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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.”
“My mind is big,” sniffed the dead prince Ispan. “As big as the sky, as big as the wall.”
Vnuk shut her eyes. She tired so easily in the autumn, when the quince she loved so turned on her. Ispan took the moment. He could not stop himself if he wanted to. He leaned over the ruin of the door and kissed her lips, his cold mouth against the warmth of her. He almost felt the weight of the kiss. He almost felt her life. “I wish I were big enough to be your home,” she breathed. But then she said: “Is there really an army out there? Led by a flawless woman atop a basilisk?” when the kiss was done. “You must tell the truth after a kiss.”
The heir to the throne said nothing, could say nothing. He was a child, still. He knew no more than she. His dead eyes reflected the dark, but not the stars.
“Go and look in the granary,” she sighed. “Go up the ladder, all the way to the back, behind the oat bales and the millstones and the rack of six broken shovels, and see there the size of your mind.”
When he had gone, Vnuk ate her evening meal in private, as she preferred to do, since it disturbed the appetite of others. She took up the teacup full of stolen paprikas from Kulacs’s mother, opened the great grey door in her belly, and placed it inside.
Blood
There had long been a saying: the gods do not speak clearly, except in Tizenharóm. The Amaranthine Bible said it, as it usually did, in an earthier fashion: In any old city, in Ketto and Öt and Nyolc and Kilenc, in Egy and Negy and Tíz and Hét, in Tizenkét and Siks and Tizenegy, you can hear the gods in the sound of the wind in the trees and the flowing of the water in the aqueducts and the laughter of children and all that church-a-day rot. But in Tizenharóm, they’ll blow out your eardrums.
Tizenharóm was an alpine city, so near to the roof of the world you could see the rafters and the thatching. The only season there was winter. The only export was prophecy. The only industry was religion. The city was a carnival for monks and priests and abbots and popes, the streets lined with stalls selling candy in the shape of the childlike god of death and cider in mugs carved to represent the face of the eyeless mother goddess. If you were lucky at the ring-toss, you might win a doll of the two-faced god of wisdom, or the corpulent god of sorrow with his infinite beard rendered in real yak-fur. There were no dark alleys or wicked shadowy gutters in Tizenharóm; everywhere there was light. Even the narrowest, most unremarkable crack in the masonry had its own small candle to engolden it, to sweep away the night and make it bright enough to please the exacting palette of heaven. The wax never burns down and the flames never gutter—it is said that Narthex the Lamplighter struck her match when first she heard the divine voice, so startled and frightened was she, half-deafened in the primeval dark, and then another and another, each time the gods spoke so her humble ears could hear them clearly, and though Narthex is long gone, her little flames will never go out until the end of days, for light is the blood of the gods, and it runneth through the veins of the world without ceasing. It was a city that glittered and a city that sang—even the meanest, most untrafficked crossroads had a musician trilling out hymns, high and soft, at every hour on the hour.
But all roads in Tizenharóm led to one place, and all the attractions and pleasures were subservient to it. For in the center of the city, there was a hole. The queue to kneel and put your eye to it wound through all those stalls and candies and ciders and rings tossed against dowels, all Narthex’s candles and all those hungry musicians, six years, six months, and six days long. Folk have died in that queue, been buried and canonized where they fell, for anyone who dies awaiting audience was sanctified before their last breath dispersed in the air. The hole was gouged from a simple wall, a meaningless expanse of brick, stained with the markings of living and dying in a city, the rear wall of a library specializing in romances and unauthorized histories. Once, in the days of Narthex, when Tizenharóm knew what a shadow was, there had been a red brick there, red as though it were sodden with blood. But now there is nothing, a simple space, and if you kneel there, if you kneel and quiet the beating of your heart and the beating of your mind and the beating of your soul agains the bones of your body, you can hear that voice that Narthex heard, and puzzle it through as others have done, until you can make a prophecy of there are rabbits in the drains and carry it down from the heights to the city of your birth, and make it mean good or bad crops, victory or defeat in war, a girl child or a boy.
But it was nothing so mysterious and interpretable that Narthex the Lamplighter heard when the world was new and fresh as the boil on a pot of paprikas. She heard only one word, a word that frightened her so badly she invented fire to chase off her horror of that bodiless voice saying:
Love.
Heart
Go and look in the granary, Ispan repeated to himself. Up the ladder, behind the oat bales and the millstones and the rack of six broken shovels.
The late afternoon sun slashed down gold and dark like war banners through the rafters of the barn. The ladder spiked his fingers with splinters, but being dead, the boy felt nothing. The oat bales pricked his hands with bristles, but being dead, no blood ran. The millstones bruised him and the shovels scraped his toes
as he dragged them from the wall, but Ispan cared not at all for that, no corpse ever could. He cared only to prove to Vnuk that his mind was as big as hers, so that she would summon them a demon to change the world for them, to break it in half so that she could be his queen and they could belong to each other, a kingdom of two.
There was nothing behind the shovels but cobwebs and mice droppings and the leavings of light. Somewhere, far off, long and distant in the east, a soft boom of thunder opened and shut like a hand, but Ispan, in his irritation, paid it no attention at all. He would have left then, scrambled back down the ladder with the utter joy of someone who has proved a friend wrong, and run to tell Vnuk how he had not been one little bit afraid of the granary no matter how crawly she had made it sound, except that a mouse screamed just then, and the prince looked to see if he had crushed the poor thing without knowing, for being dead, he had no feeling at all in his body, and often ruined things unawares.
In the shadow of the sixth shovel blade lay the corpse of a barn-mouse with a tiny bronze harpoon in its side. Something was slowly dragging the carcass across the floorboards toward a house no bigger than a Christmas bun. Something small and strange and furious in the dance of dust-motes. Something with the body of a man, the head of a camel, the wings of a dragon, and the legs of a draft horse. The house was a pleasant wee thing, its chimney puffing away, built with cast-off shafts of old wood and horse nails and wheatstalks, thatched with green oats, with a lovely, complex design drawn around it on the floor of the granary in pale chalk. It looked to Ispan like a rose made out of mathematics. Once the creature hauled his kill over the edge of the chalk, he slit its belly and began to cut the meat into steaks and bacon and offal for sausages.
Far off, but not quite so far now, the thunder echoed again.
The creature with the head of a camel finally looked up into Ispan’s gaze.
“Hello,” he said calmly. “What day is it, if you please?”
The crown prince told him.
