“I tried. I tried to take care of them: the little ones. They died soon, except for Lily. My friend Lily.” He was quiet, stopping to scratch one foot. He sighed. “Then she died too. And I went off alone. I found some others, in the woods; I know about plants, so we did all right for a little while, eating things. Then we came here, we heard there was a man here who took care of them, I mean he took care of us, people like us, lazars. He hadn’t been here long; only a little longer than me.”
We followed him silently for several minutes. Then he turned back to us, smiling. “But that was before Dr. Silverthorn got here; and it’s better now, isn’t it? He has medicine and it helps us, I feel stronger than before. He says we’ll get well, if we have medicine and the right things to eat.”
“That’s right,” said Dr. Silverthorn. To me he turned empty eyes that my own thoughts made seem reproachful. In my mind I heard his voice again:
You let them die, you let yourselves die …
Oleander woke me from my daze, pulling at my arm. “Down this hallway.” We entered another passage. This one opened into a wider space where I glimpsed numberless archways leading who knew where, columns carved to resembled huge trees of stone, gates of iron twisted into grape arbors and latticework, statuary fallen from their pediments to stare up at me with cracked faces. In the distance I spied ghostly lights that seemed to dance in the air. When we grew nearer these resolved into banks of tiny colored candles, blue and red and white, burning fitfully on iron tables set against the walls.
“This is the Crypt Church,” explained Dr. Silverthorn. “He makes offerings here. But there is a place where you may rest undisturbed, and Oleander was to bring you food?”
He turned to the boy, who stopped, embarrassed, and fumbled with his free hand through his pockets.
“I forgot,” he mumbled. “Wait—there’s this.”
I took a handful of dried fruit, apples maybe, and swallowed them so quickly I nearly choked. A few minutes later I was rewarded for this gluttony by feeling my insides cramp up painfully; but by then we had stopped.
“Sleep here,” said Dr. Silverthorn. He pushed open a tall iron grille and pointed to a chamber within—how large I could not tell in the taper’s smoky light. Oleander stood aside to let me pass, my heart heavy: I felt as though I were being imprisoned.
“Am I to die here alone?” I asked bitterly. I bumped against some hard object and swore, rubbing my knee. “No light, no food, no water?”
Dr. Silverthorn shook his head. “We can do no more for you now: he will be calling for us, and it is best for you not to meet him until you feel somewhat stronger. Later I will bring you food and water, and light too perhaps. But for now you should sleep—” He, pointed to the floor, where something flat and white had been rolled out as a sort of pallet. “There. And I will give you something to make it easier for you to rest.”
He beckoned me to him. I waited, trying not to weep from sheer terror and exhaustion. I took the capsule he had Oleander give me, watched helplessly as they turned and the boy pushed the heavy iron gate closed.
“Until the morning, then,” Dr. Silverthorn said. Oleander waved. The two of them walked away, the taper fluttering in and out of sight among the arches and columns until the darkness extinguished it completely and I was alone in the Crypt Church.
6. “The dark backward and abysm of time”
I WOKE—MORNING? MIDNIGHT ? but it was always midnight there—to find that someone had set a number of candles around me, burning yellow tapers that smelled foul despite the aromatics that had been added to the sulfurous tallow. By their jaundiced light I could finally see my room: a vault really, with a low arched marble ceiling. Its whorls and florid patterns were blackened from smoke and age and seemed to quiver in the light. Besides the pallet I lay upon there were only a number of small wooden chairs for furniture. These were very old, covered with cushions of frayed and rotted embroidery showing strange things: a bearded man covered with birds, wild beasts sleeping at his feet; a storm-tossed boat filled with animals; a white-robed figure surrounded by playing children; a very old man pulling something from a sack. While chairs and cushions alike seemed centuries old they were clean, not covered with dust or mildew as I might have expected. I dropped the last cushion, then paced the length of the chamber. I stopped to rattle half-heartedly the ornate iron grille that kept me imprisoned before stalking to the other end of the vault.
Here in a high curved recess stood an altar. Small shelves cut into the elaborate marble had once held icons of some sort, like those I had seen elsewhere in the Crypt Church. But the statues were gone now. In their place stood clumsily made dolls of bone and fur, leaning haphazardly against the heavy candlesticks. Dripping tallow threatened to set one of these pathetic images afire. I took candle in one hand and icon in the other, holding the taper to regard it more closely. A kind of animal, or a man with an animal’s head. Blank eyes scratched in a smoothed piece of bone and colored with dirt or blood. The whole thing held together with wisps of straw and fur and hair. I shuddered and replaced it in a shallow alcove where it was in no danger of catching fire.
Beside these little creatures I found offerings of bones wrapped in neat bundles, and smaller figures made of braided human hair. Other things as well, oddments and bijoux that might have fallen from a hundred hidden pockets. A braided riband, its russet and silver brocade marking it as a Paphian’s favor from some curator. A smooth round marble that, when I investigated, proved to be a prosthetic eye: its solid black core responding to the warmth of my hand and dilating as it sought to focus upon me. There was even an untidy bouquet of shrunken blossoms like desiccated human hands, gathered who knows where—beneath the Botanists’ glass domes, or within the shadows of the Narrow Forest, or by the dank green shores of the river. Perhaps the flowers had clutched and fought as they were plucked from the damp earth, to be brought here and forgotten. But everything was child-sized, toylike, including the nosegay of dead blossoms: some small fist had held them last. I turned away suddenly, the pain in my stomach that had begun as hunger now knotting itself into queasiness. A black fear gripped me: that I had been brought here as just another offering, another odd yet lovely thing stolen from the dead and left to languish here.
“Raphael. You are awake—”
I whirled to see a spidery figure standing behind the iron grille. Clean white garments covered his limbs, and he held a lantern above his head. Beside him slunk a hunched form. I heard the clatter of keys and then Dr. Silverthorn’s command, “Put the food there and leave us.”
The gate swung inward. The hunched figure placed something on the floor. It made a soft guttural sound, then slipped into the darkness. When Dr. Silverthorn hung the lantern from a corner of the gate I saw that the door; remained open.
“You are not a prisoner,” he said, bowing his head in greeting. It could not have been more than a day since had last seen him, but already the contagion had progressed. His fine ointments did little now but cover the soft globe of bone and skull with a sheen of gold. “You are here so that the lazars will not disturb your rest. They fear this place, and will not visit it unless Tast’annin forces them to.” His mouth opened wider in the goblin grin that was all that remained of his smile. “This was called the Children’s; Chapel, once.” He indicated the objects on the floor. “That is food for you: just bread and water and some dried grapes, I’m afraid. Mostly they eat human flesh here, and die from it: that is not fit nourishment and I will not offer it to you.”
I fell onto the pitiful repast like a starved animal. When I finished I turned back to my visitor. He had not moved from his place just outside the gate, and seemed to wait almost shyly for me to invite him in.