Winterlong w-1, page 25
part #1 of Winterlong Series
In the shadows before us the remains of stone buildings started to outcrop among the trees. Beside some of them deep shafts plummeted into the earth, cavernous pits lined with metal and smooth rock, veiled with wild grape vines and honeysuckle. The lazars and Dr. Silverthorn hurried through these glades, but I picked my way carefully: it would be easy to mistake those thin treacherous cloaks of greenery for solid earth and tumble into darkness.
By this time I was so drained and starving and heartsore that the thought of being anywhere was enough to give me some hope. In a few minutes we had caught up with the others. The children were exhausted. Poor Olivia wept silently, and tried to brush away the tears with her broken hands. Even Martin grew peevish, fighting with Bellanca as they picked their way ahead of the rest of us as we climbed the long hill that Dr. Silverthorn said would bring us to the end of our journey. I was too tired to imagine speaking. But Dr. Silverthorn never stopped talking. I was to learn that the capsules affected him thus; also that silence terrified him, as did sleep.
“Soon enough!” he shouted when Olivia sank to her knees beside the ruins of a great stone building, its columns fallen now and threaded with the violet blossoms of twilight glory. “We will all sleep soon enough! But not‘ now.” He stooped and pressed a small blue patch to her neck. When she whined and clawed at it he grew angry, dragging her to her feet though the exertion nearly toppled him.
“See, Olivia? There it is, we are almost there—”
He gestured wildly to where sunset streaked the clouds with scarlet and purple. At first I thought he pointed only at this lurid sky. From here I could see nothing but trees and the overgrown humps of decaying buildings, and far away the Obelisk shining faintly golden, marking where the Museums stood and the Curators would now be mourning their dead. But when I turned back and started walking once again I saw that something besides clouds did rise above the pinnacle of Saint-Alaban’s Hill: a shape so huge and black and brooding that I had thought it was part of the Hill itself. Now I wondered how it had not soiled my dreams all these years, that awful shadow stretching across the entire City of Trees.
“Is that it?” I asked, clutching at Dr. Silverthorn’s flapping sleeve.
Dr. Silverthorn grinned and clapped his gloved hands. “Ah, it’s almost worth it, isn’t it?” he exclaimed. The brazen light pooled like blood in the hollows of his face. “Etiam periere ruinae: the very ruins have been destroyed. “There were giants in the earth in those days, mighty men which were of old, men of renown.’”
“You are mad,” I said, pushing him away. “Oleander, is that it?”
The boy leaned against a tree to catch his breath. He pulled a twig from a branch, tossed it in the direction of the Hill. “That is the Engulfed Cathedral,” he said. “Where we are going.”
I cursed and pulled myself free of the brambles. Dr. Silverthorn and Oleander waited for me, the boy helping to tug from the offending thorns what remained of my garment. When we began walking again the sky showing through gaps in the trees was a deep blue, fading to green upon the horizon. A few faint stars had already appeared. My head ached from the stimulants Dr. Silverthorn had given me. I pulled the remaining pads from my temples and tossed them into the weeds as I scrambled to keep up with my two companions. From far ahead of us rang the high voices of the children. After a moment I heard other voices answer them, although I still saw nothing. We seemed to be in a small depression near the top of the Hill. I could no longer discern the monstrous silhouette that loomed high above us, but I felt it there brooding in the gathering dark: the Engulfed Cathedral.
Of the Narrow Forest I had heard many tales, and of the poisonous rivers that circled the City. But the Cathedral was so ancient, so tainted with the memories of its sanguine cult of worshippers long dead, that even the Saint-Alabans did not speak of it except with restrained dread. It was said to be haunted. Aardmen dwelt there, and wolves, and in its noisome reservoirs hydrapithecenes drifted, but nothing human. Even the lazars feared the Cathedral. Or so I had always heard.
But someone else lived there now: the one the lazars feared as the Consolation of the Dead, and whom Dr. Silverthorn regarded with less respect. But frightened as I was of going to that place and meeting him, I was still more terrified of being lost and alone again among the trees. I missed my unearthly companion Anku, who for a few hours had given me courage and even a kind of hope. But Anku was gone now. I had no hope left but to follow the lazars.
I sighted the cadaver’s white form slipping through the trees like a mist.
“Dr. Silverthorn,” I panted.
He paused, waving the children ahead. They ran on, Oleander glancing back at me with an expression compounded equally of pity and envy. At the edge of the woods Dr. Silverthorn waited for me alone, his hand outstretched to point at a sweep of gray lawn before us.
“We are here,” he said, his voice curiously empty. Nearly impossible to affix any subtlety of expression to that skeletal face, but a certain flatness and resignation colored his speech. “I am sorry, Raphael Miramar, to bring you to the end of the world.”
I stepped from beneath the trees to join him.
4. Conceptions of celestial space
THE LAST UPWARD SLOPE of Saint-Alaban’s Hill stretched before me like some horrible vision of the underworld.
Nothing grew there. Blasted trees twisted black and leafless from the ground, their limbs raised imploringly to the merciless thing towering above us. Other trees were strewn across the earth, dwarfed by the Cathedral. Only when we approached them did I see that they were huge, indescribably ancient, and the more horrible for not having decayed in the years since some cataclysm had toppled them. As we passed I heard a low sound coming from their ebony trunks, a faint yet ominous humming.
“Do not go near them.” I jumped at Dr. Silverthorn’s soft voice as he plucked at my arm. “They are infested with parasitic animalcules that replicate the forms of whatever living thing they touch.”
I pressed near to him, choking back a cry when I tripped against a stone, terrified lest I fall and the very earth devour me, barren and starved as it was. “Why have you brought me to this haunted place?” I whispered.
He shrugged. “I must serve something. The Aviator Margalis Tast’annin is the last man to have commanded me. I obey him.” He tilted his head toward the Cathedral. “Once they worshipped a god of blood and light in there. Now Tast’annin would raise the effigy of the Hanged One and revive a cult of blackened bones.”
His feet made no noise as he walked, as though the parched ground sucked all sound and light and color from the living world, leaving nothing but the screwed black forms of dead trees and other, pale shapes scattered across the stony slope. The distant figures of the young lazars darted in and out of the shadow of the Cathedral in eerie silence. Only the dull buzzing of the trees and Dr. Silverthorn’s hissing voice could be heard in all that empty space.
“Not haunted: hunted, more likely,” he wheezed, his thoughts running back and forth down strange alleys where I could not follow. He darted suddenly to one side, his feet seeming to pass right through the sharp stones that choked the earth so that I marveled he did not wince in pain. But the layer of flesh that enabled him to feel had been the first portion devoured by the rain of roses.
“Wait!” I called after him. “Don’t leave me, Dr. Silverthorn—”
He halted, staring back as though I was mad. “Leave you? Me, nothing but bones, leave you who are nothing but a body! No, no—” He pointed to a gleaming patch of white, luminous against the dark earth. Human skulls were piled there, but sloppily, as though children at play had grown weary of their game. And with a sinking feeling I realized that this was the truth of it: I had come to the lazars’ home, the playing fields where skull and knucklebones were used as shuttlecock and dice; where soon no doubt I would be as much a part of the bleached landscape as the petrified trees and leering brain-pans scattered everywhere.
“As ye are so once was I; as I am so ye shall be,” Dr. Silverthorn intoned. He kicked and set a small skull rolling, his harsh laugh ringing out like a raven’s croak. “I won’t leave you, Raphael: you are to be my eyes and ears, and I will be your guide. I have done as I promised the Aviator; but I will try to help you.” He cocked his head, clacking his jaws in a manner meant to be reassuring. “And you may be surprised, Raphael: you may not find yourself as alone as you think.”
My heart leaped at that, imagining that I might find some of my bedcousins here, or others from the Hill Magdalena Ardent. But the cadaver gave no reply to my questions.
“Not now, not now,” he hissed, and pulled me after him. “We must hurry, before he closes the south gate.”
High above us swept the huge black towers: higher than Illyria’s fortresses, than the House Persia, than High Brazil; greater even than the Library Dome or the ancient Obelisk. Flickering waves of color sometimes passed across one or another of the granite facades. I rubbed my eyes, convinced the unnatural darkness of the place was playing tricks upon my vision, before I finally realized that what I was seeing was firelight showing through immense embrasures of colored glass, like those at High Brazil.
As we drew nearer, strange patterns were traced upon the iron earth. Paths marked out in bones and skulls formed serpentine patterns, narrow tracks that stretched straight to north and east and west. They glowed eerily in the twilight, as though the bones themselves had absorbed hoary traces of the sun. It should have been horrible. And yet I found the bones almost lovely, the strict formality of their carefully assembled fulciments now tossed into disarray: torso, shanks, hands, and ribs displayed so clean and pure and shining, as innocent as driftwood cast upon a riverbank.
“Labyrinths,” explained Dr. Silverthorn. “Ley lines. To make this place more powerful.” He stopped, regarding a convoluted maze of femurs and delicate finger bones, with a small figure made of sticks propped in its center. “Old things,” he said, shifting his black bag to the other shoulder. “There are many old things here. He is a fool to wake some of them.”
We had left the buzzing trees behind us. Gaps of blue-black sky showed between the broken towers overhead. On the eastern horizon faint light gleamed where the moon would rise shortly. We were near enough now to the Cathedral gates that I could hear the children playing in the twilight, a shrill fanfare of laughter and tears and shouts echoing in its cavernous inner space as they raced or stumbled in and out of hidden doors. Someone called to my companion. He raised one spindly arm in a feeble wave, grinning as his name was taken up by the others, singing:
“A man of skin and not of bones is like a garden full of stones!”
Dr. Silverthorn pointed to a wide path, a dark avenue lined with larger bones and tattered ribands and bits of finery. I followed him in silence up this main approach, trying to ignore the lazars tuneless warble:
“And when your skin begins to crack,
It’s like a knife across your back;
And when your back begins to smart,
It’s like a missile to your heart;
And when your heart begins to bleed,
You’re dead, and dead, and dead indeed!”
The path ended abruptly; or rather, the bones that had marked it were scattered everywhere, kicked aside in some mindless game or argument. Past the ring of bones was a circle of scuffed earth. A few feet from this a set of granite stairs led up to massive gates set with iron hoops. Between the oaken doors, and to either side, and in the portal above stood carven figures of men and women, and figures like stern yet radiant men with the wings of herons.
“The South Transept,” Dr. Silverthorn said. He gazed up with glittering eyes. “The Cathedral Church of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel.”
I hesitated as he started up the steps. I was absurdly afraid: not of the Cathedral or what it contained but of those stone creatures. Ethereally beautiful, each face tilted skyward, as though divining some magnificence there. They seemed older than anything I had ever seen, older even than the archosaurs, although I knew this could not be true. And something in their faces, the pitiless eyes gazing at the stars, put me in mind of the Hanged Boy.
“Who are they?” I asked.
Dr. Silverthorn rested his bag on a stair. He shook from the effort of walking, coughing as he tried to catch his breath. “They are Saints and Angels,” he said. “Saints and Angels and ordinary men.”
I stepped beside him. A numbing cold rose from the stones around me, as though through the centuries the granite had hoarded nothing but winter. When I touched the base of one of the pillars I found it covered with a sheen of ice.
“It is an anomaly,” confessed Dr. Silverthorn.
I withdrew my hand, staring up at the face of one of the winged creatures. “Were they real?” I wondered. “Were they Ascendants?”
Dr. Silverthorn looked at me, his swollen eyes bulging. Then he laughed. “Ascendants! Are they Ascendants!” Overcome, he leaned against the pillars, gasping for breath. I turned away in embarrassment.
After a moment he recovered himself. “Forgive me, Raphael! It was just—the idea! A pleasant idea, actually. Your sister, now; she would never mistake an Angel for an Ascendant!” He peered at me curiously. “You have never heard of Angels?”
I shrugged. “I’ve heard the word, I thought it meant a pretty child. Not a man with wings.”
He stared at me, surprised. I could see him taking in my long hair and worn tunic, the remnants of glitter and beads clinging to me like evidence of some grand debauch. “Well, it does, that’s right; I suppose it does. The wings: well, they were usually pictured with wings, that’s all. But it was also one of the—beliefs of the old religion. This was the Cathedral of the Archangels—they were the most powerful of the Angels, the ruling Angels one might call them. This place honors two of them. Michael and Gabriel.”
He grew quiet, then said, “ ’There was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not.’” He stroked a pillar sadly. “This Cathedral was completed a hundred years before the First Ascension.”
Silence except for his labored breathing. It was nearly full dark now. The sound of the children playing had all but died out; I imagined they had gone indoors. I stood next to Dr. Silverthorn, both of us staring up at the implacable stone faces for several minutes. At last he sighed and climbed the remaining steps to the transept gate. He placed one hand on the door and turned to me, and said, “When people first found dinosaur fossils in the cliffs, they thought they had discovered the remains of Angels and dragons.”
He waited for me to push open the massive door. I paused, the gate’s iron ring biting my hand. “I have seen one,” I said. “Walking in the Narrow Forest, one of them spoke to me. But he did not have wings.”
Dr. Silverthorn nodded. “Yes,” he replied after a moment. “I believe you may have seen one.”
With a creak the iron-bound door swung inward, and we entered the Cathedral.
5. An exceeding barbarous condition of the human species
THE SMELL ASSAULTED ME first: bitter smoke from uncured wood, roasting flesh, human excrement, burning wax. Over all of it the reek of incense of turpentine smoldering in countless braziers, many of them toppled to the marble floor so that their contents had spilled but continued to burn, igniting whatever material was near at hand: cloth, twigs, hair. I blinked, covered my eyes against the smoke, then my nose to keep out the stench. The marble beneath my feet was slick with putrid water. I forced my eyes open, lest I slip and find myself awash with the filth clotting the floor.
A dim expanse swept before me in every direction. It stretched upward to the very stars, since chunks of the ceiling had collapsed to leave great ragged holes open to the cool sky. Were it not for this, the Cathedral’s inhabitsants would probably have suffocated from the smoke and foul air. Bonfires burned everywhere, each surrounded by little groups of chattering children feeding graying embers or livid flames with green sticks and bark. In the lurid light they looked like one of the dioramas at the Museum, naked tousled silhouettes squatting before ill-tended fires, rocking back and forth upon their heels as they sang or talked or ate. Many of them sprawled in the filth, panting or seeming scarcely to breathe at all: the ones who would die next. The sight of them eating sickened me, no matter that it had been nearly two days since I’d had anything like a proper meal.
“Look at them,” said Dr. Silverthorn softly. “Dying of gangrene and evil humors and sarcomas and sheer ignorance, just as they did a thousand years ago. Refugees of a war fought with rocks and sticks and rain; a war they have never even heard of.”
From the bonfires shrill voices called out to us. They greeted Dr. Silverthorn by name, but fell silent as I followed him toward the center of the great space, where most of the fires were clustered. Marble benches stood here and there, some of them pulled free from their moorings and tilted or thrown to the floor. I wondered who could have done that: not plaguey children, surely. The benches were seats of privilege. The oldest lazars sat there crosslegged, some of them with crowns of twisted branches and dead leaves upon their brows. They snapped at the younger children, bullying them to bring morsels of food toasting upon twigs and water (I hoped it was water) from a large standing basin near the middle of the vast room. As we approached they stopped their playing and arguing and turned to stare, the oldest ones standing upon the benches and letting their younger favorites join them. I pulled my torn robe tight and held my head up, trying hard not to look foolish, though I knew I was as filthy as they were. They twittered and pointed and called to one another through the smoky air—
“Look—look—”
“He has come, the Doctor found him, the one Pearl said, the one, the one—”
“He is here, look, look—”
Giggles and curses; scuffling behind us as they scrabbled across the floor to stare. I felt their small hands touch my ankle or arm, countless children circling me like starveling cats.
