“Stop it!” I ordered, slapping him. He covered his mouth and ran a few steps ahead of me, his laughter turning to hiccuping gasps. I licked my finger, turned, and snuffed out the passage’s single candle. I scraped it from the stone and ate it, choking on the oily taste. Then I hurried to Oleander’s side.
At first glance the vast expanse of the Cathedral seemed empty, its bays and transepts filled only with clumps of debris and the fires burning untended among the huge columns and arches. The crackling flames and wind almost drowned out the other, softer sounds, choked coughing and, from some unimaginable space overhead, voices. Then the gray light filtering down through the great windows picked out the numbing details.
A white shape moaned and tossed its arm across what had seemed to be a rotting gourd or toadstool but was in fact a face. Dark forms laid like logs beside a dying bonfire were not logs at all but those who had died since dawn (not long past, to judge by the weak light), waiting their turn to be cast upon the smoking pyres. Many were the lazars Tast’annin had set to work outside: searching for the lost arsenal of the Ascendants, hacking at the frozen ground with whatever implements they could find—staves and stones, the remains of autovehicles—until they were felled by disease or exhaustion. Beside one of the immense columns holding up the Gloria Tower a pair of gargoyles had toppled. But these raised their grotesque heads as we approached, unfurling long pink tongues as they yawned and groaned a greeting.
“He waits, master,” one said to me. His tongue wrapped around the words so that I could scarcely understand him. He stared at Oleander through slanted eyes and then flopped back onto his haunches, scratching at his jaw with one of his gnarled hands. “Little master, he shouts.”
Oleander glared at me. “I told you we should hurry!”
The other aardman remained standing, attention fixed upon the column looming above us. I followed his gaze upward, to the tangled skein of ropes and boards and scaffolding that hung beneath the Cathedral bells. I could scarcely see them there in the ruined tower: figures no larger than the Angels and Saints who peered down at us with unwinking stone eyes. But the figures upon the scaffolding moved. I began to pick out individual voices from the faint garble that drifted down. Some cried or screamed or even laughed shrilly. Others begged, and I heard several voices singing tunelessly the words to “Saint-Alaban’s Song.”
And there was another voice, calm and soothing. Resonant, speaking slowly and with great clarity, with a pronounced drawl and accent unfamiliar to the City of Trees. The Consolation of the Dead was ringing the changes.
A shriek. The aardmen’s ears flattened against their skulls. They flinched, looking askance at me before pointing their long muzzles skyward again.
“He shouts.” The first aardman wriggled closer to me, pressing his great head against my thigh and growling. “He shouts, master.”
“I know, Fury,” I said, scratching the rough fur between his ears. “It’s all right.”
Fury continued to growl, nostrils flaring as he stared into the darkness above us. Oleander fidgeted by the door half-opened in the column, the sole entry to the Gloria Tower. “Raphael,” he said again.
“Be quiet,” I said. “I want to listen—”
If I squinted I could make them out in that dizzying space. Black figures that seemed to flail crazily as they walked across the few boards and rope bridges strung beneath the twenty-four bells, all that remained of the flooring that had rotted away in the past centuries. They clung desperately to a haphazard network of ropes, invisible from the nave.
At the entrance to the Gloria Tower stood a mass of shadows. I sifted through the crowd, trying to pick out among the writhing silhouettes Fancy’s small form, her glorious golden hair.
But I did not see her. Except for Dr. Silverthorn’s insistence that she was here, I had no reason to believe she was still alive. Still I looked for her everywhere. I forced myself to search among the faces of the dead in piles by the bonfires, and among those who scuttled with averted eyes past the iron gates of the Children’s Chapel where I sat through endless twilit days and nights. I never found her.
Fury whined restlessly. I caressed his forehead, felt the short hairs bristling as his voice deepened to a more threatening note. I looked to see what alarmed him.
At the edge of the scaffolding were three figures, black and foreboding. Tast’annin’s favorite lackeys, the aardmen he had named Blanche and Trey. Between them the Aviator himself lay upon a makeshift litter. At his feet crouched a smaller form, shining as a venomous lily: the traitorous jackal who had led my captors to me at the Butterfly Ball and then fled to join the Madman. They watched as two tiny figures struggled across the scaffolding. One child swayed, seemed to plunge from the narrow planks. But she caught an unseen rope, plummeted until it grew taut, so that it seemed she jerked and twisted in the empty air. She hung from the bell’s black mouth, turned back to scream something through her sobs.
“I can’t watch this,” said Oleander. His footsteps pattered up the spiral stairs to the tower. At my side Fury whimpered, eyes furrowed as he stared at the tiny figure hanging limply from the rope.
“Master, master,” he whined, tail thumping the floor. “Why?”
“I don’t know why,” I replied, and crouched beside him.
Sweat ran down my arms despite the cold, and I shivered. By now the other child had also shimmied up a rope. The two dangled from the ancient blackened bells. As we watched they kicked at the air and began to swing, back and forth, until the clappers struck metal and a harsh knell echoed through the Cathedral, first one clanking peal and then another. The figure seated amid the ruins of the Gloria Tower began to recite, pausing to wait for the clappers to swing back and strike once more.
“Master?” Fury turned to regard me with puzzled eyes. Throughout the nave small figures began to stir from the rubbish heaps, raising themselves to watch the macabre drama overhead.
“It means nothing,” I said. “Nonsense he has made up, an invocation to the Lord of Dogs.”
“Bad, master,” he said. I nodded in agreement, then glanced up at the belltower. The Aviator droned on, the bells continued to peal. My heart had hardened in the past weeks, but still I pitied those children. “I must go, Fury,” I said, and entered the column. The aardmen raised their freakish heads: bestial jaws and teeth and fur, but with human eyes that watched me take my leave, and human tongues bidding me farewell.
Inside the column all was silent, the air close and smelling of burning wax. I walked slowly, circling higher and higher, the icy metal stairs biting through the soles of my boots. On the uneven surface of the walls words and names had been scrawled in places, written in oily smoke or with the burnt end of a stick: “Baldassare Persia died here”; “death to baal death to miramar”; “I loved Crescent Illyria tell Her.” In one spot had been scratched a crude stick figure with circles for eyes and open mouth, hanging from a tree. I did not pause to examine it closer.