I sank back upon my feet and raised my head to look at the other waiting there. Beside him Oleander and Anku stood in silence.
“You are mine now, Raphael Miramar,” he said softly. His foot nudged at the pile of bones and cloth before me. For a moment I thought he too might draw something from there to remember him by, tibia or rib or skullcap of the scientist who had served him for a little while. But he drew back his foot. His fingers clamped around Oleander’s neck. With a voluptuary’s delicate smile he pushed him toward me.
“Prepare him, Oleander. When he is ready bring him to me in the Gabriel Tower.”
He turned, with a gesture commanded the aardmen to lower the stretcher. Anku danced at his side, leaped after him onto the bier, and crouched between his legs. As the Aviator settled back a groan escaped him, of pain or perhaps of sorrow. Then he cursed, and I heard him strike one of the aardmen as they struggled to lift him again. His last words echoed back to us from the depths of the Engulfed Cathedral.
“Feed him and bathe him and anoint him as befits the one who will serve the Consolation of the Dead in raising the Gaping Lord.”
As they bore him into the darkness the aardmen began to howl.
Part Seven: A Masque of Owls
THERE WERE NO MORE dark houses after that one.
“Aidan, we have never been so in demand,” said Mehitabel one morning. It was a few weeks since the massacre at High Brazil. Paphians and Curators alike seemed to want to forget the horrors of the Butterfly Ball, the continuing outrage of children and elders captured by foraging lazars and aardmen growing more emboldened as the autumn passed, the whispered tales of an Ascendant demon holding sway over the Engulfed Cathedral. We Players seldom had a day off anymore. Scarcely a night passed without its masque or burletta or private soiree.
Mehitabel tugged her hair thoughtfully. “Maybe it was like this when Miss Scarlet first joined the troupe; but I wasn’t here then.”
“Is that when you first saw them?” I asked.
“Oh yes!” She took a bite from a slab of meringue hoarded from an Illyrian moon-viewing several days before. “She was wonderful, just wonderful. That was when I decided to become an actress.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Really? What changed your mind?”
She swallowed, stared at me open-mouthed. Then she burst out laughing, covering her mouth as she rocked back in her chair.
“Oh Aidan!” she giggled. “You know I do my best.”
Silly Mehitabel! She really was a terrible actress. She got by on her looks, and a certain look she used on stage and off, a way of tilting her head to one side and letting her hair fall into her face so that one was torn between the desire to brush it aside or give her a slap. All the Players confided in her, mostly because she would have been crushed if they had not: she brought all her secrets to us, laid them out like so many pretty stones she had found and waited for us to admire them. None of the others had the heart to turn her away.
Neither did I. Although she aggravated me, although I found her gossip tiresome and could no more imagine tapping in to her simple memories than I could imagine tapping a block of wood; still I couldn’t ignore her, or tease her cruelly as I once had.
“I don’t know what it is,” I said to Miss Scarlet that afternoon. “I know she is a perfect idiot; but I can’t seem to help it. When she needs help with her lines, or her costume, or—well, whatever it is this time—I can’t just send her away anymore.”
Miss Scarlet continued to stare at the page in front of her. I tapped my foot, waiting for a reply. When none came I crossed her room to the window.
“And what is with Justice now, he spends all his time with her, ‘reading lines.’ Reading lines with Mehitabel! he knows she’s awful, he knows they are coming to see me —”
I stopped, fearing I might have insulted Miss Scarlet, once the Prodigy of a Prodigal Age; of late busier playing mentor and adviser to Aidan Arent, the City’s newest sensation. She raised her head and smiled, her dark eyes peering from within her wizened face with an odd expression.
“Why should it matter then, who he practices with? Perhaps he feels uneasy reading with you, your talent so surpasses his own.” She glanced back down at her book. But after a few moments she looked up again and added, “Perhaps you are jealous, Wendy. Perhaps you are growing a heart.”
I ignored her, drumming my fingers on the windowsill. Outside, the earth was gray and brown. The Librarians’ sheep grazed upon an untidy pile of straw dumped on the lawn, their shepherd shivering in his homespun jacket. It would be Benedick tonight for the Historians (they loved battles; battling lovers would do if necessary); then tomorrow a smaller role in Watt the Butler, and the following week Titus Andronicus, and Juliet after that; then A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Zoologists, hosting a Masque of Owls for the Illyrians. Finally a brief hiatus while the Paphians readied themselves for the great feast of Winterlong, twelve days and nights of merrymaking that would culminate on the eve of Winterlong itself, shortest day of the year, when we would perform—Toby was beside himself to think of it— The Spectres’ Harlequinade for the masque of Winterlong at Saint-Alaban.
“Never before have the Paphians requested that we play for them at Winterlong! Never!” he had gloated. Already he could see the bartered riches that would come of it, plastics and woolen cloth and the intricate bits of hardware that the Paphians used as ornaments but which I knew were the remains of archaic computers. But looking out at the bleak lawn this wintry afternoon I wondered about Toby’s optimism; about the wisdom of people who could continue their meaningless research and revels while rumors of human sacrifices and hidden weapons brought to light fled across the Hill Magdalena Ardent.
Terrible things had befallen the City in the past weeks. The bizarre murder of a young girl in the Museum of Natural History; its Regent slain at the massacre at the Butterfly Ball when the House High Brazil burned to the ground. A figure seen at the ball, a beautiful boy clad in torn red tunic and with a vine draped about his neck, he who the Saint-Alabans name the Gaping One or Naked Lord. A burning star in the northern sky that heralded the Final Ascension. But still the round of masques and balls did not cease, only proceeded to a more somber music, dark pavane rather than sprightly reel.
“Fancy: gone,” Justice murmured after I had told him Fabian’s news. He buried his face in his hands. “And your brother—I met an Illyrian spado who claimed to have seen him at the Butterfly Ball. He is dead now; so many of us are dead.”
A mist crept over me when he said this. I closed my eyes, tried to plumb the darkness inside me, find something that would give the truth or lie to his words. Nothing; but I could not believe it was so.
At last I said, “He isn’t dead.”
Justice raised his eyes. “How do you know?”
“I don’t know. But—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Justice said bleakly. “So many are dead now, how could it matter?”
And mere days after that a viral strike: and then another.
“They are searching for someone,” Justice had muttered. We stood in the theater’s upper story, watching the fougas’ searchlights slash through the dusk.
“The Aviator,” I whispered. From the Deeping Avenue echoed screams; a party of masquers had been caught in the rain of roses. I shuddered. Justice put his arm around me. From his grim face I knew he was not thinking of the Aviator but of me, wondering if they still might search for an escaped empath whose dreams could kill.