I WOKE—MORNING? MIDNIGHT? but it was always midnight there—to find that someone had set a number of candles around me, burning yellow tapers that smelled foul despite the aromatics that had been added to the sulfurous tallow. By their jaundiced light I could finally see my room: a vault really, with a low arched marble ceiling. Its whorls and florid patterns were blackened from smoke and age and seemed to quiver in the light. Besides the pallet I lay upon there were only a number of small wooden chairs for furniture. These were very old, covered with cushions of frayed and rotted embroidery showing strange things: a bearded man covered with birds, wild beasts sleeping at his feet; a storm-tossed boat filled with animals; a white-robed figure surrounded by playing children; a very old man pulling something from a sack. While chairs and cushions alike seemed centuries old they were clean, not covered with dust or mildew as I might have expected. I dropped the last cushion, then paced the length of the chamber. I stopped to rattle half-heartedly the ornate iron grille that kept me imprisoned before stalking to the other end of the vault.
Here in a high curved recess stood an altar. Small shelves cut into the elaborate marble had once held icons of some sort, like those I had seen elsewhere in the Crypt Church. But the statues were gone now. In their place stood clumsily made dolls of bone and fur, leaning haphazardly against the heavy candlesticks. Dripping tallow threatened to set one of these pathetic images afire. I took candle in one hand and icon in the other, holding the taper to regard it more closely. A kind of animal, or a man with an animal’s head. Blank eyes scratched in a smoothed piece of bone and colored with dirt or blood. The whole thing held together with wisps of straw and fur and hair. I shuddered and replaced it in a shallow alcove where it was in no danger of catching fire.
Beside these little creatures I found offerings of bones wrapped in neat bundles, and smaller figures made of braided human hair. Other things as well, oddments and bijoux that might have fallen from a hundred hidden pockets. A braided riband, its russet and silver brocade marking it as a Paphian’s favor from some curator. A smooth round marble that, when I investigated, proved to be a prosthetic eye: its solid black core responding to the warmth of my hand and dilating as it sought to focus upon me. There was even an untidy bouquet of shrunken blossoms like desiccated human hands, gathered who knows where—beneath the Botanists’ glass domes, or within the shadows of the Narrow Forest, or by the dank green shores of the river. Perhaps the flowers had clutched and fought as they were plucked from the damp earth, to be brought here and forgotten. But everything was child-sized, toylike, including the nosegay of dead blossoms: some small fist had held them last. I turned away suddenly, the pain in my stomach that had begun as hunger now knotting itself into queasiness. A black fear gripped me: that I had been brought here as just another offering, another odd yet lovely thing stolen from the dead and left to languish here.
“Raphael. You are awake—”
I whirled to see a spidery figure standing behind the iron grille. Clean white garments covered his limbs, and he held a lantern above his head. Beside him slunk a hunched form. I heard the clatter of keys and then Dr. Silverthorn’s command, “Put the food there and leave us.”
The gate swung inward. The hunched figure placed something on the floor. It made a soft guttural sound, then slipped into the darkness. When Dr. Silverthorn hung the lantern from a corner of the gate I saw that the door; remained open.
“You are not a prisoner,” he said, bowing his head in greeting. It could not have been more than a day since had last seen him, but already the contagion had progressed. His fine ointments did little now but cover the soft globe of bone and skull with a sheen of gold. “You are here so that the lazars will not disturb your rest. They fear this place, and will not visit it unless Tast’annin forces them to.” His mouth opened wider in the goblin grin that was all that remained of his smile. “This was called the Children’s; Chapel, once.” He indicated the objects on the floor. “That is food for you: just bread and water and some dried grapes, I’m afraid. Mostly they eat human flesh here, and die from it: that is not fit nourishment and I will not offer it to you.”
I fell onto the pitiful repast like a starved animal. When I finished I turned back to my visitor. He had not moved from his place just outside the gate, and seemed to wait almost shyly for me to invite him in.
“Won’t you sit?” I asked, pointing first to a chair and then to my pallet.
“No, thank you.” His voice a harsh whistling sound grating against bare bones as it sought to escape him. The white robes stirred as his breath leaked from lungs and throat. “It is too painful for me to sit now. It has penetrated my marrow. Better to pace and let the virus move with me, exhaust it so that it may sleep later and give me peace.” His breath erupted into hiccuping gasps, and he dropped his black bag on the floor between us. “If you will Raphael …”
I found the vial and handed him a restorative. A very few yellow capsules remained. I averted my eyes from the spectacle of this cadaver attempting to gulp the pill waited several minutes until his breathing slowed and I heard the clicking of his feet upon the floor. “Thank you,”’ he rasped.
I turned back to him. “Do I have an audience with the Consolation of the Dead?” I asked bitterly. “Or have you come to tell me that Death himself awaits me even now?”’
“He will not kill you, Raphael. At least not yet. And yes: you are to meet with him this morning.”
Guttering candlelight flared in his eyesockets. For an instant shadows fleshed the solemn curves of his skull so that I had a glimpse of what he had been a month earlier: a young man, slender, with quick fey motions and eyes that were deep-set rather than sunk into gaunt hollows. When he stepped closer to the glowing altar the vision was gone; I continued my conversation with a spectre clad in pale cerements.
“I have come to bring you to him, and because I am lonely and curious—you see, I am still a man!—I would know more of you before I die; and I want to warn you.”
I nodded and settled myself on a chair, leaving him to pace as he spoke. Occasionally he paused to pass trembling fingers across his face, as though to reassure himself that something still remained there of his corporeal being.
“You said you knew of your sister? The empath Wendy Wanders?”
“No,” I said. “Only that I had a sister; Doctor Foster and Gower Miramar told me that. It was no secret to us. I assumed she was dead.”
“She is not. She lives; at least she lived to escape from the Human Engineering Laboratory two months ago, assisted by a Medical Aide named Justice Saint- Alaban. A Paphian: do you know him?”
I pried a splinter from the bottom of my chair and began to clean my fingernails with it. I believed he spoke nonsense. Yet his words disturbed me if only because they reminded me of Doctor Foster’s tales, the stories he had told us at Semhane and The Glorious and Winterlong, where among the lashing tails of aardmen and the Gray Mayor’s crimson eyes flitted this other shape, small and wailing and with blood threading from her temples: my nameless twin sold to the Ascendants. “My House does not often consort with Saint-Alabans. They are heretics. I am not surprised one served the Ascendants.”
“Well, he did: served us rather well until he ran away with our prized madcap.” A hooting gasp that might have been laughter as he reached the altar and stopped to stare at its offerings.
“A thieving Saint-Alaban. Well, that doesn’t surprise me either,” I said. But it was curious, to think of a Saint-Alaban among the Ascendants; to think of any Paphian among the Ascendants. I wished I had questioned Ketura more carefully about her meetings with them during her time outside. “But they must be dead by now—”
“I told you: they are not.” Click of his bony feet upon the floor as he began to pace again. He paused to lean against one of the ancient chairs. “Have you heard of a troupe of actors in this City?”
“Many Paphians perform. I acted in masques all the time.” I winced as the splinter dug too deeply beneath my thumb, flicked away the mite of wood, and glanced up at my visitor. “Our great festivals are masques—”
He tapped his foot impatiently. “No. These were traveling Players, they lived in the ruins of a theatrical library and performed ancient plays. They had among them a trained monkey that could speak—”
I nodded and sat back hard in my chair, excited by the sudden memory of bright and archaic costumes, a beast that recited poetry like a courtesan.
“Toby Rhymer! Yes, of course I know them. Toby Rhymer and the talking troglodyte, Miss Scarlet Pan. I wept once when she performed: oh, it was lovely!” I hesitated. “There was a boy from Persia who joined them, Fabian—”
The folds of the skeleton’s gown flapped as he interrupted me, shaking his gloved hand. “Your sister is with them! I am certain of it.”
I frowned. “How could she have found them? Surely she and the Saint-Alaban would have died, alone in the City—lazars would have caught them, or the rain of roses, or—” I did not want to admit to this learned Ascendant that I feared the aardmen, so I gestured in the smoky air. He shook his head, candlelight pricking the roiling wet shadows of his eyes so that they glittered shrewdly.’
“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.
After a very long time he spoke. “He is walking,” he whispered.
I started to my feet, looking fearfully out the open gate into the Crypt Church. Dr. Silverthorn said nothing, only continued to stare with those great dead eyes into the darkness. Holding my breath, I strained to hear footsteps or voices. Nothing. In the hallway the corpse candles in their little glass holders burned a steady blue, wisps of black smoke rising to disappear far overhead. The gray curves of the walls receded endlessly, like the inert coiled heart of a nautilus. Beside me Dr. Silverthorn stood still and somber as one of the ravished caryatids in the transept above us. I decided this was another of his imaginings, and started to cross the room to the altar when he grabbed me, the bones of his fingers surprisingly strong and cold about my wrist.
“Wait,” he said. “Can’t you hear him?”
“I hear nothing.”
He shook his head, still watching the hallway. “The stones shriek as he passes them, and in their crypts the bones of the dead shiver into pale dust; but to the living he is silence itself! It is a wonder.”
He mused for several minutes, his fingers cutting into my hand until I could bear it no more and moved away. “I’m sorry, Raphael,” he said. He still did not look at me. He ignored my physical presence completely now, except for the moments he had held my hand.
After a little while he said, “I thought I would have more time. But it is coming fast now—”
“What is?”
“My sight is blurring,” he announced, as though he had not heard me. “I’m surprised it lasted this long,” he added matter-of-factly. “But I am seeing other things. Come with me, Raphael—”
Abruptly he stood, his hand clawing at the air. I gasped at his face. His eyes had finally collapsed like melting wax. He could no longer see. Soon he would be dead.
I took a deep breath to steady myself. Then I took his arm, flinching at the touch of raw bone beneath the fabric. “Where are we going?”
“To walk a little while, before he comes to claim you. My material eyes are dead now, but I have other ways of seeing. I would have you guide me, Raphael; and I will tell you what I see, and perhaps it will comfort you when I am gone.”