Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

He staggered toward me: the Consolation of the Dead, the mad Aviator, Margalis Tast’annin. The torn jacket flapped like some withered basilisk clinging to his shoulders. From its tattered sleeves hung myriad tiny bones that clattered as he moved.

I stood frozen, staring; and finally I knew why they feared him: because now I too was afraid.

“Go back,” I hissed. “I will destroy you—” I bared my teeth and swiped at the air in front of his face.

“You are not the Gaping One,” he said. He jabbed at me, knocking me to the floor, then grabbed my shoulders. I could smell the plague on him, the fetor of rotting flesh. I fought him with all my strength, twisting, snapping at the air until my teeth felt his skin split beneath them. He swore, kicked me as his blood ran into my mouth and I choked, trying to find the strand there that would unleash the horror upon Tast’annin and disable him. I tried to escape, but succeeded in getting my head free so that I could shut my eyes and try to call it forth, the One who lived inside me, the Boy who lived on blood…

There was nothing there.

Not a thought, not a darkness, not even the black wraith of a nightmare to feed it. Instead I gagged, my mouth filling with hot blood. As when I had tried to tap Justice when he died: He was gone, truly gone. I was helpless before the power of those who worshiped the Gaping One.

I was bound again, my legs left free so that I could walk. Trey and Fury watched me as the lazars dragged Justice’s body away, the children looking at me fearfully as the Aviator shouted at them to hurry. Then I was alone with him in the Crypt Church, with only the aardmen guarding me.

“Wendy Wanders. Subject 117.”

He licked his cracked lips and reached for a taper burning upon the altar. Dried blood caked one side of his face, so that it appeared he wore a grisly half-mask. He raised the candle, held it close enough to my cheek that it burned me and I turned away. “Emma’s prize subject. You led us quite a chase, Wendy; and for what? It doesn’t even work anymore, does it? You couldn’t save your friend, you couldn’t fight me. What good are you now, Wendy?”

I spat at him. He laughed, drew the candle to my temple until I heard the hiss of hair burning and smelled where he scorched me. Beside me Fury growled. “The scars are gone, you can’t even tell anymore, can you? I would have given anything to see how you did it; but I don’t suppose we’ll ever know now, will we?”

He stepped back, kicking at something: a heap of bones, the twisted remains of a white robe. A skull clattered across the floor and came to rest beneath a smoking brazier. He stared after it for a long moment, then turned to me.

“I asked them to show it to me once. Aidan Harrow told me. He told me everything. I was his confidant, his only real friend at the Academy—

“‘Show me,’ I begged him; ‘let me see what it is.’ I wasn’t afraid of it, you see, as he was and Emma was. I knew even then that this was something that shouldn’t be kept a secret.

“But he was a coward, Aidan, and we all know what happened to him.” He laughed, flicked melting wax so that it spattered my arm. “Emma was no coward but she was a fool, to think she could hide this—”

“She didn’t know what she was doing!” I tried to pull away from the aardmen, but they only held me tighter. “The implants were part of her research—”

“She knew exactly what she was doing.” His voice was very soft. He took my chin in his hands and turned it so that I faced the brazier and blinked in its fiery light. “Not so pretty as you were, Wendy Wanders.” He traced a jagged cut upon my cheek, and I winced as he prodded where I had been burned at Saint-Alaban. “She knew there had been a boy, your twin brother; I read it in your file. She hoped to awaken this— thing —she wanted to see it again…”

I closed my eyes, trying to recall Him, the face peering from spring leaves and the color of His eyes. But it was Justice’s face I saw, pale beneath the film of blood, his eyes dead and gray. They were both gone: gone as though it really had been a dream. Justice dead. The other had forsaken me as He had Aidan and then Emma; and they had killed themselves to find Him again. That beautiful face, those eyes…

When I looked up the eyes boring into mine were pale blue and threaded with blood.

“Why?” I asked. I struggled to shake myself free of the aardmen. Tast’annin glanced at them, nodded. They stepped back to crouch in the shadows. “Why would you care after all this time, about—about Emma, and me, about all of this?”

His gaze drifted upward, seeking something in the smoke-blackened figures that watched us from the vaulted ceiling. “I told you, I was Aidan’s friend,” he said at last. “I wasn’t—happy—about his relationship with his sister. And I was curious.

“To see a god like that, or a demon; even just a hallucination! Something that strong, something to die for—surely you can understand that, Wendy?”

He was silent for a long time, staring at me and then past me, seeing something in the darkness of the Crypt Church, something perhaps in the bones he had scattered across the floor.

Finally he said, “There is a play the courtesans have, a play about twins.”

I nodded, my flesh prickling. “The masque of Baal and Anat.”

He beckoned at Fury. The aardman slunk back beside me, Trey following. “That’s right. Baal and Anat. I have seen it many times, I had the children perform it for me. But then I thought, how much better if there were real twins, that would give it more impact, more—”

He waved at the air, his hand stabbing at my chest. “More depth,” he finished.

“I—I don’t know the play,” I stammered. “It’s a sacred text of the Paphians, of the House Saint-Alaban. Waking the Magdalene—”

“It’s very simple, really. A sort of sacrificial drama. They fight. One dies, the other doesn’t. I’ve arranged a place for the performance—”

Abruptly he turned away, gesturing at the aardmen. “Bring her to the armory.”

He sounded weary, and limped as he crossed the altar. Before he reached the door leading upstairs he looked back at me.

“Even I must serve something,” he said, and began to climb the stairs.

I was half-carried out of the Cathedral. The wind had fallen, the air was still and cold and silent except for muted voices in the distance. A few stars showed through the clouds drifting across the sky. Trey and Fury dragged me hurriedly across the frozen ground, their flanks rippling as they shivered in the darkness. About me I heard the sounds of running feet, coughing, and urgent whispers.

In a few minutes Trey and Fury skidded to a stop, snarling and snapping. I fell between them, tried to brace myself against the ground. There was nothing there. Inches in front of me the earth fell away abruptly. At my side the aardmen hunched, panting.

We were on a ledge ten or fifteen feet above a gaping hole large enough to swallow the Crypt Church. Brilliant white light streamed from it. Many figures moved there, black against the glaring lanterns.

They had excavated a great pit in the earth. Frozen mounds of dirt and gravel surrounded it, heaps of stone and sand lay scattered about its floor. It was the ruins of an ancient arsenal. Banks of monitors and metal pilings, immense shining globes and myriad metal chairs had been lined around the perimeter in a feeble attempt at order. Spikes and rotting timbers protruded from the earthen walls, hung with lanterns or chains or frayed costumes.

In the center of the pit loomed some kind of launching mechanism, its hollow nose pointed skyward, jointed steel legs splayed across the uneven ground like those of a mantid. From within it protruded a long silvery missile. Nearby a small generator had been propped, its tiny operating lights blinking red and green through a film of dirt. Wires strung from it led to floodlamps pitched from crazily tilted poles and scaffolding made from warped wood and metal rods. The whole place was blindingly lit, so that it was impossible to ignore those who had died during the excavation, the stench of bodies heaped along the walls and beneath the launcher.