Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

“So soon?” I coughed, shivering despite the cloak. From the number of candles that had burned out within the Children’s Chapel I guessed I had been asleep for two or three hours. I never slept through the night—or day—anymore. Margalis Tast’annin murdered sleep as efficiently as he did those captives he tirelessly questioned in his search for the empath Wendy Wanders.

My sister, I thought. That is why these others died, enslaved Curators and Paphians alike; although mostly it was my own people who fell captive to their own faithless bedcousins.

“Hurry, Raphael,” urged Oleander through chattering teeth. He fell onto the pallet beside me. He wore only loose white trousers, tied about his thin waist with a length of rope. I hugged him close, wrapping my cloak about him and feeling the spars of his ribs as he trembled with fear and cold. “I hate it, I hate watching them die—”

“Shh …”I stroked his lank hair, his scarred shoulders with their raw fretwork where the Madman had lashed him days before. “Don’t cry, cousin, please don’t cry.”

He sniffled and buried his face in my shoulder. I moved my hand to guard him from my sagittal, though it slumbered now. Only my fear of the Aviator woke it—the Aviator knew this and delighted in it—and sometimes the sight of the dead lying pale as though sleeping in the nave.

A deep tolling note, far above us in the Gloria Belltower. A softer chime, an echo of the first; then silence. Oleander plucked at my arm. “Please, Raphael! Before he sends for others—”

I nodded, and groped on the floor until I found my boots. They were too big for me. Despite wrapping my feet in rags first, my ankles were scraped raw from wearing them and bled anew each day without healing. I blinked back tears of pain as I pulled them over my poor feet, waited for the throbbing to subside before standing to find my robe: a shapeless gray sack, long-sleeved and reaching below my knees, and with a motheaten hood. It was worn through at the elbows and unraveling at the cuffs, hideously ugly but the warmest thing I could find among the heaps of clothing torn from the dead and cast into piles about the nave. Each day the Aviator sent squalling groups of children to pick through these filthy remains, bringing to him and myself whatever seemed worth saving. Broken necklaces and armlets, dirty ribbons and brocade trim from Paphians’ robes; occasionally some shattered sliver of machinery, timepiece or spyglass or monitor, buried beneath mounds of Curators’ uniforms. The rest was burned, adding the stench of charred cloth to the reek that hung within the nave like a dense and poisonous fog. The hollow sound of children coughing was as ceaseless now as the winter wind howling in the broken west towers. This gray robe was the first and last prize I had found among the lazars’ rags, before the Aviator forbade me to show myself among them except at his command. Now I was consigned to this chamber, half prison and half sacrarium to the Gaping One.

With a sigh I motioned Oleander that I was ready. We walked through the Crypt Church, I hobbling and Oleander skipping beside me. He was barefoot and tried to keep his chilblained feet from touching the icy floor, hopping and swearing as though he walked on hot sand. We started up the passage leading to the Belltower. A solitary candle pressed into an alcove threw its wan light down the steps. As we walked there came another loud peal, cut short so that we both stopped to listen for the next sound. Oleander stared at me, looking very much like Dr. Silverthorn in the cloudy light, with his hollow eyes and sunken cheeks and nearly all his hair gone. I looked away from him, staring at the arched ceiling high above us as though I might see through it to the bay floor. From the heights of the Gloria Tower came a tiny sound, what might have been a bat squeaking, or a child’s wail. Then a soft thud. Oleander giggled nervously.

“Stop it!” I ordered, slapping him. He covered his mouth and ran a few steps ahead of me, his laughter turning to hiccuping gasps. I licked my finger, turned, and snuffed out the passage’s single candle. I scraped it from the stone and ate it, choking on the oily taste. Then I hurried to Oleander’s side.

At first glance the vast expanse of the Cathedral seemed empty, its bays and transepts filled only with clumps of debris and the fires burning untended among the huge columns and arches. The crackling flames and wind almost drowned out the other, softer sounds, choked coughing and, from some unimaginable space overhead, voices. Then the gray light filtering down through the great windows picked out the numbing details.

A white shape moaned and tossed its arm across what had seemed to be a rotting gourd or toadstool but was in fact a face. Dark forms laid like logs beside a dying bonfire were not logs at all but those who had died since dawn (not long past, to judge by the weak light), waiting their turn to be cast upon the smoking pyres. Many were the lazars Tast’annin had set to work outside: searching for the lost arsenal of the Ascendants, hacking at the frozen ground with whatever implements they could find—staves and stones, the remains of autovehicles—until they were felled by disease or exhaustion. Beside one of the immense columns holding up the Gloria Tower a pair of gargoyles had toppled. But these raised their grotesque heads as we approached, unfurling long pink tongues as they yawned and groaned a greeting.

“He waits, master,” one said to me. His tongue wrapped around the words so that I could scarcely understand him. He stared at Oleander through slanted eyes and then flopped back onto his haunches, scratching at his jaw with one of his gnarled hands. “Little master, he shouts.”

Oleander glared at me. “I told you we should hurry!”

The other aardman remained standing, attention fixed upon the column looming above us. I followed his gaze upward, to the tangled skein of ropes and boards and scaffolding that hung beneath the Cathedral bells. I could scarcely see them there in the ruined tower: figures no larger than the Angels and Saints who peered down at us with unwinking stone eyes. But the figures upon the scaffolding moved. I began to pick out individual voices from the faint garble that drifted down. Some cried or screamed or even laughed shrilly. Others begged, and I heard several voices singing tunelessly the words to “Saint-Alaban’s Song.”

And there was another voice, calm and soothing. Resonant, speaking slowly and with great clarity, with a pronounced drawl and accent unfamiliar to the City of Trees. The Consolation of the Dead was ringing the changes.

A shriek. The aardmen’s ears flattened against their skulls. They flinched, looking askance at me before pointing their long muzzles skyward again.

“He shouts.” The first aardman wriggled closer to me, pressing his great head against my thigh and growling. “He shouts, master.”

“I know, Fury,” I said, scratching the rough fur between his ears. “It’s all right.”

Fury continued to growl, nostrils flaring as he stared into the darkness above us. Oleander fidgeted by the door half-opened in the column, the sole entry to the Gloria Tower. “Raphael,” he said again.

“Be quiet,” I said. “I want to listen—”

If I squinted I could make them out in that dizzying space. Black figures that seemed to flail crazily as they walked across the few boards and rope bridges strung beneath the twenty-four bells, all that remained of the flooring that had rotted away in the past centuries. They clung desperately to a haphazard network of ropes, invisible from the nave.

At the entrance to the Gloria Tower stood a mass of shadows. I sifted through the crowd, trying to pick out among the writhing silhouettes Fancy’s small form, her glorious golden hair.