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l 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.
Sword
All the cities in that pleasant kingdom suffered from earthquakes, but the one called Ketto 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 Ketto 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 Ketto 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 Ketto 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 Ketto 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 Ketto, 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.
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 Ketto—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 Ketto, 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.
Kiss
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
