“Lord Baal.”
With a start I realized he had been calling me for some moments. I raised my head, my hair spilling down my shoulders and tangling about the hempen cord I wore around my neck.
“Yes?” I looked past the Paphian boys to where the Aviator had raised himself to stare at me with those translucent eyes.
“… accept these offerings in your name …”
I dipped my head so as not to see them, or the firelight glinting off Oleander’s knife. But I heard their fast and shallow breathing, and smelled the ammoniac reek of their terror.
The Aviator finished. A moment in which I could hear only the murmur of rain and the Paphians’ choking breath. Then from opposite me came a soft command.
“Now, Oleander.”
Oleander inhaled loudly. I closed my eyes, but not before I saw the two boys from Persia clutch each other, weeping. I lowered my head, hunching my shoulders as though this time I might somehow drown out what happened next.
I heard Oleander rumbling with the knife and cursing. An aardman growled: one of the Paphians must have tried to break away. I tried to hear only my own breathing, my heart thumping counterpoint to the boys’ despair.
Suddenly Oleander cried out. A tearing sound and a scream; then the knife clattering to the floor, Oleander weeping as he retrieved it. I clenched my hands and squeezed my eyes more tightly, tried repeating loudly the words to the “Duties of Pleasure” and “Saint-Alaban’s Song.”
It was no use. Their screams and groans went on and on and on, for hours it seemed. Warmth spattered my bare legs and feet. Oleander sobbed and shouted, striking them again and again while I rocked back and forth on the marble bench, eyes shut tight.
Gradually their shrieks grew fainter, the bubbling sound of their breathing soft and labored. Something slippery brushed my leg, slid to the floor nearby. I heard Oleander panting, and the aardmen whimpering. I opened my eyes for an instant, saw blood pooled about my foot, blood sprayed in ribbons across the stone basin and the shapeless lumps strewn about the altar floor. The tip of a finger rolled beneath my boot, and a tuft of golden hair.
It took one of them a very long time to die. He made a choking sound, like someone swallowing syrup, then finally grew still. It was quiet, except for the sound of the other children crying and Oleander talking very slowly and calmly to himself, sentences I could not hear except for the words save them whispered repeatedly. I opened my eyes, saw my legs and thighs spattered with blood, smelled it like some warm tide spilling upon the altar. An aardman lapped noisily at the floor. On my wrist the sagittal burned a fierce and brilliant violet. I raised my hand slowly, the rays streaming from it to send ripples of light across the dim room. The lazars cried out, and Oleander tossed the knife across the room, then fell to his knees, retching. The Consolation of the Dead recited words I did not hear as I stared up to where the sagittal streaked the cloister’s shadowy vault with amethyst radiance, and the cold rain dripped upon my bloodstained hands.
2. All traces of organic remains become annihilated
THAT NIGHT OLEANDER CRIED out in his sleep, thrashing so that his arm struck my cheek and woke me. “Shh—it’s a dream, Oleander, it’s just a dream.” I reached across the pallet to embrace him. From the corridor behind the iron gates of the Children’s Chapel echoed snores where an aardman lay guarding us. “No! Oh god, no—”
I covered his mouth. “Be quiet! You’ll wake Fury—” He fell silent then, clutching at me as though he would crawl inside my skin. But for many hours we lay awake, staring into the darkness that engulfed us, the darkness that was everywhere like a poison in the air;, knowing that the horror that awaited us upon waking was worse than any nightmare, and that it would never end.
3. The most remarkable of the beasts of prey
“HE WANTS YOU, RAPHAEL . He is ringing the changes.”
In the darkness I could make out Oleander, frail and sallow as one of the few candles left guttering on the altar behind him. He cursed as he bumped against a chair, rubbing his arms to warm himself and finally standing atop the heap of pillows I had arranged next to my pallet. I blinked, sat up, and pulled my bedcovering—a woolen cloak taken from a dead Saint-Alaban—about my shoulders.
“So soon?” I coughed, shivering despite the cloak. From the number of candles that had burned out within the Children’s Chapel I guessed I had been asleep for two or three hours. I never slept through the night—or day—anymore. Margalis Tast’annin murdered sleep as efficiently as he did those captives he tirelessly questioned in his search for the empath Wendy Wanders.
My sister, I thought. That is why these others died, enslaved Curators and Paphians alike; although mostly it was my own people who fell captive to their own faithless bedcousins.
“Hurry, Raphael,” urged Oleander through chattering teeth. He fell onto the pallet beside me. He wore only loose white trousers, tied about his thin waist with a length of rope. I hugged him close, wrapping my cloak about him and feeling the spars of his ribs as he trembled with fear and cold. “I hate it, I hate watching them die—”
“Shh …”I stroked his lank hair, his scarred shoulders with their raw fretwork where the Madman had lashed him days before. “Don’t cry, cousin, please don’t cry.”
He sniffled and buried his face in my shoulder. I moved my hand to guard him from my sagittal, though it slumbered now. Only my fear of the Aviator woke it—the Aviator knew this and delighted in it—and sometimes the sight of the dead lying pale as though sleeping in the nave.
A deep tolling note, far above us in the Gloria Belltower. A softer chime, an echo of the first; then silence. Oleander plucked at my arm. “Please, Raphael! Before he sends for others—”
I nodded, and groped on the floor until I found my boots. They were too big for me. Despite wrapping my feet in rags first, my ankles were scraped raw from wearing them and bled anew each day without healing. I blinked back tears of pain as I pulled them over my poor feet, waited for the throbbing to subside before standing to find my robe: a shapeless gray sack, long-sleeved and reaching below my knees, and with a motheaten hood. It was worn through at the elbows and unraveling at the cuffs, hideously ugly but the warmest thing I could find among the heaps of clothing torn from the dead and cast into piles about the nave. Each day the Aviator sent squalling groups of children to pick through these filthy remains, bringing to him and myself whatever seemed worth saving. Broken necklaces and armlets, dirty ribbons and brocade trim from Paphians’ robes; occasionally some shattered sliver of machinery, timepiece or spyglass or monitor, buried beneath mounds of Curators’ uniforms. The rest was burned, adding the stench of charred cloth to the reek that hung within the nave like a dense and poisonous fog. The hollow sound of children coughing was as ceaseless now as the winter wind howling in the broken west towers. This gray robe was the first and last prize I had found among the lazars’ rags, before the Aviator forbade me to show myself among them except at his command. Now I was consigned to this chamber, half prison and half sacrarium to the Gaping One.
With a sigh I motioned Oleander that I was ready. We walked through the Crypt Church, I hobbling and Oleander skipping beside me. He was barefoot and tried to keep his chilblained feet from touching the icy floor, hopping and swearing as though he walked on hot sand. We started up the passage leading to the Belltower. A solitary candle pressed into an alcove threw its wan light down the steps. As we walked there came another loud peal, cut short so that we both stopped to listen for the next sound. Oleander stared at me, looking very much like Dr. Silverthorn in the cloudy light, with his hollow eyes and sunken cheeks and nearly all his hair gone. I looked away from him, staring at the arched ceiling high above us as though I might see through it to the bay floor. From the heights of the Gloria Tower came a tiny sound, what might have been a bat squeaking, or a child’s wail. Then a soft thud. Oleander giggled nervously.