Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

I glanced at the near shore. The lazars who had dragged the dead boy there now crouched beside him. A third child fumbled at the sopping rags she wore until she withdrew something that gleamed. I averted my eyes.

“You have him now,” I said. “Let me go.”

“He is too small,” the girl replied. Her tone was surprisingly deep for one so young. She drew the two beside her closer, patting their heads in that absent manner that children have when they are imitating adults.

“Shh,” she said, glancing at the shore. “He sleeps now. Go help Tristin.”

Tristin. A Paphian name. I bit my tongue to keep from crying out at this awful thing: to think of one of my own cousins meeting such an end! And yet it happened to some of us every time there was a rain of roses. Children and older Paphians (but mostly children, because they could not run as quickly) were caught outside before they had a chance to flee. And I had never admitted to myself that the lazars hunting and dying in the streets were very likely lovers I had been paired with on the Hill Magdalena Ardent.

The oldest girl pushed away the two little ones. They splashed across the river to join the others, looking back fearfully at Anku.

“A star fell tonight,” the girl said after a moment. She scratched her chest, adjusting the torn yellow jacket until it closed about her hips. “In the Cathedral we saw fougas.” She cocked her head, listening to the dying echo of sirens.

“So did I.” I looked over my shoulder to make certain there were no others gathering there. Hugging my arms against my chest, I took a step toward the far bank. The girl regarded me with those piercing black eyes and kicked at the shallows.

“You are a lazar,” she said at last.

“No,” I said. “I am a Paphian. I go to the Hill Magdalena Ardent, to High Brazil for a Masque. Let me pass—”

“You dress like one of us,” she said, indicating my torn clothes. Anku tilted his head to watch us. The girl pointed at him with her thumb.

“That is a dog.” She said this as though expecting me to refute it.

“Of sorts. It’s a jackal.”

“We had a dog,” she said wistfully. “They ate him. I was too small so they took me. From the Zoo.”

“The Zoo,” I repeated. I glanced to the northwest, where on an unseen hill hidden by white oaks the Zoologists lived. A Curator, then. I looked back at her, the dark frets of her ribs shadowed beneath the torn jacket, her gaunt blackened face; the white scars on her arms where the rains had fallen. Thirteen years old, maybe. “What’s your name?”

“Pearl.” She moved closer to me with a slow uneven gait, as though immeasurably fatigued or sedated. I backed away. Behind her I could see the others swarming over the boy’s corpse, some of them heaping sticks and branches on the shingle beside him.

“Your skin is so white,” she said. She stretched a hand to touch my chest.

Anku growled, but the girl only glanced at him. I shrank from her touch. She shrugged and shuffled a few steps off.

“Let me pass,” I said. Anku’s eyes followed Pearl as she drew nearer. “I’ll kill you otherwise—”

She regarded my raised fist with its dimly glowing sagittal and shrugged. “I am pledged to Death already,” she said. Grinning, she bared her teeth at me. Then she tipped her head and stared at me more closely. “I think you too are promised to the Gaping One.”

She made a mocking bow, then coughed. “I will tell the Consolation of the Dead that I have seen the Gaping Lord’s chosen one playing with a white dog in the river.” Anku’s growl grew louder. He crouched as though to spring. Pearl laughed and shambled a few meters off.

“Who is the Consolation of the Dead?” I called after her.

She smiled, flashing those yellow teeth again as she shook her head. “Our master,” she said as she trudged onto the shore. “The Lord of the Engulfed Cathedral.”

She turned and waved. “The little ones are afraid of that dog,” she called. “So they will not kill you. And I am no longer hungry. I go very soon to meet the Gaping One, the Lord of Dogs. I will tell him I saw you here.”

Her laughter was bright and clear as any Paphian child’s, and she raised a hand in imitation of the Paphian’s beck. “I was a Zoologist’s favorite daughter. Now I have the plague that softens the bones until they melt into the skin like butter. Still—”

She made an awkward pirouette, stopping at the river’s edge. “I like the face of your dog.”

Laughing, she kicked water at Anku, who sprang snarling at her. But already she had stumbled back onto the shingle, where the younger children greeted her with mewling cries and pulled her into the circle of their bonfire’s glare.

ANKU AND I CROSSED the Tiger to the shore nearest the Hill Magdalena Ardent. Behind us the lazars’ shadows drowned the smaller flare of their bonfire. In a few minutes they were lost to sight.

After a short time the hill we climbed began a downward slope. I recognized in the near distance the first of our Houses, Saint-Alaban’s ornate spires and minarets rising above the black spirals of cypresses that lined its curving drive. I half-ran, half-skidded down the grassy hillside to where the rutted Old Road was still maintained by the Curators for their occasional passage through the City. I paused.

Hunching against a stump, I smoothed my tunic over my knees, flicking shards of bark and dead tendrils from my leg. The sight of the robe’s tattered hem reminded me that I was scarcely attired for a masque. I touched my hair, tried to untangle the mass of knots and torn leaves. No wonder Pearl had mistaken me for lazar.

And then with a grim smile I decided that I would enter the Butterfly Ball as such. It would make it that much more difficult for me to be recognized, for who would expect the catamite Raphael Miramar to appear thus—uninvited, as well!—gaunt and unkempt, yet fair and murderous as the Gaping One himself, guarded by a laughing dog and the hidden prong of a poisonous whelk? I laughed, tearing off a narrow piece of fabric from my tunic to bind back my hair; and thought blood thoughts. I called Anku and headed for the road.

I had traveled this route before, though never by moonlight and never alone. The Hill Magdalena Ardent rose before me, broidered with a road paved white with crushed marble, the tilted remains of lamp posts strung with globes of ignis florum. All afternoon the elders must have been busy, releasing the swallowtails and sambur moths in whose honor the Butterfly Ball was held each Autime. Sambur moths do not feed in their adult state. They live for only one night, to breed, and it was this brief transit from chrysalis to shattered husk that we celebrated. The butterflies drifted across the road, their hind wings dragging across the broken stones and staining them with their faintly luminous pigment. But the moths flitted everywhere, drawn especially to the greenish globes. The slow retort of their wings caused their brilliant eyespots to blink drowsily, so that the night seemed to cloak a great invisible Argus.

A sambur moth with branching coral antennae fluttered so near that the hairs on the back of my hand prickled at its wings’ breath. I raised my sagittal, concentrating the pulse of my heart and its attendant furies until the shell began to gleam. I opened my palm. Drawn to the sagittal’s violet glow the moth landed there. It crept across my hand to my wrist. For a moment it stopped, feathered antennae quivering. I thought of Roland betraying me, of my rage and lust at Franca’s corpse, and felt my blood quicken.

The black spark of the sagittal’s single tooth shot out, stabbing the moth’s thorax and impaling it. Then the spine withdrew. The tiny legs stiffened against my skin, the hollow abdomen released an atom of air as a breeze stirred its frozen wings. I blew upon it, and watched it float to join the exhausted legions of its kind who crawled across the white road. Beckoning Anku, I stepped between the dying butterflies.