When the Beggar Finial was a child, beautiful and strong and often-praised, he was walking alone along the border of the city, where the windows in the wall were tallest and finest, and the light streaming through them colored like a feast. He had come upon a heap of rubbish left over from the Greengrocers’ Crusade, boots and skulls and some poor dead men’s straps and nets and swords and tridents and bandages washed up like driftwood against the hinges of the Only Door, that massive wooden thing that towered over him so, that led Out and Away, the most important destinations imaginable. The Only Door was the last rule of Kettő—you must never open it, you must never go through it, you must pretend as though there is no door in the wall at all. It was not remotely the only door, so he’d no idea why everyone called it that. You could get to Öt and Tizenkét and Nyolc and Három and any place you cared for through a hundred other arches and paths and stairs and doors. But the Only Door was locked, and every mother, including his own, who would allow him anything, said that to open it was death. Some madness had overtaken the Beggar Finial then, the madness of the young or the male or the spoiled or the bored he never could tell, then or after. Why couldn’t he open this door? Why shouldn’t he? Why should idiots get to slaughter each other over whether a nail in a wall was happy or sad while he, Finial, the most excellent and special boy in Kettő, should be forbidden to use a door? In his thwarted rage, the boy took up one of the old swords and heaved it into the Only Door with all his beautiful strength, leaving it stuck in the ancient wood like another of God’s Fingers.
The city began to convulse, and it was none of that pleasant after-breakfast shuddering or tolerable teatime tremor that the old men said built character. It was the end of the Quiet Summer, and the world quaked and staggered and rattled until whatever good and special fate was in the Beggar Finial was shaken from him like the last dry peapod in a straw sack.
ONCE, IN THE grips of one of Vnuk’s quince-fevers, the crown prince Ispan came to the door of her sickroom in the broken spire. He leaned against the stove-in red wood and bronze bolts of the door. Being a live boy in a dead body, he did not mind the cold or the fasting or even the sharpness of the shattered wall and roof where once, possibly, a real basilisk had done its duty. Yet, for all the rules the little gang of aristocrats stepped upon daily and nightly, he would not go past that door and into Vnuk’s private territory.
“Hullo, Vnuk,” said the prince, peering over the ruin of the door. The top half had been sheared away, as if by some awful claw. “I have brought you a cup of paprikas from Kulacs’s mother, a backgammon board with red velvet on the inside and pieces carved like foxes from Sedria, a tinderbox and candle from Geza, some cherry vodka from Szemmel and Szagol, and a book from Archfiend the Lesser called A Census of the Infernal Regions, Volume Two: The Wasteland of Water, at least I think so, it is in Latin. It looks very juicy. What do you and he do together in that little birch-tar chapel?”
Vnuk looked up at the stars of the constellation Scorpio, which did seem somehow cool and pale and medicinal as they streamed through the shattered brickwork. “We talk about rabbits,” she said quietly.
“Rabbits are boring,” sighed Ispan. “They’re so small and there’s so many of them but all they do is… twitch. Have you summoned a demon yet? You’ve been at it long enough.”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“I bet you can’t, I bet you can’t even do a little tiny one, like the demon who makes you trip on the cobbles when there wasn’t anything to trip over, I bet you can’t even do him.”
“I could if I wanted.”
“Could not.”
“Could so.”
“You couldn’t, Vnuk, you really couldn’t. You needn’t feel shame on it, though. Girls can’t be diabolists.”
“And dead boys can’t inherit thrones. You will tell me when you plan to abdicate, won’t you?”
Ispan looked stricken. The stars in the dead, flat eyes of the crown prince looked like dandelion seeds sinking beneath black seas.
Vnuk relented. Her little shoulders softened. She came to the door and took his gifts, setting them on the floor beside her pitcher of water and basket of boiled white eggs. The two looked at each other over the slashed slats, each wondering if it had really been a basilisk who had done it, each wishing it had finished the job.
“What would you make him do,” whispered the daughter of Lord Bittern, “if I did summon a demon?”
The corpse prince shrugged. He had never considered it. In his mind, once the demon was there, huge and sulfurous and horned and roaring and flaming and all the rest, you had all the entertainment you could ever pray for. “I don’t know, what are you supposed to do with demons once you’ve summoned them?”
“They can do anything. Anything in the world you could ever want. Only you’ve always got to pay for it. They’re very strict capitalists, demons. Archfiend the Lesser says that the old king summoned Amusdias to solve the famine, and that’s how he got the whole idea of killing all the songbirds, and also how he got them to all hold still for their trials and executions and such. And the diabolists brought forth a demon for poor King Blancmange, which is why if you break one of his laws you get kidney stones and you start talking backwards and your fingers fall off one by one until you stop what you’re doing.”
“I would make him change everything so I could marry you,” Ispan interrupted. His grey, green-veined lips trembled. He remembered his mother, staring down at him with her eyeless face, her bronze pangolin tail thrashing against the flagstones, in a wintry rage. You would have no heir out of that walking privy-house but a mute brick, swaddled in silk and rocked to sleep by an idiot.
Vnuk reached out her hand. Ispan laced his fingers through hers. “And what would you pay for that?”
“My soul.”
“They don’t want your soul, Ispan. The Devil wants your soul, but he comes for it in the end and not before. Demons want only your pain. It is their food and their wine. It wouldn’t… come out the way you want it. Do you know what happened after all the songbirds died?”
“Yes, yes, a demon’s bargain will turn on you. Everyone knows that. I don’t care.” Ispan reached one moldering hand out. Vnuk laced her warm fingers through it. “I wish I was small enough to live inside you,” he said helplessly.
In the light of Scorpio, Vnuk answered him: “When the songbirds were gone, there was no one to eat the grasshoppers and the beetles, and so they ate up even more of the harvest than before. So the perfumers and the alchemists invented a poison to kill grasshoppers and beetles, since they are too stupid and innocent to stand trial. It worked, and everything smelled like African violets for weeks and weeks, which was very nice, I suppose, but it killed all the bees as well, and then there was no one to carry pollen from flower to flower and nothing fruited at all, just endless flowers blooming and blooming and falling away dead onto the dry ground. It’s not the summoning that’s any trouble. It’s like whistling for a dog. A dog that you know for certain is going to eat you as soon as it can. Nearly the whole of a diabolist’s education is to get for himself a mind big enough to see the whole trick, all the way through to the end. All the way through to us being born and everything that’s still to come.”