Winterlong

1. Catastrophes of different kinds

L AZARS WOKE ME FROM a black and dreamless sleep in the Hagioscopic Embrasure.

“It is him,” said a child’s voice. So vast was the void that had swallowed me I could not for some moments discern their figures moving about the room, although my eyes were open and gray dawn slanted from slits in the varicolored ceiling.

“Yes,” another voice lisped. “He killed Peter in the river last night. I saw him.”

“We must take him,” the first voice said, but doubtfully.

“Yes,” the other agreed, and fell into thoughtful silence.

They did not kill me, though I lay for many minutes waiting to feel their small knives in my throat, their teeth. I heard them stirring about the room, kicking at oddments that rolled across the floor, and imagined what broken toys they played with: Whitlock’s cosmetics, candicaine pipettes, a flask of absinthium emptied of its green liquor. I groped at my side for Whitlock’s body, felt nothing there. I whispered Anku’s name: nothing.

The voices sounded very young. Finally I could stand it no more. I sat up, blinking.

At the edge of the obfuscating oriels several figures squatted. One swept the floor with a cosmetic brush, drawing something in the powders and ointments spilled there. The others watched her with no great interest. Their voices were soft, curiously inert, as though nothing remained in the world to amuse or frighten them.

Surely not this empty chamber. Nopcsa’s corpse was gone, and Whitlock’s. Of Anku I saw nothing.

“Where is my familiar?” I asked.

Every head turned to stare. Then they raced to my side, giggling and shoving at one another. They gathered in a circle around me, grinning: all of them filthy, with stained hands and hair clotted with blood and dirt. They smelled of rotting meat.

“He’s awake! Where’s Dr. Silverthorn?” wondered a little girl of five or six. She had painted her cheeks with rouge and eye-powder and stuck her ratty hair with feathers. She turned to face a boy taller and older than the rest, maybe thirteen. “Oleander?”

I repeated, “Where is my familiar?—the white jackal.”

The oldest boy pushed the girl out of his way. Great open sores erupted everywhere on his arms and face. The rest of him was hidden by some dead Paphian’s costume, all sequined sighs and tears. “Your dog brought us here,” he said. “But he ran away. We didn’t hurt him, I swear.” He smiled, twitching at the sleeves of his costume so that sequins rained to the floor. “I’m Oleander.”

“And I’m Bellanca,” piped the little girl as she slipped beside him. Beneath a shift of torn indigo linen her swollen stomach bulged. What remained of her blond hair fell free of its confining ribbons, wispy feathers about sunken cheeks. She smiled. Then, to my horror, she raised three fingers to her blackened mouth. “Greetings, cousin,” she lisped sweetly.

My heart sank: more Paphian children.

“I thought that was your dog,” said another child smugly. I turned to recognize one of the lazars I had met by the Rocreek, a plain boy with intelligent eyes burning in a scarred face. He would have been a Curator. “A boy took him away—”

“A boy?” I repeated stupidly.

He nodded. “Like you—” By this I could only imagine he meant another Paphian. He continued respectfully,

“He wore flowers in his hair and said you awaited us here. Are you ready to go now?”

I stared at them dully, counting five. The boy Oleander. A girl his age, her scalp smooth and bald as a stone, who opened and shut her mouth constantly, as though gasping for air. The child Bellanca and another small girl who drooled and said nothing, and the boy I had met earlier with Pearl’s troupe by the Rocreek.

“I’m Martin,” he announced shrilly, poking at his thin chest. “She’s Octavia,” pointing at the silent girl.

I said nothing, imagined killing them, either with my sagittal or my hands. But I felt no desire to kill them, or do anything to save myself; Because hadn’t I led them here, hadn’t I betrayed my people to them? How many of those at the niasque had been murdered or captured by lazars? And Ketura among them, and Fancy too perhaps—

“Wait,” I said, beckoning Martin. “I’ll go with you; but tell me, was there a woman, or a little girl, did you see a little girl—”

“Lots,” Martin said helpfully. “I saw some, they took some—”

Oleander frowned. The sequined rags made him look foolish, and the others seemed to pay him little attention, but he obviously felt that he must act the leader. “Shut up, Martin,” he ordered. He tapped a long-nosed gun tied about his waist with a leather thong. He turned to me, drawing himself up and scratching at an oozing cut on his thigh. “You are Raphael Miramar? The one they call the Gaping One?”

I hadn’t the strength to argue. “Yes.”

“Well, you’re to come with us. Tast—The Consolation of the Dead says so. Please.” His voice cracked. He coughed, glancing to see if the others had noticed. The silent drooling Octavia had wandered to the edge of the chamber and glanced down at the Great Hall. Bellanca and Martin were dabbling with the ruined cosmetics. The remaining older girl yawned, her slack mouth working as though she would say something to me, but no words came. Before I could move away she shuffled toward me, hands reaching for my hair.

“Get away!” I scrambled backward, terrified of her scabbed hands, the slack curl of her mouth. But she did not listen, only continued to gape like a dying fish as she tried to touch me. I cried out and swiped at her. A flash of violet as I struck her arm. She gazed at me curiously, her fingers brushing against my hair.

“Pretty,” she said thickly. She sank to her knees. As the other children watched she died, her face and hands erupting with crimson petals.

Oleander stared at the girl, then turned to me. “What did you do to her? To do that? The colors.” The others lifted their heads for my answer. Bellanca stuck her thumb in her mouth and gazed at me with wide eyes.

I stammered, “She was—I didn’t want her to touch me!”

“She was looking at your hair,” explained Martin. “She lost all her hair, she was just looking at your hair—”

“Shut up!” I whirled to raise my fist at them so that they could see the sagittal glowing there. “Take her—get it out of here!” I kicked at the girl’s corpse and stumbled away from it, shielding my eyes.

After a minute I heard Oleander command them, “Do it.” The smaller children scuffled for a little while, dragging their burden. The door wheezed open and shut. When they returned I stood panting in the center of the chamber, glaring at Oleander as he fingered his swivel nervously. He cleared his throat.

“You—we’re supposed to—you’re still to come with us.” He raised his eyes and smiled, looked more sober as I bared my teeth at him.

“And if I don’t?” I snarled, when from the chamber entrance rang the scholiast’s harsh voice.

“Flee, cousins. The House of High Brazil is beset by lazars. Flee, cousins. The House —”

A crash. The scholiast fell silent. The door swung open to show a tall slender figure silhouetted against the pale light.

“Dr. Silverthorn!” Bellanca cried. She and Martin ran to greet him. Oleander bit his lip, drew the gun from his makeshift belt and pointed it at me. From across the room Octavia made a thick clucking sound and waved. Her fingers had rotted, flesh and bone, all the way to the second knuckle.

“Dr. Silverthorn,” began Oleander. He shifted the gun from one hand to the other. “It’s him. That boy. The one he told us about.”

The figure stepped into the light where I could see him for the first time. I gasped and looked away.

“I understand that the Consolation of the Dead wishes him to be returned alive, Oleander,” he said, disdain icing the words Consolation of the Dead. A thick voice—he had difficulty forming the words—but kindly and intelligent for all that. “Will you put that damned thing away and let me see him? And where is Angeline?”

Sheepishly Oleander tucked the gun back into his belt and stepped away. I heard the other children whispering as they surrounded the newcomer and plucked at his clothes.

“He killed her, Dr. Silverthorn. I saw it—”

“That one, the one he told us—”

How can they bear to touch him? I thought as I tried to calm myself.

Because in that brief instant I had seen a horrible thing: a man of bones whose clothes flapped about him like gulls taking flight, with a nearly fleshless face drawn into the hideous grimace of a skull picked clean of skin and sinew.

2. Parts of the nature of a skeleton

I STARED AT THE floor, trying to keep my heart from racing. That awful face! I heard the scrape and rattle of his feet upon the floor, the crackle of his stiff clothes as he moved slowly among the remaining children.

“Dr. Silverthorn, can we go home now?”

“Dr. Silverthorn, did you see the party?”

“Dr. Silver—”

“Shh, children,” he hushed them. A rustle as he crossed the room. He finally stopped a few meters from me. I heard his breathing, a thick glottal sound as though he choked upon the air. Still, if the children did not fear him I could at least make a show of boldness. I turned to face him.

He stood there, a shrunken scarecrow of a man all in white, his long tunic stained with dirt and grass. White gloves covered his hands, a loose white scarf wrapped his throat. Only his face was not hidden: pink and white and gleaming as a piece of fresh meat, the veins and capillaries stretched like vines across the tendons and smooth solid bones of his skull. My eyes filled with tears.

“Ohh …” I cried. In spite of myself I was moved to pity at the mere sight of this stranger. “Why have they done this.to you?”

He shook his head very slowly, as though if he moved too quickly the tenuous strands that held him together might tear. “But don’t I know you?” he murmured as though he had not heard me. He stretched out one gloved hand to brush the tears from my cheeks. “Wendy Wanders?”

I shook my head. “No—I am Raphael Miramar.”

My tears stained the tips of his gloves. He drew his hand to his face and stared at the damp cloth, then turned his gaze back upon me. Once perhaps those brown eyes had been tender; perhaps even now they regarded me with pity or wonder. But with no flesh upon his brow, no lashes to droop across those swollen orbs he could only stare rigidly, a fine sheath of flesh flicking up and down when he blinked. “Raphael,” he said, shaking his head. “Yes, of course—the Aviator told me, the children spoke of you, they saw you by the river. …”

With a soft creak he swiveled his head to look behind him, to where the children waited. “Poor things, they are tired,” he murmured, then returned his attention to me. “But you are not Wendy?”

“No,” I said. I was torn between wanting to look away from him and wanting to stare in repelled fascination and pity. I fixed my gaze upon his hands. A clear liquid seeped from beneath the gloves and stained them as my tears had. “Who are you?”

He sighed, the sound unnaturally harsh as it hissed from his lipless mouth. “Three weeks ago I was Dr. Lawrence Silverthorn of the Human Engineering Laboratory. Three days from now I will be dead.” His clothes rustled as he shrugged and pulled from beneath his tunic a large black leather bag. He removed a narrow vial and began to rub a clear ointment on his face. “Antibiotic,” he explained, smearing it across the planes of his cheeks.

“We heard that Wendy was alive,” he said absently, as though once more taking up a long story. “A trader from the City said he had seen her performing with a wretched group of actors. We thought we might escape as she did, we thought we might find help here …”

He glanced up at me and laughed silently, mirthlessly. I hugged myself to keep from shaking at the sight; but I would not look away. “They kept some of them alive for a month while they tried to synthesize the bioprints,” he went on, clumsily replacing the cap on the vial of ointment. “After that they killed them. Their heads in vats while they pried their brains out. I hid Gligor and Anna in my room. At the end they ran out of anesthesia. All of your empath friends, Wendy, except for Anna and Gligor. All of them dead; all the children.”

His teeth clicked as he shook his head to indicate the lazars. “You were right to run away with that Aide. But you are not Wendy?” he asked again, confused. He glanced around the chamber. “Where is Angeline?”

“Dead, she’s dead, Dr. Silverthorn,” Bellanca cried. “He killed her. Can we go home?”

He started at the sound of her voice, then nodded. “Of course. Yes, of course, Bellanca. But lie down first, rest for a few minutes. All of you, rest.” He turned to me. “You did kill them, then: the albino boy and that other man. How?”

He stared as though he perceived me through a thick wall of glass. I held up my fist. The sagittal’s fierce radiance had faded to a faint lilac, almost gray. “This,” I said. “A sagittal. I did not mean to.” I bowed my head.

Dr. Silverthorn nodded. “A sagittal. I have seen them. They were prototype geneslaves developed during the Second Ascension, for—” His jaws moved as he turned his face toward mine, teeth bared in a horrible leer. “But you already know what they are for.”

He continued to stare at me for a long time. Finally he dipped his head to pore through the contents of his bag. I glimpsed the soft white globe of the top of his skull, blue-veined and shining dully. “Ah—here, boy.”

I moved to avoid the hand he reached toward me. He only stared with those cloudy eyes, continuing to stretch out a gloved palm holding a small round patch of blue cloth. “I am not contagious,” he said softly. “None of us are—but nobody here knows that, do they? They pick you off like little flies and you let them die, you let yourselves die. You ignorant fools.” There was no malice in his voice, not even a hint of it. All feeling might have been stripped from him as well as flesh and nerve.

“Here: this is a mild stimulant, it will make it easier for you to come with us.” I shuddered as he touched my neck but this time did not move away. He pressed the patch beneath my ear and drew back. “Now: look through this and find a vial with clear yellow capsules in it and give me one. Please.”

He handed me the bag and waited while I fumbled through its contents, strange bottles and instruments like swivels and flares, oddments similar to those I had seen Doctor Foster employ, but new and gleaming as though they had never been used. I found the bottle he wanted and handed him a single capsule.

“Thank you,” he said, swallowing it with difficulty. “It’s hard for me to get those out with the gloves. And I can’t use the others now: no skin left for them to adhere to. Soon not even these …”

After a moment or two his eyes seemed to glitter more brightly, and he flapped his hands. “Well! But I’ll feel better now.” He dropped the bottle into his bag and patted it closed. “Are you ready to come with us?”

My head had begun pounding, but not unpleasantly. I paused.

My tunic hung from me like a tattered standard. The sagittal was a cool weight about my wrist. Perhaps I might fight my way free of here. Perhaps I was strong enough to run, hide within the endless chambers of High Brazil, and after a day flee to the House Miramar. But then I recalled Whitlock’s face when the lazar Pearl had greeted me as Baal. Remembered the malicious eyes of the elder Balfour, and how the Saint-Alaban had cried aloud in fear when he saw me at the Butterfly Ball, and how even Ketura’s face had twisted in terror when she met my eyes.

There would be no going back for me now. The Hanged Boy had marked me as His own, and it was as it had always been in Doctor Foster’s tales. The old miser must go with the ghosts; the magicians must search for the beggar king; the metal boy find his human father in the belly of the mosasaur.

I would follow the Gaping One’s children to find Him again. Then I might be free.

I got my boots and pulled them on. Then I stared at Dr. Silverthorn defiantly.

“Where am I going?”

He grinned, baring his teeth. I heard his jaw snap as he replied, “Where we are all going: to die a horrible death.”

3. A brief and paroxysmal period

I CAN HARDLY BEAR to relive our trek across the City. At the fringe of the Narrow Forest a path led to the northwest, where no one but Zoologists and lazars ever traveled. That was the road we took. In the distance I saw the spires of our Houses upon the Hill Magdalena Ardent, and black smoke billowing from the minarets of High Brazil. A little while earlier I had watched numbly as flames swept the Great Hall. But Dr. Silverthorn had hurried us outside.

“It is better this way, boy,” he said as we passed the ruins of the Butterfly Ball, ribbons and streamers and the empty husks of moths all given to embers now in the blue light of day. “Let them burn, let them burn!” We fled down the Hill and passed into the Narrow Forest.

Fever and fatigue plagued me despite Dr. Silverthorn’s stimulants. He insisted upon pressing another patch to my temple, and had me feed him more of the yellow capsules. For hours I stumbled through the forest, prodded by Oleander or helped by one of the smaller lazars when I felt I could go no farther. Dr. Silverthorn’s chemistries only fed my hunger and terror, until a sort of delirium overcame me.

“Here, Raphael,” someone murmured. Dr. Silverthorn prodded at my chin, tilting it back as he held out a broken shoot of a thick reddish vine. “Drink this.” He poured the liquid into my mouth: thick and speckled with dirt and insects, but sweet and cool nonetheless.

“It will give you strength for what is to come,” he said. “I tested the water here when we first escaped: pond water, rain water, still water in tree stumps. Did you know it all has abnormally high levels of biotoxins?” He tossed aside the broken vine and started clambering along a twisting path amidst the greenery.

“So you are poisoning me.” I stumbled after him. “Is the Gaping One worth anything to your master dead?”

He paused, steadying himself against a slender tree like a white birch, but with filaments of green and yellow dangling from its limbs instead of leaves. They drifted to caress his skull, drew back to float upon the still air. “No,” he said, surprised. “I am not poisoning you. It won’t kill you. That’s what’s so strange, that it doesn’t kill you. At least not immediately. I took samples of Gligor’s blood, before we were—detained. And the toxin levels were high, so high; and it— changed him, it does seem to change things.” He looked down at his gloved hands, the sleeves of his white robes hanging limply from arms as thin and fleshless as the limbs of trees. “But it doesn’t kill you outright.”

“Dr. Silverthorn!” Bellanca’s voice shrilled from somewhere far ahead and out of sight.

“We’re coming,” he called. He waited for me to draw alongside him. “You don’t think that’s odd,” he said after we had been walking for several more minutes.

I slapped at a green fly biting at my leg. “No,” I said. “I know nothing of the Ascendants and their poisons.”

He nodded very slightly, almost regretfully. “No. Of course you wouldn’t. But it’s very strange. We had no idea, back at HEL , what it’s like in the besieged sectors.”

I snorted. Through the mesh of leaves I could see the children in the distance, hacking at vines with sticks and pelting one another with the harmless yellow flowers that grew from rotting stumps. “Is that what you call our City? The ‘besieged sector’?”

He stopped in the shade of a great sycamore tree and clicked open his black bag, held it out for me. I found one of the yellow capsules and waited for him to swallow it before we went on.

He said, “One of the besieged sectors. Just one.”

After a few minutes he added, “There will be many more in the days to come.”

I bit my lip to keep from sneering at him. His words infuriated me. All that I had heard of the Ascendants was proving to be true: that they were monstrous, that they had nothing but contempt for my people and even for the Curators whose knowledge was so far beneath their own; nothing but contempt for the entire City they had all but forgotten in the pursuit of their distant and endless wars. I followed him in silence.

But after a while a sort of peacefulness descended on me. The warmth and sweet odor of the afternoon, the buzz of the great gold and crimson bees in the trumpet flowers, even the silent wings of passing butterflies all conspired to drain me of my anger and even my fears, for a little while. The children too had fallen into a drowsy silence. One or another would run a distance ahead, to lie upon a cool bank of moss and nap until the others woke her. Only Dr. Silverthorn seemed untouched by the torpid vapors that drifted here at the edge of the Narrow Forest. He talked ceaselessly the whole time, to himself if no one else was listening. As the afternoon wore on and its languid air dissipated he recited one nonsensical tale after another to the children, now restive and anxious to reach our destination. And he told me things that sounded as mad as those stories he amused the’ lazars with.

“At the end Emma told me there was a twin boy,” he said once. His teeth chattered with excitement, and he stroked Martin’s head as the boy paced alongside him. “If we’d only known before!” The gaze he turned upon me was brilliant, the dark eyes glowing. “To think of what we might have learned!”

And later, “If only I’d known. I would have saved her if I could. We might have revived her, you know; although they weren’t going to do anything with her brain, not after cyanide! She was a brilliant doctor. I quite hated her when she was alive.”

And, “I didn’t believe they’d come after us, you see. They sent fougas: our own people sent fougas after us. They caught us crossing the river. Anna nearly escaped but ran back for us. And Gligor went quite mad. He tried to pluck his eyes out, to kill himself. And I should have let him, you know. I should have let him.” He fell into brooding silence.

As nightfall drew near, even Dr. Silverthorn began to seem uneasy. He walked faster, waiting impatiently for the smaller children to catch up with him. I had grown weary of his endless chatter, and fell back to walk alongside the sober Oleander.

“Where are we going?” I asked him, hoping for a more satisfying answer than that Dr. Silverthorn had given me earlier.

Oleander looked at me in surprise, then made a steeple of his hands as he replied, “To the Engulfed Cathedral.”

I stopped in the middle of the path. “The Cathedral?” I repeated, stunned. “You mean Saint-Alaban’s Hill?”

“That’s right.” He dropped his hands, pulled a leaf from an overhanging limb. When he bruised it between his fingers it released the sharp scent of lemons. “Saint-Alaban’s Hill, that’s what the Paphians call it. We always said the ‘Engulfed Cathedral.’ Once great fields of lavender and dittany-of-crete grew there.”

“But why?” I asked. “Why the Cathedral?”

“Because that is where we live,” said Oleander. “We have to return there. Tast’annin says so.”

“But no one has ever lived there,” I said, stumbling after him. “It’s haunted.” I clutched at the tattered collar of my tunic, drew away a handful of feathers that I cast into the shadows.

“This entire City is haunted,” a hollow voice said into my ear. I cried out and backed into a thorny hedge of roses. Beside me Dr. Silverthorn peered from the thicket. He cackled at my alarm, and the children with him. “You must walk faster to get there before dark,” he scolded. “Else you won’t get the full effect.”

But it was nearly another hour by my reckoning before we reached our destination.

Saint-Alaban’s Hill: the viper curled at the foot of all the Saint-Alabans’ superstition, the legendary ruin whence the Gaping One would rise to confront the Magdalene to begin the Final Ascension. In all my seventeen years I had heard nothing but evil of Saint-Alaban’s Hill and the Engulfed Cathedral. I prayed silently for the Magdalene to deliver me from what was to come.

In the shadows before us the remains of stone buildings started to outcrop among the trees. Beside some of them deep shafts plummeted into the earth, cavernous pits lined with metal and smooth rock, veiled with wild grape vines and honeysuckle. The lazars and Dr. Silverthorn hurried through these glades, but I picked my way carefully: it would be easy to mistake those thin treacherous cloaks of greenery for solid earth and tumble into darkness.

By this time I was so drained and starving and heartsore that the thought of being anywhere was enough to give me some hope. In a few minutes we had caught up with the others. The children were exhausted. Poor Olivia wept silently, and tried to brush away the tears with her broken hands. Even Martin grew peevish, fighting with Bellanca as they picked their way ahead of the rest of us as we climbed the long hill that Dr. Silverthorn said would bring us to the end of our journey. I was too tired to imagine speaking. But Dr. Silverthorn never stopped talking. I was to learn that the capsules affected him thus; also that silence terrified him, as did sleep.

“Soon enough!” he shouted when Olivia sank to her knees beside the ruins of a great stone building, its columns fallen now and threaded with the violet blossoms of twilight glory. “We will all sleep soon enough! But not‘ now.” He stooped and pressed a small blue patch to her neck. When she whined and clawed at it he grew angry, dragging her to her feet though the exertion nearly toppled him.

“See, Olivia? There it is, we are almost there—”

He gestured wildly to where sunset streaked the clouds with scarlet and purple. At first I thought he pointed only at this lurid sky. From here I could see nothing but trees and the overgrown humps of decaying buildings, and far away the Obelisk shining faintly golden, marking where the Museums stood and the Curators would now be mourning their dead. But when I turned back and started walking once again I saw that something besides clouds did rise above the pinnacle of Saint-Alaban’s Hill: a shape so huge and black and brooding that I had thought it was part of the Hill itself. Now I wondered how it had not soiled my dreams all these years, that awful shadow stretching across the entire City of Trees.

“Is that it?” I asked, clutching at Dr. Silverthorn’s flapping sleeve.

Dr. Silverthorn grinned and clapped his gloved hands. “Ah, it’s almost worth it, isn’t it?” he exclaimed. The brazen light pooled like blood in the hollows of his face. “Etiam periere ruinae: the very ruins have been destroyed. “There were giants in the earth in those days, mighty men which were of old, men of renown.’”

“You are mad,” I said, pushing him away. “Oleander, is that it?”

The boy leaned against a tree to catch his breath. He pulled a twig from a branch, tossed it in the direction of the Hill. “That is the Engulfed Cathedral,” he said. “Where we are going.”

I cursed and pulled myself free of the brambles. Dr. Silverthorn and Oleander waited for me, the boy helping to tug from the offending thorns what remained of my garment. When we began walking again the sky showing through gaps in the trees was a deep blue, fading to green upon the horizon. A few faint stars had already appeared. My head ached from the stimulants Dr. Silverthorn had given me. I pulled the remaining pads from my temples and tossed them into the weeds as I scrambled to keep up with my two companions. From far ahead of us rang the high voices of the children. After a moment I heard other voices answer them, although I still saw nothing. We seemed to be in a small depression near the top of the Hill. I could no longer discern the monstrous silhouette that loomed high above us, but I felt it there brooding in the gathering dark: the Engulfed Cathedral.

Of the Narrow Forest I had heard many tales, and of the poisonous rivers that circled the City. But the Cathedral was so ancient, so tainted with the memories of its sanguine cult of worshippers long dead, that even the Saint-Alabans did not speak of it except with restrained dread. It was said to be haunted. Aardmen dwelt there, and wolves, and in its noisome reservoirs hydrapithecenes drifted, but nothing human. Even the lazars feared the Cathedral. Or so I had always heard.

But someone else lived there now: the one the lazars feared as the Consolation of the Dead, and whom Dr. Silverthorn regarded with less respect. But frightened as I was of going to that place and meeting him, I was still more terrified of being lost and alone again among the trees. I missed my unearthly companion Anku, who for a few hours had given me courage and even a kind of hope. But Anku was gone now. I had no hope left but to follow the lazars.

I sighted the cadaver’s white form slipping through the trees like a mist.

“Dr. Silverthorn,” I panted.

He paused, waving the children ahead. They ran on, Oleander glancing back at me with an expression compounded equally of pity and envy. At the edge of the woods Dr. Silverthorn waited for me alone, his hand outstretched to point at a sweep of gray lawn before us.

“We are here,” he said, his voice curiously empty. Nearly impossible to affix any subtlety of expression to that skeletal face, but a certain flatness and resignation colored his speech. “I am sorry, Raphael Miramar, to bring you to the end of the world.”

I stepped from beneath the trees to join him.

4. Conceptions of celestial space

THE LAST UPWARD SLOPE of Saint-Alaban’s Hill stretched before me like some horrible vision of the underworld.

Nothing grew there. Blasted trees twisted black and leafless from the ground, their limbs raised imploringly to the merciless thing towering above us. Other trees were strewn across the earth, dwarfed by the Cathedral. Only when we approached them did I see that they were huge, indescribably ancient, and the more horrible for not having decayed in the years since some cataclysm had toppled them. As we passed I heard a low sound coming from their ebony trunks, a faint yet ominous humming.

“Do not go near them.” I jumped at Dr. Silverthorn’s soft voice as he plucked at my arm. “They are infested with parasitic animalcules that replicate the forms of whatever living thing they touch.”

I pressed near to him, choking back a cry when I tripped against a stone, terrified lest I fall and the very earth devour me, barren and starved as it was. “Why have you brought me to this haunted place?” I whispered.

He shrugged. “I must serve something. The Aviator Margalis Tast’annin is the last man to have commanded me. I obey him.” He tilted his head toward the Cathedral. “Once they worshipped a god of blood and light in there. Now Tast’annin would raise the effigy of the Hanged One and revive a cult of blackened bones.”

His feet made no noise as he walked, as though the parched ground sucked all sound and light and color from the living world, leaving nothing but the screwed black forms of dead trees and other, pale shapes scattered across the stony slope. The distant figures of the young lazars darted in and out of the shadow of the Cathedral in eerie silence. Only the dull buzzing of the trees and Dr. Silverthorn’s hissing voice could be heard in all that empty space.

“Not haunted: hunted, more likely,” he wheezed, his thoughts running back and forth down strange alleys where I could not follow. He darted suddenly to one side, his feet seeming to pass right through the sharp stones that choked the earth so that I marveled he did not wince in pain. But the layer of flesh that enabled him to feel had been the first portion devoured by the rain of roses.

“Wait!” I called after him. “Don’t leave me, Dr. Silverthorn—”

He halted, staring back as though I was mad. “Leave you? Me, nothing but bones, leave you who are nothing but a body! No, no—” He pointed to a gleaming patch of white, luminous against the dark earth. Human skulls were piled there, but sloppily, as though children at play had grown weary of their game. And with a sinking feeling I realized that this was the truth of it: I had come to the lazars’ home, the playing fields where skull and knucklebones were used as shuttlecock and dice; where soon no doubt I would be as much a part of the bleached landscape as the petrified trees and leering brain-pans scattered everywhere.

“As ye are so once was I; as I am so ye shall be,” Dr. Silverthorn intoned. He kicked and set a small skull rolling, his harsh laugh ringing out like a raven’s croak. “I won’t leave you, Raphael: you are to be my eyes and ears, and I will be your guide. I have done as I promised the Aviator; but I will try to help you.” He cocked his head, clacking his jaws in a manner meant to be reassuring. “And you may be surprised, Raphael: you may not find yourself as alone as you think.”

My heart leaped at that, imagining that I might find some of my bedcousins here, or others from the Hill Magdalena Ardent. But the cadaver gave no reply to my questions.

“Not now, not now,” he hissed, and pulled me after him. “We must hurry, before he closes the south gate.”

High above us swept the huge black towers: higher than Illyria’s fortresses, than the House Persia, than High Brazil; greater even than the Library Dome or the ancient Obelisk. Flickering waves of color sometimes passed across one or another of the granite facades. I rubbed my eyes, convinced the unnatural darkness of the place was playing tricks upon my vision, before I finally realized that what I was seeing was firelight showing through immense embrasures of colored glass, like those at High Brazil.

As we drew nearer, strange patterns were traced upon the iron earth. Paths marked out in bones and skulls formed serpentine patterns, narrow tracks that stretched straight to north and east and west. They glowed eerily in the twilight, as though the bones themselves had absorbed hoary traces of the sun. It should have been horrible. And yet I found the bones almost lovely, the strict formality of their carefully assembled fulciments now tossed into disarray: torso, shanks, hands, and ribs displayed so clean and pure and shining, as innocent as driftwood cast upon a riverbank.

“Labyrinths,” explained Dr. Silverthorn. “Ley lines. To make this place more powerful.” He stopped, regarding a convoluted maze of femurs and delicate finger bones, with a small figure made of sticks propped in its center. “Old things,” he said, shifting his black bag to the other shoulder. “There are many old things here. He is a fool to wake some of them.”

We had left the buzzing trees behind us. Gaps of blue-black sky showed between the broken towers overhead. On the eastern horizon faint light gleamed where the moon would rise shortly. We were near enough now to the Cathedral gates that I could hear the children playing in the twilight, a shrill fanfare of laughter and tears and shouts echoing in its cavernous inner space as they raced or stumbled in and out of hidden doors. Someone called to my companion. He raised one spindly arm in a feeble wave, grinning as his name was taken up by the others, singing:

“A man of skin and not of bones is like a garden full of stones!”

Dr. Silverthorn pointed to a wide path, a dark avenue lined with larger bones and tattered ribands and bits of finery. I followed him in silence up this main approach, trying to ignore the lazars tuneless warble:

“And when your skin begins to crack,

It’s like a knife across your back;

And when your back begins to smart,

It’s like a missile to your heart;

And when your heart begins to bleed,

You’re dead, and dead, and dead indeed!”

The path ended abruptly; or rather, the bones that had marked it were scattered everywhere, kicked aside in some mindless game or argument. Past the ring of bones was a circle of scuffed earth. A few feet from this a set of granite stairs led up to massive gates set with iron hoops. Between the oaken doors, and to either side, and in the portal above stood carven figures of men and women, and figures like stern yet radiant men with the wings of herons.

“The South Transept,” Dr. Silverthorn said. He gazed up with glittering eyes. “The Cathedral Church of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel.”

I hesitated as he started up the steps. I was absurdly afraid: not of the Cathedral or what it contained but of those stone creatures. Ethereally beautiful, each face tilted skyward, as though divining some magnificence there. They seemed older than anything I had ever seen, older even than the archosaurs, although I knew this could not be true. And something in their faces, the pitiless eyes gazing at the stars, put me in mind of the Hanged Boy.

“Who are they?” I asked.

Dr. Silverthorn rested his bag on a stair. He shook from the effort of walking, coughing as he tried to catch his breath. “They are Saints and Angels,” he said. “Saints and Angels and ordinary men.”

I stepped beside him. A numbing cold rose from the stones around me, as though through the centuries the granite had hoarded nothing but winter. When I touched the base of one of the pillars I found it covered with a sheen of ice.

“It is an anomaly,” confessed Dr. Silverthorn.

I withdrew my hand, staring up at the face of one of the winged creatures. “Were they real?” I wondered. “Were they Ascendants?”

Dr. Silverthorn looked at me, his swollen eyes bulging. Then he laughed. “Ascendants! Are they Ascendants!” Overcome, he leaned against the pillars, gasping for breath. I turned away in embarrassment.

After a moment he recovered himself. “Forgive me, Raphael! It was just—the idea! A pleasant idea, actually. Your sister, now; she would never mistake an Angel for an Ascendant!” He peered at me curiously. “You have never heard of Angels?”

I shrugged. “I’ve heard the word, I thought it meant a pretty child. Not a man with wings.”

He stared at me, surprised. I could see him taking in my long hair and worn tunic, the remnants of glitter and beads clinging to me like evidence of some grand debauch. “Well, it does, that’s right; I suppose it does. The wings: well, they were usually pictured with wings, that’s all. But it was also one of the—beliefs of the old religion. This was the Cathedral of the Archangels—they were the most powerful of the Angels, the ruling Angels one might call them. This place honors two of them. Michael and Gabriel.”

He grew quiet, then said, “ ’There was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not.’” He stroked a pillar sadly. “This Cathedral was completed a hundred years before the First Ascension.”

Silence except for his labored breathing. It was nearly full dark now. The sound of the children playing had all but died out; I imagined they had gone indoors. I stood next to Dr. Silverthorn, both of us staring up at the implacable stone faces for several minutes. At last he sighed and climbed the remaining steps to the transept gate. He placed one hand on the door and turned to me, and said, “When people first found dinosaur fossils in the cliffs, they thought they had discovered the remains of Angels and dragons.”

He waited for me to push open the massive door. I paused, the gate’s iron ring biting my hand. “I have seen one,” I said. “Walking in the Narrow Forest, one of them spoke to me. But he did not have wings.”

Dr. Silverthorn nodded. “Yes,” he replied after a moment. “I believe you may have seen one.”

With a creak the iron-bound door swung inward, and we entered the Cathedral.

5. An exceeding barbarous condition of the human species

THE SMELL ASSAULTED ME first: bitter smoke from uncured wood, roasting flesh, human excrement, burning wax. Over all of it the reek of incense of turpentine smoldering in countless braziers, many of them toppled to the marble floor so that their contents had spilled but continued to burn, igniting whatever material was near at hand: cloth, twigs, hair. I blinked, covered my eyes against the smoke, then my nose to keep out the stench. The marble beneath my feet was slick with putrid water. I forced my eyes open, lest I slip and find myself awash with the filth clotting the floor.

A dim expanse swept before me in every direction. It stretched upward to the very stars, since chunks of the ceiling had collapsed to leave great ragged holes open to the cool sky. Were it not for this, the Cathedral’s inhabitsants would probably have suffocated from the smoke and foul air. Bonfires burned everywhere, each surrounded by little groups of chattering children feeding graying embers or livid flames with green sticks and bark. In the lurid light they looked like one of the dioramas at the Museum, naked tousled silhouettes squatting before ill-tended fires, rocking back and forth upon their heels as they sang or talked or ate. Many of them sprawled in the filth, panting or seeming scarcely to breathe at all: the ones who would die next. The sight of them eating sickened me, no matter that it had been nearly two days since I’d had anything like a proper meal.

“Look at them,” said Dr. Silverthorn softly. “Dying of gangrene and evil humors and sarcomas and sheer ignorance, just as they did a thousand years ago. Refugees of a war fought with rocks and sticks and rain; a war they have never even heard of.”

From the bonfires shrill voices called out to us. They greeted Dr. Silverthorn by name, but fell silent as I followed him toward the center of the great space, where most of the fires were clustered. Marble benches stood here and there, some of them pulled free from their moorings and tilted or thrown to the floor. I wondered who could have done that: not plaguey children, surely. The benches were seats of privilege. The oldest lazars sat there crosslegged, some of them with crowns of twisted branches and dead leaves upon their brows. They snapped at the younger children, bullying them to bring morsels of food toasting upon twigs and water (I hoped it was water) from a large standing basin near the middle of the vast room. As we approached they stopped their playing and arguing and turned to stare, the oldest ones standing upon the benches and letting their younger favorites join them. I pulled my torn robe tight and held my head up, trying hard not to look foolish, though I knew I was as filthy as they were. They twittered and pointed and called to one another through the smoky air—

“Look—look—”

“He has come, the Doctor found him, the one Pearl said, the one, the one—”

“He is here, look, look—”

Giggles and curses; scuffling behind us as they scrabbled across the floor to stare. I felt their small hands touch my ankle or arm, countless children circling me like starveling cats.

“Raphael! It’s me!”

In a patch of orange light Oleander popped up, grinning.

I smiled back. “Oleander! I’m glad to see you—”

And grew quiet; because I was glad.

“I told him, Dr. Silverthorn. Tast’ann—” He lowered his voice. “The Consolation of the Dead, ” he continued, walking between Dr. Silverthorn and myself and eyeing the other children scornfully. “I told him we had found him, you and me, I told him we found Raphael Miramar, the boy they call the Gaping One.”

Dr. Silverthorn nodded wearily. He handed his bag to Oleander. “Are we to have an audience, then?”

Oleander shook his head. “No. He took more of those pills you gave him, he is making the Saint-Alaban children perform “The Masque of Baal and Anat.’ I think he forgot he told us to bring him.”

Dr. Silverthorn snorted, then waved his hand to indicate that Oleander was to open his bag.

“One yellow and one green one, please,” he said. We had crossed the center of the Cathedral and stood before a door opening onto a dim passage. The air blew fresher from this portal. I breathed gratefully, glancing back at the children scurrying through the nave. They had already forgotten us, all but Oleander.

“Tast’annin will remember about Raphael,” Dr. Silverthorn said after he had taken the capsules. “He has a plan. Worse: he has a vision. Always be wary of men with visions.”

He grinned as he said this, a skull ogling us from the shadows. “Well, Oleander, let us show Raphael to his chamber.”

The passage snaked along the outer wall of the Cathedral, branching often. Stone staircases loomed out of the darkness, a deeper black where they plunged or climbed to secret bays and chapels. Set high up along the smooth gray walls were empty recesses and narrow windows. Some were shattered; some held black traceries that I imagined would show elaborate scenes in colored glass, come daybreak: if day broke here. Oleander kicked through the debris and found a taper which he lit from a smoking pile someone had left beside a door. With him leading us we descended into the Crypt Church.

The air was better here: not the fresh air of trees and sun but cool and still nonetheless, redolent of ancient stone and hidden water. We met no one.

“The children are forbidden here without permission,” explained Dr. Silverthorn. He nodded at Oleander. “He is a clever boy; a sort of favorite of the Aviator’s, he runs errands and goes where he pleases. As do I; though nothing will hold me back soon, I will go wherever I wish.” A low whistling laugh, air seeping from throat and chest and mouth. “But Oleander races through here like a mouse in the walls. And there are other mice, too, mice in cages, rats in traps.”

I shuddered. I had seen small things scamper across the floor, disturbed by the taper’s uneven light; but I did not like to imagine what he might mean by mice in cages, rats in traps. Everywhere faces glowered at me, white stone figures and flowering columns and bizarre animals, plinths upholding those, whom Dr. Silverthorn had named as Saints and Angels and ordinary men. They observed us impassively, dignified in spite of the decay of years and the occasional spray of graffiti rippling across their severe faces. Oleander walked a few feet in front of us, his broken face pitifully young. He might have been a handsome boy, before the rain of roses; a Botanist for sure, but with a Paphian father I would guess.

“How long have you been here, Oleander?” I asked him.

He shifted the taper to his other hand, shaking wax from his fingers. “I don’t know. A few weeks? We were caught outside, some of us, we were working on the boxtree hedges at the Botanical Gardens. The older ones ran. They left me and a few of the others who couldn’t run fast enough.

“I tried. I tried to take care of them: the little ones. They died soon, except for Lily. My friend Lily.” He was quiet, stopping to scratch one foot. He sighed. “Then she died too. And I went off alone. I found some others, in the woods; I know about plants, so we did all right for a little while, eating things. Then we came here, we heard there was a man here who took care of them, I mean he took care of us, people like us, lazars. He hadn’t been here long; only a little longer than me.”

We followed him silently for several minutes. Then he turned back to us, smiling. “But that was before Dr. Silverthorn got here; and it’s better now, isn’t it? He has medicine and it helps us, I feel stronger than before. He says we’ll get well, if we have medicine and the right things to eat.”

“That’s right,” said Dr. Silverthorn. To me he turned empty eyes that my own thoughts made seem reproachful. In my mind I heard his voice again:

You let them die, you let yourselves die …

Oleander woke me from my daze, pulling at my arm. “Down this hallway.” We entered another passage. This one opened into a wider space where I glimpsed numberless archways leading who knew where, columns carved to resembled huge trees of stone, gates of iron twisted into grape arbors and latticework, statuary fallen from their pediments to stare up at me with cracked faces. In the distance I spied ghostly lights that seemed to dance in the air. When we grew nearer these resolved into banks of tiny colored candles, blue and red and white, burning fitfully on iron tables set against the walls.

“This is the Crypt Church,” explained Dr. Silverthorn. “He makes offerings here. But there is a place where you may rest undisturbed, and Oleander was to bring you food?”

He turned to the boy, who stopped, embarrassed, and fumbled with his free hand through his pockets.

“I forgot,” he mumbled. “Wait—there’s this.”

I took a handful of dried fruit, apples maybe, and swallowed them so quickly I nearly choked. A few minutes later I was rewarded for this gluttony by feeling my insides cramp up painfully; but by then we had stopped.

“Sleep here,” said Dr. Silverthorn. He pushed open a tall iron grille and pointed to a chamber within—how large I could not tell in the taper’s smoky light. Oleander stood aside to let me pass, my heart heavy: I felt as though I were being imprisoned.

“Am I to die here alone?” I asked bitterly. I bumped against some hard object and swore, rubbing my knee. “No light, no food, no water?”

Dr. Silverthorn shook his head. “We can do no more for you now: he will be calling for us, and it is best for you not to meet him until you feel somewhat stronger. Later I will bring you food and water, and light too perhaps. But for now you should sleep—” He, pointed to the floor, where something flat and white had been rolled out as a sort of pallet. “There. And I will give you something to make it easier for you to rest.”

He beckoned me to him. I waited, trying not to weep from sheer terror and exhaustion. I took the capsule he had Oleander give me, watched helplessly as they turned and the boy pushed the heavy iron gate closed.

“Until the morning, then,” Dr. Silverthorn said. Oleander waved. The two of them walked away, the taper fluttering in and out of sight among the arches and columns until the darkness extinguished it completely and I was alone in the Crypt Church.

6. “The dark backward and abysm of time”

I WOKE—MORNING? MIDNIGHT ? but it was always midnight there—to find that someone had set a number of candles around me, burning yellow tapers that smelled foul despite the aromatics that had been added to the sulfurous tallow. By their jaundiced light I could finally see my room: a vault really, with a low arched marble ceiling. Its whorls and florid patterns were blackened from smoke and age and seemed to quiver in the light. Besides the pallet I lay upon there were only a number of small wooden chairs for furniture. These were very old, covered with cushions of frayed and rotted embroidery showing strange things: a bearded man covered with birds, wild beasts sleeping at his feet; a storm-tossed boat filled with animals; a white-robed figure surrounded by playing children; a very old man pulling something from a sack. While chairs and cushions alike seemed centuries old they were clean, not covered with dust or mildew as I might have expected. I dropped the last cushion, then paced the length of the chamber. I stopped to rattle half-heartedly the ornate iron grille that kept me imprisoned before stalking to the other end of the vault.

Here in a high curved recess stood an altar. Small shelves cut into the elaborate marble had once held icons of some sort, like those I had seen elsewhere in the Crypt Church. But the statues were gone now. In their place stood clumsily made dolls of bone and fur, leaning haphazardly against the heavy candlesticks. Dripping tallow threatened to set one of these pathetic images afire. I took candle in one hand and icon in the other, holding the taper to regard it more closely. A kind of animal, or a man with an animal’s head. Blank eyes scratched in a smoothed piece of bone and colored with dirt or blood. The whole thing held together with wisps of straw and fur and hair. I shuddered and replaced it in a shallow alcove where it was in no danger of catching fire.

Beside these little creatures I found offerings of bones wrapped in neat bundles, and smaller figures made of braided human hair. Other things as well, oddments and bijoux that might have fallen from a hundred hidden pockets. A braided riband, its russet and silver brocade marking it as a Paphian’s favor from some curator. A smooth round marble that, when I investigated, proved to be a prosthetic eye: its solid black core responding to the warmth of my hand and dilating as it sought to focus upon me. There was even an untidy bouquet of shrunken blossoms like desiccated human hands, gathered who knows where—beneath the Botanists’ glass domes, or within the shadows of the Narrow Forest, or by the dank green shores of the river. Perhaps the flowers had clutched and fought as they were plucked from the damp earth, to be brought here and forgotten. But everything was child-sized, toylike, including the nosegay of dead blossoms: some small fist had held them last. I turned away suddenly, the pain in my stomach that had begun as hunger now knotting itself into queasiness. A black fear gripped me: that I had been brought here as just another offering, another odd yet lovely thing stolen from the dead and left to languish here.

“Raphael. You are awake—”

I whirled to see a spidery figure standing behind the iron grille. Clean white garments covered his limbs, and he held a lantern above his head. Beside him slunk a hunched form. I heard the clatter of keys and then Dr. Silverthorn’s command, “Put the food there and leave us.”

The gate swung inward. The hunched figure placed something on the floor. It made a soft guttural sound, then slipped into the darkness. When Dr. Silverthorn hung the lantern from a corner of the gate I saw that the door; remained open.

“You are not a prisoner,” he said, bowing his head in greeting. It could not have been more than a day since had last seen him, but already the contagion had progressed. His fine ointments did little now but cover the soft globe of bone and skull with a sheen of gold. “You are here so that the lazars will not disturb your rest. They fear this place, and will not visit it unless Tast’annin forces them to.” His mouth opened wider in the goblin grin that was all that remained of his smile. “This was called the Children’s; Chapel, once.” He indicated the objects on the floor. “That is food for you: just bread and water and some dried grapes, I’m afraid. Mostly they eat human flesh here, and die from it: that is not fit nourishment and I will not offer it to you.”

I fell onto the pitiful repast like a starved animal. When I finished I turned back to my visitor. He had not moved from his place just outside the gate, and seemed to wait almost shyly for me to invite him in.

“Won’t you sit?” I asked, pointing first to a chair and then to my pallet.

“No, thank you.” His voice a harsh whistling sound grating against bare bones as it sought to escape him. The white robes stirred as his breath leaked from lungs and throat. “It is too painful for me to sit now. It has penetrated my marrow. Better to pace and let the virus move with me, exhaust it so that it may sleep later and give me peace.” His breath erupted into hiccuping gasps, and he dropped his black bag on the floor between us. “If you will Raphael …”

I found the vial and handed him a restorative. A very few yellow capsules remained. I averted my eyes from the spectacle of this cadaver attempting to gulp the pill waited several minutes until his breathing slowed and I heard the clicking of his feet upon the floor. “Thank you,”’ he rasped.

I turned back to him. “Do I have an audience with the Consolation of the Dead?” I asked bitterly. “Or have you come to tell me that Death himself awaits me even now?”’

“He will not kill you, Raphael. At least not yet. And yes: you are to meet with him this morning.”

Guttering candlelight flared in his eyesockets. For an instant shadows fleshed the solemn curves of his skull so that I had a glimpse of what he had been a month earlier: a young man, slender, with quick fey motions and eyes that were deep-set rather than sunk into gaunt hollows. When he stepped closer to the glowing altar the vision was gone; I continued my conversation with a spectre clad in pale cerements.

“I have come to bring you to him, and because I am lonely and curious—you see, I am still a man!—I would know more of you before I die; and I want to warn you.”

I nodded and settled myself on a chair, leaving him to pace as he spoke. Occasionally he paused to pass trembling fingers across his face, as though to reassure himself that something still remained there of his corporeal being.

“You said you knew of your sister? The empath Wendy Wanders?”

“No,” I said. “Only that I had a sister; Doctor Foster and Gower Miramar told me that. It was no secret to us. I assumed she was dead.”

“She is not. She lives; at least she lived to escape from the Human Engineering Laboratory two months ago, assisted by a Medical Aide named Justice Saint- Alaban. A Paphian: do you know him?”

I pried a splinter from the bottom of my chair and began to clean my fingernails with it. I believed he spoke nonsense. Yet his words disturbed me if only because they reminded me of Doctor Foster’s tales, the stories he had told us at Semhane and The Glorious and Winterlong, where among the lashing tails of aardmen and the Gray Mayor’s crimson eyes flitted this other shape, small and wailing and with blood threading from her temples: my nameless twin sold to the Ascendants. “My House does not often consort with Saint-Alabans. They are heretics. I am not surprised one served the Ascendants.”

“Well, he did: served us rather well until he ran away with our prized madcap.” A hooting gasp that might have been laughter as he reached the altar and stopped to stare at its offerings.

“A thieving Saint-Alaban. Well, that doesn’t surprise me either,” I said. But it was curious, to think of a Saint-Alaban among the Ascendants; to think of any Paphian among the Ascendants. I wished I had questioned Ketura more carefully about her meetings with them during her time outside. “But they must be dead by now—”

“I told you: they are not.” Click of his bony feet upon the floor as he began to pace again. He paused to lean against one of the ancient chairs. “Have you heard of a troupe of actors in this City?”

“Many Paphians perform. I acted in masques all the time.” I winced as the splinter dug too deeply beneath my thumb, flicked away the mite of wood, and glanced up at my visitor. “Our great festivals are masques—”

He tapped his foot impatiently. “No. These were traveling Players, they lived in the ruins of a theatrical library and performed ancient plays. They had among them a trained monkey that could speak—”

I nodded and sat back hard in my chair, excited by the sudden memory of bright and archaic costumes, a beast that recited poetry like a courtesan.

“Toby Rhymer! Yes, of course I know them. Toby Rhymer and the talking troglodyte, Miss Scarlet Pan. I wept once when she performed: oh, it was lovely!” I hesitated. “There was a boy from Persia who joined them, Fabian—”

The folds of the skeleton’s gown flapped as he interrupted me, shaking his gloved hand. “Your sister is with them! I am certain of it.”

I frowned. “How could she have found them? Surely she and the Saint-Alaban would have died, alone in the City—lazars would have caught them, or the rain of roses, or—” I did not want to admit to this learned Ascendant that I feared the aardmen, so I gestured in the smoky air. He shook his head, candlelight pricking the roiling wet shadows of his eyes so that they glittered shrewdly.’

“They did not die. I do not know if Wendy Wanders can die: although many patients she touched at HEL did. Perhaps her Paphian savior is dead now too: my guess would be that he is.” He sucked in his breath and laughed hoarsely. “But she is alive: I know it.

“After her escape we began to hear stories, hearsay about a boy in the City, an actor commanding audiences and calling himself Aidan Arent.” He paused, waiting for me to show some recognition.

“You must forgive me,” I said. “My last few months were spent among the Naturalists, who have little use for Players—or Paphians either,” I added bitterly. “That name means nothing to me.”

“He is described as being seventeen years of age, with tawny hair once close-cropped but now growing longer, gray eyes, a surpassingly beautiful face and voice. He possesses a supernatural ability to charm and terrify his audiences. And despite the fact that he usually takes the feminine roles in performance, a number of Paphians in his audiences have remarked upon his startling resemblance to a favored catamite now feared dead, one Raphael Miramar.

“Knowing Wendy, and having seen you, I can attest that this at least is true: you are her mirror image.”

I sat in silence, oddly disinterested. It was as though he spoke of someone besides myself. And of course he did speak of someone other than me; although perhaps it was that this Player, Aidan Arent, sounded more believable than did Raphael Miramar. I shook my head but said nothing.

Behind Dr. Silverthorn the candles burned more and more brightly. The tallow melted into smoking pools upon the altar. Rivulets of flame ran down its marble facade as the burning fat dripped to the floor. In front of this flickering display Dr. Silverthorn glowed like a taper himself, the brilliant light glowing through his robes so that the bones beneath showed stark black, and I could see inside his chest a small dark shape like a fist clenching and unclenching. When he spoke again his voice rang loudly, though it still rasped like a saw through his throat.

“Some of those who have seen Aidan Arent perform have said he is the Gaping One.”

I stared back at him, shaking my head. “That’s impossible.”

He grinned, carmine light dancing from his teeth. “Why? Because you are the Gaping One?”

“Of course not!” I said, but he went on as though he hadn’t heard me.

“The Mad Aviator thinks you are. That’s why he’s brought you here.”

I stood, bewilderment and anger vying inside me, and stalked to the gate. In the distance I could see the little candles in their banks of dusty glass holders. The wavering shadows made it look as though figures darted back and forth in the murky light; but I heard nothing there. “Why are you insulting me?” I demanded hoarsely. “Isn’t it enough that you brought me to this crypt—”

“If Tast’annin hadn’t ordered the children to capture you, you would be dead now.”

“Better that than this!” I grabbed the iron bars and bowed my head, grief striking me like a stone. “Better you had killed me!”

He shrugged. “Better I had died after that viral strike, the way Gligor did. But I did not, and you did not. I have only a little time remaining; perhaps you have longer, perhaps you have less. But you have power, Raphael; and not all your friends are dead.

“In the evenings I go among the prisoners here and minister to those I can, to ease their last days. The Consolation of the Dead would have it that way,” he said with soft irony.

He walked toward me. I backed against the gate, frightened by how quickly he moved, the light in his eyes extinguished to malicious darkness. “There is a little girl imprisoned here. She was captured yesterday near the House Miramar with a party of mourners. I saw her last night. When the child heard where I had been she described you, and asked if I had seen Raphael Miramar among the corpses at the Butterfly Masque. I told her you were here, and alive.”

“Fancy,” I whispered. I had not forgotten her; rather had spent the last hours refusing to think of her, making a gift of her memory to those minor deities Grief and Exhaustion. “Where is she?”

“Here. I can tell you no more than that. As I said, my allegiance is to the Aviator. If he is pleased with you; if she does not succumb to madness or illness or the lazars; if you do not fall prey to this place: well then, he may treat you kindly, and treat her kindly, since she is your friend.

“The children told him of meeting you by the river. Pearl was another— favorite of his.” He grimaced at some unpleasant memory. “She too thought she had met an Angel walking in the forest; and this gave the Madman an idea.

“He has many interesting ideas.”

He stood near enough that I could smell the sweetness of his decay, the bitter chemical residue of the antibiotic ointment. He reached for me, his gloved hand moist and cold as it gripped my chin, firmly as though it were held by metal forceps.

“How odd,” he murmured. Through the thin gloves, damp and already starting to rot into strings of dirty cotton, the blades of his fingers cut into my chin. I was still terrified of contagion, but feared even more his anger and the plunge back into solitude if he left. “You look exactly like her …

“She was so beautiful, our Wendy; but mad, we all knew she was quite mad. All of them were by the end. It was one of the secondary effects of the Harrow Project, because of course they were all grossly flawed children to begin with; and who could endure such a life, living constantly the nightmares and hallucinations of others day after day after day, and never waking from your own dreams? But we made of them the walking vessels of our madnesses and it made them more lovely and then grotesque, the gynander Merle sprouted more breasts, Taylor’s eyes turned from gray to white and finally calcified like granite pearls, Gligor began to smell of carrion and butterflies flocked around him in the garden, Anna woke one day to find in her bed a shriveled homunculus with her own face and withered male genitals …

“But Wendy only grew more beautiful and deadly, although of course she could not see it, she was incapable of recognizing anything but pain and horror and fear and she embraced those, oh she did. Emma Harrow was a fool, not to see what was happening to her prize changeling, that stolen child now stealing with no thought or reason the fancies and desires and finally the very hopes of all she touched, leaving only despair in their place …”

I listened fascinated to his ravings. He let go of me and began to pace, three steps and then back, three steps and back, as though some imaginary cage about him was shrinking to the size of his ribs. In my mind a strange picture took shape, the image of this creature called Wendy Wanders: a girl so like me she could pass for a boy and fool my own people into thinking they saw me upon a dusty stage. But with this grew something else, a sensation so hard and bitter it was like an unripe fruit I had swallowed to rot and fester inside me: the idea that all of the horrible things that had happened to me had happened by mistake. It was not Raphael who should have seen death and dishonor and abandonment, but this other thing, this awful simulacrum called Wendy that had somehow broken free from the Ascendants’ prison, and in so doing had loosed the rage and grim delight of the Gaping One upon the City.

Then I felt inside me a terrible rage building, a desire for havoc and bloodshed like that which had possessed me in the Narrow Forest when I ran with the white jackal to seek my Patron’s death. But to Dr. Silverthorn I displayed nothing; only nodded and stared as he paced, while about us the candles burned to oily smears upon the altar.

“Do you see? Do you understand now, Raphael? There is a reason for this, there has to be a reason for this —”

For the first time I heard raw desperation in his voice, glimpsed the ravaged man clinging to some hope inside that cell of bone and diseased flesh. I turned to see his eyes glowing like the flames that sprang like pale irises from the marble. I started to nod, thinking he merely wanted me to reassure him. But then I saw that he was waiting for me to answer, waiting for me to explain it to him, as though I saw within the wreckage surrounding us some magic spindle that could be spun to turn all this horror to a final good.

“Do you understand, Raphael?”

“I—I think so,” I said slowly. “I would like to, anyway. It’s just so strange, to think of it; to think of her, alive somewhere, as if—”

As if I were not, I thought; as if only one of us could be within the City of Trees.

But she had been alive all along! She had not died, as Doctor Foster and Miramar had told me. Dr. Silverthorn waited for me to go on. I shrugged and opened my hands in a helpless gesture.

“What do you want of me, Dr. Silverthorn?”

He lifted one arm, the sleeve of his white robe hanging from it like a sheet from a broomstick. “You will bring her here,” he said, and dropped his arm. I shuddered, half- expecting it to clatter to the floor, but he only regarded me with a grin as though he read my thoughts and then laughed. “You said you perform in theatricals: well, the Consolation of the Dead wants you to act the part of the Gaping One for him. And you must do it, you must! The entire City will hear of it, the Players will hear of it—and she will come with them to see you. Then you can use her to destroy him—”

“But why?”

“Because she is Death, Raphael: those she touches dies, I have seen it!”

I shook my head. “But this is all madness! My sister alive, and you say she is monstrous; and a madman ruling here though I’ve seen nothing, nothing but yourself and lazars! And why does he want this, why me to act as the Gaping One?”

“To amuse him; to bloat his pride and sickness; to lure your people and the others of this City here: because who could resist it, the chance to see a beautiful demon in a ruined Cathedral! He is mad for glory.

“He was promised a position of power: here, in this City. A puppet Governor, ruling an abandoned kingdom! The Ascendants promised him this, because he was a Hero, you see; and they had their own reasons, they wanted to see if there was anything left here worth devouring: dogs sniffing at corpses and rubbish.

“They plan to strike against the Commonwealth. They wanted to reclaim the City, establish a garrison here and seek the lost armory. Margalis Tast’annin was a brilliant strategist, a leader of the Archipelago Conflict. He was to retire from fighting, and NASNA had pledged him this City of fools and whores; what other cities are left to rule?

“But he was betrayed by the Curators—whether in collusion with rebels or not, I do not know. I think not; I think the Curators truly feared him. They gave him over to the aardmen. And the aardmen tortured him; they unmanned him; but they did not kill him.

“In the end they pitied him.”

He shook his head. “Foolish creatures! but it is in their slavish nature to obey men, as it is in mine. He ordered them to free him, and they did.

“He will be avenged upon the City now. He claims to have found the ancient weapons stored beneath Saint-Alaban’s Hill. He was a military Hero. He seeks to bring the Final Ascension.”

I shook my head. “This is sheer lunacy! One man against the City—and for what cause? I have never heard of him before.”

“He was an Ascendant, as I was.”

“Did you know him?”

“I knew of him. Margalis Tast’annin was a NASNA Aviator, a Hero of the Archipelago Conflict and many skirmishes with the Balkhash Commonwealth. He came to HEL with Odolf Leslie after the Wendy suicides. They were the ones who authorized the new diagnostics, the new— methods. I met Tast’annin briefly. He was interested in the new biosyntheses from the empaths, the aggression resonators in multiple personalities.

“You see, they had many plans, these new Governors. They had some new ideas, they had new alembics, they were going to make new things from the old materials. They have already made many new things, each skirmish brings new terrors and new chemicals and new microphages—”

“There really is a war, then?”

Dr. Silverthorn stared at me, his jaws grinding silently.

“No,” he said after a moment. “There is no real war. There is no one left to lead real wars. Only madmen in the middlelands and scientists at the fringes of those cities that are still standing. And for the rest, nothing but foot soldiers and freaks: guerrillas and gorillas.”

He laughed again; his breathing grew labored. I noticed his glove-clad hands shaking and was terrified that he would die here before me. But no. He gestured wildly until I realized he wanted his bag. I hurried to give it to him, waiting while he dumped its contents on the floor and scrabbled among vials and silvery gavelocks, knocking bottles across the room until he found a metal container, an atomizer of some sort that he sprayed into the hollow cavity of his throat.

“Aaugh,” he groaned, heedless of the atomizer falling from his hand. “So soon, so soon …”

My heart ached to watch him: to feel one’s body decay thus! “Did they do this to you, Dr. Silverthorn? The new Governors?”

His voice was dull, perhaps from the effects of the atomizer. “No. My colleagues did this. The Doctors I worked with at HEL . When I escaped with Anna and poor Gligor they sent a NASNA fouga after us, they alerted the avernian janissaries, and Gligor was, they—

“God, to watch him die like that! To think of anyone dying like this—”

He drew his hands to his ruined face in an agony of grief and horror and hopelessness. And then I began to weep, because I was exhausted by my own sorrows; because he had been kind to me even while bringing me to my death; because he could no longer weep himself.

I have no idea how long I sat there, slumped in that cold vault with the pitiful offerings of geneslaves and dying children all about me. But eventually my sobs gave way to silence, a cold ache in my chest that was dreadful because it bespoke utter emptiness and despair. I lifted my head to see Dr. Silverthorn standing above me. The last bits of burning tallow had died. From somewhere in the bowels of the Crypt Church a chilly blue light threaded its way into the Children’s Chapel to touch his cerements with an ashen pallor. The sight of him filled me with a sort of detached terror: the silent skeleton staring blankly into the winding fastnesses of the Engulfed Cathedral, his white shroud stirring softly to some subterranean air. I knew he would do me no harm; indeed that he had meant to help me, and at the least had warned me that my sister now walked in the City of Trees. But his very presence was a horror to me. I breathed as quietly as I could and said nothing, hoping that he would leave. Still he remained there, watchful and silent, until I wondered if he was waiting for someone.

After a very long time he spoke. “He is walking,” he whispered.

I started to my feet, looking fearfully out the open gate into the Crypt Church. Dr. Silverthorn said nothing, only continued to stare with those great dead eyes into the darkness. Holding my breath, I strained to hear footsteps or voices. Nothing. In the hallway the corpse candles in their little glass holders burned a steady blue, wisps of black smoke rising to disappear far overhead. The gray curves of the walls receded endlessly, like the inert coiled heart of a nautilus. Beside me Dr. Silverthorn stood still and somber as one of the ravished caryatids in the transept above us. I decided this was another of his imaginings, and started to cross the room to the altar when he grabbed me, the bones of his fingers surprisingly strong and cold about my wrist.

“Wait,” he said. “Can’t you hear him?”

“I hear nothing.”

He shook his head, still watching the hallway. “The stones shriek as he passes them, and in their crypts the bones of the dead shiver into pale dust; but to the living he is silence itself! It is a wonder.”

He mused for several minutes, his fingers cutting into my hand until I could bear it no more and moved away. “I’m sorry, Raphael,” he said. He still did not look at me. He ignored my physical presence completely now, except for the moments he had held my hand.

After a little while he said, “I thought I would have more time. But it is coming fast now—”

“What is?”

“My sight is blurring,” he announced, as though he had not heard me. “I’m surprised it lasted this long,” he added matter-of-factly. “But I am seeing other things. Come with me, Raphael—”

Abruptly he stood, his hand clawing at the air. I gasped at his face. His eyes had finally collapsed like melting wax. He could no longer see. Soon he would be dead.

I took a deep breath to steady myself. Then I took his arm, flinching at the touch of raw bone beneath the fabric. “Where are we going?”

“To walk a little while, before he comes to claim you. My material eyes are dead now, but I have other ways of seeing. I would have you guide me, Raphael; and I will tell you what I see, and perhaps it will comfort you when I am gone.”

7. Delicate details of internal structure

WE PASSED INTO THE dark corridors of the Crypt Church. I carried the lantern and Dr. Silverthorn’s black bag, lighter now than it had been the day before. My companion’s arm rested upon mine like a nearly weightless splint of wood. We walked slowly, my footsteps silent upon the cold stone floor, Dr. Silverthorn’s joints creaking alarmingly, so that more than once I saw the tiny shadows of rats racing away at our approach. Dr. Silverthorn laughed at this, and I wondered aloud how he could see them if he was now blind.

“There is no longer a veil of flesh between myself and the world,” he said. He halted and pointed to one side. “What is there?”

I shrugged. “Nothing: a gray wall of many stones. The narrow passageway continues there, and …”I squinted. “There are some kind of statues up ahead, but here the wall is empty.”

He tilted his head to me. His sockets held only ruined jelly, like the tallow smeared upon the children’s altar. A little longer and even that would be gone. “But they are lovely!” he whispered, letting go my arm to gesture at the blank expanse of granite, smooth except for where names, thousands of names, had been incised in the stone. “Can’t you see them?”

I peered at the wall, stretching my hand to touch its surface, cold and faintly damp, as though I might find there the impression of what he saw. I felt only the engraved letters, and the grit lodged within them. “I see nothing,” I confessed ruefully. “What do you see?”

“Wonderful things,” he murmured. “Many sleeping faces, ancient men and women dreaming of the morning. I think that I recognize some of them. Perhaps I may find Gligor here …” His voice trailed off and his hands dropped to his sides. I realized that he referred to the dead who had been interred within the Cathedral walls.

“You see revenants.” Shivering, I stared at the wall, as though they might start to pour from there like smoke.

“No,” said Dr. Silverthorn. “They are not revenants. They are but sleeping, it is but a long sleep, not to be feared. If only I had known …”

He continued on. With each step I felt him drifting farther from me. It seemed now that he could see through the veil that separated us from the immaterial world, that he walked between the two. He spoke of flowers within the granite walls, and faces peering from empty niches; of many voices raised in song in the great nave above us, and black engines buried in the fruitless earth. The minutes passed dreamlike: the whisper of cloth against my skin the only evidence that I did not walk alone, the whisper of cloth and a soft voice intoning wonders into my ear.

We turned a corner. Far off in the darkness faint yellow lights bloomed. I could no longer hear Dr. Silverthorn’s harsh breathing. His voice had dwindled to a rustle, nearly inaudible; it might have been a voice inside my head.

“He comes,” whispered my guide. The sleeve of his robe trembled as he tried to point at something. “There—they bear him to meet you.”

I squinted. My eyes had been playing tricks on me all this time, giving life to stone and imagining trapdoors in every crevice. It was several minutes before I finally saw that the misty lights in the distance had grown more distinct, formed themselves into bobbing globes. They were drawing nearer. In a few minutes more I saw that they were some kind of torches carried by moving figures; that the figures were weighted beneath something black and solid; that they were indeed bearing something, or someone; that they were coming now to meet me.

“Dr. Silverthorn!” I dropped his bag. My voice cracked; sweat broke out on my neck as I groped for his hand. It was not there. “Is that him? Tell me!”

Dr. Silverthorn had slipped a few feet away, caught between the ruddy light of my lantern and the torches’ smoky glare. He swayed at their approach.

“Greetings, Margalis.” His voice was surprisingly loud and strong, echoing through the space about us. “You have come just in time. I was preparing to leave you.”

The soft thud of heavily padded feet upon stone; a stench of smoke, and of the bier. I forced myself to hold the lantern high enough to cast its glow upon them.

They were aardmen.

They carried a litter of wooden beams wrapped about with rope and cloth, and upon this lay a man. But all I could see were those others: six of them, their spines arched so that they seemed to lope even though they proceeded slowly, vestigial tails switching behind them as they bore their injured master. Large eyes set beneath deep brows, jaws jutting from faces a little too large or too small; long curved yellow teeth rising from blue gums. Ears pressed against sleek dark skulls, pricking up as they drew near, nostrils dilating as they scented me and their tails lashing excitedly.

“Stop here,” commanded a clear voice. They halted, growling softly as they swept their heads back and forth, snuffling, their bright eyes fixed upon me. “Is that him, Lawrence?”

Dr. Silverthorn stepped beside me. “This is the Paphian boy named Raphael Miramar, whom you asked be brought to you.”

The insistent voice said, “But is he the one the girl told me about? The one she met by the river, the one she called the Gaping Lord? Boy!”

He turned, gesturing in the dark behind him. Someone else stepped into the torchlight: no, not one, but two slight figures—the boy Oleander, and, winding about his feet, my white jackal familiar.

“Anku!” I cried. He sat back upon his haunches, tipped his head to stare at me with glowing eyes. Then he raised his muzzle and yelped once, sharply. Beside him Oleander shifted from one foot to the other, trying to keep out of hand’s reach of the man upon the bier.

“That’s him,” the boy stated. He moved anxiously from the jackal and into a pool of ocher light. “Tell him, Dr. Silverthorn.”

The other propped himself up on his elbows to stare at me. He would be a very tall man standing: big-boned but thin, with sandy hair fading from a high brow and eyes of a piercing clarity, even in this eternal dusk: almost transparent eyes. Later I would see that they were palest blue, like periwinkles whose color had been washed away by dark water. The aardmen had broken his face. Seams stretched across his taut skin from cheek to chin to forehead, ragged scars like cracks in parched earth. One eye had been drawn too near the bridge of his nose and bulged slightly, and the corner of his mouth pulled upward, as though he were perpetually stifling a smile.

He did smile, now. “I can see him, Oleander,” he reproached him. “It is him. What a beautiful boy.” He motioned for the aardmen to set him upon the ground. They did so, still growling. The Aviator eased himself up, standing unsteadily with one hand beating the air until Oleander hastened beside him to help. Anku remained where he was, observing the aardmen from red slitted eyes.

At my side Dr. Silverthorn trembled. I would have embraced him, given or taken comfort; but I knew that any slight breeze would undo him now. I took a deep breath and stood as tall as I could, and addressed the Consolation of the Dead.

“I am Raphael Miramar; some call me the Gaping One.”

My words sounded idiotic. I cleared my throat and bowed my head, trying to think of something else to say, something that might make him fear me. Nothing came. I added, “You may let this man go now, he has done what you sent him to do.”

The Aviator shook his head, pointing at Dr. Silverthorn.

“I have never kept him against his will. Have I, Lawrence?”

Dr. Silverthorn lifted his head: a barren skull at last. “No,” he said wearily. But when he turned to me there was something nearly exultant in his naked gaze; and I knew that he saw past me, past all of us, into those shadows that had finally engulfed him.

“Raphael: remember he is only a man—” he said. “Remember that the dead but sleep—”

Then his jaw rattled, chopped his words into harsh phrases—“Why, they are here! Gligor—Emma—”

A clattering, stones shaken inside an empty gourd. The others watched in silence as the skeleton tottered beside me.

He asked, “Is it like this, then, in the other kingdom? Is it?”

I shivered as he clutched my arm. “I don’t know,” I whispered. “I don’t know.”

But he could no longer hear me. He turned so that those black pits seemed to stare into the darkness and pointed to the empty air before him.

“There, Wendy,” he chattered. “Is this what you showed them? Emma and the rest, is that what they saw? Oh tell me quick—”

He cried out, so loudly that I yelled and pulled away from him. For one instant as he raised his empty face the torchlight ignited it, made of him a burning mask both terrifying and radiant, transformed him so that I gazed where he pointed—

And I saw it too, glimpsed what he perceived in the blank air: the shades that waited behind the veil, a fissure opening upon blazing heavens and the ranks of sleeping dead: the skeleton transcendent, beneath its skull the promised country unfolding before an endless vernal dawn.

“‘Look at the stars!’” he cried. “‘Look, look up at the skies!’”

And then he collapsed. When I knelt and reached for him in the darkness I grasped nothing, nothing at all save a brittle handful of bones and shrunken cloth.

“Oh no …” I drew the hem of his robe to my cheek and buried my face in it. “Don’t leave me—”

For many minutes I wept, mourning my patient suffering guide gone to join those other wraiths in the Cathedral’s abyss. But finally my tears stopped. I wiped my face upon his robe, groped among his scattered bones until I found one, smooth and light and longer than my hand; and tucked it into a pocket of my robe, to bury later I thought, to inter as was proper for a man of charity and learning.

I sank back upon my feet and raised my head to look at the other waiting there. Beside him Oleander and Anku stood in silence.

“You are mine now, Raphael Miramar,” he said softly. His foot nudged at the pile of bones and cloth before me. For a moment I thought he too might draw something from there to remember him by, tibia or rib or skullcap of the scientist who had served him for a little while. But he drew back his foot. His fingers clamped around Oleander’s neck. With a voluptuary’s delicate smile he pushed him toward me.

“Prepare him, Oleander. When he is ready bring him to me in the Gabriel Tower.”

He turned, with a gesture commanded the aardmen to lower the stretcher. Anku danced at his side, leaped after him onto the bier, and crouched between his legs. As the Aviator settled back a groan escaped him, of pain or perhaps of sorrow. Then he cursed, and I heard him strike one of the aardmen as they struggled to lift him again. His last words echoed back to us from the depths of the Engulfed Cathedral.

“Feed him and bathe him and anoint him as befits the one who will serve the Consolation of the Dead in raising the Gaping Lord.”

As they bore him into the darkness the aardmen began to howl.