“Will there really be a Final Ascension, d’you think?” she wondered aloud. Through the narrow windows with their panes of diamond glass we could see the snow still slanting down. Now and then a gust would shake the window, and Jane and Miss Scarlet would pull their hassocks closer to the stove.
“My people think so,” Justice replied softly. He stroked my neck, staring at me with eyes wide but unafraid. “All the signs are there: the brilliance in the sky the night of the Butterfly Ball, the massacre at High Brazil; aardmen and lazars hunting together in the Narrow Forest; a boy who impersonates the Gaping One, and the Madman in the Engulfed Cathedral. And now it is Winterlong. We have only to wait, and see if the Magdalene awakens as they say She will, to confront the Gaping One.”
“A man,” Jane snorted. “Remember the Aviator’s only a man, and not even much of a man anymore, eh Scarlet?”
She nudged Miss Scarlet’s hassock. The chimpanzee shook her head, continuing to stare at the embers glowing in the grate.
“It is the end of something,” she murmured. “The end of the way things are now, at least.”
Jane tucked her feet under the hassock and glanced over at me. “The beginning of something else, too, I guess.” She sniffed, eyeing Justice as he toyed with my hair. “So much for the chaste young Sieur Aidan.”
She made a face and turned to Miss Scarlet. “Aw, don’t get all worked up over it, Scarlet, it’s just another costume party.” She tugged at the hair flopping into her eyes, then reached to pat the chimpanzee. Miss Scarlet sighed, adjusted the collar of her gown, and pursed her lips.
“I consulted the pantomancer Zuriel Persia when we gave The Spectre’s Harlequinade last week,” she said.
“That fraud!” snorted Justice. He reached for another candicaine pipette.
I propped my chin on my hand. “So that’s why you weren’t at the supper afterward,” I said. “I wondered.”
Justice cracked a pipette beneath my nose. I shut my eyes, tried to think what it reminded me of, this cold rush of pleasure. But all I came up with was the memory of the supper at the House Persia, where Justice and I had lingered with the suzein over candicaine and morpha tubes. Lately all I could think of was Justice, his hands and mouth and the taste of his skin, his hair soft as feathers. When I tried to remember what had haunted me since leaving HEL , the eyes I drew up were not green but blue, the loveliest sapphire blue: a boy’s shining eyes and not a demon’s.
“You needn’t have stayed there quite so long, Wendy,” said Miss Scarlet. “You two certainly made a sight, carrying on like that.”
She pulled up her skirts, stretched her furry legs until her toes curled in front of the glowing stove. “Although I don’t imagine it matters much anymore.”
She sighed, hunching forward to gaze into the coals. Justice leaned to kiss my shoulder. I closed my eyes and murmured happily, looked up to see Jane Alopex staring at me in disgust. Justice drew three fingers to his lips and made the Paphian’s beck, winking.
Jane looked away. “So what did Zuriel Persia, that fraud, say exactly? Tell me, Scarlet. I didn’t come all this way in a snowstorm to watch the Gaping One roll her eyes at Justice.”
“He said,” Miss Scarlet began, drawing herself up to command us with her sober brown eyes, “that the Masque at Winterlong would not be the one traditionally performed.”
“Well,” said Justice, “we haven’t heard that they’ve changed it, have we?”
I shook my head. I started to reply but Jane silenced me with a glare. “Go on, Scarlet,” she ordered.
“I met him in the Chamber of August Divination. He took an impression of my face in heated wax. ‘For the Ages,’ he said. ‘So that we may remember the greatest glory of our Stage.’ He was really quite charming, although he had an odd sort of voice.”
Jane frowned. “That doesn’t sound so charming, Scarlet. Taking a death mask before you’re dead.”
Miss Scarlet shrugged. Outside, the snow tapped against the windows. I moved closer to Justice.
“Well, nothing he said was very encouraging,” she admitted. “After the mask he burned some joss sticks, then smoked quite a lot of honeyed tobacco and a pipeful of opium. Then he killed a squirrel—poor thing, it was half-dead already, it looked starved. None of the animals look very healthy this winter, do they? Then he drained its blood into a bowl and he, he—”
She hesitated. At Jane’s impatient cough she looked at her, aggravated, and said, “Well, he drank it. Really, it seems as though barbarism is quite the fashion these days. But what could I say, when I had consulted him?
“So I waited, while he smacked his lips over the blood and muttered about there not being enough of it; until finally he performed a kind of divination with books. Stichomancy, he called it. I was surprised to see that he had books at all. Surprised he could read, actually.
“‘The Curators taught me,’ he said. That nasty voice, for all that he was quite handsome. ‘These books came from the Museum of Natural History, they gave them to me when I exorcised the Hall of Archosaurs after Nopcsa’s murder.’ I glanced at some of them—you know how I love to read—but they were mostly very old textbooks, natural-history books I suppose. He chose one at random, then flipped through it and selected phrases—quite aimlessly, I thought.
“This is what he gave me.”
She took a rolled-up bit of parchment from her reticule, unfolded it, and began to read.
“‘… the traces of the existence of a body … as to the succession of life upon the earth … the course of nature will be a continuous and uninterrupted one … an interminable vista is opened out for the future … the central fire and the rain from heaven … all traces of organic remains become annihilated … the ancient peace once more came to reign upon the earth.’”
She finished, stared down at the parchment, and then rolled it up and replaced it, closing her reticule with a snap that made me jump. Then she folded her paws upon her lap.
“That is what he told me,” she said. “That, and to beware of the Masque Winterlong. ‘The Masque of the Gaping One,’ he called it. He said he would not be in attendance.”
“He sounds quite intelligent for a pantomancer and a fraud,” said Jane Alopex. “I think you’re mad to go there tomorrow, Scarlet. And you too, Wendy, after you’ve been warned that the lazars plan an attack.”
I shrugged. “Anna was—she was never very reliable, actually.” I spread my hands in front of the stove. “And really, what else are we to do? The whole City can’t hide forever, and you said yourself we have no weapons to fight back with.”
Jane said nothing, only turned to stare out the window until Miss Scarlet crept into her lap and engaged her in more cheerful conversation.
So we passed our last night in the theater. The four of us talked until a few hours before dawn, recalling the glories of past performances, giddy sleepless nights of rehearsals and the triumphant applause that followed. We fed the little woodstove with sticks of applewood until first Justice and then Jane nodded off, leaving Miss Scarlet and I watching the embers turn gray and cold.
“There was something else, Wendy.”
I started, bumping my chin against Justice’s shoulder. I had almost fallen asleep.
“What, Miss Scarlet?” I mumbled, sitting up.