Winterlong (33 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And when your skin begins to crack,

It’s like a knife across your back;

And when your back begins to smart,

It’s like a missile to your heart;

And when your heart begins to bleed,

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

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

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

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

“Who are they?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Look—look—”

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

“He is here, look, look—”

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

“Raphael! It’s me!”

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

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

And grew quiet; because I
was
glad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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