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“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—”
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 chise
