This was in reference to the most oft-repeated passage of the Amaranthine Bible: In the beginning of the world, only three things existed: the stone beneath our feet, the sun above our heads, and paprikas. When questioned, as he often was, as to how paprikas could exist before chickens, cows for the necessary sour cream, and hot red peppers growing in good brown earth, he answered: Does not the mortar come before the house? Do not the birch trees come before the wooden wheel? Do not the parts come before the wholes? So doth the parts that comprise a paprikas, before the wholes from whence they came. Whereupon his questioners walked away, initially satisfied, only to turn back in consternation and find Chancel having run off whilst their back was turned. Even in death, Chancel could find no comfort in anything he did not write himself.
Perhaps the oddest thing in the whole long life of the cleverest man ever born in the universe was that he was right. He would never know it, except in the way men like Chancel always know they are right, without any real reason to think so. One moment the world did not exist. The next, there was stone, veined and cold. The next, there was a golden pearl hanging in the sky dripping life like organ meat hung up to cure. And the next, the very next moment, there was, upon the stone and beneath the sun, a white and purple porcelain bowl full of steaming paprikas, long before anyone existed to eat it.
Chancel the Sophist would not live nearly long enough to meet the beginning of this tale which is named Vnuk, nor even seize with his own eyes the River Sz or Ognisko Square. But his grandson and granddaughter, who happened to be twins and therefore twice as bad and twice as good as their famous ancestor, would.
THE DIABOLIST WHO came to examine Vnuk and record her into the books of peerage, once she had lived through a few poxes and bad winters and seemed destined to survive at least the immediate future, despite having no visible heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, or liver, was known as Archfiend the Lesser. He was called this despite being a rather nice man with a closely-trimmed beard who hated clutter and bad manners but loved injured animals, stained glass windows, watercress soup with dollops of sour cream, going to bed early, and had been compelled to hide, from childhood, his passion for embroidery. Men of his profession were imagined to commit pyrotechnical sins of wrath and adultery and ambition, nothing so vile and degenerate as enjoying the work and company of women. Nevertheless, after the explosion of King Blancmange, the bishopry of ———— compelled all diabolists to take names that plainly and obviously announced their profession, so that no child might be seduced into thinking they were upstanding, jovial, worthy men they might want to grow up to be, like Istevan or Konrad or Milosh down the way. It was devoutly hoped that the occupation would shortly die out, and whatever the deconstructed king had done to ensure the longevity of his laws would be unspooled like so much loudly-colored thread and everyone could breathe a sigh of joy and release and go back to patting down the poor for pennies and tossing their extraneous daughters in the river like they’d always done.
It did not have the intended effect. In fact, Archfiend the Lesser had been followed to the palace grounds from his cottage, over the Gyöngy Bridge on the River Sz, through the comedians’ district and Slatterncourt Row, past dismemberers taking elk and boar and lion apart like puzzles previously solved by God, through wide open nearly cosmopolitan Ognisko Square in the sun, by a veritable totentanz of children of every economic class and level of nutrition begging him to take them on as his apprentices, despite his protestations that diabolist was just a word, not to be taken literally any more than an alewife was actually married to a barrel of black beer, his knowledge of demons merely academic, not practical in the least, his work almost entirely medical, astrological, or algebraic, and the most dangerous thing he’d ever done had been to set the crown a sensible budget when he was a young and reckless man.
The diabolist found Vnuk dressed in a gown of yellow and green chevrons trimmed in badger tails that buttoned all the way up to the tip of her chin. She sat, with a posture that could make a man believe in God, on a chair with a blue velvet cushion whose ivory back was carved to imitate the arches of the cathedral visible just outside the window of their allotted chambers, for at that time all members of the aristocracy lived within the walls of the palace and not on their own estates, where they could neither be trusted nor protected from the approaching army—and, one way or another, on horse or on foot, from the north or the west or the south, there was always an approaching army. It was what came of being situated so pleasantly as ————, between mountains, seas, generous growing seasons, and cross-hatching trade routes. The present horde, the king had shared in confidence, rode basilisks into battle, shot angels from the sky and cut them into rations for the infantry, spoke the language of silkworms, and was commanded by a woman-general without any single physical flaw. Why risk bodily autonomy on even the possibility of basilisks? And so they came into the fold, and were given rooms and gardens and plate in perfect proportion to what they had possessed out there in the sun-drenched lands beneath the wall, arrayed in just the same configuration, so that each lord retained his neighbors, and the palace became a microcosm of the kingdom itself.
“May I?” asked Archfiend the Lesser, reaching for the freshwater pearl buttons of Vnuk’s gown with some hesitation of virtue.
“Of course, of course,” snapped Vnuk’s father, waving his broad hand in the air. Lord Bittern wore his cynicism in his beard and his grief in his belly, as though he could give birth to it one day, and finally be rid of the thing. His coat-of-rank strained at its clasps, its velvet stretched, only just able to keep all that sadness in one place. “I shouldn’t think a man of your profession would be so bloody ecclesiastical. She has no shame, nor should you. I have a furious faith in searching out some slovenly little goodness in all hideous things, and in my personal tragedy it is this: My daughter alone is exempt from the sins of the primeval female. She has no stink of Eve about her, no inch of the Magdalene. You will find nothing to tempt the flesh beneath that dress. If not for the sniffing and clucking of your sort, I would let her run naked. She prefers it, you know. Her innocence is that extreme.”
“It’s all right,” Vnuk whispered softly. “I don’t mind. The crown prince already kissed my belfry, so you can’t shock me. He said I had to let him, because, while the people are free of will and movement, all buildings in the kingdom belong to him. He said if I did not let him, he would charge me rent.”
Archfiend the Lesser undressed the child and could not think of one single reason that his hands should tremble as they did, with each pearl button, with each dark flash of the body beneath. He harbored no clandestine love for children as some men of his profession did, nor did nakedness of any sort move him half so much as a perfect passage of Greek. And yet he trembled.
“This will require a new categorization,” said Archfiend the Lesser, very handsomely lit by shafts of late sunlight slashing through the room. He flipped through the pages of his book, illuminated with oxblood and emerald headers that read: Animalia, Missing or Additional Parts, Mineral Contamination, Disorders of the Blood, Skin, or Hair, Disorders of Doubling or Tripling, Disorders of Selfhood, and wrote, somewhat experimentally: Architectural.