Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

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.