Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

Miss Scarlet shrugged. Outside, the snow tapped against the windows. I moved closer to Justice.

“Well, nothing he said was very encouraging,” she admitted. “After the mask he burned some joss sticks, then smoked quite a lot of honeyed tobacco and a pipeful of opium. Then he killed a squirrel—poor thing, it was half-dead already, it looked starved. None of the animals look very healthy this winter, do they? Then he drained its blood into a bowl and he, he—”

She hesitated. At Jane’s impatient cough she looked at her, aggravated, and said, “Well, he drank it. Really, it seems as though barbarism is quite the fashion these days. But what could I say, when I had consulted him?

“So I waited, while he smacked his lips over the blood and muttered about there not being enough of it; until finally he performed a kind of divination with books. Stichomancy, he called it. I was surprised to see that he had books at all. Surprised he could read, actually.

“‘The Curators taught me,’ he said. That nasty voice, for all that he was quite handsome. ‘These books came from the Museum of Natural History, they gave them to me when I exorcised the Hall of Archosaurs after Nopcsa’s murder.’ I glanced at some of them—you know how I love to read—but they were mostly very old textbooks, natural-history books I suppose. He chose one at random, then flipped through it and selected phrases—quite aimlessly, I thought.

“This is what he gave me.”

She took a rolled-up bit of parchment from her reticule, unfolded it, and began to read.

“‘… the traces of the existence of a body … as to the succession of life upon the earth … the course of nature will be a continuous and uninterrupted one … an interminable vista is opened out for the future … the central fire and the rain from heaven … all traces of organic remains become annihilated … the ancient peace once more came to reign upon the earth.’”

She finished, stared down at the parchment, and then rolled it up and replaced it, closing her reticule with a snap that made me jump. Then she folded her paws upon her lap.

“That is what he told me,” she said. “That, and to beware of the Masque Winterlong. ‘The Masque of the Gaping One,’ he called it. He said he would not be in attendance.”

“He sounds quite intelligent for a pantomancer and a fraud,” said Jane Alopex. “I think you’re mad to go there tomorrow, Scarlet. And you too, Wendy, after you’ve been warned that the lazars plan an attack.”

I shrugged. “Anna was—she was never very reliable, actually.” I spread my hands in front of the stove. “And really, what else are we to do? The whole City can’t hide forever, and you said yourself we have no weapons to fight back with.”

Jane said nothing, only turned to stare out the window until Miss Scarlet crept into her lap and engaged her in more cheerful conversation.

So we passed our last night in the theater. The four of us talked until a few hours before dawn, recalling the glories of past performances, giddy sleepless nights of rehearsals and the triumphant applause that followed. We fed the little woodstove with sticks of applewood until first Justice and then Jane nodded off, leaving Miss Scarlet and I watching the embers turn gray and cold.

“There was something else, Wendy.”

I started, bumping my chin against Justice’s shoulder. I had almost fallen asleep.

“What, Miss Scarlet?” I mumbled, sitting up.

“What he told me. The pantomancer; there was more that I didn’t tell them.”

She tilted her head to where Justice slept beside me and Jane snored stretched out upon the floor, her traveling cloak rumpled beneath her. Miss Scarlet smiled wistfully. She had removed the lace mobcap she wore to cover her nearly hairless skull, the coarse ridge of fur that bristled across her head. Her paws kneaded restively at her throat.

“I—I asked him what he saw for me, if he saw anything.” She glanced to make sure the others were really asleep. “I wanted to know whether—well, you know. If it was to happen, if there really is a Magdalene—whether She might make me truly human. He put down the book and closed his eyes, and sat for a long time, so long I thought he had fallen asleep. I decided he’d forgotten me, and started to go, to find the rest of you, when he suddenly threw back his head.

“‘Nothing!’ he exclaimed. He looked quite alarmed. ‘I see nothing in this City of a talking chimpanzee, nor of your companion Aidan Arent, nor his Paphian leman. Nothing, nothing at all; but of this I will say no more.’“

She was silent then. The snow rattled against the windows. Jane’s snores mingled with Justice’s gentler breathing. After a few minutes Miss Scarlet crept from her hassock to Jane’s side, and curled in the crook of her arm to sleep.

A pantechnicon from the House Saint-Alaban arrived the next afternoon. The Players embarked, Jane Alopex riding beside us on Sallymae, her pistol hanging from her waist. Darkness crept across the City, the Narrow Forest’s shadowy fingers groping across the Museums and up Library Hill, to fall just short of the white lawn where sheep no longer grazed. The solitary young shepherd still stood guard there, silent and watchful, his round face more inched than it had been in the autumn. He watched us pass without a word. Only when the pantechnicon clattered around the curve and began the long slide down Deeping Avenue he raised his hand and called out:

“The Magdalene guard you through Winterlong.”

I stood in the back of the wagon and waved, clutching my cape against the bitter wind, and stared until I saw him no more. ‘

The Saint-Alaban elders driving the pantechnicon were well fortified with apricot negus and a steaming tin of hot whiskey that they shared with Toby and the others. Faces hardened or bodies too frail to barter with the City, still they were good-natured, not resentful as were so many P’aphian elders. I sat a little apart from them all. Even Justice’s company seemed too much for me this afternoon. I smiled wanly as they raised their tumblers to salute me.

“Hang the boy and raise the girl, Arent!”

“We’ll break the old whore Winter’s back, eh Aidan?”

Then they burst into one of the lewder choruses of Saint Alaban’s Song, stopping often to repeat the words for the benefit of Jane Alopex.

As we turned from the Deeping Avenue toward the Hill Magdalena Ardent, Curators poured from the Museums. Black-clad, brown-clad, they carried tall poles each topped with an animal’s skull, whipped by ribbons of green and due and red. In front of the Museum of Natural History a small group gathered around the slender figure of the new Regent, Clara Brown, and struggled to hoist the immense beribboned skull of an archosaur upon their shoulders. The other Curators stopped to help them, then swept them along in the growing crowd that trailed us. They greeted us boisterously, tromping through the snow and raising their skull-topped icons, tugging the ribbons so that the skulls’ jaws clattered as they fell in behind us in a long parade.

At last we mounted the Hill Magdalena Ardent and came to the House Saint-Alaban.

“Sweet Mother, look at them all!” Fabian stumbled against me as the wagon bounced up the icy drive. “The whole City must be here—”

“There’s less of the whole City than there used to be,’ one of the Saint-Alaban elders intoned, then hiccuped “The other Houses decided to throw their luck with us tonight. They’ll all be there …”

He swayed, grabbed a passing pole so that its skeletal embellishment clacked mournfully. Justice crossed to the back of the wagon to join me.

“Did you hear that, Wendy? The whole City here! That’s never happened, especially at Saint-Alaban! It really is like the old stories—”