Winterlong

Part Three: After the Rain of Roses

EYES EVERYWHERE. DR. HARROW’S shift into those of her brother Aidan. Anna and Andrew split like an amoeba, grinning as they proffer me a feathered headband. Atop my armoire a boy laughs, his smile strangled by a belt that twists into a garrotte as he falls onto the foot of my bed. Margalis Tast’annin looms above me, his voice soft as he repeats his question, the same question day after day, echoing now through my dreams—

“How do you do it, Wendy? What is it like, what do you see when you make them die?”

I scream and lurch forward, the sheets tangling my arms as I try to stand.

And then light rent the room. A lumiere guttering within a cupped palm tossed black and golden petals upon the hooded face before me.

“Get up,” he hissed, dragging me from bed. I stumbled to my feet, dizzy from the drugs they had given me. I tried to explain that the session earlier had left me bruised and unable to dream properly. My tongue caught on my teeth and I retched, tasting my own blood.

“Quiet,” he ordered, still whispering. I felt the sharp prick of an ampule against my neck. He missed the vein and I moaned. The figure pulled me to him, covering my mouth with his palm as he drew the hood back to show his face. It was the Aide Justice.

“We’re getting out,” he said. With a quick motion like someone killing an insect, he slapped another ampule to my neck. “Your acetelthylene.”

My spine tingled with a rush of pleasure. I nodded gratefully. I had been without proper medication for days now—I was uncertain how long. My head ached from where they had shaved it to attach the electrodes and chemical lozenges they’d used for the endless experiments of the last few weeks. Only in the last few days, since Tast’annin had left, had the rounds of questioning and testing abated. I stripped off the yellow shift they’d given me and pawed through my wardrobe, tossing clothes onto the rug.

“Hurry.” Justice glanced behind him, kicking aside several scarves and a leather blouson. As I reached for my favorite blue haik he stepped forward.

“No—nothing they might recognize.” For a moment he stared at me, then rubbed my shorn scalp with the back of his hand. He glanced at the floor and nudged something with his foot. “Those—”

I pulled on the trousers, a loose white shirt. I crammed Anna’s hummingbird bandeau in my pocket and started rummaging in the back of the wardrobe when Justice yanked me away.

“Now. “He pulled me after him to the door. He cracked it and peered out, then tossed the spent lumiere behind us. For a moment he regarded me as I swayed beside him, trying to steady myself. Then he clicked the door shut and motioned me down the hall.

Sudden freedom made me giddy. Paneled walls ballooned in shadow. Beneath me the florid carpet snaked blue and gold in the rain-washed light. Justice took my hand and led me like a child, the two of us racing silently down the dim hallway. Abruptly he stopped and dragged me into an alcove. He drew something from his pocket. I smelled his fear and shut my eyes until the piercing desire to tap him faded.

“I’ll kill you now.” He spread his palm to show a cobalt capsule. “Or will you come with me?”

I nodded. He stared at me, after another moment replaced the capsule and turned to the door. When its old-fashioned latch gave, the door creaked inward onto a long dark stairway winding down: Andrew’s secret passage. I glanced down, half-hoping that I might see him crouched on the stairs with his cigarette lighter, luring spiders.

But no. I had seen no one for weeks, no one except for Dr. Leslie and Tast’annin and the janissary medics who slipped into my room when I was sedated. Later they would attach the siphons to my head as I slept. I began to shake and stumbled against Justice. He took my hand and squeezed it.

It was so dark that I could not even glimpse the step I stood upon. A sharp crack; I started and saw a fresh lumiere glowing in Justice’s other hand. He steadied himself against the wall and glanced at me.

“They were going to kill you,” he said. “They’ve already killed most of the others. Do you think you can walk?”

I nodded and stroked his face, his skin warm beneath its sheath of sweat. He shrank against the damp wall. I brought my hand to my lips and licked it. In his sweat I tasted blunt desire, and shivered with the sudden thrill of understanding that it was an empty he wanted, as there had been those I treated who longed to sleep with the dead. I stared at him until he looked away and shifted the lumiere to shadow his face. We descended the stairs.

As we fled downward the air grew cooler. The walls roughened from wood to rough granite and moldering brick. I smelled refrigeration; rotting orchids; the drowsy chypre of the sleeplabs. The lumiere’s faint light dwindled.

“Do you know where we are?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said, slowing his pace to answer me. “But I thought we might gain a little time before they track us here.” He glanced at me doubtfully. “But this is only a way out of the building. We can’t stay on the grounds—the dogs will find us for sure.”

“Where does it come out?”

“The Glass Fountain.”

“And then?”

He shrugged, shaking the lumiere in a vain effort to get a stronger light. “It’s only the old fence there—I don’t think there’s a surveillance system. They never worried about keeping you in; it was more to keep the world out. Behind the fence there’s the cemetery and the forest. They might be afraid to follow us there.” The stairway curved so sharply that for an instant I lost sight of him and heard his voice echo, “Anyway, we have no choice.”

“But where can we go?” I coughed, trying to keep up with him. “The forest—they’ll find us there—”

He waved the lumiere as though to drive off hidden enemies. “I know. But I read the applications disc for you, Wendy … ”

Below us I glimpsed a break in the darkness.

“This is it,” Justice whispered. He halted and took my hand, fumbled in his pocket for a moment. “If they catch us, I have these.” His fist opened to display five cobalt ampules threaded with jet.

I shook my head. “I don’t want them.”

He stared at me, fingering his hood.

“I’m not afraid,” I said. “They can kill me.”

“It’s not that.” He shoved the ampules back into his pocket. “It’s how—”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “He’s in my head now. I can’t get rid of Him, Justice. She gave Him to me, Justice. Dr. Harrow.”

I could not finish. He turned to face another door that opened easily. Lantern light splintered about us as we stepped onto a patio. Justice pulled his hood tighter around his face, then tossed away the spent lumiere.

We hurried down steps that glimmered pink and yellow in the glow of sulfur lanterns. Far above us in the jutting gables and turrets of HEL , lights flickered and died. I heard the mewling whine of night monitors on their circuit through the upper gardens.

“Are you sure this is right?” Justice whispered. I ignored him, finding my way by scent as much as sight: tracing through the boxwood maze a thread of citrus that led us into a tiny circle of dwarf kumquats, and from there seeking out the firs that bordered the very edge of the estate.

“You said the Glass Fountain.” I pointed to where it danced and sang in the soft rain, its canopy embracing a circle of rainbow light.

“Can you see behind it? To a fence?”

I squinted through the rain, then shook my head. “We’ll have to get past the fountain.”

We slid down a small knoll and waited beneath its shadow. A sound rose behind us—the yelping of guard hounds. A moment later the wailing shriek that signaled the release of the mastiffs from their pit beneath the greenhouse. Justice grabbed my hand.

“There!” he gasped. I stumbled with him over a low stone wall. To either side stretched the high impenetrable hedge of lindens and thorntrees that bounded HEL . In front of us leaned a barbed-wire fence, overgrown with thorns and strangling ivy except for a few yards of rusted metal snagged with feathers and a loop of some small animal’s vertebrae. Beyond the wire stretched woods and the tilted gray humps of tombstones.

From the hill behind us a mastiff squalled. I whirled to Justice. “You said there was a way out—”

He still gazed behind us like one entranced. I shook his arm and he pointed to the ground where a strand of wire had nearly rusted away. “Under there …”

We scrabbled through a few inches of dirt until we scraped broken concrete and gravel. Justice leaned back on his heels, swearing.

I shook my head, took a deep breath, and flattened myself against the ground. A barb tore through my clothes, raking my back almost to my waist. I pushed myself forward, hands and elbows grinding against crushed cement and glass.

I was on the other side. Justice hesitated before he bellied against the slick ground, yelping as the wire tore his cheek. In a few seconds he stumbled to his feet beside me. We kicked rocks and leaves to cover the shallow opening, then stood staring back at the rainbow Fountain, the glittering emerald lawns sloping above us beneath their diadem of watchlights. As the baying of the dogs shook the hedges we fled into the black and dripping woods.

During the last centuries the trees had grown unchecked. Decaying leaves muffled our footsteps. I stumbled on toadstools the size of dinner plates that expelled acrid clouds of brown spores. After a few minutes Justice whistled for me to stop.

“Wait.”

The forest fell back around a clearing studded with the domes of mausoleums and kudzu-covered pillars. A stand of young gingkos littered the ground with their leaves, already bright yellow. Tombstones lay everywhere like discarded dominos poking through the undergrowth. I tipped my chin westward toward Linden Glory.

“So why—” I began.

“No—listen.” He wiped the rain from a tombstone before leaning against its mossy flank. “Can you hear?”

The dogs’ howls grew more frantic, then abruptly stilled. “They can’t have given up already. But where—”

Then I heard it. From high overhead a very soft whirring, persistent as the rain. Something huge and black crept across the floodlit lawns of HEL , a shadow like that of a vast cloud.

“Wendy.” Justice stared at the sky. Without looking at me he made a strange gesture, crossing his hands at the wrist. “Wendy, it’s a strike …”

More lights sprang on in the towers. Shouts and the clang of doors opening. On the lawn I could see the mastiffs waiting, tails wagging uneasily as they stared up. Behind them their keepers ran across the grass. From the highest turret searchlights pierced the night until they found their target.

An airship, one of the great dirigibles called fougas. Immense and nearly silent, its vast hull drab blue except where a white hand surmounted by a crescent moon had been painted near the rear propellor.

The sigil of the Balkhash Commonwealth.

I had never seen a fouga, and started to my feet in amazement when Justice grabbed me. Yelling, he pulled me with him into a mausoleum.

Rotting acorns popped beneath our feet. A cracked marble slab leaned in front of a tomb robbed decades before. Justice shoved this out of our way and dragged me after him. Inside it smelled of decaying leaves. He tore the hem from his jacket, wrapping it around my head. I tried to push him away, but he silenced me and pointed outside.

Against the black sky I saw the fouga silhouetted, hovering over the lawn in a near-silence eerier than any roar or siren. Brilliant streams of light suddenly erupted from its gondola, sweeping across the grounds of HEL and touching the edge of the woods. As we watched, the viral strike began.

A gentle pattering upon the lawn and the canopy of trees. A wind like the promise of spring. A sweet smell seeped through the damp air, the odor of a million roses masking the chemical stench of the mutagens. Watchlights swept the lawn and candled shallow pools where the viral rain had gathered. Beside me Justice stared, his hands on mine cold and unmoving.

Then, as quickly and quietly as it had come, the fouga retreated. Its lights winked out; the shadows crept back across the lawns. Outside, the forest dripped black and still. I crept forward to peer at the stricken gardens of HEL .

On the grass stood the mastiffs, shaking their heads. One had collapsed and was licking its front leg. Another pawed repeatedly at its face, as though to dislodge a burr or tick. Their human keepers staggered nearby. I could hear one screaming, the muted voices of the others moaning or calling for help as they tore off their clothes. A siren began to shriek, too late to warn the denizens of the Human Engineering Laboratory. Justice let his breath out in a shuddering sigh. I turned back and crouched beside him.

“Were they after us? Who were they?”

He shook his head. He also looked dazed. “I don’t know. Rebels, I guess. Fougas supplied by the Commonwealth.”

“But what are they doing here?” I unpeeled the cloth he had wrapped around my face, coughed at the cloying scent of roses. I leaned against the wall, trying to find a comfortable spot.

Justice shook his head. “Who knows? The Aviator, maybe; maybe they were making a show of force to impress him, maybe—”

“But he’s gone. He left a week ago, he went into the City with his guards.”

In the darkness I could feel Justice next to me, brushing aside stones and dead leaves. “Maybe they don’t know that. Or maybe they do and don’t care. Or maybe he’s already dead, and this is their way of telling us.”

We were silent for a long time. Outside, the siren ceased its bleating. I wondered if anyone would come searching for us now.

“No,” said Justice, as though he had read my thoughts. He reached to take my hand. “We’re safe, I think. Anyone at HEL will assume we were caught by the rain. No one will look for us, at least not tonight. They’re afraid of the rebels; they’ll be trying to trace the source of the attack.”

“But what of us? Won’t the lazars find us out here?”

He made a face. “We’ll have to chance it. But I think we’re safe for now, at least this side of the river.”

He hugged me. “We’re free, Wendy. By morning we can leave. I know a place we can go for a few days—”

“But,” I stammered, “what will we do?”

I could imagine his mouth pursed in the darkness, thinking. “We’ll go to the City,” he said at last. “I have people there; they may help us.” But he sounded doubtful.

“But what about me: they’ll know who I am.” I pulled closer to the wall, disliking this enforced proximity. I felt stronger since he had given me my medication, and wished morning would come. I wished he would leave.

“No one knows who you are, Wendy,” Justice said softly. “Outside of HEL no one has heard of you or the others.”

“Won’t they look for you?”

“They terminated me two days ago, but it’s been so disorganized that the release code wasn’t changed yet. One of the servers let me in. They won’t bother with me. I’m only an Aide.” He hesitated, then added, “And I’m not an Ascendant.”

I flopped back against the tomb wall. “What about me?” I had never been outside of HEL , except for chaperoned visits to the riverwalk and giddy forays to the ziggurat with Anna and a few of the other empties.

“Can you do anything?”

“I can assist in emotive engram therapy.”

“Well.” He did not sound impressed. “My— people —are in the City. They may be able to help. Or there’s others might be interested in you.” He regarded me critically. No one would recognize you like this.”

“No one knows me outside of HEL ,” I said. The thought evoked an echo of Dr. Harrow’s sorrow and loneliness, and I shivered. He drew me closer.

“You can use another name. Travel in disguise. It might be exciting.” He rubbed the nape of my neck, brushing the short hairs the wrong way. “We’ll say you’re a Curator.”

“My name is Wendy Wanders.”

“Take another; take a boy’s name.”

I thought for a moment, then said, “Tell them to call me Aidan.” And I stretched out upon the dank marble floor beside him and fell slowly into sleep.

I slept fitfully. Although undisturbed by the rush of wind in the leaves or the faint footfalls of passing animals, I could not grow accustomed to the unfamiliar weight of Justice beside me, the flickering shades of his dreams intruding upon my own. Several times I started awake in terror, seeing a pair of glowing green eyes fading into the confines the tomb’s walls. And Dr. Harrow’s voice echoed over and over in my mind, calling my name and her brother Aidan’s until finally she faded into silence.

Once, near dawn, I woke to feel Justice’s hands sliding beneath my shirt.

“Get away,” I said, although there was nowhere for him go. As I tried to edge from him I could smell his arousal, he pressed me against the wall, his jacket falling about us like a tent. I tried to bite his shoulder, but he shoved me back so that my cheek grazed the marble. Then holding my face in his hands he kissed me, murmuring my name as he ran his hands across my skull. I bit his tongue. With a choked cry he yanked away from me, but not before a little blood trickled into my mouth: enough that his desire exploded in my brain and I shut my eyes, trembling.

Cursing, he touched the tip of his tongue, drew away finger spotted with blood. In the near-darkness he might have been a stone angel fallen from atop one of the vaults. He turned back to me, his eyes clouded with anger.

“You ungrateful—”

A drop of blood welled onto his lip and I tilted my head to kiss him. My tongue flicked across the tiny cut and tasted what blood remained, the bright flash of his anger melting into disappointment and confusion. He fumbled to put his arms about me, but I crouched against the back of the tomb. Without a word he lay down again, his back to me. I sensed his wakefulness long afterward.

At first light he crept from our hiding place. A few minutes later he returned to wake me.

“Get up,” he said. He braided his hair, tying the end with a black silk ribbon. “Even if they think we’re dead we can’t stay here.”

“But the virus?”

“It doesn’t live more than an hour in the open air. But we can’t trust Leslie or the others not to come looking for your corpse.”

“Will the lazars hunt us?” I stretched, wondering what we would be able to eat.

Justice stood, hands slouched in the deep pockets of his jacket as he watched me tuck in my shirt. “This is probably the best time to avoid them. After the rain of roses they’re—sated.”

“I have never seen one,” I admitted, and smiled. “I’m thirsty.”

Justice stared at me as though waiting for me to say something else; to apologize, perhaps. I adjusted the cuff of my shirt, wishing I’d brought other clothes. After a moment he shook his head.

“Well, come on, then,” he said. We left the tomb.

Sunrise misted the eastern edge of the woods, where through the deep green leaves I glimpsed the chromati haze of the Glass Fountain and the purer emerald of HEL lawns.

Justice said, “You can go back if you want. Go ahead: see what happens.”

“I don’t want to go back.” I turned from this last sight of my home to follow him. “You didn’t have to free me. I’ll go on alone now if you want.”

“Hah.” He snorted, but paused to hold a wiry sumac hip while I passed beneath it. “No point letting you get killed out here after all that trouble.” As I passed, his voice rose slightly. “Why’d you bite me last night?”

“’I don’t like to fuck.”

“’Then why did you kiss me?”

“I tapped you.”

His eyes darkened as he stepped beside me, kicking at mushrooms and damp leaves. “What?”

I squinted to find a path among the ancient trees. “I can read blood.”

He stared at me for a long moment. I met his gaze, finally shrugged and turned to make my way through the tangled forest.

We walked in silence until the sun hung high overhead, Justice seemed to find his way by the sun, and by following the river. Occasionally we glimpsed it through the trees, a litter of blue and gold.

A heavy jasmine-scented steam began to rise from the earth. This came from carpets of white flowers that covered the ground like moss, their blossoms no bigger than my fingernail. As I stooped to watch them the tiny blooms opened and closed like little gaping mouths. When I touched one it snapped at my finger.

“Look, Justice! It’s hungry—”

He shook his head and pulled me to my feet. “No, Wendy.”

“Are they poisonous?”

“Sometimes. Things change, after the rain of roses.”

I followed him. When he wasn’t looking I would kick at the mats of white flowers and watch them seethe as we passed.

We skirted the rotted foundations of small wooden buildings, the collapsed tangle of steel walls and cavernous bunkers and commercial ziggurats that during the Third Ascension had been built upon the earlier ruins. On the decaying ziggurat steps I saw copperheads drowsing in coiled knots and other, larger snakes, blue-black and with scales so long and fine they looked like feathers. The fallen steel archways were pied with lizards, golden-eyed and blue-tongued, waiting patiently for crickets to waken and warm themselves on the metal. I was hungry. In the trees ahead Justice waited for me to catch up. I waved to him to go on ahead, waited for him to turn away so that I could capture a lizard as it dozed. It was lovely, raised rounded scales like tiny rust-and-azure studs. I wished I could save its skin; but I killed it quickly by biting its neck. I sucked the little blood there was from its body cavity and made quick mouthful of the meat in belly and tail. A flicker of the animal’s hunger and heat sparked in my brain: the warmth of insects and then the quick slash of my own teeth through its spine. That was all it gave me. I was sorry about the pretty scales.

I skipped ahead to join Justice and we continued in silence for a time.

“You’ve never been this far outside before, have you?” he said at last.

“We had no need to leave HEL .”

For what? Dr. Harrow had warned me that the world outside was a decadent place, and dangerous. Certainly the ruined City of Trees was no place for a creature dependent upon a carefully administered regime of chemicals and stolen dreams. But Justice only motioned for me to follow him to the edge of the forest. We left the cool shelter of the trees behind.

“Where are we?” I asked, stepping among shattered blocks of granite.

“Near the Key Bridge.”

A path of white stones curled from the edge of the broken road and stretched through the trees. Justice hesitated, squatting on a ledge of tarmac.

“Are we lost?”

He shook his head. “No. But it will be dark soon. That’s the City, there.”

He pointed to the far shore of the river. Through a green scrim I glimpsed broken roofs and towers vying with tree tops for the afternoon sun.

“Tired?”

“No.” Instead I felt edgy, wide awake. At HEL we would have been dressing for dinner, or stealing things for a secret meeting in our quarters. And a certain uneasiness shaded all my thoughts now: fear of those brilliant eyes and the longing they kindled within me; fear of the loneliness that crept over me whenever I recalled Dr. Harrow’s white form lying still on the floor of the Home Room …

“Good. We’ll cross there—” He pointed, and I peered through the thicket. For the first time I saw the bridge spanning the murky river, its ancient fretwork rusted to a filigree of red and black, virginia creeper scalloping the tower struts in waves of green that shimmered in the warm breeze.

We followed the path of white stones. It skimmed the broken ribs of what had once been a road, hedged by tall bronzed oaks and a winding network of ditches now filled with stagnant water. Occasionally the rusted shell of an automobile or velocipede poked from the greenery or lay submerged in the brackish pools like gaunt pike. Once we heard something thrash in the ditch. Justice pulled me after him into the brush, and from there we glimpsed a pale slender appendage like an arm or tentacle gently plying the surface of the black water behind us. Justice watched impassively until it withdrew and the ripples subsided in the scummy pool.

In a few more minutes we reached the bridge. Justice shook his head as though testing the air. Then he turned to me, laughing in relief.

“This is it. We made it.”

And as I followed Justice I suddenly felt Him again inside me, stirring against the shell of nerve and bone that contained Him. I knew that the dark flash that tore through me was not my jubilation, not Dr. Harrow’s or Aidan’s but His, the Other now with me and within me.

He saw the City too, and the sight filled Him with a raging joy: joy and blood-hunger and a thirst for worship.

But for myself, crossing that river, the sluggish guardian of my childhood—what stirred me at first sight of the fallen City of Trees unfurled before me like a ruined flag, all the more valiant for its tattered heraldry?

The tales Dr., Harrow had told us of the City painted a grimy metropolis, justly forsaken: a cheap bauble not worth preserving. Its people died horrible deaths in the Long Night of the First Ascension—starvation, radiation sickness, plague. Its rulers had already fled west. There they perished in the wilderness or else joined the fledgling alliance that a century later would bring about the Second Ascension. Since then the City was held by the researchers (and camp followers) who had been sent to recover some of the knowledge of the Civil Servants, and then, in the chaos following the first mutagenic warfare, forgotten. They owned the City now: mad watchdogs of useless knowledge and their whores, feasting upon the ruins like fat ticks. And in the streets lived cannibal children and the geneslaves who preyed upon the living.

But always Dr. Harrow gave us a gray city not worth dreaming of, bound by a dead river.

Yet now the river itself seemed to have awakened at the sound of our footsteps, the heavy waters uncoiling to flash silver and blue beneath the bridge. Instead of the mud-colored fish that nudged at our riverwalk in search of crusts I saw huge golden carp, circling slowly to the surface to peer up at us with wise round eyes. And sea-birds whose cries streaked the still afternoon with harsh echoes of white shores, and ospreys and eagles hunting the noble carp, and otters like arrows striking the bright water. I froze.

“What is it?” Justice called, turning to look back at me. I shook my head and steadied myself with one hand upon the rusted ironwork. Too much! I wanted to scream; and instinctively crouched and turned to strike my forehead against a piling. Even there the world loomed: a string of tiny scarlet mites threading through the flaking green paint, a tendril of kudzu like a child’s beckoning finger. I started to scream.

“Wendy! Stop—” Justice ran and knelt beside me. He grabbed my wrists and pulled me from the railing so that my head thrashed against empty air. “Stop it!”

I tried to beat myself against his chest and mute the clamor in my head, the sight of all those things moving and brilliant in the world. He hugged me tight, until it passed; until once more I could focus on the shattered concrete I knelt upon, the raveled hem of his ‘jacket, my knuckles laced with blood.

“Are you all right?” His face was white. “What is it?”

I breathed deeply, the way Dr. Harrow had taught me to breathe after a seizure; then shut my eyes and concentrated, trying to draw up a memory to stanch the horrible welling of sensation and light. But there was nothing there, nothing like this river, these birds, this golden haze rising to veil the heavy green of the eastern shore. Only a faint comforting memory of dead trees and hills, like a small cold nugget lodged inside me; and so I focused on that, until the dead calm soothed me and I could speak again.

“Too much,” I whispered, shielding my eyes from the sun. Justice draped his jacket about me and helped me to my feet.

“Can you walk?”

I nodded, pulling the folds of cloth about my face. “Too sudden,” I said.

“You’ve never been outside,” he said, as if truly realizing it for the first time.

“No. I told you.” I shook my head. “It will go away—just too sudden, too much light, all those—” I flapped my hand at the flickering shapes I could still just barely make out from the corner of my eyes, the gulls disporting along the bridge’s ramparts.

“I’m sorry. I—I couldn’t chance stealing more of your medication. Can you …”

But already I felt stronger—as I always did after capturing a new sensation, if the first violent impressions did not completely overwhelm me. I took a deep breath, then lifted my head.

“I’m better now,” I said. I stretched my arms and flexed my hands, feeling my blood quicken. I faced Justice. Far behind him I could just make out the shattered ramparts that had been my home. I turned to see the unknown City at bridge’s end, just a few feet away. And suddenly I laughed, so loudly that a skein of gulls shrieked and banked away from us. Then I ran the last steps to the far shore.

So we entered the City of Trees. In the growing dusk it looked more strange, the low ruined lines of buildings and verdant trees painted with a brooding light. The air still smelled of summer, wild grapes and honeysuckle and the river’s stagnant breath. We picked our way across the rubble of what had once been a road. Now oaks and gingkos thrust through the concrete to tower overhead. Beneath our feet ivy and thick runners of some thorny plant covered the shattered road.

We climbed a gently sloping hill scented with honeysuckle and the rich odors of other, strangely colored flowers. As we left it behind us the river’s soft rush fell into silence. Justice seemed more watchful now. Often he stopped to regard the remains of some ancient structure—a metal monument in the shape of a man, a pox of briar roses covering its face; a great machine of some smooth rivetless material still humming and vibrating despite the myriad skinks sunning themselves on its black surface—and he would click his tongue in dismay or curse beneath his breath.

“It changes so fast,” he said once. He stared in chagrin at the hollow body of an autobus collapsed in a ditch like some drowned beast, then glanced toward the horizon before us.

I was starting to feel dizzy and ill from hunger and thirst. Worse, the acetelthylene was wearing off. I could feel the effects of being without my medication for so many days: a hollow feeling inside my head and the Voices that, if I listened to them, would call my name repeatedly in soft yet urgent tones. These were the flickering embers of consciousness of all those patients I had tapped at HEL , flaring bits of memory and desire that would not die but were kept imprisoned within my mind by constant medication. But now they were starting to creep out again, as they did in dreams, or if my dosage was changed, or when I had been subjected to the ruthless probes of Dr. Leslie’s janissary medics. I stumbled as I walked, and swatted fiercely at my ears as if that might silence them.

Justice watched me with concern. “Are you all right? What is it?”

I cupped my hands over my ears. “The Small Voices.” That had been the name Anna and I gave to them as children; before Anna’s favorite Small Voice manifested itself as Andrew, her secondary personality.

Justice stared, baffled. I shrugged and continued to follow him through the underbrush. I was so exhausted that the Small Voices’ babble soon grew no more worrisome than the chirping of birds or crickets. After a few more minutes the flutter and squeaking of real birds roosting for the night drowned them out.

We passed a clearing ringed with white trees like birches. The air smelled of warm earth and goldenrod, but also of something foul, fetid water perhaps, trapped in a rotting stump. The sky glowed deepening blue and green. I sighed, feeling the breeze cool against my shorn skull, watched the long slender branches of the birch trees float upon the wind as though reaching for me. I had started toward one of them, thinking I might lie there to rest a moment, when Justice grabbed me and pulled me back.

“No, Wendy!”

I fell against him, and started to push him away angrily when he forced my head around. “Look—”

Against the boles of two trees a pair of figures reclined, as I had imagined myself resting beneath the lacy birches. Their heads had all but disappeared within the loose folds of their janissary’s uniforms. Willowy branches had wrapped themselves around them, snaking through flaps of yellow cloth to fasten upon their arms and chest and eyes. One had thrown his arm across his face, as though to shield it from the sun. Crumpled flesh hung from his wrist. Worms had bored small, perfectly round holes through his cheeks. The rest of his face seemed to have slipped from his skull like a mask of thin cloth.

The other gazed rigidly at us. As I stared back her mouth moved wordlessly. A black-winged beetle crawled from it, crept down her chin and onto the peaked collar of her uniform jacket. The net of branches rippled about her, their smooth white outer bark pulsing ever so slightly as they fed.

Justice turned away, tried to pull me after him; but I continued to stare. The scene wavered. Sunlight faded to gray twilight, white ribs and fleshless fingers emerging from black water, another tree whose limbs cracked beneath a body’s weight. He falls, turns bald white eyes to stare at me as I scream and look away—

“Shh, Wendy.” Justice drew me from the clearing, pushing back vines loud with bees and sparrows until we found a safer spot. “Here, sit …”

I found a large stone and settled there, breathing deeply until I felt calm again.

“Betulamia,” he explained. He sat a few feet from me, propping his feet on another rock and leaning so that his chin rested on his knees. “But we were safe; they had already fed.”

I tore leaves from an oak sapling at my feet. “It wasn’t that, really. It—They reminded me of something else.”

We rested for a few more minutes. Justice peered through the undergrowth, first north, then west, trying to get his bearings. When we started off again I asked, “Where are we going?”

“There’s a woman of my House who lives nearby; if she hasn’t left, or been driven out, or …”

The woods fell back. Before us opened a wide grassy avenue, speared by small saplings and the green mounds of overgrown autovehicles. To one side it sloped down to the river. A hill continued upward to our left, and there loomed a gold-domed building, its stained marble pillars choked with wisteria and ivy. Sunset ignited the dome so that I blinked to stare at it; but. from a narrow barred window at ground level a fainter light gleamed.

“She’s there!” Justice said. I let him drag me, stumbling over a moss-grown curb to where a tiny patio building had been trimmed of underbrush. I squinted to read broken letters on the dome overhead:

RI S NATION ANK

On the door itself hung a small hand-lettered wooden placard, the words spelled out in faded but carefully drawn cursives:

LAST NATIONAL BANK

Lalage Saint-Alaban, Prop.

Love Philtres

Tea Readings

Psychotropic Drugs

“What is this?” I began; but Justice had already raced up the steps leading to a set of huge metal doors. A great steel ring hung there. Justice banged this once, twice. As the third clang echoed down the empty avenue a tiny slit opened in the door. An alarmingly bright blue eye peered out.

“Lalage!” he yelled. “It’s Justice—”

The blue eye disappeared. A harsh grating signaled bolts being drawn. One of the doors creaked inward.

“Justice!” In the shadows I glimpsed a small figure that drew up sharply at the sight of me. Justice stepped past me into the room. I hesitated.

“It’s all right, Wen— Aidan,” he called back. “It’s only Lalage.”

“Justice,” the woman rebuked. She peered at me suspiciously.

“A friend, Lalage. A Patron.”

“Oh, all right,” she sighed, and pulled the door back another inch.

It opened onto a great chamber. The only light filtered from windows high overhead, touching the room with glints of green and gold. Tables made of dismembered automobiles were scattered across the floor, chairs over-turned or leaning against them haphazardly. Small shapes fluttered around them. There was a strong animal smell.

“Thank you, Lalage. I wasn’t certain you’d still be here …” His voice faded as he stepped farther into the cavernous room.

The woman laughed, turning a series of bolts and locks within the door. “Where else would I go? Too old for the duties of pleasure now. And you can’t really picture me in the kitchen at Saint-Alaban, can you, Justice?”

They laughed. Lalage crossed the room to embrace Justice, leaving me to wander among the tables of a forsaken hospice. The fluttering shapes were birds, guinea hens and peahens and doves. Peacocks dragged soiled trains through the muck. In the shadows a number of small barred chambers protected shattered glass monitors and more empty chairs.

Justice called to me across the room and I joined them, nudging guinea hens from my path. “Lalage, may I introduce my companion, Aidan.”

She inclined her head toward me. Then she smiled and raised three fingers to her mouth, a gesture that Justice imitated: the Paphians’ beck.

“A handsome leman, Justice,” she said, gazing at me and winking. “Especially for a. Curator—”

“I’m not his leman!” I began hotly, when Justice cut me off.

“No, he’s not my lover. We’re merely traveling together.”

“I understand.” Lalage nodded, a smile twitching at the corners of her mouth. Now that we stood in the center of the chamber I could see her more clearly in the hazy light. She was smaller than Justice and myself, very thin, and wearing a shift of some heavy green fabric, once no doubt very fine, now sloppily tied with a black sash and spattered with bird droppings and streaks of dust. But her hands were small and slender (if dirty), heavy with jeweled bracelets and antique rings; and her eyes were carefully painted to play up their oblique tilt and odd color: a dark and clouded blue. Her gray hair—blond once as Justice’s—was loosely braided above a pointed foxlike face. And I smelled in her sweat expensive spices—cinnamon, sandalwood, bitter rue. She bent to pick up a bedraggled guinea hen and stroked it gently.

“An interesting traveling companion, Justice.” She stared at my auburn stubble. “Someday you will have to tell me of your adventures there in the Citadel.” She tipped her head in the direction of the river, toward HEL . “We thought you had forsaken us for the Ascendants.”

Justice tossed back his head, avoiding her eyes. “I missed our people. But tell me, cousin: there are no guests?”

Lalage sighed, picking matted down from the guinea fowl’s breast. “Hardly ever now. Outside trade has fallen off. I was supposed to receive more frilite and morpha from the Botanists, but I haven’t seen them for nearly two weeks.”

She lowered her voice, glancing at the dim vault arching high above us. “There was trouble, Justice. A new Governor was sent here from the Citadel. The Curators were in an uproar. He came here, last week—”

Justice nodded. “In the woods—we saw two janissaries taken by the trees.”

“They were in his party. They arrived that night, I fed them, acted innocence, even gave them the last of my morpha tubes. Next morning sent them on their way.”

Her eyes glittered. I could smell her cunning like a thick musk. She tossed the guinea hen into the air and it flapped into the darkness. “The Governors will never hear from them again.”

Justice nodded, cast me an uneasy glance. “But otherwise, things are as they were? Our people?”

She shook her head and began to cross the room. “They come here seldom. They fear being this close to the edge of the City. I’ve been lonely this last week; I’ll be delighted to serve you both. Come with me.”

We followed her, Justice giving me warning looks when I angrily started to question him. Small round tables edged the far wall of the room, some of them still littered with tumblers sticky with absinthium and broken candicaine pipettes. Scrawny roosters and glossy black hens picked among the refuse. I kicked at a shattered morpha tube, the once-bright label with its grinning Man in the Moon faded to a pale blur.

“I haven’t cleaned in a while,” Lalage admitted. “It hardly seems worth it, with no Patrons …”

We followed her into a narrow passageway. Runners of pleated rubber covered the floor, brittle and curling with age. The hall was lit by elongated tubes stretching across the length of the ceiling. These were filled with murky water that sparkled pale blue and green, phosphorescent algae and diatoms that emitted a faint eerie glow. Fortunately the birds preferred the half-light of the rotunda. I inhaled with some relief the cooler air, only slightly tainted with the bittersweet smell of stale absinthium.

“If you wait here for a few minutes I’ll make the atrium ready for you.” She flashed me a brilliant smile before disappearing behind a fringed curtain.

When she was gone I turned to Justice.

“You’re a Paphian,” I said, pushing him against the wall. “You’ve stolen me to be a prostitute.”

He winced, shook his head. “No, Wendy. But I am a Paphian.” He drew his hand to his mouth and rested three fingers upon his lower lip: the Paphians’ beck, signifying the three sexes. “But I have no claim on you. They would have killed you, Wendy. I would have killed you before I’d leave you to them …”

I scented his arousal again, tinged now with the metallic edge of fear as he edged away from me. I felt a sudden rush, as though I had received a jolt of acetelthylene. Where the small nodes bulged from my temples a faint warmth spread until my hair prickled and stood on end. And suddenly I felt it, felt Him, that overwhelming desire and terror surging through me like raw adrenaline. I laughed.

“I was the wrong toy for you to steal, Justice,” I whispered. I brought my face close to his, until his shallow breathing warmed me. I brushed my tongue against his cheeks, tasted his bitter pleasure. Then I bit his mouth, until I felt my teeth meet through his soft skin.

With a cry he kicked me away, but not before I kissed him to draw a sharp draught of blood. I reeled backward, dizzy at the intensity of his desire, and drew my hand to my face to wipe the blood from my chin. I started to lick my fingers; but he grabbed me.

“I did not steal you! I saved you—”

But his words echoed meaninglessly as I gave myself up to a sudden shuddering ecstasy. I struck at him only to trip and fall. Pain blurred into an image dredged from the last fevered drop of blood upon my tongue:

My own face, blank and calm upon its soiled pillow. A golden-haired figure stands silently above me, watching for hours as I dreamed …

“Wendy— ”

I blinked to see him standing there still, the pale blue light tinting his cheekbones and his luminous eyes. But he no longer wore HEL ’s yellow robes, and his golden hair now hung loose and tangled from our flight. I shook my head, tried to stand. Justice glanced behind him before pulling me into a sitting position.

“You fainted.” He rubbed his mouth ruefully where a dark welt marred his lower lip. “You really are crazy, aren’t you?”

I stared at the phosphorescent ceiling. My head ached, and the giddy pangs of desire were gone. I felt only an indifferent regret for having hurt the boy who’d saved me.

“I’m not safe company for you, Justice,” I said at last. “I’ll harm you, whether I want to or not.”

He edged closer to me, eyeing the doorway where Lalage had disappeared. “I saw your scan on the monitor that afternoon.” He spoke softly, his blue eyes intent upon me. “You thought you were entering a fugue state.”

“I was wrong.”

“But something did happen; that’s why you came to me for the scan. You killed them, didn’t you?”

I felt a pressure building inside my chest. “I didn’t kill them,” I whispered. “I told you that—I told them all that.”

“But somehow you drove them to suicide: Morgan Yates, Emma Harrow, the sleep researcher. All those children. Why? How?”

I leaned forward and gripped my knees. Inside my head a vision was forming, distinct from the dimly lit room around us. I bit my lip, feeling sick at the taste of my own blood; thought of tapping Justice again, to somehow draw him into the scintillating landscape that was beginning to loom behind my eyes. Black mountains, an endless plain shot with dead white light. In the air in front of me something else began to form. A spectral figure crouched as if preparing to spring.

I snatched my hand from Justice and pounded my fist against the wall behind me, hard enough to make me gasp with pain. The brilliant interior horizon shivered. The ghostly silhouette disappeared. I sat in a narrow corridor flickering with blue light, staring wildly at a fair young man.

I gritted my teeth, waited for the throbbing in my knuckles to subside.

“Justice,” I began. “Dr. Harrow engaged in therapy with me. Did you know that?”

Pupils retracting in gold-flecked eyes: no.

“She—Something went wrong. A long time ago …

“She and her twin brother played at—at witchcraft. They invoked something, and—it came. Something strong and dangerous. It killed her brother; it drove him mad, and he hanged himself. But she had this—hypostate—dormant inside of her all that time. When she did my neural implants fourteen years ago, I think the engrams were stronger than anyone ever knew. She patterned me without really knowing it was there, that memory, without me knowing. And nothing happened until I was the same age she was when they woke it, and then it—it manifested itself.”

“And that’s what you think killed Dr. Harrow?” He tilted his head in disbelief. “What of the others?”

“It just waited until I tapped anyone susceptible to it. It latched on to them: Morgan, Melisande …”

“A poet and a sick child, a dreaming woman,” Justice said slowly. “And Dr. Harrow …” He laced his fingers with mine. “But what is it?”

“I don’t know. A hypostate. Some terribly destructive impulse …” He stared at me, thoughtful. “Twins, and—well, something. Like Baal and Anat.”

“What?” I shook my head impatiently.

“A story, a masque of ours, about twins. At Saint-Alaban. Baal wakes Death, but his sister Anat saves him. It’s a story of the Magdalene, really. A fable.”

I snorted, and he glared at me.

“Well, if you’re carrying this thing inside you, why hasn’t it affected you? Why aren’t you dead? Why didn’t it kill the other empaths when you tapped them?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps because of what we are: maybe we have nothing for it to feed on. But it drove her to despair. The last—what I felt of her—” I licked my lips at the memory.

Justice flinched and rubbed his mouth gingerly. “So it’s a parate emergent personality,” he said. “Like Andrew—”

“No!” I insisted. “Andrew is part of Anna. They induced him when she was little. She was afraid of the dark,” I called wistfully. “But this is not mine.”

“How do you know? All of the multiple personalities at HEL considered themselves independent.”

“I am not an MP!” I lashed at him. He grabbed my hand, but at that moment we heard the curtains being drawn behind us.

“Ah. Pardon me, cousins.” Lalage smiled. I drew away from Justice and stood up too quickly. I felt dizzy again. Justice grabbed my elbow and nodded to Lalage.

“He’s tired,” he explained, glancing at me with concern. “We’ve come a long way …”

Lalage held the curtains so that we could pass into another narrow hallway. “Curators tire easily. Don’t they?” she added sympathetically.

She had changed clothes. Now she wore a loose crimson tunic, no less soiled than the other; but it was harder to see the stains on this one’s darker fabric. And she had braided her hair into tight coils about her ears. I thought curious that she would bother to change clothes for two itinerants, until I also noted that she invariably directed her questions to me. Even when Justice answered, her eyes never left my face.

“What is the news of the City?” he asked as we followed her through a twisting hallway. Baskets and heavy sacks lined the walls, Lalages wealth. It smelled overpowering of cumin and coriander and cinnamon.

“It will be a harsh winter this year. The lazars grow bolder every day. The Ascendants I entertained last week boasted of war with the Balkhash Commonwealth.”

I would hear more of this, but Justice interrupted. “But what of our Houses, Lalage? What news there?”

“Oh, such scandals! Salamanda Illyria deflowered her son two nights before his debut to Rufus Lynx, the Regent of Zoologists. Cliantha Persia stole a beautiful child from the Librarians, and in retaliation they took Tarleton Persia. Raphael Miramar left his House to live among the Natural Historians. The House Miramar is losing Patrons without him; but already they say that Roland Nopcsa will dismiss Raphael for that albino boy from High Brazil—

I yawned, and she laughed. “I forget that the Curators have no patience with our gossip. Come, Aidan—here is something to interest you.”

The hallway ended in a barred gate. Lalage held the door open and we stepped out onto an open patio. Or so I thought at first. When I glanced up I saw that a glass room soared many feet above us. In its airy reaches flitted numerous butterflies and tiny bright shapes, glowing in the sunset light.

“Hummingbirds!” I ran to where a thicket of beetlebrush grew from a chipped porcelain bowl. Amid the scarlet flowers a dozen hummingbirds darted, flashes emerald and blue vying with butterflies for nectar.

“I’m roasting a capon for you, cousins, and there are peaches and field salad, and the first plum wine of the year,” Lalage announced grandly. She gestured toward flat metal chassis salvaged from some vehicle, now set upon stones as a table. “I’ll join you shortly.” She touched her fingers to her mouth and left.

We sank onto the grass in front of the table. About me fruit trees heavy with plums roared with golden bees longer than my middle finger. They lit upon our table to sip at the overripe windfalls splattered on its metal surface I laughed and licked the back of my hand, watched a drone land there and feed lazily upon my damp skin.

After some minutes Lalage returned. Behind her rolled a very old rusted house server, squeaking and squealing like an ill-behaved child.

“Stop here,” commanded Lalage, clapping her hands.

“Yes mistress yes mistress yes,” piped the server, bumping against me. It set steaming platters and chipped plates upon the makeshift table. Lalage rearranged three un-matched glasses and gave it a kick.

“Welcome mistress mistress mistress,” it lisped, grinding over a tree root as it rolled off. Lalage smiled after it, then sat on the grass between us.

“My pleasure to share my food with you,” she said, bowing her head. Justice bowed his in turn, nudging me until I lid the same.

The food was very good, surprisingly so. I complimented her, and Lalage beamed. While we had always eaten the best at H EL , it had been my understanding that our bounty was due only to the good graces and munificence of our Ascendant supervisors. But surely the Ascendants did not provide Lalage with cardamom and kef and absinthium?

At my audacious question Lalage stared, then laughed so hard that she inhaled her wine and Justice had to slap her back to stop her choking. She had drunk a great deal by then, as had Justice. I allowed myself a sip for politeness’ sake only, though it had a cleaner taste than the water in its rusted carafe.

“He’s a comedian!” she exclaimed when she could talk again. She leaned companionably against me. Her hand rustled through the grass and started to glide up my thigh. I moved closer to Justice, trying to hide my disgust. “Are you a Player, then, Sieur Aidan? You are too fair for a Curator!”

“Aidan has not lived with his people for many years,” said Justice. He licked a drop of grease from his finger.

“Then why is he shorn?” She ran her other hand up my back to toy with my short hair.

“A sign of respect for his people,” Justice explained clearing his throat as he glanced at me.

Lalage nodded drunkenly, her voice softening. “Oh, I understand, dear Aidan.”

Overhead, twilight deepened. I sighed and let her take my hand as she continued earnestly.

“Our people are of the House Saint-Alaban. And even though they have cast me aside for being too old —” She twirled a stray curl from one of her braids, batting her eyes. “Well, as you can see, I’ve not forgotten how to take care of myself. Not like some elders.”

She paused, slightly out of breath. I took this chance to disengage my hand. I tugged a leg from the capon and started to gnaw upon it.

“Aidan is blessed with a memory somewhat shorter than yours,” began Justice. He drew me toward him, stroking my neck, I felt as if I were playing a weary round of kiss-in the-ring with Gligor and Anna. I started to pull away; when:

“Help, mistress. Help help help help help,” piped the server. It had bumped against the far wall of the atrium, it wheels grinding against the brick. “

Another sound came from outside. Muffled voices. Then laughter and the thump of a strong hand upon wood. Beside me Lalage sat up straight and carefully put down he wineglass.

“Ask who it is,” she commanded the server; but it only; mewled help help help help.

“Damn,” muttered Lalage. When she stood she swayed slightly. “Who is it?” she shouted as she walked toward the far wall.

“‘An ambassador from Witchland and his train,” quoted a resonant voice.” ‘We craveth present audience.” He also sounded drunk.

Lalage wiped her hands on her shift. She raced to the wall, stumbling on a stone and sending a peahen caterwauling. I glanced at Justice, wondering if we should flee but he only waited until Lalage was halfway across the atrium, and then drank what remained in her wineglass.

I stood and followed our hostess. In the twilight I could just make out a heavy planked door in the wall, crisscrossed with metal and set with a listening auricle that amplified the voices of our visitors, so that I heard them shuffling in the grass outside and giggling. Lalage fumbled with several locks, finally drew herself up, and shouted “Open!”—whereupon the door flew outward. A thump and more shouts and curses followed. After a moment a bedraggled retinue tramped into the atrium.

“Toby!” Lalage threw her arms around the neck of the tallest figure, who, by his clothes and bearing, seemed to be the leader. Behind her the server squealed piteously, until a plump girl in short skirts and tight crimson jacket kicked it into silence. I drew closer to a tall plum tree.

“We have interrupted a rendezvous!” boomed the tall man. He had a deep voice and a long ruddy face ending in an unruly black beard. He drew himself up and surveyed the atrium grandly, casting Justice a mocking little wave. “How clever of us! We’ve found a Paphian boy, another Saint-Alaban, too.” He blew a kiss, then turned back to Lalage. “Many greetings, dear cousin! Girls, get out of the way.”

He stepped aside so that the others could spill into the court. Four of them: two young girls, one the plump interloper who was now pulling peaches from the trees and tasting them for ripeness; the other a tall, heavyset girl with black hair and a mustache. She carried a heavy satchel. A rangy young brown-skinned boy strode in next, somewhere between my age and Justice’s. He wore velvet knickers that displayed his slender fawn-colored legs and two enormously knobbed knees, like a pair of blackthorn walking-sticks.

And, finally, stepping demurely behind Toby, a diminutive figure in a woman’s dress and lace bonnet. I poked my head around the tree to stare at her.

“Why, here’s another!” exclaimed Toby, sweeping Lalage from his path and stepping toward me in one long stride. “My dear cousin, are you poncing?”

I shrank from him, but he pulled me from the sheltering branches. Nearly two heads taller than myself—and I was tall—his hair stuck out in an untidy aureole, adding inches more to his height. His lanky torso was draped in a long loose tunic faded to a drab memory of its former glorious blue and smelling of face powder and sweat. He jammed a huge hand beneath each of my armpits and lifted me, until I stared him square in the face.

“A pretty catamite,” he announced. He kissed me on the mouth and set me back on the grass.

“I am Toby Rhymer, boy,” he intoned, thrusting his hand at mine. “A nom du theatre, of course. Né’e Toby Crouch, of the Historians.” As I took his hand, Justice slipped beside me. Toby glanced at him, nodding. “Toby Rhymer, my dear.”

“Justice Saint-Alaban,” he said. “You’ve met my companion Aidan.”

“Aidan,” said Toby.

“Aidan,” a soft voice echoed. From behind him peered the tiny figure I had glimpsed before. I squinted, trying to make out the wizened face hidden behind the torn lace. From within the cloud of white netting I glimpsed only a flash of intelligent black eyes surveying me calmly.

“That is a woman, sieur,” she whispered. Justice flinched beside me, but Toby only guffawed and pinched my cheek.

“I bet you could play the part better than I ever could, eh, boy?” He laughed, and gave Justice an admiring look. “A handsome leman, Saint-Alaban.”

I stepped from him to gaze down at the figure who had recognized me so easily. From the folds of her bonnet peered a shriveled face, so that for a moment I thought her a very old woman. But a hag with extraordinarily bright eyes and a gentle voice. She gazed back at me unperturbed, so that I drew even closer, until I gazed directly into her face and found myself drawing back her silken bonnet. , I stepped back in amazement.

“Justice!” I gasped. “Look!”

With a sigh the little figure raised her head to Toby, then plucked back the bonnet with very long slender brown fingers. Justice drew in his breath.

“A monkey!”

Toby Rhymer shook his head and knelt beside her, drawing his arm protectively about the folds of her gown. “No,” he said. “Miss Scarlet is a wonder, a marvel, the prodigy of a prodigal age; a troglodyte with the wit and grace of a Paphian and the brilliance of a Curator, a beacon in these dark and desperate times. In short, An Actress.”

She tipped her head modestly, her long lips drawing back to show sharp yellow teeth. “Ah, Toby,” she murmured; in her voice the rustle of warm leaves. “He is a showman,” she said aside to me apologetically; then fixed me with a piercing look. She said no more; but in her deep-set eyes I read that while she had seen through my disguise she would not betray my secret.

“My dear Miss Scarlet,” gushed Lalage, brushing aside the insistent hands and imprecations of Toby’s troupe to greet the chimpanzee. “It’s been much too long since I had the honor of seeing you perform.”

“How kind of you,” murmured Miss Scarlet, extending those extraordinarily long fingers to be kissed.

Behind her the plump girl and her mustachioed companion mocked Lalage’s greeting. Toby glanced back at them.

“Ladies! Perhaps our hostess will not object to your performing ablutions before performing a Bluebeard or Hamlet this evening?” He inclined his head to Lalage.

“Of course not.” She rose and shook the grass from her shift, motioning the girls to follow her.

“Fabian—you will assist Lalage in serving our meal,” Toby ordered. With a wink the long-legged young man disappeared after the others.

“Please forgive my rudeness,” Justice began. Toby brushed him aside, taking Miss Scarlet’s hand.

“I am not in need of your apologies, and Miss Scarlet Pan rises above such idle speculation. It is Her Way,” he said. “May we join you?”

We settled back at the stone table, Toby escorting his little soubrette and seeing that she was comfortable before seating himself. I was unable to resist staring at Miss Scarlet. She beckoned for me to sit beside her.

“I have never known an animal that could speak before,” I said. Across from us Justice was offering Toby the last sip of Lalage’s plum wine. “We had macaws and budgerigars at HEL , but they only repeated our speech. They had no reason.”

The chimpanzee nodded, extending one foot to grasp a peach in her curling toes. She passed the fruit from foot to hand and began to munch it daintily.

“I grew up among the Zoologists,” she began, pausing to flick a drop of ambrosia from her lip. “As I girl I was quite ill, and underwent a number of operations which resulted in long periods of convalescence. The Zoologists have a cinematograph, film projectors, and video monitors. I spent the months of my recovery watching the spectacles of the last centuries. The experience left me with an undying affection for the glories of the proscenium and the lost and lamented silver screens. I was, in short, stagestruck.”

I listened eagerly, sensing within her tale faint echoes of my own fate. “These operations gifted you with speech?”

Miss Scarlet nodded. “Yes.” She stroked her throat, extravagantly furred with lustrous dark hair. “I bear scars, here, and—” She caressed her temple, pulling the hair back so that I could discern the faded impression of an incision. “Here.”

She regarded me curiously. “Do I detect a resonant sympathy within your bosom, Aidan?” She dropped her voice to a husky whisper. “I call you Aidan because your friend addresses you thus; you own another, a gentler name perhaps? Do you too heed the circean songs of Melpomene and Thalia and Calliope?”

I shook my head. Toby Rhymer had now extracted a flask from within the folds of his tunic. He and Justice passed this between them, engaged in their own discussion—which inspired Toby Rhymer to fix me with a very long, searching stare. I turned back to Miss Scarlet.

“I am an heteroclite, like yourself.” I bowed my head to display the scars upon my own scalp. “I also was given speech as a child—”

“But as your birthright.” Miss Scarlet reached to touch a node upon my temple. I shivered: the touch of that gnarled hand, so like and yet so alien to my own, filled me with a vast and lonely awe. “But all such miraculous venesections have a price. I lost all contact with my family, all pride in my race. When I last glimpsed the faces of my parents it was with the terrible knowledge that they were brute animals, and ever would be.”

She pressed her fingers to her jutting mouth as though to stave off the painful memory. “And you, Aidan? What did they take from you?”

“My heart,” I said softly. “My soul.”

“But surely you have a heart, who travels in such romantic fashion with one of the Children of the Magdalene.” She indicated Justice on the other side of the table. “And we all have souls.”

“He is not my lover,” I replied. “And my soul is not my own.”

She edged closer to me, her petticoats rustling as they brushed my knees. “I understand,” she said at last. She gazed so intently that I looked away. “There is another set of eyes that sees me through your own. You are possessed by an afreet. A demon.”

She leaned back once more, resting her hand upon my knee reassuringly. “Well, Aidan, that is not such a bad thing. Changelings have their own kind of luck—literature teaches us that if nothing else!—as well as beauty; and while heartless and soulless they may still assist mortal men and women in their sanguine challenges—”

She coughed delicately, then recited in a soft voice:

“They that have power to hurt and will do none,

That do not do the thing they most do show,

Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,

Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;

They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces,

And husband nature’s riches from expense;

They are the lords and owners of their faces,

Others but stewards of their excellence.”

I listened spellbound, hearing in her rich tones the echo of some distant battle, the clash and clamor of a great day dawning to which I would soon wake. Then I shook my head, as though dispersing a dream from my bed in the Home Room.

“How do you know such things?”

A smile twitched across her wrinkled face as she tapped a finger to her lips. “Science has awakened her brother Magic from his long sleep. The goddess is alive, Magic is afoot. And you and I will follow in their train.” She turned from me to take Toby’s hand.

It may have been that Miss Scarlet and I spoke for longer than I imagined. Certainly I have since seen hours fly past when she was onstage, and her audiences stir themselves afterward as though resentful that they had been cheated by a performance of mere moments. I was surprised to see that already Lalage and the Players had returned. The little server squeaked behind its mistress, its hold filled with bottles and globes and a small glass cylinder filled with absinthium of a poisonous green. Behind them Fabian juggled tamarillos and plums, dropping them much to the amusement of the pretty round-faced Player who carried a bowl of fieldcress and nasturtium blossoms. Last of all came the mustachioed girl, balancing on her broad shoulder a platter of salted pigeons.

Fabian tossed a plum to Toby. With a flourish Toby presented it to Miss Scarlet. Lalage bowed to us, her head held proudly despite the crooked crown of leaves that had displaced the neat braids upon her brow.

“You bring me good luck, cousins!” she called out to Justice and myself. Justice grabbed her and kissed her on the mouth. Toby blew a kiss to Miss Scarlet.

Gitana set the platter on the table, adjusted her spectacles, and wiped her hands upon her thighs.

“Dinner is served,” she announced, and flopped onto the grass.

Curiosity was a good sauce for this second meal. Toby and Fabian and Gitana and Mehitabel (I learned her name when Toby bellowed it, demanding more wine from the carafe she hugged between her knees) tucked in with much loud praise for Lalage’s food. Lalage settled upon Justice’s lap to feed him greengages and burgundy streams from the carafe, spilling most of it. Miss Scarlet ate quietly at my side, amassing a small arsenal of plum stones before her.

“An Ascendant among cooks!” Toby tossed another pigeon to Gitana. “Lalage, why don’t you join our troupe? Then we could eat like Governors every day!”

“And I could live like an animal, and sleep in a drafty theater, and wonder if my throat would be slit in the night.” Lalage stumbled to her feet. Mehitabel promptly took her place and began twirling Justice’s hair about her greasy fingers.

I averted my eyes. Toby leaned across the table to me, covering both my hands with his huge one (his nails clean and well shaped, I noticed with some surprise, and stained with crimson dye).

“You would have no such objections to our life, Sieur Aidan,” he suggested, and turned my hands palm-upward. “These hands would welcome hardening—” He brushed my fingertips. “Haven’t you ever wanted to see our City by night, when the old moon cuts broad milky avenues through the Narrow Forest, and aardmen swim across the Tiger to hunt swans and lazars?”

“No,” I said, and turned to watch Justice.

The new moon had risen. Lalage had gone to pace among the trees, lighting a series of metal torches that sputtered fitfully before leaping into golden light. After a few minutes the conversation was punctuated by the hiss and sizzle of moths’ Icarian flights.

“Ah, but there’s better than that!” said Fabian. A handful of candicaine pipettes lay scattered like jackstraws on the table before him. He broke one, inhaled deeply. “There are birds with the breasts of women, and trees that will sing you to sleep—”

“And then suck you dry as a dead leaf,” called Lalage.

Fabian ignored her. “And you should see how the Paphian women treat you! Men, too, I suppose,” he added and passed me a candicaine pipette.

I felt a small hand plucking at my sleeve and turned to see Miss Scarlet.

“Would you like to see our show?” she asked softly. She climbed onto the table so that her long skirts spilled around her. Before I could reply, Fabian and Gitana and Mehitabel had lunged through the shadows to where their huge, satchel lay by the gate. Toby stood and bowed to Lalage’, then took Miss Scarlet by the hand and assisted her down.

“You will excuse us while we prepare the entertainment,” he said. As he passed Justice I saw the two of them exchange knowing glances, and Toby winked broadly.

“Well!” said Lalage. She smoothed her hair and looked sideways at Justice, who grinned like a cat. “I suppose I’d better clear some of this.”

“Let me help you,” said Justice, carelessly gathering an armful of chipped plates and the pigeons’ carcasses, but being very careful not to upset a single wineglass or carafe. He paused in front of me to stack more plates, then dipped his head to brush my cheek. He turned away, scattering Miss Scarlet’s pyramid of plum stones. I watched them disappear inside.

By the outer gate Toby’s Players giggled and fought for costumes and scripts. I was alone for the first time since Justice had freed me. After several minutes I reached into my pocket and withdrew Anna’s hummingbird bandeau. I turned it over in my hands, then slipped it onto my shorn head, hoping that when she returned Miss Scarlet would notice it. I felt my heart stirred by all this cheerful ruckus. Closing my eyes, I sought within the knots of memory one that would tighten this thread of feeling.

And found it upon a small raised stage, some fifty years earlier, a stage lit by hissing gas lamps and smelling of cheap cosmetics and powder, where a boy and girl in matching broadcloth tunics and carrying matching blue books carefully followed marks chalked upon the scuffed floor reciting.

“ ’…I never had a brother;

Nor can there be that deity in my nature

Of here and everywhere. I had a sister

Whom the blind waves and surges have devoured …’”

This a memory of Emma’s slipped somehow within my own, a stray cell sailing through me until it bumped another. Then another scene flashed through memory’s aperture. Emma’s bed, Aidan and Emma and mumbling Molly knocking heads together above the stained counterpane. A rush of displaced thought, like a wind careening through a broken window; and this image too spun off its string to join the others jumbled inside me.

I shivered in anticipation, for an instant thought I lay upon my bed in the Home Room. But a hand drawn to my forehead touched only Anna’s hummingbird bandeau. The flare of memory cooled, coalesced into a firefly dropping through the air, a glowing green scarab. I opened my hand. It lit there, wings blurring as they clicked back into their sturdy casing. I recalled the huge bees hovering in the afternoon air, the trees that had devoured Tast’annin’s bodyguard. Fireflies and bees the size of hummingbirds. A talking chimpanzee. Even the Players seemed somewhat inflated, as if they all deigned to imagine one another wiser, lovelier, bolder, and braver than they really were; and by so dreaming had awakened to find it come true.

But now the firefly shakes its wings and buzzes from my hand. In the doorway Justice and Lalage embrace before rejoining me at table, Justice preening slightly, his long hair tangled and his lip bleeding again. Fabian moves several of the metal torches so that their light falls upon the dark grass before us, then with a bow and a flourish announces:

“‘The Romantic History of Algernon Moncrieff and Gwendolen Fairfax,’ as performed by Toby Rhymer, His Troupe, Featuring Miss Scarlet Pan as Lady Bracknell.”

And I am a virgin witness as the Players begin their show.