“In the end they pitied him.”
He shook his head. “Foolish creatures! but it is in their slavish nature to obey men, as it is in mine. He ordered them to free him, and they did.
“He will be avenged upon the City now. He claims to have found the ancient weapons stored beneath Saint-Alaban’s Hill. He was a military Hero. He seeks to bring the Final Ascension.”
I shook my head. “This is sheer lunacy! One man against the City—and for what cause? I have never heard of him before.”
“He was an Ascendant, as I was.”
“Did you know him?”
“I knew of him. Margalis Tast’annin was a NASNA Aviator, a Hero of the Archipelago Conflict and many skirmishes with the Balkhash Commonwealth. He came to HEL with Odolf Leslie after the Wendy suicides. They were the ones who authorized the new diagnostics, the new— methods. I met Tast’annin briefly. He was interested in the new biosyntheses from the empaths, the aggression resonators in multiple personalities.
“You see, they had many plans, these new Governors. They had some new ideas, they had new alembics, they were going to make new things from the old materials. They have already made many new things, each skirmish brings new terrors and new chemicals and new microphages—”
“There really is a war, then?”
Dr. Silverthorn stared at me, his jaws grinding silently.
“No,” he said after a moment. “There is no real war. There is no one left to lead real wars. Only madmen in the middlelands and scientists at the fringes of those cities that are still standing. And for the rest, nothing but foot soldiers and freaks: guerrillas and gorillas.”
He laughed again; his breathing grew labored. I noticed his glove-clad hands shaking and was terrified that he would die here before me. But no. He gestured wildly until I realized he wanted his bag. I hurried to give it to him, waiting while he dumped its contents on the floor and scrabbled among vials and silvery gavelocks, knocking bottles across the room until he found a metal container, an atomizer of some sort that he sprayed into the hollow cavity of his throat.
“Aaugh,” he groaned, heedless of the atomizer falling from his hand. “So soon, so soon …”
My heart ached to watch him: to feel one’s body decay thus! “Did they do this to you, Dr. Silverthorn? The new Governors?”
His voice was dull, perhaps from the effects of the atomizer. “No. My colleagues did this. The Doctors I worked with at HEL . When I escaped with Anna and poor Gligor they sent a NASNA fouga after us, they alerted the avernian janissaries, and Gligor was, they—
“God, to watch him die like that! To think of anyone dying like this—”
He drew his hands to his ruined face in an agony of grief and horror and hopelessness. And then I began to weep, because I was exhausted by my own sorrows; because he had been kind to me even while bringing me to my death; because he could no longer weep himself.
I have no idea how long I sat there, slumped in that cold vault with the pitiful offerings of geneslaves and dying children all about me. But eventually my sobs gave way to silence, a cold ache in my chest that was dreadful because it bespoke utter emptiness and despair. I lifted my head to see Dr. Silverthorn standing above me. The last bits of burning tallow had died. From somewhere in the bowels of the Crypt Church a chilly blue light threaded its way into the Children’s Chapel to touch his cerements with an ashen pallor. The sight of him filled me with a sort of detached terror: the silent skeleton staring blankly into the winding fastnesses of the Engulfed Cathedral, his white shroud stirring softly to some subterranean air. I knew he would do me no harm; indeed that he had meant to help me, and at the least had warned me that my sister now walked in the City of Trees. But his very presence was a horror to me. I breathed as quietly as I could and said nothing, hoping that he would leave. Still he remained there, watchful and silent, until I wondered if he was waiting for someone.
After a very long time he spoke. “He is walking,” he whispered.
I started to my feet, looking fearfully out the open gate into the Crypt Church. Dr. Silverthorn said nothing, only continued to stare with those great dead eyes into the darkness. Holding my breath, I strained to hear footsteps or voices. Nothing. In the hallway the corpse candles in their little glass holders burned a steady blue, wisps of black smoke rising to disappear far overhead. The gray curves of the walls receded endlessly, like the inert coiled heart of a nautilus. Beside me Dr. Silverthorn stood still and somber as one of the ravished caryatids in the transept above us. I decided this was another of his imaginings, and started to cross the room to the altar when he grabbed me, the bones of his fingers surprisingly strong and cold about my wrist.
“Wait,” he said. “Can’t you hear him?”
“I hear nothing.”
He shook his head, still watching the hallway. “The stones shriek as he passes them, and in their crypts the bones of the dead shiver into pale dust; but to the living he is silence itself! It is a wonder.”
He mused for several minutes, his fingers cutting into my hand until I could bear it no more and moved away. “I’m sorry, Raphael,” he said. He still did not look at me. He ignored my physical presence completely now, except for the moments he had held my hand.
After a little while he said, “I thought I would have more time. But it is coming fast now—”
“What is?”
“My sight is blurring,” he announced, as though he had not heard me. “I’m surprised it lasted this long,” he added matter-of-factly. “But I am seeing other things. Come with me, Raphael—”
Abruptly he stood, his hand clawing at the air. I gasped at his face. His eyes had finally collapsed like melting wax. He could no longer see. Soon he would be dead.
I took a deep breath to steady myself. Then I took his arm, flinching at the touch of raw bone beneath the fabric. “Where are we going?”
“To walk a little while, before he comes to claim you. My material eyes are dead now, but I have other ways of seeing. I would have you guide me, Raphael; and I will tell you what I see, and perhaps it will comfort you when I am gone.”
7. Delicate details of internal structure
WE PASSED INTO THE dark corridors of the Crypt Church. I carried the lantern and Dr. Silverthorn’s black bag, lighter now than it had been the day before. My companion’s arm rested upon mine like a nearly weightless splint of wood. We walked slowly, my footsteps silent upon the cold stone floor, Dr. Silverthorn’s joints creaking alarmingly, so that more than once I saw the tiny shadows of rats racing away at our approach. Dr. Silverthorn laughed at this, and I wondered aloud how he could see them if he was now blind.
“There is no longer a veil of flesh between myself and the world,” he said. He halted and pointed to one side. “What is there?”
I shrugged. “Nothing: a gray wall of many stones. The narrow passageway continues there, and …”I squinted. “There are some kind of statues up ahead, but here the wall is empty.”
He tilted his head to me. His sockets held only ruined jelly, like the tallow smeared upon the children’s altar. A little longer and even that would be gone. “But they are lovely!” he whispered, letting go my arm to gesture at the blank expanse of granite, smooth except for where names, thousands of names, had been incised in the stone. “Can’t you see them?”
I peered at the wall, stretching my hand to touch its surface, cold and faintly damp, as though I might find there the impression of what he saw. I felt only the engraved letters, and the grit lodged within them. “I see nothing,” I confessed ruefully. “What do you see?”