“She will destroy you, Miramar!”
4. We shrink back affrighted at the vastness of the conception
“SHE REFERRED TO YOUR sister, of course,” the Aviator repeated softly.
It was much later, perhaps days later. I thought it must be evening. When I answered the Aviator’s summons a window like a gash in the Crypt Church had shown me a sliver of cobalt sky peppered with stars. I had returned to the Children’s Chapel and slept for a few hours after my sojourn in the Gloria Tower; awakened and slept again, and again, until once more Oleander appeared in the chamber to bring me here to the very heart of the Aviator’s stronghold: the Resurrection Chapel of the Cathedral Church of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel.
“She spoke of the Magdalene,” I said for the third or fourth time, and coughed.
He reclined upon a dais, originally part of an altar, surrounded by massive blocks of granite fallen from the ceiling and scattered like so many broken tombstones. At his side was Dr. Silverthorn’s black bag. The floor was littered with broken capsules, torn adhesive pads, half-empty tubes of morpha and octine and frilite. And everywhere were piles of trinkets brought him by the lazars—dolls and gowns and dead flowers, stones and bundles of twigs, a prosthetic arm and a scholiast’s head. Scattered among these were braziers that burned damp green wood and old cloth.
At the base of each tripod were carefully placed three objects, particolored as though overgrown with moss or lichen. Stones, I thought the first time I had come here. But they were not stones. The lank stuff hanging like yellowed chaff was not dried moss but hair; the glints of silver were bits of glass and metal pressed into empty eyesockets. The sight no longer sickened me. They were dead now, whoever they had been, and at play in that green country I had glimpsed in Dr. Silverthorn’s dying eyes.
In the midst of all this Margalis Tast’annin reposed like an effigy from one of the Museum’s dioramas: his skin waxy and moist from the fevers that plagued him, a pallid yellow; eyes black pits from smoking uncured opium. In the firelight the scars upon his face appeared darker, and seemed to follow some pattern unknown to me; as though they had been scored there purposefully. Sometimes they seemed to move, writhing black characters etched upon his skin.
Set into the wall behind him was a window of colored glass with several panes broken or missing. The ones that remained formed a picture, the image of a woman draped in blue and carrying a lighted torch. In the chill winter sunlight her figure shone pale blue and white. Now it was dull, flat black and gray, the woman almost indistinguishable from the random patterns of glass and empty air. I stared at it with dread, this likeness of the Magdalene in such an awful place; and wondered who could have placed it there, aeons ago when the Cathedral was raised upon Saint-Alaban’s Hill.
At Tast’annin’s feet panted the white jackal, ruby eyes alert as ever. I had realized some days before that I had never seen Anku asleep. Now I believed that he did not sleep, that he was truly an immortal creature, one of the Egyptians’ ancient demons somehow awakened by the Aviator; or, Magdalene forbid, awakened by me. The Aviator’s shadow fell across his shrewd foxy face as he leaned’ over to poke at a brazier with a long white bone, clumsily carved and bound roundabout with strips of skin. Tast’annin wore the remnants of his Aviator’s uniform: heavy breeches and a jacket of red metallic cloth, emblazoned with the yellow triangle of the last Ascension. The jacket was hung with teeth and small bones, broken blades of knives and strings of glass beads all sewn neatly across the leather. Oleander had done this; Oleander who sat patiently at Tast’annin’s side, piercing a pair of leather trousers with a needle made of a finger bone, and stitching bright ribbons culled from the braids of dead Paphians, up and down the trouser legs in waves of gold and green and blue.
“This Magdalene, then—”
The Aviator paused, the carven bone poised in the air. He smiled at me with complicity: he would take another tack. “Your sister might be the living image of the Magdalene, as you represent the Gaping One.”
The bone clattered to the floor. His finger stabbed the air in front of my face, then flicked a strand of wheat-colored hair from his lip. He continued, “There would be a certain symmetry; like in that masque the blond children showed me. ‘Baal and Anat’: I quite liked that one.”
His voice wandered off. He stretched his hand to pinch Oleander’s shoulder, kneading the loose skin as though he were testing a bolt of fine silk.
“She might be,” I said. “Only she was raised among the Ascendants, who do not believe. And that masque is nonsense, a ghost story taught the Saint-Alabans by the Historians. I do not believe in the Magdalene or the Gaping One.”
Which was no longer strictly true, since I had seen with my own eyes a spectral Boy walking in the Narrow Forest, whom Dr. Silverthorn might have called an Angel, but who I believed to be the Hanged Boy. And his jackal familiar sat not an arm’s length from me. But I could not understand why an Ascendant would be interested in these things. It was almost beyond comprehension to think that he might believe in them.
Tast’annin looked at me with those vulpine eyes. They glowed dull orange, as though banked embers burned somewhere behind his shattered face.
“I was not a religious man,” he said, his voice fallen to a whisper. From behind him billowed a sigh, the flop of a heavy leg upon the stone floor. The aardman Trey had turned over in his sleep. “I saw too many things, things you would not believe, my lovely child …”
He motioned for me to draw nearer. I dragged myself across the floor, sweating as I came within the murky radius of firelight. I started to pull off my woolen cloak, decided not to. That would leave me only in a thin shift, and that would make it easier for the Aviator to grope at me with his large bony hands. Like many eunuchs his physical loss had honed his hatred to a fine dangerous point; he struck me whenever the temper took hold of him.
Not now, though. He merely tousled my unbound hair, then traced the edges of the hempen rope I wore about my neck at his command.
“No, darling boy: I ceased to believe after I saw entire cities erupt in liquid flame, and heard the sound a million people make when they die all at once. A sort of scream, so loud that my ears bled; and for many days afterward I heard a dull whining, as though flies whirred and banged inside my skull.
“I heard it so many times I went deaf in one ear—”
A draft of icy air shot up from one of the grates in the stone floor. The Aviator tapped his ear with a long ivory fingernail, then waved to disperse the smoke roiling around him.
“But the Governors repaired that. When I underwent rehabilitation, when I retired from active duty; when they decided to send me here to this accursed City.”
He drifted into silence, running his front teeth over his lip again and again as though to strip the skin from it. I stared down at my hands folded in my lap. The sagittal glowed very faintly in here, the palest lilac; as though it drew strength from the stench of evil that hung about the Chapel. When the Aviator had been silent for several minutes Oleander lifted his head. His sunken eyes shone. As I took in his hollow cheeks, the unnatural brightness of his eyes, I realized that he really was starving. His cotton trousers had grown too loose to hang about his emaciated hips. He had discarded them for a pair of particolored breeches, a High Brazilian child’s harlequin costume: gaudy gold and green, torn and bloodied at the knees (she too had been ringing the changes when she died), but fitting Oleander’s demeanor, his somewhat melancholy gaiety.