Winterlong

Part Nine: Winterlong

JANE ALOPEX JOINED US at the theater the morning of the eve of Winterlong. We were eating a more formal and elaborate breakfast than we usually did: dried fruits and bread, the last of Toby’s gingko brandy and my own sweet-mint tea hoarded all these weeks, pickled carp and a smoked ham from the Zoologists that Toby had been saving for a special occasion. No one said what we feared this occasion was: the last time we would all be alive together.

“Maybe we shouldn’t go,” Mehitabel said for the tenth time. “Aidan told us, that lazar warned him not to attend the Masque Winterlong.”

“But we have to,” said Miss Scarlet, sipping from her demitasse. “The Show Must Go On.”

Even she sounded doubtful. For all that it was still early morning—the sky was sunless, the trees pleached with snow and ice—we had the air of campaigners working through the night, or of party-goers reluctant to end a bibacious evening. The room smelled of brandy and wood-smoke. A half-dozen empty bottles and the shards of candicaine pipettes added to the scene of exhausted if desperate gaiety. Only Jane seemed unconcerned. She sat beside Miss Scarlet, cleaning her fingernails with a bread knife.

“God forbid the Paphians should miss a party,” she said dryly. “If it were up to me, I’d be home in bed. But there were aardmen’ skulking around the Zoo last night. The animals went half-crazy and I was up all night trying to calm them. When I saw the weather this morning I thought I’d better come here, in case you needed an escort to the House Saint-Alaban.”

She looked out at the snow, heavy wet flakes that hissed against the windowpanes. I had seen snow only a few times in my life, and wondered what this storm portended.

“Well, thank you for coming, Jane,” said Toby, and poured her the last of his gingko brandy.

That night we talked for hours, Jane and Miss Scarlet and Justice and myself, all of us crowded into the little room I shared with my Paphian consort. I suspected the other Players were up too, Gitana and Mehitabel gossiping in their chamber, Toby and Fabian keeping unease at bay by practicing their fencing in the gymnasium. Justice and I sprawled on one bed, enjoying the luxury of being with trusted friends. A fire smoked in the little stove that heated the room. Jane’s boots sent up plumes of steam and a muddy smell where she had leaned them to dry against the grate.

“Will there really be a Final Ascension, d’you think?” she wondered aloud. Through the narrow windows with their panes of diamond glass we could see the snow still slanting down. Now and then a gust would shake the window, and Jane and Miss Scarlet would pull their hassocks closer to the stove.

“My people think so,” Justice replied softly. He stroked my neck, staring at me with eyes wide but unafraid. “All the signs are there: the brilliance in the sky the night of the Butterfly Ball, the massacre at High Brazil; aardmen and lazars hunting together in the Narrow Forest; a boy who impersonates the Gaping One, and the Madman in the Engulfed Cathedral. And now it is Winterlong. We have only to wait, and see if the Magdalene awakens as they say She will, to confront the Gaping One.”

“A man,” Jane snorted. “Remember the Aviator’s only a man, and not even much of a man anymore, eh Scarlet?”

She nudged Miss Scarlet’s hassock. The chimpanzee shook her head, continuing to stare at the embers glowing in the grate.

“It is the end of something,” she murmured. “The end of the way things are now, at least.”

Jane tucked her feet under the hassock and glanced over at me. “The beginning of something else, too, I guess.” She sniffed, eyeing Justice as he toyed with my hair. “So much for the chaste young Sieur Aidan.”

She made a face and turned to Miss Scarlet. “Aw, don’t get all worked up over it, Scarlet, it’s just another costume party.” She tugged at the hair flopping into her eyes, then reached to pat the chimpanzee. Miss Scarlet sighed, adjusted the collar of her gown, and pursed her lips.

“I consulted the pantomancer Zuriel Persia when we gave The Spectre’s Harlequinade last week,” she said.

“That fraud!” snorted Justice. He reached for another candicaine pipette.

I propped my chin on my hand. “So that’s why you weren’t at the supper afterward,” I said. “I wondered.”

Justice cracked a pipette beneath my nose. I shut my eyes, tried to think what it reminded me of, this cold rush of pleasure. But all I came up with was the memory of the supper at the House Persia, where Justice and I had lingered with the suzein over candicaine and morpha tubes. Lately all I could think of was Justice, his hands and mouth and the taste of his skin, his hair soft as feathers. When I tried to remember what had haunted me since leaving HEL , the eyes I drew up were not green but blue, the loveliest sapphire blue: a boy’s shining eyes and not a demon’s.

“You needn’t have stayed there quite so long, Wendy,” said Miss Scarlet. “You two certainly made a sight, carrying on like that.”

She pulled up her skirts, stretched her furry legs until her toes curled in front of the glowing stove. “Although I don’t imagine it matters much anymore.”

She sighed, hunching forward to gaze into the coals. Justice leaned to kiss my shoulder. I closed my eyes and murmured happily, looked up to see Jane Alopex staring at me in disgust. Justice drew three fingers to his lips and made the Paphian’s beck, winking.

Jane looked away. “So what did Zuriel Persia, that fraud, say exactly? Tell me, Scarlet. I didn’t come all this way in a snowstorm to watch the Gaping One roll her eyes at Justice.”

“He said,” Miss Scarlet began, drawing herself up to command us with her sober brown eyes, “that the Masque at Winterlong would not be the one traditionally performed.”

“Well,” said Justice, “we haven’t heard that they’ve changed it, have we?”

I shook my head. I started to reply but Jane silenced me with a glare. “Go on, Scarlet,” she ordered.

“I met him in the Chamber of August Divination. He took an impression of my face in heated wax. ‘For the Ages,’ he said. ‘So that we may remember the greatest glory of our Stage.’ He was really quite charming, although he had an odd sort of voice.”

Jane frowned. “That doesn’t sound so charming, Scarlet. Taking a death mask before you’re dead.”

Miss Scarlet shrugged. Outside, the snow tapped against the windows. I moved closer to Justice.

“Well, nothing he said was very encouraging,” she admitted. “After the mask he burned some joss sticks, then smoked quite a lot of honeyed tobacco and a pipeful of opium. Then he killed a squirrel—poor thing, it was half-dead already, it looked starved. None of the animals look very healthy this winter, do they? Then he drained its blood into a bowl and he, he—”

She hesitated. At Jane’s impatient cough she looked at her, aggravated, and said, “Well, he drank it. Really, it seems as though barbarism is quite the fashion these days. But what could I say, when I had consulted him?

“So I waited, while he smacked his lips over the blood and muttered about there not being enough of it; until finally he performed a kind of divination with books. Stichomancy, he called it. I was surprised to see that he had books at all. Surprised he could read, actually.

“‘The Curators taught me,’ he said. That nasty voice, for all that he was quite handsome. ‘These books came from the Museum of Natural History, they gave them to me when I exorcised the Hall of Archosaurs after Nopcsa’s murder.’ I glanced at some of them—you know how I love to read—but they were mostly very old textbooks, natural-history books I suppose. He chose one at random, then flipped through it and selected phrases—quite aimlessly, I thought.

“This is what he gave me.”

She took a rolled-up bit of parchment from her reticule, unfolded it, and began to read.

“‘… the traces of the existence of a body … as to the succession of life upon the earth … the course of nature will be a continuous and uninterrupted one … an interminable vista is opened out for the future … the central fire and the rain from heaven … all traces of organic remains become annihilated … the ancient peace once more came to reign upon the earth.’”

She finished, stared down at the parchment, and then rolled it up and replaced it, closing her reticule with a snap that made me jump. Then she folded her paws upon her lap.

“That is what he told me,” she said. “That, and to beware of the Masque Winterlong. ‘The Masque of the Gaping One,’ he called it. He said he would not be in attendance.”

“He sounds quite intelligent for a pantomancer and a fraud,” said Jane Alopex. “I think you’re mad to go there tomorrow, Scarlet. And you too, Wendy, after you’ve been warned that the lazars plan an attack.”

I shrugged. “Anna was—she was never very reliable, actually.” I spread my hands in front of the stove. “And really, what else are we to do? The whole City can’t hide forever, and you said yourself we have no weapons to fight back with.”

Jane said nothing, only turned to stare out the window until Miss Scarlet crept into her lap and engaged her in more cheerful conversation.

So we passed our last night in the theater. The four of us talked until a few hours before dawn, recalling the glories of past performances, giddy sleepless nights of rehearsals and the triumphant applause that followed. We fed the little woodstove with sticks of applewood until first Justice and then Jane nodded off, leaving Miss Scarlet and I watching the embers turn gray and cold.

“There was something else, Wendy.”

I started, bumping my chin against Justice’s shoulder. I had almost fallen asleep.

“What, Miss Scarlet?” I mumbled, sitting up.

“What he told me. The pantomancer; there was more that I didn’t tell them.”

She tilted her head to where Justice slept beside me and Jane snored stretched out upon the floor, her traveling cloak rumpled beneath her. Miss Scarlet smiled wistfully. She had removed the lace mobcap she wore to cover her nearly hairless skull, the coarse ridge of fur that bristled across her head. Her paws kneaded restively at her throat.

“I—I asked him what he saw for me, if he saw anything.” She glanced to make sure the others were really asleep. “I wanted to know whether—well, you know. If it was to happen, if there really is a Magdalene—whether She might make me truly human. He put down the book and closed his eyes, and sat for a long time, so long I thought he had fallen asleep. I decided he’d forgotten me, and started to go, to find the rest of you, when he suddenly threw back his head.

“‘Nothing!’ he exclaimed. He looked quite alarmed. ‘I see nothing in this City of a talking chimpanzee, nor of your companion Aidan Arent, nor his Paphian leman. Nothing, nothing at all; but of this I will say no more.’“

She was silent then. The snow rattled against the windows. Jane’s snores mingled with Justice’s gentler breathing. After a few minutes Miss Scarlet crept from her hassock to Jane’s side, and curled in the crook of her arm to sleep.

A pantechnicon from the House Saint-Alaban arrived the next afternoon. The Players embarked, Jane Alopex riding beside us on Sallymae, her pistol hanging from her waist. Darkness crept across the City, the Narrow Forest’s shadowy fingers groping across the Museums and up Library Hill, to fall just short of the white lawn where sheep no longer grazed. The solitary young shepherd still stood guard there, silent and watchful, his round face more inched than it had been in the autumn. He watched us pass without a word. Only when the pantechnicon clattered around the curve and began the long slide down Deeping Avenue he raised his hand and called out:

“The Magdalene guard you through Winterlong.”

I stood in the back of the wagon and waved, clutching my cape against the bitter wind, and stared until I saw him no more. ‘

The Saint-Alaban elders driving the pantechnicon were well fortified with apricot negus and a steaming tin of hot whiskey that they shared with Toby and the others. Faces hardened or bodies too frail to barter with the City, still they were good-natured, not resentful as were so many P’aphian elders. I sat a little apart from them all. Even Justice’s company seemed too much for me this afternoon. I smiled wanly as they raised their tumblers to salute me.

“Hang the boy and raise the girl, Arent!”

“We’ll break the old whore Winter’s back, eh Aidan?”

Then they burst into one of the lewder choruses of Saint Alaban’s Song, stopping often to repeat the words for the benefit of Jane Alopex.

As we turned from the Deeping Avenue toward the Hill Magdalena Ardent, Curators poured from the Museums. Black-clad, brown-clad, they carried tall poles each topped with an animal’s skull, whipped by ribbons of green and due and red. In front of the Museum of Natural History a small group gathered around the slender figure of the new Regent, Clara Brown, and struggled to hoist the immense beribboned skull of an archosaur upon their shoulders. The other Curators stopped to help them, then swept them along in the growing crowd that trailed us. They greeted us boisterously, tromping through the snow and raising their skull-topped icons, tugging the ribbons so that the skulls’ jaws clattered as they fell in behind us in a long parade.

At last we mounted the Hill Magdalena Ardent and came to the House Saint-Alaban.

“Sweet Mother, look at them all!” Fabian stumbled against me as the wagon bounced up the icy drive. “The whole City must be here—”

“There’s less of the whole City than there used to be,’ one of the Saint-Alaban elders intoned, then hiccuped “The other Houses decided to throw their luck with us tonight. They’ll all be there …”

He swayed, grabbed a passing pole so that its skeletal embellishment clacked mournfully. Justice crossed to the back of the wagon to join me.

“Did you hear that, Wendy? The whole City here! That’s never happened, especially at Saint-Alaban! It really is like the old stories—”

I nodded, took his hand and squeezed it. I felt as though every nerve in my body was firing at once. Bright images flared in my mind as the Curators and Paphians shouted—

“hang the boy and raise the girl

‘til Winterlong is broken!”

—figures resplendent as though painted on glass. Aidai Harrow; Emma Harrow in the Home Room, flinging ; broken hibiscus blossom into my lap; the Paphian child Fancy standing on tiptoe to embrace Raphael Miramar, hi face flushed as he gathers her to his breast, as he turns to me and it is my own face there, my arms enfolding the child. Sorrow pierces me and I feel my knees buckle. Darkness whirls behind my eyes. Justice catches me before can fall.

“Wendy—”

I lift my head and see him, his blue eyes worried. Behind him stands Toby Rhymer staring at me, his hand tight about a mug of steaming wine. He says nothing but continues to stare. I know then that he heard Justice name me, that he has suspected for some time and now he knows. Slowly a smile creeps across’ his face as he raises the glass his eyes glittering.

“Through Winterlong, Wendy Wanders,” he murmurs and drains the mug. He turns to gaze at the House before us, Paphians like brilliant pennons waving from the step and balconies and snowdrifted terraces of Saint-Alaban.

Adonia Saint-Alaban, the suzein of the House, greeted us as we clambered from the pantechnicon.

“Through Winterlong, cousins,” she called as she descended the main stairway to the drive. She wore a long tunic of scarlet cloth worked with green thread. Even in mourning, the Paphians would be fashionable. She was older than most of the other suzeins, older than any Paphian I had ever seen. Small and plump, she was still beautiful, with the same slanted blue eyes that marked Justice and Lalage and others of the House Saint-Alaban. On each high cheekbone a crescent moon was tattooed in red and violet ink. She chanted her words in a voice raspy from ears of smoking kef and opium.

“Justice, my dear cousin, everyone is waiting to see you!” he made him the Paphians’ beck, then kissed him. Behind her, Paphians radiant in gold and crimson and blue swarmed down the steps to join the crowd outside. Some of them began lugging props and baskets of costumes from the pantechnicon. Others brought steaming bowls of wine and whiskey to the Curators, and then helped them carry their macabre standards inside. Still others greeted the players, bowing to Toby and kissing Miss Scarlet’s gloved paws. Before I could rejoin Justice several of his bedcousins lifted him onto their shoulders. Laughing resignedly, he waved to me as they bore him up the steps. After greeting Toby and Miss Scarlet, Adonia Saint-Alaban took me by the arm and led me indoors.

“Dear Sieur Aidan, our House is honored to have you here, tonight of all nights.” She leaned against my shoulder, her tongue flicking unsettlingly close to my ear. I smiled uneasily, tossing back the folds of my heavy cape.

“What a lovely costume!” she exclaimed, admiring my boots and crimson tunic. Her eyes lingered on the ornament I wore around my neck, a gift from Justice: a necklace of gold worked to resemble vines and trumpet-shaped flowers like lilies, traded from the Historians.

I nodded my thanks. “Your bedcousin Justice helped me with it,” I said. We paused at a set of massive wooden doors flung open to reveal the Great Hall. I blinked at the sudden blaze of candles and gaslights, huge cylinders of glass and metal suspended from the ceiling by chains and so dazzling that I had to look away for a moment.

“At Winterlong we set the night on fire to keep the Gaping One at bay,” said Adonia, smiling. Her eyes darted across the sweep of marble, as though to make sure there was no corner left unlit.

I wished for a shred of darkness: my eyes ached at so much radiance. Hundreds of revelers moved across a floor of polished marble, blazing nearly as brilliantly as the chandeliers overhead. The masquers seemed to course through a forest of flame. Evergreens were everywhere trees that would have dwarfed the theater but here made copses of green and silver, their boughs so heavy beneath dripping candles that I marveled they did not break. Beside each one stood a Saint-Alaban child, clad in shifts of diaphanous yellow so that their slender forms were silhouetted in the candlelight. The children held salvers of water, and laughed and sprayed one another until their costumes hung wet and limp. I wondered aloud at this unreliable method of firefighting.

“Oh, there’s never any problem,” Adonia assured me “The candles are set far beneath the leaves, and beside the trees were all cut this morning. Green wood shouldn’t burn.”

A young boy from Illyria sidled beside her. A wreath of pine cones crowned his black curls. “The masquers from Illyria want to know where their seats are during dinner, he said.

Adonia’s hand fluttered before her face. “Oh! I forgot and put them with that spado from Persia—well, come quick, Hilary, you can help—”

Her fingers brushed my mouth and she kissed me fleetingly, so that I had a quick taste of the raw fear beneath her coy posings. Then she was gone, the spangled hem of her tunic lost among the masked harlequins and columbine and mock-Raphaels milling about the room.

I looked around at the trees like waterfalls of fire, the white smoke curled beneath the domed ceiling high above me. I inhaled the heady scent of evergreens, fir resin, and the hundreds of red roses the Botanists had brought from their greenhouses and piled beside the tinkling fountains where the children refilled their salvers.

She is afraid, I thought. She is thinking of the lazars and the Madman in the Cathedral.

I glanced at those around me: Persian dominatrices with tattooed eyelids; three swaggering boys from Miramar; an Illyrian gynander swathed cap-a-pie in ropes of emerald feathers woven to look like verdant leaves. Did they know the lazars had planned an attack this evening? If so, why were they here?

Why was I here?

I grabbed a passing girl, a Saint-Alaban with chalk-white face and eyes painted to resemble holly leaves. She went with me laughing, but her smile died when she saw who held her.

“Greetings, cousin,” she said gravely. “You honor me, Sieur Aidan.”

“What is your name?” I pulled her into a small alcove where a fountain bubbled gaily, hidden behind sheaves of dark-green holly and magnolia leaves. She trembled in my arms. “I will not harm you—”

“I know.” Her pupils had dilated with fear, but she did not resist as I drew her face to mine. “Tansy. Tansy Saint-Alaban. I was paired with your consort Justice last year at the Glorious Fourth.”

“Tansy,” I repeated. I would tap her, learn what it was that made her come tonight and perhaps face her death. “Kiss me, Tansy.”

She turned her face from me. I could see tears in her cornflower eyes.

“Why are you afraid, Tansy?” I asked, taking her chin and forcing her to look at me. “I am Aidan Arent, a Player. You’ve seen me?”

“Yes,” she answered, her voice scarcely audible above the fountain. “At the Chrysanthemum Carnival at Illyria.”

“Then why are you afraid of me? Why are you here if you are so afraid?”

She gave me a look of such sadness that I let her go. “This is my House,” she pronounced with dignity. “In ‘The Duties of Pleasure’ it says that great sorrow will come to it, but also that a Saint-Alaban will be the one to wake the Magdalene from Her long sleep. We believe that the Final Ascension is coming, now. We believe it will begin at Winterlong. So we are afraid, all of us upon the Hill; but we will not run away. Too many of us are already dead, and what good will it do to flee and join our cousins who have gone to serve the Lord of Dogs?”

I turned to the fountain. The water tasted of oranges, and I splashed some upon my cheeks. “That doesn’t answer my question,” I finally said, drying my face on my sleeve. “You are afraid of me. Why?”

She smoothed her costume, a chemise of blood-red silk that barely covered the tops of her thighs. “Because they say you are the same one who rules in the Engulfed Cathedral, the one who commands our cousins to slaughter us as offerings to him. The Gaping One. The Hanged Boy.”

“But I’m not,” I said. “How could I be? He rules the Cathedral, and I am a Player. I have never been near the Cathedral—”

She stared at me with huge eyes blank as a small child’s. “I do not know how this can be true. But I saw the great star the night of the Butterfly Ball. And for three nights running I have dreamed of monstrous things, wolves with the faces of men racing through a flaming forest, and myself lying dead in the snow. I do not know what any of these things mean, and I am afraid. But I will stay here tonight with my people to await the waking of the Magdalene.”

Before I could stop her she turned away. “I will leave you now, Aidan Arent.”

Anger throbbed in my temples. I started to snatch her back, to force myself upon her and draw from her that dream, as though it might help me understand this madness. But as my hand fell upon her arm she turned and smiled, then leaned forward to kiss my mouth.

“May the Magdalene guard you through Winterlong, Aidan,” she said, and left.

I lingered for a few more minutes by the fountain, splashing idly at the falling water. So that is why they are here, I thought. My anger melted away. This was like the old religions Dr. Harrow had taught us about, the ones that had been suppressed by the First Ascension. To see the waking of the Magdalene. Not even lazars would frighten them from it, and Justice was too embarrassed to tell me.

As I walked out of the alcove I laughed, so loudly that an Illyrian malefeant admiring an evergreen’s young steward dropped her whip in surprise. As she retrieved it she bowed, then flashed me a quick smile. “May She guard you through Winterlong, young Aidan.”

“May She guard all of us, cousin,” I replied.

Our performance of The Spectre’s Harlequinade was not the evening’s highlight. The little play went well, my appearances as the Spectre—costumed after Raphael Miramar, and wearing a crimson death’s mask until my final revelation as the ghost of the dying heroine’s beloved—provoking not gasps but enthusiastically polite applause. But the Paphians in the treelit ballroom awaited other entertainments.

We took our bows. Adonia beckoned us to where she reclined with visiting Regents and the suzeins of the other Paphian Houses. Gower Miramar sat there, clad in a simple tunic of dark green, his only ornament a wreath of holly. He greeted me but did not smile, nor make the Paphian’s beck. I turned to help Miss Scarlet onto the cushion between myself and Justice. Jane Alopex stood nearby, biting her nails as she gazed across the room.

The Great Hall had grown eerily silent. Paphians stood grouped around the blazing fir trees, their bright costumes incongruous with the air of trepidation that had replaced the afternoon’s urgent revelry. Beside them stood the Curators, holding their skull-crowned staves. They glanced often at their Regents, but they too were silent. I heard only my own breathing, the hiss of candles, and the purl of water in the fountains. Burning wax nearly overpowered the scents of balsam and roses and musk. Only the youngest children waited with expectant faces, grinning and smirking at one another beneath the radiant trees. Miss Scarlet slipped her hand into mine, her glove not disguising how cold it was, nor how her long fingers trembled. Behind her simple black domino her eyes glanced nervously about the room.

Silence. Then from somewhere high above us came a single deep note, the tolling of a great bell. The tocsin that warned of attack by lazars or fouga strike; the tocsin that also each year marked the beginning of the Masque Winterlong. It echoed into the whisper of flame.

The bell sounded again. A rustle throughout the hall. Heads craned upward. I glanced at the main entrance, where sentries in blue and crimson shifted uneasily, armed with pistols and swivel guns borrowed from the Curators.

A final gong. It scarcely died away when there came a boom, the hammering of a knocker upon the entrance to the Great Hall. The sentries looked to Adonia Saint-Alaban. I saw her take the hand of the Regent at her side, her face dead white except for the scars of the crescent moons upon her cheeks. She nodded. The sentries pulled open the doors.

Flurries of snow rolled through the hall, a bitter wind sent a thousand candles guttering.

“Who will let the Winter in?” cried a voice from the shadows.

No reply; only the wind rushing through the room.

“Who will let the Winter in?” the voice repeated.

Adonia stood, the blast ruffling the fillet of leaves in her hair. “Not I!”

“Who will let the Winter in, who will let the Winter in?” other voices chanted. I glimpsed figures stirring in the darkness outside. Then suddenly the entry was filled with them, throwing back capes heavy with snow to display their costumes, shifts trimmed with gold and silver, tuxedos of very old black satin, robes trimmed with lumens blinking red and green and blue. Their eyes shone behind elaborate masks, masks of flowers and leaves, masks of holly and balsam and magnolia. Vines—dead grape vines, living nightcoils, frail ivy—curled about their brows. They pushed aside the guards, tossing handfuls of rose petals to drift with the snowflakes to the marble floor.

“Send her on,” cried Adonia Saint-Alaban, her voice rising shrilly. A Regent grabbed her as she stumbled and pulled her down beside him. I waited for the others to join in, as they had when I tapped Fancy and spied last year’s masque, the joyous children and roisterous masquers in the House Miramar. There was silence.

“But there is nowhere left to go.”

A masquer stepped forward from the group inside the door. A man dressed as a woman, his blond braid laced with greenery. Beside him was a boy in mask of emerald holly holding a child-sized bow and arrow. “All the City of Trees is here tonight, and Winter is tired of wandering—”

All about me I heard whispers, voices truly fearful now at this breach with tradition.

“Send her on!”

Beside me Miss Scarlet cried out, pulling the domino from her face to show flashing eyes, her mouth bared in a snarl. “Send her on, her power is broken, we light the end of Winterlong!”

The man-woman bowed, turned to gesture behind him. From the darkness a figure strode into the hall, tall and draped in crimson and black. Atop its head was a horse’s skull hung with red ribbons. At its side crouched a pair of wolvish creatures with the eyes of men, and between them a small form, gleaming white with glowing ruby eyes. It lifted its head and wailed. The figure with the horse’s skull lifted one arm and pointed at Adonia Saint-Alaban.

“There is no end to it. The Lord of Misrule will not be overthrown this time—”

I heard Justice and Miss Scarlet gasp at that voice, heard the sound ripple across the hall as I felt them all turn to me, Players and Paphians and Curators, strangers and friends; then from me to the figure in the doorway now pulling the horse’s skull from his head. For the first time I saw him in waking life: his russet hair bound with vines, his gaunt face powdered ghastly white so that his eyes burned above his cheeks.

Raphael Miramar. The Gaping One.

I knocked Miss Scarlet from her perch as I stumbled forward. “No!” I shouted.

He searched the room until his eyes found me. For a moment he stared as his mouth worked silently about a name; my name. Then:

“To me, Scarlet! Wendy, run!”

I heard Jane shout, the click of her pistol turning uselessly; then a booming report. One of the chandeliers shattered, showering us with glass and liquid flame and the smell of gas. A scream. I stepped backward, tripped, and shielded my eyes from the blistering fumes.

Figures raced across the hall. I saw Raphael shouting at the aardmen and lazars. Then he raised his hand. It held something, a globe of dull-colored metal. As Paphians fled past him he threw the globe into the center of the Great Hall. There was a whistling shriek, a soft thump; a deafening explosion. A wall of flame erupted, subsided, and then leaped again as it claimed a stand of evergreens.

“The arsenal!” Miss Scarlet cried. “They found the arsenal beneath the Cathedral—”

Behind her Toby yelled, waving the Players to follow him. Jane grabbed Miss Scarlet. Justice lunged for me, but I was looking for Raphael amid the screaming revelers.

“Let me go!” I shouted, pushing at Justice as he tried to drag me away. “They’re looking for me, it’s me they want—”

“Stay with me, Wendy!”

I cried out as I tripped over a flaming bough, twisted away from a great evergreen roaring as it tottered and then collapsed. “Wendy!”

I glimpsed Justice’s face, his arm thrown up to protect Miss Scarlet from the embers and flaming branches that pelted them as the tree crashed down. I shouted his name, tried to break through that wall of flame; but it was no use. Smoke rolled over me. Flames seared my cloak. Something slashed against my cheek; I drew my hand away streaming with blood. I covered my mouth, pushed my way through the mass of bodies that crowded me, every one trying to reach the doors in the torrent of smoke and flame howling through the room.

An explosion from overhead. More screams as glass and metal cascaded down from a window shattered by the inferno. I fell back against a crush of bodies. A struggling woman suddenly collapsed, her breast pierced by a spear of broken glass. Someone else stumbled to his feet. I was thrown down once more. I rolled blindly across the floor to keep from being trampled, until I slammed against the wall. For a minute I lay there dazed, pulling the tattered ends of my tunic to my face and coughing into it as I tried to catch my breath.

After a few moments I raised my head and saw the doorway, midnight blue behind a scintillant tapestry of orange and black and scarlet. It was only a hand’s-throw from where I lay. Looking back I saw nothing but a blazing horror, black figures racing screaming through the holocaust, trees bursting into flame, the hanging gaslights exploding and showering the hall with liquid fire. If Justice or Miss Scarlet or the others were back there they were dead. I turned and crawled along the wall toward the doorway, pushing away bodies, some of them already dead, others sobbing or gasping for breath.

At last I reached a spot far enough from the conflagration that I could stagger to my feet and lean against the wall, breathing freely for a moment. I rested, wheezing and wiping my eyes, and kept my gaze from the atrocity behind me.

“Master,” I heard suddenly: a voice like a groan of thunder. I looked up at the doors leading outside.

In the opening loomed three deformed creatures made more repulsive by the leaping play of shadow and flame. The tallest raised its great head, snapping its jaws as it weaved from side to side as though looking for someone.

“Master.” Its deep voice echoed above the Paphians’ screams and the crackling fire. The other two followed it a few paces into the ballroom, snarling and swiping at the masquers trying to flee.

One stiffened, pawed its face as though to disperse the smoke. It raised its head as though scenting something, then turned.

“Master?” it said again, taking a step toward me. It sniffed, then snarled a command to the others. I started to run, stumbled, and was knocked to the floor by one of the aardmen.

“Master!” it howled. It straddled me with its long legs, its breath worse even than the stench of burning. The others slunk beside it, lowering their heads to gaze at me and sniff doubtfully. One nosed my cheek where it bled, then raised its head and howled. Surely no one could hear it above the din of screams and roaring flame; but someone did.

“Trey—let me see—”

An emaciated lazar in harlequin’s breeches, his bare chest and face black with soot and red-streaked. In one hand he clutched a knife, in the other the torn hem of some feckless reveler’s costume. The aardman who guarded me stepped back. The boy stared down, coughing and shaking his head.

“Raphael,” he murmured. Then he turned and looked around, excited, and yelled, “Raphael!”

“He is gone, little master,” said one of the aardmen. “This one, this one?” It pawed at me anxiously.

The boy stared down at me, dropped to one knee, and pointed his knife at my chest. “You are the girl called Wendy Wanders? The actor disguised as Aidan Arent?”

Behind me I heard screams, the boom and crash of a gas chandelier exploding, or perhaps another of the Aviator’s explosive weapons. In the ruin that had been the Great Hall of Saint-Alaban trees still burned. I thought numbly of the yellow-clad children, of Justice and Miss Scarlet fleeing through the carnage.

“Yes,” I said at last.

The boy dropped his knife in excitement, hastily shoved it into a sheath at his side. “You are,” he said. “I can tell, you look just like him—”

“Tell me—” I took his hand, ignoring the aardmen’s growls. “My friends, the Players—a blond Saint-Alaban and a talking chimpanzee, a Zoologist girl—have you captured them? Are they alive?”

He gazed down at me, childish eyes in a shrunken face. “I don’t know. Or—yes, maybe, there were guards at the front gate said they had an animal there—”

It was all I had to hope on. I nodded and let go his hand. “What will you do with me?” I whispered.

The boy stood, shouted at a group of lazars struggling with several captives.

“You! Come here, leave them and help me—”

The lazars obeyed, their prisoners staggering for the gate and what freedom might await them outside.

“Tie her and bring her to the Cathedral,” the boy commanded. “I’ll go with you to make sure she doesn’t escape.” He flourished his knife again, but glanced apprehensively back into the Great Hall.

I did not fight when they bound me, nor when they laid me on a palanquin stolen from those left outside Saint-Alaban. As they bore me away I lifted my head to gaze back at the burning ruins, sparks and smoke leaping through the snowy darkness, the end of the oldest of the Houses of the Hill Magdalena Ardent.

There were other prisoners in the long file that made its way to Saint-Alaban’s Hill and the Engulfed Cathedral. I glimpsed them through gaps in the curtained palanquin that let in the snow and wind along with a shred of view. Paphians sobbing and sometimes falling to their knees, begging their captors for release; Curators walking silently, some still bearing their skeletal standards. The boy who had overseen my capture—Oleander, he introduced himself to me almost shyly—would occasionally stick his head through the palanquin’s drapery. He would start to speak. But fear or shyness would overcome him, and he would prod me (but gently) or brandish his knife before rejoining the horde of lazars and aardmen. When I could peer through the curtains I searched as best I could for Justice, Jane Alopex, or Miss Scarlet; listened for their voices among those weeping or cursing or laughing shrilly in the mob. But I heard and saw nothing; only once imagined Miss Scarlet’s voice wafting to me:

Whoever the searchlights catch, whatever the loudspeakers blare,

We are not to despair …

But surely this must have been my own imagining.

Now even breathing exhausted me. I coughed ceaselessly, my lungs still heavy with corrosive smoke and the painfully frigid air. But at last I must have dozed, despite the jarring of the palanquin, the aardmen’s howls and groans, and the Paphians’ piteous cries.

What woke me was silence. The palanquin had stopped, though its subtle motion told me that my captors still bore it upon their hairy shoulders. I sat up, pulled back a curtained panel to peer outside.

We stood on a barren heath near the top of a tall hill. In the darkness about me Paphians and lazars stood without speaking, without moving. Only an occasional cough floated back to me on the wind. The snow had stopped. Across the starless sky swept heavy clouds, so close it appeared they might settle upon the towers and spars of the great edifice looming above us.

From the Zoological Gardens, the Cathedral had appeared to me as a single column, a dark and broken spar much like the Obelisk. But it was not. A thousand spires and turrets and broken towers stretched across the leaden sky. Light rippled across immense windows of colored glass, their patterns shattered or twisted into horrible forms by the passing centuries. Within the soaring vaults of stone grinned fantastic figures, creatures lovelier than any Paphian or more horrible than the geneslaves who bore me to their master: the eidolons of a dead god, a god resurrected by a deranged Aviator and a kidnapped whore.

I shivered. What sort of men had built such a monstrous edifice, how many had labored to bring those stones to life and lift them’ to unimaginable heights above the black and hungry earth? Did they know that centuries hence it would still stand, that sacrifices would once again be offered within its dismal nave? Even the aardmen cowered at the sight of it, and Oleander stood between them, hugging his thin arms to his chest and shaking his head as though begging to go free.

From within the tallest spire of the Cathedral came a sound. A clang as of a single bell; magnified until the frozen air splintered with its clamor. One of the great windows shone brilliantly, lit by some inner fire. For an instant a dazzling figure glowed from within the labyrinthine patterns of scalloped glass. Young man or boy, one hand raised to grasp a flaming heart, the other clasping the neck of a small white animal. The bells pealed thunderously as it stared out into the night, the Ascendants’ abandoned god trapped within the embrasure.

There was a bellow, a deafening explosion. The glowing window burst apart, white flame and smoke tearing through iron mullions and melting glass. I clapped my hands to my ears. Captives and captors alike cried out, sheltering their heads from raining debris.

More shouting; then the flames subsided to a steady flicker. The palanquin lurched forward to the Cathedral’s South Gate.

He was gone from me now, the Boy in the tree; but I knew where He had fled.

We crossed the charred earth leading to the gate. Petrified trees littered the ground, and among them the bodies of the dead, their eyes still staring upward, hands clasping at the ground. The air was loud with a humming like that of many wasps. My guardians bore me carefully among these corpses, and thence into the Cathedral.

Inside wandered the numbed guests of the Masque Winterlong, their costumes torn and dragging in the half-frozen muck that covered the floor. Many still held masks before their faces; faces that had been burned or scarred in the conflict with the lazars. A few smoky fires burned from makeshift altars of fallen stone or overturned braziers. Figures milled about them, haggard children or their shriveled elders clad in rags. They scarcely acknowledged the newcomers, only glanced as they passed among them. Occasionally a soft cry or shout of recognition would flare up, to fade into sobbing or anguished shrieks. I thought I glimpsed Fabian, a tiny figure across the Cathedral’s vast interior; but before I could cry out the aardmen laid my palanquin to rest. The boy Oleander yanked back the frayed curtains.

“Come with me,” he said. He grabbed my arm, but I struck him and sent him reeling.

“Don’t touch me,” I spat.

I stumbled from the litter. The aardmen shied away. One regarded me with calm yellow eyes, and something like pity. I rubbed my cheek where the blood had stiffened and cracked. My hand brushed my throat; I still wore the necklace of golden vines. “Where are you taking me?” I croaked.

Oleander sucked at his teeth. “The Aviator would see you,” he said, fingering his blade. I glared at it disdainfully. “The Consolation of the Dead; and Lord Baal, the Gaping Lord.”

“He is here? Raphael Miramar?” My disdain withered. I thought of my friends. “What of those I asked about: Justice Saint-Alaban and Miss Scarlet Pan and Jane Alopex? And the others, the Players from the masque—”

Oleander looked across the nave to where a group of new captives huddled about a fire. “I told you, I don’t know. But: we were told to take prisoners, not to kill them. No more than we had to.”

No more than we had to …

How I longed to rend him, taste his blood and trace within it whatever path might lead me to my friends, my beloved leman! I groped at his hand. He pushed me away, fearful, and commanded the aardmen, “Follow me! To the Crypt Church—”

They led me down passages so dark that only the aardmen could tell where to step safely, the only sound our breathing and their loud snuffling as they sought the way. Candles glimmered here and there, throwing into sudden relief the hollow contours of a skull, a sleeping effigy’s calm face. Oleander turned to blow out each one as we passed. When I looked behind us I saw only darkness.

At last the passage ended. We stepped into an open space. It was still dim, but enough pale light glimmered from crevices and narrow windows and even torches that I could see. The ceiling rose above us in a series of vaults, leading north and south and east in an endless progression of archways. Rows of tiny candles lined one wall. As we passed, their smell assaulted me, burning fat or flesh.

Some subterranean furnace must have warmed that place. It was cold, but not so frigid as the nave above us. I recalled someone speaking of engines in the earth, was momentarily grateful if they still ran here. But my guards were not eased by it. I smelled the aardmen’s fear, and Oleander’s blunt terror as he walked beside me.

“What will he do with me?’

The boy jumped at the sound of my voice. I heard his knife slide from its sheath, then slip back again. “I don’t know,” he replied after a moment. He paused at the intersection of two passages, chose the one lit by rows of tapers set upon the floor, two by two. “We’re almost there now.”

The passage twisted. A doorway opened before us, iron grates’ pulled back to show a long room dim with smoke curling from crackling braziers. A raised dais was at one end; before it a sort of tub or basin of stone, stained black along the lip. Many people stood against the walls, children and Paphians and lazars and Curators, gaunt and unmoving. A column reared from the center of the room, pale marble wrapped about with vivid green vines, their leaves shining even in that murky light. Someone sat upon the dais, and something white crouched at his feet.

We hurried through the iron gates into a small alcove, from this into an adjoining alcove that hid us from those watching in the chamber, though we could see them by peering through the narrow doorway. Here Oleander turned and bade the aardmen hold me fast. Then he ripped a panel from my tunic and gagged me with it. He stared at me for a moment, then tugged at the necklace I wore until its clasp gave way and took it.

“Hold her here.”

He slipped out. A minute later I saw. him weaving through the lazars until he reached the dais. The figure there stepped forward, a small white shape coiling about his legs like a cat. His face was darkened with ash and he had bound back his hair. When he raised his hand to greet Oleander something glimmered there, the faintest lilac.

They spoke softly. I saw Raphael glance back at the alcove and smile. Then Oleander handed him something, a flash of gold in the firelight. Raphael dipped his head and Oleander fastened my necklace about his neck. Then the younger boy stepped back to disappear through a door at one side of the altar.

Raphael stood a little longer, fingering the necklace’s intricate turnings of leaf and flower. He stared back at where I stood hidden by the shadows. The aardman Trey whimpered at that look, and tightened his grip upon me. Then behind Raphael something else took shape in the darkness of the doorway. It remained there where I could not see it clearly. Silence, except for the crackling of the braziers, the hissing of tapers set about the floor, the soft stir of lazars shifting their feet where they watched.

Abruptly Raphael looked away, to another alcove oppo sitemine.

“Bring him here,” he said. “I want to see him.”

From the alcove two aardmen emerged, half-dragging a third figure. When they reached the center of the room the murky firelight touched his hair with a faint cast of gold. The aardmen pushed him forward roughly, so that he fell to his knees in front of the dais. I tried to cry out, the gag cutting my mouth as I fought against Trey and Fury.

“No, lady,” Fury growled softly.

At the foot of the altar Justice crouched, coughing. When he raised his head I saw a gash across his forehead still bleeding slightly. He blinked at the smoke, ran a hand across his eyes, and shook his head, dazed. Then he stumbled to his feet, swaying as though drunk, and looked up.

On the dais stood my brother, clad in torn red tunic, his matted hair pulled back. At his throat shone the necklace Justice had given me. Behind him in the doorway stood the Aviator. Two aardmen supported him, their slanted eyes vivid in the firelight.

“Wendy,” Justice said. He shook his head again, wincing, and looked back at Raphael.

“Yes, Justice,” Raphael called softly. He held out his hands and beckoned Justice toward him. About his wrist glowed a band of violet light.

Justice took a step toward the altar, stopped. At Raphael’s feet the white animal, dog or small Wolvish creature, stared with blazing eyes at my lover. A murmur passed through the chamber; several of the children turned away or covered their eyes. Still no one spoke or tried to warn him. I tried to scream, choking on the cloth in my mouth.

“Do not watch,” croaked Fury. He tried as gently as he could to twist my head from the sight. I kicked at him until he loosened his grip and I could turn to watch.

Very slowly Justice mounted the steps, slowly as someone in a nightmare. I shut my eyes and tried desperately to draw something up, tried to turn his steps as I had those of countless dreamers at HEL . But when I opened them again he had mounted the last step and stood unsteadily before Raphael, his hands open before him.

“Wendy! I was so afraid—”

He took one last step, reaching for Raphael’s hand. As he did so my brother embraced him, pulled him to his breast, and bowed his head so that their hair fell in tangled waves, mingled gold and russet. Raphael caressed him, murmuring. There was an uncanny lavender glow against Justice’s cheek.

My brother stepped away. For a moment Justice stood before him, confused. He touched his throat, as though to ease a bruise there. My twin gazed at him, toying with the gold chain around his neck.

“You are mine now,” he said.

Justice raised his eyes to Raphael and choked out a single word, his knees buckling.

“Miramar—”

He sank to the floor and was still.

Raphael turned to the shadows behind him, raised a shaking fist encircled by a band gone dark and gray. Without looking back he strode across the altar to the sanctuary. The white jackal sniffed at Justice’s body, then turned and darted after Raphael. The Aviator let him pass. He stared out across the nave to where I stood; Fury and Trey pressed close against me. He made a cutting gesture with his hand.

“Ungag her and bring her to the armory,” he called. He turned and followed Raphael.

Fury struggled with my gag. As it fell to the floor I commanded him, “Free me!”

The aardmen stared at me uneasily, tails switching.

“Free me!”

Trey crouched, growling, then dropped his hold and loped across the room to the sanctuary. Fury stared after him. “Please,” I whispered.

He let go of me. I stood shivering, rubbing my arms. Before me flames darted across the floor, licking at pools of melted tallow and dried grass and ruined cloth. I walked slowly from the alcove to where Justice lay upon the steps. In the shadows the silent lazars watched.

“Justice.”

I knelt beside him, brushing back his long hair to see a tiny mark upon his neck, like an insect’s bite. A drop of blood no larger than a bee’s eye pearled there. I touched it. brought it to my lips not caring if it were poison. Then I bent to kiss him, pulling oh so gently at his jaw still warm in my fingers. My tongue slipped between his teeth, his mouth unyielding now for the first time, the only time, as I kissed him, my Justice, kissed him and found nothing, nothing at all: only my own tears falling upon his lips and throat and he was not there, he was gone, gone past all redeeming. Justice Saint-Alaban whom I had loved was dead. The Gaping One had claimed him.

I drew back, stunned. Dark bruises had begun to erupt on his skin, the beautiful pale skin that had not been a vanity to him. And at the thought of that, of his beauty ravished in death, horror and grief overwhelmed me so that I knotted his hair about my fingers and began to sob Fury crept to the altar to slink warily between the flames, The lazars slipped from the shadows and approached me, murmuring.

I wept then, who had never wept before; while behind me in the crypt I could hear the hiss of the bonfire where they would lay him—my friend and companion, who had led me from HEL and lived only long enough to teach me the beginning of love.

And now I would never know what it was to be human; now all there had been of love in me would burn upon a madman’s pyre. My brain seethed as though it might explode, as inside me I heard the weeping of all the ones I had taken, all those who had gone to feed the Gaping One: Emma and Aidan, Morgan Yates, Melisande, all the others for whom it had been too much, this life, this waking horror that was the world; their voices rising to a shriek, until I shook and my hands dropped from him.

And I screamed, striking at a lazar who had reached to touch Justice’s hair. She fell back, her head striking a marble pillar. She slipped to the floor, a seam of blood like a crack upon her pale face.

“Don’t touch him! Don’t try to hold me!” I shouted. “None of you can hold me!” Another child slipped and fell in his haste to run from me. I lunged to grab him, held him above me, and hurled him across the chapel. He screamed, and the voices of the other lazars echoed his end.

“The Gaping One, the Gaping One!” they cried. “He wakes, he wakes—‘”

I stood, panting as they cringed in the shadows of the Chapel, weeping and coughing from the bitter smoke. Then someone else limped from the altar, the reflection of firelight scorching his tattered crimson jacket until he seemed another flame approaching me.

“No!” he shouted, kicking a knot of crouching children so they scattered like a nest of voles before a stoat. “That is not the Gaping One!”

He staggered toward me: the Consolation of the Dead, the mad Aviator, Margalis Tast’annin. The torn jacket flapped like some withered basilisk clinging to his shoulders. From its tattered sleeves hung myriad tiny bones that clattered as he moved.

I stood frozen, staring; and finally I knew why they feared him: because now I too was afraid.

“Go back,” I hissed. “I will destroy you—” I bared my teeth and swiped at the air in front of his face.

“You are not the Gaping One,” he said. He jabbed at me, knocking me to the floor, then grabbed my shoulders. I could smell the plague on him, the fetor of rotting flesh. I fought him with all my strength, twisting, snapping at the air until my teeth felt his skin split beneath them. He swore, kicked me as his blood ran into my mouth and I choked, trying to find the strand there that would unleash the horror upon Tast’annin and disable him. I tried to escape, but succeeded in getting my head free so that I could shut my eyes and try to call it forth, the One who lived inside me, the Boy who lived on blood…

There was nothing there.

Not a thought, not a darkness, not even the black wraith of a nightmare to feed it. Instead I gagged, my mouth filling with hot blood. As when I had tried to tap Justice when he died: He was gone, truly gone. I was helpless before the power of those who worshiped the Gaping One.

I was bound again, my legs left free so that I could walk. Trey and Fury watched me as the lazars dragged Justice’s body away, the children looking at me fearfully as the Aviator shouted at them to hurry. Then I was alone with him in the Crypt Church, with only the aardmen guarding me.

“Wendy Wanders. Subject 117.”

He licked his cracked lips and reached for a taper burning upon the altar. Dried blood caked one side of his face, so that it appeared he wore a grisly half-mask. He raised the candle, held it close enough to my cheek that it burned me and I turned away. “Emma’s prize subject. You led us quite a chase, Wendy; and for what? It doesn’t even work anymore, does it? You couldn’t save your friend, you couldn’t fight me. What good are you now, Wendy?”

I spat at him. He laughed, drew the candle to my temple until I heard the hiss of hair burning and smelled where he scorched me. Beside me Fury growled. “The scars are gone, you can’t even tell anymore, can you? I would have given anything to see how you did it; but I don’t suppose we’ll ever know now, will we?”

He stepped back, kicking at something: a heap of bones, the twisted remains of a white robe. A skull clattered across the floor and came to rest beneath a smoking brazier. He stared after it for a long moment, then turned to me.

“I asked them to show it to me once. Aidan Harrow told me. He told me everything. I was his confidant, his only real friend at the Academy—

“‘Show me,’ I begged him; ‘let me see what it is.’ I wasn’t afraid of it, you see, as he was and Emma was. I knew even then that this was something that shouldn’t be kept a secret.

“But he was a coward, Aidan, and we all know what happened to him.” He laughed, flicked melting wax so that it spattered my arm. “Emma was no coward but she was a fool, to think she could hide this—”

“She didn’t know what she was doing!” I tried to pull away from the aardmen, but they only held me tighter. “The implants were part of her research—”

“She knew exactly what she was doing.” His voice was very soft. He took my chin in his hands and turned it so that I faced the brazier and blinked in its fiery light. “Not so pretty as you were, Wendy Wanders.” He traced a jagged cut upon my cheek, and I winced as he prodded where I had been burned at Saint-Alaban. “She knew there had been a boy, your twin brother; I read it in your file. She hoped to awaken this— thing —she wanted to see it again…”

I closed my eyes, trying to recall Him, the face peering from spring leaves and the color of His eyes. But it was Justice’s face I saw, pale beneath the film of blood, his eyes dead and gray. They were both gone: gone as though it really had been a dream. Justice dead. The other had forsaken me as He had Aidan and then Emma; and they had killed themselves to find Him again. That beautiful face, those eyes…

When I looked up the eyes boring into mine were pale blue and threaded with blood.

“Why?” I asked. I struggled to shake myself free of the aardmen. Tast’annin glanced at them, nodded. They stepped back to crouch in the shadows. “Why would you care after all this time, about—about Emma, and me, about all of this?”

His gaze drifted upward, seeking something in the smoke-blackened figures that watched us from the vaulted ceiling. “I told you, I was Aidan’s friend,” he said at last. “I wasn’t—happy—about his relationship with his sister. And I was curious.

“To see a god like that, or a demon; even just a hallucination! Something that strong, something to die for—surely you can understand that, Wendy?”

He was silent for a long time, staring at me and then past me, seeing something in the darkness of the Crypt Church, something perhaps in the bones he had scattered across the floor.

Finally he said, “There is a play the courtesans have, a play about twins.”

I nodded, my flesh prickling. “The masque of Baal and Anat.”

He beckoned at Fury. The aardman slunk back beside me, Trey following. “That’s right. Baal and Anat. I have seen it many times, I had the children perform it for me. But then I thought, how much better if there were real twins, that would give it more impact, more—”

He waved at the air, his hand stabbing at my chest. “More depth,” he finished.

“I—I don’t know the play,” I stammered. “It’s a sacred text of the Paphians, of the House Saint-Alaban. Waking the Magdalene—”

“It’s very simple, really. A sort of sacrificial drama. They fight. One dies, the other doesn’t. I’ve arranged a place for the performance—”

Abruptly he turned away, gesturing at the aardmen. “Bring her to the armory.”

He sounded weary, and limped as he crossed the altar. Before he reached the door leading upstairs he looked back at me.

“Even I must serve something,” he said, and began to climb the stairs.

I was half-carried out of the Cathedral. The wind had fallen, the air was still and cold and silent except for muted voices in the distance. A few stars showed through the clouds drifting across the sky. Trey and Fury dragged me hurriedly across the frozen ground, their flanks rippling as they shivered in the darkness. About me I heard the sounds of running feet, coughing, and urgent whispers.

In a few minutes Trey and Fury skidded to a stop, snarling and snapping. I fell between them, tried to brace myself against the ground. There was nothing there. Inches in front of me the earth fell away abruptly. At my side the aardmen hunched, panting.

We were on a ledge ten or fifteen feet above a gaping hole large enough to swallow the Crypt Church. Brilliant white light streamed from it. Many figures moved there, black against the glaring lanterns.

They had excavated a great pit in the earth. Frozen mounds of dirt and gravel surrounded it, heaps of stone and sand lay scattered about its floor. It was the ruins of an ancient arsenal. Banks of monitors and metal pilings, immense shining globes and myriad metal chairs had been lined around the perimeter in a feeble attempt at order. Spikes and rotting timbers protruded from the earthen walls, hung with lanterns or chains or frayed costumes.

In the center of the pit loomed some kind of launching mechanism, its hollow nose pointed skyward, jointed steel legs splayed across the uneven ground like those of a mantid. From within it protruded a long silvery missile. Nearby a small generator had been propped, its tiny operating lights blinking red and green through a film of dirt. Wires strung from it led to floodlamps pitched from crazily tilted poles and scaffolding made from warped wood and metal rods. The whole place was blindingly lit, so that it was impossible to ignore those who had died during the excavation, the stench of bodies heaped along the walls and beneath the launcher.

“Come,” said Fury. He nosed at the earth until he found something, the lip of a rickety metal ladder. He mounted it with difficulty, hind legs scrabbling at the narrow struts as he clambered down, until finally he slipped and fell the last few feet. Shivering, I followed, my hands sticking to the freezing metal, and stepped carefully to the bottom. Trey crouched at the rim of the pit, his eyes glowing as he stared down at us. After a moment a smaller shape joined him, foxy muzzle and ruby eyes watching shrewdly.

“This way, lady,” Fury ordered. I turned to follow him. Lazars squatted exhausted against the walls. Others dragged more captives down from above, and hurried to avoid us as we passed. I shielded my eyes against the glaring lights, stumbling against broken chairs, the gutted shell of some kind of robotic server. Beneath the missile launcher the ground had been swept clear except for a few metal screws, a tooth, and shards of glass. “Here,” said Fury.

As he turned away another voice cried my name, hoarse but unmistakable.

I whirled, tripping so that I grabbed one of the launcher’s legs to keep from falling. In the shadows behind a narrow scaffold stood Jane Alopex, her arms held tightly by a slender lazar still wearing a columbine’s purple shift. A bruise welled beneath one eye, but she held her head high and stared at me with relief.

“Jane!” The word came out in a whisper. Then I nearly wept, because from behind her a smaller figure emerged, dragged by a lazar scarcely bigger than herself. Her gown filthy, mobcap gone, limping slightly because she wore only one boot. “Miss Scarlet—”

Another person was pushed forward. Fabian, staring dazed at the ground. Even at this distance I could see him shaking, his torn clothes fluttering from thin wrists. Of Toby and the others I saw nothing.

“Well! We seem to have all the principals assembled. Not as large a cast as usual, but sure to be an interesting one.”

At the base of a ladder weaved Tast’annin, clutching at Oleander and Trey for support. Behind him stood Raphael Miramar, calm as though just awakened from untroubled sleep.

I drew myself up and called out, “Let my friends go free, Tast’annin! You have no fight with them, you had none with Justice—” I stammered the name, halted.

Tast’annin shook his head. He looked weary beyond belief, his eyes sunk within his ravaged face, his face almost bloodless as it turned from me to Raphael. As his gaze lingered upon my brother loathing writhed across his features, loathing and a dull sort of recognition. He raised one hand to Raphael, with the other grasped at Trey as though to pull him closer. For a moment I thought he would speak, command the aardmen to bear my brother back into the fastnesses of the Engulfed Cathedral, and slay him there as a final offering to the Naked Lord.

Then the light died in his pale eyes. He turned back to me, his voice a raven’s croak.

“No. It must be done—”

He pointed at the far wall where Fabian cowered beside Jane Alopex. “You—whore there, you actor —introduce them.”

Tast’annin’s hand flailed at the air. Fabian gasped, then was shoved forward into the ring of light.

“What—I don’t—”

“The masque of Baal and Anat,” prodded Tast’annin. He leaned heavily upon Oleander. The boy grimaced, moved the belt and sheath around his waist, and stepped forward bearing his master. Raphael followed them, then walked until he stood a few paces from me.

“The masque—” Fabian began in a wavering voice. The Aviator stared at him coldly, his lip catching on one upper tooth. “The masque of Baal and Anat, performed by—by”

Tast’annin grinned and clenched his fist. A cry as Fabian was struck and sank to the ground; and another lazar stood pale and trembling where he had.

“You may begin,” whispered Tast’annin. “Wendy—Raphael—”

My brother stared back at the Aviator as though for the first time. His hair had fallen unbound to his shoulders; his face was white as ash, his mouth red against its pallor. Blood caked at the corners as though he had been bitten. My necklace still hung about his throat. Then he turned to gaze at me, his unearthly calm finally shaken.

There was not a sound, not a breath, in that place. I felt as though even the freezing air had fallen away; I felt nothing, nothing at all.

“Wendy?” he asked, so softly that I almost could not hear him. He reached one hand to touch me, his fingers sliding from my wrist to my arm. Maybe I did not really hear him, maybe it was only that I knew what he would say, perhaps the name had been fluttering in my mind waiting only for him to say it. Not Aidan Arent but Wendy Wanders. Not a solitary wanderer but Raphael’s sister; not a research subject but a real girl. He stared where his fingers stroked my arm, marveling, shut his eyes for a moment as he traced the crook of my elbow.

“You’re just like me.” He pulled me closer, until our faces almost touched. I could smell the blood on him, the breath of poison that had claimed Justice. I wanted to draw away from him but could not. To see him like this, to touch him for the first time; to realize that it was true, that all these years there had been this other part of me, this changeling boy living in the City of Trees, and never knowing it, never knowing me; never knowing him. He stroked my face, took my hand, lifted it so that I could see our fingers entwined and the same thin wrists, the same broken nails and slender fingers, then pulling back my other sleeve to show me my arm, his arm, the veins like new young vines and their patterns both the same. He dropped my hand and gazed into my eyes once more.

“You are so beautiful,” he whispered. And staring at him I nodded, and murmured his name; because it was so. I glimpsed the beauty that had held the City in sway, the sweetness in his features beneath their film of blood; the high cheekbones and gray eyes that, had they not been so striated by fatigue and madness, would have been lovelier than any eyes I had ever seen, lovely eyes, eyes I dared not meet in dreams, the eyes of the Boy in the tree…

And suddenly I saw it, saw Him; suddenly I knew that this was what Miss Scarlet had glimpsed at our first meeting, and knew at last what it was those others had seen through me:

A demon, a god. Revenant and revered one, the eternal victim and He who holds the knife. A boy of unearthly beauty, different from the One who had haunted me but also the same, as Raphael was like me and yet not me; as though Raphael’s corporeal body had been transformed and this other one shone through him as though he were a beaker of clear water. As I gazed into those eyes I knew that He had found His final place, He had found His way into the world. I had been an imperfect vessel; Raphael Miramar had become His ideal host.

“Wendy. My sister—”

He drew my face to his and kissed me. For one instant I felt in him a spark of something that was neither hatred nor desire but perhaps relief, and peace. Then he groaned, turned so that his cheek crushed against mine. His eyes clenched shut as though to keep from seeing some horror beside him. His hands clutched my side, his tongue slipped between my lips as he pulled me tight against him.

“No—” I cried, trying to pull away.

But in this, at least, he was different: he was stronger than I was. I fought and bit, tried to scratch at him, went mad thinking, This is the one who killed him, this is the one who murdered Justice; but it was no use. Neither hatred nor will nor force could shake him from me. My struggle only aroused him more until finally I kicked him, knocking him aside for a moment as I fell. I staggered to my feet. He threw himself against me and knocked me down, then grabbing my shoulders forced me back and smashed my head against the earth, so hard that it felt as though he had taken a knife to my temple. I nearly passed out from the pain; perhaps I did …

Because now there is a thrumming in the air, a sound like wind in the leaves or something else, a sound I have never heard, not in Waking; only perhaps in dreams. The sound of waves returning to some distant shore, the sound of voices chanting. Gradually their words become clear:

We came upon Baal

Stricken on the ground:

Mot had slain him. We cried,

“Puissant Baal is dead,

The Prince, Lord of Earth, is perished.”

Our lamentation wakes Anat.

She descends from the throne,

Pours’ dust of mourning on her head.

In her face she cuts a gash with a stone,

She gashes her cheeks and her chin,

She plows her breast like a garden,

Harrows her back like a plain. She lifts up her voice and cries:

“Baal’s dead!—what becomes of our people?

What becomes of the earth?

After Baal I’ll descend into earth.”

Anat goes and wanders

Every mount to the heart of the earth,

Every hill to the earth’s very bowels.

She comes to the Wasteland

To the horror of Mot’s field.

She comes upon Baal

Stricken on the ground.

Then weeps she her fill of weeping;

Deep she drinks tears, like wine.

Loudly she calls

Unto the Mother above.

“Lift Puissant Baal, I pray,

Onto me.”

The Mother wakes.

She picks up Puissant Baal,

Sets him upon his sister’s shoulder.

Anat lifts up her voice and cries:

“Now will I sit and rest,

And my soul be at ease in my breast.

For alive is Puissant Baal,

My brother, king of the earth.”

When I open my eyes once more I see him above me, his hands tight about my shoulders as he thrusts against me, grunting, his face contorted into a mask of such despair and terror that I try to turn my head so as not to see it, not to see him, my own face there above me in the throes of such torment as I can no longer imagine, a horror even worse than mine at being ravaged by him.

But He is too strong; I cannot look away…

And suddenly they are there with me, all of them: Morgan Yates with her face pressed against a bloodstained window, Emma Harrow staring as her brother’s body twists slowly from a leather belt, Jane Alopex recoiling as He turns to her and extends His hand, Fabian a gray wraith twisting in the night. Just as suddenly they are gone. I am alone. It is me there, for one moment my own face hangs above me in the darkness, not Raphael but Wendy. Then he tosses back his head and cries out: a scream that echoes from the walls and is taken up by those who watch, until the air is filled with it: a shriek of such horror and misery and loathing that it deafens me, and I shut my eyes so as not to see the anguished face that would make such a sound.

It is over. He rolls from me and lies prostrate upon the blackened earth. I turn onto my side to stare at him, reach to touch him: my consort, my enemy, my brother. He does not move; he lies there as though dead.

A shadow falls across his face. Dimly I become aware of other sounds; cries and the sound of fighting, metal against metal, granite crushing bone. There is a smell of burning, of flesh. Above me stands the Aviator. Blood slicks his arm and hand, and he holds a piece of metal like a bloodied scythe.

“Kill him!” a voice shrilled. I twisted to see Oleander hanging from a spike beside the ladder, his face contorted as his arms flailed. Blood frothed from his mouth as he strove to free himself. “The missiles — he will destroy us all—kill him!”

His hand flopped against his side. With his last bit of strength he pulled a knife from the folds of his trousers and tossed it. It skittered across the floor and halted beside my brother’s body.

With a roar Tast’annin leaped from where he swayed above me. Stumbling against the ladder he raised his arm, the light blazing crimson from his scythe as it struck at the boy’s neck. For one instant Oleander’s mouth mirrored Tast’annin’s own, a frozen mask of loathing and horror; then with a rush of blood his head toppled from his shoulders.

“Kill him?” shouted Tast’annin. But no one seemed to hear him but me. Everywhere lazars ran blindly, scrabbling at ropes and ladders, kicking as they fought to climb the walls of the pit. “Kill him? No one can kill him! It is the Final Ascension: he will rise again!” His voice rose to a scream, bubbling from his twisted mouth so that I could not be certain what words I heard and what I only imagined in my delirium. “He is not dead, he doth but sleep—”

Then there was a flash of light. The generator exploded with a hollow sound, showering me with sparks. Tast’annin disappeared in the shadows. There was only torchlight and a few sullen candles glowing fitfully above the melee.

I turned dully to stare at the stricken form on the ground in front of me: so like myself I might have aligned my body beside his, the two of us forming twin curves of a human arabesque, gray eyes deadened, tawny hair a wasted wave upon this bleak shingle, our broken limbs entwined cold and unmoving. Raphael Miramar. Neither god nor Gaping One: only my brother given to the dark.

“Kill him,” another Voice whispered. I lifted my head; but Tast’annin had forgotten me. I heard him growling as he lunged and struck at something in the dark.

— Kill him, Wendy.

The yellow points of the lazars’ torches guttered and went out. With them it seemed the very voices of the lazars died. A terrible silence encloaked me, although I could still see the wraithlike figures of the damned children soundlessly spinning about the abyss, contorted like insects trapped in a lamp. Even the pounding of my heart stilled. For a moment I thought, We are all dead.

Then, from the charred ground in front of me a brilliant white flame leaped up like a fountain, a flame with neither heat nor color besides that painful argent. The stench of rotting flesh arose with it. I blinked and shielded my eyes and mouth.

— Oh, Wendy, the flame sighed. The brilliant light danced and faded to a harsher yellow, then began to shape itself into a more substantial form. Slowly it rose and fell, as though trying to draw strength from the freezing air.

— Poor Wendy! Alone now, you are truly alone —

—But I can still hear you, Small Voice, I said in surprise. If I am alone you must be gone—

— No. I am still here, for the moment. Kill him, Wendy. He is an abomination; you cannot both live. Kill Raphael.

With difficulty I turned from the flame; it seemed to will me to stare at it, be consumed by it. But I looked back down at the boy lying there. So frail now, and white. His eyes were closed but I knew that even if he opened them there would be no light there, no reflected glory to mad’den me, no maenad’s Dionysus there now but only a broken shell.

— Kill him, hissed the flame. There is a knife, take it and kill him!

I nodded and reached for the knife Oleander had thrown: a golden knife with a curved blade, so keen the light refracted from its edge in dazzling waves of blue and white. I held it a long time. It seemed to have no weight at all in my hand.

— Kill him, the flame repeated. Kill him, Wendy. Each time it leaped higher beside me.

—Be quiet, I commanded it. I was trying to remember something, something the Boy had told me at the Zoo:

We will meet again … but you may not remember my names. Although perhaps by then you will recall your own …

— Your name? the flame screamed. Your name? You know it now! Kali is your name, and Athena; and Morgan and Mayuel; Clytemnestra and Artemis and Hecate!

“No,” I said suddenly. I recalled that strange sound, a noise like waves, like many women chanting. “I am Anat, the consort of my brother Baal. But I am also Wendy Wanders, the lover of Justice Saint-Alaban.

“I am the Magdalene.”

I stared down at him, the bright one broken, my own face stricken and bloodless before me, Raphael Miramar, Aidan Harrow, the Hanged Boy: my beautiful brother in the dark.

And there came to me then a great sound, the sound of singing. And I saw all of them, Emma and Aidan, Gligor and Merle and Anna, Dr. Silverthorn and Toby Rhymer, a white dog with eyes like burning ice and a girl who longed to fly with finches, all of them like lights dancing in the air. With them shrilled the voices of the lazars like wounds bleeding song, all of them crying out to me. Loudest of all was the piercing cry of a boy with fair tangled hair and green eyes, his hands streaming through the darkness like the purest moonlight and his eyes two burning stars. And the song they sang had only one note and one sound and one word, and the word they sang was Death; the song they sang was Supplication to slay him there where he lay with his white throat awaiting the knife, his eyes shut against the blade. And the song they sang went on and on and on, their voices grew higher and louder until the sky whirled with them and the stars began to wink out one by one. And within me I felt my heart wither, and the knife Oleander had tossed me grew heavy and cold in my fist as I raised it above my brother.

As abruptly as it had begun the singing ceased. I heard only a dull hissing from the flame still flickering before me. I stared at the golden blade in my hand, then carefully looked around. Where the flame leaped a fissure had opened, a black pit that descended endlessly into the earth. Unsteadily I got to my feet. I walked to the edge of the pit and stared down into it. Then I dropped the knife.

For a. moment it seemed to hang in the air, blindingly golden, a scythe or perhaps a crescent moon. Then it fell, its light extinguished. With a shriek that deepened to a thundering roar the flame leaped as though it would consume us all, leaped until the sky vanished as though behind a curtain of light. The flame dwindled, and finally disappeared. I blinked, trying to adjust to the darkness, and walked to my stricken brother.

Something moved behind me. I whirled around, and there stood Miss Scarlet, rubbing her arms where the ropes had fallen from them. Only with her bonds it seemed that the dark hair had fallen from her arms and face so that they gleamed like smooth brown glass, and she stepped delicately from a shriveled thing like a filthy robe of fur and walked toward me. And though I knew her face it was changed. Instead of the shrunken features of a wizened monkey I saw now that she was a woman, and suddenly it seemed to me that she had always been a woman. It had been myself that was the blind animal, and my own eyes had never seen before the colors that the world showed to me now, the colors that Miss Scarlet Pan saw as well and laughed to see.

From the ground beneath my brother a faint light glittered, and grew brighter, until the black stones cracked and split like a great fruit. And to my amazement it was not my brother who lay there after all. It was Justice. But Justice as I had never seen him, laughing with joy as he leaped from the frozen earth and reached for me and glad, so glad! to see me. He gathered me to him and then it was myself who was laughing and crying to see him again, not dead but alive, alive! and his hands warm about me and his mouth soft and laughing as he pulled me to him.

As he drew me to him he also reached for Miss Scarlet. He pulled her to him as well, until the three of us stood embraced. It seemed the world had stopped turning except for our mingled tears and laughter and their hands in mine, hands strong and small and strong and large. And suddenly I felt inside me the vibration of my heart thrumming and my breath coming loud and hard in sobs that were not sorrow but a joy I had never known. I don’t know how long we stood there; a long time, I think, because when I opened my eyes once more I blinked at the light: not lantern light but dawn. I drew away from Justice and Miss Scarlet.

At my feet lay Raphael. He was bathed in golden brilliance. I heard a wailing as of some creature falling from the air and looked up. I saw the stars, one by one, coming into sight once more, and the sky folding itself back like the dark underside of a leaf turning to the rain.

I drew my breath and turned to my friends there beside me, Justice and Scarlet Pan. Justice looked at me and smiled. He took my face in his hands and kissed it, and said, “Now you know, Wendy. Now you are truly awake and you can see, it’s not all horror and confusion; even death.”

I kissed his mouth. “Now I know”

He stooped to lift Miss Scarlet and kissed her as well; and then holding her he turned to me and said goodbye.

“But it’s only started,” I cried.

He nodded. His eyes were not sad, but still they held something in them of pity.

“I know,” he said; “but I have to go on, you see. Because I’ve done what I had to do. And besides, I’ve already left.”

He set Miss Scarlet gently back upon the ground and pointed to where my brother lay, his face so pale and his eyes twitching beneath their lids in troubled sleep.

“There is your brother to be made whole,” he said. His arms swept out to encompass the dark pit about us, barren glassy Saint-Alaban’s Hill and the sky pale and still, the lazars still struggling to flee. “A City to be made whole, a world perhaps …”

He took me once more and kissed me, and I wept. But this time there was no bitterness, nothing of vengeance or horror but only sadness to see him go.

“You still have your good Angel there,” he said, smiling as he pointed to Miss Scarlet. “Even though you have grown a conscience of your own.”

He touched me on the forehead and quoted, laughing softly: “‘If you learn to be brave, honest, and unselfish, then you will become a real girl.’”

He bowed to us both, drawing three fingers to his mouth in the Paphian’s beck, then dropped one and then the other until only his index finger remained upon his lips.

“Remember, Wendy: It is all one,” he whispered. “Death and growth and desire and fear. It is all one.” He was gone.

I stood, dazed, and stared at the sky. Above me reared the launcher. As I watched it shuddered, then recoiled as with a tremendous shriek the missile shot from it, speared the clouds and burst into flames of white and red. The launcher shuddered again, then was still. After a moment debris rained down like hail, but I was heedless of it striking me.

The explosion in the heavens faded to black smoke, streamers of gray and white. In the distance the horizon glowed pale pink. The Cathedral’s dark spires pointed heavenward where the last stars gleamed faintly: all but one that flared brightly and then faded to a prick of white like the others upon that black map. Beside me stood Miss Scarlet: not a woman but the same small wizened figure as before, staring at her gnarled hands in disbelief.

“Wendy?” She turned to me pleading. Her eyes fell upon Raphael, the small forms scattered about the pit, and she was quiet. After a moment she said, “It doesn’t matter, really, does it? We’re alive, at least—”

“Yes,” I said. I reached to take her small hand. “But it did happen; something did happen.”

For a moment we stared at each other, and I wept to remember Justice Saint-Alaban.

Then a shout rang through the air. We turned, and saw against the wall something slumped beside a small body covered with a rainbow cloak. The Aviator lay there, dead, his ruined face staring at the dawn. Above him stood Jane Alopex, disbelief turning to joy as she waved her pistol, then with a whoop threw it so that it bounced over the rim of the pit. I smiled despite my sorrow, and looked down.

He lay there still, the broken boy; but his face was not so tormented as it had been. It seemed even that he might dream of gentle things, for his eyes no longer twitched beneath their lids, and the soft full curve of his mouth now turned slightly upward. I stood a moment, then looked to the east where the sky now was yellow. I waited until the first brilliant blade of sunlight sliced across the Cathedral’s tallest tower. I stooped and brushed the tangled hair from my brother’s brow, and kissed him upon the forehead.

“Wake, Raphael,” I whispered. His eyes twitched and opened to stare at me, a gray flash of alarm that faded as quickly as the stars.

“Wh—” he started, but I touched his mouth with my finger.

“We are waking now,” I said, and stood.

Behind me Jane started to say something, fell silent. I felt Miss Scarlet’s hand slip into mine.

“Where are we going?” she asked. “Or doesn’t it matter now?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Well, yes; I suppose it probably does.”

I brushed the hair from my eyes. I took Miss Scarlet into my arms and with Jane behind me climbed the ladder until we stood above the pit, gazing down from Saint-. Alaban’s Hill.

The sun had risen above the horizon, and I could see the entire City of Trees laid out before me, trees and ruined buildings and four fair Houses upon a hill. Far far beyond these I made out the faint sparkling cusp of the river.

“Well,” I said, tightening my grip upon Miss Scarlet’s hand. I looked at her and then at Jane. “I guess we’d better go.”

They nodded. Together we walked down Saint-Alaban’s Hill.