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“Perfect,” said the chimera in his tiny cottage. “You’re right on time.”
“Are you a demon?” breathed Ispan.
“Are you a boy?”
“Well, of course I am!” spluttered the prince.
“Well, of course I am!” grinned the demon.
“What is your name?”
“I am Gremory, grand duke of Hell,” he grunted, pulling out the mouse’s heart and cutting it into four equal roasts, “with sixty and six legions at my command, or I will have, when I am released from my duty.”
Ispan controlled himself and did not clap his hands in delight. “What is your duty?”
Gremory put his scaled hand over his heart and intoned: “To enforce the laws of the king who summoned me for seven hundred years, in every cranny of his domain, and thereafter to protect his kingdom from invaders in perpetuity. Seven diabolists of seven schools put that doom upon me, and I shall be glad to be rid of it.”
“That seems like a good and noble deed,” the corpse prince said.
“I have made it wicked where I could,” the demon shrugged. “It is not easy work, but I am dedicated. And it is almost over now.” Gremory wiped his palms on his powerful draft horse legs. “There is just enough time to answer your wish, and then I will be home in my own black palace with my own full belly and ready to receive the great praise of my master.”
“I did not wish for anything!” cried Ispan. “And I will not give you my soul!”
“There is no need for that little melodrama, my lad. This is long paid for, by men you never knew. A demon’s bargain is cruel, yes, and seeks to snare, of course, but grace is Hell’s last gambit, and all I have ever done is give men just what they ask for, nothing more or less. They make enough of a hash of that to give me centuries of leisure. You are no diabolist. There is no shame in being unable to see the shape of a trick seven hundred times bigger than you.”
Gremory, grand duke of Hell, opened his camel’s mouth, and what emerged from it was Ispan’s own voice, whispering: I wish I were small enough to live inside you. And then he opened his left hand, and Vnuk’s voice came out of it: I wish I were big enough to be your home.
“Ispan!” came a terrible cry at the door of the granary. The dead prince leapt to his feet and toppled down the ladder as Vnuk collapsed in the doorway, a wound gouged in her head, wearing a maroon winter gown, the color of hopelessness. She bled onto his hands, nothing red or wet but candlelight, flowing as free as water. “They are coming,” she gasped. “I thought they would never come. I thought they were a dream. They rode under silk banners, Ispan, and God did not see them.”
The thunder that was not thunder was close now, and the lightning was not lightning but trebuchets, and the air was full of an awful yelling, grinding, screeching, for the army at the gates was now inside them, and their horses’ armor was wrought like feathered basilisks and the woman who led them was as beautiful as the sun. But try as he might, the crown prince of that vanished country could see no one else through the smoke, no familiar face, no mother or father or lord or lady, only the enemy, and too many of them.
Ispan held Vnuk tight and put his head to her heart, that glowed the color of turmeric, the color of an infinity of candles. He heard no beating, but birdsong, and before the next blast of cannonfire, he found that his face was no longer pressed to the bosom of beloved, but his feet were planted upon the balconies of her ribcage, and the world of her was vast and far as any he had ever seen.
The dead prince walked over Vnuk’s brick sternum, toward the nearest lancet window, and raised his hand to knock upon the stained glass.
Grave
They came two by two and three by three, nine by nine and one by one to the door of the world, the door that Finial the Beggar had been forbidden to open. They looked nothing like the inhabitants of Ketto or Öt or Nyolc or Kilenc, or Egy or Negy or Tíz or Hét or Tizenkét or Siks or Tizenegy. They had long hair and beards and skin the color of worms in the morning, and many of them had more or less than the usual two eyes, some had tails, some were not made of flesh at all. They were strangers, but in Tizenharóm, through the hole in the library wall, the voice of the gods had said to welcome them, and allow them to live in those great cities, and allow them to eat of the common table, and read the words of Chancel the Sophist and Cinquefoil the Rhymer, and marvel at the candles of Narthex the Lamplighter, and feast on the goods of the world, which some would call a tower, as St. Gremory taught them to do.
The newcomers looked out and up into the lands they would make their homes and saw the creatures that would be their neighbors, their lovers and their enemies and their rivals and their friends, and shyly gave their names to the million songbirds that were the people of the kingdom of Vnuk, who had spun through generations concealed behind the inner walls, raised cities on staircases and in galleries and cells, marveled at the autumn forests of her neurons and the candlelight of her blood, the aqueducts of her digestion and the sound of her gentle voice and the voices of her friends. The songbirds greeted them with stern, suspicious faces: sparrows, finches, thrushes, nightingales, and starlings, shrikes and robins, cardinals. The nations stared and stared and would not be the first to move, and ever after, this spot on the outskirts of the town of Egy would be marked with statues and flowers to remember this day. For then did the starlings Trefoil and Apse, the grandchildren of Chancel the Sophist, of whom we have spoken much, short and stout like all their people, reach out dark and speckled wings toward the eyeless queen of ————and welcome her when no one else would. As her wing grazed those long royal fingers, the terrible tiny flutter of an earthquake began, and in that moment no one needed to find their way to Tizenharóm to hear the voice of some kind god cry: Run, run, child, get out before they burn it to the ground!
But before she ran, one last man came to the great grey walnut door. He wore a face he had never worn before, a young, keen face with dark eyes and red hair, a face for passion and for awe. He looked up toward Vnuk’s face, a million miles away from him now, at the soft pale mountain of her jaw. He alone would not be surprised to meet the kingdom of birds within. Tears overflowed the eyes of Archfiend the Lesser as he asked his question once more, once more before escaping into the scion of King Blancmange’s house, which would be his house and all of theirs forever and ever.
“What is the name of the Devil, my child?”
Inside the tower of Vnuk, Ispan collapsed weeping into the soft, confused magpie wings of the Beggar Finial. “I’ll never see her again,” he wept. “I shall live in her body like a husband, but I will never see her eyes again.”
Vnuk’s great and monstrous hand, now as tall as a trebuchet, guided the diabolist through the door and locked it behind him.
“Love,” she said as she saved her kingdom. “The name of the Devil is love.”
The silver bell at her throat rang out, and Vnuk began to run.
If you go and search well for it, outside the borders of a walled country that is neither Poland nor Hungary nor Serbia nor Romania, you may find beneath a rowan tree a peculiar ruin, not much larger than a girl’s torso, of a tower of somewhat confused architecture and peculiarly beautiful black masonry. Beside it, long bones slowly turn to long grass, and above it, rooks have made a nest in the pale skull that hangs off the crumbling market cross at the top of the tower. I have heard it said that if you put your ear to the eighth lancet window on the eleventh floor, you can hear, ever so faintly, a hundred million voices singing forever.
Major
Tom
