My head had begun pounding, but not unpleasantly. I paused.
My tunic hung from me like a tattered standard. The sagittal was a cool weight about my wrist. Perhaps I might fight my way free of here. Perhaps I was strong enough to run, hide within the endless chambers of High Brazil, and after a day flee to the House Miramar. But then I recalled Whitlock’s face when the lazar Pearl had greeted me as Baal. Remembered the malicious eyes of the elder Balfour, and how the Saint-Alaban had cried aloud in fear when he saw me at the Butterfly Ball, and how even Ketura’s face had twisted in terror when she met my eyes.
There would be no going back for me now. The Hanged Boy had marked me as His own, and it was as it had always been in Doctor Foster’s tales. The old miser must go with the ghosts; the magicians must search for the beggar king; the metal boy find his human father in the belly of the mosasaur.
I would follow the Gaping One’s children to find Him again. Then I might be free.
I got my boots and pulled them on. Then I stared at Dr. Silverthorn defiantly.
“Where am I going?”
He grinned, baring his teeth. I heard his jaw snap as he replied, “Where we are all going: to die a horrible death.”
3. A brief and paroxysmal period
I CAN HARDLY BEAR to relive our trek across the City. At the fringe of the Narrow Forest a path led to the northwest, where no one but Zoologists and lazars ever traveled. That was the road we took. In the distance I saw the spires of our Houses upon the Hill Magdalena Ardent, and black smoke billowing from the minarets of High Brazil. A little while earlier I had watched numbly as flames swept the Great Hall. But Dr. Silverthorn had hurried us outside.
“It is better this way, boy,” he said as we passed the ruins of the Butterfly Ball, ribbons and streamers and the empty husks of moths all given to embers now in the blue light of day. “Let them burn, let them burn!” We fled down the Hill and passed into the Narrow Forest.
Fever and fatigue plagued me despite Dr. Silverthorn’s stimulants. He insisted upon pressing another patch to my temple, and had me feed him more of the yellow capsules. For hours I stumbled through the forest, prodded by Oleander or helped by one of the smaller lazars when I felt I could go no farther. Dr. Silverthorn’s chemistries only fed my hunger and terror, until a sort of delirium overcame me.
“Here, Raphael,” someone murmured. Dr. Silverthorn prodded at my chin, tilting it back as he held out a broken shoot of a thick reddish vine. “Drink this.” He poured the liquid into my mouth: thick and speckled with dirt and insects, but sweet and cool nonetheless.
“It will give you strength for what is to come,” he said. “I tested the water here when we first escaped: pond water, rain water, still water in tree stumps. Did you know it all has abnormally high levels of biotoxins?” He tossed aside the broken vine and started clambering along a twisting path amidst the greenery.
“So you are poisoning me.” I stumbled after him. “Is the Gaping One worth anything to your master dead?”
He paused, steadying himself against a slender tree like a white birch, but with filaments of green and yellow dangling from its limbs instead of leaves. They drifted to caress his skull, drew back to float upon the still air. “No,” he said, surprised. “I am not poisoning you. It won’t kill you. That’s what’s so strange, that it doesn’t kill you. At least not immediately. I took samples of Gligor’s blood, before we were—detained. And the toxin levels were high, so high; and it— changed him, it does seem to change things.” He looked down at his gloved hands, the sleeves of his white robes hanging limply from arms as thin and fleshless as the limbs of trees. “But it doesn’t kill you outright.”
“Dr. Silverthorn!” Bellanca’s voice shrilled from somewhere far ahead and out of sight.
“We’re coming,” he called. He waited for me to draw alongside him. “You don’t think that’s odd,” he said after we had been walking for several more minutes.
I slapped at a green fly biting at my leg. “No,” I said. “I know nothing of the Ascendants and their poisons.”
He nodded very slightly, almost regretfully. “No. Of course you wouldn’t. But it’s very strange. We had no idea, back at HEL , what it’s like in the besieged sectors.”
I snorted. Through the mesh of leaves I could see the children in the distance, hacking at vines with sticks and pelting one another with the harmless yellow flowers that grew from rotting stumps. “Is that what you call our City? The ‘besieged sector’?”
He stopped in the shade of a great sycamore tree and clicked open his black bag, held it out for me. I found one of the yellow capsules and waited for him to swallow it before we went on.
He said, “One of the besieged sectors. Just one.”
After a few minutes he added, “There will be many more in the days to come.”
I bit my lip to keep from sneering at him. His words infuriated me. All that I had heard of the Ascendants was proving to be true: that they were monstrous, that they had nothing but contempt for my people and even for the Curators whose knowledge was so far beneath their own; nothing but contempt for the entire City they had all but forgotten in the pursuit of their distant and endless wars. I followed him in silence.
But after a while a sort of peacefulness descended on me. The warmth and sweet odor of the afternoon, the buzz of the great gold and crimson bees in the trumpet flowers, even the silent wings of passing butterflies all conspired to drain me of my anger and even my fears, for a little while. The children too had fallen into a drowsy silence. One or another would run a distance ahead, to lie upon a cool bank of moss and nap until the others woke her. Only Dr. Silverthorn seemed untouched by the torpid vapors that drifted here at the edge of the Narrow Forest. He talked ceaselessly the whole time, to himself if no one else was listening. As the afternoon wore on and its languid air dissipated he recited one nonsensical tale after another to the children, now restive and anxious to reach our destination. And he told me things that sounded as mad as those stories he amused the’ lazars with.
“At the end Emma told me there was a twin boy,” he said once. His teeth chattered with excitement, and he stroked Martin’s head as the boy paced alongside him. “If we’d only known before!” The gaze he turned upon me was brilliant, the dark eyes glowing. “To think of what we might have learned!”
And later, “If only I’d known. I would have saved her if I could. We might have revived her, you know; although they weren’t going to do anything with her brain, not after cyanide! She was a brilliant doctor. I quite hated her when she was alive.”
And, “I didn’t believe they’d come after us, you see. They sent fougas: our own people sent fougas after us. They caught us crossing the river. Anna nearly escaped but ran back for us. And Gligor went quite mad. He tried to pluck his eyes out, to kill himself. And I should have let him, you know. I should have let him.” He fell into brooding silence.
As nightfall drew near, even Dr. Silverthorn began to seem uneasy. He walked faster, waiting impatiently for the smaller children to catch up with him. I had grown weary of his endless chatter, and fell back to walk alongside the sober Oleander.
“Where are we going?” I asked him, hoping for a more satisfying answer than that Dr. Silverthorn had given me earlier.
Oleander looked at me in surprise, then made a steeple of his hands as he replied, “To the Engulfed Cathedral.”
I stopped in the middle of the path. “The Cathedral?” I repeated, stunned. “You mean Saint-Alaban’s Hill?”
“That’s right.” He dropped his hands, pulled a leaf from an overhanging limb. When he bruised it between his fingers it released the sharp scent of lemons. “Saint-Alaban’s Hill, that’s what the Paphians call it. We always said the ‘Engulfed Cathedral.’ Once great fields of lavender and dittany-of-crete grew there.”