Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

“Dr. Silverthorn!” Bellanca’s voice shrilled from somewhere far ahead and out of sight.

“We’re coming,” he called. He waited for me to draw alongside him. “You don’t think that’s odd,” he said after we had been walking for several more minutes.

I slapped at a green fly biting at my leg. “No,” I said. “I know nothing of the Ascendants and their poisons.”

He nodded very slightly, almost regretfully. “No. Of course you wouldn’t. But it’s very strange. We had no idea, back at HEL , what it’s like in the besieged sectors.”

I snorted. Through the mesh of leaves I could see the children in the distance, hacking at vines with sticks and pelting one another with the harmless yellow flowers that grew from rotting stumps. “Is that what you call our City? The ‘besieged sector’?”

He stopped in the shade of a great sycamore tree and clicked open his black bag, held it out for me. I found one of the yellow capsules and waited for him to swallow it before we went on.

He said, “One of the besieged sectors. Just one.”

After a few minutes he added, “There will be many more in the days to come.”

I bit my lip to keep from sneering at him. His words infuriated me. All that I had heard of the Ascendants was proving to be true: that they were monstrous, that they had nothing but contempt for my people and even for the Curators whose knowledge was so far beneath their own; nothing but contempt for the entire City they had all but forgotten in the pursuit of their distant and endless wars. I followed him in silence.

But after a while a sort of peacefulness descended on me. The warmth and sweet odor of the afternoon, the buzz of the great gold and crimson bees in the trumpet flowers, even the silent wings of passing butterflies all conspired to drain me of my anger and even my fears, for a little while. The children too had fallen into a drowsy silence. One or another would run a distance ahead, to lie upon a cool bank of moss and nap until the others woke her. Only Dr. Silverthorn seemed untouched by the torpid vapors that drifted here at the edge of the Narrow Forest. He talked ceaselessly the whole time, to himself if no one else was listening. As the afternoon wore on and its languid air dissipated he recited one nonsensical tale after another to the children, now restive and anxious to reach our destination. And he told me things that sounded as mad as those stories he amused the’ lazars with.

“At the end Emma told me there was a twin boy,” he said once. His teeth chattered with excitement, and he stroked Martin’s head as the boy paced alongside him. “If we’d only known before!” The gaze he turned upon me was brilliant, the dark eyes glowing. “To think of what we might have learned!”

And later, “If only I’d known. I would have saved her if I could. We might have revived her, you know; although they weren’t going to do anything with her brain, not after cyanide! She was a brilliant doctor. I quite hated her when she was alive.”

And, “I didn’t believe they’d come after us, you see. They sent fougas: our own people sent fougas after us. They caught us crossing the river. Anna nearly escaped but ran back for us. And Gligor went quite mad. He tried to pluck his eyes out, to kill himself. And I should have let him, you know. I should have let him.” He fell into brooding silence.

As nightfall drew near, even Dr. Silverthorn began to seem uneasy. He walked faster, waiting impatiently for the smaller children to catch up with him. I had grown weary of his endless chatter, and fell back to walk alongside the sober Oleander.

“Where are we going?” I asked him, hoping for a more satisfying answer than that Dr. Silverthorn had given me earlier.

Oleander looked at me in surprise, then made a steeple of his hands as he replied, “To the Engulfed Cathedral.”

I stopped in the middle of the path. “The Cathedral?” I repeated, stunned. “You mean Saint-Alaban’s Hill?”

“That’s right.” He dropped his hands, pulled a leaf from an overhanging limb. When he bruised it between his fingers it released the sharp scent of lemons. “Saint-Alaban’s Hill, that’s what the Paphians call it. We always said the ‘Engulfed Cathedral.’ Once great fields of lavender and dittany-of-crete grew there.”

“But why?” I asked. “Why the Cathedral?”

“Because that is where we live,” said Oleander. “We have to return there. Tast’annin says so.”

“But no one has ever lived there,” I said, stumbling after him. “It’s haunted.” I clutched at the tattered collar of my tunic, drew away a handful of feathers that I cast into the shadows.

“This entire City is haunted,” a hollow voice said into my ear. I cried out and backed into a thorny hedge of roses. Beside me Dr. Silverthorn peered from the thicket. He cackled at my alarm, and the children with him. “You must walk faster to get there before dark,” he scolded. “Else you won’t get the full effect.”

But it was nearly another hour by my reckoning before we reached our destination.

Saint-Alaban’s Hill: the viper curled at the foot of all the Saint-Alabans’ superstition, the legendary ruin whence the Gaping One would rise to confront the Magdalene to begin the Final Ascension. In all my seventeen years I had heard nothing but evil of Saint-Alaban’s Hill and the Engulfed Cathedral. I prayed silently for the Magdalene to deliver me from what was to come.

In the shadows before us the remains of stone buildings started to outcrop among the trees. Beside some of them deep shafts plummeted into the earth, cavernous pits lined with metal and smooth rock, veiled with wild grape vines and honeysuckle. The lazars and Dr. Silverthorn hurried through these glades, but I picked my way carefully: it would be easy to mistake those thin treacherous cloaks of greenery for solid earth and tumble into darkness.

By this time I was so drained and starving and heartsore that the thought of being anywhere was enough to give me some hope. In a few minutes we had caught up with the others. The children were exhausted. Poor Olivia wept silently, and tried to brush away the tears with her broken hands. Even Martin grew peevish, fighting with Bellanca as they picked their way ahead of the rest of us as we climbed the long hill that Dr. Silverthorn said would bring us to the end of our journey. I was too tired to imagine speaking. But Dr. Silverthorn never stopped talking. I was to learn that the capsules affected him thus; also that silence terrified him, as did sleep.

“Soon enough!” he shouted when Olivia sank to her knees beside the ruins of a great stone building, its columns fallen now and threaded with the violet blossoms of twilight glory. “We will all sleep soon enough! But not‘ now.” He stooped and pressed a small blue patch to her neck. When she whined and clawed at it he grew angry, dragging her to her feet though the exertion nearly toppled him.

“See, Olivia? There it is, we are almost there—”

He gestured wildly to where sunset streaked the clouds with scarlet and purple. At first I thought he pointed only at this lurid sky. From here I could see nothing but trees and the overgrown humps of decaying buildings, and far away the Obelisk shining faintly golden, marking where the Museums stood and the Curators would now be mourning their dead. But when I turned back and started walking once again I saw that something besides clouds did rise above the pinnacle of Saint-Alaban’s Hill: a shape so huge and black and brooding that I had thought it was part of the Hill itself. Now I wondered how it had not soiled my dreams all these years, that awful shadow stretching across the entire City of Trees.

“Is that it?” I asked, clutching at Dr. Silverthorn’s flapping sleeve.