Vnuk watched him calmly as he wrote, her badger-lined gown laid open, her hands folded calmly in her lap, just below the great door of her tower. Although she, without a doubt, had bricks and mortar and portcullises and doors and windows where she should have had blood and skin and a chest and a stomach, she was an unsettlingly beautiful child. Her hair was dark, dark blue, the color of a whale’s shadow, but the viscount’s daughter had braids of such pure, hot light that they sheared them into two hundred lanterns at the beginning of winter every year. Her eyes were enormous, knowing, black as the inside of a winecask, with a pinprick of silver at the bottom of each iris like a tiny star, but the queen had no eyes at all and a pangolin’s tail so long it curled three times around the throne. Archfiend the Lesser had himself been born with three faces, the extraneous two clutched one in each fist as he entered the world. He kept them nowadays carefully rolled in a surveyor’s tube, and wore one for prayer, one for work, and one for passion, though having never experienced the third of these, he had yet to see the world through that last face.
The child lifted her chin in an attitude of arrogant wisdom, but this was all due to the architecture of the tower. Vnuk could no more slouch than Archfiend the Lesser could fly without weeks of prayer and study. Her skin shone with all the milk-fed clarity of her cow-besotted ancestor, and where it joined the bricks of her chest, the seam was no seam at all, flesh simply flowed into stone as smoothly and naturally as earth slopes into a river. The architecture of Vnuk was an upset and flustered thing, a runaway cathedral caught out between the Gothic and the Baroque, having stolen significantly from the Romanesque, the Russian Revival, late Byzantine, and the Early Grand Duchy school of Finland. The materials of her were, at the extremities, ashen skin, thin meat, thick hair, long bone, the usual nacre of nail, and in the trunk, a kind of strange brick so smooth and without pock it might have been a flow of lava cooled by a sudden sea. Most of this brick was black, but here and there, the tower of her glinted: a red slab, a blue stone, a green or violet trio of blocks, like any child’s moles or freckles or portwine stains.
Vnuk possessed thirteen black-bricked levels from pelvis to jawline, terminating in an octagonal market cross at the crest of her collarbone, cradling her skull as a finial at the joining of eight flying buttresses so cluttered with dark croquets they looked like the legs of a great and sinister insect, and where the hollow of her throat should have been, that part of the body which all in the country of ———— agreed was the most beautiful, rode a solemn silver silent bell. Each floor of her body was a pitched aesthetic and winnerless battle of ribbed vaults, secretive alcoves, long graceful galleries, nave arcades whose arches within arches within arches bristled with primeval faces and keystones wrought from unpolished gems, columns and capitals in every style painted in Turkish geometric patterns, French florals, Greek mosaics. Her ribcage unfolded into cloister walks and delicate balustrades whose railings curled like jet lily-vines, gargoyles and grotesques peering round every corner, and a multitude of mullioned windows, lancet, trefoil, reticulated tracery, Lucarne windows, rose windows, splayed and dormer windows, some as large as crabapples, some so tiny no human hand could open them without shattering them like ice over shallows, some papered, some crystal, some fitted with stained glass so fine that in later years, the glaziers of that country would take the name of their guild from Vnuk and make of her an informal patron saint. A wooden door of petrified grey walnut rode low in her belly, hinged in fresh iron, undecorated, dry as gasping, its slats born half-splintered. A scent emerged from the dark slats and gangplanks of her chest, a scent like African violets boiling in seawater.
The royal architects, an occult and unpleasable lot, would ultimately declare the whole effect rather an unsightly mess, and express a hope that, perhaps, at the onset of puberty, the poor benighted child might develop some unity of style.
Archfiend the Lesser put his thumb at the base of her chin and lifted slightly, peering through the dark archways to the other side of the room. He lifted his eyes; the buttresses flowed up into the skin of her face, and all else beneath the jawbone was smooth, flat, featureless skin, like a theatrical prop of a skull, unconnected to any part of the body. She should not have been able to speak or walk or live at all, her head having no method by which to discuss action or inaction with her limbs, and yet Vnuk was Vnuk, the fact of her in itself already proven. Archfiend the Lesser felt the great business of his life settle upon him. Presumably, behind these many doors and windows and arches, further cells and chambers and passageways lay as hidden and unseeable as the flora of the gut, connected by staircases of black proportions beyond mortal calculation, be their mathematics heavenly or infernal. A certainty set up its business in the base of his brain, that if he could know the map of her interior, he could know the map of everything.
The diabolist put his ink-stained hand on the stone of her chest. He meant to ask the same questions he asked of all the nobly deformed children he had examined in his life: does it hurt when I do this, or perhaps this, can you count to ten, is your eyesight improved by this lens of glass or that, what can you do that I cannot, can you imagine for me a machine that might ease some little annoyance of your life in this body, even if it seems absurd and impossible? He did mean to. But what came to his lips unwilled was instead a crime, a humiliation, a horror not his to commit—the great question asked of all diabolists on their first day of their enclosure, when they are still only boys trying to look up the infinite skirt of the universe, a question which is itself an initiation, the beginning of knowledge.
“What is the name of the Devil, my child?”
On the eleventh level of Vnuk, in the eighth lancet window, a soft light came on, the color of turmeric.
IN OCTOBER, THE trees in the city of Tizenkét do not lose their leaves. Instead, a slick of blue-white fire licks along their bark and their branches, sketching an arboreal outline in a crackling ghostmoon flame. The aqueducts run green and hot, as sharp-bubbled as champagne, and no one can drink from them until the season is past. The University Proctors once commissioned a study to explain why no one could get a decent glass of water for weeks on end every year, (was civilization itself in vain?), and even brought Chancel the Sophist on a significant salary to answer for this phenomena. The scholars could not agree between three theories—that some sort of clam was deep in its mating season upstream, that people really ought to stop pouring the more liquid of their rubbish into the river, or that the masters of hell were offended by the indomitable virtue of the citizenry—and the group disbanded after one of the Clamites stabbed one of the Rubbishers between the eyes. Chancel ignored the aqueduct completely, and claimed to discern a pattern in the crackling of the blue-white light in the trees, but when pressed for a translation by the Dean of Linguistics, the great man blushed and said only that he was angry with himself for never thinking that the universe itself might also know lustful thoughts.
That was where the matter rested for many hundreds of years. It is a fact simply accepted that in Tizenkét, October is for beer and palinka and slivovitz and kefir, not water.
But October was also the time of the festival of St. Gremory-on-the-Stair, when the people poured out of their tall, narrow houses in the very corners of the night, chisels and buckets and knives and spiles and sewing needles and picnic blankets and wine bottles in all their merry hands. Look, there go Baldachin and Oriel, the best of friends since their seventh breaths, one a gravedigger like her father, eight months gone with her latest babe, the other a midwife like her mother, barren as sand in a glass, death and life, holding hands and drinking from the same bottle of yellow wine, wearing camels’ skulls tangled in wild speckled mushrooms and monkshood and maroon silk ribbons on their heads. Their grandmothers made them those Gremory caps, and in each knot there was both love and a grand, luxurious irritation with the youth of the world. They will lay out their down-stuffed blankets on the cobblestone streets with their neighbors, where all carriages, horses, and carts have been banned for the night. They will sing the old thirteen-part songs as they light their camel-tallow candles, as big around as a strong man’s ankle, and paint the little ones faces to look like wild camels and dragons, draft ponies and intricate glittering machines, all to commemorate the coming of St. Gremory when the world was new. Gablet the Fool will stare longingly at Baldachin, wishing the small soul in her nest were his, its future face his right to paint in the colors of a celestial camel, and braising in his bitterness, juggle cutting implements for coins. He is in secret the richest man in Tizenkét, all in small coins hidden away in his cellar and never let out to breathe.