Winterlong

1. The central fire and the rain from heaven

THEY STOOD AT THE foot of the altar beside a stone basin: three young boys, all Paphians. Two had the tawny skin and black eyes that marked them of the House High Brazil, slender and long-legged. They still wore fine ropes of gold looped through their ears, and each had his dark hair braided down his back. The other was a Saint-Alaban, blond and blue-eyed and the youngest of the three. When he saw me he spat and crossed his arms before his bare chest, hands splayed in the protective gesture against the Gaping One. They were naked, save for wreaths of leafless vines about their necks. That morning before dawn they had been forced to gather the vines themselves. Aardmen led them to the river and watched panting on its banks while the boys pulled the plants from the earth. Their hands still bled where the vines had fought, and the Saint-Alaban’s breast was scored with livid wounds like lashmarks. Now they waited while the Consolation of the Dead questioned them as to the whereabouts of the empath named Wendy Wanders.

I stared coldly at the Saint-Alaban, then shifted on my marble bench. Beside me Oleander shuffled, hissed under his breath as he nearly dropped the knife he held. He shot me a panicked glance. I shook my head and he averted his eyes.

Marble fountains stood at either side of the altar. They no longer held water, but twigs and powdered bricks of opium taken from captive Botanists. Black smoke poured from them, nearly obscuring the flames that licked at the base of the fountains where small fires were tended by other children, naked and filthy from rolling about on the floor of the nave. Aardmen lolled among them as well, scratching or biting at their flanks. A soft thrumming filled the air, compounded of the fires burning and the drip of rain seeping from holes in the ceiling high above, the lazars’ restless fidgeting and the Aviator’s soothing voice droning on and on.

“Have you seen her? A girl who looks like ‘him, the very incarnation of the Gaping Lord, the good Dr. Silverthorn swore to me they were as alike as two drops of rain—”

The Paphians protested no, no, they had never seen her, never. Only the Saint-Alaban continued to stare back at me while the Aviator continued his tedious questioning.

Finally the Saint-Alaban called out, “I saw her. She is disguised as a boy, and names herself Aidan Arent. I thought she was him —”

He pointed at me, then continued, “She was with one of my bedcousins, Justice Saint-Alaban, a paillard who went among the Ascendants to betray us, may our Mother curse him!”

The Aviator nodded. “Where was she, my darling boy?”

The Saint-Alaban gave me a look of such hatred that I stared down at my hands, the stony lip of my sagittal gleaming pale violet.

“With a group of traveling Players performing at the House Illyria,” he said. “She appears in blasphemous garb. My people believe she impersonates the murderer Raphael Miramar. They will be at the Masque of Winterlong—” His voice shook with such fury that he could not go on.

The Aviator nodded again. “But I know all this already,” he said impatiently. “I want to find her now. Where is she now?”

One of the boys from Persia cried out, “Can’t you see we don’t know? Let us go, we’ll help you, please—”

But already the Aviator had turned away, reaching for the book he had dropped when he’d begun his interrogation.

“… I am the bray of the brute in the night, whoever is deceived by me …”

Margalis Tast’annin, the Mad Aviator, lay upon a pallet at the back of the North Cloister facing me. At his feet sat the jackal Anku, still and white as a carven cenotaph. Even at that small distance I could not see them clearly through the roiling smoke and steam. Tast’annin’s voice alone possessed a physical immediacy and potency. It cut through the opium’s narcotic vapor, the thick stench of dread and hopelessness, so that even though I knew the man who lay there—knew every scar upon his body, knew the tenor of his groans as nightmares chased him, knew the place like a secret spring that bled slowly but ceaselessly, and the smell of his bloodstained raiment—even knowing all this I could sit here and imagine another man speaking in the gloom. A tall strong man with face unscarred and close-cropped wheaten hair, wearing metallic clothes that creaked, and smelling of scorched metal and ozone and (very faintly) of charred flesh.

“Lord Baal.”

With a start I realized he had been calling me for some moments. I raised my head, my hair spilling down my shoulders and tangling about the hempen cord I wore around my neck.

“Yes?” I looked past the Paphian boys to where the Aviator had raised himself to stare at me with those translucent eyes.

“… accept these offerings in your name …”

I dipped my head so as not to see them, or the firelight glinting off Oleander’s knife. But I heard their fast and shallow breathing, and smelled the ammoniac reek of their terror.

The Aviator finished. A moment in which I could hear only the murmur of rain and the Paphians’ choking breath. Then from opposite me came a soft command.

“Now, Oleander.”

Oleander inhaled loudly. I closed my eyes, but not before I saw the two boys from Persia clutch each other, weeping. I lowered my head, hunching my shoulders as though this time I might somehow drown out what happened next.

I heard Oleander rumbling with the knife and cursing. An aardman growled: one of the Paphians must have tried to break away. I tried to hear only my own breathing, my heart thumping counterpoint to the boys’ despair.

Suddenly Oleander cried out. A tearing sound and a scream; then the knife clattering to the floor, Oleander weeping as he retrieved it. I clenched my hands and squeezed my eyes more tightly, tried repeating loudly the words to the “Duties of Pleasure” and “Saint-Alaban’s Song.”

It was no use. Their screams and groans went on and on and on, for hours it seemed. Warmth spattered my bare legs and feet. Oleander sobbed and shouted, striking them again and again while I rocked back and forth on the marble bench, eyes shut tight.

Gradually their shrieks grew fainter, the bubbling sound of their breathing soft and labored. Something slippery brushed my leg, slid to the floor nearby. I heard Oleander panting, and the aardmen whimpering. I opened my eyes for an instant, saw blood pooled about my foot, blood sprayed in ribbons across the stone basin and the shapeless lumps strewn about the altar floor. The tip of a finger rolled beneath my boot, and a tuft of golden hair.

It took one of them a very long time to die. He made a choking sound, like someone swallowing syrup, then finally grew still. It was quiet, except for the sound of the other children crying and Oleander talking very slowly and calmly to himself, sentences I could not hear except for the words save them whispered repeatedly. I opened my eyes, saw my legs and thighs spattered with blood, smelled it like some warm tide spilling upon the altar. An aardman lapped noisily at the floor. On my wrist the sagittal burned a fierce and brilliant violet. I raised my hand slowly, the rays streaming from it to send ripples of light across the dim room. The lazars cried out, and Oleander tossed the knife across the room, then fell to his knees, retching. The Consolation of the Dead recited words I did not hear as I stared up to where the sagittal streaked the cloister’s shadowy vault with amethyst radiance, and the cold rain dripped upon my bloodstained hands.

2. All traces of organic remains become annihilated

THAT NIGHT OLEANDER CRIED out in his sleep, thrashing so that his arm struck my cheek and woke me. “Shh—it’s a dream, Oleander, it’s just a dream.” I reached across the pallet to embrace him. From the corridor behind the iron gates of the Children’s Chapel echoed snores where an aardman lay guarding us. “No! Oh god, no—”

I covered his mouth. “Be quiet! You’ll wake Fury—” He fell silent then, clutching at me as though he would crawl inside my skin. But for many hours we lay awake, staring into the darkness that engulfed us, the darkness that was everywhere like a poison in the air;, knowing that the horror that awaited us upon waking was worse than any nightmare, and that it would never end.

3. The most remarkable of the beasts of prey

“HE WANTS YOU, RAPHAEL . He is ringing the changes.”

In the darkness I could make out Oleander, frail and sallow as one of the few candles left guttering on the altar behind him. He cursed as he bumped against a chair, rubbing his arms to warm himself and finally standing atop the heap of pillows I had arranged next to my pallet. I blinked, sat up, and pulled my bedcovering—a woolen cloak taken from a dead Saint-Alaban—about my shoulders.

“So soon?” I coughed, shivering despite the cloak. From the number of candles that had burned out within the Children’s Chapel I guessed I had been asleep for two or three hours. I never slept through the night—or day—anymore. Margalis Tast’annin murdered sleep as efficiently as he did those captives he tirelessly questioned in his search for the empath Wendy Wanders.

My sister, I thought. That is why these others died, enslaved Curators and Paphians alike; although mostly it was my own people who fell captive to their own faithless bedcousins.

“Hurry, Raphael,” urged Oleander through chattering teeth. He fell onto the pallet beside me. He wore only loose white trousers, tied about his thin waist with a length of rope. I hugged him close, wrapping my cloak about him and feeling the spars of his ribs as he trembled with fear and cold. “I hate it, I hate watching them die—”

“Shh …”I stroked his lank hair, his scarred shoulders with their raw fretwork where the Madman had lashed him days before. “Don’t cry, cousin, please don’t cry.”

He sniffled and buried his face in my shoulder. I moved my hand to guard him from my sagittal, though it slumbered now. Only my fear of the Aviator woke it—the Aviator knew this and delighted in it—and sometimes the sight of the dead lying pale as though sleeping in the nave.

A deep tolling note, far above us in the Gloria Belltower. A softer chime, an echo of the first; then silence. Oleander plucked at my arm. “Please, Raphael! Before he sends for others—”

I nodded, and groped on the floor until I found my boots. They were too big for me. Despite wrapping my feet in rags first, my ankles were scraped raw from wearing them and bled anew each day without healing. I blinked back tears of pain as I pulled them over my poor feet, waited for the throbbing to subside before standing to find my robe: a shapeless gray sack, long-sleeved and reaching below my knees, and with a motheaten hood. It was worn through at the elbows and unraveling at the cuffs, hideously ugly but the warmest thing I could find among the heaps of clothing torn from the dead and cast into piles about the nave. Each day the Aviator sent squalling groups of children to pick through these filthy remains, bringing to him and myself whatever seemed worth saving. Broken necklaces and armlets, dirty ribbons and brocade trim from Paphians’ robes; occasionally some shattered sliver of machinery, timepiece or spyglass or monitor, buried beneath mounds of Curators’ uniforms. The rest was burned, adding the stench of charred cloth to the reek that hung within the nave like a dense and poisonous fog. The hollow sound of children coughing was as ceaseless now as the winter wind howling in the broken west towers. This gray robe was the first and last prize I had found among the lazars’ rags, before the Aviator forbade me to show myself among them except at his command. Now I was consigned to this chamber, half prison and half sacrarium to the Gaping One.

With a sigh I motioned Oleander that I was ready. We walked through the Crypt Church, I hobbling and Oleander skipping beside me. He was barefoot and tried to keep his chilblained feet from touching the icy floor, hopping and swearing as though he walked on hot sand. We started up the passage leading to the Belltower. A solitary candle pressed into an alcove threw its wan light down the steps. As we walked there came another loud peal, cut short so that we both stopped to listen for the next sound. Oleander stared at me, looking very much like Dr. Silverthorn in the cloudy light, with his hollow eyes and sunken cheeks and nearly all his hair gone. I looked away from him, staring at the arched ceiling high above us as though I might see through it to the bay floor. From the heights of the Gloria Tower came a tiny sound, what might have been a bat squeaking, or a child’s wail. Then a soft thud. Oleander giggled nervously.

“Stop it!” I ordered, slapping him. He covered his mouth and ran a few steps ahead of me, his laughter turning to hiccuping gasps. I licked my finger, turned, and snuffed out the passage’s single candle. I scraped it from the stone and ate it, choking on the oily taste. Then I hurried to Oleander’s side.

At first glance the vast expanse of the Cathedral seemed empty, its bays and transepts filled only with clumps of debris and the fires burning untended among the huge columns and arches. The crackling flames and wind almost drowned out the other, softer sounds, choked coughing and, from some unimaginable space overhead, voices. Then the gray light filtering down through the great windows picked out the numbing details.

A white shape moaned and tossed its arm across what had seemed to be a rotting gourd or toadstool but was in fact a face. Dark forms laid like logs beside a dying bonfire were not logs at all but those who had died since dawn (not long past, to judge by the weak light), waiting their turn to be cast upon the smoking pyres. Many were the lazars Tast’annin had set to work outside: searching for the lost arsenal of the Ascendants, hacking at the frozen ground with whatever implements they could find—staves and stones, the remains of autovehicles—until they were felled by disease or exhaustion. Beside one of the immense columns holding up the Gloria Tower a pair of gargoyles had toppled. But these raised their grotesque heads as we approached, unfurling long pink tongues as they yawned and groaned a greeting.

“He waits, master,” one said to me. His tongue wrapped around the words so that I could scarcely understand him. He stared at Oleander through slanted eyes and then flopped back onto his haunches, scratching at his jaw with one of his gnarled hands. “Little master, he shouts.”

Oleander glared at me. “I told you we should hurry!”

The other aardman remained standing, attention fixed upon the column looming above us. I followed his gaze upward, to the tangled skein of ropes and boards and scaffolding that hung beneath the Cathedral bells. I could scarcely see them there in the ruined tower: figures no larger than the Angels and Saints who peered down at us with unwinking stone eyes. But the figures upon the scaffolding moved. I began to pick out individual voices from the faint garble that drifted down. Some cried or screamed or even laughed shrilly. Others begged, and I heard several voices singing tunelessly the words to “Saint-Alaban’s Song.”

And there was another voice, calm and soothing. Resonant, speaking slowly and with great clarity, with a pronounced drawl and accent unfamiliar to the City of Trees. The Consolation of the Dead was ringing the changes.

A shriek. The aardmen’s ears flattened against their skulls. They flinched, looking askance at me before pointing their long muzzles skyward again.

“He shouts.” The first aardman wriggled closer to me, pressing his great head against my thigh and growling. “He shouts, master.”

“I know, Fury,” I said, scratching the rough fur between his ears. “It’s all right.”

Fury continued to growl, nostrils flaring as he stared into the darkness above us. Oleander fidgeted by the door half-opened in the column, the sole entry to the Gloria Tower. “Raphael,” he said again.

“Be quiet,” I said. “I want to listen—”

If I squinted I could make them out in that dizzying space. Black figures that seemed to flail crazily as they walked across the few boards and rope bridges strung beneath the twenty-four bells, all that remained of the flooring that had rotted away in the past centuries. They clung desperately to a haphazard network of ropes, invisible from the nave.

At the entrance to the Gloria Tower stood a mass of shadows. I sifted through the crowd, trying to pick out among the writhing silhouettes Fancy’s small form, her glorious golden hair.

But I did not see her. Except for Dr. Silverthorn’s insistence that she was here, I had no reason to believe she was still alive. Still I looked for her everywhere. I forced myself to search among the faces of the dead in piles by the bonfires, and among those who scuttled with averted eyes past the iron gates of the Children’s Chapel where I sat through endless twilit days and nights. I never found her.

Fury whined restlessly. I caressed his forehead, felt the short hairs bristling as his voice deepened to a more threatening note. I looked to see what alarmed him.

At the edge of the scaffolding were three figures, black and foreboding. Tast’annin’s favorite lackeys, the aardmen he had named Blanche and Trey. Between them the Aviator himself lay upon a makeshift litter. At his feet crouched a smaller form, shining as a venomous lily: the traitorous jackal who had led my captors to me at the Butterfly Ball and then fled to join the Madman. They watched as two tiny figures struggled across the scaffolding. One child swayed, seemed to plunge from the narrow planks. But she caught an unseen rope, plummeted until it grew taut, so that it seemed she jerked and twisted in the empty air. She hung from the bell’s black mouth, turned back to scream something through her sobs.

“I can’t watch this,” said Oleander. His footsteps pattered up the spiral stairs to the tower. At my side Fury whimpered, eyes furrowed as he stared at the tiny figure hanging limply from the rope.

“Master, master,” he whined, tail thumping the floor. “Why?”

“I don’t know why,” I replied, and crouched beside him.

Sweat ran down my arms despite the cold, and I shivered. By now the other child had also shimmied up a rope. The two dangled from the ancient blackened bells. As we watched they kicked at the air and began to swing, back and forth, until the clappers struck metal and a harsh knell echoed through the Cathedral, first one clanking peal and then another. The figure seated amid the ruins of the Gloria Tower began to recite, pausing to wait for the clappers to swing back and strike once more.

“Master?” Fury turned to regard me with puzzled eyes. Throughout the nave small figures began to stir from the rubbish heaps, raising themselves to watch the macabre drama overhead.

“It means nothing,” I said. “Nonsense he has made up, an invocation to the Lord of Dogs.”

“Bad, master,” he said. I nodded in agreement, then glanced up at the belltower. The Aviator droned on, the bells continued to peal. My heart had hardened in the past weeks, but still I pitied those children. “I must go, Fury,” I said, and entered the column. The aardmen raised their freakish heads: bestial jaws and teeth and fur, but with human eyes that watched me take my leave, and human tongues bidding me farewell.

Inside the column all was silent, the air close and smelling of burning wax. I walked slowly, circling higher and higher, the icy metal stairs biting through the soles of my boots. On the uneven surface of the walls words and names had been scrawled in places, written in oily smoke or with the burnt end of a stick: “Baldassare Persia died here”; “death to baal death to miramar”; “I loved Crescent Illyria tell Her.” In one spot had been scratched a crude stick figure with circles for eyes and open mouth, hanging from a tree. I did not pause to examine it closer.

At last the stairs ended. Most of the wall had fallen away, leaving a jagged gap through which I saw the miserable cluster of bodies I’d glimpsed from below. They were all children except for two: a girl unknown to me, tall and angular, with long straight blond hair and wearing a short blue tunic, like a Curator’s gown but of different cut. The other was a young Paphian woman captured a few days earlier near the Rocreek. A Persian malefeant with eyelashes dyed carnelian and poppies tattooed upon her cheeks, she had been trysting with a Naturalist. Now the Naturalist sprawled outside the Cathedral, where he had tripped over one of the deadly parasitic trees. His face was still twisted into an expression of dazed alarm, his eyes staring at the blackened earth. I had seen him there, and stepped carefully around him. The dull buzzing that emanated from his body revealed that his corpse had been completely invaded by the animalcules.

His luckless consort stared wild-eyed over the void, clutching the shoulder of the louse-ridden child at her side. I thought with mean satisfaction how a week earlier she would have fled shrieking from that poor boy. Now he afforded her the last shred of human comfort she would know. I tugged the hood of my woolen cloak about my head, pulling it to shadow my face.

Above us soared the broken cusp of the Gloria Tower. The roofstones had long since fallen away, leaving it open to rain and snow and viral strike. Clouds raced across a pewter sky, so close it seemed the edges of the tower might snag them. The wind howled, tearing at my cloak and the children’s rags. One or two of the lazars glanced at me as I slipped between them, then returned their attention to the two children who still hung from the bell ropes. I saw Tast’annin and his lackeys at the front of the small crowd, Oleander a few steps from the aardmen and eyeing them with distaste.

The Aviator had grown silent. He stared at the bells, the broken boards leading to the skeletal remains of the tower floor. Without warning he turned, cast his glance upon the children huddled behind him, and pointed at the Paphian woman. She shrieked and grabbed another child at her side, as though she would put him between herself and the Aviator. A few steps away the blond girl watched with amusement, her hands twitching at the hem of her tunic. Tast’annin nodded, continuing to regard the malefeant with an almost gentle expression as he leaned forward to stroke Anku’s back.

“Gelasia Persia,” he murmured at last. “See, I remembered your name! Gelasia, come here please.” He gave Anku’s fur a last fond tug and extended his hand to her.

Gelasia Persia shook her head. Her hair—still neatly braided—whipped the air like the Aviator’s quirt. She shoved one of the children forward. The boy gave a small squeak, scrabbling at the empty air; then tumbled from the edge of the platform. The Consolation of the Dead watched, perhaps with slight disappointment. Beside him the aardmen growled and Anku whined. The blond girl covered her mouth, snickering. The children murmured and rustled and whispered, and a few of. them peered down after the unfortunate boy.

Gelasia Persia stared stupidly at the nave floor far below. Then she turned and pushed her way through the crowd of children.

Her eyes lit upon me in my gray Curator’s cape. “Help me, sieur!” she cried, grabbing my arm. “My lover was Friedrich Durrell, a Naturalist, please help me—”

The Aviator drawled a command to Blanche and Trey. The lazars pressed close together as the aardmen loped across the rickety flooring. The malefeant stared back at them, her fingernails digging through my worn cloak.

An arm’s length from us the aardmen stopped. They raised themselves upon their hind legs. One stroked his jaw, puzzled, while the other looked at me with dispassionate golden eyes.

“Girl, master,” he snarled, indicating Gelasia Persia with a flick of his head. I shrugged and tried to push her away. Staring terrified at the aardmen she clung to me, panting. My hood dropped. The aardmen crouched and warily approached us. Gelasia turned to me with wide mad eyes, her gaze settling upon the sagittal dull-gray about my wrist.

“Miramar,” she gasped. She snatched her hands back. “Dear Mother, it’s true—”

I pulled the hood around my face. The aardmen grabbed Gelasia Persia and began to drag her to the edge of the platform. The lazars scrambled away. Some gazed at me with sudden recognition; one boy crossed his hands before his breast. But the blond girl beside him looked at me boldly, then to my amazement burst out laughing. Before I could get a closer look at her she turned and, glancing back to make sure the Aviator did not notice, disappeared down the spiral stairs.

Gelasia Persia only stared with utter loathing, mouth working silently, too overcome with hatred even to curse me.

At the edge of the scaffolding the aardmen halted. The children clinging to the ropes dangled exhausted, hundreds of feet above the floor of the nave. The boy’s head was hidden by the bell’s mouth. The girl had slipped so far that only a few measures of rope remained for her to grasp. She clung with eyes tightly shut, her bleeding hands sliding bit by bit down the hempen cord.

With pursed lips Tast’annin surveyed the bells, pale eyes darting from one to another. Finally he pointed at one, an immense black shape with glints of gold showing through its patina of smoke and filth. It hung at least ten lengths above the maze of rope and board, and a good twenty from where the aardmen held their prisoner.

“That one,” he said.

Gelasia Persia stared in disbelief. “I can’t reach that!” she cried. The tattooed poppies burned against her white skin.

The Aviator shook his head and repeated, “That one.” He leaned forward on the litter, his scarred mouth more hideous now as he smiled at her.

I looked down to see that lazars had already dragged off the other child’s body. A small group remained standing, staring up expectantly at the bells.

Gelasia Persia shook her head. “I will die.”

“You have nothing to fear from death, dearest child,” said the Aviator. “Such a beautiful girl, the Gaping One will be glad of such an offering.” His smile twisted into a horrible rictus, his eye bulging as though he enjoyed a lewd joke at her expense. He pointed at me. “See: there is his envoy, the one who has been consecrated to Baal- Phegor the Lord of Dogs.”

“He is no lord!” spat Gelasia Persia. “I know Raphael Miramar—he is a traitor, a monster and murderer!” Her eyes flashed beneath their scarlet lashes. “He murdered his Patron and another Naturalist and my bedcousin Whitlock High Brazil, may our Mother’s hands embrace him—”

The Aviator stared at her, still smiling. “But if your Mother will embrace you what have you to fear, beloved cousin?”

“Please—I don’t want to die,” she pleaded. “I am of the House Persia, I could serve you well—”

The Aviator shook his head. “But haven’t you seen all my servants?” He spread his hands, indicating the restless lazars, Anku watchful at his feet, the aardmen Blanche and Trey and last of all myself standing aloof. “No, Gelasia: you go to serve a mightier Lord. I am but His servant; you may be His handmaiden.”

A shriek pierced the air. I turned to see the little girl slide from the bell rope, her face crimson with weeping. Several of the lazars cried out. Then the other boy yelled, let go of his rope and plunged after her.

Gelasia Persia screamed and looked away, tried to bury her face in her shoulder. The Aviator grew stern. His voice rang out as he pointed to the ropes strung from the edge of the scaffolding.

“Ring the changes, Gelasia. I will console you in your need.”

The aardmen pushed her shrieking toward the platform’s edge. I turned away; but then heard the Consolation of the Dead command, “Watch her, young Lord Baal. Tell her she has nothing to fear. Tell her she goes to meet the Gaping One.”

As I lifted my head she flailed and kicked desperately at her captors. The aardmen drew back, snarling. Blanche let go of her arm. Before Gelasia could grab one of the ropes she tripped, and screaming, plunged over the edge. I had a glimpse of her face, eyes livid and mouth contorted as she scrabbled helplessly for the ropes. As she fell her voice wailed above the wind:

“She will destroy you, Miramar!”

4. We shrink back affrighted at the vastness of the conception

“SHE REFERRED TO YOUR sister, of course,” the Aviator repeated softly.

It was much later, perhaps days later. I thought it must be evening. When I answered the Aviator’s summons a window like a gash in the Crypt Church had shown me a sliver of cobalt sky peppered with stars. I had returned to the Children’s Chapel and slept for a few hours after my sojourn in the Gloria Tower; awakened and slept again, and again, until once more Oleander appeared in the chamber to bring me here to the very heart of the Aviator’s stronghold: the Resurrection Chapel of the Cathedral Church of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel.

“She spoke of the Magdalene,” I said for the third or fourth time, and coughed.

He reclined upon a dais, originally part of an altar, surrounded by massive blocks of granite fallen from the ceiling and scattered like so many broken tombstones. At his side was Dr. Silverthorn’s black bag. The floor was littered with broken capsules, torn adhesive pads, half-empty tubes of morpha and octine and frilite. And everywhere were piles of trinkets brought him by the lazars—dolls and gowns and dead flowers, stones and bundles of twigs, a prosthetic arm and a scholiast’s head. Scattered among these were braziers that burned damp green wood and old cloth.

At the base of each tripod were carefully placed three objects, particolored as though overgrown with moss or lichen. Stones, I thought the first time I had come here. But they were not stones. The lank stuff hanging like yellowed chaff was not dried moss but hair; the glints of silver were bits of glass and metal pressed into empty eyesockets. The sight no longer sickened me. They were dead now, whoever they had been, and at play in that green country I had glimpsed in Dr. Silverthorn’s dying eyes.

In the midst of all this Margalis Tast’annin reposed like an effigy from one of the Museum’s dioramas: his skin waxy and moist from the fevers that plagued him, a pallid yellow; eyes black pits from smoking uncured opium. In the firelight the scars upon his face appeared darker, and seemed to follow some pattern unknown to me; as though they had been scored there purposefully. Sometimes they seemed to move, writhing black characters etched upon his skin.

Set into the wall behind him was a window of colored glass with several panes broken or missing. The ones that remained formed a picture, the image of a woman draped in blue and carrying a lighted torch. In the chill winter sunlight her figure shone pale blue and white. Now it was dull, flat black and gray, the woman almost indistinguishable from the random patterns of glass and empty air. I stared at it with dread, this likeness of the Magdalene in such an awful place; and wondered who could have placed it there, aeons ago when the Cathedral was raised upon Saint-Alaban’s Hill.

At Tast’annin’s feet panted the white jackal, ruby eyes alert as ever. I had realized some days before that I had never seen Anku asleep. Now I believed that he did not sleep, that he was truly an immortal creature, one of the Egyptians’ ancient demons somehow awakened by the Aviator; or, Magdalene forbid, awakened by me. The Aviator’s shadow fell across his shrewd foxy face as he leaned’ over to poke at a brazier with a long white bone, clumsily carved and bound roundabout with strips of skin. Tast’annin wore the remnants of his Aviator’s uniform: heavy breeches and a jacket of red metallic cloth, emblazoned with the yellow triangle of the last Ascension. The jacket was hung with teeth and small bones, broken blades of knives and strings of glass beads all sewn neatly across the leather. Oleander had done this; Oleander who sat patiently at Tast’annin’s side, piercing a pair of leather trousers with a needle made of a finger bone, and stitching bright ribbons culled from the braids of dead Paphians, up and down the trouser legs in waves of gold and green and blue.

“This Magdalene, then—”

The Aviator paused, the carven bone poised in the air. He smiled at me with complicity: he would take another tack. “Your sister might be the living image of the Magdalene, as you represent the Gaping One.”

The bone clattered to the floor. His finger stabbed the air in front of my face, then flicked a strand of wheat-colored hair from his lip. He continued, “There would be a certain symmetry; like in that masque the blond children showed me. ‘Baal and Anat’: I quite liked that one.”

His voice wandered off. He stretched his hand to pinch Oleander’s shoulder, kneading the loose skin as though he were testing a bolt of fine silk.

“She might be,” I said. “Only she was raised among the Ascendants, who do not believe. And that masque is nonsense, a ghost story taught the Saint-Alabans by the Historians. I do not believe in the Magdalene or the Gaping One.”

Which was no longer strictly true, since I had seen with my own eyes a spectral Boy walking in the Narrow Forest, whom Dr. Silverthorn might have called an Angel, but who I believed to be the Hanged Boy. And his jackal familiar sat not an arm’s length from me. But I could not understand why an Ascendant would be interested in these things. It was almost beyond comprehension to think that he might believe in them.

Tast’annin looked at me with those vulpine eyes. They glowed dull orange, as though banked embers burned somewhere behind his shattered face.

“I was not a religious man,” he said, his voice fallen to a whisper. From behind him billowed a sigh, the flop of a heavy leg upon the stone floor. The aardman Trey had turned over in his sleep. “I saw too many things, things you would not believe, my lovely child …”

He motioned for me to draw nearer. I dragged myself across the floor, sweating as I came within the murky radius of firelight. I started to pull off my woolen cloak, decided not to. That would leave me only in a thin shift, and that would make it easier for the Aviator to grope at me with his large bony hands. Like many eunuchs his physical loss had honed his hatred to a fine dangerous point; he struck me whenever the temper took hold of him.

Not now, though. He merely tousled my unbound hair, then traced the edges of the hempen rope I wore about my neck at his command.

“No, darling boy: I ceased to believe after I saw entire cities erupt in liquid flame, and heard the sound a million people make when they die all at once. A sort of scream, so loud that my ears bled; and for many days afterward I heard a dull whining, as though flies whirred and banged inside my skull.

“I heard it so many times I went deaf in one ear—”

A draft of icy air shot up from one of the grates in the stone floor. The Aviator tapped his ear with a long ivory fingernail, then waved to disperse the smoke roiling around him.

“But the Governors repaired that. When I underwent rehabilitation, when I retired from active duty; when they decided to send me here to this accursed City.”

He drifted into silence, running his front teeth over his lip again and again as though to strip the skin from it. I stared down at my hands folded in my lap. The sagittal glowed very faintly in here, the palest lilac; as though it drew strength from the stench of evil that hung about the Chapel. When the Aviator had been silent for several minutes Oleander lifted his head. His sunken eyes shone. As I took in his hollow cheeks, the unnatural brightness of his eyes, I realized that he really was starving. His cotton trousers had grown too loose to hang about his emaciated hips. He had discarded them for a pair of particolored breeches, a High Brazilian child’s harlequin costume: gaudy gold and green, torn and bloodied at the knees (she too had been ringing the changes when she died), but fitting Oleander’s demeanor, his somewhat melancholy gaiety.

“But you flew in the air!” he said. “You lived in the NASNA station!”

The idea delighted him beyond all measure. I had grown weary weeks before of the Aviator’s exploits. Oleander, it seemed, never would.

Tast’annin let his lip slide slowly between his teeth until it curled back into its accustomed nerveless grin.

“Yes, I flew in the air,” he said. He turned to look at Oleander, so slowly it seemed he was some huge automaton formed of metal and bone.

“I was one of the last. I was a NASNA Aviator, a remarkable soldier of the firmament; one of those who would save the world and bring about a final glorious Ascension, though not the one your people dream of, Oleander, nor yours, my dear Raphael …”

He laughed mirthlessly. One hand groped through a pile of bright rubbish arranged by one of the smoking braziers. It withdrew a book, an archaic volume tied with string so that its pages would not come loose. I craned my neck to read the title faded across its mottled cover: An Inquiry into Some Ethical Points of Celestial Navigation. He glanced at it, frowned, and tossed it onto the heap of glowing embers. He raked his hand through the rubbish once again, until he drew forth another volume. Its cover was gone and many pages seemed missing, but it appeared to meet his satisfaction. He flipped through the matted pages, peeling them apart with great care, until he found the one he wanted. He began to read. The echo of his words hung in the heavy air, hollow and faintly threatening.

It was a terrible story, and it seemed to go on for hours. I moved closer to Oleander. He listened without looking up, and his stitches grew looser and more uneven, until when he jerked on the thread it broke, and the bone needle flew into the fire. Then he gave up all pretense of working. He huddled beside me, his hands slipping beneath my cloak to clasp mine as the Aviator’s voice broke over us in inescapable waves, and the snores of the aardman droned on behind us, and in the shadows Anku stared unblinking as though he waited and watched for something to take shape and rise from the darkness of the Resurrection Chapel.

“’ The conquest of the earth is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea — something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to…’”

As Tast’annin read this his tone grew dreamy, almost gentle. He lifted his head from the page.

“That is what we lost,” he said. “The primacy of an idea, an idea worth dying for, something greater than ourselves and deserving of sacrifice …

“But you did not forget, Raphael, and your people did not forget, did they? And these others—”

He pointed at Trey snoring lustily. “The geneslaves have always looked for someone to bow down to: it is in their mongrel nature as dogs, and as failed men too I suppose, to find someone worth naming master.

“I think that is why I was not a religious man: I never found anyone or anything I could bow down to. Pasty weak men and women kneeling before insipid gods, gods with all the blood washed from their wounds, gods who died without a fight—else they’d still be getting their share of glory and blood and sacrifice, eh, Raphael?”

I had lost the sense of what he was saying. The words of his dreadful story still had me in a sort of trance, so that when the Aviator’s cold fingers grabbed the rope around my neck I cried out, and Oleander nearly jumped into my lap.

I thought Tast’annin would kill me then, for no reason but that I had shown fear of him. But after a moment he dropped the cord and leaned back.

“The boy has no idea what I am speaking of,” he whispered. In the dying firelight he looked even more like some ancient effigy, some terrible thing wakened from a long and restive sleep. But it was not the obvious symbols of his derangement that frightened me, the bones and braids and broken knives, or even the rope he made me wear. No, it was the more subtle emblems of the outer world that filled me with a growing unease: that triangle of shining cloth adorning his breast, a type of luminous cloth I had never seen; the little icons emblazoned on his Aviator’s jacket, stars and moons and shapes like arrows or the prows of boats. The ring upon one gnarled finger, a circle of heavy gold set with a large blue stone and surrounded by letters spelling out NASNA . I could not imagine that his people would have weak gods. I could’ not imagine that they would have gods at all, and I told him so.

“You do understand, then, Miramar; a little at least. Yes, they had gods; but not such as you have in this City, a corpse and a whore!”

He laughed, a harsh hooting noise. At his feet Anku turned to regard him before laying his muzzle back upon his paws. As if the jackal reminded him of more serious business the Aviator fell quiet.

“The Gaping One,” he said softly. “Now there is a god whose time has come: a god of death and destruction and despair. Because what have we now to live for or hope for, and what is there left to repair?”

He leaned forward until I felt his breath upon my cheeks and smelled the taint of opium. Oleander crawled away from us and crouched beside a brazier. I swallowed, drew back before replying, “But I do not believe in the Gaping One—my people do not believe, it is an ancient superstition that only the House Saint-Alaban gives any credence to.”

Tast’annin smiled. His upper lip drew up like an animal’s, catching on one of his front teeth. “But your people do believe, Raphael,” he said. “I have used my time wisely in the City of Trees. I have used the tools put in my hands, the geneslaves and the children of the plague and now the Children of the Magdalene, and from them I have learned many things.

“About six weeks ago there was an atmospheric disturbance. We lost one of our stations to the Balkhash Commonwealth. Your people believed the blast signaled a new Ascension; many felt it heralded the Final Ascension.”

“I saw it,” I blurted. “It was—” I started to speak of my meeting with the Hanged Boy, but stopped. “It was very unusual.”

The Aviator fixed me with a strange look. “It was indeed. I was fortunate enough to be watching the skies from the Gloria Tower. As I was fortunate enough to have an intelligent little girl who had joined my little family here, a child named Pearl, whose people had discarded her as they might have tossed away a bad fruit, once they saw she could not run fast enough to escape the fougas.”

His face contorted. He threw his hands open, as though to dismiss everything in the Chapel, toys and aardman and Oleander cowering in the shadows.

“Pagh! You are the real animals, you Paphians and Curators who let your children die and kill these poor misshapen creatures that would have served you bravely, if only you had not been so corrupted by fear! But they have found a better master now, a truthful man if not a kindly one; because it is better in these days to embrace death than to flee him, and offer what solace we can to ourselves since no one will escape him.”

He reached for Dr. Silverthorn’s bag, his hand rummaging around until he withdrew a capsule. Without glancing at it he popped it into his mouth. He continued, “Pearl saw you by the river, in your torn clothes and with a vine about your neck, and with this circus animal protecting you.”

He roughed Anku’s fur affectionately. “‘I have seen the Lord of Dogs, master,’ she told me when she came back that evening. ‘The one the Paphians talk of, I saw him walking in the river.’

“I had her describe this strange figure to me, because as you know I was searching for an escaped empath. Until that evening I retained some foolish hope that if I found her and returned her to my superiors they would reward me, forgive me for my failure to assume command of the City.

“But when I saw the explosion of the NASNA station that night I knew that I no longer had any superiors.”

He paused, staring confused at the book in his hands, as though he had no, idea how it had gotten there. After a moment he folded it shut and looked up at me, the black holes of his eyes so filled with despair that I glanced away.

He said, “In a way it really was the Final Ascension; for me at least. I have died many times, in aerial strikes and skirmishes, and been reborn, rehabilitated by the Governors more often than you could imagine, my lovely boy. And even when the Curators betrayed me, and the aardmen took me and tortured me and dismasted me: even from that I was saved, and when Lawrence Silverthorn arrived with his Physician’s bag I began to grow stronger still.

“But when I saw the explosion that evening I knew this would be my last life. Everything and everyone I lived for died then. That was my world and my home, not this—”

He waved his hand, indicating the braziers and blocks of fallen granite surrounding us upon the altar; but with a chilling certainty I knew that he did not really mean this at all: not the Resurrection Chapel or the Cathedral or even the City of Trees itself. He dismissed an entire world with that small gesture, the vast world outside that I had never known and would never know, but which included myself and my people and my City nonetheless.

And as I stared up at him with growing unease he smiled; a very small, knowing smile.

I knew then that he meant to destroy us as that other small world, his world, had been destroyed. He only knew how to do one thing, you see, he only understood one thing. That was why the image of the Hanged Boy appealed to him; that was why he searched obsessively for a girl who could deal death with her mind.

But that day I still retained some hope of salvation, of the supremacy of a gentle goddess I had never really believed in. I had not yet grasped that the Aviator’s truth might be the only truth worth knowing; and so that smile filled me with more horror than the sight of him sacrificing the children in the cloister or Gloria Tower ever had.

“There is an arsenal here,” he said. “On the hillside beneath the Cathedral. A stockpile of weaponry NASNA put there two hundred years ago. One of my duties as Governor was to set up a janissary outpost here.”

He chewed his lip. “Of course there is no reason whatsoever to guard it now: there’s no one left to guard. There’s no reason for anything, really.”

“But we are here,” I protested. “And the Curators—”

“But they’re all dead, darling boy. All of them. No one could possibly have survived.”

Oleander stared at the Aviator, puzzled. “They aren’t dead. I know they’re not de—”

The Aviator struck him, so hard that Oleander’s lip split and blood sprayed my cheek as the boy sprawled backward. Tast’annin never even looked at him. He continued to stare at me, his smile frozen, and reached for my robe to wipe the blood from his hand.

“They are all dead,” he repeated. “If anyone survived the rebel strike they will have killed them by now. There is no one left to answer to, dearest child; no one except me.”

I sat rigidly, waiting for him to strike me or continue with this disordered talk. But he said nothing, only stared at me with that ghastly fixed grin. I stared back, afraid to look away lest he kill me, until my eyes swam and all I saw was his idiot grimace floating in the gloom like a disembodied skull.

Gradually his consciousness seemed to waver. His pupils shrank until they all but disappeared in his watery eyes. He continued to gaze vacantly into the darkness. I glanced at Oleander, sniffling quietly as he nursed his bleeding lip. When after some time it was obvious that the Aviator would say no more, indeed that he had entered some kind of trance, I quickly and quietly fled the Chapel, abandoning poor Oleander to stand watch over the Madman.

5. A lapse of misrepresented time

I HAD NO CLEAR idea as to where I was going, only that I wanted to get as far from Tast’annin as I could. I dared not leave the Cathedral. No one would have stopped me, no one would have dared; but the landscape of this part of the City itself was threat enough to keep me here.

It was winter now. Snow had drifted through the holes in the Cathedral roof to form shallow gray banks. In places the children had sculpted figures from it, men and women and animals—aardmen?—blackened with soot and melted into grotesque shapes. As I wandered I could look out windows and see the City dusted with white, the distant river sheathed in gray ice beneath a new moon’s feeble gleaming. Only the ashen slope in front of the Cathedral was untouched by snow. Whatever poisons had leached into the earth there melted it so that the ground remained black as rotten ice, dotted with the corpses of those fallen prey to the parasitic trees. Not even the ravens crying in the frigid air would light upon the Cathedral grounds. I would not venture there.

So I wandered through the twisting halls and bays of the ancient Church, and thought how strange it was that every path in the City seemed to lead here: how the corridors in the House Miramar and the other Paphian Houses had brought me to the labyrinthine passages of the Museum of Natural History, and from there I had lost myself in the Narrow Forest, and the House High Brazil, until finally the tortuous path had led me to Saint-Alaban’s Hill. Like the whorls and swirls upon my sagittal, dizzying complexity in such a small thing; and how much more complicated were the windings and turnings of the City of Trees—a place that was only one of the world’s besieged sectors, if I was to believe Dr. Silverthorn.

It was night when the Aviator had summoned me to him. It was night still. I was beginning to think that perhaps the Madman was right. Maybe the very nature of the world itself had changed to accommodate the coming of the Gaping One, and there would never be another bright dawn. Certainly I could scarcely recall the last time I had seen the sun: when we fled the Butterfly Ball, perhaps.

I leaned upon a parapet overlooking the nave. Nothing moved down there save the smoke from a half-dozen feeble bonfires left untended through the night. Despite the raiding parties that returned daily with captives, mostly Paphian children, it seemed to me that the number of those who dwelled within the Cathedral grew fewer and fewer each day. Those who did not succumb to disease were slaughtered by the Aviator. A fetid smell hung in the frigid air, the smell of blood and decay, of bodies lying unburned and unburied outside the Cathedral walls. I shivered, sighted a figure nosing among the still forms below. An aardman, starving as we all were, searching for food.

I turned away. I wished I had not left Oleander behind; wished I had been able to do something to save the Persian malefeant, the Illyrian boys, or even the Saint-Alaban. But the Aviator’s strength lay in this, his power to command. It was as Dr. Silverthorn had said. One must serve somebody, and only Margalis Tast’annin remained to command. I was not a fighter. My only power had been to inspire worship through my beauty. I took my place here passively as I had upon the Hill Magdalena Ardent, receiving whatever the Aviator offered me: a rain of blood instead of petals, curses and imprecations instead of lustful glances, a hempen cord rubbing raw against my neck instead of flowers upon my brow. I tugged uneasily at the rope. He had knotted it so tightly that I would have to cut it off; but Tast’annin guarded his weapons carefully, and Oleander had refused when I asked him to remove it.

I heard a small sound down the corridor. Perhaps an aardman had crept upstairs, thinking me an unsuspecting lazar and hoping to surprise me. I moved so that the moonlight shining through a window revealed who I was.

But the figure stepping from the shadows was not an aardman.

“Hallo, Wendy.”

My hair stood on end at the husky voice and the name it spoke. Backing against the parapet, I pulled my hood about my face. She stood in a small bay flanked by twin Angels of pocked stone, a wiry girl peering at me amused.

“Don’t worry,” she said airily. “He’s forgotten all about me. After Dr. Silverthorn died, I guess. Nobody cares, nobody remembers about Anna. Nobody misses Andrew but me.”

She stepped into the corridor. It was the girl I had seen in the Gloria Tower a few days before, the blond girl who had winked at me. Now I could see that her smile was the only fair thing that remained of her face. She was gruesomely scarred.

“Who are you?” I said, trying to sound bold.

“Who am I?” she retorted mockingly. “Who are you?”

“I am Raphael Miramar.” When she made no move to come any nearer I let my hood droop back and peered at her. “But you think I am Wendy Wanders.”

She shrugged. “Maybe. Dr. Silverthorn told me about you. He turned out to be a nice Doctor after all, didn’t he? He tried to save Gligor—”

Suddenly she doubled over, racked by a fit of coughing. When she raised her face again tears streaked it, and when she brushed them away blood smeared her cheeks. The rain of roses had left suppurating wounds across her face and arms and legs, any place that had not been protected by her short tunic. “You were smart to leave when you did,” she said hoarsely. “They killed all the rest of us.”

“What is your name?” I asked. I tried to imagine what she had looked like before the rain of roses, this Ascendant girl, but it was impossible to tell. Her skin had cracked and blackened like scorched bark; flesh hung in tiny curls from her arms. Only her eyes still shone with sharp intelligence within her ravaged face.

“Anna,” she said. A flash of white as she smiled again. “I had a brother too, you know. An independent personality. Andrew. They fed him to the NET . I’m alone now, Wendy.”

I nodded. She seemed harmless, and I was lonely. “Yes. I’m alone too, Anna.”

She coughed again, covering her mouth with her hand, then gazed surprised at the film of blood upon her fingers. When she looked up her eyes were unfocused, her words slurred.

“I was looking for you, Wendy. To warn you: he means to capture you. They will kill you just like Andrew and Gligor, just like me …”

She took a step, weaving as though drunk. Then she stopped. With a smile she stuck her hand into a pocket. I drew my breath sharply: I had misjudged, she had a weapon hidden there. I glanced around to see how I might escape, but when I looked back she held her hands out to me one at a time, chanting in a hoarse childish voice:

“Now: this is for me, and this is for you.”

There was no weapon. One raw palm held a slender cobalt capsule, its casing dull as though she had carried it for a long time. In the other was some bit of gaudery, cloth or feathers mashed flat and pickled with dirt. As I stared uncomprehending she pushed her hand closer to me, the one holding the filthy cloth.

“Take it,” she urged.

Gingerly I picked it up, held it at arm’s length. A narrow headband made of feathers, matted together with grime and all but colorless.

“Andrew and I made it for you after you left,” she said softly. “After they killed him I finished it. That was why I followed Dr. Silverthorn and Gligor. I was afraid they’d forget to give it to you.”

I stared at it numbly, this pathetic bit of frippery.

“Don’t you like it?” she asked with a twinge of anxiety.

I nodded. “You came all the way here just to give this to her?”

She shrugged. “They would have killed me anyway,” she said. “Silverthorn was mad at first, but then he didn’t have much time to stay mad, did he? And I remembered how much you liked the other one.”

She smiled then, a smile of ineffable sweetness. “It’s funny, after Andrew died I felt so horrible, but it was different than before, when we tapped them. I wanted to ask you about that, and about that Boy you showed me—”

A spasm shook her. She waved her empty hand across her face, then looked down at the capsule in her other hand as though she had forgotten it. “But I guess I won’t have time now.”

Before I could stop her she tossed the capsule into her mouth, making a wry face. She waited a moment, then shook her head apologetically.

“I was the one who betrayed you to the Aviator, Wendy. I was still mad at you. One of the blond children told me about the masque at Winterlong. I was the one who told the Madman. I’m sorry now. I felt bad afterward, that’s why I wanted to warn you, to give you a chance to escape.”

She hiccuped, then grimaced. “Dr. Silverthorn told me it would taste awful, and he was right: it does. Augh. Well, I was afraid I’d never see you again, Wendy. I’m glad I was able to give you your bandeau—”

Turning, she took a few steps, then stumbled and fell, suddenly hidden in the shadows of the bay.

“Wait, Anna!” I cried. I shoved the headband into a pocket and rushed after her. I knelt at her side, turning her body so that she faced me. Moonlight fell from a window in the granite wall above us, a thread of fine white light across her face.

But it was not the face I had seen an instant before. As I held her the broken skin rippled and then grew smooth and pale, her eyes blinked open and stared up at me with an expression of faint derision.

“Franca!” I cried.

She pulled herself up and shook her head, the hair whipping across her face no longer tawny but silver-fair. The eyes staring at me from behind that gossamer cloud were green as unripe apples.

I staggered back. Without thinking I crossed my hands in front of me, but He only laughed.

“Raphael Miramar!” He scolded. He reached for the rope about my neck and tweaked it teasingly, pulling me near Him. “You saw how little protection that afforded the Saint-Alaban in the cloister.”

I dropped my hands. “But you were not in the cloister,” I stammered.

“Oh, but I was,” He replied. He looked at the bit of rope, let go of it and settled back upon His heels. He seemed heedless of the freezing stone floor, for all that He was naked as an egg. “I am with you always, Raphael. With all of them: Franca and Anna and Dr. Silverthorn, Margalis and Oleander and yes, your little friend Fancy—”

“Fancy? She is alive, you know where she is?”

I tried to grab Him, torn between rage and hope, between wanting to rend Him or embrace Him if what He said was true. But as my hand closed about His a burning pain shot through it. I snatched it back.

“Not yet, Raphael,” the Boy murmured, a note of menace in his voice. “You should wait until you are invited. Soon enough, darling boy, soon enough.”

His tone had deepened to the Aviator’s soft drawl. I looked up, then stumbled to my feet. Because the Aviator stood there, staring down at me with pale mad eyes.

“Did you kill her?” he asked. He stooped, took Anna’s corpse by the hair and yanked it so that her head lolled backward, gazing at him blindly. I stared in disbelief, then glanced around the tiny bay. Her scars were unhealed, and she was certainly dead. And the alcove was empty, the Boy gone. The chink in the wall showed a fingerlength of pale gray, bright enough that I knew it must be morning.

He let go of the girl. Her body fell back to the floor with a thud. He stood, continuing to stare at me with that knowing smile, his eye bulging.

“Your little friend,” he said. “Fancy.”

I felt as though he had driven a knife through my stomach. “Yes,” I said at last.

The Consolation of the Dead extended his hand, took the end of the cord about my neck and tugged it.

“Come,” he said, as though promising wonderful things. “She is in the cloister, waiting to see you again.”

Without a word I rose and followed him.

It was not until we reached the cloister that I saw a tendril of living vine had clasped itself like a green finger around the hempen rope that bound me to him.

6. The most formidable of the many tyrants

SHE WAS HANGING FROM a metal spike protruding from one of the columns in the center of the room. Her throat had been slashed, ripped from chin to breast, the blade wrenching through flesh and sinew all the way to her backbone so that her vertebrae were exposed, a necklace of twisted coral. The stone basin that had been dragged beneath her was half-filled with blood. Her face was a color I had never seen before: the color of a winter sky scraped of sun, so utterly bloodless that the whites of her eyes seemed blue in comparison. Her mouth twisted as though she had tried to scream, an expression of such unrelieved torment that I could only imagine she had been alive when the knife tore through her.

I walked up to the basin, reached to touch one of her bare feet. The blood had thickened where it dripped from her toes in a blackening stalactite. A spider clung there, uneven threads marking the beginning of a web strung from one foot to the other. I stretched my finger to caress her foot, the skin white and glistening, striped with crimson like an overripe fig. When I dug my nail into her heel the flesh split as though it were a sheet of parchment. As I withdrew my finger the spider scurried away. I turned and fell to the floor.

Many minutes passed before I opened my eyes. Darkness seethed around me, waves of black and scarlet. I was sick again, and again; felt a burning in my bowels so that I squatted and defecated upon the stones, then stumbled until I found another column and embracing it slumped to the floor. I lay with my face pressed against the cool stone, weightless, feeling nothing but darkness and cold, as though my skin had been flayed from me and my bones had become part of the stone blocks of the Cathedral. An immense and mindless relief flooded me, an emptiness more soothing than any lover’s touch, a wakeful void that held more promise than an aeon of undisturbed sleep. I felt the very stones of the Cathedral melt away; I saw the sky above me, brilliant, limitless, glazed with a multitude of stars. Then the stars began to wink out, one by one, until whole patches of the vast firmament stretched dead and black across my vision, and the horizon itself disappeared. I hung suspended in that void, watching as the last points of light flickered and went out, until finally there was nothing there, nothing at all. It was then that the Voice began to speak.

— You have seen Me, it said.

—I see nothing, I replied. I tried to move my hand before my eyes. Nothing: no hand, and no eyes to see it. I am dead, I thought; and the thought was comfort.

— But that is Me, it said: Nothing. You see now that is all there is: only this and nothing more.

I waited but it was silent. Finally I had a thought.

—There is something, I said. There is an Enemy.

It replied, You know that there is.

I said, What is its name?

I saw something then. A hand, or something like a hand; a flame like a smaller tongue of blue ice rising from its palm.

— Her name is Anat, it replied.

— Her name, it went on, is Tiamet, and Astarte, and Isis, and Maria, and Ariadne, and Aphrodite.

— Her Name, it said, the blue flame leaping, is Wendy.

— Her Name, it said after a long moment, is Hope.

The Voice fell silent then. The flame licked at the emptiness and was gone. The echo of that last word hung in the air for hours, a hissing venomous breath that meant to extinguish me, the sound the stars made as one by one they died.

Then gradually I began to feel something, gradually I began to feel cold, as though drop by drop every atom of my body had been replaced by slivers of ice. My head ached; my cheek felt bruised. When I opened my eyes I saw not black but gray, the surface of the Cathedral floor, granite slabs fitted together so that the cracks between them were no wider than hairs. I raised myself, coughing at the stench of my own body, my own filth and that which surrounded me.

“He is awake,” whispered the Consolation of the Dead. He lay at the other end of the cloister on a pallet strewn with rags. At his feet lay the white jackal and the aardmen Blanche and Trey, and half-hidden behind him squatted Oleander.

I stood. I felt weak, but no longer ill. I felt as though I had crept from a husk that lay behind me, a shapeless thing with gray eyes and tawny hair and a beating heart now stilled. I looked back but only my gray robe lay there. When I glanced down at myself I saw that I was naked, wearing only a length of green vine that hung from my neck to my thighs, a living vine the rich deep green of summer.

The child’s body still hung in the center of the room. I walked to it and placed my hand upon it, then wrenched it from the metal spike so that it fell, the head with its tangled golden hair spilling into the blood-filled basin at my feet and the torso sprawled beside it. I glanced down, then kicked it so that the rest of the body tumbled into the basin.

I lifted my head to stare at the Consolation of the Dead as he watched me. I raised my hand to point, first at the aardmen and then Oleander.

“Bring me all of the girl children who are still alive in this place,” I said. I turned and walked to the marble bench upon the dais and sat there upon it.

The Consolation of the Dead regarded me for a long moment, then slowly began to smile.

“It is as you wish, Lord Baal,” he replied.

I waited upon the marble bench until they returned. I watched unblinking all that followed, all that I commanded. I felt no need for sleep, or for any sustenance besides that offered me from the stone basin where the Consolation of the Dead presided. I felt nothing, nothing at all.