“Better that than this!” I grabbed the iron bars and bowed my head, grief striking me like a stone. “Better you had killed me!”
He shrugged. “Better I had died after that viral strike, the way Gligor did. But I did not, and you did not. I have only a little time remaining; perhaps you have longer, perhaps you have less. But you have power, Raphael; and not all your friends are dead.
“In the evenings I go among the prisoners here and minister to those I can, to ease their last days. The Consolation of the Dead would have it that way,” he said with soft irony.
He walked toward me. I backed against the gate, frightened by how quickly he moved, the light in his eyes extinguished to malicious darkness. “There is a little girl imprisoned here. She was captured yesterday near the House Miramar with a party of mourners. I saw her last night. When the child heard where I had been she described you, and asked if I had seen Raphael Miramar among the corpses at the Butterfly Masque. I told her you were here, and alive.”
“Fancy,” I whispered. I had not forgotten her; rather had spent the last hours refusing to think of her, making a gift of her memory to those minor deities Grief and Exhaustion. “Where is she?”
“Here. I can tell you no more than that. As I said, my allegiance is to the Aviator. If he is pleased with you; if she does not succumb to madness or illness or the lazars; if you do not fall prey to this place: well then, he may treat you kindly, and treat her kindly, since she is your friend.
“The children told him of meeting you by the river. Pearl was another— favorite of his.” He grimaced at some unpleasant memory. “She too thought she had met an Angel walking in the forest; and this gave the Madman an idea.
“He has many interesting ideas.”
He stood near enough that I could smell the sweetness of his decay, the bitter chemical residue of the antibiotic ointment. He reached for me, his gloved hand moist and cold as it gripped my chin, firmly as though it were held by metal forceps.
“How odd,” he murmured. Through the thin gloves, damp and already starting to rot into strings of dirty cotton, the blades of his fingers cut into my chin. I was still terrified of contagion, but feared even more his anger and the plunge back into solitude if he left. “You look exactly like her …
“She was so beautiful, our Wendy; but mad, we all knew she was quite mad. All of them were by the end. It was one of the secondary effects of the Harrow Project, because of course they were all grossly flawed children to begin with; and who could endure such a life, living constantly the nightmares and hallucinations of others day after day after day, and never waking from your own dreams? But we made of them the walking vessels of our madnesses and it made them more lovely and then grotesque, the gynander Merle sprouted more breasts, Taylor’s eyes turned from gray to white and finally calcified like granite pearls, Gligor began to smell of carrion and butterflies flocked around him in the garden, Anna woke one day to find in her bed a shriveled homunculus with her own face and withered male genitals …
“But Wendy only grew more beautiful and deadly, although of course she could not see it, she was incapable of recognizing anything but pain and horror and fear and she embraced those, oh she did. Emma Harrow was a fool, not to see what was happening to her prize changeling, that stolen child now stealing with no thought or reason the fancies and desires and finally the very hopes of all she touched, leaving only despair in their place …”
I listened fascinated to his ravings. He let go of me and began to pace, three steps and then back, three steps and back, as though some imaginary cage about him was shrinking to the size of his ribs. In my mind a strange picture took shape, the image of this creature called Wendy Wanders: a girl so like me she could pass for a boy and fool my own people into thinking they saw me upon a dusty stage. But with this grew something else, a sensation so hard and bitter it was like an unripe fruit I had swallowed to rot and fester inside me: the idea that all of the horrible things that had happened to me had happened by mistake. It was not Raphael who should have seen death and dishonor and abandonment, but this other thing, this awful simulacrum called Wendy that had somehow broken free from the Ascendants’ prison, and in so doing had loosed the rage and grim delight of the Gaping One upon the City.
Then I felt inside me a terrible rage building, a desire for havoc and bloodshed like that which had possessed me in the Narrow Forest when I ran with the white jackal to seek my Patron’s death. But to Dr. Silverthorn I displayed nothing; only nodded and stared as he paced, while about us the candles burned to oily smears upon the altar.
“Do you see? Do you understand now, Raphael? There is a reason for this, there has to be a reason for this —”
For the first time I heard raw desperation in his voice, glimpsed the ravaged man clinging to some hope inside that cell of bone and diseased flesh. I turned to see his eyes glowing like the flames that sprang like pale irises from the marble. I started to nod, thinking he merely wanted me to reassure him. But then I saw that he was waiting for me to answer, waiting for me to explain it to him, as though I saw within the wreckage surrounding us some magic spindle that could be spun to turn all this horror to a final good.
“Do you understand, Raphael?”
“I—I think so,” I said slowly. “I would like to, anyway. It’s just so strange, to think of it; to think of her, alive somewhere, as if—”
As if I were not, I thought; as if only one of us could be within the City of Trees.
But she had been alive all along! She had not died, as Doctor Foster and Miramar had told me. Dr. Silverthorn waited for me to go on. I shrugged and opened my hands in a helpless gesture.
“What do you want of me, Dr. Silverthorn?”
He lifted one arm, the sleeve of his white robe hanging from it like a sheet from a broomstick. “You will bring her here,” he said, and dropped his arm. I shuddered, half- expecting it to clatter to the floor, but he only regarded me with a grin as though he read my thoughts and then laughed. “You said you perform in theatricals: well, the Consolation of the Dead wants you to act the part of the Gaping One for him. And you must do it, you must! The entire City will hear of it, the Players will hear of it—and she will come with them to see you. Then you can use her to destroy him—”
“But why?”
“Because she is Death, Raphaeclass="underline" those she touches dies, I have seen it!”
I shook my head. “But this is all madness! My sister alive, and you say she is monstrous; and a madman ruling here though I’ve seen nothing, nothing but yourself and lazars! And why does he want this, why me to act as the Gaping One?”
“To amuse him; to bloat his pride and sickness; to lure your people and the others of this City here: because who could resist it, the chance to see a beautiful demon in a ruined Cathedral! He is mad for glory.
“He was promised a position of power: here, in this City. A puppet Governor, ruling an abandoned kingdom! The Ascendants promised him this, because he was a Hero, you see; and they had their own reasons, they wanted to see if there was anything left here worth devouring: dogs sniffing at corpses and rubbish.
“They plan to strike against the Commonwealth. They wanted to reclaim the City, establish a garrison here and seek the lost armory. Margalis Tast’annin was a brilliant strategist, a leader of the Archipelago Conflict. He was to retire from fighting, and NASNA had pledged him this City of fools and whores; what other cities are left to rule?
“But he was betrayed by the Curators—whether in collusion with rebels or not, I do not know. I think not; I think the Curators truly feared him. They gave him over to the aardmen. And the aardmen tortured him; they unmanned him; but they did not kill him.