Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

He did smile, now. “I can see him, Oleander,” he reproached him. “It is him. What a beautiful boy.” He motioned for the aardmen to set him upon the ground. They did so, still growling. The Aviator eased himself up, standing unsteadily with one hand beating the air until Oleander hastened beside him to help. Anku remained where he was, observing the aardmen from red slitted eyes.

At my side Dr. Silverthorn trembled. I would have embraced him, given or taken comfort; but I knew that any slight breeze would undo him now. I took a deep breath and stood as tall as I could, and addressed the Consolation of the Dead.

“I am Raphael Miramar; some call me the Gaping One.”

My words sounded idiotic. I cleared my throat and bowed my head, trying to think of something else to say, something that might make him fear me. Nothing came. I added, “You may let this man go now, he has done what you sent him to do.”

The Aviator shook his head, pointing at Dr. Silverthorn.

“I have never kept him against his will. Have I, Lawrence?”

Dr. Silverthorn lifted his head: a barren skull at last. “No,” he said wearily. But when he turned to me there was something nearly exultant in his naked gaze; and I knew that he saw past me, past all of us, into those shadows that had finally engulfed him.

“Raphael: remember he is only a man—” he said. “Remember that the dead but sleep—”

Then his jaw rattled, chopped his words into harsh phrases—“Why, they are here! Gligor—Emma—”

A clattering, stones shaken inside an empty gourd. The others watched in silence as the skeleton tottered beside me.

He asked, “Is it like this, then, in the other kingdom? Is it?”

I shivered as he clutched my arm. “I don’t know,” I whispered. “I don’t know.”

But he could no longer hear me. He turned so that those black pits seemed to stare into the darkness and pointed to the empty air before him.

“There, Wendy,” he chattered. “Is this what you showed them? Emma and the rest, is that what they saw? Oh tell me quick—”

He cried out, so loudly that I yelled and pulled away from him. For one instant as he raised his empty face the torchlight ignited it, made of him a burning mask both terrifying and radiant, transformed him so that I gazed where he pointed—

And I saw it too, glimpsed what he perceived in the blank air: the shades that waited behind the veil, a fissure opening upon blazing heavens and the ranks of sleeping dead: the skeleton transcendent, beneath its skull the promised country unfolding before an endless vernal dawn.

“‘Look at the stars!’” he cried. “‘Look, look up at the skies!’”

And then he collapsed. When I knelt and reached for him in the darkness I grasped nothing, nothing at all save a brittle handful of bones and shrunken cloth.

“Oh no …” I drew the hem of his robe to my cheek and buried my face in it. “Don’t leave me—”

For many minutes I wept, mourning my patient suffering guide gone to join those other wraiths in the Cathedral’s abyss. But finally my tears stopped. I wiped my face upon his robe, groped among his scattered bones until I found one, smooth and light and longer than my hand; and tucked it into a pocket of my robe, to bury later I thought, to inter as was proper for a man of charity and learning.

I sank back upon my feet and raised my head to look at the other waiting there. Beside him Oleander and Anku stood in silence.

“You are mine now, Raphael Miramar,” he said softly. His foot nudged at the pile of bones and cloth before me. For a moment I thought he too might draw something from there to remember him by, tibia or rib or skullcap of the scientist who had served him for a little while. But he drew back his foot. His fingers clamped around Oleander’s neck. With a voluptuary’s delicate smile he pushed him toward me.

“Prepare him, Oleander. When he is ready bring him to me in the Gabriel Tower.”

He turned, with a gesture commanded the aardmen to lower the stretcher. Anku danced at his side, leaped after him onto the bier, and crouched between his legs. As the Aviator settled back a groan escaped him, of pain or perhaps of sorrow. Then he cursed, and I heard him strike one of the aardmen as they struggled to lift him again. His last words echoed back to us from the depths of the Engulfed Cathedral.

“Feed him and bathe him and anoint him as befits the one who will serve the Consolation of the Dead in raising the Gaping Lord.”

As they bore him into the darkness the aardmen began to howl.

THERE WERE NO MORE dark houses after that one.

“Aidan, we have never been so in demand,” said Mehitabel one morning. It was a few weeks since the massacre at High Brazil. Paphians and Curators alike seemed to want to forget the horrors of the Butterfly Ball, the continuing outrage of children and elders captured by foraging lazars and aardmen growing more emboldened as the autumn passed, the whispered tales of an Ascendant demon holding sway over the Engulfed Cathedral. We Players seldom had a day off anymore. Scarcely a night passed without its masque or burletta or private soiree.

Mehitabel tugged her hair thoughtfully. “Maybe it was like this when Miss Scarlet first joined the troupe; but I wasn’t here then.”

“Is that when you first saw them?” I asked.

“Oh yes!” She took a bite from a slab of meringue hoarded from an Illyrian moon-viewing several days before. “She was wonderful, just wonderful. That was when I decided to become an actress.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Really? What changed your mind?”

She swallowed, stared at me open-mouthed. Then she burst out laughing, covering her mouth as she rocked back in her chair.

“Oh Aidan!” she giggled. “You know I do my best.”

Silly Mehitabel! She really was a terrible actress. She got by on her looks, and a certain look she used on stage and off, a way of tilting her head to one side and letting her hair fall into her face so that one was torn between the desire to brush it aside or give her a slap. All the Players confided in her, mostly because she would have been crushed if they had not: she brought all her secrets to us, laid them out like so many pretty stones she had found and waited for us to admire them. None of the others had the heart to turn her away.

Neither did I. Although she aggravated me, although I found her gossip tiresome and could no more imagine tapping in to her simple memories than I could imagine tapping a block of wood; still I couldn’t ignore her, or tease her cruelly as I once had.

“I don’t know what it is,” I said to Miss Scarlet that afternoon. “I know she is a perfect idiot; but I can’t seem to help it. When she needs help with her lines, or her costume, or—well, whatever it is this time—I can’t just send her away anymore.”

Miss Scarlet continued to stare at the page in front of her. I tapped my foot, waiting for a reply. When none came I crossed her room to the window.

“And what is with Justice now, he spends all his time with her, ‘reading lines.’ Reading lines with Mehitabel! he knows she’s awful, he knows they are coming to see me —”

I stopped, fearing I might have insulted Miss Scarlet, once the Prodigy of a Prodigal Age; of late busier playing mentor and adviser to Aidan Arent, the City’s newest sensation. She raised her head and smiled, her dark eyes peering from within her wizened face with an odd expression.

“Why should it matter then, who he practices with? Perhaps he feels uneasy reading with you, your talent so surpasses his own.” She glanced back down at her book. But after a few moments she looked up again and added, “Perhaps you are jealous, Wendy. Perhaps you are growing a heart.”