Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

“Shh, Wendy.” Justice drew me from the clearing, pushing back vines loud with bees and sparrows until we found a safer spot. “Here, sit …”

I found a large stone and settled there, breathing deeply until I felt calm again.

“Betulamia,” he explained. He sat a few feet from me, propping his feet on another rock and leaning so that his chin rested on his knees. “But we were safe; they had already fed.”

I tore leaves from an oak sapling at my feet. “It wasn’t that, really. It—They reminded me of something else.”

We rested for a few more minutes. Justice peered through the undergrowth, first north, then west, trying to get his bearings. When we started off again I asked, “Where are we going?”

“There’s a woman of my House who lives nearby; if she hasn’t left, or been driven out, or …”

The woods fell back. Before us opened a wide grassy avenue, speared by small saplings and the green mounds of overgrown autovehicles. To one side it sloped down to the river. A hill continued upward to our left, and there loomed a gold-domed building, its stained marble pillars choked with wisteria and ivy. Sunset ignited the dome so that I blinked to stare at it; but. from a narrow barred window at ground level a fainter light gleamed.

“She’s there!” Justice said. I let him drag me, stumbling over a moss-grown curb to where a tiny patio building had been trimmed of underbrush. I squinted to read broken letters on the dome overhead:

RI S NATION ANK

On the door itself hung a small hand-lettered wooden placard, the words spelled out in faded but carefully drawn cursives:

LAST NATIONAL BANK

Lalage Saint-Alaban, Prop.

Love Philtres

Tea Readings

Psychotropic Drugs

“What is this?” I began; but Justice had already raced up the steps leading to a set of huge metal doors. A great steel ring hung there. Justice banged this once, twice. As the third clang echoed down the empty avenue a tiny slit opened in the door. An alarmingly bright blue eye peered out.

“Lalage!” he yelled. “It’s Justice—”

The blue eye disappeared. A harsh grating signaled bolts being drawn. One of the doors creaked inward.

“Justice!” In the shadows I glimpsed a small figure that drew up sharply at the sight of me. Justice stepped past me into the room. I hesitated.

“It’s all right, Wen— Aidan,” he called back. “It’s only Lalage.”

“Justice,” the woman rebuked. She peered at me suspiciously.

“A friend, Lalage. A Patron.”

“Oh, all right,” she sighed, and pulled the door back another inch.

It opened onto a great chamber. The only light filtered from windows high overhead, touching the room with glints of green and gold. Tables made of dismembered automobiles were scattered across the floor, chairs over-turned or leaning against them haphazardly. Small shapes fluttered around them. There was a strong animal smell.

“Thank you, Lalage. I wasn’t certain you’d still be here …” His voice faded as he stepped farther into the cavernous room.

The woman laughed, turning a series of bolts and locks within the door. “Where else would I go? Too old for the duties of pleasure now. And you can’t really picture me in the kitchen at Saint-Alaban, can you, Justice?”

They laughed. Lalage crossed the room to embrace Justice, leaving me to wander among the tables of a forsaken hospice. The fluttering shapes were birds, guinea hens and peahens and doves. Peacocks dragged soiled trains through the muck. In the shadows a number of small barred chambers protected shattered glass monitors and more empty chairs.

Justice called to me across the room and I joined them, nudging guinea hens from my path. “Lalage, may I introduce my companion, Aidan.”

She inclined her head toward me. Then she smiled and raised three fingers to her mouth, a gesture that Justice imitated: the Paphians’ beck.

“A handsome leman, Justice,” she said, gazing at me and winking. “Especially for a. Curator—”

“I’m not his leman!” I began hotly, when Justice cut me off.

“No, he’s not my lover. We’re merely traveling together.”

“I understand.” Lalage nodded, a smile twitching at the corners of her mouth. Now that we stood in the center of the chamber I could see her more clearly in the hazy light. She was smaller than Justice and myself, very thin, and wearing a shift of some heavy green fabric, once no doubt very fine, now sloppily tied with a black sash and spattered with bird droppings and streaks of dust. But her hands were small and slender (if dirty), heavy with jeweled bracelets and antique rings; and her eyes were carefully painted to play up their oblique tilt and odd color: a dark and clouded blue. Her gray hair—blond once as Justice’s—was loosely braided above a pointed foxlike face. And I smelled in her sweat expensive spices—cinnamon, sandalwood, bitter rue. She bent to pick up a bedraggled guinea hen and stroked it gently.

“An interesting traveling companion, Justice.” She stared at my auburn stubble. “Someday you will have to tell me of your adventures there in the Citadel.” She tipped her head in the direction of the river, toward HEL . “We thought you had forsaken us for the Ascendants.”

Justice tossed back his head, avoiding her eyes. “I missed our people. But tell me, cousin: there are no guests?”

Lalage sighed, picking matted down from the guinea fowl’s breast. “Hardly ever now. Outside trade has fallen off. I was supposed to receive more frilite and morpha from the Botanists, but I haven’t seen them for nearly two weeks.”

She lowered her voice, glancing at the dim vault arching high above us. “There was trouble, Justice. A new Governor was sent here from the Citadel. The Curators were in an uproar. He came here, last week—”

Justice nodded. “In the woods—we saw two janissaries taken by the trees.”

“They were in his party. They arrived that night, I fed them, acted innocence, even gave them the last of my morpha tubes. Next morning sent them on their way.”

Her eyes glittered. I could smell her cunning like a thick musk. She tossed the guinea hen into the air and it flapped into the darkness. “The Governors will never hear from them again.”

Justice nodded, cast me an uneasy glance. “But otherwise, things are as they were? Our people?”

She shook her head and began to cross the room. “They come here seldom. They fear being this close to the edge of the City. I’ve been lonely this last week; I’ll be delighted to serve you both. Come with me.”

We followed her, Justice giving me warning looks when I angrily started to question him. Small round tables edged the far wall of the room, some of them still littered with tumblers sticky with absinthium and broken candicaine pipettes. Scrawny roosters and glossy black hens picked among the refuse. I kicked at a shattered morpha tube, the once-bright label with its grinning Man in the Moon faded to a pale blur.

“I haven’t cleaned in a while,” Lalage admitted. “It hardly seems worth it, with no Patrons …”

We followed her into a narrow passageway. Runners of pleated rubber covered the floor, brittle and curling with age. The hall was lit by elongated tubes stretching across the length of the ceiling. These were filled with murky water that sparkled pale blue and green, phosphorescent algae and diatoms that emitted a faint eerie glow. Fortunately the birds preferred the half-light of the rotunda. I inhaled with some relief the cooler air, only slightly tainted with the bittersweet smell of stale absinthium.

“If you wait here for a few minutes I’ll make the atrium ready for you.” She flashed me a brilliant smile before disappearing behind a fringed curtain.