’d never seen, they would have known exactly how many steps to get to this neighbor or that, for they were represented by the number of portraits between one bank of rooms and the next, exactly how the stables stood, and the mills, and the vineyards, for statues of cows, horses, wheat, and grapes in enamel and glass marked these spots along the royal mazeways, the directions of the brooks and streams and the names of all the creatures inside them, for these were painted along the floors, and words like cyprinius carpo, lepomis auritus, and esox lucius swam along the currents like real and breathing fish.

Vnuk tried to keep up with her playmates, but having no lungs, she was easily winded; having no heart, she would easily swoon. She loved to run along behind Ispan, the crown prince born already a corpse, and Sedria, the viscount’s daughter with a perfect hole through her forehead through which you could see, no matter where she stood, a foreign desert of sand and starving rabbits as clear as a window, and Geza, the underpope’s cat-eyed, seven-fingered girl, the silver ducal twins Szemmel and Szagol, and Kulacs, third in line for the throne, with his knees that bent backward like a seabird and his beautiful mouthless face. They stole joints of ham from the kitchens, books of occult philosophy and unvarnished history from the libraries, hid in wait for unsuspecting duchesses, climbed into the high gables and imitated the sobbing of ghosts until the whole palace rang with little soft lamentations and giggles and still further wailing on the subject of the horrors of the grave. They played at burnt-bone dice and taroc cards in the gardens, at pyromania in the vaults, at kisses in the shadows. But if she ran too fast (and she never could run so fast as the others, for her tower could not bend or flex like a back), Vnuk would fall sick and have to sit on the flagstones as still as winter until the spell passed. She had a horror of fire and if Szemmel and Geza’s beloved flames licked too close to her, she would scream and scream until she fell down faint. And she could not eat the quinces or the figs from the orchards the other children loved to burgle away from the harvest, though she loved them too and always tried, hoping this time, this year she would be cured of it, but with one bite she always went so pale and sick the astrologer-physicians would lock her in a crumbling unused tower, ruined, the king said to all who would listen, by the basilisk-drawn trebuchets of the enemy during the last invasion, there to drink only rainwater, eat only the yolks of the eggs of white hens, and bathe in the healing light of Scorpio for a fortnight.

Diabolists were in those days only allowed past the palace gates on Thursdays, for long ago, when glaciers could be counted in the morning like pale geese and God still spoke to man, the first king of ————, who had no name, no gender, and came from nowhere, and was therefore judged by the people to be the only one among them uncorrupted by ambition, offspring or foreign interests, asked Murmex the Impenetrable what day of the week the diabolists held holy. Murmex answered: there are few enough scraps left of the feast of days, for Sunday belongs to the Christians, Saturday to the Jews, and Friday to the Muslim with his forehead to the ground. Wednesday is the province of the pagan, Tuesday the kingdom of the tax collector, and Monday is the Great Sabbat of the owners of the means of production. Therefore we will make of Thursdays our masses, for nothing much of import happens on a Thursday, and it is with the stuff of idleness that we do our best work.

And so Archfiend the Lesser came to Vnuk on Thursdays, wearing the face he used for work, and thus in the cosmology of Vnuk, Thursday was the name of the god of knowledge. They met in a little chapel adjoining Lord Bittern’s bedchamber, eleven meters from his bedside, corresponding precisely at scale to the half kilometer between Milkdrop Hall and a particular orchard worked since before the songbirds burned by the old tarman Pkelnik and his wife. The chapel walls were thus painted round with sixty-six silver birch trees, two young fawns and their mother, a tame fox, a stone well, seventeen sour cherry trees, four bilberry bushes, a potato patch, a small thatched hut with a smoky fire burning outside, and Pkelnik himself with all his liver spots, industriously boiling bark into pitch. Beneath the brass drain in the center of the floor, a family of sleeping rabbits were painted in careful browns and greys and pinks, as real as if they meant to wake at dusk and set upon Pkelnik’s potatoes.

At first, the diabolist brought both gifts and tools to the deformed child, to ply at her in both ways. On one table, he laid out a doctor’s leather roll containing hammers, scalpels, chisels both toothed and flat, nails, needle and thread, a speculum, glass pots of exotic mortars and acids, levels and rules, shears, and vials of narcotics more powerful than prayer, all in miniature, delicate enough to work upon that famous pinhead over-populated with angels. On another table, he rolled out another physician’s hide, this one containing sticks of peppermint and cinnamon, paints and brushes of Italian glass, ivory dolls so thin and long their heads could be used as quill tips, pots of meringue and honeyed cream, and a little silver whistle with a reed of sugar cane.

Vnuk looked from the left-hand table to the right. She sighed, and the sigh sounded so awfully old in her small body.

“Someone’s painted rabbits in the drain,” the child said on that first Thursday.

“H… have they?” said Archfiend the Lesser.

“Yes. A mother and six babies. I suppose the father’s scampered off. They do that, you know. Fathers. Though I suppose I have made certain assumptions with regard to the larger rabbit. Mothers scamper off, too.”

“Ah,” said the diabolist, scratching his head beneath his green leather cap. The join between his face and his skull always itched him terribly. “Well, rabbits in the drain or no rabbits, we have much work ahead of us, and it’s a sin to waste a Thursday.”

“Why would someone do that, do you think?”

Archfiend the Lesser selected the little hammer and the toothed chisel. “Do what?” he said, with a whiff of exasperation.

“Paint a mother rabbit and six babies under the brass grate in the drain. It’s a very good likeness. It must have taken days. And no one will ever see them. No one even knows they’re there.”

“You’ve seen them.”

Vnuk paused and looked down at her long, slender fingers holding tight to the sash of her yellow autumn gown. “Is that enough?” she whispered. “I had to pry up the grate with a trowel.”

“If someone painted them there, that means there are rabbits in the real world, on your real estate, where these birch trees are really birch trees and your father’s bondsman really does spend his life blackening his lungs and teeth and soul with tar-smoke. Now, take this peppermint. Science waits on no man’s fancy. Or rabbit’s.”

Vnuk leaned closer to the diabolist. The grey walnut door in her belly creaked. “But surely not anymore, Archfiend. Surely they’ve all grown up by now, and had other babies. Rabbits make babies very fast, you know. There’s probably millions of them running all over poor Pkelnik’s potatoes, because no one’s there to hunt them for stew. What are you going to do to me with that hammer and that chisel? Is it something you’ve already done to the other children?”

Archfiend the Lesser had spent the holy days of all the other religions stirring his courage round and round to this day. He had worn the stern, severe, sharp-cheekboned face of work. It had grey hair, though he was a young man, in case he needed the extra authority. He’d tried to forget about the child of Vnuk and concentrate only on the tower of Vnuk. All his brothers of the diabolists college agreed that she herself was irrelevant, surplus, no more to be worried over than the apple-skin which covers the apple, which was only there to keep the fruit from going brown too soon. Yet there she sat, with her black buttressed throat, her blue hair rippling over her shoulders, nearly down to the floor that concealed those painted, sleeping rabbits.

“There are no other children like you,” he rasped. “A baby born with no eyes or seven fingers on each hand or a even wolf’s tail is still within the bounds of positable humanity, however unpleasant to look at. It is something Aristotle could imagine. Something findable within the pages of Herodotus. You… are not.”

“Ispan is a corpse, and he’s going to be king. I don’t think you took a crowbar to the king.”

“You have me there.”

“Please tell me. I’ll know in a minute anyway, once you’re doing it to me.”

Archfiend the Lesser tried to think of Lord Bittern’s daughter as an apple-skin. “As it is our first day, I thought we would begin slowly. I mean to remove those three little blue bricks near the kidney area, and perhaps one of the lancet windows, through which opening I will pass my instruments in order to begin a rough calculation of your interior volume. Perhaps, if we are lucky, even find the source of that light in your aorta.”

“Will it hurt?”

“I have no idea. Cathedrals do not scream. Girls do. It could go either way, honestly. Whether or not it will hurt is… it is part of what I wish to learn.”

Vnuk considered for a long moment. She looked from the right-hand table to the left.

“No,” she said.

“No?” repeated the diabolist, who had never heard the word, not even from the, admittedly tiny and quite lazy, demons he’d once summoned to defend his thesis.

“No. You will not do that.”

“Your father has already agreed to this. My colleagues have negotiated an increase in his rank as compensation. It has all been arranged by men wiser than us both. You will be a baroness now. Won’t that be nice?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. If my father would like parts of him removed in order to calculate his interior volume, which is probably quite impressive, he is free to make himself a baroness and do it.” Tears floated in Vnuk’s strange eyes. She wrapped her thin arms around her architecture. “I am mine,” she pleaded.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you, but the high court has determined that property law applies in this case. The trial was very long. I testified. So did your father. So did the locksmith who was present at your birth. The judge went through a third change of wigs. Konrad the Rhymer has already written two romances about it. You are, technically speaking, rather less a member of the nobility and rather more a structure situated upon the lands of the king and therefore—”

Vnuk trembled and tightened her arms around the balconies of her ribcage. “But I am mine.”

Archfiend the Lesser had no answer for her. He set down the hammer and the chisel. He drew out his surveyor’s tube containing his other two faces and laid it on the floor. The diabolist opened one end and carefully worked out the face he wore for prayer. A kinder face, a rounder face, soft and young and sad, with solemn dark hair and eyes like saltwater. He allowed Vnuk to watch him change his face, which he had allowed no one to see before. When it was done he knelt before her with his saint’s eyes and his martyr’s lips.

“Please,” he said.

“What will you give me?”

“I gave you a peppermint. And the dolls.”

Vnuk shriveled him with a glare. “Teach me what you know. Teach me the names of all the devils and their sigils and their mounts. Teach me to be like you.”

“It is forbidden for women to study such things.”

“When you met me in my father’s rooms, when you saw me naked and asked me the name of the Devil as though a child of six should know such a thing, did I answer correctly?”

Archfiend the Lesser’s gentlest face darkened with shame. Why had he said it? What had moved his absurd mouth? “Yes.”

“Then am I not already your apprentice?”

“It is too dangerous for women, Vnuk. Men may have their ambition, their lands, their treasure, their talent, their name, but you have only one thing to trade to the legions for knowledge, and though one good coin still makes the sale, it is not your coin to barter. It belongs to your father, to your king, and to your husband, whoever he may be.”

Vnuk began to laugh, and when she laughed, the bell at the base of her throat began to toll like the striking of some hour deep in the night.

“What could amuse you so?” asked Archfiend.

“Two things,” laughed the girl, “and I cannot decide which is the better. That I should need my father’s permission to sell my soul, or that you think I have that coin you speak of with which to go to market.”

Vnuk held her hand against the splintered door at the join of her legs, against the bricks and the black tracery.

The diabolist rose, his heart boiling in him, his liver cursing his spleen. He drew the long silver whistle from the left-hand table and gave it to the child with a tower in her belly.

“Do you know what a songbird sounds like?”

“Of course not. They are all dead.”

“Amusdias is the name of a certain lieutenant. He commands legions numbering six by six. He appears in the form of a man with the head of a unicorn crowned, but his hands are the hands of an ape, and he can, under compulsion, change into the form of a thrush or a starling. He is the provider of all the cacophonous music of Hell, and his sigil is that of Saturn and Neptune conjoined, with his name writ upon it in Hebrew and Sanskrit. When you have mastered those languages, and the melody he calls most favored, and can tell me how life begins, where comes the first seed of dust, the first drop of water, the first inkling of intelligence, we will attempt your first summoning, and you will tire of all of this or run shrieking from it, but either way, you, among all the children of ————, will at least have heard the singing of a bird.”

Archfiend the Lesser took up his tools again, and this time, looked to Vnuk for permission. She nodded slowly. As he bent to wedge his chisel behind the first blue stone in her side, she cried out:

“Wait!”

“What is it now, girl? Must I stand on my head? Tell you how to turn lead to gold? Bring you the heart of a griffin?”

Vnuk looked into his eyes and all the way through them down into the fire at the center of his life.

“What if I have rabbits in my drains?” she whispered in terror.

“Ah, dear, sweet thing, I will not wake them,” the diabolist answered tenderly. “But I will see them, and that will be enough.”

“I don’t think the king ever does mean to let us out of the palace,” the daughter of Lord Bittern sighed. “I don’t believe there really are any basilisks at all.”

With a hesitant motion, her new friend struck out one bright blue brick from her body.

Vnuk began to scream.

ALL THE CITIES in that pleasant kingdom suffered from earthquakes, but the one called Kettő had taken those cataclysms to wife. Travelers leaving the Dancing City feel the tremors in their legs for days afterward, like sailors suddenly cast ashore. Even the infants of Kettő know like dogs when a quake is about to begin. They feel it in their soft bones, in the cartilage of their flat noses. There are still days, to be sure, days when the balconies and colonnades know no other turmoil than the play of shadows on their stones. Mothers still sing of the Quiet Summer, when not a drop of water was spilt in all the hundred houses of Kettő and all the nets and straps of daily life were, for a time—and what a time it was!—laid to rest. But it was not to last, no summer ever is, and to be truthful, many were glad when the world began to shake again. They had not known how to live without. The Quiver is life, the Quiver is death. All the old men sipping thick tea in the afternoons had taken to yelling at anyone who would listen that this degenerate world was slowing down, growing lazy and weak, unable even to shake off its own dust like it used to. And what would the younger generation become now, without the Quiver to keep them agile, sharp, and clever? Layabouts, that’s what.

The rules of survival in Kettő were simple and short, and the Beggar Finial had obeyed them all the days of his life. Strap, net, and door. If you had your strap and you had your sleeping nets, there was nothing at all to fear from a little clearing of the geological throat. After all, God’s Fingers were always there to catch you. The Dancing City bristled with them: little curls of stone or iron jutting out of the masonry like errant nails, a little face on the head of each one, laughing or vomiting, depending on your religious philosophy, and the two schisms had long since divided Kettő into a patchwork of loyalties and blood feuds, the market district marching on crusade against the launderers’ grotto, the millers excommunicating the bakers and the bakers excommunicating the millers. The Beggar Finial picked his way among the territories of the faithful every day, scraping coins to fill his belly, caring nothing for whether the tiny faces laughed or retched, for millers or for bakers, as long as he could still get a bit of bread out of them. And if he felt an earthquake coming in his cartilage, he slipped the holes on either end of his strap, thick as a wrist and wide as a forearm, over two of God’s Fingers, and hung there safe until the dance was done. You walked with your strap, you slept with your net so as not to tumble out of bed, and sometimes you could fall asleep there, hanging between two faces, perhaps happy, perhaps near to death, rocked into dreams by the motion of the world.

The Beggar Finial had once hoped for more in this life. He hoped for a family, he hoped for a trade, he hoped for that beast called satisfaction that always ran faster than he. He had always had the feeling, as deep in him as marrow, that he was special, favored by whatever passed for fate. No matter how low his station, how miserably bruised his pride, how furious his empty stomach, he could not take off that suspicion of his own greatness. He blamed his mother, for calling him beautiful and strong. He blamed his father, for praising him for even so much as waking up of a morning. And he blamed Kettő, the whole of it, for since he had no house, he considered all the city his manor, and holy wars had made his manor filthy, cluttered, strewn with bones and swords and broken tabernacles, for neither side would lower themselves to do the tidying up, since, as far as both were concerned, they hadn’t made the mess to begin with. But in the cold, still nights when he had not even the Quiver to keep him company and reassure him, the Beggar Finial knew full well what sin had cost him his grace.

When the Beggar Finial was a child, beautiful and strong and often-praised, he was walking alone along the border of the city, where the windows in the wall were tallest and finest, and the light streaming through them colored like a feast. He had come upon a heap of rubbish left over from the Greengrocers’ Crusade, boots and skulls and some poor dead men’s straps and nets and swords and tridents and bandages washed up like driftwood against the hinges of the Only Door, that massive wooden thing that towered over him so, that led Out and Away, the most important destinations imaginable. The Only Door was the last rule of Kettő—you must never open it, you must never go through it, you must pretend as though there is no door in the wall at all. It was not remotely the only door, so he’d no idea why everyone called it that. You could get to Öt and Tizenkét and Nyolc and Három and any place you cared for through a hundred other arches and paths and stairs and doors. But the Only Door was locked, and every mother, including his own, who would allow him anything, said that to open it was death. Some madness had overtaken the Beggar Finial then, the madness of the young or the male or the spoiled or the bored he never could tell, then or after. Why couldn’t he open this door? Why shouldn’t he? Why should idiots get to slaughter each other over whether a nail in a wall was happy or sad while he, Finial, the most excellent and special boy in Kettő, should be forbidden to use a door? In his thwarted rage, the boy took up one of the old swords and heaved it into the Only Door with all his beautiful strength, leaving it stuck in the ancient wood like another of God’s Fingers.

The city began to convulse, and it was none of that pleasant after-breakfast shuddering or tolerable teatime tremor that the old men said built character. It was the end of the Quiet Summer, and the world quaked and staggered and rattled until whatever good and special fate was in the Beggar Finial was shaken from him like the last dry peapod in a straw sack.

ONCE, IN THE grips of one of Vnuk’s quince-fevers, the crown prince Ispan came to the door of her sickroom in the broken spire. He leaned against the stove-in red wood and bronze bolts of the door. Being a live boy in a dead body, he did not mind the cold or the fasting or even the sharpness of the shattered wall and roof where once, possibly, a real basilisk had done its duty. Yet, for all the rules the little gang of aristocrats stepped upon daily and nightly, he would not go past that door and into Vnuk’s private territory.

“Hullo, Vnuk,” said the prince, peering over the ruin of the door. The top half had been sheared away, as if by some awful claw. “I have brought you a cup of paprikas from Kulacs’s mother, a backgammon board with red velvet on the inside and pieces carved like foxes from Sedria, a tinderbox and candle from Geza, some cherry vodka from Szemmel and Szagol, and a book from Archfiend the Lesser called A Census of the Infernal Regions, Volume Two: The Wasteland of Water, at least I think so, it is in Latin. It looks very juicy. What do you and he do together in that little birch-tar chapel?”

Vnuk looked up at the stars of the constellation Scorpio, which did seem somehow cool and pale and medicinal as they streamed through the shattered brickwork. “We talk about rabbits,” she said quietly.

“Rabbits are boring,” sighed Ispan. “They’re so small and there’s so many of them but all they do is… twitch. Have you summoned a demon yet? You’ve been at it long enough.”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“I bet you can’t, I bet you can’t even do a little tiny one, like the demon who makes you trip on the cobbles when there wasn’t anything to trip over, I bet you can’t even do him.”

“I could if I wanted.”

“Could not.”

“Could so.”

“You couldn’t, Vnuk, you really couldn’t. You needn’t feel shame on it, though. Girls can’t be diabolists.”

“And dead boys can’t inherit thrones. You will tell me when you plan to abdicate, won’t you?”

Ispan looked stricken. The stars in the dead, flat eyes of the crown prince looked like dandelion seeds sinking beneath black seas.

Vnuk relented. Her little shoulders softened. She came to the door and took his gifts, setting them on the floor beside her pitcher of water and basket of boiled white eggs. The two looked at each other over the slashed slats, each wondering if it had really been a basilisk who had done it, each wishing it had finished the job.

“What would you make him do,” whispered the daughter of Lord Bittern, “if I did summon a demon?”

The corpse prince shrugged. He had never considered it. In his mind, once the demon was there, huge and sulfurous and horned and roaring and flaming and all the rest, you had all the entertainment you could ever pray for. “I don’t know, what are you supposed to do with demons once you’ve summoned them?”

“They can do anything. Anything in the world you could ever want. Only you’ve always got to pay for it. They’re very strict capitalists, demons. Archfiend the Lesser says that the old king summoned Amusdias to solve the famine, and that’s how he got the whole idea of killing all the songbirds, and also how he got them to all hold still for their trials and executions and such. And the diabolists brought forth a demon for poor King Blancmange, which is why if you break one of his laws you get kidney stones and you start talking backwards and your fingers fall off one by one until you stop what you’re doing.”

“I would make him change everything so I could marry you,” Ispan interrupted. His grey, green-veined lips trembled. He remembered his mother, staring down at him with her eyeless face, her bronze pangolin tail thrashing against the flagstones, in a wintry rage. You would have no heir out of that walking privy-house but a mute brick, swaddled in silk and rocked to sleep by an idiot.

Vnuk reached out her hand. Ispan laced his fingers through hers. “And what would you pay for that?”

“My soul.”

“They don’t want your soul, Ispan. The Devil wants your soul, but he comes for it in the end and not before. Demons want only your pain. It is their food and their wine. It wouldn’t… come out the way you want it. Do you know what happened after all the songbirds died?”

“Yes, yes, a demon’s bargain will turn on you. Everyone knows that. I don’t care.” Ispan reached one moldering hand out. Vnuk laced her warm fingers through it. “I wish I was small enough to live inside you,” he said helplessly.

In the light of Scorpio, Vnuk answered him: “When the songbirds were gone, there was no one to eat the grasshoppers and the beetles, and so they ate up even more of the harvest than before. So the perfumers and the alchemists invented a poison to kill grasshoppers and beetles, since they are too stupid and innocent to stand trial. It worked, and everything smelled like African violets for weeks and weeks, which was very nice, I suppose, but it killed all the bees as well, and then there was no one to carry pollen from flower to flower and nothing fruited at all, just endless flowers blooming and blooming and falling away dead onto the dry ground. It’s not the summoning that’s any trouble. It’s like whistling for a dog. A dog that you know for certain is going to eat you as soon as it can. Nearly the whole of a diabolist’s education is to get for himself a mind big enough to see the whole trick, all the way through to the end. All the way through to us being born and everything that’s still to come.”

“My mind is big,” sniffed the dead prince Ispan. “As big as the sky, as big as the wall.”

Vnuk shut her eyes. She tired so easily in the autumn, when the quince she loved so turned on her. Ispan took the moment. He could not stop himself if he wanted to. He leaned over the ruin of the door and kissed her lips, his cold mouth against the warmth of her. He almost felt the weight of the kiss. He almost felt her life. “I wish I were big enough to be your home,” she breathed. But then she said: “Is there really an army out there? Led by a flawless woman atop a basilisk?” when the kiss was done. “You must tell the truth after a kiss.”

The heir to the throne said nothing, could say nothing. He was a child, still. He knew no more than she. His dead eyes reflected the dark, but not the stars.

“Go and look in the granary,” she sighed. “Go up the ladder, all the way to the back, behind the oat bales and the millstones and the rack of six broken shovels, and see there the size of your mind.”

When he had gone, Vnuk ate her evening meal in private, as she preferred to do, since it disturbed the appetite of others. She took up the teacup full of stolen paprikas from Kulacs’s mother, opened the great grey door in her belly, and placed it inside.

THERE HAD LONG been a saying: the gods do not speak clearly, except in Tizenharóm. The Amaranthine Bible said it, as it usually did, in an earthier fashion: In any old city, in Kettő and Öt and Nyolc and Kilenc, in Egy and Negy and Tíz and Hét, in Tizenkét and Siks and Tizenegy, you can hear the gods in the sound of the wind in the trees and the flowing of the water in the aqueducts and the laughter of children and all that church-a-day rot. But in Tizenharóm, they’ll blow out your eardrums.

Tizenharóm was an alpine city, so near to the roof of the world you could see the rafters and the thatching. The only season there was winter. The only export was prophecy. The only industry was religion. The city was a carnival for monks and priests and abbots and popes, the streets lined with stalls selling candy in the shape of the childlike god of death and cider in mugs carved to represent the face of the eyeless mother goddess. If you were lucky at the ring-toss, you might win a doll of the two-faced god of wisdom, or the corpulent god of sorrow with his infinite beard rendered in real yak-fur. There were no dark alleys or wicked shadowy gutters in Tizenharóm; everywhere there was light. Even the narrowest, most unremarkable crack in the masonry had its own small candle to engolden it, to sweep away the night and make it bright enough to please the exacting palette of heaven. The wax never burns down and the flames never gutter—it is said that Narthex the Lamplighter struck her match when first she heard the divine voice, so startled and frightened was she, half-deafened in the primeval dark, and then another and another, each time the gods spoke so her humble ears could hear them clearly, and though Narthex is long gone, her little flames will never go out until the end of days, for light is the blood of the gods, and it runneth through the veins of the world without ceasing. It was a city that glittered and a city that sang—even the meanest, most untrafficked crossroads had a musician trilling out hymns, high and soft, at every hour on the hour.

But all roads in Tizenharóm led to one place, and all the attractions and pleasures were subservient to it. For in the center of the city, there was a hole. The queue to kneel and put your eye to it wound through all those stalls and candies and ciders and rings tossed against dowels, all Narthex’s candles and all those hungry musicians, six years, six months, and six days long. Folk have died in that queue, been buried and canonized where they fell, for anyone who dies awaiting audience was sanctified before their last breath dispersed in the air. The hole was gouged from a simple wall, a meaningless expanse of brick, stained with the markings of living and dying in a city, the rear wall of a library specializing in romances and unauthorized histories. Once, in the days of Narthex, when Tizenharóm knew what a shadow was, there had been a red brick there, red as though it were sodden with blood. But now there is nothing, a simple space, and if you kneel there, if you kneel and quiet the beating of your heart and the beating of your mind and the beating of your soul agains the bones of your body, you can hear that voice that Narthex heard, and puzzle it through as others have done, until you can make a prophecy of there are rabbits in the drains and carry it down from the heights to the city of your birth, and make it mean good or bad crops, victory or defeat in war, a girl child or a boy.

But it was nothing so mysterious and interpretable that Narthex the Lamplighter heard when the world was new and fresh as the boil on a pot of paprikas. She heard only one word, a word that frightened her so badly she invented fire to chase off her horror of that bodiless voice saying:

Love.

GO AND LOOK in the granary, Ispan repeated to himself. Up the ladder, behind the oat bales and the millstones and the rack of six broken shovels.

The late afternoon sun slashed down gold and dark like war banners through the rafters of the barn. The ladder spiked his fingers with splinters, but being dead, the boy felt nothing. The oat bales pricked his hands with bristles, but being dead, no blood ran. The millstones bruised him and the shovels scraped his toes as he dragged them from the wall, but Ispan cared not at all for that, no corpse ever could. He cared only to prove to Vnuk that his mind was as big as hers, so that she would summon them a demon to change the world for them, to break it in half so that she could be his queen and they could belong to each other, a kingdom of two.

There was nothing behind the shovels but cobwebs and mice droppings and the leavings of light. Somewhere, far off, long and distant in the east, a soft boom of thunder opened and shut like a hand, but Ispan, in his irritation, paid it no attention at all. He would have left then, scrambled back down the ladder with the utter joy of someone who has proved a friend wrong, and run to tell Vnuk how he had not been one little bit afraid of the granary no matter how crawly she had made it sound, except that a mouse screamed just then, and the prince looked to see if he had crushed the poor thing without knowing, for being dead, he had no feeling at all in his body, and often ruined things unawares.

In the shadow of the sixth shovel blade lay the corpse of a barn-mouse with a tiny bronze harpoon in its side. Something was slowly dragging the carcass across the floorboards toward a house no bigger than a Christmas bun. Something small and strange and furious in the dance of dust-motes. Something with the body of a man, the head of a camel, the wings of a dragon, and the legs of a draft horse. The house was a pleasant wee thing, its chimney puffing away, built with cast-off shafts of old wood and horse nails and wheatstalks, thatched with green oats, with a lovely, complex design drawn around it on the floor of the granary in pale chalk. It looked to Ispan like a rose made out of mathematics. Once the creature hauled his kill over the edge of the chalk, he slit its belly and began to cut the meat into steaks and bacon and offal for sausages.

Far off, but not quite so far now, the thunder echoed again.

The creature with the head of a camel finally looked up into Ispan’s gaze.

“Hello,” he said calmly. “What day is it, if you please?”

The crown prince told him.

“Perfect,” said the chimera in his tiny cottage. “You’re right on time.”

“Are you a demon?” breathed Ispan.

“Are you a boy?”

“Well, of course I am!” spluttered the prince.

“Well, of course I am!” grinned the demon.

“What is your name?”

“I am Gremory, grand duke of Hell,” he grunted, pulling out the mouse’s heart and cutting it into four equal roasts, “with sixty and six legions at my command, or I will have, when I am released from my duty.”

Ispan controlled himself and did not clap his hands in delight. “What is your duty?”

Gremory put his scaled hand over his heart and intoned: “To enforce the laws of the king who summoned me for seven hundred years, in every cranny of his domain, and thereafter to protect his kingdom from invaders in perpetuity. Seven diabolists of seven schools put that doom upon me, and I shall be glad to be rid of it.”

“That seems like a good and noble deed,” the corpse prince said.

“I have made it wicked where I could,” the demon shrugged. “It is not easy work, but I am dedicated. And it is almost over now.” Gremory wiped his palms on his powerful draft horse legs. “There is just enough time to answer your wish, and then I will be home in my own black palace with my own full belly and ready to receive the great praise of my master.”

“I did not wish for anything!” cried Ispan. “And I will not give you my soul!”

“There is no need for that little melodrama, my lad. This is long paid for, by men you never knew. A demon’s bargain is cruel, yes, and seeks to snare, of course, but grace is Hell’s last gambit, and all I have ever done is give men just what they ask for, nothing more or less. They make enough of a hash of that to give me centuries of leisure. You are no diabolist. There is no shame in being unable to see the shape of a trick seven hundred times bigger than you.”

Gremory, grand duke of Hell, opened his camel’s mouth, and what emerged from it was Ispan’s own voice, whispering: I wish I were small enough to live inside you. And then he opened his left hand, and Vnuk’s voice came out of it: I wish I were big enough to be your home.

“Ispan!” came a terrible cry at the door of the granary. The dead prince leapt to his feet and toppled down the ladder as Vnuk collapsed in the doorway, a wound gouged in her head, wearing a maroon winter gown, the color of hopelessness. She bled onto his hands, nothing red or wet but candlelight, flowing as free as water. “They are coming,” she gasped. “I thought they would never come. I thought they were a dream. They rode under silk banners, Ispan, and God did not see them.”

The thunder that was not thunder was close now, and the lightning was not lightning but trebuchets, and the air was full of an awful yelling, grinding, screeching, for the army at the gates was now inside them, and their horses’ armor was wrought like feathered basilisks and the woman who led them was as beautiful as the sun. But try as he might, the crown prince of that vanished country could see no one else through the smoke, no familiar face, no mother or father or lord or lady, only the enemy, and too many of them.

Ispan held Vnuk tight and put his head to her heart, that glowed the color of turmeric, the color of an infinity of candles. He heard no beating, but birdsong, and before the next blast of cannonfire, he found that his face was no longer pressed to the bosom of beloved, but his feet were planted upon the balconies of her ribcage, and the world of her was vast and far as any he had ever seen.

The dead prince walked over Vnuk’s brick sternum, toward the nearest lancet window, and raised his hand to knock upon the stained glass.

THEY CAME TWO by two and three by three, nine by nine and one by one to the door of the world, the door that Finial the Beggar had been forbidden to open. They looked nothing like the inhabitants of Kettő or Öt or Nyolc or Kilenc, or Egy or Negy or Tíz or Hét or Tizenkét or Siks or Tizenegy. They had long hair and beards and skin the color of worms in the morning, and many of them had more or less than the usual two eyes, some had tails, some were not made of flesh at all. They were strangers, but in Tizenharóm, through the hole in the library wall, the voice of the gods had said to welcome them, and allow them to live in those great cities, and allow them to eat of the common table, and read the words of Chancel the Sophist and Cinquefoil the Rhymer, and marvel at the candles of Narthex the Lamplighter, and feast on the goods of the world, which some would call a tower, as St. Gremory taught them to do.

The newcomers looked out and up into the lands they would make their homes and saw the creatures that would be their neighbors, their lovers and their enemies and their rivals and their friends, and shyly gave their names to the million songbirds that were the people of the kingdom of Vnuk, who had spun through generations concealed behind the inner walls, raised cities on staircases and in galleries and cells, marveled at the autumn forests of her neurons and the candlelight of her blood, the aqueducts of her digestion and the sound of her gentle voice and the voices of her friends. The songbirds greeted them with stern, suspicious faces: sparrows, finches, thrushes, nightingales, and starlings, shrikes and robins, cardinals. The nations stared and stared and would not be the first to move, and ever after, this spot on the outskirts of the town of Egy would be marked with statues and flowers to remember this day. For then did the starlings Trefoil and Apse, the grandchildren of Chancel the Sophist, of whom we have spoken much, short and stout like all their people, reach out dark and speckled wings toward the eyeless queen of ————and welcome her when no one else would. As her wing grazed those long royal fingers, the terrible tiny flutter of an earthquake began, and in that moment no one needed to find their way to Tizenharóm to hear the voice of some kind god cry: Run, run, child, get out before they burn it to the ground!

But before she ran, one last man came to the great grey walnut door. He wore a face he had never worn before, a young, keen face with dark eyes and red hair, a face for passion and for awe. He looked up toward Vnuk’s face, a million miles away from him now, at the soft pale mountain of her jaw. He alone would not be surprised to meet the kingdom of birds within. Tears overflowed the eyes of Archfiend the Lesser as he asked his question once more, once more before escaping into the scion of King Blancmange’s house, which would be his house and all of theirs forever and ever.

“What is the name of the Devil, my child?”

Inside the tower of Vnuk, Ispan collapsed weeping into the soft, confused magpie wings of the Beggar Finial. “I’ll never see her again,” he wept. “I shall live in her body like a husband, but I will never see her eyes again.”

Vnuk’s great and monstrous hand, now as tall as a trebuchet, guided the diabolist through the door and locked it behind him.

“Love,” she said as she saved her kingdom. “The name of the Devil is love.”

The silver bell at her throat rang out, and Vnuk began to run.

IF YOU GO and search well for it, outside the borders of a walled country that is neither Poland nor Hungary nor Serbia nor Romania, you may find beneath a rowan tree a peculiar ruin, not much larger than a girl’s torso, of a tower of somewhat confused architecture and peculiarly beautiful black masonry. Beside it, long bones slowly turn to long grass, and above it, rooks have made a nest in the pale skull that hangs off the crumbling market cross at the top of the tower. I have heard it said that if you put your ear to the eighth lancet window on the eleventh floor, you can hear, ever so faintly, a hundred million voices singing forever.