His feet made no noise as he walked, as though the parched ground sucked all sound and light and color from the living world, leaving nothing but the screwed black forms of dead trees and other, pale shapes scattered across the stony slope. The distant figures of the young lazars darted in and out of the shadow of the Cathedral in eerie silence. Only the dull buzzing of the trees and Dr. Silverthorn’s hissing voice could be heard in all that empty space.
“Not haunted: hunted, more likely,” he wheezed, his thoughts running back and forth down strange alleys where I could not follow. He darted suddenly to one side, his feet seeming to pass right through the sharp stones that choked the earth so that I marveled he did not wince in pain. But the layer of flesh that enabled him to feel had been the first portion devoured by the rain of roses.
“Wait!” I called after him. “Don’t leave me, Dr. Silverthorn—”
He halted, staring back as though I was mad. “Leave you? Me, nothing but bones, leave you who are nothing but a body! No, no—” He pointed to a gleaming patch of white, luminous against the dark earth. Human skulls were piled there, but sloppily, as though children at play had grown weary of their game. And with a sinking feeling I realized that this was the truth of it: I had come to the lazars’ home, the playing fields where skull and knucklebones were used as shuttlecock and dice; where soon no doubt I would be as much a part of the bleached landscape as the petrified trees and leering brain-pans scattered everywhere.
“As ye are so once was I; as I am so ye shall be,” Dr. Silverthorn intoned. He kicked and set a small skull rolling, his harsh laugh ringing out like a raven’s croak. “I won’t leave you, Raphaeclass="underline" you are to be my eyes and ears, and I will be your guide. I have done as I promised the Aviator; but I will try to help you.” He cocked his head, clacking his jaws in a manner meant to be reassuring. “And you may be surprised, Raphaeclass="underline" you may not find yourself as alone as you think.”
My heart leaped at that, imagining that I might find some of my bedcousins here, or others from the Hill Magdalena Ardent. But the cadaver gave no reply to my questions.
“Not now, not now,” he hissed, and pulled me after him. “We must hurry, before he closes the south gate.”
High above us swept the huge black towers: higher than Illyria’s fortresses, than the House Persia, than High Brazil; greater even than the Library Dome or the ancient Obelisk. Flickering waves of color sometimes passed across one or another of the granite facades. I rubbed my eyes, convinced the unnatural darkness of the place was playing tricks upon my vision, before I finally realized that what I was seeing was firelight showing through immense embrasures of colored glass, like those at High Brazil.
As we drew nearer, strange patterns were traced upon the iron earth. Paths marked out in bones and skulls formed serpentine patterns, narrow tracks that stretched straight to north and east and west. They glowed eerily in the twilight, as though the bones themselves had absorbed hoary traces of the sun. It should have been horrible. And yet I found the bones almost lovely, the strict formality of their carefully assembled fulciments now tossed into disarray: torso, shanks, hands, and ribs displayed so clean and pure and shining, as innocent as driftwood cast upon a riverbank.
“Labyrinths,” explained Dr. Silverthorn. “Ley lines. To make this place more powerful.” He stopped, regarding a convoluted maze of femurs and delicate finger bones, with a small figure made of sticks propped in its center. “Old things,” he said, shifting his black bag to the other shoulder. “There are many old things here. He is a fool to wake some of them.”
We had left the buzzing trees behind us. Gaps of blue-black sky showed between the broken towers overhead. On the eastern horizon faint light gleamed where the moon would rise shortly. We were near enough now to the Cathedral gates that I could hear the children playing in the twilight, a shrill fanfare of laughter and tears and shouts echoing in its cavernous inner space as they raced or stumbled in and out of hidden doors. Someone called to my companion. He raised one spindly arm in a feeble wave, grinning as his name was taken up by the others, singing:
“A man of skin and not of bones is like a garden full of stones!”
Dr. Silverthorn pointed to a wide path, a dark avenue lined with larger bones and tattered ribands and bits of finery. I followed him in silence up this main approach, trying to ignore the lazars tuneless warble:
“And when your skin begins to crack,
It’s like a knife across your back;
And when your back begins to smart,
It’s like a missile to your heart;
And when your heart begins to bleed,
You’re dead, and dead, and dead indeed!”
The path ended abruptly; or rather, the bones that had marked it were scattered everywhere, kicked aside in some mindless game or argument. Past the ring of bones was a circle of scuffed earth. A few feet from this a set of granite stairs led up to massive gates set with iron hoops. Between the oaken doors, and to either side, and in the portal above stood carven figures of men and women, and figures like stern yet radiant men with the wings of herons.
“The South Transept,” Dr. Silverthorn said. He gazed up with glittering eyes. “The Cathedral Church of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel.”
I hesitated as he started up the steps. I was absurdly afraid: not of the Cathedral or what it contained but of those stone creatures. Ethereally beautiful, each face tilted skyward, as though divining some magnificence there. They seemed older than anything I had ever seen, older even than the archosaurs, although I knew this could not be true. And something in their faces, the pitiless eyes gazing at the stars, put me in mind of the Hanged Boy.
“Who are they?” I asked.
Dr. Silverthorn rested his bag on a stair. He shook from the effort of walking, coughing as he tried to catch his breath. “They are Saints and Angels,” he said. “Saints and Angels and ordinary men.”
I stepped beside him. A numbing cold rose from the stones around me, as though through the centuries the granite had hoarded nothing but winter. When I touched the base of one of the pillars I found it covered with a sheen of ice.
“It is an anomaly,” confessed Dr. Silverthorn.
I withdrew my hand, staring up at the face of one of the winged creatures. “Were they real?” I wondered. “Were they Ascendants?”
Dr. Silverthorn looked at me, his swollen eyes bulging. Then he laughed. “Ascendants! Are they Ascendants!” Overcome, he leaned against the pillars, gasping for breath. I turned away in embarrassment.
After a moment he recovered himself. “Forgive me, Raphael! It was just—the idea! A pleasant idea, actually. Your sister, now; she would never mistake an Angel for an Ascendant!” He peered at me curiously. “You have never heard of Angels?”
I shrugged. “I’ve heard the word, I thought it meant a pretty child. Not a man with wings.”
He stared at me, surprised. I could see him taking in my long hair and worn tunic, the remnants of glitter and beads clinging to me like evidence of some grand debauch. “Well, it does, that’s right; I suppose it does. The wings: well, they were usually pictured with wings, that’s all. But it was also one of the—beliefs of the old religion. This was the Cathedral of the Archangels—they were the most powerful of the Angels, the ruling Angels one might call them. This place honors two of them. Michael and Gabriel.”
He grew quiet, then said, “ ’There was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not.’” He stroked a pillar sadly. “This Cathedral was completed a hundred years before the First Ascension.”