“Kill him?” shouted Tast’annin. But no one seemed to hear him but me. Everywhere lazars ran blindly, scrabbling at ropes and ladders, kicking as they fought to climb the walls of the pit. “Kill him? No one can kill him! It is the Final Ascension: he will rise again!” His voice rose to a scream, bubbling from his twisted mouth so that I could not be certain what words I heard and what I only imagined in my delirium. “He is not dead, he doth but sleep—”
Then there was a flash of light. The generator exploded with a hollow sound, showering me with sparks. Tast’annin disappeared in the shadows. There was only torchlight and a few sullen candles glowing fitfully above the melee.
I turned dully to stare at the stricken form on the ground in front of me: so like myself I might have aligned my body beside his, the two of us forming twin curves of a human arabesque, gray eyes deadened, tawny hair a wasted wave upon this bleak shingle, our broken limbs entwined cold and unmoving. Raphael Miramar. Neither god nor Gaping One: only my brother given to the dark.
“Kill him,” another Voice whispered. I lifted my head; but Tast’annin had forgotten me. I heard him growling as he lunged and struck at something in the dark.
— Kill him, Wendy.
The yellow points of the lazars’ torches guttered and went out. With them it seemed the very voices of the lazars died. A terrible silence encloaked me, although I could still see the wraithlike figures of the damned children soundlessly spinning about the abyss, contorted like insects trapped in a lamp. Even the pounding of my heart stilled. For a moment I thought, We are all dead.
Then, from the charred ground in front of me a brilliant white flame leaped up like a fountain, a flame with neither heat nor color besides that painful argent. The stench of rotting flesh arose with it. I blinked and shielded my eyes and mouth.
— Oh, Wendy, the flame sighed. The brilliant light danced and faded to a harsher yellow, then began to shape itself into a more substantial form. Slowly it rose and fell, as though trying to draw strength from the freezing air.
— Poor Wendy! Alone now, you are truly alone —
—But I can still hear you, Small Voice, I said in surprise. If I am alone you must be gone—
— No. I am still here, for the moment. Kill him, Wendy. He is an abomination; you cannot both live. Kill Raphael.
With difficulty I turned from the flame; it seemed to will me to stare at it, be consumed by it. But I looked back down at the boy lying there. So frail now, and white. His eyes were closed but I knew that even if he opened them there would be no light there, no reflected glory to mad’den me, no maenad’s Dionysus there now but only a broken shell.
— Kill him, hissed the flame. There is a knife, take it and kill him!
I nodded and reached for the knife Oleander had thrown: a golden knife with a curved blade, so keen the light refracted from its edge in dazzling waves of blue and white. I held it a long time. It seemed to have no weight at all in my hand.
— Kill him, the flame repeated. Kill him, Wendy. Each time it leaped higher beside me.
—Be quiet, I commanded it. I was trying to remember something, something the Boy had told me at the Zoo:
We will meet again … but you may not remember my names. Although perhaps by then you will recall your own …
— Your name? the flame screamed. Your name? You know it now! Kali is your name, and Athena; and Morgan and Mayuel; Clytemnestra and Artemis and Hecate!
“No,” I said suddenly. I recalled that strange sound, a noise like waves, like many women chanting. “I am Anat, the consort of my brother Baal. But I am also Wendy Wanders, the lover of Justice Saint-Alaban.
“I am the Magdalene.”
I stared down at him, the bright one broken, my own face stricken and bloodless before me, Raphael Miramar, Aidan Harrow, the Hanged Boy: my beautiful brother in the dark.
And there came to me then a great sound, the sound of singing. And I saw all of them, Emma and Aidan, Gligor and Merle and Anna, Dr. Silverthorn and Toby Rhymer, a white dog with eyes like burning ice and a girl who longed to fly with finches, all of them like lights dancing in the air. With them shrilled the voices of the lazars like wounds bleeding song, all of them crying out to me. Loudest of all was the piercing cry of a boy with fair tangled hair and green eyes, his hands streaming through the darkness like the purest moonlight and his eyes two burning stars. And the song they sang had only one note and one sound and one word, and the word they sang was Death; the song they sang was Supplication to slay him there where he lay with his white throat awaiting the knife, his eyes shut against the blade. And the song they sang went on and on and on, their voices grew higher and louder until the sky whirled with them and the stars began to wink out one by one. And within me I felt my heart wither, and the knife Oleander had tossed me grew heavy and cold in my fist as I raised it above my brother.
As abruptly as it had begun the singing ceased. I heard only a dull hissing from the flame still flickering before me. I stared at the golden blade in my hand, then carefully looked around. Where the flame leaped a fissure had opened, a black pit that descended endlessly into the earth. Unsteadily I got to my feet. I walked to the edge of the pit and stared down into it. Then I dropped the knife.
For a. moment it seemed to hang in the air, blindingly golden, a scythe or perhaps a crescent moon. Then it fell, its light extinguished. With a shriek that deepened to a thundering roar the flame leaped as though it would consume us all, leaped until the sky vanished as though behind a curtain of light. The flame dwindled, and finally disappeared. I blinked, trying to adjust to the darkness, and walked to my stricken brother.
Something moved behind me. I whirled around, and there stood Miss Scarlet, rubbing her arms where the ropes had fallen from them. Only with her bonds it seemed that the dark hair had fallen from her arms and face so that they gleamed like smooth brown glass, and she stepped delicately from a shriveled thing like a filthy robe of fur and walked toward me. And though I knew her face it was changed. Instead of the shrunken features of a wizened monkey I saw now that she was a woman, and suddenly it seemed to me that she had always been a woman. It had been myself that was the blind animal, and my own eyes had never seen before the colors that the world showed to me now, the colors that Miss Scarlet Pan saw as well and laughed to see.
From the ground beneath my brother a faint light glittered, and grew brighter, until the black stones cracked and split like a great fruit. And to my amazement it was not my brother who lay there after all. It was Justice. But Justice as I had never seen him, laughing with joy as he leaped from the frozen earth and reached for me and glad, so glad! to see me. He gathered me to him and then it was myself who was laughing and crying to see him again, not dead but alive, alive! and his hands warm about me and his mouth soft and laughing as he pulled me to him.
As he drew me to him he also reached for Miss Scarlet. He pulled her to him as well, until the three of us stood embraced. It seemed the world had stopped turning except for our mingled tears and laughter and their hands in mine, hands strong and small and strong and large. And suddenly I felt inside me the vibration of my heart thrumming and my breath coming loud and hard in sobs that were not sorrow but a joy I had never known. I don’t know how long we stood there; a long time, I think, because when I opened my eyes once more I blinked at the light: not lantern light but dawn. I drew away from Justice and Miss Scarlet.