Authors: Elizabeth Hand
But that was not what Jane meant for me to see.
“There,” she whispered. In my arms Miss Scarlet twisted, her long black fingers icy against my neck. “Above the Cathedral—”
At first I thought they were trails of smoke: threads of black and gray and silver, spiraling downward until they were lost in the haze surrounding the Cathedral. But then I saw the bright forms darting insectlike in the sky above them. Glinting gold and steely blue, invisible save when the sun struck their deltoid wings and for an instant they would blaze like dragonflies caught in a leaping flame.
“Gryphons,” I breathed. The biotic aircraft of the NASNA Aviators. I had never seen them before, save in videofiles of the ongoing wars between the Ascendants and the Balkhash Commonwealth.
“But what are they doing here?” Miss Scarlet clutched the tattered remnants of her cloak and hugged closer to me.
I shook my head, and Jane cursed.
“The Aviator,” she said. “He signaled them, somehow—”
“No.” The day’s cold swept over me as suddenly as though I had fallen into a freezing stream. I shuddered and stepped backward, until I stood in the shadow of a gnarled oak tree abutting the ruins of the old City Road. “He had no way of calling them. He
wouldn’t
have called them, I don’t think—”
Jane snorted and remained in the middle of the road. One hand closed tightly about her pistol. The other clenched angrily at her side. “There’s
nothing
he wouldn’t have done,” she spat. “Murdering children and spitting them like rabbits—”
“Stop!” cried Miss Scarlet. “Please, by the Goddess, don’t speak of him.” I could feel her hair bristling beneath her thin garments, and smell her fear—an animal’s raw terror, not a human’s.
“No,” I said slowly. The cold bark of the oak pressed against my back. “They came independently. They are looking for him—all this time went by, and they heard nothing from the City of Trees—”
At that moment a dull
boom!
echoed across the empty miles. Behind the Cathedral a ball of gold and crimson blossomed. Beneath our feet the ground trembled. In the afterglow a dozen Gryphons glittered like embers circling a bonfire.
“They’re attacking the City!” Jane gasped, and shoved her pistol back into her belt. “Look! There—fougas—”
Where she pointed I could see three of the Ascendants’ dirigibles cruising above Library Hill. Beneath them the air sparkled with an eerie pinkish gleam, as though the fougas were silver needles threading the hill with rain. To the east another ball of flame erupted, and the air shook thunderously.
Miss Scarlet began to weep. I found myself holding my breath, distant as the danger was. Because it was clear that the City
was
under attack. Fougas spreading the mutagenic rains of roses, and airships bombing the hills where the seven fair Paphian Houses had stood. And Gryphons! Never had I heard of Gryphons being used anywhere within the borders of the Northeastern American Republic. Jane stepped slowly across the road to join us, and together we watched without speaking, unable to move or do anything but huddle there in the shadow of the winter oak.
“They must have thought some powerful enemy was there, holding their Aviator Commander captive,” I said after a long while. “When he didn’t report back to them. They sent him to retake the City and reclaim the lost arsenals there, but when they heard nothing from him, they must have thought some great force lingered here through all these centuries—”
Miss Scarlet buried her face in my neck, shaking with sobs. Her small body contained such an immensity of emotion that she seemed frailer than she was; but in truth the horrors we had witnessed at Winterlong affected her more strongly than they did Jane and me. Though I wept as well, to think of that fair ruined City burning there before us, which had housed only gentle courtesans and the guardians of lost and useless knowledge. Only Jane remained silent, her face twisted into an unmoving mask of grief and rage. I knew she was thinking of her beloved animals at the Zoo, helpless in their cages as their Keepers fell before the Ascendant janissaries.
We might have stayed there until the early December twilight, had not a thrumming sound overhead sent a host of chickadees twittering past our tree. I crouched down against the bole, holding Miss Scarlet tight against the sudden flurry of dead leaves that flew up around us. Jane dropped beside me, drawing the hood of her coat about her face as if it could shield her. The sun seemed to shiver. Across the barren Earth a great shadow crept, so slowly that it seemed we were watching some small eclipse, as the cold yellow light was bitten back and a dead grayness spilled across the ground like poisonous ash. I hardly dared look up; but when I did, I saw a fouga, vast and black and nearly silent, passing overhead. It was near enough that I could make out small figures silhouetted against the windows of its gondola, and see its rearward propellers spinning in a pale blur. Across its bulk NASNA was spelled in grim red letters, and above them the Aviators’ sigil: a black arrow thrust before a blighted moon.
“Can they see us?” Miss Scarlet’s voice shrilled frantically. “Can they—”
“Shh!” Jane’s hand clapped across the chimpanzee’s mouth, and she pressed against me. So we waited, terrified that the dirigible would loose its viral rains upon us; but it did not. It moved quickly, as though to reach the City before nightfall. Its silvery bulk could be seen nosing slowly to the east, so low that I held my breath, waiting to hear the sound of branches scraping against its gondola. Finally it moved on past us. It seemed much longer before its shadow was gone, but little by little the darkness receded. The sun shone brightly as before, and we even heard faint dripping as the ice-bound trees relented; but the birds did not return.
We began walking again, following the old road west. At first we debated returning to the City of Trees. Our friends were there, Miss Scarlet argued, at least whoever among them had survived the slaughter at the festival of Winterlong. Jane said little, remembering the poor creatures at the Zoo, abandoned to starve or be captured by the janissaries, and then turned over to the Ascendants’ bioengineers.
“But if we go back, then we will be captured too,” I said dully. I was not really afraid, not anymore. Justice had been taken from me and I would never see him again, gone to that twilight kingdom where the Gaping One rules. Not even the thought of returning to the Human Engineering Laboratory was enough to pierce the shell of grief and horror that had grown up around me.
“But what’s the point of wandering like this in the wilderness?” Jane kicked at a heap of dead leaves. Behind her Miss Scarlet lifted her torn skirts and hurried through the brush. “We’ll starve, or freeze—”
I nodded glumly. Of all of us, only Jane with her heavy wool coat wore anything fit for traveling. Miss Scarlet and I shivered in the tattered remnants of the costumes we had donned for the feast of Winterlong. Miss Scarlet had the wits to grab a ragged cape from among the rubbish back at Saint Alaban’s Hill, but even so she often stumbled from exhaustion and had to be carried in turn by Jane and myself. I wore only my ripped tunic and trousers. My legs were so numb, I had almost ceased to feel the cold seeping into them.
We continued in silence for several minutes. Before us the sun hung low in the sky, promising early darkness. Finally Miss Scarlet sighed. “Wendy is right. I don’t know if I could bear to see the City in flames. But where will we go?”
There was no answer to this. What little I knew of the outside world came from seeing a few maps and atlases at HEL, but I recalled nothing of the unpopulated lands surrounding the ancient capital.
Still, “The road must lead somewhere,” I said. I pointed to where flames banked around livid clouds. “There may be Ascendant outposts here, or—”
“Very comforting,” grumbled Jane, but she hurried to catch up with me, Miss Scarlet clinging to her hand like a child.
The country we passed through was grim. Hundreds of years before, many people had lived here—too many, to judge by the ruins of huge bleak edifices that rose everywhere from among the stands of oak and maple and pale birch. Mile after mile they stretched, hedging the road like the walls of a prison. Time and the forest had tumbled many of the vast structures. What remained were the shattered remnants of steel-and-concrete blockades where men had been forced to live like bees in hives. None of the ivy-covered houses of the City, or the grand mansions where the Paphians had held court. Only these monstrous squares and the rubble of ancient highways, choked with rusted autovehicles and piles of glass overgrown with kudzu and Virginia creeper.
Through it all ran the road. It was not until the end of our long day’s walking that this narrowed, from a boulevard wide enough to hold many houses and countless vehicles, to a stretch where maybe six of us might have stood, hands linked, and covered it with only a few feet to spare. Before, the highway had often broken into great slabs of concrete and tarmac, leaving rifts difficult and dangerous to skirt. Now the road merely buckled with the shape of the land, or surrendered to small copses of trees.
Finally even these grim reminders of the earliest Ascendants began to disappear. The terrain grew hilly, which made walking more wearying. Without the huge buildings to protect us, the cold wind raved in our ears and sent the bare branches of trees rattling and snapping. We passed small patches of snow in tree-bound hollows the sun had not struck for many days. The clouds faded from gold to red to indigo.
“Can we stop somewhere?” Miss Scarlet asked, yellow teeth chattering. “Or should we walk all night?”
“You can’t walk all night, Scarlet, and I’m too tired to carry you.” Jane bent to scoop snow from beneath a stand of alders. At their base, water had pooled and frozen, and she cracked off pieces of ice and handed them to us. “God, I’m hungry. If I’d known this was ahead of us, I’d have eaten more at your damn feast.”
Miss Scarlet’s red-rimmed eyes watered as she sucked at the ice. My entire face ached from the cold: good in one way, because it kept me from feeling the pain of a long scar on my cheek, where a flaming brand had struck me the night before. As long as we were moving, I could ignore my exhaustion and hunger; but even stopping now, for a moment, I felt as though I might faint. I leaned against the tree, pressed the shard of ice to my cheek, and closed my eyes.
“Wendy!” cried Miss Scarlet. “My poor friend—”
Jane made an impatient sound at the chimpanzee’s outburst. I smiled and opened my eyes.
“I’ll be all right,” I said. I did not tell them that I saw my lover when I shut my eyes like that; nor that I welcomed the numbing exhaustion, because it kept me from recalling his face in death where he lay at the feet of my murderous twin, the courtesan Raphael Miramar. “Miss Scarlet’s right, we should try to find some place to sleep.”
So we started once more. I staggered forward, stumbling after the others as darkness fell. The wind still railed at the trees, but it had shifted and was less cold than it had been. As the cold eased, I could smell things again—rotting leaves, the dusty scent of old concrete; but mostly just the bleak sharp smell of a midwinter night. Jane had gathered up Miss Scarlet and wrapped the ends of her coat around her. I tried to hurry, my feet snagging on broken tarmac and old roots in the growing darkness. The thought of sleep and whatever evil dreams it might bring did not ease me at all.
We had not walked for long before we saw a building to the right of the road. Ancient brick and masonry, gnawed and tumbled by the elements; but in places the roof still held, and its four corners were sturdy against the wind. We squeezed through a collapsed door frame so narrow, I was afraid it would crash down onto us. Inside we bumped into old furniture and tripped over lumps of rotting cloth.
“If I had some matches or lucifer, we could burn this,” Jane lamented, shoving at an old table until it crashed against the wall.
“At least there’s no wind,” Miss Scarlet said, shivering. She began pulling at oddments of old cloth and drifts of leaves, until she had made a pallet big enough for all of us. We lay down, groaning and trying not to think about food: Jane and I front-to-front, with Miss Scarlet in the middle and Jane’s coat draped over most of us. So we slept, until the Boy came to me with his lovely face and revenant’s hands and drove my sleep away.
It was a dismal rising we had that morning. Miss Scarlet was so weakened by fatigue and hunger that she could not move. In my arms she felt like a dead thing already. It was all I could do not to close my eyes and huddle deeper into the well of rags that was our bed. Only Jane staggered to her feet, groaning and rubbing her hands, her breath pocking the darkness with gray.
“Damn! We’d better get moving—”
I lay there for several minutes, trying to will the day away. Finally I stumbled up and followed her outside, carrying Miss Scarlet. Without speaking, we headed back toward the road and started walking.
Within minutes the cold had eaten through my soles so that my feet burned. But a little longer and I could no longer feel them at all. Miss Scarlet dozed fitfully in my arms, or else stared up at me with a child’s blank, miserable eyes. Jane went on bravely ahead of us. I could hear her muttering and swearing to herself. It was only when she glanced back at me that I could see the fear and weariness that stained her face.
The wind had shifted again during the night. Now it was bitterly cold. The broken tarmac glittered painfully at our feet, and the harsh light made it too clear that there was nothing before us but endless miles of the old highway. Overhead hung cinerous gray clouds, the color of sloughed flesh, but the light was strong, with a relentless midwinter clarity that made my eyes ache. I gritted my teeth and hugged Miss Scarlet more tightly to my chest.
“Got to be
something
along here,” Jane muttered. We were taking turns wearing her coat. She stopped to drape it over my shoulders, pulling it carefully around Miss Scarlet. “Ascendants still use this road sometimes, there must be some kind of way-station somewhere—”
I nodded, too weary to argue. I was thinking that yesterday we should have turned back and retraced our steps to the City. Now it was too late. We would die long before the janissaries had the chance to capture us. Jane seemed to read my thoughts. Silently she turned away.