Winterlong

Part Seven: A Masque of Owls

THERE WERE NO MORE dark houses after that one.

“Aidan, we have never been so in demand,” said Mehitabel one morning. It was a few weeks since the massacre at High Brazil. Paphians and Curators alike seemed to want to forget the horrors of the Butterfly Ball, the continuing outrage of children and elders captured by foraging lazars and aardmen growing more emboldened as the autumn passed, the whispered tales of an Ascendant demon holding sway over the Engulfed Cathedral. We Players seldom had a day off anymore. Scarcely a night passed without its masque or burletta or private soiree.

Mehitabel tugged her hair thoughtfully. “Maybe it was like this when Miss Scarlet first joined the troupe; but I wasn’t here then.”

“Is that when you first saw them?” I asked.

“Oh yes!” She took a bite from a slab of meringue hoarded from an Illyrian moon-viewing several days before. “She was wonderful, just wonderful. That was when I decided to become an actress.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Really? What changed your mind?”

She swallowed, stared at me open-mouthed. Then she burst out laughing, covering her mouth as she rocked back in her chair.

“Oh Aidan!” she giggled. “You know I do my best.”

Silly Mehitabel! She really was a terrible actress. She got by on her looks, and a certain look she used on stage and off, a way of tilting her head to one side and letting her hair fall into her face so that one was torn between the desire to brush it aside or give her a slap. All the Players confided in her, mostly because she would have been crushed if they had not: she brought all her secrets to us, laid them out like so many pretty stones she had found and waited for us to admire them. None of the others had the heart to turn her away.

Neither did I. Although she aggravated me, although I found her gossip tiresome and could no more imagine tapping in to her simple memories than I could imagine tapping a block of wood; still I couldn’t ignore her, or tease her cruelly as I once had.

“I don’t know what it is,” I said to Miss Scarlet that afternoon. “I know she is a perfect idiot; but I can’t seem to help it. When she needs help with her lines, or her costume, or—well, whatever it is this time—I can’t just send her away anymore.”

Miss Scarlet continued to stare at the page in front of her. I tapped my foot, waiting for a reply. When none came I crossed her room to the window.

“And what is with Justice now, he spends all his time with her, ‘reading lines.’ Reading lines with Mehitabel! he knows she’s awful, he knows they are coming to see me —”

I stopped, fearing I might have insulted Miss Scarlet, once the Prodigy of a Prodigal Age; of late busier playing mentor and adviser to Aidan Arent, the City’s newest sensation. She raised her head and smiled, her dark eyes peering from within her wizened face with an odd expression.

“Why should it matter then, who he practices with? Perhaps he feels uneasy reading with you, your talent so surpasses his own.” She glanced back down at her book. But after a few moments she looked up again and added, “Perhaps you are jealous, Wendy. Perhaps you are growing a heart.”

I ignored her, drumming my fingers on the windowsill. Outside, the earth was gray and brown. The Librarians’ sheep grazed upon an untidy pile of straw dumped on the lawn, their shepherd shivering in his homespun jacket. It would be Benedick tonight for the Historians (they loved battles; battling lovers would do if necessary); then tomorrow a smaller role in Watt the Butler, and the following week Titus Andronicus, and Juliet after that; then A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Zoologists, hosting a Masque of Owls for the Illyrians. Finally a brief hiatus while the Paphians readied themselves for the great feast of Winterlong, twelve days and nights of merrymaking that would culminate on the eve of Winterlong itself, shortest day of the year, when we would perform—Toby was beside himself to think of it— The Spectres’ Harlequinade for the masque of Winterlong at Saint-Alaban.

“Never before have the Paphians requested that we play for them at Winterlong! Never!” he had gloated. Already he could see the bartered riches that would come of it, plastics and woolen cloth and the intricate bits of hardware that the Paphians used as ornaments but which I knew were the remains of archaic computers. But looking out at the bleak lawn this wintry afternoon I wondered about Toby’s optimism; about the wisdom of people who could continue their meaningless research and revels while rumors of human sacrifices and hidden weapons brought to light fled across the Hill Magdalena Ardent.

Terrible things had befallen the City in the past weeks. The bizarre murder of a young girl in the Museum of Natural History; its Regent slain at the massacre at the Butterfly Ball when the House High Brazil burned to the ground. A figure seen at the ball, a beautiful boy clad in torn red tunic and with a vine draped about his neck, he who the Saint-Alabans name the Gaping One or Naked Lord. A burning star in the northern sky that heralded the Final Ascension. But still the round of masques and balls did not cease, only proceeded to a more somber music, dark pavane rather than sprightly reel.

“Fancy: gone,” Justice murmured after I had told him Fabian’s news. He buried his face in his hands. “And your brother—I met an Illyrian spado who claimed to have seen him at the Butterfly Ball. He is dead now; so many of us are dead.”

A mist crept over me when he said this. I closed my eyes, tried to plumb the darkness inside me, find something that would give the truth or lie to his words. Nothing; but I could not believe it was so.

At last I said, “He isn’t dead.”

Justice raised his eyes. “How do you know?”

“I don’t know. But—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Justice said bleakly. “So many are dead now, how could it matter?”

And mere days after that a viral strike: and then another.

“They are searching for someone,” Justice had muttered. We stood in the theater’s upper story, watching the fougas’ searchlights slash through the dusk.

“The Aviator,” I whispered. From the Deeping Avenue echoed screams; a party of masquers had been caught in the rain of roses. I shuddered. Justice put his arm around me. From his grim face I knew he was not thinking of the Aviator but of me, wondering if they still might search for an escaped empath whose dreams could kill.

But the fougas had withdrawn after these two strikes; although many died in the streets, and the lazars’ gleeful wailing kept us all from sleep for several hours. Since then more rumors raged through the City of Trees. Everyday life took on the shocking and explosive nuances of the tales we enacted.

The morbidly superstitious House Saint-Alaban enjoyed an unprecedented wave of popularity in light of the City’s recent misfortunes. Death became the fashionable theme at masquerades. Red, the Paphian hue of mourning, colored everything from hair to dominatrice’s hoods. The Botanists were unable to meet the demand for a particular shade of crimson henna. Scarlet love apples adorned every dish we ate for two solid weeks, and every invitation to a ball was writ in sanguine ink. An Illyrian eunuch inspired his Librarian Patron to compose a long poem entitled “The Coming of the Gaping One.” When recited at the Illyrians’ Semhane Masque, three Saint-Alabans fainted. A fourth was found dead afterward, hanging from an apple tree.

Fashion began to reflect these macabre preoccupations. Paphians my own age or younger emulated the startling deshabille of the ill-fated Raphael Miramar as he had last been seen at the Butterfly Ball: deathly pallor enhanced by powder of lead, crimson tunics carefully torn; fillets of twigs and vine woven upon their brows and hempen ropes worn about the neck in lieu of the customary wreaths of blossoms or bijoux. Raphael Miramar himself had become a sort of romantic figure in death, mourned by his many friends and lovers. An ardent cult sprang up around his memory; a violent tango was named after him, and a dangerous means of achieving sexual gratification by use of a rope.

Fin-de-sècle thinking, a renowned Librarian christened it all. The phrase was enthusiastically parroted by the Paphians, although few of them recognized the language it came from; and no one could have guessed what century this was, or whether or not we approached its end.

My star continued to rise amidst all this confused speculation. My amazing resemblance to Raphael Miramar had of course already been remarked upon. Now it became our stock-in-trade. Paphians from the remaining Houses flocked to each performance at our theater. A masque was no longer considered proper entertainment unless we were there in attendance, and we turned down countless invitations to perform.

Throughout I enjoyed the attention of myriad admirers. I eschewed Raphaelesque garb save onstage, as when I played Lear’s Fool. I preferred my own restrained taste in clothing, although I did indulge in accepting gifts of feathered caps and bandeaux from the Zoologists, once they learned my fondness for these. The mode Raphael was risky for me, since it involved a certain amount of exposed flesh.

“You should be more careful, Wendy,” Justice scolded late that night. Our performance for the Historians had been an enormous success, but afterward I had grown cocky waiting for my curtain call. Inspired by his recent triumph, Fabian and I staged a mock duel backstage. He had playfully torn my blouse with his sword. I took my bow with the ripped cloth flapping, my hair tangled, flushed and grinning from our game. The Paphians in the audience had cheered madly. Some even rushed the stage. I made a scarce retreat down the trapdoor before they could capture me and adapt my wardrobe further. Miss Scarlet had been aghast at this unprofessional behavior—“ Quite unlike you, Aidan,” she had remarked sternly—but Fabian and the rest of the troupe seemed pleased that Aidan had dropped his prim hauteur for a few minutes.

Justice of course sided with Miss Scarlet. “What if they had caught you?” he demanded.

He and I had taken to sharing a room, twin sleigh beds drawn up against opposite walls beneath curled photographs of unconvincingly histrionic thespians. This arrangement kept me from being bothered by my admirers. It also put off the questions of others in the troupe regarding my amorous tastes. Since our visit to the House Miramar, Toby Rhymer had regarded me suspiciously: with more respect, perhaps, but also with skepticism, fueled by envy of my success.

“Our dear Aidan is more than what he seems to be,” he often said, affection vying with malice in his tone.

But as a roommate Justice, like Miss Scarlet, was above reproach. He wanted only to act as my friend and conscience (but still hoped to take me as his lover). I found that I liked his company: sober and intelligent for a Paphian, and relatively chaste. After that evening at the House Miramar he had made no more overtures toward me. His intrigues tended to be brief: a very young sloe-eyed refugee from Miramar; an Illyrian gynander with a jealous Naturalist Patron; this continuing flirtation with Mehitabel, under Gitana’s reproving gaze.

Now he sat curled up on his bed, weaving colored wires and tiny bulbs of glass into his braid.

“Do you think you could do that to my hair?” I asked. A Historian had given me a brooch after my performance, a flat square of plastic embellished with letters and numbers. “I’ll give you this—”

“No,” he said, glancing up and shaking his head. “Your hair’s still too short. Aren’t you listening to me, Wendy? What would have happened if they’d caught you and found out they’d been fooled all this time?”

I held the brooch to my breast. I decided it was ugly, and tossed it to the floor. “I don’t know,” I said. “Does it matter?”

“It should. It wouldn’t go very well for the rest of us, I can tell you that. People don’t like being made fools of.”

I felt flushed from that intense rippling joy that remained with me after a good performance: better than my acetelthylene had been, better than almost anything except tapping new blood. “But it wouldn’t be my fault, Justice. It would be Aidan’s! I’m not responsible—Wendy can’t be responsible.”

He gazed at me, wrapping a wire around one finger. “Is that what you think, Wendy? Is that what you really believe—that this is like the Human Engineering Laboratory, that Dr. Harrow’s out there somewhere to protect you and save you if you go too far?

“Because you’re wrong. Terrible things are happening. If the Ascendants are really looking for you then you’re in danger all the time, and so am I, and Miss Scarlet and probably every single other person in this damned City. And if the man in the Cathedral is the same one who ordered the purge at HEL —”

I knelt to retrieve the brooch, so he wouldn’t see my face.

“At the very least, Wendy, you shouldn’t make it harder for those who love you and are the only wall between you and the dark.”

I put the brooch in my pocket. I sat on the floor for a minute, then reached for the bottom drawer of my bureau. I withdrew a feathered bandeau, the one Andrew had given me at HEL . I stared at it a long time without speaking; because I felt ashamed, and angry, and frightened.

Because something terrible was happening in the City: something terrible was happening to me, but it was not what Justice or anyone else might imagine in all their gory nightmares.

No: I felt within my head a new thing burgeoning, jealous and implacable and tender and bewildering by turns. Even my dreams had changed. They held not the faces of Dr. Harrow or Morgan Yates or the other subjects at HEL , but those of myself and Justice, or Miss Scarlet, or others I met each day in the City. And as I stared at the bandeau a terrifying thought came to me: that after seventeen years I was changing, that something had changed me: something even Emma Harrow had never dreamed might happen to her sacred monster.

A few weeks later an emissary from the Zoologists arrived. It was the morning of our performance at the Masque of Owls. We were sitting at breakfast together in the oak-paneled dining chamber, picking over the remnants of one of Gitana’s peppery frittatas.

“Someone is at the door,” Mehitabel announced. Through the dirty panes of leaded glass I glimpsed something moving, too big to be a person. A palanquin, maybe, or a cart delivering goods in payment for past performances on the Hill Magdalena Ardent.

“Then why don’t you let them in?” Gitana said through clenched teeth. She poked Mehitabel with her bread knife so that the plump girl shrieked and bumped cozily against Justice.

“Well, all right! ‘Scuse me,” she said, winking at Justice. Gathering her skirts above her knees, she flounced down the hall. The others yawned and chatted as they finished breakfast. Toby droned on (to himself, apparently) about the virtues of performing for the lazars.

I could see Mehitabel’s eyes widening as she peeked out the window.

“Toby …” she called doubtfully. When she glanced back at the dining room I was the only one who met her gaze. “Aidan?” she asked, her hand on the doorknob as she waited for my advice. I nodded. With a flourish she flung open the door.

“Hey, girl!” a voice bellowed from outside. Mehitabel shrieked softly. “Hey!”

“Aidan,” said Mehitabel weakly.

I went to see who was there. For an instant the morning sun dazzled me so that I could make out nothing.

“Hey, boy!” the voice yelled again at me. “I’ve come to see Toby and Scarlet Pan. They here?”

Blinking, I looked up to see a monstrous figure on the lawn, two-headed and horned with four glowering eyes. It took a moment to sort out that this was a tall young girl astride a great antlered beast, and that she was growing impatient.

“Agh!” she shouted, and swung down from her mount. A faint jingling of many little bells as it shook its great dark head. “Is everyone here an idiot? Scarlet!”

Behind me a soft voice said, “Jane?”

“Hey, girl!”

I turned to see Miss Scarlet in the doorway, still holding her demitasse. Her expression brightened from disbelief to delight, and she shoved her cup into Mehitabel’s hand before running to throw herself into the arms of the strange girl.

“Oh, Jane!”

I stared bemused as the girl Jane caught her up and swung her into the air like a child. Miss Scarlet wrapped her wiry arms around her neck and the tall girl swung her around, laughing.

“Scarlet! D’you miss me?”

Now the others had joined us outside. Mehitabel peeked from behind Justice’s shoulder. Gitana stood finishing her tea, while beside her Toby shook his head at the commotion.

Fabian walked to the animal Jane had ridden and waved me to join him.

“It won’t hurt you,” he said. “See?” He tugged its bridle. The animal nodded complacently.

I stepped beside him. “What is it?”

“A sambar.” He reached to stroke its muzzle: a creature like a great heraldic stag, russet brown with darker chocolate markings on its legs and back and a thick stiff mane of nearly black hair growing on its throat. I brushed it tentatively with one hand. It regarded me with intelligent liquid eyes and dipped its head. I heard that soft chiming again and saw that its antlers were wrapped with fine aluminum wire and strung with myriad tiny bells. Its saddle was a simple pad of woven cloth, once vivid red and green but now worn and much patched, though bright with bells hanging from its braided trim.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Fabian murmured as he stroked the sambar’s muzzle. The animal snorted softly into his cupped palm. “They take such good care of them.”

“Who does?” I asked. I hardly listened for his reply. Instead I watched with some dismay as Miss Scarlet climbed upon Jane’s shoulders, behaving for all the world like a trained monkey and not the Prodigy of a Prodigal Age.

“The Zoologists,” said Fabian. His frosty breath mingled with the sambar’s as he looked up from warming his hands in its thick fur. “Who do you think Jane is?”

“I have no idea,” I said, and turned to go back inside.

“Aidan!” Miss Scarlet cried as I passed. “Come meet my old Keeper!”

I started to pretend I hadn’t heard her. Then, “Yes,” I replied stiffly.

“This is Aidan Arent,” said Miss Scarlet, smiling to bare her teeth. “He is my newest friend.”

Jane shrugged Miss Scarlet higher upon her shoulders and extended her hand. “Jane Alopex,” she said. Her gaze swept me appraisingly, a long cool look: as if I were an unusual specimen. I stared back at her. She was a tall girl my own age, stocky, with thick straight black hair cut short to frame round brown eyes and a ruddy freckled face. Strange for a Curator to look as though she’d ever seen the sun. Odd too to hear her brazen laughter. Her clothes suited her: a long green tunic embellished with gold braid over breeches of brilliant sky blue tucked into high black boots, so well polished despite obvious years of wear that they creaked when she moved. She held on to my hand and continued to stare at me through narrowed eyes for a long moment. With alarm I recalled my first meeting with Miss Scarlet— “Sieur, that is a woman …” —and wondered if these Zoologists and their charges were gifted with some kind of special sight that would enable Jane Alopex to see through my masculine attire.

“‘Aidan errant,’” she repeated with a sardonic grin. “‘The one who wanders.’ We’ve heard of you in your travels”’

My own smile froze. I glanced up at Miss Scarlet perched upon this girl’s shoulders; but my friend was laughing and waving at Fabian, heedless of my concern.

“My travels are over. I live here now,” I replied. I slipped my hand from Jane’s, shrugged in what I hoped appeared to be a careless boyish manner. “Maybe you know my partner, Justice Saint-Alaban?”

Jane Alopex threw back her head and laughed. “It’ll be a cold day in hell before I know a Saint-Alaban!” she said, but without rancor. “Are you a courtesan then, young errant?”

“I am as you see me: a Player.”

A flicker of respect shot through her brown eyes. “Huh,” she muttered, and began looking around at the other Players. “Well, I’m here about the performance tonight in honor of Rufus Lynx’s birthday—our Regent,” she explained, and then tugged at one of Miss Scarlet’s still-slippered feet. “Hey, Scarlet! Did you hear that? There’s been a change: he wants that other show, the one with the magician and the shipwreck. The Storm —”

“The Tempest,” Toby corrected her. He elbowed me aside and stared down at Jane, who stood her ground and grinned. “But we haven’t rehearsed that; the arrangements were for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

“Well, Toby.” She lifted Miss Scarlet to the ground. “What of it? The Regent says there’s enough fairy-dust in the City these days without your Players adding to it. He likes that other story better, he says. ‘This isn’t Midsummer,’ he says, ‘there’s a storm brewing and we might as well welcome it.’ So I’m to ask if you can do it, this other play, The Thunderclap —”

“The Tempest,” Toby repeated, glaring and indifferent of Miss Scarlet at his side, a beaming black imp. He turned to me and demanded, “Well, Aidan? Can you do it? Ariel and Caliban?”

I shrugged. “Of course.”

He snorted. He had revised the play so that I could take both parts, Caliban and Ariel; favorite roles of mine. His own alchemist Prospero and Miss Scarlet’s tender Miranda were also sheer joy to watch. It was of the others he was thinking, the lesser parts unrehearsed.

“Humph,” he said again. He stroked Miss Scarlet’s head. She took his hand and murmured, “Now, Toby.”

Toby glanced over at the rest of his troupe, ticking them off one by one. He sighed. “Tell Rufus we’ll do it; but we’re underrehearsed. I don’t want to hear any complaints—”

Jane Alopex waved her hand. “No complaints, no complaints. A birthday masque, that’s all. To cheer him up; to cheer us all up, dark days behind us and darker ones ahead, hey Scarlet?” She gave that short barking laugh again, twisted her head to flash me a wink. I shoved my hands in my pockets and walked away, uneasy.

I started to find Justice; but he was engaged in laughing conversation with Mehitabel and Gitana. So I waited while Fabian cooed to the Zoologist’s sambar, and Mehitabel and Gitana made sniggering remarks about our visitor as she haggled with Toby over the arrangements for Rufus Lynx’s command performance. A caracul pelt apiece for Toby and Miss Scarlet and myself, furs of lesser worth—coyote and raccoon—for the rest, and a vial of civet musk we could trade with the Botanists later for perfume. All of us to share in the feasting afterward, and an extra pair of snakeskins for Toby’s trouble, not to worry about missed lines or cues—

“We’ll never notice,” Jane Alopex assured him. Toby scowled.

“All right then!” exclaimed Jane, clapping her hands against her breeches. “I’ve got to get back, else they’ll think the aardmen got me.” She laughed, striding across the sward to cup her mount’s muzzle in one strong hand. “Eh then, Sallymae: you ready to go home?”

The sambar tossed its head in a jingling of silver bells. Fabian grinned. “Toby, I’ll send a pantechnicon for everyone this afternoon. Not afraid of our animals, are you?” she called out to Mehitabel, who giggled and hid her face in her sleeve. “Who’s for going back with me now? Scarlet?”

“I would be delighted,” replied Miss Scarlet, smoothing her bare head. “But I’m not even dressed yet!”

“Well, hurry up then,” said Jane impatiently. She blew into the sambar’s ear and scratched its chin.

Miss Scarlet bustled past the others, pausing to remind Gitana of the change in costume.

“You’ll be certain to bring the blue gown, not the silver one? Toby—?” She turned to pat his knee. “You don’t mind, do you? It’s been so long since I visited!”

“Of course not, Miss Scarlet.” I imagined he was still tallying up his share of the night’s proceeds. “Just don’t forget your nap.”

“Anyone else?” demanded Jane Alopex. Fabian started forward eagerly, but before he could say a word Jane turned and pointed at me. “What about you, errant? I bet you’ve never been to the Zoo.”

“Oh, yes, Aidan!” Miss Scarlet exclaimed. “Come with us—you’ll love it, the trees and all the birds singing!” She clasped her hands and fluttered her eyelids.

“I will come if Toby permits.” I looked at him questioningly. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Justice and Mehitabel walk back inside, arm in arm. I turned back to Toby. He tapped a finger against his nose, then nodded.

“All right. Aidan may accompany Miss Scarlet this time. Fabian, I need you and Justice to dismantle the flats for Tempest.”

Fabian checked his disappointment and shrugged. He saluted Jane Alopex’s sambar and spun on his heel to return inside.

And so we set out, Miss Scarlet and Jane Alopex and I. Miss Scarlet rode astride the sambar, clutching the edge of its cloth saddle to steady herself. Jane Alopex and I walked alongside, myself glancing back several times to see if perhaps Justice had returned to watch me leave; he had not. This amused Jane Alopex greatly.

“Such a pretty catamite, Aidan Arent! Wasting yourself on a foolish Saint-Alaban. I could find a better boy for you at home.”

But her laughter belied this: the Zoologists loved nothing and no one so much as their animal charges. No Paphian would ever look lovelier to Jane Alopex than Miss Scarlet Pan. And nothing Miss Scarlet had ever told me of her upbringing—the long rainshot afternoons in the Infirmary watching ancient films and videos; learning human language from a captured aardman tamed for this sole purpose; her heartbreaking decision to leave the Zoologists and join Toby’s troupe—none of this prepared me for the slavish devotion Miss Scarlet showed Jane Alopex, or the condescension with which the Zoologist treated her former charge.

“Don’t tug too hard on that, Scarlet,” she scolded; and, “Sit farther up on the saddle and it won’t rock so.” And, “You know, that’s rather a bright yellow for your eyes, you should have one of those red things made like they’re wearing now.” After each admonition she turned and winked at me. But otherwise I found it quite pleasant to travel through the City with Jane Alopex at my side and Miss Scarlet chattering from atop her mount.

Light streamed through the bare limbs above the grassy avenue as we walked down Library Hill. A few rosehips still brightened the roadside, and the sun took a little of the cold edge off the morning, but the air smelled of smoke, fires burning in distant woodstoves. Soon it would be true winter. Jane tried to draw me into conversation but I was quiet, thinking of Justice walking arm in arm with Mehitabel.

“What news of the Cathedral, Jane?” Miss Scarlet asked after a time. We had reached a spot where the Deeping Avenue continued on to the Museums, but it seemed we were to turn here. Jane tugged the sambar’s bridle, leading it to the right. Through the thick mesh of dead matted kudzu ran a small track, barely high or wide enough to allow the animal easy passage. Jane laid a hand upon its steaming flank to steady it. Miss Scarlet looked concerned: not frightened but distracted, as though the scene called for a change in demeanor and she was unsure how to act. Jane reached into a deep pocket and withdrew a heavy pistol, ancient but shining where she had recently oiled it. She held it up and stared down the barrel before tucking it into her belt.

“It’s faster this way,” she explained. “Perfectly safe, really; but these days …” She shook her head. “We see strange things in our part of the City.”

“The Cathedral?” asked Miss Scarlet again.

Jane Alopex nodded. “What have you heard?”

“Only the rumor that a deranged Ascendant lives in the ruins there, and commands the lazars bring him captives for sacrifice.”

Jane chewed her lip. After a moment she slapped the sambar’s flank so that it lumbered on again, shaking its antlers free of tangled vines. Miss Scarlet lurched forward, caught herself, and dug her paws into the sambar’s mane. Then she straightened the stiff folds of her skirt and fixed Jane with a stare. The girl looked away and sighed.

“It’s true, then!” Miss Scarlet exclaimed, alarmed. “Have you seen him, Jane?”

Jane Alopex shook her head. She stepped aside to allow the sambar onto the trail, eyeing a yellow creeper whose serrated leaves twitched slightly as the stag trudged past. “No. I’ve been on duty in the Herp Lab; the anacondas are shedding, and I’m saving the skins. But some of us have seen things—

“A star, a sort of brightness in the sky like an explosion the night of the Butterfly Ball. You must have heard about it; the Paphians said it heralded the next Ascension. Isidore Myotis saw it, he was tending a live birth among the flying foxes. A nova, he said; but we’ve heard it was something else …”

Absently she pointed her pistol at a dead tree limb and fired. An explosion; the tree limb crashed to earth. The sambar snorted, rearing back in fright. Jane turned to stroke its muzzle. “Ah, there, Sallymae, I’m sorry.”

I paused to finger a charred bit of wood. Atop Sallymae Miss Scarlet rubbed her hairy chin.

“What do you think it was?” I asked.

Jane Alopex pursed her lips. “That’s rather a blunt question to ask a Curator, Sieur Aidan,” she said. She gave me the same condescending look she’d given Miss Scarlet earlier. “It seems to me that you’re rather adrift in our City, young Arent. Unfamiliar with our ways of doing things, if you know what I mean.”

I flushed, but she cut me off before I could protest. “No: if Scarlet likes you, I guess that’s good enough. Uppity actors don’t bother me, really. And I’ve heard of Aidan Arent, of course. The Paphians are quite mad about you.” Grinning, she flicked at my hair; but there was a glint of shrewd intelligence in her eyes.

I followed her in silence as she led Sallymae down the path. Miss Scarlet pulled her shawl closer against the chill, then twisted to look down at me.

“Something is happening in the world,” she said at last to Jane. “I spoke of this with Aidan at our first meeting. You and the other Zoologists may think it’s nonsense, but I fear the Saint-Alabans are right: Final Ascension or not, something is coming.”

Jane squinted at the weak sunlight. “Well, you may be right, Scarlet. Last week we heard that runagates from the Citadel escaped and entered the City.”

I stopped in the middle of the trail. A small astonished sound escaped me. I looked up at Miss Scarlet. She stared back in amazement, but quickly composed herself by grabbing her mount’s mane.

“When?” she asked with breathless innocence, rocking as the sambar loped down the path. “How many?”

Jane shrugged. “Three of them, two weeks ago. Escaped research subjects, is what I was told.”

Three! And two weeks ago. Not Justice and myself, then—but who?

As Jane stared at me I realized I had muttered aloud. “Who told you?” I asked. I pretended to be having difficulty clambering over an ivy-choked log, and paused to collect my wits.

Jane frowned. “Now why would you ask me that? Why would you even want to know, unless you were an Ascendant delator?” From her expression I could tell she was measuring me up, trying to decide if it was possible that the Ascendants had chosen such a careless informer. She finally shook her head.

“No: you’re too stupid to be a spy. And too obvious—who’d trust you?”

This thought seemed to cheer her. “Well, Aidan Arent, since you’re so bold as to ask, I’ll tell you: an aardman told me. I caught them poaching in the Zoo. I let one go free, in exchange for news; nothing like aardmen for news.

“He told me that three refugees escaped from the Citadel. Fougas pursued them and one died in the strike. The other two fled into the Narrow Forest. They were tending to the corpse of the boy who died when the aardmen took them. A man and a girl. The aardmen thought he was a Scientist, the girl they said was a witch. A witch!”

She laughed a bit too heartily. “The aardmen give allegiance now to the one in the Cathedral. He has commanded them to bring to him, alive, anyone they capture in the City. They brought him the Scientist and the girl. They told me that the Scientist will certainly die from his injuries. The girl I know nothing more of, save that they took her to the Cathedral as well. The aardmen said that she scratched and fought like a wolf.”

“Anna!” I exclaimed; then bit my tongue.

Jane yelled a command to the sambar. It halted and began to graze upon the yellowing grass. Miss Scarlet took a sudden interest in the hem of her shawl.

“Scarlet,” asked Jane Alopex with measured calm. “What do you know of this?” She grabbed my arm and pulled me close to her.

“Only what you’ve told us,” the chimpanzee replied. She looked up, her face clouding. “And rumors, just rumors. What we heard from the suzein Miramar: a shooting star in the north, a runaway Paphian favorite the Saint-Alabans says is a demon incarnate. None of this other, I swear—”

“But Master Aidan seems quite disturbed by this news. Although, as a matter of fact, it doesn’t even seem like it’s news to him.”

She tightened her grip on my arm, waiting for me to explain. Her face was quite pale: I had taken her by surprise. She tapped uneasily at her pistol. I wondered if she knew something more, something worse than this. I closed my eyes, my head whirling, and tried to imagine myself somewhere far away: back in the Home Room, or in my little chamber at the theater. When I remained silent Jane snapped, “Well, say something, dammit!”

“Anna,” I said at last. “The girl’s name is Anna.”

“Or Andrew,” I added a moment later.

Miss Scarlet began to fan herself with her shawl. Jane stared at me as though I spoke an unknown tongue. Finally she said, “How do you know that?”

I said nothing more; only opened my eyes and stared at my hands. When it became clear I would admit to nothing else, she let go of me. The sambar shook its head, bells jingling gaily in the cold air. Apart from that there was silence.

“Well, Scarlet,” Jane said at last. “You’ve met up with bad company this time. ‘Actors,’ I always said; ‘she’ll get herself into trouble if she leaves us for Actors.’ And I was right: this is a bad business, Scarlet.”

She turned to me, pointing her pistol at my feet. “And you, sweetheart: either you’re mixed up in this trouble past all help; or else you’re a fool.

“The aardmen brought the Scientist and the girl to the Madman in the Cathedral.” She spat. “Paaugh! The aardmen are idiots, and the Historians cowardly fools who didn’t have the courage to kill the Aviator themselves; and now look what they’ve brought on to the City! They gave him to the aardmen, so if there was ever an investigation it would look like the aardmen had devoured him. And of course when they took him prisoner the aardmen botched it. They tortured him and castrated him—”

Miss Scarlet gasped.

“—but then he convinced them to free him. He told them he was actually an emissary of the hanged god, he told them he had been sent here to rule not by the Ascendants but by the Gaping One, the Lord of Dogs; and the aardmen would be punished horribly if they did not free him.

“They let him go; they escorted him to the Cathedral, and now they pay him homage. All this the aardmen told me when I caught them sniffing around the civets’ cages. I killed one of them, just to let the other know I meant business. Then whimpering he told me the last part of the story:

“ ‘He looks for someone,’ the aardman said. He was afraid to tell me; terrified the Aviator would find out and kill him. ‘He is searching for one of their subjects, a girl kidnapped from the Citadel. He wants to find her and return her alive to the Citadel. For further processing,’ said the aardman.

“‘She has powers, this girl; she deals death with her mind, and contorts the dreams of men so that they go mad. Even the Ascendants feared her; and now they fear to lose her, fear that in the City she will find followers, and turn upon the Citadel and destroy them.

“‘But this Aviator is already mad, he has no fear! He wishes to avenge himself upon the City, and the Ascendants: upon everyone he feels betrayed him. To this end he seeks the girl. He would use her power to destroy anyone who will thwart him. And he preys upon the weakness of the Paphians, he claims that he will raise the god that they call the Gaping One. The aardman said he raved about ancient weapons in the earth that he will turn upon the City of Trees. He uses the lazars to work the earth beneath the Cathedral, seeking an arsenal buried there after the First Ascension. And still the lazars flock to him, and the aardmen. He will make an effigy of the hanged god to frighten your stupid whores, and they too will worship him.’

“So the aardman told me.”

She finished, wiping her brow. She seemed surprised to see the sun still shining and Miss Scarlet and myself there beneath the trees with her. I had begun shaking as Jane Alopex told her tale. I heard tiny sounds like insects boring into my ears. I clasped my hands and paced back and forth, back and forth, trying to think my way clear of this, trying to force back the Small Voices.

“Why doesn’t someone kill him?” I asked.

“Someone? Who?! There are no warriors in this City!” Jane exploded. She pointed her pistol at a rotting log, clicked its release. Nothing. “See? Everything is hundreds of years old, nothing works when it should! I had to slit that aardman’s throat to kill him because my other weapons are useless; and you think I’m going to creep into the Cathedral among a thousand lazars and aardmen and capture a NASNA Aviator by myself?”

She waved the pistol furiously above her head. It went off and a shower of bark rained onto us.

“Yes, of course, I understand,” I said hastily. I looked up at Miss Scarlet, hoping that she might come forth with some revelation, some word that would gainsay all that Jane Alopex had told us. But she only shook her head, as though she had perceived this a long time coming. Jane too stared at me, her eyes glittering.

“If he finds the ancient arsenal he will destroy us all,” she said at last. “It is as the Saint-Alabans and lazars are saying, it has come at last. The Final Ascension.” She slipped the pistol back into her pocket and turned to her mount.

I watched as she stroked its dark flank. Atop it sat Miss Scarlet, chewing on the fringe of her shawl. I thought of Justice and the others back in the theater. Tiny figures they seemed to me now, brightly colored and moving with jerky slowness, as though some great hand tugged and twitched at invisible strings. Words roared in my head, the Small Voices gathering force like some shrill whirlwind:

I can’t be responsible, I’m not responsible …

Find him, Wendy!

Something has happened, something is happening in the City—

And over them all a soft chanting, a child’s voice repeating again and again:

hang the boy and raise the girl

‘til Winterlong is broken —

The roaring grew louder, became the voice of something huge and black, something pressing against my temples until I thought the blood would burst from there.

Then suddenly there was silence, utter silence.

And it came: the terrifying pulsing in my head that signaled the beginning of a seizure. I sank to my knees; clutched at my head as the air swam before me in motes of gray and black and I thrashed against the earth, trying to smash Him, rend Him, push Him back, His white hands reaching for me and eyes glowing like flowers, like stars, like great suns exploding above the City’s ruined spires—

“Scarlet! Stop him! What is it?!”

Other voices shouting but I could not stop, could not turn, He is there and He is too strong for me, I feel Him within me and the rage burns through my eyes, He has come at last, o come to me, come to me—

“Aidan!”

A flash of crimson light; then nothing.

Gradually I heard voices again, and wind. It was the wind that told me I was not hallucinating. I blinked and sat up groggily, groping to feel the bump where I had knocked myself unconscious. Jane and Miss Scarlet squatted a few feet away, staring at me with drawn faces. Behind them the sambar munched upon some purple thistles.

“Aidan!” Jane exclaimed. “What happened? Are you all right?”

I rubbed my forehead, grimacing. “I think so,” I said. Miss Scarlet twittered in relief and ran to my side.

“Oh, poor Wendy,” she cried, her words tumbling back to the Zoologist before I could stop her. “She’s been so overworked, Jane, Toby won’t listen when I—”

“She?” Jane Alopex stood, dead leaves falling from where they’d stuck to her breeches. “She?”

Miss Scarlet gasped and covered her mouth with her paws, then drew up her skirts to hide her face.

Jane stared at me in amazement. Before I could move she jumped beside me, grabbed my shirt, and tore it open. I recovered myself in time to slap her and yank my shirt closed; but not before she had seen beneath it. She collapsed back onto her haunches and cursed so loudly that the sambar started, looking over its shoulder with mild questioning eyes.

“Sweet mother of us all! It’s you they’re after.”

“Don’t hurt her, Jane,” begged Miss Scarlet, running to Jane and throwing herself upon her. “Please, please—”

Jane didn’t move, only continued to look at me in astonishment. I stood a few feet off with my hands clenched at my sides.

“She couldn’t hurt me!” I sneered. To prove it I shut my eyes, drawing up those last images once more, the Boy ghastly white and laughing, that rush of ecstatic pleasure and terror as He turns to me—

“No, Jane!”

Abruptly I was knocked down again. I grunted, opening my eyes to see Jane straddling my chest, holding her pistol like a bludgeon. I hissed in disappointment: had she broken my concentration, or was I losing control of the thread that bound me to Him, subject now only to His whims and desires and not my own?

“Tell me your name,” Jane ordered. She nudged my cheek with the butt of her pistol. “Your real name.”

I twisted to see Miss Scarlet plucking at Jane’s sleeve. She gazed at me. Then, suddenly defeated, she fell back and clasped her paws.

I turned back to Jane and recited, “I am Wendy Wanders, Subject 117, neurologically augmented empath specializing in emotive engram therapy.” As I spat the last word I shoved Jane from my chest and sat up. We glared at each other across the grass.

“Oh, stop, please, ” Miss Scarlet pleaded. She knelt beside Jane, a small pathetic creature in crinoline and lace. Jane let out her breath in a long frustrated sigh, then stuck her pistol back into her pocket.

“All right. But tell me—”

We did. Or rather, Miss Scarlet did, embellishing my tale so that even I held my breath at certain points, and wondered had it really all been so dramatic—the horrifying tenure at HEL , followed by dangerous flight and pursuit and finally success with Toby Rhymer’s Players, not forgetting my bosom friendship with that acclaimed thespian Miss Scarlet Pan?

Jane listened dubiously.

“Well,” she said at last, when with paws joined Miss Scarlet had beseeched her to help and not betray me. “This is all a little hard to swallow, isn’t it?”

At Miss Scarlet’s offended expression she quickly added, “But very nicely told, Scarlet, very nice! But—well, suppose she is the one they’re searching for.”

She indicated me with a nod. I had for the moment become stock character in Miss Scarlet’s picaresque and not a participant in this discussion. “How am I to know that? And what is she going to do? If this Aviator is drawing the lazars and aardmen in to a search for you—”

She turned to me again. “Aidan Arent is too well known now in the City. Even if I don’t breathe a word—and I won’t—once a secret’s out it’s out, if you know what I mean. Someone else is bound to discover you, and then …” She circled her throat with her hand and made a choking sound.

We sat in silence for a few minutes. The sambar snorted, munching grass. Pale sunlight laced through the trees. A cricket sawed in the thickets, waking to the scant warmth. Miss Scarlet stared with sorrowful eyes into the forest, and I brooded on the Ascendant in the Cathedral who had vowed to find me, and cursed the labyrinth of chance and careless science that had brought me here.

Finally Jane said, “What exactly is it you do, Wendy?”

A cunning thought came to me: a means to escape. I looked up at her and asked, “Do you want me to show you?”

“Wendy!” Miss Scarlet said; but Jane had already nodded.

“Come here,” I said, drawing her to me. She lifted her face to mine. I pushed the hair back from her eyes, stared into them for a long moment. Still a little suspicious of me (rightly so, Jane!) but bold and unafraid. Then I kissed her. She pulled back, embarrassed, but I held her chin and brought her mouth to mine, my tongue probing between her lips until she sighed and closed her eyes. I waited until I felt her breathing quicken, then nipped softly at her lip, once and again, until blood mingled with the sweet salt in her mouth.

Bewilderment; a fiery burst of amazement and I behold her confused spectrum of desire and fear, liquid rolling eyes and a rich odor of the stable. Jane’s consciousness surprisingly powerful, a heated core burning through me so that I groan with pleasure, fall back as it flows over me, the warmth of sun and thick matted fur beneath her fingertips, undiminished awe as she watches a cinnabar fox being born, the damp scrawny mess of a hatching finch, a viper’s demon face breaking through a leathery shell with its egg tooth—

I recall myself, force my will upon the serpent’s triangular head until the black agate chips of its eyes slant, grow pale and green and glowing and its shining scales take on the contours of fluttering leaves. Before me the Boy shimmers into sight, face and body rippling as though seen through waves of heated air, His eyes alone steady and unwavering, green tunnels leading into darkness.

I pull back to consciousness, sit up drunkenly to peer at Jane’s face twisted into a look of blank yet intense concentration. Her eyes fluttered open and she blinked, trying to bring me into focus.

“That, how did you, what—” she stammered, swaying. Miss Scarlet clutched her arm as Jane reached for something not quite there, leaf falling through autumn light or whirring emerald-hinged beetle. Marveling, she brought her hand before her face, then suddenly doubled over as though struck.

“Aaah—” she groaned. She twisting to stare at me, choking on her words. “Take him!—make it go! —”

I stared at her coldly: she was but another of those bright figures moving through a gray landscape. Her pleas faded to a whisper of despair, the sigh of wind in leafless branches. Then I heard Miss Scarlet’s shrill voice, chattering and keening and it was that I could not bear, it was that which finally drew me back—

“Help her, Wendy! Please—”

I turned from her, bowed my head to meet Jane’s eyes. Dull now and exhausted, their light extinguished as she contemplated what He offered her, the wasted fields and stony ground that would give birth to no more birds, no more serpents or sambars or black-eyed vixens. Only livid sky to see and ashes to taste for eternity, only this and nothing more.

“Look at me,” I said. I squeezed my eyes so tightly closed that tears welled from them. I summoned Him, forced Him to turn that implacable gaze from Jane to me, His glittering emerald eyes staring without anger or surprise, their reserve broken all the same as they froze upon me.

“Leave her,” I commanded.

He stared, cold and pitiless as a great cat disturbed at its repast. Then, slowly, He smiled, gnashing His small white teeth as He acceded me this small triumph; and faded into nothing.

The remainder of our trip to the Zoo was subdued. Jane crept back to consciousness, shaken as a child waking from a nightmare. Like a child she recovered quickly, although her eyes darted distrust as she walked beside me, and she held herself a little distant even from Miss Scarlet. Miss Scarlet was quiet upon her antlered mount, the sambar the only one of us unshaken, if silent as the rest.

My own thoughts were bleak ones. I felt a growing sense of shame at what I had done, and an odd bewilderment: because how was it that I was feeling shame? How was it that I felt anything and everything these days, until it seemed I was a roiling caldron of joys and terrors spilling over to scald those who loved me, those whom Justice had named as the only wall between myself and the dark?‘ Was that how I had pushed Him back, the Boy in the tree? Was it as Dr. Harrow had dreamed: that exposure to sensation, to real human emotion and not the refined chemistries of HEL , had rived new channels through the scars in my brain, so that I now began to feel what I had distilled from the hearts of others for all these years?

And could it be that feeling these things made one stronger, not weak and stupid as Anna and Gligor and myself had always thought? Strong enough that my own tongue might one day drown out the Small Voices, and my own eyes lock with the Boy’s and force Him back into the empty lands beyond sleep and dreaming?

But I did not know any of this; only guilt and sorrow and apprehension of the long night ahead. To ease the trek I went over my lines, and found myself repeating what Miss Scarlet had told me when we first met:

They that have power to hurt and will do none,

That do not do the thing they most do show …

Pondering these words, I came to the northwest part of the City, where I had never been before: where ancient gates rose from the trees and rubble to enclose the Zoological Gardens, and where if one stood upon the yellowing turf beneath the Regent’s Oak one might glimpse in the near distance the black cusp of the Engulfed Cathedral stabbing at the sky.

All was in an uproar when we arrived. A spotted cat, Rufus Lynx’s namesake, had escaped. It was to have been led by a very young Paphian girl (looking much relieved by the turn of events) to the center of the grass-grown amphitheater where our play would progress, and there presented with pretty ceremony to the Regent as the festivities began.

“Mmm! Jane Alopex! Mmm, they were looking for you in the Paradise Aviary, mmm mmm—”

A short heavyset man puffed up to greet us as we entered the Zoo barricades, waving back the two gatekeepers who hurried to his side.

“Rufus!” exclaimed Jane Alopex, dropping the sambar’s bridle and wiping her hands on her breeches.

“Yes yes, mmm, hallo, Rufus Lynx, mmm, Scarlet Pan, yes, h’lo, mmm, Aidan, yes yes yes—”

Nodding, he shook all our hands, not excluding the abashed Jane’s. The Regent was nearly bald, with a soft fine fringe of dark hair that might once have been red and stuck out in uneven peaks about his pink skull. This, along with his habit of humming to himself and his saffron tunic, gave him the manner of an agitated cockatiel. He wore muck-stained boots and bright trousers spattered with dirt and flecks of birdseed, and barely came up to my chin. He expressed vague pleasure at meeting Miss Scarlet once again, but scarcely seemed to see me at all. He was intent only upon recapturing the fugitive lynx.

“Now Jane, mmm, come along, it’s frightened the nesting hoopoes into the rafters and Fauna Avis seems to think you’re the only one can get them down again, mmm mmm.”

He took Jane’s arm and started to walk off with her, leaving the sambar to the care of the two gatekeepers. Jane patted it goodbye and waved at Miss Scarlet, then gazed at me coldly. But after a moment she grinned wryly. “I’ll find you and Scarlet later,” she said, and sauntered off.

This left me alone with Miss Scarlet. The early afternoon’s cool breeze licked at my neck and I shivered.

“Come, Wendy,” Miss Scarlet said in a low voice, slipping her small hand into mine. “I’ll show you where I grew up.”

We started along a neat little path of crushed tarmac, weeds and dead plants trimmed from its borders. In the near distance several odd buildings poked through the mesh of leafless trees and tall wild grasses. On the paths between these raced figures clad brightly as Jane Alopex, carrying buckets and trays and brooms in a rumpus of activity such as I had never seen elsewhere in the City.

We passed a red-roofed pagoda with a wrought-iron stork standing one-legged at each end of its peak. Two real storks stalked splenetically between these effigies, ugly and bald and with beady eyes as bloodshot as a Senator’s. When they met in the roof’s middle they paused, flapped their wings and clacked their bills together dolefully before continuing on their brooding perambulation.

“The Bird House,” explained Miss Scarlet. She waved at the storks, who glared down disapprovingly as we walked past.

Next was a stark glass and steel structure that gleamed coldly in the sun. Amorphous figures fluttered in some of its dark windows. In others tiny furred faces pressed close against the glass to stare out at us with wide mad eyes, baring their teeth and scrabbling at the glass as we went by. Miss Scarlet grew tight-lipped at the sight of them and quickened her pace, head bowed. After this a gentle slope rose before us, topped by a mock gothic cathedral with stone geckos and chameleons instead of gargoyles perched upon its eaves.

“You look uneasy,” said Miss Scarlet. She nodded as we passed a young boy pushing a wheelbarrow full of stones. “Which is understandable.”

I grimaced. I was not accustomed to having others know what I was thinking. Miss Scarlet laughed, her fingers tightening about mine. “When I first met you, Wendy, your face was blank as a block of wood. But now!”

She stopped and drew herself up, her dark agile face contorting as she mimicked my expressions: alarm, fear, wonder, pique, delight.

“I don’t look like that,” I said, offended.

“See for yourself.” From the satin reticule at her waist she withdrew a tiny mirror set in a sheath of aluminum. I grabbed it and tilted it before my face.

“I look exactly the same,” I pronounced. But as I squinted at my reflection I noted with surprise the new constellation of freckles arrayed across my cheeks. I pushed back a wisp of hair at my temple and rubbed the fleshy nodule hidden beneath. It felt smaller, less swollen. When I tipped the mirror to peer at it I saw that the scar tissue had indeed grown smoother. The node itself seemed to be shrinking. Turning to inspect its mate on the other temple I saw that it was no longer than my thumbnail. I let my hair fall back to cover the scars and returned the mirror to Miss Scarlet. She replaced it, then stroked her throat wistfully.

“I don’t suppose mine will ever disappear,” she said. She indicated a curving grass-grown pathway that crept over the hill. I followed as she clambered up, holding her skirts to keep them from dragging in the high yellow grass. “The Zoologists don’t have the sort of refined instruments that the Ascendants used with you. I’ll bring these scars to my grave.”

I winced as a long briar tendril whipped back into my face. “Mine weren’t supposed to heal.” I slapped the dust and clinging seed pods from my trousers, straightening as we stood at the top of the little rise. “And for all I know they’re not healing at all. I’ve had no medication for months now. Maybe this is terrible for me. Maybe I’m dying.”

I pressed a finger to my temple, biting my lip as I realized I felt nothing: no customary ache as though I grazed against bruised flesh, no tremor of pain or longing triggered by the random firing of nerves. I was afraid then, to think that I might be losing my sole conduit for the only emotions I had ever known, those channeled into me at HEL through Emma Harrow.

“But maybe it is good for you, Wendy,” said Miss Scarlet. She pulled a burdock sticker from her skirt and popped it into her mouth. “Maybe the medication made you sick. Maybe now you can begin to get well.”

I shuddered at the thought of being so exposed to raw sensation. “No! I hear Voices. I see faces in the air. I had a seizure this morning and almost killed your friend Jane. I will never be well, Miss Scarlet.” I smiled bitterly. “I am as you see me: a Player only.”

Miss Scarlet nodded. She raised a finger as though to make a point but then stopped. “Well, perhaps. But I will show you something while we wait for Toby and the rest. Just don’t tell him that I missed my nap.”

I smiled and motioned for her to lead on.

Before us swept the curved gray buttresses of the faux gothic Reptile House. Lizards and serpents of chipped green enamel clung to its crumbling walls, half-hidden by a sheath of Virginia creeper gone crimson since the first frost. On the lintel above the main entrance stood a stegosaurus of red sandstone, its lumbering gait captured by some artisan centuries earlier. Crouching at its tail was a little carven mouse, winking slyly at onlookers below.

“At least it’s always warm in here,” said Miss Scarlet as we passed through the entrance.

I sighed gratefully as a blast of heated air rolled over me. It was dark inside, illuminated only by squares of greenish light coming from glass cages set into the walls. An overwhelmingly pungent smell pervaded the chambers, rotting flesh and rotting vegetation; but the floor was immaculately swept and the glass fronting the cages was so clean that more than once I paused to prod it with my finger, just to be certain there was something between myself and the cages’ sluggish inhabitants. The place was empty, although brooms and mops and nets stacked in corners seemed to caution that its Keepers would return soon.

“They’re busy getting ready for this evening,” said Miss Scarlet. She stopped in front of a large cage. She eyed its inhabitant with loathing—a serpent coiled about a dead stump. “Are you warmer yet, Wendy?”

I nodded, stooping to stare at a speckled viper. It regarded me balefully, black tongue flicking in and out, then without warning lunged toward us and struck the glass. I stumbled backward, tripping over Miss Scarlet, then laughing a little breathlessly helped her to her feet. A small bloody streak smeared the glass. On the floor of the cage the viper lashed back and forth, trying to find us in the darkness.

“Did you see that?” I exclaimed, pushing my hair from my eyes. “I’ve never seen a—”

I turned to see that my friend had collapsed against the wall, heedless of the brooms that had toppled beside her. “Miss Scarlet! Are you all right?”

As I knelt beside her she nodded. “The snake,” she said faintly. “I can’t bear them.”

I helped her to her feet and looked around for someplace to sit.

“Really, I’m fine, Wendy—Here, turn at this corner, I wanted to show you something in here.”

We hurried past a huge display area covered by a glass roof, where crocodiles like immense and idle machines floated in stagnant pools. Crested white herons stepped nimbly from one plated back to another, dipping their bills to spear fish from the dark water. Miss Scarlet looked away and held her breath until we were safely past, but I glanced back, marveling that they never moved.

“The Herp Lab,” Miss Scarlet muttered, almost to herself. “This way, if I remember it right. Or not?”

She stopped in front of a case which held a pair of bloated golden toads, each bigger than my head but with lovely round jeweled eyes wise and tender as an aging courtesan’s. “Yes. This way.”

We rounded a corner into darkness. No cages here. The only light trickled from chinks in the ceiling high above.

“They used to leave it open, we’d come in here, Jane and I and some of others—Jane was a clever child, she taught me how to run the old machines—” “’She halted, quite out of breath, and gestured toward a tall arched door, oak inlaid with stained glass. Very old figured metal letters spelled out HERP LAB/AUDI VIS AL FAC ITY. I was surprised when the knob turned freely in my hand, and Miss Scarlet laughed in relief.

“Oh! I was so afraid it might be locked—not that anyone would dream of stealing anything, but— you know, policy changes.”

I nodded as we stepped inside. The door creaked loudly as it shut behind us. As if in answer a chorus of bell-like voices chirped from a corner of the room.

“Peepers,” said Miss Scarlet. Cages filled this end of the laboratory, some of glass, some of metal or plastic, some crude shells of wood and wire mesh. The room had a dry sugary smell, no longer merely warm but hot. I wiped my brow and blew down the front of my shirt. Miss Scarlet looked comfortable, in spite of her heavy crinolines. Holding up her skirts, she crossed to the far side of the lab, fastidiously avoiding looking into any of the cages. Against a windowless wall a number of very old machines were arranged on metal shelves, most of them sheathed in silver or black metal, a few with their intricate inner anatomies exposed to show wheels and gears and shining levers.

“You’re in the Nursery,” she called, waving me to join her. I could scarcely see her head poking above the uneven rows of cages. “But they store projectors and videos and cinematographs here, too. Come see.”

I walked slowly, pausing often to peer into cages where ruby-throated anoles stalked each other up and down pale bamboo shoots, and agamas blinked beneath the heat lamps as they guarded leathery eggs, and where in a cool dim corner the deceptively big-voiced peepers proved to be only three tiny frogs now silent at my approach: translucent throats deflated, their mottled brown backs crossed with red as though someone had X’ed them with a fingernail. I passed them and stopped in front of a narrow cage labeled HOGNOSED SNAKE . Half a dozen eggs lay in a depression in the sand, eggs the color of spoiled milk, the approximate shape and length of my thumb. As I watched one shifted very slightly. I thought of Jane, recalled her joy at witnessing the birthing vipers. And suddenly I wanted to stay to watch them, to lose myself among all these new small lives. I felt a violent pang as I recalled Jane’s accusing eyes, and remembered sadly the lizard I had killed the morning I escaped with Justice from HEL .

“Wendy!”

I started. Miss Scarlet stood atop a wire chair and beckoned me, brow furrowed. “Ugh! You can’t be mooning over those things! You’re worse than Jane.”

I shrugged and crossed the lab. Several yards of empty space divided the Herp Lab from where the machines were stored. A single diatom lantern was suspended from the ceiling, its silvery filaments casting bluish light over the silent machines. The air smelled pleasantly of cedar.

“Hog-nosed snakes,” I said. “Hog-nosed snake eggs, actually.”

Miss Scarlet rolled her eyes. “How revolting! I despise serpents—I don’t suppose you can smell them, else you would too.”

“I never saw one before,” I said. “Except in pictures. So many things …”

My friend nodded, patting my arm. “Well, we haven’t an awful lot of time left before the others arrive.” She coughed discreetly. I turned to see that she had drawn her chair in front of a cinematograph. Pinpoints of red and green light shone at its edges. After a moment pearly sparks began to glimmer across the dull black screen.

“Wendy?”

She dipped her head to indicate a chair beside hers. From their corner of the room the peepers began to chime once more. We settled into our chairs and stared at the screen brightening before us.

I glanced at Miss Scarlet and saw that she was sitting bolt upright, her face rapt with an expectation so intent it might have been dread. The little screen cast greenish highlights across her smooth black face. She began to rock back and forth with excitement.

“What is it, Miss Scarlet?”

A louder, sweeter music drowned out the peepers’ song. Words flowed across the black screen in an elegant script, yellow and green and white, names it seemed; but they meant nothing to me.

“It is one of their histories,” she whispered. She clasped her hands together. “A very old story, I first saw it oh so many years ago and that was when I realized I was not the first, just as when I saw you I knew that you were another, Wendy—”

Colors swirled about the screen, formed vague lines, then took shape. A midnight sky speared by stars, tiny buildings clustered in a valley between dark and snowcapped mountains. A high voice singing to itself, so achingly sweet that I shivered and knotted my hands together. It was like one of the Small Voices, piercing me with a yearning that could never be fulfilled. I leaned forward to stare at the screen. A square of yellow light swelled into a window looking in upon a solitary old man and a room filled with toys and clocks, and unnoticed among these automatons a tiny figure, singing.

“What are they?” I said. Not real actors, surely? I had seen holos and videos and even films before, but never anything like this, never such colors and faces, no more alive than the Paphians’ scholiasts but strange and lovely all the same: and moving and speaking like human beings.

“It is an ancient history of those who were here before the First Ascension,” whispered Miss Scarlet. “It is one of their lost Arts. It has survived to show us the world as it truly was then.”

When I started to ask another question she put a finger to her lips and shook her head. “Watch, Wendy,” she said; “and you will understand why I dream that one day we may become Truly Human, you and I.”

So I watched and listened to a story like nothing I had ever seen before. Oh, histories I knew; but even as Dr. Harrow taught us of these she had cautioned us:

“There are too many histories now. Once there was only one, and the world was a simpler place. But now every Ascension has its Historian, its Poet, its Savior, its Traitor.” Memory of her bitter voice rang in my ears as she said, “Choose carefully the history you want, Wendy: it will determine the world you live in.”

The world on the cinematograph was not the one I had chosen. But as I watched the strange images race across the screen I knew it was Miss Scarlet’s world: one where the animals spoke, and the cruelty and kindness of humans was punished or rewarded; where audiences showered gold upon a marvelous fantoccio that danced and sang, and a man could love a creature made of wood. And as I untangled the threads that strung the tale together—selfishness and lies, laziness and arrogance and too late the bittersweet knowledge of love—I realized why she had wanted me to see this.

“She thinks it’s like me,” I thought, mortified.

And, shrilling like the peepers, the Small Voices whirred inside my head, It’s you, it’s you, it’s you.

Something moved behind me. I turned to see Jane Alopex shutting the lab door, shaking her head so that I would remain quiet as she crossed the room to join us.

“Look,” Miss Scarlet said as the girl pulled another chair beside hers and sat. The long black hairs on her neck stood up out of her high collar. I smelled the ripe odor she gave off before a performance, fear and arousal and anticipation all at once.

“I see,” said Jane, letting the chimpanzee crawl into her lap. I looked back at the screen. A woman in long blue robes floated there. She reminded me of the images of the Magdalene I had seen at the House Miramar, except that she had wings. I wondered if the Magdalene was that old; if before the First Ascension Her followers had worshipped at the Cathedral as others did now.

The blue lady on the screen said, “If you learn to be brave, honest, and unselfish, then you will become a real boy.” Miss Scarlet stared raptly. I knew that if she had been capable of weeping—one of the many things she dreamed of—she would have cried. I stared down at my knees. I could never have chosen such a world for myself.

A little longer and the story ended. We sat in silence, Jane and Miss Scarlet and I. After a minute or two Jane leaned forward and clicked something so that the screen went black and the machine’s hum was stilled. Miss Scarlet slid from her lap to the floor and walked a few steps away from us.

“Well,” said Jane as she stood and stretched. “I figured I’d find you here. I see that Scarlet has shown you her favorite story.”

I nodded, continuing to stare at the empty screen.

“She loves that one. When she was only a few years old;— after the operation …”

She lowered her voice. “One of the Keepers set up a cinematograph in her room. That was the first one she ever saw, that one you just watched.” She pointed at the machine, then glanced over at Miss Scarlet standing by herself at the edge of the room, her back to us.

“She thinks it’s true,” Jane whispered. Her dark eyes glazed with pity as they met mine. “You could never tell her otherwise—not that I’d want to, it would break her heart. And really, look at her! She’s famous, the entire City knows her and loves her, you would think that would be enough.

“But she never thought it was enough. She’s like the Paphians. Dreams that someday the Magdalene will come to save them all: overthrow the Ascendants, teach the Curators a lesson in humility, turn a chimpanzee into a woman.” She shrugged, sighing. “Turn me into a fox, if I had my wish! Then I wouldn’t have to worry about all this nonsense tonight. Ha!”

She laughed, shaking the hair from where it flopped into her eyes. “They found the lynx,” she called to Miss Scarlet. The chimpanzee turned, face rumpling into a smile. “But not before it killed Anatole Equestris’s favorite bird-of-paradise.”

“Oh dear,” said Miss Scarlet. “Poor Anatole! I meant to ask him for another of those feathered flywhisks he made for me last year.”

She rejoined us, tsk-tsking over the state of Jane’s breeches and a fresh bloody cut upon the girl’s arm. “I don’t know how you can stand it, Jane. Those—”

She hesitated, searching for the right word. “Those animals, those barbarians! You with your carnivores and now you’ve got Wendy looking at snakes… .”

She shook her head. “But what time is it? Wendy and I should be thinking about meeting the others and setting up for The Tempest.”

Miss Scarlet gasped when Jane told her the hour. “And I meant to visit Koko and Effie!”

“Oh, there’s still time for that,” insisted Jane. “They’re right on the way to the amphitheatre.”

Miss Scarlet looked discomfited, but after a moment sighed. “I suppose I should: it’s been almost a year. It’s just so hard …”

I followed them, looking back regretfully at the terrarium where the peepers clung to the glass until we had passed out of the Herp Lab, when I heard their ringing song once more.

Outside it had grown cooler. Dark clouds sailed across a blue sky rapidly turning gray. But there was a buoyancy to the air as we crossed the wide avenue where the Zoologists strolled, wearing clean tunics of green and russet and yellow, laughing and calling to Jane and Miss Scarlet, and even acknowledging me with bright smiles.

“They know you are one of Toby’s troupe, Wendy,” Jane proudly announced as we passed a group of laughing women carrying hooded gerfalcons, like small gloomily cowled monks perched upon their wrists. The women giggled. One who was hawkless pressed three fingers to her lips and winked, then rubbed her fingers across her palm to show her interest in me. I looked away.

“Aidan, I mean,” Jane corrected herself, glancing to see if I had taken offense.

“That’s all right,” I said. “As long as no one else hears you.”

“Oh, they won’t,” said Jane. “No one ever listens to me. Here, Scarlet—a new shortcut to the Primate House since you’ve been back. Follow me.”

The Zoologists had laid an orderly path of smooth stones, with goldenrod growing alongside it and the day’s ration of autumn leaves already raked up and burning nearby. Miss Scarlet coughed at the whiff of smoke and hung back from Jane and me. At the end of the path stood the Primate House. Not a large building, but constructed of glass and steel and other metals so that it seemed more massive than it really was. Over the centuries most of the glass had broken, to be replaced by boards and makeshift walls of iron bars salvaged from other cages. A sort of dry moat separated us from the overgrown habitats, empty except for sparrows and squirrels who dug industriously for acorns beneath the leafless oaks.

“They’re inside for the winter,” Jane explained. Miss Scarlet kept her head down, still walking a little behind us. Jane raised her eyebrows. “Scarlet, we don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

“No, no,” the chimpanzee replied. She gazed at a small area barren of grass, the dun-colored earth hacked up and spattered with dried feces and rotting carrots. “I’ll feel worse if I don’t.”

We entered by a heavy metal door, guarded by an older man who yawned and nodded as the gate clanged after us. “Hello, Jane,” he said. “Scarlet Pan, how are you?”

She nodded, face drawn. Although this building was as neat and well-swept as the Reptile House, and better lit, she lifted her skirts with a grimace, as though afraid to let them touch the floor. I wrinkled my nose at the smell. A heavy musky air, cool but not very fresh. It was noisy, too, as we ducked down the corridor that led into the great covered courtyard where the primates were housed.

“Ah, Magdalene,” Miss Scarlet said beneath her breath.

Jane bit her lip. “They’re really very well cared for,” she told me. “What can we do? We are their Keepers, they all would have died years and years ago if not for us.”

On every side immense bars rose from floor to ceiling. Behind them, on sloping concrete floors stained by centuries of damp and mold and urine, squatted figures much like Miss Scarlet. Only these creatures were huge, bigger than a man, with sorrowful heavy-browed faces that scarcely took note of us as we stopped to look at them. One cradled a little animal, a miniature of the great monsters rocking or sitting on the floor about her. The baby peered at us with inquisitive black eyes, but its dam gave us only a passing glance as she bowed her head to the infant. Her huge arms curled about the baby, her fingers moving in front of its wizened face in a repetitive series of gestures. When she dipped her head I saw that a number of black wires protruded from a shaved portion of her skull. Beside me Miss Scarlet shivered. My hair stood on end when I heard the creature in the cage mutter hoarsely, “Men, men, men. Go.”

Jane Alopex looked away. “Come on, Scarlet, there’s no need for this … ”

“But there is,” Miss Scarlet retorted. “If I am ever to become truly human I must learn from these poor souls—”

“Why torture yourself?” said Jane angrily. She stopped in front of a cage where a single animal, massive and barrel-chested, with long matted auburn hair and hands the size of a bunch of plantains, crouched in front of a flattened sheet of polished metal. It regarded its distorted reflection impassively, fingers working the same strange patterns in the air, brow furrowed as though it sought to remember something.

“They are not torturing themselves,” Miss Scarlet said at my elbow. Her pupils dilated and her hackles stiffened. “You have imprisoned them—”_,

“They would die without us!” Jane repeated. I left them and crossed to another cage, my heart pounding. In this one a number of small monkeys leaped and fought and howled. Several of them stopped and raced to the edge of the cage to stare up at me, paws writhing between the bars to pat at my knees as they squealed and chirped. But after a moment their cries grew petulant, their tiny black fingers clawing angrily when I did not acknowledge them. I pulled myself away.

In the next cage a family of the tall red-haired apes reclined against a log. The largest groomed one of the younger ones, parting its long fur so that I could see the scars where it too had been venesected. I hurried away to lean against a crooked metal railing, trying to breathe through my mouth so as not to smell the stench of fear and numbing boredom that seeped through that place.

“—then why do you never try to speak to them, Jane, why these endless games in the name of research—”

Jane stalked over to me, throwing her hands into the air as Miss Scarlet followed her, arguing. I pressed my thumbs to my eyes and breathed deeply. The sound of Miss Scarlet’s shrill voice seemed to alarm the other animals in the Primate House. The small monkeys began to screech, the sullen mother ape to grunt, “Go, go, go, “in a guttural voice that grew gradually louder and louder.

“Scarlet, you know I hate it worse than you do—”

I opened my eyes. Beside Jane, Miss Scarlet swung her arms up and down furiously, heedless of her stiff garment tearing as she bobbed on her heels. “Why did you ever teach them, can’t you see they are trying to remember—”

I let out my breath and asked, “What are they trying to remember?”

Miss Scarlet’s long teeth gnashed as she cried, “Speech! They are descended from geneslaves, they taught them once to speak with their hands—”

“Hundreds of years ago!” exploded Jane. “They don’t know what they’re doing anymore, it’s—”

“Then teach them!” cried Miss Scarlet. The monkeys exploded into screams and hoots of fright. Miss Scarlet crouched, rose up on her hind legs as though she were going to spring at Jane. Jane moved closer to me, her hand fumbling at her waist for her pistol. Then Miss Scarlet whirled and ran across the room to the cage nearest the outer door. In front of it she stopped, stock still, shoulders drooping and long arms dragging so that her knuckles grazed the floor. Jane turned to me, her eyes filled with tears.

“She gets like this every time she visits them,” she said, her fingers dropping from the pistol. She motioned me to follow her to where Miss Scarlet stood in front of the last cage.

Two pathetic figures squatted inside it. They stared dully at a stream of urine threading to a rusted grate in the concrete floor. Grizzle-headed, naked, with red and listless eyes, they were still indisputably of Miss Scarlet’s blood and kind. She hunched before them, her arms enfolded over her head, eyes shut, making a soft hoo-hoo sound as she swayed back and forth. Jane and I stopped behind her. I drew my hands to my throat—hairless, no scars there—and my eyes burned. But I could not cry: not when tears were denied my dear guide, who squatted before a cage and moaned with an animal’s mute and ageless grief. I stood beside Jane Alopex, the girl staring at her feet with her hands clenched at her sides. In the cage sat the two chimpanzees, one of them scratching at the dirty floor, the other raising its head to regard Miss Scarlet. Dirt caked the lines about its eyes, and a fly lit upon its cheek before it dipped its head again to gaze at the concrete. Miss Scarlet buried her face in her paws.

“Come, Scarlet,” Jane said after a few more minutes. “Your friends will be here soon.”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” Miss Scarlet said in a low voice. She stood, turning from the cage to take my hand. “Forgive me, Jane. Wendy.”

The monkeys hooted as we crossed the courtyard, and one of the great apes bared its teeth at us. At the door of the Primate House the Keeper informed us that Toby and the other Players had arrived by pantechnicon and were already setting up in the amphitheater.

“Best hurry,” he said, patting Miss Scarlet’s head as she passed. “Come again, Scarlet. We miss you around here.”

Miss Scarlet composed herself, smiling wanly. By the time we reached the path to the amphitheater she was calmly discussing the evening’s performance; but she avoided looking into any of the cages.

Afternoon had faded into a clouded but promising evening. I felt that the day’s heightened strangeness, its revelations and fears, all seemed to be leading up to this performance and this place: an ancient amphitheater dug into the earth, where already the first palanquins of costumed revelers gathered in small groups, and where I could spy Toby and the rest of the troupe struggling to unload a striped pantechnicon.

The amphitheater had been built into the hillside facing the Engulfed Cathedral, that sinister finger pointed accusingly at the sunset. Torchieres burned between rows of stone benches set into the damp grass, and a few children ran shrieking between their pockets of yellow light. A crowd of Zoologists had gathered to watch Toby and Justice and Fabian contend with the sets for The Tempest. A pair of striped horses were hitched to the gaily painted pantechnicon, the wagon piled with baskets of costumes and props. The horses whickered and kicked viciously at Fabian as he swung a papier-măché column from the wagon onto the hillside.

“How thoughtful of you to drop by,” he called as we slipped through the crowd. He tossed me a hamper, then turned to where Justice panted up the hillside.

“Perfect timing, Aidan. All the hard work’s done,” said Justice, wiping his brow as he climbed the last few steps to join us. “Toby was looking for you.”

His hair had fallen from its thick braid, and he wore the heavy dark-blue smock we donned when building or striking sets, worn and stained: very much a Player and not a Child of the Magdalene. But I grinned to see him anyway. Glancing around for Gitana or Mehitabel, I spotted them with Toby at the bottom of the slope, stringing lantern globes across the grassy sward that would be our stage. I hefted the basket Fabian had thrown to me and started down the hillside with it. Justice grabbed another hamper and hurried after me, sliding on the slick grass.

“I wish Toby had let you come with us,” I said. Behind us I heard Jane’s hoarse laughter and the excited voices of other Zoologists greeting Miss Scarlet. “Miss Scarlet showed me a cinematograph—”

Justice shrugged. “There was work to be done. And I had to go over my lines—”

“With Mehitabel?” I sniffed. Justice looked back at me, grinning.

“Yes, as a matter of fact. She’s really quite talented.”

I set the hamper on the ground, pretending to tighten its fastenings. “I would have helped you, if you wanted.”

From the stage area echoed giggles and Toby’s booming voice lamenting, “Not that one! Sweet Mother, the girl has no sense at all!”

Toby raised his head and waved at me impatiently. “It’s about damn time, Aidan! The stupid girl’s brought the wrong costume for Caliban.”

Justice laughed, steadying me as I swung the hamper back onto my shoulder. “Maybe one of Rufus Lynx’s people can help us find something,” he said as Toby stormed after the giggling Mehitabel. We ran the last few steps down the hillside and dropped the hampers onto the grass. “There’s still a little time.”

Gitana adjusted her spectacles and glared at him. “You distracted her, Justice. Toby is very upset.”

From behind a papier-măchè column came a shriek, followed by the soft report of a slap. The column toppled to reveal Toby and Mehitabel, the girl’s face streaked with tears, Toby rubbing his cheek ruefully.

“I suppose Aidan can improvise a costume,” said Toby, striding over to join Justice and me. Gitana glared at him, then stalked off to take Mehitabel by the hand and lead her up the hill. Toby watched them go, relieved.

The girls sauntered out of sight. On the hilltop Miss Scarlet and Jane perched on the edge of the pantechnicon, talking animatedly with a half-dozen Zoologists. Most of the Curators had wandered into the twilight, flanked by Paphians in feathered masks and beaks of gilt paper in honor of the evening’s theme, A Masque of Owls. Stars pricked through the deepening sky. In the distance I could hear faint music.

“There’s a dinner first,” said Toby. “Let it be noted that as usual we have been asked to sup with our hosts after the play.” He stooped to retrieve a scarf blown from its hamper. “These damn Curators must think we perform better on an empty stomach. Ah, well. Come on, Caliban, let’s figure out how you’ll be dressed tonight. Did Miss Scarlet get her nap?”

To the strains of music piping down from the masque we readied the little stage. I stayed close to Justice, offering to help him with his lines. He refused, but seemed glad enough of my company. When the attention of the others had turned to preparing a smokepot for one of my entrances he drew me behind a tree.

“Did you mean what you said before, Wendy?” he asked. “When you said you wished I’d come with you?”

“Yes.” I took his face in my hands and tilted it to the glowing torchlight. I stared at him a moment and then kissed him without biting (though I wanted to) and without trying to read his desires. They were apparent enough.

“None of that,” Fabian snapped as he crossed upstage with an armful of props.’ “Haven’t you got your costume yet, Caliban?” He prodded me with the blunted edge of a sword. I pushed Justice away and stumbled behind the gingko as though searching for something; but not before I saw Fabian wink at Justice, and Justice himself turn to stare after me in delight.

Gitana and Mehitabel returned soon, having left the feasting early. Mehitabel looked flushed and happy, owing no doubt to the contents of a silver decanter she pulled from beneath her skirts. In a tiny space made by stringing several sheets between gingko trees Miss Scarlet rested on a stack of heavy pillows, finally getting her nap. Her soft snores mingled with the creaks of crickets and the occasional whoop that echoed down from the Regent’s birthday dinner.

An hour or so later the Zoologists and their Paphian guests began to straggle down into the amphitheater. Impossible to recognize the Paphians behind their elaborate headdresses and glittering dominos, although they made mocking bows to us, gloved fingers raised to masked faces. One seemed particularly glad to see Mehitabel peeking coyly from behind a tree ablaze with white candles. The older Zoologist children pranced down the slope, carrying torches and globes of ignis flora for their elders, many of whom had by now succumbed to either lust or drink. They leaned heavily upon the arms of their Paphian escorts, or called boisterously to one another, mimicking the bleats and yelps of their animal charges and inspiring the Zoo’s unseen inhabitants to respond vigorously from their prisons in the surrounding trees. I spotted the young girl who had been chosen to present the ceremonial lynx to the Regent. Wearing a dove-gray robe and arching headdress of emerald plumage she chattered happily at Rufus Lynx’s side. It seemed the actual lynx would not be appearing tonight. The festivities would continue with our play.

Behind the curtains that designated “backstage” the Players gathered their props. Miss Scarlet rose from her nap. I assisted her into a gown, groomed her to assuage her stage fright, and shook out Miranda’s blond beribboned wig.

“But where is your Caliban costume, Wendy?” she asked. “You can’t double in that —”

She pointed at the white shift spangled with silver spiderwebs that I wore as Ariel.

I reached beneath an overturned basket and withdrew a torn crimson tunic, the one Fabian had been wearing when we had our cheerful backstage scuffle. I slipped it over Ariel’s costume and rubbed my face with dirt. I mussed my hair and stuck a few dead leaves behind my ears for good measure.

“There,” I announced, leering at Miss Scarlet and shambling to her side. “Caliban: the Gaping One himself.”

Miss Scarlet shook her head. She tapped her foot, bent to flick a twig from the sole of her high-buttoned boot, and looked up at me with clouded eyes.

She said, “Wendy, you can’t go on like that. There’s a houseful of Paphians out there: you’ll cause a riot. This is not a good idea.”

“Too late: it’s the only one I’ve got.” From the slopes of the amphitheater rang a chorus of bleary voices singing “The Saint-Alaban’s Song.” If we didn’t start soon the audience would be too unruly to play to. I shut my eyes, summoned the image of the Boy until His surge of imprisoned rage flooded me, helping me focus my impression of Caliban. That metallic tang in the back of my throat; a twinge of fire behind my eyes. Breathing deeply, I pushed back the shadowy figure groping through the darkness for me. I turned to bow to Miss Scarlet. Before she could warn me again I pulled aside the curtain and left her, scooping up my little pouch of cosmetics and taking my place behind the largest tree abutting the stage area.

In the middle of the grass stood Fabian. He cleared his throat and announced, “In honor of the Birthday of the Regent of Zoologists, Rufus Lynx, there will now be presented The Tempest, as adapted for this stage by Toby Rhymer and performed by this troupe.”

Catcalls from the inebriated Zoologists. On the bench fronting the stage Rufus Lynx beamed, flanked by several Illyrians holding feathered masks in their laps. At the end of the row sat Jane Alopex. She spied me and waved. I waggled a finger at her (very unprofessional) and stepped back into the shadows.

My first entrance as Ariel provoked cheers from the Paphians. But this was nothing compared to their excitement when I reappeared a moment later as Caliban, red tunic askew over Ariel’s gossamer. Leaves fell from my hair as I lumbered toward Toby, magnificent in his sorcerer’s robes and turban. I cursed Prospero boldly and turned to snarl at Miranda cowering behind her father.

“Greetings, cousin!” a woman yelled from the hillside. From the corner of my eye I saw a Paphian stagger to her feet, a coronet of macaw feathers dipping rakishly over her brow. She bowed and made the Paphian’s beck before the man beside her pulled her back down. But other Paphians took up her cry, saluting me as Aidan and Raphael and Baal-Phegor, the demon they called the Naked Lord. The Zoologists craned their heads and tried vainly to silence their guests.

Toby gave me a dangerous look, gazing fixedly at my costume as he finished the scene. I made a hasty exit to the wrong side to avoid confronting him. Fabian whistled softly as he slipped past me onstage, shaking his head. In the shadows behind one of the torchieres Justice waited, and pulled me to him in the darkness.

“Did you hear them?” I whispered gleefully. “ ‘Lord Death, Lord Baal!’”

From the other side of the stage came Toby’s voice reminding me of my cue. I motioned for Justice to wait, and began to sing offstage in Ariel’s voice:

“ ‘ … Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange …’”

As I sang I tore off the red tunic, spat into my hands, and tried to rub the dirt from my cheeks. I was so elated I was shaking, and reached for Justice’s shoulder to steady myself.

“Shh!” He glanced over his shoulder, then pointed to the side of the hill where trees were crowded near the last row of benches. “Wendy, there are lazars here—”

I stared at him in disbelief. I smoothed Ariel’s gossamer webs and tugged a leaf from my brow. “Where?”

“On the hillside there, among the trees.”

A bellow as Toby repeated a line. Justice grimaced and ran onstage for a brief scene. He returned minutes later to whisper, “Look to the left when you next go on: hiding in the bushes by that big oak. I counted five, and something else with them too—aardmen, I think.”

Beneath the flaking powder and rouge his face was ashen, and his voice shook as he said, “It’s like the Butterfly Ball, Wendy—they’ll take us—”

“No,” I whispered,- glaring at the dim silhouettes as though I might destroy them with my eyes. “No, they won’t. I won’t let them.”

“Wendy! How can you—”

But here was another cue. I squeezed his hand and darted on, gave Ariel’s speech and flitted offstage. I had several minutes before I would be on again as Caliban. Behind the stage was a small stand of birch trees. I grabbed my tunic and crept among them unnoticed. I hugged close to one of the bigger trees and scanned the hillside for lazars.

And found them. My heart tumbled to see how near they were. They ringed the top of the amphitheater, hidden for the most part behind tall grass and brush. But they must be growing bolder. Several no longer crouched but stood to watch the play unfold—with great interest, it seemed, since in the wan torchlight I saw them covering their mouths to stifle their laughter. A quick count gave me ten. Not all children, either. I saw four tall figures standing close together, long hair matted and their faces filthy. But even from that distance I could make out the dusky skin and round eyes that marked them of the House High Brazil. They watched hungrily, like the weary dead envying the living their share of a feast.

A few steps away from them another tall form stood aloof: wiry and with long tangled hair, a silhouette that was somehow familiar to me. I stared for a long minute, trying to place her: no doubt an admirer from an earlier masque. I finally turned my attention to the other, stranger creatures pacing restlessly among the Paphians. At first I thought that more of the Zoo animals had escaped. Large powerful beasts, stooped like the apes I had seen in the Primate House, with spines curved as though they were unaccustomed to standing upright. I glanced at the stage to make sure I had not missed my cue, then turned back to them, fascinated. They slunk back and forth among the lazars, short wiry tails whipping through the high grass. Every few minutes they would pause to press close to the tallest Paphians. Pointed ears raised as they listened to the voices rising from the amphitheater. But large intelligent eyes glinted beneath their heavy brows, and their powerful forelegs ended in huge gnarled hands. I sniffed, caught their rank smell: canine servility and wolfish bloodlust just barely held in check by the presence of the human lazars.

Aardmen, and the enslaved Paphians who served the Madman in the Engulfed Cathedral. For the first time I realized how brave (or reckless) the Zoologists must really be, to live with them so near.

I turned back to survey my fellow Players and our audience. Zoologists and Paphians alike stared enthralled as Toby cast his spells and Miss Scarlet Pan defied him. For the moment the watchers on the hill were equally entranced. Lazars and aardmen tamed by an ancient play upon a stage: that would make a story Toby Rhymer himself would be proud to tell, only who would be left to hear it? A score of maddened chattering monkeys and countless caged beasts. I could make an escape now if I tried, might even alert Justice or some of the offstage Players to run to safety and leave the rest, actors and audience alike, to the mercy of King Mob.

But I could not leave them. I tried to imagine fleeing, tried to picture myself safe, taken in by one of the Paphian Houses or by the Curators, or even back at HEL . But each time I brought up an image of myself safe within the Home Room or a seraglio at the House Miramar, a gory shade would thrust it aside. Miss Scarlet with her head shaved and electrodes protruding from her skull, starving behind iron bars. Toby Rhymer torn by the ravening jaws of the aardmen. Jane Alopex fighting bravely until she fell “pierced by a lazar’s arrow. And worst of all the thought of Justice lying dead, his golden hair matted with blood and his blue eyes cold and empty.

Sudden anger tore through me, frustrated rage that I should be thus enslaved. My head swam as I stared at the stage where Toby gesticulated wildly and tossed handfuls of glitter. Prospero’s bitter words slashed through the air:

“ ‘Poor worm! Thou art infected;

This visitation shows it!’”

I nodded grimly. I could not leave them to die. Something bound me there to all of them, Justice and Miss Scarlet and sour Gitana, Jane Alopex and those nameless others, swaggering Zoologists and mincing Paphians and even the mute apes mindlessly signaling to one another in their barren cages. Voices whined in my ears: no longer the Voices of the dead, but the remembered words of those who watched or strutted nearby. Miss Scarlet reciting poetry, Justice weeping that he loved me, Jane Alopex’s hoarse laughter. I ground my teeth, trying to will myself to turn and flee. But it was no use now. For good or ill I had thrown my lot with this mess of Players and Whores and Curators. I would die with them if I had to. From the stage rang Fabian’s sweet tenor, reminding me that in a few moments I should make my next entrance. I pulled on my tunic, trying to think of some way to keep the renegade Paphians and aardmen from attacking. My bold words to Justice earlier had been mere bravado. But I felt an edge of exhilarated terror and expectation now, the Boy’s hypostate seething inside me: a leviathan beneath calm waters. I recalled again Miss Scarlet’s doggerel:

They that have power to hurt and will do none,

That do not do the thing they most do show …

And I felt terror and strength and desire all at once, knowing that I was going to do the one thing I should not do.

“Greetings, young Lord Death,” I whisper, and laugh.

I step to the edge of the stage, tense my body and focus on the image of a tree, new leaves and a softer air than stirs this late autumn night. My hands clench as I summon Him; very faintly the Small Voices wail, warning me—

‘“ No , Wendy! He is too strong, so cold, he is so cold! —”

I push them back, draw up in the image of the doomed twins among boughs of apple blossom, fragments of leaf and flower sparkling in the air and their high voices intoning:

Here we stand

Eye to hand and heart to head,

Deep in the dark with the dead.

The rush comes on, my heart hammers as though I have received a crystal pulse of adrenaline. As I step onstage I hear tiny frogs singing, whispered nonsense words; the creak of a branch breaking beneath a dangling form as a pendulum swings back from another time. My mouth fills with bitter liquid, a taste like hot copper. Through the air cascades the scent of apple blossom.

And He is there, green eyes shining with malicious joy as He sights me: a shimmering figure like something made of motes of light. The torches shine right through Him. I exhale and blink, try to clear my vision so that I can see the stage with its Players backlit by guttering lanterns. Waves of light ripple in the air before my face. Fabian lifts his head to greet me:

“Lo, now, lo!

Here comes a spirit of his, and to torment me …”

He stutters over his last line because suddenly he sees that there is something in the air between us: a spectral form, with hair like clear water and eyes that outshine the dying torches, a beautiful boy’s face and body turning from me to extend a white hand to the terrified actor. From the audience come gasps and muffled cries. Toby’s curses turn to loud amazement, and I hear Miss Scarlet cry my name.

I laugh, take a step toward the radiant phantasm commanding center stage. In the audience the Zoologists hush their Paphian guests. They are delighted, certain they are seeing some miracle of stagecraft engineered for their Regent’s birthday.

For a moment everything comes to a halt: the actors have forgotten their lines, the audience waits impatiently. On the hillside the grass rustles as the lazars creep toward the stage, and I hear the deep cough of the aardmen breathing. The Boy too waits, hand cupped coyly beneath His chin, emerald eyes winking.

And just when it seems that something terrible must happen—an aardman will leap from the underbrush to rip out Rufus Lynx’s throat; the Boy will take Fabian’s hand and lead him to suicidal despair; Mehitabel will shriek and ruin Miss Scarlet’s next entrance—just when I think I will collapse into a seizure and force the whole spectacle to some awful conclusion—

Justice strides onstage, so white with terror that his pale hair seems dark as blood in the firelight. With shaking voice he cries, “ ‘What’s the matter? Have we divels here?’”

A relieved sigh from the audience. The hidden figures in the trees grow still. My voice rings out as I shamble toward the glittering spectre, “ ’This spirit torments me!’”

Scattered applause from the Zoologists. Paphians call on the Magdalene with slurred whispers. I try to make eye contact with Fabian. It is hopeless. He stands frozen, hands raised to fend off the ethereal creature suspended in the air before him, gazing with cold yet proprietary calm upon the amazed audience.

Then, despite his own terror, Justice recites Fabian’s lines as well as his own, stumbling through his speech. I crouch and strike at the air, as though there are demons there, and reply:

“ ‘His spirits hear me;

For every trifle they are set upon me; sometime am I

All wound with adders, who with cloven tongues

Do hiss me into madness. Art thou afeard?’”

With unsteady voice Justice calls back, “ ‘No, monster, not I.’”

The Boy turns to regard me, His eyes glowing with merciless delight as I continue:

“‘Be not afeared, the isle is full of noises;

Sometime voices

That if I then had wak’d after long sleep

Will make me sleep again; and when I wak’d

I cried to dream again.’”

And as Justice replies, and Caliban groans and shouts, and finally Fabian breaks in with a line (not the right one), the Boy stares past them to me, then slowly disappears.

The audience erupted into applause. For a quarter-hour all was in an uproar. Toby and Miss Scarlet took the stage to try to bring some order. I bowed and lurched offstage, then raced to where I could scan the surrounding hillside. The lazars and aardmen had fled, presumably to bear news of this marvel to their master in the Cathedral.

All but one of them. She stood brazenly in sight of the audience below, her tousled blond hair aflame by torch light, her face raked by scars but no less recognizable to me now. Laughing softly she raised one hand and waved, calling out in a low voice:

“Hallo, Wendy! They killed Andrew, you know, and Merle and Gligor and Dr. Leslie and Dr. Silverthorn and everyone but me, everyone but Anna!”

Anna glanced over her shoulder, then called down, “I’m glad they’re dead, Wendy. Dr. Leslie lied to me, Andrew lied to me, they all lied to me, and now they’re dead, and soon I will be too.”

The wind brought her sweet cold laughter, and I shivered. She slapped at her face, as though an insect had stung her, then stared dazed into the empty air before recalling me and looking back down.

“Listen to me, Wendy!” she said. “You should be careful. They weren’t nice Doctors after all. That man, the Aviator—he’s looking for you. He’s crazier than Dr. Leslie was at the end. He knows you’re with those actors—

“Be careful, Wendy. Stay away from the Masque at Winterlong—”

She grimaced and brought her hands to her temples, as though she might scream with pain; but before I could call out to her she turned and stumbled into the darkness.

I returned to the amphitheater, stunned. Toby had calmed the crowd sufficiently for us to complete the play. I remember little of the performance. Several minor scenes were skipped, due to Mehitabel’s refusal to be onstage with me; but as Jane had told us that morning, no one noticed. And while thunderous cheers greeted me When I took my final bow, the faint sour odor of disappointment tainted the scene. There had been no further sign of the Gaping One. The Zoologists crawled over the stage searching for wires or other evidence of technological sorcery, but found nothing. I felt let down as well. My final speech went poorly, and my head throbbed. Worst of all was the memory of Anna’s sudden appearance, but I said nothing of this to anyone. Only Justice’s delight at having salvaged Fabian’s scene made the next few hours bearable.

I left the private party that followed as early as I could. While only Toby’s troupe and a half-dozen Zoologists and Paphians were present I was beset by questions, from Players and our hosts alike. Toby in particular was anxious to preserve the illusion that the spectral appearance onstage in Act Two had been carefully planned by himself. I revealed nothing, to Toby or anyone else. Piqued by my surly mood, Justice finally turned his attentions to Mehitabel. I reverted to sullen silence, then finally left. The party’s raucous laughter chased me out into the night, and I walked angry and alone about the Zoo grounds.

The night had grown cold. The rest of the masquers had retreated to the Lion House for the masque proper, whence streamed music and brilliant candlelight and more loud laughter. I avoided that part of the Zoo and headed down a narrow road. Overhead shone a three-quarter moon, dappling the barren earth with gray and white. I kicked dispiritedly among dead leaves and feathers fallen from avian costumes. I wondered why, if I was suddenly capable of feeling things, all I could feel was unhappy.

My rambling brought me at last to the huge gates of the Zoo’s entrance, now chained shut. In front of them reared the Regent’s Oak, a massive tree centuries old, gnarled and ominous in the moonlight. Through the iron barriers I saw the Engulfed Cathedral atop Saint-Alaban’s Hill: a grim black shape glowing with subtle colors, as though another, older moon cast its light upon it. I turned from this disturbing vision to lean against the Regent’s Oak. I rested my cheek against its rough skin and sighed.

I would leave now. It would be easy to scale the gates; I would make my way to the Cathedral and find certain death there. Miss Scarlet would be heartbroken, Toby furious at losing his prize actor. Perhaps Justice would blame himself for wasting this last evening with Mehitabel …

From behind me came a soft sound, a snort as of suppressed laughter. I whirled, half-expecting to see Justice there. But it was not he.

Beneath the cold moon stood the Boy: leaf-crowned, naked, His skin shimmering white. He seemed completely unaware of His surroundings, as though like a hummingbird He moved through a finer air than held these things, moon and trees and iron gates, and perceived them as some kind of mist. But He saw me, and acknowledged me with a bow. Mockingly I thought: but when He raised His head His emerald eyes regarded me with respect.

“Greetings, Lady,” He said. Laughter in that voice despite His serious demeanor. Laughter and what might have been pity, if He had seemed capable of it. He did not.

“I am called Aidan Arent.” I moved away from the oak and smoothed my hair, then looked down the hill to where the bright strains of the Masque of Owls echoed.

“They cannot hear us, Wendy.” The Boy shook his head, smiling. “And I know who you really are.”

“Why are you here?” I drew closer to the tree.

“Because you called me,” He said. “I always come when called.”

“How do you know my name?”

He laughed. “I have always known you and I have always known your name, Lady. I knew Aidan Harrow too, though he would not recognize me now.”

“Why wouldn’t he recognize you?” I asked. I took a wary step away from Him.

“Because to him I am horror and corruption, and while he calls me by one name it is not my only name,”

“And what name is that?” Suddenly I felt elated, almost bodiless. This was like a marvelous dream; like tapping some harnessed soul at HEL and discovering a secret strand of desire as yet untasted. I grinned, and He smiled at me. “Tell me, Boy.”

He parried, “What do you think it is, Lady?”

I frowned a little at being called Lady again. Perhaps He was mocking me, after all. “The Paphians call you the Gaping One.”

He narrowed his eyes, nodding slightly: as though He were an Ascendant rector who had received only partial answer to a complicated question. “The Paphians do not make a practice of calling things by their real names,” He said. “They say, the Gaping One, the Naked Lord, the Lord of Dogs. Others have named me things similar to these: Baal-Zebub, the Lord of Flies; and Baal-Phegor, which means the Gaping Lord. But I am also called simply Baal, which is Lord; and Osiris, and Orpheus, and Hermes Chthonius; and in the East they named me Joshua, and Judas; and in Boeotia, Dionysus Dendrites, which means the God in the Tree.”

He finished and looked at me expectantly.

“What did Morgan Yates call you?” I began slowly.

“Poetic Ecstasy.”

“And that woman in the sleeplabs?”

“Sexual Desire.”

I thought for a minute. I asked, “What did Melisande call you?”

“Peter Pan.”

“And Dr. Harrow?”

“Unreason.”

“And her brother Aidan?”

“Despair.”

I fell silent. In the chill air the masque’s clamor racketed more loudly. Even from here I sensed the revelers’ desires, tugging insistently at me as they begged for release. How easy it would be to join them, pass among those bright figures and take from each whatever sensation I desired. I could let this other dream pass; but that was dangerous. Because if others had seen Him now, the Boy in the Tree, the Gaping One, then surely His power had grown beyond imagining; and how easy it would be for the Aviator to use Him against the City. I shuddered and bit the ball of my thumb, hard. That was how I used to wake myself from a patient’s bad dreams at HEL .

I did not wake; the Boy did not disappear; but I was able to think clearly again.

I said, “So those are not your names?”

He grinned, flashing small even white teeth. “They are all my names.”

I hesitated. “ I think you are Death.”

The Boy stared at me with those fathomless summer eyes. “I am.”

“Then Aidan was right, to name you Despair.” I held out my hand as if to take a prize.

“No,” He said. “He was not right; because he did not want to learn the rest of it. Lazy thing.”

Suddenly He laughed, tossing His head so that the crown of leaves sprang through the air and unfurled to reveal a froth of blossoms, white and gold and periwinkle blue. I caught and held them before me: leaves such as I had never seen, leaves like verdant stars and silvery blades and cupped hands, and all entwined with flowers that smelled of every spring that had ever been hoped for in the shrunken heart of winter.

“You must teach them the rest of my name, Lady!” He laughed again and bounced back on His feet as though he could scarcely contain Himself from leaping into the air. “You must tell them stories, you must tuck them in at night, you must be their Mother!”

I glared at His foolishness, and placed the crown of flowers upon my head. “And what will you be, Boy?” I said. “Their Father?”

“Of course! And your brother, and lover, and victim all in one! Just like before. All of it, all the same! All singing, all dancing all dying!”

“You sound mad, like that Aviator they talk about, the one Anna called the Consolation of the Dead.”

He frowned. “He is a fool, a neophyte. He does not understand what must be done. You will see for yourself when you meet him.”

He turned away, for the first time noticed the moon and made a mocking bow to it, as He had to me earlier. Then he glanced back. “I go now, Wendy, sister mine. We will meet again; but not for a little while, and likely as not you won’t recognize me, and you may not remember my names. Although perhaps by then you will recall your own.” He shrugged, tossed His fair curls as though He had grown weary of this game.

“When will we meet?” Suddenly I was frightened of His leaving me, but as I reached to hold Him He skipped away, shaking His head.

“Why, at Winterlong of course,” He cried, and laughing sprang into the air as though He would seize the moon. I shielded my eyes from its yellow glare; but when blinking I tried to find Him again He was gone.

A small sound by the Regent’s Oak. I turned expectantly. But this time it was Justice, looking shy and uncertain as he stepped from behind the tree.

“I heard you talking,” he said, looking surprised to see me alone. “I’m sorry, I’ll leave you—”

My disappointment at losing the Boy eased. “No,” I said. I took a step toward him. “I hoped you’d come.”

Justice smiled, glanced up at the moon and then at me. He touched the crown of flowers upon my brow. “Really, Wendy?”

“Really,” I replied, and took his hand. Together we walked down to the Masque of Owls.