Winterlong (35 page)

“They did not die. I do not know if Wendy Wanders
can
die: although many patients she touched at
HEL
did. Perhaps her Paphian savior is dead now too: my guess would be that he is.” He sucked in his breath and laughed hoarsely. “But she is alive: I know it.

“After her escape we began to hear stories, hearsay about a boy in the City, an actor commanding audiences and calling himself Aidan Arent.” He paused, waiting for me to show some recognition.

“You must forgive me,” I said.
“My
last few months were spent among the Naturalists, who have little use for Players—or Paphians either,” I added bitterly. “That name means nothing to me.”

“He is described as being seventeen years of age, with tawny hair once close-cropped but now growing longer, gray eyes, a surpassingly beautiful face and voice. He possesses a supernatural ability to charm and terrify his audiences. And despite the fact that he usually takes the feminine roles in performance, a number of Paphians in his audiences have remarked upon his startling resemblance to a favored catamite now feared dead, one Raphael Miramar.

“Knowing Wendy, and having seen you, I can attest that this at least is true: you are her mirror image.”

I sat in silence, oddly disinterested. It was as though he spoke of someone besides myself. And of course he
did
speak of someone other than me; although perhaps it was that this Player, Aidan Arent, sounded more believable than did Raphael Miramar. I shook my head but said nothing.

Behind Dr. Silverthorn the candles burned more and more brightly. The tallow melted into smoking pools upon the altar. Rivulets of flame ran down its marble facade as the burning fat dripped to the floor. In front of this flickering display Dr. Silverthorn glowed like a taper himself, the brilliant light glowing through his robes so that the bones beneath showed stark black, and I could see inside his chest a small dark shape like a fist clenching and unclenching. When he spoke again his voice rang loudly, though it still rasped like a saw through his throat.

“Some of those who have seen Aidan Arent perform have said he is the Gaping One.”

I stared back at him, shaking my head. “That’s impossible.”

He grinned, carmine light dancing from his teeth. “Why? Because
you
are the Gaping One?”

“Of course not!” I said, but he went on as though he hadn’t heard me.

“The Mad Aviator thinks you are. That’s why he’s brought you here.”

I stood, bewilderment and anger vying inside me, and stalked to the gate. In the distance I could see the little candles in their banks of dusty glass holders. The wavering shadows made it look as though figures darted back and forth in the murky light; but I heard nothing there. “Why are you insulting me?” I demanded hoarsely. “Isn’t it enough that you brought me to this crypt—”

“If Tast’annin hadn’t ordered the children to capture you, you would be dead now.”

“Better that than this!” I grabbed the iron bars and bowed my head, grief striking me like a stone. “Better you had killed me!”

He shrugged. “Better I had died after that viral strike, the way Gligor did. But I did not, and you did not. I have only a little time remaining; perhaps you have longer, perhaps you have less. But you have power, Raphael; and not all your friends are dead.

“In the evenings I go among the prisoners here and minister to those I can, to ease their last days. The Consolation of the Dead would have it that way,” he said with soft irony.

He walked toward me. I backed against the gate, frightened by how quickly he moved, the light in his eyes extinguished to malicious darkness. “There is a little girl imprisoned here. She was captured yesterday near the House Miramar with a party of mourners. I saw her last night. When the child heard where I had been she described you, and asked if I had seen Raphael Miramar among the corpses at the Butterfly Masque. I told her you were here, and alive.”

“Fancy,” I whispered. I had not forgotten her; rather had spent the last hours refusing to think of her, making a gift of her memory to those minor deities Grief and Exhaustion. “Where is she?”

“Here. I can tell you no more than that. As I said, my allegiance is to the Aviator. If he is pleased with you; if she does not succumb to madness or illness or the lazars; if
you
do not fall prey to this place: well then, he may treat you kindly, and treat her kindly, since she is your friend.

“The children told him of meeting you by the river. Pearl was another—
favorite
of his.” He grimaced at some unpleasant memory. “She too thought she had met an Angel walking in the forest; and this gave the Madman an idea.

“He has many interesting ideas.”

He stood near enough that I could smell the sweetness of his decay, the bitter chemical residue of the antibiotic ointment. He reached for me, his gloved hand moist and cold as it gripped my chin, firmly as though it were held by metal forceps.

“How odd,” he murmured. Through the thin gloves, damp and already starting to rot into strings of dirty cotton, the blades of his fingers cut into my chin. I was still terrified of contagion, but feared even more his anger and the plunge back into solitude if he left. “You look exactly like her …

“She was so beautiful, our Wendy; but mad, we all knew she was quite mad. All of them were by the end. It was one of the secondary effects of the Harrow Project, because of course they were all grossly flawed children to begin with; and who could endure such a life, living constantly the nightmares and hallucinations of others day after day after day, and never waking from your own dreams? But we made of them the walking vessels of our madnesses and it made them more lovely and then grotesque, the gynander Merle sprouted more breasts, Taylor’s eyes turned from gray to white and finally calcified like granite pearls, Gligor began to smell of carrion and butterflies flocked around him in the garden, Anna woke one day to find in her bed a shriveled homunculus with her own face and withered male genitals …

“But Wendy only grew more beautiful and deadly, although of course she could not see it, she was incapable of recognizing anything but pain and horror and fear and she embraced those, oh she did. Emma Harrow was a fool, not to see what was happening to her prize changeling, that stolen child now stealing with no thought or reason the fancies and desires and finally the very hopes of all she touched, leaving only despair in their place …”

I listened fascinated to his ravings. He let go of me and began to pace, three steps and then back, three steps and back, as though some imaginary cage about him was shrinking to the size of his ribs. In my mind a strange picture took shape, the image of this creature called Wendy Wanders: a girl so like me she could pass for a boy and fool my own people into thinking they saw me upon a dusty stage. But with this grew something else, a sensation so hard and bitter it was like an unripe fruit I had swallowed to rot and fester inside me: the idea that all of the horrible things that had happened to me had happened by mistake. It was not Raphael who should have seen death and dishonor and abandonment, but this other thing, this awful simulacrum called Wendy that had somehow broken free from the Ascendants’ prison, and in so doing had loosed the rage and grim delight of the Gaping One upon the City.

Then I felt inside me a terrible rage building, a desire for havoc and bloodshed like that which had possessed me in the Narrow Forest when I ran with the white jackal to seek my Patron’s death. But to Dr. Silverthorn I displayed nothing; only nodded and stared as he paced, while about us the candles burned to oily smears upon the altar.

“Do you see? Do you understand now, Raphael? There is a reason for this, there
has to be a reason for this
—”

For the first time I heard raw desperation in his voice, glimpsed the ravaged man clinging to some hope inside that cell of bone and diseased flesh. I turned to see his eyes glowing like the flames that sprang like pale irises from the marble. I started to nod, thinking he merely wanted me to reassure him. But then I saw that he was waiting for me to answer, waiting for me to
explain
it to him, as though I saw within the wreckage surrounding us some magic spindle that could be spun to turn all this horror to a final good.

“Do you understand, Raphael?”

“I—I think so,” I said slowly. “I would like to, anyway. It’s just so strange, to think of it; to think of
her,
alive somewhere, as if—”

As if I were not,
I thought;
as if only one of us could be within the City of Trees.

But she had been alive all along! She had not died, as Doctor Foster and Miramar had told me. Dr. Silverthorn waited for me to go on. I shrugged and opened my hands in a helpless gesture.

“What do you want of me, Dr. Silverthorn?”

He lifted one arm, the sleeve of his white robe hanging from it like a sheet from a broomstick. “You will bring her here,” he said, and dropped his arm. I shuddered, half- expecting it to clatter to the floor, but he only regarded me with a grin as though he read my thoughts and then laughed. “You said you perform in theatricals: well, the Consolation of the Dead wants you to act the part of the Gaping One for him. And you must do it, you must! The entire City will hear of it, the Players will hear of it—and she will come with them to see you. Then you can use her to destroy him—”

“But why?”

“Because she is Death, Raphael: those she touches dies, I have seen it!”

I shook my head. “But this is all madness! My sister alive, and you say she is monstrous; and a madman ruling here though I’ve seen nothing, nothing but yourself and lazars! And why does he want this, why me to act as the Gaping One?”

“To amuse him; to bloat his pride and sickness; to lure your people and the others of this City here: because who could resist it, the chance to see a beautiful demon in a ruined Cathedral! He is mad for glory.

“He was promised a position of power: here, in this City. A puppet Governor, ruling an abandoned kingdom! The Ascendants promised him this, because he was a
Hero,
you see; and they had their own reasons, they wanted to see if there was anything left here worth devouring: dogs sniffing at corpses and rubbish.

“They plan to strike against the Commonwealth. They wanted to reclaim the City, establish a garrison here and seek the lost armory. Margalis Tast’annin was a brilliant strategist, a leader of the Archipelago Conflict. He was to retire from fighting, and
NASNA
had pledged him this City of fools and whores; what other cities are left to rule?

“But he was betrayed by the Curators—whether in collusion with rebels or not, I do not know. I think not; I think the Curators truly feared him. They gave him over to the aardmen. And the aardmen tortured him; they unmanned him; but they did not kill him.

“In the end they pitied him.”

He shook his head. “Foolish creatures! but it is in their slavish nature to obey men, as it is in mine. He ordered them to free him, and they did.

“He will be avenged upon the City now. He claims to have found the ancient weapons stored beneath Saint-Alaban’s Hill. He was a
military
Hero. He seeks to bring the Final Ascension.”

I shook my head. “This is sheer lunacy! One man against the City—and for what cause? I have never heard of him before.”

“He was an Ascendant, as I was.”

“Did you know him?”

“I knew of him. Margalis Tast’annin was a
NASNA
Aviator, a Hero of the Archipelago Conflict and many skirmishes with the Balkhash Commonwealth. He came to
HEL
with Odolf Leslie after the Wendy suicides. They were the ones who authorized the new diagnostics, the new—
methods.
I met Tast’annin briefly. He was interested in the new biosyntheses from the empaths, the aggression resonators in multiple personalities.

“You see, they had many plans, these new Governors. They had some
new ideas,
they had
new alembics,
they were going to make
new things
from the old materials. They have already made many new things, each skirmish brings new terrors and new chemicals and new microphages—”

“There really is a war, then?”

Dr. Silverthorn stared at me, his jaws grinding silently.

“No,” he said after a moment. “There is no real war. There is no one left to lead real wars. Only madmen in the middlelands and scientists at the fringes of those cities that are still standing. And for the rest, nothing but foot soldiers and freaks: guerrillas and gorillas.”

He laughed again; his breathing grew labored. I noticed his glove-clad hands shaking and was terrified that he would die here before me. But no. He gestured wildly until I realized he wanted his bag. I hurried to give it to him, waiting while he dumped its contents on the floor and scrabbled among vials and silvery gavelocks, knocking bottles across the room until he found a metal container, an atomizer of some sort that he sprayed into the hollow cavity of his throat.

“Aaugh,” he groaned, heedless of the atomizer falling from his hand. “So soon, so soon …”

My heart ached to watch him: to feel one’s body decay thus! “Did they do this to you, Dr. Silverthorn? The new Governors?”

His voice was dull, perhaps from the effects of the atomizer. “No. My colleagues did this. The Doctors I worked with at
HEL
. When I escaped with Anna and poor Gligor they sent a
NASNA
fouga after us, they alerted the avernian janissaries, and Gligor was, they—

“God, to watch him die like that! To think of anyone dying like this—”

He drew his hands to his ruined face in an agony of grief and horror and hopelessness. And then I began to weep, because I was exhausted by my own sorrows; because he had been kind to me even while bringing me to my death; because he could no longer weep himself.

I have no idea how long I sat there, slumped in that cold vault with the pitiful offerings of geneslaves and dying children all about me. But eventually my sobs gave way to silence, a cold ache in my chest that was dreadful because it bespoke utter emptiness and despair. I lifted my head to see Dr. Silverthorn standing above me. The last bits of burning tallow had died. From somewhere in the bowels of the Crypt Church a chilly blue light threaded its way into the Children’s Chapel to touch his cerements with an ashen pallor. The sight of him filled me with a sort of detached terror: the silent skeleton staring blankly into the winding fastnesses of the Engulfed Cathedral, his white shroud stirring softly to some subterranean air. I knew he would do me no harm; indeed that he had meant to help me, and at the least had warned me that my sister now walked in the City of Trees. But his very presence was a horror to me. I breathed as quietly as I could and said nothing, hoping that he would leave. Still he remained there, watchful and silent, until I wondered if he was waiting for someone.