Tonight I would tell Miramar I was leaving.
I smiled into the mirror, once more made the Paphian’s beck to myself. I was turning to leave when a shape shot across the room, giggling.
“Fancy!” I cried, laughing as I whirled to catch her. Candlelight struck the spurs of her shoulders, collarbone, knees; made a golden cerement of her thin white tunic. She squealed as I grabbed her and we both tumbled onto the thick carpet. For a moment I pinned her, felt those sharp thin ribs that I could have crushed like the husk of a tamarind. Then she wriggled from my arms and slid beneath the bed.
“Miramar is waiting!” she said, blowing a dust feather into my face. “Let me out.” She peered from the bed-shadows: enormous eyes in a triangular face; golden hair just long enough to be pulled into two tight braids that left her ears pitifully exposed to the autumn drafts that chilled our House.
I settled back onto my heels. “Come on out, then.”
“You’ll catch me.”
“I’ll come under there and catch you if you don’t.”
“You can’t, you’re too big—” She laughed, grasping one of the bed’s heavy carven feet and snaking behind it.
“Huh,” I said, prying her fingers loose.
With a shriek she darted from beneath the bed. I caught her before she could flee back into the Clandestine Adytum and hugged her to me, kissing her cheek and inhaling her soft scent, still milky and sweet with childhood. “How long were you there, you little snake?”
She shrugged, flushed with excitement, and straightened her shift. “Not long. An hour—”
“An hour!” I pretended to pull her braids, when from downstairs resounded the harsh strains of the sistrum heralding last worship, and Doctor Foster’s voice intoning the opening verse of “The Magdalena.”
“Come on,” she said, and we ran downstairs.
Only Miramar and Doctor Foster lay prostrate in the fane when we arrived. All of the older children and pathics had gone to a Conciliatory Masque at Saint-Alaban. Since this was Third Day, when Doctor Foster attended to Miramar’s castigations, I knew that if I remained I would have the chance to tell Miramar of my decision to join Roland at the Museum. I waited while Fancy stood on tiptoe to reach the font which held civet and attar of roses, tried not to grin at how earnestly she anointed herself before turning to let me pass. My own anointment was cursory, and I was punished for my sloppiness in spilling unguent down the front of my chasuble. Miramar ignored Fancy and myself as he chanted the long verses of “The Duties of Pleasure.” Doctor Foster sniffed and rolled his eyes as I took my place beside him, trying not to choke on the cloying scent of roses that mingled with the more bitter reek of hemp burning on the altar.
After only a few minutes I heard Fancy’s slow breathing: already sound asleep. How could Miramar and Doctor Foster stay awake through worship, night after night, despite long hours of attendance upon the Magdalene’s affairs and the samovars of sedative tea they consumed between Visits from Curators and other Paphians? I yawned and focused as I always did upon the ancient figure of the Magdalene. Swathed in smoke from the blackened brazier, the pale contours of Her face had been smoothed to an eyeless plane by the impressions of thousands of small hands over the centuries. To stay awake I counted the stars painted upon Her blue robe and wondered how many years it had been since She was made. Hundreds, perhaps. Miramar and Doctor Foster maintained that ours was the oldest of all the Magdalenes upon the Hill Magdalena Ardent. It was brought there from the ruined Shrine in the northeast part of the City, in the first years of the Second Ascension. That was before the ‘rains of roses made a wasteland of the northeast, before the aardmen and hydrapithecenes and other geneslaves drove the Curators and the first Paphians from their homes, to dwell in the Museums and Embassies as we did now. The House Saint-Alaban claimed that its Magdalene was older than ours. It had come from the Cathedral that still stood to the northwest upon Saint-Alaban’s Hill. But the Cathedral was an evil place. The very earth there was poisonous, contaminated by the rains of roses. Only lazars lived in the ruins now, though Doctor Foster said that many janissaries once stood guard over an ancient hoarde of weapons placed near Saint-Alaban’s Hill before the First Ascension.
“Only a Saint-Alaban would want to lay claim to an image from the Engulfed Cathedral,” Miramar would say disdainfully whenever the issue was brought up. “If they are so proud of their ancestry, why don’t they return there to live?” This would anger whatever Saint-Alabans were present, but the rest of us would laugh.
Perched upon a small ridge overlooking the River Gorge, our House commanded a view of two others—Saint-Alaban and Persia. To the south sloped the Hill Magdalena Ardent, shadowing the ornate fastnesses of Illyria and crowned by High Brazil’s minarets and glowing lights. Many nights as a child I had huddled with my bedcousins in the upstairs nursery, staring out the beveled windows to watch Miramar and the older children traipse across the Bison Bridge to attend masques in those gaslit halls, or begin the longer pilgrimage to the outskirts of the Narrow Forest where the Curators dwelled. By the time I was old enough to accompany our Patrons outside, I had learned that (alas!) the House Miramar was not as wealthy as the House High Brazil (that entertained the Botanists almost exclusively, in exchange for opium and atropa belladonna); that our own Doctor Foster had been sold to the House Miramar by the hydrapithecenes who had devoured his parents, for a vial of tincture of opium and a bolt of water proof silk (to which we attributed his predilection for laudanum and costly fabrics); that the occasional Ascendant visiting our Patrons must be entertained without question; that from the Curators we might demand orchids and textiles and cosmetics in return for our rarefied lust, but never ask for learning.
Still, no Curator or Illyrian could have lavished us with as much affection and as many attempts at luxury as did Miramar. The original gold and indigo mosaic tiles glittered on our nursery walls, although there were many gaps in the intricate geometries patterned there. Our clothes were designed and woven by Curators at the Museum of Technologies, or obtained by them from Ascendant traders. In seraglios lit by dozens of electrified candles we entertained our Patrons, and slept in beds that had been imported from the Balkhash countries centuries ago. My room had a balcony overlooking the river, and my own tiny radiophone patched into the House generator. Late at night, after my last Patron had left, I would lie long awake listening to the pulsing strains of waltzes broadcast from the Museum of Technologies as I pored over the brittle pages of the volumes Roland Nopcsa had given me last Winterlong. Books with titles like The Ancient Life-History of the Earth and The Modern Changes of the Earth: Its Inhabitants Considered as Illustrative of Geology, and A Short History of a Great Group of Extinct Reptiles. And one cold and windless winter’s eve I picked up an Ascendant radio signal broadcasting from somewhere in the United Provinces. For hours I listened to a faint sweet voice telling an old, old story of a man redeemed by ghosts, until the signal, ghostlike itself, faded into the dawn.
But there was no radiophone to entertain me now: only the featureless Magdalene with Her plaster hands joined, holding the beads upon which She counted the Decades. Five sets of beads; five Houses. In a whispered monotone Doctor Foster responded to Miramar’s Invocation of the Sacred Jade, the secret names of Desire. Fancy’s breathing had grown softer still, the smoky air warm and ripe with dreams.