Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

I stared coldly at the Saint-Alaban, then shifted on my marble bench. Beside me Oleander shuffled, hissed under his breath as he nearly dropped the knife he held. He shot me a panicked glance. I shook my head and he averted his eyes.

Marble fountains stood at either side of the altar. They no longer held water, but twigs and powdered bricks of opium taken from captive Botanists. Black smoke poured from them, nearly obscuring the flames that licked at the base of the fountains where small fires were tended by other children, naked and filthy from rolling about on the floor of the nave. Aardmen lolled among them as well, scratching or biting at their flanks. A soft thrumming filled the air, compounded of the fires burning and the drip of rain seeping from holes in the ceiling high above, the lazars’ restless fidgeting and the Aviator’s soothing voice droning on and on.

“Have you seen her? A girl who looks like ‘him, the very incarnation of the Gaping Lord, the good Dr. Silverthorn swore to me they were as alike as two drops of rain—”

The Paphians protested no, no, they had never seen her, never. Only the Saint-Alaban continued to stare back at me while the Aviator continued his tedious questioning.

Finally the Saint-Alaban called out, “I saw her. She is disguised as a boy, and names herself Aidan Arent. I thought she was him —”

He pointed at me, then continued, “She was with one of my bedcousins, Justice Saint-Alaban, a paillard who went among the Ascendants to betray us, may our Mother curse him!”

The Aviator nodded. “Where was she, my darling boy?”

The Saint-Alaban gave me a look of such hatred that I stared down at my hands, the stony lip of my sagittal gleaming pale violet.

“With a group of traveling Players performing at the House Illyria,” he said. “She appears in blasphemous garb. My people believe she impersonates the murderer Raphael Miramar. They will be at the Masque of Winterlong—” His voice shook with such fury that he could not go on.

The Aviator nodded again. “But I know all this already,” he said impatiently. “I want to find her now. Where is she now?”

One of the boys from Persia cried out, “Can’t you see we don’t know? Let us go, we’ll help you, please—”

But already the Aviator had turned away, reaching for the book he had dropped when he’d begun his interrogation.

“… I am the bray of the brute in the night, whoever is deceived by me …”

Margalis Tast’annin, the Mad Aviator, lay upon a pallet at the back of the North Cloister facing me. At his feet sat the jackal Anku, still and white as a carven cenotaph. Even at that small distance I could not see them clearly through the roiling smoke and steam. Tast’annin’s voice alone possessed a physical immediacy and potency. It cut through the opium’s narcotic vapor, the thick stench of dread and hopelessness, so that even though I knew the man who lay there—knew every scar upon his body, knew the tenor of his groans as nightmares chased him, knew the place like a secret spring that bled slowly but ceaselessly, and the smell of his bloodstained raiment—even knowing all this I could sit here and imagine another man speaking in the gloom. A tall strong man with face unscarred and close-cropped wheaten hair, wearing metallic clothes that creaked, and smelling of scorched metal and ozone and (very faintly) of charred flesh.

“Lord Baal.”

With a start I realized he had been calling me for some moments. I raised my head, my hair spilling down my shoulders and tangling about the hempen cord I wore around my neck.

“Yes?” I looked past the Paphian boys to where the Aviator had raised himself to stare at me with those translucent eyes.

“… accept these offerings in your name …”

I dipped my head so as not to see them, or the firelight glinting off Oleander’s knife. But I heard their fast and shallow breathing, and smelled the ammoniac reek of their terror.

The Aviator finished. A moment in which I could hear only the murmur of rain and the Paphians’ choking breath. Then from opposite me came a soft command.

“Now, Oleander.”

Oleander inhaled loudly. I closed my eyes, but not before I saw the two boys from Persia clutch each other, weeping. I lowered my head, hunching my shoulders as though this time I might somehow drown out what happened next.

I heard Oleander rumbling with the knife and cursing. An aardman growled: one of the Paphians must have tried to break away. I tried to hear only my own breathing, my heart thumping counterpoint to the boys’ despair.

Suddenly Oleander cried out. A tearing sound and a scream; then the knife clattering to the floor, Oleander weeping as he retrieved it. I clenched my hands and squeezed my eyes more tightly, tried repeating loudly the words to the “Duties of Pleasure” and “Saint-Alaban’s Song.”

It was no use. Their screams and groans went on and on and on, for hours it seemed. Warmth spattered my bare legs and feet. Oleander sobbed and shouted, striking them again and again while I rocked back and forth on the marble bench, eyes shut tight.

Gradually their shrieks grew fainter, the bubbling sound of their breathing soft and labored. Something slippery brushed my leg, slid to the floor nearby. I heard Oleander panting, and the aardmen whimpering. I opened my eyes for an instant, saw blood pooled about my foot, blood sprayed in ribbons across the stone basin and the shapeless lumps strewn about the altar floor. The tip of a finger rolled beneath my boot, and a tuft of golden hair.

It took one of them a very long time to die. He made a choking sound, like someone swallowing syrup, then finally grew still. It was quiet, except for the sound of the other children crying and Oleander talking very slowly and calmly to himself, sentences I could not hear except for the words save them whispered repeatedly. I opened my eyes, saw my legs and thighs spattered with blood, smelled it like some warm tide spilling upon the altar. An aardman lapped noisily at the floor. On my wrist the sagittal burned a fierce and brilliant violet. I raised my hand slowly, the rays streaming from it to send ripples of light across the dim room. The lazars cried out, and Oleander tossed the knife across the room, then fell to his knees, retching. The Consolation of the Dead recited words I did not hear as I stared up to where the sagittal streaked the cloister’s shadowy vault with amethyst radiance, and the cold rain dripped upon my bloodstained hands.

THAT NIGHT OLEANDER CRIED out in his sleep, thrashing so that his arm struck my cheek and woke me. “Shh—it’s a dream, Oleander, it’s just a dream.” I reached across the pallet to embrace him. From the corridor behind the iron gates of the Children’s Chapel echoed snores where an aardman lay guarding us. “No! Oh god, no—”

I covered his mouth. “Be quiet! You’ll wake Fury—” He fell silent then, clutching at me as though he would crawl inside my skin. But for many hours we lay awake, staring into the darkness that engulfed us, the darkness that was everywhere like a poison in the air;, knowing that the horror that awaited us upon waking was worse than any nightmare, and that it would never end.

“HE WANTS YOU, RAPHAEL . He is ringing the changes.”

In the darkness I could make out Oleander, frail and sallow as one of the few candles left guttering on the altar behind him. He cursed as he bumped against a chair, rubbing his arms to warm himself and finally standing atop the heap of pillows I had arranged next to my pallet. I blinked, sat up, and pulled my bedcovering—a woolen cloak taken from a dead Saint-Alaban—about my shoulders.