“And Dr. Harrow?”
“Unreason.”
“And her brother Aidan?”
“Despair.”
I fell silent. In the chill air the masque’s clamor racketed more loudly. Even from here I sensed the revelers’ desires, tugging insistently at me as they begged for release. How easy it would be to join them, pass among those bright figures and take from each whatever sensation I desired. I could let this other dream pass; but that was dangerous. Because if others had seen Him now, the Boy in the Tree, the Gaping One, then surely His power had grown beyond imagining; and how easy it would be for the Aviator to use Him against the City. I shuddered and bit the ball of my thumb, hard. That was how I used to wake myself from a patient’s bad dreams at HEL .
I did not wake; the Boy did not disappear; but I was able to think clearly again.
I said, “So those are not your names?”
He grinned, flashing small even white teeth. “They are all my names.”
I hesitated. “ I think you are Death.”
The Boy stared at me with those fathomless summer eyes. “I am.”
“Then Aidan was right, to name you Despair.” I held out my hand as if to take a prize.
“No,” He said. “He was not right; because he did not want to learn the rest of it. Lazy thing.”
Suddenly He laughed, tossing His head so that the crown of leaves sprang through the air and unfurled to reveal a froth of blossoms, white and gold and periwinkle blue. I caught and held them before me: leaves such as I had never seen, leaves like verdant stars and silvery blades and cupped hands, and all entwined with flowers that smelled of every spring that had ever been hoped for in the shrunken heart of winter.
“You must teach them the rest of my name, Lady!” He laughed again and bounced back on His feet as though he could scarcely contain Himself from leaping into the air. “You must tell them stories, you must tuck them in at night, you must be their Mother!”
I glared at His foolishness, and placed the crown of flowers upon my head. “And what will you be, Boy?” I said. “Their Father?”
“Of course! And your brother, and lover, and victim all in one! Just like before. All of it, all the same! All singing, all dancing all dying!”
“You sound mad, like that Aviator they talk about, the one Anna called the Consolation of the Dead.”
He frowned. “He is a fool, a neophyte. He does not understand what must be done. You will see for yourself when you meet him.”
He turned away, for the first time noticed the moon and made a mocking bow to it, as He had to me earlier. Then he glanced back. “I go now, Wendy, sister mine. We will meet again; but not for a little while, and likely as not you won’t recognize me, and you may not remember my names. Although perhaps by then you will recall your own.” He shrugged, tossed His fair curls as though He had grown weary of this game.
“When will we meet?” Suddenly I was frightened of His leaving me, but as I reached to hold Him He skipped away, shaking His head.
“Why, at Winterlong of course,” He cried, and laughing sprang into the air as though He would seize the moon. I shielded my eyes from its yellow glare; but when blinking I tried to find Him again He was gone.
A small sound by the Regent’s Oak. I turned expectantly. But this time it was Justice, looking shy and uncertain as he stepped from behind the tree.
“I heard you talking,” he said, looking surprised to see me alone. “I’m sorry, I’ll leave you—”
My disappointment at losing the Boy eased. “No,” I said. I took a step toward him. “I hoped you’d come.”
Justice smiled, glanced up at the moon and then at me. He touched the crown of flowers upon my brow. “Really, Wendy?”
“Really,” I replied, and took his hand. Together we walked down to the Masque of Owls.
Part Eight: The Gaping One Awakes
1. The central fire and the rain from heaven
THEY STOOD AT THE foot of the altar beside a stone basin: three young boys, all Paphians. Two had the tawny skin and black eyes that marked them of the House High Brazil, slender and long-legged. They still wore fine ropes of gold looped through their ears, and each had his dark hair braided down his back. The other was a Saint-Alaban, blond and blue-eyed and the youngest of the three. When he saw me he spat and crossed his arms before his bare chest, hands splayed in the protective gesture against the Gaping One. They were naked, save for wreaths of leafless vines about their necks. That morning before dawn they had been forced to gather the vines themselves. Aardmen led them to the river and watched panting on its banks while the boys pulled the plants from the earth. Their hands still bled where the vines had fought, and the Saint-Alaban’s breast was scored with livid wounds like lashmarks. Now they waited while the Consolation of the Dead questioned them as to the whereabouts of the empath named Wendy Wanders.
I stared coldly at the Saint-Alaban, then shifted on my marble bench. Beside me Oleander shuffled, hissed under his breath as he nearly dropped the knife he held. He shot me a panicked glance. I shook my head and he averted his eyes.
Marble fountains stood at either side of the altar. They no longer held water, but twigs and powdered bricks of opium taken from captive Botanists. Black smoke poured from them, nearly obscuring the flames that licked at the base of the fountains where small fires were tended by other children, naked and filthy from rolling about on the floor of the nave. Aardmen lolled among them as well, scratching or biting at their flanks. A soft thrumming filled the air, compounded of the fires burning and the drip of rain seeping from holes in the ceiling high above, the lazars’ restless fidgeting and the Aviator’s soothing voice droning on and on.
“Have you seen her? A girl who looks like ‘him, the very incarnation of the Gaping Lord, the good Dr. Silverthorn swore to me they were as alike as two drops of rain—”
The Paphians protested no, no, they had never seen her, never. Only the Saint-Alaban continued to stare back at me while the Aviator continued his tedious questioning.
Finally the Saint-Alaban called out, “I saw her. She is disguised as a boy, and names herself Aidan Arent. I thought she was him —”
He pointed at me, then continued, “She was with one of my bedcousins, Justice Saint-Alaban, a paillard who went among the Ascendants to betray us, may our Mother curse him!”
The Aviator nodded. “Where was she, my darling boy?”
The Saint-Alaban gave me a look of such hatred that I stared down at my hands, the stony lip of my sagittal gleaming pale violet.
“With a group of traveling Players performing at the House Illyria,” he said. “She appears in blasphemous garb. My people believe she impersonates the murderer Raphael Miramar. They will be at the Masque of Winterlong—” His voice shook with such fury that he could not go on.
The Aviator nodded again. “But I know all this already,” he said impatiently. “I want to find her now. Where is she now?”
One of the boys from Persia cried out, “Can’t you see we don’t know? Let us go, we’ll help you, please—”
But already the Aviator had turned away, reaching for the book he had dropped when he’d begun his interrogation.
“… I am the bray of the brute in the night, whoever is deceived by me …”
Margalis Tast’annin, the Mad Aviator, lay upon a pallet at the back of the North Cloister facing me. At his feet sat the jackal Anku, still and white as a carven cenotaph. Even at that small distance I could not see them clearly through the roiling smoke and steam. Tast’annin’s voice alone possessed a physical immediacy and potency. It cut through the opium’s narcotic vapor, the thick stench of dread and hopelessness, so that even though I knew the man who lay there—knew every scar upon his body, knew the tenor of his groans as nightmares chased him, knew the place like a secret spring that bled slowly but ceaselessly, and the smell of his bloodstained raiment—even knowing all this I could sit here and imagine another man speaking in the gloom. A tall strong man with face unscarred and close-cropped wheaten hair, wearing metallic clothes that creaked, and smelling of scorched metal and ozone and (very faintly) of charred flesh.