Winterlong (49 page)

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

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

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

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

—
You have seen Me,
it said.

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

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

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

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

It replied,
You know that there is.

I said, What is its name?

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

—
Her name is Anat,
it replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J
ANE 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.