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 chisel 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.
ALL THE CITIES in that pleasant kingdom suffered from earthquakes, but the one called Kettő had taken those cataclysms to wife. Travelers leaving the Dancing City feel the tremors in their legs for days afterward, like sailors suddenly cast ashore. Even the infants of Kettő know like dogs when a quake is about to begin. They feel it in their soft bones, in the cartilage of their flat noses. There are still days, to be sure, days when the balconies and colonnades know no other turmoil than the play of shadows on their stones. Mothers still sing of the Quiet Summer, when not a drop of water was spilt in all the hundred houses of Kettő and all the nets and straps of daily life were, for a time—and what a time it was!—laid to rest. But it was not to last, no summer ever is, and to be truthful, many were glad when the world began to shake again. They had not known how to live without. The Quiver is life, the Quiver is death. All the old men sipping thick tea in the afternoons had taken to yelling at anyone who would listen that this degenerate world was slowing down, growing lazy and weak, unable even to shake off its own dust like it used to. And what would the younger generation become now, without the Quiver to keep them agile, sharp, and clever? Layabouts, that’s what.
The rules of survival in Kettő were simple and short, and the Beggar Finial had obeyed them all the days of his life. Strap, net, and door. If you had your strap and you had your sleeping nets, there was nothing at all to fear from a little clearing of the geological throat. After all, God’s Fingers were always there to catch you. The Dancing City bristled with them: little curls of stone or iron jutting out of the masonry like errant nails, a little face on the head of each one, laughing or vomiting, depending on your religious philosophy, and the two schisms had long since divided Kettő into a patchwork of loyalties and blood feuds, the market district marching on crusade against the launderers’ grotto, the millers excommunicating the bakers and the bakers excommunicating the millers. The Beggar Finial picked his way among the territories of the faithful every day, scraping coins to fill his belly, caring nothing for whether the tiny faces laughed or retched, for millers or for bakers, as long as he could still get a bit of bread out of them. And if he felt an earthquake coming in his cartilage, he slipped the holes on either end of his strap, thick as a wrist and wide as a forearm, over two of God’s Fingers, and hung there safe until the dance was done. You walked with your strap, you slept with your net so as not to tumble out of bed, and sometimes you could fall asleep there, hanging between two faces, perhaps happy, perhaps near to death, rocked into dreams by the motion of the world.
The Beggar Finial had once hoped for more in this life. He hoped for a family, he hoped for a trade, he hoped for that beast called satisfaction that always ran faster than he. He had always had the feeling, as deep in him as marrow, that he was special, favored by whatever passed for fate. No matter how low his station, how miserably bruised his pride, how furious his empty stomach, he could not take off that suspicion of his own greatness. He blamed his mother, for calling him beautiful and strong. He blamed his father, for praising him for even so much as waking up of a morning. And he blamed Kettő, the whole of it, for since he had no house, he considered all the city his manor, and holy wars had made his manor filthy, cluttered, strewn with bones and swords and broken tabernacles, for neither side would lower themselves to do the tidying up, since, as far as both were concerned, they hadn’t made the mess to begin with. But in the cold, still nights when he had not even the Quiver to keep him company and reassure him, the Beggar Finial knew full well what sin had cost him his grace.