The first commandment of St. Gremory, the only one most people cared much about, was this: “This world is yours to use, to consume and to devour and to delight in. Seize it, take what you will from it and of it, and like the maggot upon the carcass, know no part of guilt. All things great and small are yours to command, and it is a sin to waste their value. Go forth and exhaust this universe, wring from it every last seep of strength which is yours by right, and you will know the weight of blessings. But if I return to find one stone unmolested, unknown, unhollowed, my displeasure will be the fission of atoms.”
When the hundred and eleven clocks in Grisaille Spire chime eleven minutes after one in the morning, the moment when St. Gremory descended his mountain stair and began the tocking of history, the people of Tizenkét will let out a great wail and cry and drive their chisels and their knives and their spiles and their corkscrews into the black cobblestones with all their strength, prying up flakes and shards and chunks of stone, cramming them into their mouths like soft, fatty meat, grinning in holy transport as the dust runs down their chins like juice, and in her hunger and her satiation, Gablet the Fool will see at last that the midwife’s daughter Oriel had hoarded beauty in her left profile and not her right, just as he had hoarded his small coins in his cellar and not his purse.
Seven hundred years has long come and gone in Tizenkét.
Virgin
The childhood of Vnuk was a hall of strange turnings, and to the right was always the wildness of the little furred boar, and to the left was always the illness of the orphaned lamb. The monstrous children of the nobility ran rude and unruled through the palace, accepting no governance for themselves but a kindly anarchy. They tumbled through the grounds as they would have through the unfenced lands of their fathers, climbing through windows like manor doors, down passageways like rows of turnips planted for fall, up and down stairs like larch trees, stumbling into servants’ quarters as into the fields of tenant farmers, hunting tomcats and kitchen rats and speckled doves down the arcades and courtyards with the solemnity they would have given to the stalking of stags in the shaded parks of their inheritances. To them, the palace was the world and the world was the palace. They did not even dream of those grand estates their parents abandoned for the safety of the king’s eye on them. Yet the whole arrangement was so scaled to life that if you set down any boy or girl of that time on the thick seedy grass of the homes they’d never seen, they would have known exactly how many steps to get to this neighbor or that, for they were represented by the number of portraits between one bank of rooms and the next, exactly how the stables stood, and the mills, and the vineyards, for statues of cows, horses, wheat, and grapes in enamel and glass marked these spots along the royal mazeways, the directions of the brooks and streams and the names of all the creatures inside them, for these were painted along the floors, and words like cyprinius carpo, lepomis auritus, and esox lucius swam along the currents like real and breathing fish.
Vnuk tried to keep up with her playmates, but having no lungs, she was easily winded; having no heart, she would easily swoon. She loved to run along behind Ispan, the crown prince born already a corpse, and Sedria, the viscount’s daughter with a perfect hole through her forehead through which you could see, no matter where she stood, a foreign desert of sand and starving rabbits as clear as a window, and Geza, the underpope’s cat-eyed, seven-fingered girl, the silver ducal twins Szemmel and Szagol, and Kulacs, third in line for the throne, with his knees that bent backward like a seabird and his beautiful mouthless face. They stole joints of ham from the kitchens, books of occult philosophy and unvarnished history from the libraries, hid in wait for unsuspecting duchesses, climbed into the high gables and imitated the sobbing of ghosts until the whole palace rang with little soft lamentations and giggles and still further wailing on the subject of the horrors of the grave. They played at burnt-bone dice and taroc cards in the gardens, at pyromania in the vaults, at kisses in the shadows. But if she ran too fast (and she never could run so fast as the others, for her tower could not bend or flex like a back), Vnuk would fall sick and have to sit on the flagstones as still as winter until the spell passed. She had a horror of fire and if Szemmel and Geza’s beloved flames licked too close to her, she would scream and scream until she fell down faint. And she could not eat the quinces or the figs from the orchards the other children loved to burgle away from the harvest, though she loved them too and always tried, hoping this time, this year she would be cured of it, but with one bite she always went so pale and sick the astrologer-physicians would lock her in a crumbling unused tower, ruined, the king said to all who would listen, by the basilisk-drawn trebuchets of the enemy during the last invasion, there to drink only rainwater, eat only the yolks of the eggs of white hens, and bathe in the healing light of Scorpio for a fortnight.
Diabolists were in those days only allowed past the palace gates on Thursdays, for long ago, when glaciers could be counted in the morning like pale geese and God still spoke to man, the first king of ————, who had no name, no gender, and came from nowhere, and was therefore judged by the people to be the only one among them uncorrupted by ambition, offspring or foreign interests, asked Murmex the Impenetrable what day of the week the diabolists held holy. Murmex answered: there are few enough scraps left of the feast of days, for Sunday belongs to the Christians, Saturday to the Jews, and Friday to the Muslim with his forehead to the ground. Wednesday is the province of the pagan, Tuesday the kingdom of the tax collector, and Monday is the Great Sabbat of the owners of the means of production. Therefore we will make of Thursdays our masses, for nothing much of import happens on a Thursday, and it is with the stuff of idleness that we do our best work.
And so Archfiend the Lesser came to Vnuk on Thursdays, wearing the face he used for work, and thus in the cosmology of Vnuk, Thursday was the name of the god of knowledge. They met in a little chapel adjoining Lord Bittern’s bedchamber, eleven meters from his bedside, corresponding precisely at scale to the half kilometer between Milkdrop Hall and a particular orchard worked since before the songbirds burned by the old tarman Pkelnik and his wife. The chapel walls were thus painted round with sixty-six silver birch trees, two young fawns and their mother, a tame fox, a stone well, seventeen sour cherry trees, four bilberry bushes, a potato patch, a small thatched hut with a smoky fire burning outside, and Pkelnik himself with all his liver spots, industriously boiling bark into pitch. Beneath the brass drain in the center of the floor, a family of sleeping rabbits were painted in careful browns and greys and pinks, as real as if they meant to wake at dusk and set upon Pkelnik’s potatoes.
At first, the diabolist brought both gifts and tools to the deformed child, to ply at her in both ways. On one table, he laid out a doctor’s leather roll containing hammers, scalpels, chisels both toothed and flat, nails, needle and thread, a speculum, glass pots of exotic mortars and acids, levels and rules, shears, and vials of narcotics more powerful than prayer, all in miniature, delicate enough to work upon that famous pinhead over-populated with angels. On another table, he rolled out another physician’s hide, this one containing sticks of peppermint and cinnamon, paints and brushes of Italian glass, ivory dolls so thin and long their heads could be used as quill tips, pots of meringue and honeyed cream, and a little silver whistle with a reed of sugar cane.
Vnuk looked from the left-hand table to the right. She sighed, and the sigh sounded so awfully old in her small body.
“Someone’s painted rabbits in the drain,” the child said on that first Thursday.
“H…have they?” said Archfiend the Lesser.
“Yes. A mother and six babies. I suppose the father’s scampered off. They do that, you know. Fathers. Though I suppose I have made certain assumptions with regard to the larger rabbit. Mothers scamper off, too.”
“Ah,” said the diabolist, scratching his head beneath his green leather cap. The join between his face and his skull always itched him terribly. “Well, rabbits in the drain or no ra
bbits, we have much work ahead of us, and it’s a sin to waste a Thursday.”
“Why would someone do that, do you think?”
Archfiend the Lesser selected the little hammer and the toothed chisel. “Do what?” he said, with a whiff of exasperation.
“Paint a mother rabbit and six babies under the brass grate in the drain. It’s a very good likeness. It must have taken days. And no one will ever see them. No one even knows they’re there.”
“You’ve seen them.”
Vnuk paused and looked down at her long, slender fingers holding tight to the sash of her yellow autumn gown. “Is that enough?” she whispered. “I had to pry up the grate with a trowel.”
“If someone painted them there, that means there are rabbits in the real world, on your real estate, where these birch trees are really birch trees and your father’s bondsman really does spend his life blackening his lungs and teeth and soul with tar-smoke. Now, take this peppermint. Science waits on no man’s fancy. Or rabbit’s.”
Vnuk leaned closer to the diabolist. The grey walnut door in her belly creaked. “But surely not anymore, Archfiend. Surely they’ve all grown up by now, and had other babies. Rabbits make babies very fast, you know. There’s probably millions of them running all over poor Pkelnik’s potatoes, because no one’s there to hunt them for stew. What are you going to do to me with that hammer and that chisel? Is it something you’ve already done to the other children?”
Archfiend the Lesser had spent the holy days of all the other religions stirring his courage round and round to this day. He had worn the stern, severe, sharp-cheekboned face of work. It had grey hair, though he was a young man, in case he needed the extra authority. He’d tried to forget about the child of Vnuk and concentrate only on the tower of Vnuk. All his brothers of the diabolists college agreed that she herself was irrelevant, surplus, no more to be worried over than the apple-skin which covers the apple, which was only there to keep the fruit from going brown too soon. Yet there she sat, with her black buttressed throat, her blue hair rippling over her shoulders, nearly down to the floor that concealed those painted, sleeping rabbits.
“There are no other children like you,” he rasped. “A baby born with no eyes or seven fingers on each hand or a even wolf’s tail is still within the bounds of positable humanity, however unpleasant to look at. It is something Aristotle could imagine. Something findable within the pages of Herodotus. You…are not.”
“Ispan is a corpse, and he’s going to be king. I don’t think you took a crowbar to the king.”
“You have me there.”
“Please tell me. I’ll know in a minute anyway, once you’re doing it to me.”
Archfiend the Lesser tried to think of Lord Bittern’s daughter as an apple-skin. “As it is our first day, I thought we would begin slowly. I mean to remove those three little blue bricks near the kidney area, and perhaps one of the lancet windows, through which opening I will pass my instruments in order to begin a rough calculation of your interior volume. Perhaps, if we are lucky, even find the source of that light in your aorta.”
“Will it hurt?”
“I have no idea. Cathedrals do not scream. Girls do. It could go either way, honestly. Whether or not it will hurt is…it is part of what I wish to learn.”
Vnuk considered for a long moment. She looked from the right-hand table to the left.
“No,” she said.
“No?” repeated the diabolist, who had never heard the word, not even from the, admittedly tiny and quite lazy, demons he’d once summoned to defend his thesis.
“No. You will not do that.”
“Your father has already agreed to this. My colleagues have negotiated an increase in his rank as compensation. It has all been arranged by men wiser than us both. You will be a baroness now. Won’t that be nice?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. If my father would like parts of him removed in order to calculate his interior volume, which is probably quite impressive, he is free to make himself a baroness and do it.” Tears floated in Vnuk’s strange eyes. She wrapped her thin arms around her architecture. “I am mine,” she pleaded.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you, but the high court has determined that property law applies in this case. The trial was very long. I testified. So did your father. So did the locksmith who was present at your birth. The judge went through a third change of wigs. Konrad the Rhymer has already written two romances about it. You are, technically speaking, rather less a member of the nobility and rather more a structure situated upon the lands of the king and therefore—”
Vnuk trembled and tightened her arms around the balconies of her ribcage. “But I am mine.”
Archfiend the Lesser had no answer for her. He set down the hammer and the chisel. He drew out his surveyor’s tube containing his other two faces and laid it on the floor. The diabolist opened one end and carefully worked out the face he wore for prayer. A kinder face, a rounder face, soft and young and sad, with solemn dark hair and eyes like saltwater. He allowed Vnuk to watch him change his face, which he had allowed no one to see before. When it was done he knelt before her with his saint’s eyes and his martyr’s lips.
“Please,” he said.
“What will you give me?”
“I gave you a peppermint. And the dolls.”
Vnuk shriveled him with a glare. “Teach me what you know. Teach me the names of all the devils and their sigils and their mounts. Teach me to be like you.”
“It is forbidden for women to study such things.”
“When you met me in my father’s rooms, when you saw me naked and asked me the name of the Devil as though a child of six should know such a thing, did I answer correctly?”
Archfiend the Lesser’s gentlest face darkened with shame. Why had he said it? What had moved his absurd mouth? “Yes.”
“Then am I not already your apprentice?”
“It is too dangerous for women, Vnuk. Men may have their ambition, their lands, their treasure, their talent, their name, but you have only one thing to trade to the legions for knowledge, and though one good coin still makes the sale, it is not your coin to barter. It belongs to your father, to your king, and to your husband, whoever he may be.”
Vnuk began to laugh, and when she laughed, the bell at the base of her throat began to toll like the striking of some hour deep in the night.
“What could amuse you so?” asked Archfiend.
“Two things,” laughed the girl, “and I cannot decide which is the better. That I should need my father’s permission to sell my soul, or that you think I have that coin you speak of with which to go to market.”
Vnuk held her hand against the splintered door at the join of her legs, against the bricks and the black tracery.
The diabolist rose, his heart boiling in him, his liver cursing his spleen. He drew the long silver whistle from the left-hand table and gave it to the child with a tower in her belly.
“Do you know what a songbird sounds like?”
“Of course not. They are all dead.”
“Amusdias is the name of a certain lieutenant. He commands legions numbering six by six. He appears in the form of a man with the head of a unicorn crowned, but his hands are the hands of an ape, and he can, under compulsion, change into the form of a thrush or a starling. He is the provider of all the cacophonous music of Hell, and his sigil is that of Saturn and Neptune conjoined, with his name writ upon it in Hebrew and Sanskrit. When you have mastered those languages, and the melody he calls most favored, and can tell me how life begins, where comes the first seed of dust, the first drop of water, the first inkling of intelligence, we will attempt your first summoning, and you will tire of all of this or run shrieking from it, but either way, you, among all the children of ————, will at least have heard the singing of a bird.”
Archfiend the Lesser took up his tools again, and this time, looked to Vnuk for permission. She nodded slowly. As he bent to wedge his chise
l behind the first blue stone in her side, she cried out:
“Wait!”
“What is it now, girl? Must I stand on my head? Tell you how to turn lead to gold? Bring you the heart of a griffin?”
Vnuk looked into his eyes and all the way through them down into the fire at the center of his life.
“What if I have rabbits in my drains?” she whispered in terror.
“Ah, dear, sweet thing, I will not wake them,” the diabolist answered tenderly. “But I will see them, and that will be enough.”
“I don’t think the king ever does mean to let us out of the palace,” the daughter of Lord Bittern sighed. “I don’t believe there really are any basilisks at all.”
With a hesitant motion, her new friend struck out one bright blue brick from her body.
Vnuk began to scream.