“But when I saw the explosion of the NASNA station that night I knew that I no longer had any superiors.”
He paused, staring confused at the book in his hands, as though he had no, idea how it had gotten there. After a moment he folded it shut and looked up at me, the black holes of his eyes so filled with despair that I glanced away.
He said, “In a way it really was the Final Ascension; for me at least. I have died many times, in aerial strikes and skirmishes, and been reborn, rehabilitated by the Governors more often than you could imagine, my lovely boy. And even when the Curators betrayed me, and the aardmen took me and tortured me and dismasted me: even from that I was saved, and when Lawrence Silverthorn arrived with his Physician’s bag I began to grow stronger still.
“But when I saw the explosion that evening I knew this would be my last life. Everything and everyone I lived for died then. That was my world and my home, not this—”
He waved his hand, indicating the braziers and blocks of fallen granite surrounding us upon the altar; but with a chilling certainty I knew that he did not really mean this at alclass="underline" not the Resurrection Chapel or the Cathedral or even the City of Trees itself. He dismissed an entire world with that small gesture, the vast world outside that I had never known and would never know, but which included myself and my people and my City nonetheless.
And as I stared up at him with growing unease he smiled; a very small, knowing smile.
I knew then that he meant to destroy us as that other small world, his world, had been destroyed. He only knew how to do one thing, you see, he only understood one thing. That was why the image of the Hanged Boy appealed to him; that was why he searched obsessively for a girl who could deal death with her mind.
But that day I still retained some hope of salvation, of the supremacy of a gentle goddess I had never really believed in. I had not yet grasped that the Aviator’s truth might be the only truth worth knowing; and so that smile filled me with more horror than the sight of him sacrificing the children in the cloister or Gloria Tower ever had.
“There is an arsenal here,” he said. “On the hillside beneath the Cathedral. A stockpile of weaponry NASNA put there two hundred years ago. One of my duties as Governor was to set up a janissary outpost here.”
He chewed his lip. “Of course there is no reason whatsoever to guard it now: there’s no one left to guard. There’s no reason for anything, really.”
“But we are here,” I protested. “And the Curators—”
“But they’re all dead, darling boy. All of them. No one could possibly have survived.”
Oleander stared at the Aviator, puzzled. “They aren’t dead. I know they’re not de—”
The Aviator struck him, so hard that Oleander’s lip split and blood sprayed my cheek as the boy sprawled backward. Tast’annin never even looked at him. He continued to stare at me, his smile frozen, and reached for my robe to wipe the blood from his hand.
“They are all dead,” he repeated. “If anyone survived the rebel strike they will have killed them by now. There is no one left to answer to, dearest child; no one except me.”
I sat rigidly, waiting for him to strike me or continue with this disordered talk. But he said nothing, only stared at me with that ghastly fixed grin. I stared back, afraid to look away lest he kill me, until my eyes swam and all I saw was his idiot grimace floating in the gloom like a disembodied skull.
Gradually his consciousness seemed to waver. His pupils shrank until they all but disappeared in his watery eyes. He continued to gaze vacantly into the darkness. I glanced at Oleander, sniffling quietly as he nursed his bleeding lip. When after some time it was obvious that the Aviator would say no more, indeed that he had entered some kind of trance, I quickly and quietly fled the Chapel, abandoning poor Oleander to stand watch over the Madman.
5. A lapse of misrepresented time
I HAD NO CLEAR idea as to where I was going, only that I wanted to get as far from Tast’annin as I could. I dared not leave the Cathedral. No one would have stopped me, no one would have dared; but the landscape of this part of the City itself was threat enough to keep me here.
It was winter now. Snow had drifted through the holes in the Cathedral roof to form shallow gray banks. In places the children had sculpted figures from it, men and women and animals—aardmen?—blackened with soot and melted into grotesque shapes. As I wandered I could look out windows and see the City dusted with white, the distant river sheathed in gray ice beneath a new moon’s feeble gleaming. Only the ashen slope in front of the Cathedral was untouched by snow. Whatever poisons had leached into the earth there melted it so that the ground remained black as rotten ice, dotted with the corpses of those fallen prey to the parasitic trees. Not even the ravens crying in the frigid air would light upon the Cathedral grounds. I would not venture there.
So I wandered through the twisting halls and bays of the ancient Church, and thought how strange it was that every path in the City seemed to lead here: how the corridors in the House Miramar and the other Paphian Houses had brought me to the labyrinthine passages of the Museum of Natural History, and from there I had lost myself in the Narrow Forest, and the House High Brazil, until finally the tortuous path had led me to Saint-Alaban’s Hill. Like the whorls and swirls upon my sagittal, dizzying complexity in such a small thing; and how much more complicated were the windings and turnings of the City of Trees—a place that was only one of the world’s besieged sectors, if I was to believe Dr. Silverthorn.
It was night when the Aviator had summoned me to him. It was night still. I was beginning to think that perhaps the Madman was right. Maybe the very nature of the world itself had changed to accommodate the coming of the Gaping One, and there would never be another bright dawn. Certainly I could scarcely recall the last time I had seen the sun: when we fled the Butterfly Ball, perhaps.
I leaned upon a parapet overlooking the nave. Nothing moved down there save the smoke from a half-dozen feeble bonfires left untended through the night. Despite the raiding parties that returned daily with captives, mostly Paphian children, it seemed to me that the number of those who dwelled within the Cathedral grew fewer and fewer each day. Those who did not succumb to disease were slaughtered by the Aviator. A fetid smell hung in the frigid air, the smell of blood and decay, of bodies lying unburned and unburied outside the Cathedral walls. I shivered, sighted a figure nosing among the still forms below. An aardman, starving as we all were, searching for food.
I turned away. I wished I had not left Oleander behind; wished I had been able to do something to save the Persian malefeant, the Illyrian boys, or even the Saint-Alaban. But the Aviator’s strength lay in this, his power to command. It was as Dr. Silverthorn had said. One must serve somebody, and only Margalis Tast’annin remained to command. I was not a fighter. My only power had been to inspire worship through my beauty. I took my place here passively as I had upon the Hill Magdalena Ardent, receiving whatever the Aviator offered me: a rain of blood instead of petals, curses and imprecations instead of lustful glances, a hempen cord rubbing raw against my neck instead of flowers upon my brow. I tugged uneasily at the rope. He had knotted it so tightly that I would have to cut it off; but Tast’annin guarded his weapons carefully, and Oleander had refused when I asked him to remove it.
I heard a small sound down the corridor. Perhaps an aardman had crept upstairs, thinking me an unsuspecting lazar and hoping to surprise me. I moved so that the moonlight shining through a window revealed who I was.
But the figure stepping from the shadows was not an aardman.
“Hallo, Wendy.”