The Wax Cathedral

Light came out of the tree the way heat comes out of an oven door, all at once and with a smell.

It was the smell of church. Beeswax and cold stone and old incense, and under them something sweeter, a heavy buttery sweetness that clung to the back of the throat and made her think, helplessly, of a kitchen on baking day. Isolde stepped out of the hollow trunk and her boots rang on flagstones. Behind her the Hungry Wood sealed itself with a small sigh, and the silence of the forest dropped away like a cloak, and she heard the cathedral for the first time.

It was shouting.

The nave was a hundred paces long and as high as a cliff. Pillars rose in double rows, thick as oaks, their capitals lost in a gloom of smoke, and between the pillars stood the saints. There were hundreds of them. They were carved of wax, life-size, in robes of every color, each on its own plinth and each holding a single lit candle in its pale hands. The flames burned straight up. Their light fell warm on the upturned faces, and the faces were beautiful, every one: grave, tender, with downcast eyes and mouths just parted, as though about to speak.

Not one of them moved. Not yet.

Down the center aisle, between the ranks of saints, forty or fifty people were fighting.

She saw steel. She saw a man go down with a hand over his face. She saw a woman in a lantern pin shout something and fall back, and a big red-bearded figure in a leather jerkin bring down a mace on the place where she had been. Those at the far end wore a red hand stenciled on the breast, a flat crimson palm, and they fought the way a butcher works: heavy, workmanlike, enjoying it.

"Redhand," murmured Valerian at her ear. "Ketch Morrow's lot."

"And the other side?"

"Lantern."

She stared. Gideon's people. She spotted him at once, near the transept, a bright head among the dark ones, calling orders in a calm clear voice. He had a sword in his hand. He did not use it like a man who enjoyed using it. He used it like someone setting a table.

"Why are they fighting?" whispered Odile.

"Over that."

He pointed with his chin. At the head of the nave, on the altar steps, three people were kneeling in a row.

…

They were not praying.

They had their hands tied behind them, and a Redhand man stood over each with a knife. Two of them were grown, a gaunt woman and a stooped old man with the dazed eyes of the very tired. The third was a child. He could not have been more than ten. He had a mop of sandy hair and a nightshirt and a face the color of wet paper, and he was crying so hard that his whole body shook.

Tears ran down his chin. They fell on the altar steps, dark, one after another. And where each tear struck the stone, a bead of pale wax gathered and hardened.

"Oh," breathed Isolde.

It was not the child's face she was looking at. It was the statue behind him. It was a saint in a dark blue robe, a woman with a long grave oval face and a candle in her left hand, and she stood at the very head of the nave, over the altar. The candle was guttering. The flame had gone low and blue. And as the boy sobbed, the wax figure's head was slowly, slowly turning.

"They're feeding it," said Valerian. His voice was flat. "The saints wake for tears. A weeping child is a lure. Redhand are using the three to hold the cathedral's attention while they strip the reliquary. The captain does not care if the saints take them. He only cares that they are busy."

"That's monstrous."

"Yes."

"Can't you—"

"No." He did not look at her. "That is not within the covenant."

She turned on him. It was a mistake. In the same moment, a voice at the foot of the nave bellowed, "Hoy!"

…

A man had seen them.

He was a big man, bigger than anyone else in the nave, with a shaven head and a beard like a red bush and a hand that had been dipped in something up to the wrist. It was a dried dark crimson, and it ran to the elbow. He wore a belt strung with small bright objects that it took her a moment to recognize as rings. He had dropped his mace to point at her, with a wide delighted grin, and now he was striding up the aisle with six men at his back.

"New fish!" Ketch Morrow roared. "Look at that! Straight out of the trees!" He thundered up. "And with the Overseer! Well, I'll be damned. Is it true, then? The pretty one's gone and taken a mistress?"

"Stay behind me," said Valerian quietly.

"I can't—"

"Isolde."

She stayed.

It was not a decision. It was the sound of his voice on her name, low, harsh, with a note in it she'd heard once before, on a forest floor. The Redhand men spread out in a half-circle. The big man spread his hands, still grinning, and said: "No need for any of that. I'm a reasonable fellow. All I want is to borrow the little one."

He was looking at Odile.

"Not a scratch on her," said Ketch. "I'll have her back by suppertime. I've only got three weepers, you see, and the saints are getting hungry, and that lot over there—" He jerked his chin at Gideon's people. "—are making a nuisance. A fourth would just about do it."

"No," said Isolde.

"I wasn't asking you, my lamb."

He moved fast for a man his size. His arm shot out, and Odile gave a shriek, and he had her by the collar and dragged her off her feet, kicking, the pot lid ringing on the flags. A knife appeared at her throat. It was a short thing, very sharp, and it rested just under her ear.

"There now," said Ketch kindly. "Isn't that easier?"

Isolde did not move.

She was aware of everything. The hush that had come down on both armies. The light of the candles on the faces of the wax saints, soft and golden. The thin white line of the knife. Odile's eyes, rolling toward her, wide and wet and enormous.

Don't cry, she thought. Don't. Oh, Odile, don't, please.

"Valerian," she said. It came out thin. "The covenant."

"Yes."

"The second clause."

"I know it."

He was beside her. He had not moved. But the air had changed. It had got heavier, and colder, and very still, and the candles on the nearest saints had begun to bend toward him, all together, like flowers toward a window.

"Let her go," said Valerian.

"Or what?"

"I have not decided," he said, "which of the ways to do it."

…

She would not afterward remember the whole of it.

She remembered the shadows rising. She remembered the sound, which was a great wet shiver, like sheets torn in a gale. She remembered Ketch Morrow's grin going slack, and then stiffening, and a look of intense surprise settling over his heavy red face as his own shadow, sprawled long on the floor, came up and put its hands round his throat. The knife dropped. Odile fell. Isolde caught her.

She remembered that she did not look away.

She had promised. She had said it plainly, in a field, under the sun: I don't look away. And so she knelt on the flagstones of a cathedral with her arms round a sobbing girl, and watched.

It was not clean. The chapel had been quick, almost delicate, a matter of folding. This was not. The black hands tore. They tore through the Redhand ranks in a spreading wave, flinging men into pillars, into one another, into the feet of the saints, and the saints' candles flared, and the air filled with a sound that was half shriek and half song. A big man in a red-stenciled jerkin ran at the Overseer with his sword raised; the shadows took him by the arm and turned it, quite gently, the wrong way. Another swung a mace. It stopped in the air as if it had hit a wall.

Valerian walked through it.

He did not hurry. He did not even draw a weapon. He moved up the aisle, step by step, with his black coat swinging and his gloved hands loose at his sides, and the dark moved with him like a tide, and where it passed the men of Redhand stopped. He looked, she thought, like something carved on a tomb: the knight at the foot of the stair, the one with the sword on his knees. A figure meant to warn the living.

And his face was empty.

That was what she could not bear. There was nothing there. No fury, no pleasure, no distaste. He might have been sweeping a floor. When the last Redhand man was down, he stopped, and stood for a moment in the middle of the nave, in the wreck of the fighting, with the candlelight shining on his bare black head. Then he turned and looked at her.

She saw it then. The tiniest flicker. A pulse of something, behind the ice, like the first crack on a frozen pond.

He wants me not to be afraid, she thought.

She was not, quite. That was the astonishing part.

…

"Thank you," said Gideon Fallowes.

He had come up the aisle at the end of it, with his sword sheathed and his hat in his hand, and his people at his back. He looked at the bodies. He looked at the black coat. His warm open face held an expression that was part dismay and part wonder and part a third thing that she could not read. He bowed to Valerian, slightly, a bow of precisely the right depth.

"You have done us a considerable service. That was Ketch Morrow's third attempt at the reliquary, and I confess that I had begun to think he'd outlast us."

"I did it for her," said Valerian.

"Naturally."

"Not for you."

"I would not dream of suggesting it." He turned to Isolde, and smiled, and the smile was careful. "Miss Isolde. How very good to see you again. And this must be—" His eyes flicked to Odile, who was glaring at him over Isolde's shoulder. "—a friend of yours. Do forgive the confusion. I would have intervened, but you will understand that the Overseer's reputation is such that one hesitates to be seen taking sides."

"You hesitated to save a child."

"I did my best for the child." He nodded toward the altar. "You may see for yourself."

She turned.

The three kneeling figures had not moved. The ropes round their wrists had been cut, by Valerian's shadows, and they were gaping at one another in a stunned kind of joy. The gaunt woman was holding the old man. The little boy sat with his knees drawn up and his face hidden in his arms. He had stopped crying. His back was heaving. But the wax on the steps had stopped growing.

"It's all right," Isolde said to him, in the gentlest voice she had. "You're safe now."

He lifted his head.

His eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, and perfectly dry. They were the eyes of someone who has cried until there is nothing left. He looked at her with a stunned, trusting, helpless stare, and she felt her own throat begin to ache, in a way she had no leave to indulge.

"What's your name?" she said.

"Wick."

"That's a good name. That's the best name for this place." She gave him a wavering smile. "Keep your face still, Wick. Don't think about anything sad. Think about something stupid."

"Like what?"

"Like a goat," said Isolde, "in a hat."

The boy's mouth twitched.

"No," she said, quickly. "Don't smile either. It's not that sort of place. Just look blank. Like a statue."

"Like them?"

"Like them." She glanced up at the nearest saint, a tall grave figure in green, with a candle that burned straight and clear. "They've got it right. No smiling, no weeping. A good dull saint's face." She tried it herself: lowered her eyelids, parted her lips, let all expression go out. "There. What do you think?"

"You look dead," said Wick.

"Yes. That's the idea."

He laughed.

It was a very small laugh, a surprised hiccup. It was not the Door 1 rule, so she let it pass. She felt a stir of warmth in her chest. And then, a few paces behind her, a quiet dry voice said, in a tone she'd never heard from him before:

"Do you still feel anything when you do that?"

It took her a moment to realize that the question was not for the child.

…

She turned.

Valerian had not spoken. He stood where he was, in the wreck of the aisle, with his hands at his sides. He was not looking at her. He was staring at Wick, with an expression of faint and curious bewilderment, as a man looks at an animal whose name he has forgotten.

"Pardon?" she said.

"No." He shook his head, slowly. "I was— I did not mean—"

She understood.

She took her time. She rose, and brushed the dust off her skirt, and walked up the aisle until she stood in front of him. He was a head taller than she. She had to look up. In the candlelight his face was gray, the scar through the brow standing out like a thread of white wire, and his eyes had gone the color of wet slate.

"You asked it," she said. "I didn't. I was going to."

"I withdraw it."

"No." She spoke softly. "I want to know. When you do that. When you take a man's arm and turn it. When you drag him up by the throat and he looks at you. Do you feel anything?"

The nave was very quiet. Behind her, the Lantern Company had drawn back. Gideon was watching with an odd, bright, intent look. The candles stood straight in their stands, and the wax saints looked on with downcast eyes.

"I do not know," said Valerian.

"That isn't an answer."

"It is the only one I have." He drew breath. "There is a moment, before. It is very cold. Then there is a moment when it is not cold, and I would call that—" His voice caught. "—not unpleasant. It is the worst thing I know about myself. And then there is nothing. A long nothing, as of a bell that has stopped." He looked at her. "I did not expect you to ask."

"Why not?"

"No one has."

He said it so simply that for a moment she could not reply. It occurred to her that this was a man who had killed thousands, who had stood by and watched ten thousand deaths, and that in all that time no one had asked him whether he minded.

She said, "I'm asking."

"Yes," said the Overseer. He closed his eyes, briefly. "I see that you are."

…

They found the side chapel an hour later.

The Lantern Company had camped in the transept, and Gideon, with perfect courtesy, had invited them to share the fire. Isolde declined. She wanted to read the cathedral, and she wanted to do it alone, with Odile at her heels and Valerian a pace behind. So she walked the nave from end to end, stopping at each plinth, noting every inscription on every base. Names, mostly. Dates. A line from the Old Tongue she did not recognize, repeated on every stone: Here is kept what grief has cost.

She wrote it down. She counted the saints, which took a long time. And she was standing in front of the eighty-ninth when she saw the little door in the north wall.

It was low and arched, half hidden by a curtain of faded velvet. Beyond it lay a small round chapel, no bigger than a bedroom, lit by a single candle. And in the chapel there was a single statue.

She stopped on the threshold.

It was not like the others. It was smaller, and plainer, and it stood on no plinth. It was made of wax the color of old ivory, and it stood on the stone floor in a rough brown robe with the hood thrown back. A young man. He might have been twenty-five. He had a long thin face and black hair that fell untidily over his forehead, and a scar that ran through the left eyebrow. He was not praying. He was looking up, with his head tilted, as though someone had called him from above.

And his eyes had been painted, with great skill, a clear warm gray, the gray of a spring sky after rain. They were laughing.

She knew the face. She had been looking at it for days.

Behind her she heard a boot on the stone, and then a very small sound, like the intake of a breath that never came out. She did not turn. She did not need to. She stood with her hand on the doorframe, and looked at the wax young man with the warm gray eyes, and understood, with a slow cold drop of the heart, that the statue was a portrait.

It was Valerian.

It was Valerian as he had been before he had learned to stand still.