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 rabbits, 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—”