“We summon the suzein of the House High Brazil.”
“Raphael Miramar has committed a crime of interjacence.”
“We summon the suzein of the House High Brazil …”
The muted cadence of the masque below faltered and then stilled. With a clang the brazen voices of the scholiasts announced my name one last time and fell silent.
“Whitlock,” I began.
“Shh!”
His fear bled into taut concentration. I raised myself to lean upon one elbow, reaching for Anku. Behind the jackal I glimpsed Roland’s bulk, a maroon coverlet tossed across him so that only his hand could be seen. Within that ominous silence this alone seemed right: that Roland should lie there dead, and that I should sit a few feet away and be glad of it. I felt my shoulders heave beneath the weight of some kind of vicious glee and turned to Whitlock as if he might explain to me this sudden violent humor.
But he was not looking at me. Nor did he stare at the man he had killed protecting me. Head cocked to one side, he gazed at the ceiling, pale ruby eyes blinking as though he strove to read our names there among the velvet ropes and spiderwebs. And now Anku mirrored Whitlock’s posture, sitting on his haunches and. staring upward, ears pricked.
“What—” I demanded, hearing nothing at first; ‘then bit off the end of my sentence. From far within the labyrinth of High Brazil a bell began to toll.
“That is the tocsin,” said Whitlock very slowly, as though somehow it might not really be the tocsin until he had pronounced the word.
I nodded, dazed. By some extraordinary effort I got to my feet. “The tocsin,” I said.
Whitlock turned to face me. “High Brazil is beset by lazars,” he said, and stumbled to the windows overlooking the Great Hall.
Now I could hear it clearly: three long repeated notes, deep and dreadful, a sound I had grown up fearing from Doctor Foster’s tales. The tocsin sounded once a year to announce the Masque of Winterlong and so allow us all to hear its hollow song, and afterward begin our games of go-bang and snapdragon.
But this was not Winterlong. This was the Butterfly Ball, and the warning tocsin sounded now when we should be hearing the laughter of the judges pronouncing the masque’s cacique.
“That’s impossible,” I protested. But in my head rang other words: / have gone mad; I am dreaming. Whitlock fumbled with a curtain at the wall’s edge until his fingers found a switch. A soft click. The obfuscating oriels shimmered. The chamber grew dim.
“Look,” my friend whispered. “It has begun …”
I stepped around Roland’s corpse to join Whitlock. As we stared down I saw upon the entrance balcony a grinning line of emaciated children, one beside the other, hands linked as though for some harrowing antic. They had torn the ropes of flowers from the balustrades and hung them about their necks in imitation of the Paphians. Some of them wore the remnants of actual costumes. I recognized Aspasia Persia’s beaded cobwebs now adorning the matted curls of a boy with fiery eyes and livid face.
“They must have taken her outside,” said Whitlock. “We will be eaten alive.” He pointed at the ORPHEUS , its glass pipes now silent. The masquers ringed tightly the calliope’s gleaming bulk, as if it might shelter them from the murderous children.
Upon the parapets more and more lazars gathered, and at the top of each stairway, and within the embrasures, their skeletal arms and legs outstretched like mayflies impaled upon the varicolored glass. But they moved in utter silence, as though waiting for a signal to begin their play.
Suddenly I heard a piercing cry. From the crowd huddled about the ORPHEUS darted a willowy harlequin, his costume billowing behind him as he ran toward the main steps.
None of the lazars pursued him. He cleared the top step. It seemed he might escape, go free to summon aid, when a bowstring twanged. The figure halted, jerked back and forth like a teetotum. Then he toppled and rolled down the steps, a scarlet streamer unraveling behind him upon each white stair.
A moment more of silence. Then from the main balcony rang a strong familiar voice.
“Greetings, cousins!”
Whitlock started as I turned and began to look among the spectral children ranged across the House, until I saw her.
The yellow janissary’s jacket slipped from her thin shoulders as she balanced atop the balustrade on one foot. A grinning child at each side waited to catch her if she fell. She raised her arms, crowing with delight at the terrified revelers huddling below. Laughing she cried, “The bad fairies have come to the ball!”
She turned to face our side of the Great Hall, her eyes probing the blank faces of the Masquers. Then she stiffened, and slowly raised her head to where Whitlock and I stood in the Hagioscopic Embrasure. Her eyes fixed upon mine. With a swagger she tossed back her tangled hair. The janissary’s jacket slid back a little more upon her narrow shoulders as she cried for all to hear.
“Ill-met by moonlight, Young Lord Baal! Many thanks for the invitation! My master bids you come now as his guest to the Cathedral. But I go to meet your lord: he waits for me below. Look for me in the gray lands among the gaping ones—”
Then she leaped, spinning so that her wasted smile flashed one last time from within that tangle of white hair. On the floor below masquers scattered, giving voice to the first wails of horror and despair as the girl struck the marble and, like a child turning in her sleep, tossed one broken arm across her smiling face and lay still.
“Baal …” whispered Whitlock. His eyes showed fear, but he did not pull away from me. “She named you Baal? How did she know you, Raphael?”
I shook my head. “The river,” I said. “They think I am the one the Saint-Alabans call Baal or the Hanged Boy—”
A wave of sound overtook the Great Hall. Shouts and wails and bleating cries mingled with the gleeful yelps and laughter of the lazars as they watched the hapless revelers try to flee. Several of the children who had stood beside Pearl now turned their eyes upon the embrasure where Whitlock and I stood. I could see them talking excitedly and pointing to us.
“The Hanged Boy,” Whitlock repeated, licking his lips. He nodded slowly, his ruby eyes filling with tears even as he smiled. “Ah, Raphael—it has come, then.”
“What?” I cried. “What has come?”
“Like the Saint-Alabans always told us. The Final Ascension, the coming of the Hanged Boy—”
“I am not the Hanged Boy! I’m Raphael Miramar—you’ve known me your whole life!”
Smiling, he leaned to kiss me gently upon one cheek. “Ah yes. Well. I know, dear heart.” He gestured toward the far balcony. “But they see us, there—they will come for you, and kill me.
“I don’t want them to kill me, Raphael. …”
He drew my hand to his face, pressed the sagittal against his neck as he raised his mouth to kiss me. “Take me, Raphael,” he murmured. “Let me die now, with you, and take some memory of beauty with me.”
I tried to push him away, but he only smiled and crushed me closer to him. “They’re right, you know,” he whispered between kisses as we sank to the floor. “You were the most beautiful of us all, Raphael. Let me die now with you …”
Without wanting to I tangled my fingers in his silver hair and kissed him, groaning. A shimmer where my sagittal cast a violet nimbus about his lovely face. Then he drew my hand close until the bracelet rested against his throat and he arched against it.
A sound soft as night falling; the clouded blur of the spine darting into Whitlock’s skin. He shuddered. For an instant his eyes fixed upon me, soft and ardent.
“Remember me at Winterlong,” he sighed; and was dead.