Winterlong (51 page)

I turned to the fountain. The water tasted of oranges, and I splashed some upon my cheeks. “That doesn’t answer my question,” I finally said, drying my face on my sleeve. “You are afraid of
me.
Why?”

She smoothed her costume, a chemise of blood-red silk that barely covered the tops of her thighs. “Because they say you are the same one who rules in the Engulfed Cathedral, the one who commands our cousins to slaughter us as offerings to him. The Gaping One. The Hanged Boy.”

“But I’m not,” I said. “How could I be? He rules the Cathedral, and I am a Player. I have never been near the Cathedral—”

She stared at me with huge eyes blank as a small child’s. “I do not know how this can be true. But I saw the great star the night of the Butterfly Ball. And for three nights running I have dreamed of monstrous things, wolves with the faces of men racing through a flaming forest, and myself lying dead in the snow. I do not know what any of these things mean, and I am afraid. But I will stay here tonight with my people to await the waking of the Magdalene.”

Before I could stop her she turned away. “I will leave you now, Aidan Arent.”

Anger throbbed in my temples. I started to snatch her back, to force myself upon her and draw from her that dream, as though it might help me understand this madness. But as my hand fell upon her arm she turned and smiled, then leaned forward to kiss my mouth.

“May the Magdalene guard you through Winterlong, Aidan,” she said, and left.

I lingered for a few more minutes by the fountain, splashing idly at the falling water.
So that is why they are here,
I thought. My anger melted away. This was like the old religions Dr. Harrow had taught us about, the ones that had been suppressed by the First Ascension. To see the waking of the Magdalene. Not even lazars would frighten them from it, and Justice was too embarrassed to tell me.

As I walked out of the alcove I laughed, so loudly that an Illyrian malefeant admiring an evergreen’s young steward dropped her whip in surprise. As she retrieved it she bowed, then flashed me a quick smile. “May She guard you through Winterlong, young Aidan.”

“May She guard all of us, cousin,” I replied.

Our performance of
The Spectre’s Harlequinade
was not the evening’s highlight. The little play went well, my appearances as the Spectre—costumed after Raphael Miramar, and wearing a crimson death’s mask until my final revelation as the ghost of the dying heroine’s beloved—provoking not gasps but enthusiastically polite applause. But the Paphians in the treelit ballroom awaited other entertainments.

We took our bows. Adonia beckoned us to where she reclined with visiting Regents and the suzeins of the other Paphian Houses. Gower Miramar sat there, clad in a simple tunic of dark green, his only ornament a wreath of holly. He greeted me but did not smile, nor make the Paphian’s beck. I turned to help Miss Scarlet onto the cushion between myself and Justice. Jane Alopex stood nearby, biting her nails as she gazed across the room.

The Great Hall had grown eerily silent. Paphians stood grouped around the blazing fir trees, their bright costumes incongruous with the air of trepidation that had replaced the afternoon’s urgent revelry. Beside them stood the Curators, holding their skull-crowned staves. They glanced often at their Regents, but they too were silent. I heard only my own breathing, the hiss of candles, and the purl of water in the fountains. Burning wax nearly overpowered the scents of balsam and roses and musk. Only the youngest children waited with expectant faces, grinning and smirking at one another beneath the radiant trees. Miss Scarlet slipped her hand into mine, her glove not disguising how cold it was, nor how her long fingers trembled. Behind her simple black domino her eyes glanced nervously about the room.

Silence. Then from somewhere high above us came a single deep note, the tolling of a great bell. The tocsin that warned of attack by lazars or fouga strike; the tocsin that also each year marked the beginning of the Masque Winterlong. It echoed into the whisper of flame.

The bell sounded again. A rustle throughout the hall. Heads craned upward. I glanced at the main entrance, where sentries in blue and crimson shifted uneasily, armed with pistols and swivel guns borrowed from the Curators.

A final gong. It scarcely died away when there came a boom, the hammering of a knocker upon the entrance to the Great Hall. The sentries looked to Adonia Saint-Alaban. I saw her take the hand of the Regent at her side, her face dead white except for the scars of the crescent moons upon her cheeks. She nodded. The sentries pulled open the doors.

Flurries of snow rolled through the hall, a bitter wind sent a thousand candles guttering.

“Who will let the Winter in?”
cried a voice from the shadows.

No reply; only the wind rushing through the room.

“Who will let the Winter in?”
the voice repeated.

Adonia stood, the blast ruffling the fillet of leaves in her hair. “Not I!”

“Who will let the Winter in, who will let the Winter in?” other voices chanted. I glimpsed figures stirring in the darkness outside. Then suddenly the entry was filled with them, throwing back capes heavy with snow to display their costumes, shifts trimmed with gold and silver, tuxedos of very old black satin, robes trimmed with lumens blinking red and green and blue. Their eyes shone behind elaborate masks, masks of flowers and leaves, masks of holly and balsam and magnolia. Vines—dead grape vines, living nightcoils, frail ivy—curled about their brows. They pushed aside the guards, tossing handfuls of rose petals to drift with the snowflakes to the marble floor.

“Send her on,” cried Adonia Saint-Alaban, her voice rising shrilly. A Regent grabbed her as she stumbled and pulled her down beside him. I waited for the others to join in, as they had when I tapped Fancy and spied last year’s masque, the joyous children and roisterous masquers in the House Miramar. There was silence.

“But there is nowhere left to go.”

A masquer stepped forward from the group inside the door. A man dressed as a woman, his blond braid laced with greenery. Beside him was a boy in mask of emerald holly holding a child-sized bow and arrow. “All the City of Trees is here tonight, and Winter is tired of wandering—”

All about me I heard whispers, voices truly fearful now at this breach with tradition.

“Send her on!”

Beside me Miss Scarlet cried out, pulling the domino from her face to show flashing eyes, her mouth bared in a snarl. “Send her on, her power is broken, we light the end of Winterlong!”

The man-woman bowed, turned to gesture behind him. From the darkness a figure strode into the hall, tall and draped in crimson and black. Atop its head was a horse’s skull hung with red ribbons. At its side crouched a pair of wolvish creatures with the eyes of men, and between them a small form, gleaming white with glowing ruby eyes. It lifted its head and wailed. The figure with the horse’s skull lifted one arm and pointed at Adonia Saint-Alaban.

“There is no end to it. The Lord of Misrule will not be overthrown this time—”

I heard Justice and Miss Scarlet gasp at that voice, heard the sound ripple across the hall as I felt them all turn to me, Players and Paphians and Curators, strangers and friends; then from me to the figure in the doorway now pulling the horse’s skull from his head. For the first time I saw him in waking life: his russet hair bound with vines, his gaunt face powdered ghastly white so that his eyes burned above his cheeks.

Raphael Miramar. The Gaping One.

I knocked Miss Scarlet from her perch as I stumbled forward. “No!” I shouted.

He searched the room until his eyes found me. For a moment he stared as his mouth worked silently about a name; my name. Then:

“To me, Scarlet! Wendy, run!”

I heard Jane shout, the click of her pistol turning uselessly; then a booming report. One of the chandeliers shattered, showering us with glass and liquid flame and the smell of gas. A scream. I stepped backward, tripped, and shielded my eyes from the blistering fumes.

Figures raced across the hall. I saw Raphael shouting at the aardmen and lazars. Then he raised his hand. It held something, a globe of dull-colored metal. As Paphians fled past him he threw the globe into the center of the Great Hall. There was a whistling shriek, a soft thump; a deafening explosion. A wall of flame erupted, subsided, and then leaped again as it claimed a stand of evergreens.

“The arsenal!” Miss Scarlet cried. “They found the arsenal beneath the Cathedral—”

Behind her Toby yelled, waving the Players to follow him. Jane grabbed Miss Scarlet. Justice lunged for me, but I was looking for Raphael amid the screaming revelers.

“Let me go!” I shouted, pushing at Justice as he tried to drag me away. “They’re looking for me, it’s me they want—”

“Stay with me, Wendy!”

I cried out as I tripped over a flaming bough, twisted away from a great evergreen roaring as it tottered and then collapsed.
“Wendy!”

I glimpsed Justice’s face, his arm thrown up to protect Miss Scarlet from the embers and flaming branches that pelted them as the tree crashed down. I shouted his name, tried to break through that wall of flame; but it was no use. Smoke rolled over me. Flames seared my cloak. Something slashed against my cheek; I drew my hand away streaming with blood. I covered my mouth, pushed my way through the mass of bodies that crowded me, every one trying to reach the doors in the torrent of smoke and flame howling through the room.

An explosion from overhead. More screams as glass and metal cascaded down from a window shattered by the inferno. I fell back against a crush of bodies. A struggling woman suddenly collapsed, her breast pierced by a spear of broken glass. Someone else stumbled to his feet. I was thrown down once more. I rolled blindly across the floor to keep from being trampled, until I slammed against the wall. For a minute I lay there dazed, pulling the tattered ends of my tunic to my face and coughing into it as I tried to catch my breath.

After a few moments I raised my head and saw the doorway, midnight blue behind a scintillant tapestry of orange and black and scarlet. It was only a hand’s-throw from where I lay. Looking back I saw nothing but a blazing horror, black figures racing screaming through the holocaust, trees bursting into flame, the hanging gaslights exploding and showering the hall with liquid fire. If Justice or Miss Scarlet or the others were back there they were dead. I turned and crawled along the wall toward the doorway, pushing away bodies, some of them already dead, others sobbing or gasping for breath.

At last I reached a spot far enough from the conflagration that I could stagger to my feet and lean against the wall, breathing freely for a moment. I rested, wheezing and wiping my eyes, and kept my gaze from the atrocity behind me.

“Master,” I heard suddenly: a voice like a groan of thunder. I looked up at the doors leading outside.

In the opening loomed three deformed creatures made more repulsive by the leaping play of shadow and flame. The tallest raised its great head, snapping its jaws as it weaved from side to side as though looking for someone.

“Master.” Its deep voice echoed above the Paphians’ screams and the crackling fire. The other two followed it a few paces into the ballroom, snarling and swiping at the masquers trying to flee.

One stiffened, pawed its face as though to disperse the smoke. It raised its head as though scenting something, then turned.

“Master?” it said again, taking a step toward me. It sniffed, then snarled a command to the others. I started to run, stumbled, and was knocked to the floor by one of the aardmen.

“Master!” it howled. It straddled me with its long legs, its breath worse even than the stench of burning. The others slunk beside it, lowering their heads to gaze at me and sniff doubtfully. One nosed my cheek where it bled, then raised its head and howled. Surely no one could hear it above the din of screams and roaring flame; but someone did.

“Trey—let me see—”

An emaciated lazar in harlequin’s breeches, his bare chest and face black with soot and red-streaked. In one hand he clutched a knife, in the other the torn hem of some feckless reveler’s costume. The aardman who guarded me stepped back. The boy stared down, coughing and shaking his head.

“Raphael,” he murmured. Then he turned and looked around, excited, and yelled, “Raphael!”

“He is gone, little master,” said one of the aardmen. “This one, this one?” It pawed at me anxiously.

The boy stared down at me, dropped to one knee, and pointed his knife at my chest. “You are the girl called Wendy Wanders? The actor disguised as Aidan Arent?”

Behind me I heard screams, the boom and crash of a gas chandelier exploding, or perhaps another of the Aviator’s explosive weapons. In the ruin that had been the Great Hall of Saint-Alaban trees still burned. I thought numbly of the yellow-clad children, of Justice and Miss Scarlet fleeing through the carnage.

“Yes,” I said at last.

The boy dropped his knife in excitement, hastily shoved it into a sheath at his side. “You are,” he said. “I can tell, you look just like him—”

“Tell me—” I took his hand, ignoring the aardmen’s growls. “My friends, the Players—a blond Saint-Alaban and a talking chimpanzee, a Zoologist girl—have you captured them? Are they alive?”

He gazed down at me, childish eyes in a shrunken face. “I don’t know. Or—yes, maybe, there were guards at the front gate said they had an animal there—”

It was all I had to hope on. I nodded and let go his hand. “What will you do with me?” I whispered.

The boy stood, shouted at a group of lazars struggling with several captives.

“You! Come here, leave them and help me—”

The lazars obeyed, their prisoners staggering for the gate and what freedom might await them outside.

“Tie her and bring her to the Cathedral,” the boy commanded. “I’ll go with you to make sure she doesn’t escape.” He flourished his knife again, but glanced apprehensively back into the Great Hall.

I did not fight when they bound me, nor when they laid me on a palanquin stolen from those left outside Saint-Alaban. As they bore me away I lifted my head to gaze back at the burning ruins, sparks and smoke leaping through the snowy darkness, the end of the oldest of the Houses of the Hill Magdalena Ardent.