Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

“You do understand, then, Miramar; a little at least. Yes, they had gods; but not such as you have in this City, a corpse and a whore!”

He laughed, a harsh hooting noise. At his feet Anku turned to regard him before laying his muzzle back upon his paws. As if the jackal reminded him of more serious business the Aviator fell quiet.

“The Gaping One,” he said softly. “Now there is a god whose time has come: a god of death and destruction and despair. Because what have we now to live for or hope for, and what is there left to repair?”

He leaned forward until I felt his breath upon my cheeks and smelled the taint of opium. Oleander crawled away from us and crouched beside a brazier. I swallowed, drew back before replying, “But I do not believe in the Gaping One—my people do not believe, it is an ancient superstition that only the House Saint-Alaban gives any credence to.”

Tast’annin smiled. His upper lip drew up like an animal’s, catching on one of his front teeth. “But your people do believe, Raphael,” he said. “I have used my time wisely in the City of Trees. I have used the tools put in my hands, the geneslaves and the children of the plague and now the Children of the Magdalene, and from them I have learned many things.

“About six weeks ago there was an atmospheric disturbance. We lost one of our stations to the Balkhash Commonwealth. Your people believed the blast signaled a new Ascension; many felt it heralded the Final Ascension.”

“I saw it,” I blurted. “It was—” I started to speak of my meeting with the Hanged Boy, but stopped. “It was very unusual.”

The Aviator fixed me with a strange look. “It was indeed. I was fortunate enough to be watching the skies from the Gloria Tower. As I was fortunate enough to have an intelligent little girl who had joined my little family here, a child named Pearl, whose people had discarded her as they might have tossed away a bad fruit, once they saw she could not run fast enough to escape the fougas.”

His face contorted. He threw his hands open, as though to dismiss everything in the Chapel, toys and aardman and Oleander cowering in the shadows.

“Pagh! You are the real animals, you Paphians and Curators who let your children die and kill these poor misshapen creatures that would have served you bravely, if only you had not been so corrupted by fear! But they have found a better master now, a truthful man if not a kindly one; because it is better in these days to embrace death than to flee him, and offer what solace we can to ourselves since no one will escape him.”

He reached for Dr. Silverthorn’s bag, his hand rummaging around until he withdrew a capsule. Without glancing at it he popped it into his mouth. He continued, “Pearl saw you by the river, in your torn clothes and with a vine about your neck, and with this circus animal protecting you.”

He roughed Anku’s fur affectionately. “‘I have seen the Lord of Dogs, master,’ she told me when she came back that evening. ‘The one the Paphians talk of, I saw him walking in the river.’

“I had her describe this strange figure to me, because as you know I was searching for an escaped empath. Until that evening I retained some foolish hope that if I found her and returned her to my superiors they would reward me, forgive me for my failure to assume command of the City.

“But when I saw the explosion of the NASNA station that night I knew that I no longer had any superiors.”

He paused, staring confused at the book in his hands, as though he had no, idea how it had gotten there. After a moment he folded it shut and looked up at me, the black holes of his eyes so filled with despair that I glanced away.

He said, “In a way it really was the Final Ascension; for me at least. I have died many times, in aerial strikes and skirmishes, and been reborn, rehabilitated by the Governors more often than you could imagine, my lovely boy. And even when the Curators betrayed me, and the aardmen took me and tortured me and dismasted me: even from that I was saved, and when Lawrence Silverthorn arrived with his Physician’s bag I began to grow stronger still.

“But when I saw the explosion that evening I knew this would be my last life. Everything and everyone I lived for died then. That was my world and my home, not this—”

He waved his hand, indicating the braziers and blocks of fallen granite surrounding us upon the altar; but with a chilling certainty I knew that he did not really mean this at all: not the Resurrection Chapel or the Cathedral or even the City of Trees itself. He dismissed an entire world with that small gesture, the vast world outside that I had never known and would never know, but which included myself and my people and my City nonetheless.

And as I stared up at him with growing unease he smiled; a very small, knowing smile.

I knew then that he meant to destroy us as that other small world, his world, had been destroyed. He only knew how to do one thing, you see, he only understood one thing. That was why the image of the Hanged Boy appealed to him; that was why he searched obsessively for a girl who could deal death with her mind.

But that day I still retained some hope of salvation, of the supremacy of a gentle goddess I had never really believed in. I had not yet grasped that the Aviator’s truth might be the only truth worth knowing; and so that smile filled me with more horror than the sight of him sacrificing the children in the cloister or Gloria Tower ever had.

“There is an arsenal here,” he said. “On the hillside beneath the Cathedral. A stockpile of weaponry NASNA put there two hundred years ago. One of my duties as Governor was to set up a janissary outpost here.”

He chewed his lip. “Of course there is no reason whatsoever to guard it now: there’s no one left to guard. There’s no reason for anything, really.”

“But we are here,” I protested. “And the Curators—”

“But they’re all dead, darling boy. All of them. No one could possibly have survived.”

Oleander stared at the Aviator, puzzled. “They aren’t dead. I know they’re not de—”

The Aviator struck him, so hard that Oleander’s lip split and blood sprayed my cheek as the boy sprawled backward. Tast’annin never even looked at him. He continued to stare at me, his smile frozen, and reached for my robe to wipe the blood from his hand.

“They are all dead,” he repeated. “If anyone survived the rebel strike they will have killed them by now. There is no one left to answer to, dearest child; no one except me.”

I sat rigidly, waiting for him to strike me or continue with this disordered talk. But he said nothing, only stared at me with that ghastly fixed grin. I stared back, afraid to look away lest he kill me, until my eyes swam and all I saw was his idiot grimace floating in the gloom like a disembodied skull.

Gradually his consciousness seemed to waver. His pupils shrank until they all but disappeared in his watery eyes. He continued to gaze vacantly into the darkness. I glanced at Oleander, sniffling quietly as he nursed his bleeding lip. When after some time it was obvious that the Aviator would say no more, indeed that he had entered some kind of trance, I quickly and quietly fled the Chapel, abandoning poor Oleander to stand watch over the Madman.

I HAD NO CLEAR idea as to where I was going, only that I wanted to get as far from Tast’annin as I could. I dared not leave the Cathedral. No one would have stopped me, no one would have dared; but the landscape of this part of the City itself was threat enough to keep me here.

It was winter now. Snow had drifted through the holes in the Cathedral roof to form shallow gray banks. In places the children had sculpted figures from it, men and women and animals—aardmen?—blackened with soot and melted into grotesque shapes. As I wandered I could look out windows and see the City dusted with white, the distant river sheathed in gray ice beneath a new moon’s feeble gleaming. Only the ashen slope in front of the Cathedral was untouched by snow. Whatever poisons had leached into the earth there melted it so that the ground remained black as rotten ice, dotted with the corpses of those fallen prey to the parasitic trees. Not even the ravens crying in the frigid air would light upon the Cathedral grounds. I would not venture there.