Winterlong (37 page)

“Aidan, we have
never
been so in demand,” said Mehitabel one morning. It was a few weeks since the massacre at High Brazil. Paphians and Curators alike seemed to want to forget the horrors of the Butterfly Ball, the continuing outrage of children and elders captured by foraging lazars and aardmen growing more emboldened as the autumn passed, the whispered tales of an Ascendant demon holding sway over the Engulfed Cathedral. We Players seldom had a day off anymore. Scarcely a night passed without its masque or burletta or private soiree.

Mehitabel tugged her hair thoughtfully. “Maybe it was like this when Miss Scarlet first joined the troupe; but I wasn’t here then.”

“Is that when you first saw them?” I asked.

“Oh yes!” She took a bite from a slab of meringue hoarded from an Illyrian moon-viewing several days before. “She was wonderful, just wonderful. That was when I decided to become an actress.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Really? What changed your mind?”

She swallowed, stared at me open-mouthed. Then she burst out laughing, covering her mouth as she rocked back in her chair.

“Oh Aidan!” she giggled. “You know I do my best.”

Silly Mehitabel! She really was a terrible actress. She got by on her looks, and a certain look she used on stage and off, a way of tilting her head to one side and letting her hair fall into her face so that one was torn between the desire to brush it aside or give her a slap. All the Players confided in her, mostly because she would have been crushed if they had not: she brought all her secrets to us, laid them out like so many pretty stones she had found and waited for us to admire them. None of the others had the heart to turn her away.

Neither did I. Although she aggravated me, although I found her gossip tiresome and could no more imagine tapping in to her simple memories than I could imagine tapping a block of wood; still I couldn’t ignore her, or tease her cruelly as I once had.

“I don’t know what it is,” I said to Miss Scarlet that afternoon. “I know she is a perfect idiot; but I can’t seem to help it. When she needs help with her lines, or her costume, or—well, whatever it is this time—I can’t just send her away anymore.”

Miss Scarlet continued to stare at the page in front of her. I tapped my foot, waiting for a reply. When none came I crossed her room to the window.

“And what is with Justice now, he spends all his time with her, ‘reading lines.’ Reading lines with
Mehitabel!
he knows she’s awful, he knows they are coming to see
me
—”

I stopped, fearing I might have insulted Miss Scarlet, once the Prodigy of a Prodigal Age; of late busier playing mentor and adviser to Aidan Arent, the City’s newest sensation. She raised her head and smiled, her dark eyes peering from within her wizened face with an odd expression.

“Why should it matter then, who he practices with? Perhaps he feels uneasy reading with you, your talent so surpasses his own.” She glanced back down at her book. But after a few moments she looked up again and added, “Perhaps you are jealous, Wendy. Perhaps you are growing a heart.”

I ignored her, drumming my fingers on the windowsill. Outside, the earth was gray and brown. The Librarians’ sheep grazed upon an untidy pile of straw dumped on the lawn, their shepherd shivering in his homespun jacket. It would be Benedick tonight for the Historians (they loved battles; battling lovers would do if necessary); then tomorrow a smaller role in
Watt the Butler,
and the following week
Titus Andronicus,
and Juliet after that; then
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
for the Zoologists, hosting a Masque of Owls for the Illyrians. Finally a brief hiatus while the Paphians readied themselves for the great feast of Winterlong, twelve days and nights of merrymaking that would culminate on the eve of Winterlong itself, shortest day of the year, when we would perform—Toby was beside himself to think of it—
The Spectres’ Harlequinade
for the masque of Winterlong at Saint-Alaban.

“Never before have the Paphians requested that we play for them at Winterlong! Never!” he had gloated. Already he could see the bartered riches that would come of it, plastics and woolen cloth and the intricate bits of hardware that the Paphians used as ornaments but which I knew were the remains of archaic computers. But looking out at the bleak lawn this wintry afternoon I wondered about Toby’s optimism; about the wisdom of people who could continue their meaningless research and revels while rumors of human sacrifices and hidden weapons brought to light fled across the Hill Magdalena Ardent.

Terrible things had befallen the City in the past weeks. The bizarre murder of a young girl in the Museum of Natural History; its Regent slain at the massacre at the Butterfly Ball when the House High Brazil burned to the ground. A figure seen at the ball, a beautiful boy clad in torn red tunic and with a vine draped about his neck, he who the Saint-Alabans name the Gaping One or Naked Lord. A burning star in the northern sky that heralded the Final Ascension. But still the round of masques and balls did not cease, only proceeded to a more somber music, dark pavane rather than sprightly reel.

“Fancy: gone,” Justice murmured after I had told him Fabian’s news. He buried his face in his hands. “And your brother—I met an Illyrian spado who claimed to have seen him at the Butterfly Ball. He is dead now; so many of us are dead.”

A mist crept over me when he said this. I closed my eyes, tried to plumb the darkness inside me, find something that would give the truth or lie to his words. Nothing; but I could not believe it was so.

At last I said, “He isn’t dead.”

Justice raised his eyes. “How do you know?”

“I don’t know. But—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Justice said bleakly. “So many are dead now, how could it matter?”

And mere days after that a viral strike: and then another.

“They are searching for someone,” Justice had muttered. We stood in the theater’s upper story, watching the fougas’ searchlights slash through the dusk.

“The Aviator,” I whispered. From the Deeping Avenue echoed screams; a party of masquers had been caught in the rain of roses. I shuddered. Justice put his arm around me. From his grim face I knew he was not thinking of the Aviator but of me, wondering if they still might search for an escaped empath whose dreams could kill.

But the fougas had withdrawn after these two strikes; although many died in the streets, and the lazars’ gleeful wailing kept us all from sleep for several hours. Since then more rumors raged through the City of Trees. Everyday life took on the shocking and explosive nuances of the tales we enacted.

The morbidly superstitious House Saint-Alaban enjoyed an unprecedented wave of popularity in light of the City’s recent misfortunes. Death became the fashionable theme at masquerades. Red, the Paphian hue of mourning, colored everything from hair to dominatrice’s hoods. The Botanists were unable to meet the demand for a particular shade of crimson henna. Scarlet love apples adorned every dish we ate for two solid weeks, and every invitation to a ball was writ in sanguine ink. An Illyrian eunuch inspired his Librarian Patron to compose a long poem entitled “The Coming of the Gaping One.” When recited at the Illyrians’ Semhane Masque, three Saint-Alabans fainted. A fourth was found dead afterward, hanging from an apple tree.

Fashion began to reflect these macabre preoccupations. Paphians my own age or younger emulated the startling deshabille of the ill-fated Raphael Miramar as he had last been seen at the Butterfly Ball: deathly pallor enhanced by powder of lead, crimson tunics carefully torn; fillets of twigs and vine woven upon their brows and hempen ropes worn about the neck in lieu of the customary wreaths of blossoms or bijoux. Raphael Miramar himself had become a sort of romantic figure in death, mourned by his many friends and lovers. An ardent cult sprang up around his memory; a violent tango was named after him, and a dangerous means of achieving sexual gratification by use of a rope.

Fin-de-sècle thinking,
a renowned Librarian christened it all. The phrase was enthusiastically parroted by the Paphians, although few of them recognized the language it came from; and no one could have guessed what century this was, or whether or not we approached its end.

My star continued to rise amidst all this confused speculation. My amazing resemblance to Raphael Miramar had of course already been remarked upon. Now it became our stock-in-trade. Paphians from the remaining Houses flocked to each performance at our theater. A masque was no longer considered proper entertainment unless we were there in attendance, and we turned down countless invitations to perform.

Throughout I enjoyed the attention of myriad admirers. I eschewed Raphaelesque garb save onstage, as when I played Lear’s Fool. I preferred my own restrained taste in clothing, although I did indulge in accepting gifts of feathered caps and bandeaux from the Zoologists, once they learned my fondness for these. The
mode Raphael
was risky for me, since it involved a certain amount of exposed flesh.

“You should be more careful, Wendy,” Justice scolded late that night. Our performance for the Historians had been an enormous success, but afterward I had grown cocky waiting for my curtain call. Inspired by his recent triumph, Fabian and I staged a mock duel backstage. He had playfully torn my blouse with his sword. I took my bow with the ripped cloth flapping, my hair tangled, flushed and grinning from our game. The Paphians in the audience had cheered madly. Some even rushed the stage. I made a scarce retreat down the trapdoor before they could capture me and adapt my wardrobe further. Miss Scarlet had been aghast at this unprofessional behavior—“
Quite
unlike you, Aidan,” she had remarked sternly—but Fabian and the rest of the troupe seemed pleased that Aidan had dropped his prim hauteur for a few minutes.

Justice of course sided with Miss Scarlet. “What if they had caught you?” he demanded.

He and I had taken to sharing a room, twin sleigh beds drawn up against opposite walls beneath curled photographs of unconvincingly histrionic thespians. This arrangement kept me from being bothered by my admirers. It also put off the questions of others in the troupe regarding my amorous tastes. Since our visit to the House Miramar, Toby Rhymer had regarded me suspiciously: with more respect, perhaps, but also with skepticism, fueled by envy of my success.

“Our dear Aidan is more than what he seems to be,” he often said, affection vying with malice in his tone.

But as a roommate Justice, like Miss Scarlet, was above reproach. He wanted only to act as my friend and conscience (but still hoped to take me as his lover). I found that I liked his company: sober and intelligent for a Paphian, and relatively chaste. After that evening at the House Miramar he had made no more overtures toward me. His intrigues tended to be brief: a very young sloe-eyed refugee from Miramar; an Illyrian gynander with a jealous Naturalist Patron; this continuing flirtation with Mehitabel, under Gitana’s reproving gaze.

Now he sat curled up on his bed, weaving colored wires and tiny bulbs of glass into his braid.

“Do you think you could do that to
my
hair?” I asked. A Historian had given me a brooch after my performance, a flat square of plastic embellished with letters and numbers. “I’ll give you this—”

“No,” he said, glancing up and shaking his head. “Your hair’s still too short. Aren’t you listening to me, Wendy? What would have happened if they’d caught you and found out they’d been fooled all this time?”

I held the brooch to my breast. I decided it was ugly, and tossed it to the floor.
“I
don’t know,” I said. “Does it matter?”

“It should. It wouldn’t go very well for the rest of us, I can tell you that. People don’t like being made fools of.”

I felt flushed from that intense rippling joy that remained with me after a good performance: better than my acetelthylene had been, better than almost anything except tapping new blood. “But it wouldn’t be
my
fault, Justice. It would be Aidan’s! I’m not responsible—Wendy
can’t
be responsible.”

He gazed at me, wrapping a wire around one finger. “Is that what you think, Wendy? Is that what you really believe—that this is like the Human Engineering Laboratory, that Dr. Harrow’s out there somewhere to protect you and save you if you go too far?

“Because you’re wrong. Terrible things are happening. If the Ascendants are really looking for you then you’re in danger all the time, and so am I, and Miss Scarlet and probably every single other person in this damned City. And if the man in the Cathedral is the same one who ordered the purge at
HEL
—”

I knelt to retrieve the brooch, so he wouldn’t see my face.

“At the very least, Wendy, you shouldn’t make it harder for those who love you and are the only wall between you and the dark.”

I put the brooch in my pocket. I sat on the floor for a minute, then reached for the bottom drawer of my bureau. I withdrew a feathered bandeau, the one Andrew had given me at
HEL
. I stared at it a long time without speaking; because I felt ashamed, and angry, and frightened.

Because something terrible
was
happening in the City: something terrible was happening to
me,
but it was not what Justice or anyone else might imagine in all their gory nightmares.

No: I felt within my head a new thing burgeoning, jealous and implacable and tender and bewildering by turns. Even my dreams had changed. They held not the faces of Dr. Harrow or Morgan Yates or the other subjects at
HEL
, but those of myself and Justice, or Miss Scarlet, or others I met each day in the City. And as I stared at the bandeau a terrifying thought came to me: that after seventeen years I was changing, that something had changed me: something even Emma Harrow had never dreamed might happen to her sacred monster.

A few weeks later an emissary from the Zoologists arrived. It was the morning of our performance at the Masque of Owls. We were sitting at breakfast together in the oak-paneled dining chamber, picking over the remnants of one of Gitana’s peppery frittatas.