And he had begun thinking of the weather again. He could not help himself.
He would be leaving soon.
Marvel Whiteside Parsons was the High Priest of Cape Canaveral, Hierophant and Head Magician. Born fifty and some years before in Dread Kansas, the Center of the World, he knew he was growing old, and yet still he felt like a younger man. Perhaps it was destiny that he should be robust. By design, his birth had taken place at the holiest spot in the holiest place in all the world: inside the Black Watchtower. His mother was a descendant of Huldah, the Mother Prophetess who had given the world the Primary Law. Wonderblood. His father had been a holy monk, one of the dark priests who prayed continually for the end of the world. Marvel was a man entirely of the deathscapes—he embodied their torment, so to speak, the way other men carried family names. His entire personage was to have been like those flat lands: alive with death, seething with righteous terror, unyielding and impartial.
But it had not happened that way.
Though Marvel was born to be a saving king from the great plain where the ruin of the world had begun—the True King, in fact—he was not. He was not even in Kansas.
He looked down the path at the busy courtyard. When people noticed him, they bowed perfunctorily. He often went about the palace grounds alone. He looked up again as another droplet splashed on his forehead. He was supposed interrogate a prisoner this morning, a job he preferred to delay.
The weather today, a spate of seasonal November drear. Rain had been falling from a sky the color of a kidney for how long? Maybe no more than a day, but if he were crossing the land, even a day of rain would be miserable. He must have the correct supplies for days and days of rain. And cold. The air today was uncomfortably windy and the gusts spat cold water blown in from the deathscapes. Marvel did hate the cold—he had grown to adolescence in the frigid stone rooms of Huldah’s Black Tower. Here at the Cape, cold was never truly cold, but over time he had grown more sensitive to it.
He trudged through the courtyard, his black shoes dirtying in the wet paste of straw and sawdust. And there, look! A carpet thrown over a puddle. For who? His daughter Alyson perhaps. O, most certainly for her. Michael would never consider using a carpet to cross a puddle. What a waste, Marvel thought, of a perfectly nice carpet, and how like Alyson to demand something so frivolous. He shook his head and blamed her although he had no evidence.
He was unfair to his daughter. It was not her fault she was as vapid as the deathscapes were vast. Marvel had not been a good father. Where had he gone wrong? To look at her was a delight, but to listen to her … Marvel could hardly stand it. She thought only of sport and smoking. She may have resembled Marvel’s pious mother Nasa Whiteside with her dark hair and round face, but she embodied everything he had wasted of himself during his years at the Cape: his virtue, his talent, his devotion. She embarrassed him.
But he was being petty. It was the weather, yes, his boots squelching in the mud; that sound made his skin crawl, the plump glug-glug of mud sucking at him. Something about it only just sickening. He was not by any means a precious man. He had some time ago discarded all the fine clothes his high office had afforded him and now wore only a plain brown cassock. He went barefoot to his prayers in warm weather. Marvel had shed nearly all the material trappings of his office over the years, yet couldn’t contain his annoyance at this muddy courtyard. The king’s courtyard. Did no one believe they were worthy of a clean and tidy courtyard any longer? Where was the man to lay down more straw? Marvel pulled his foot from the mud again and sighed.
When Marvel had first encountered the countryside outlying Cape Canaveral, he was struck by its utter inhospitality—and he had come from Kansas, Dread of the continent. He had been walking nearly a month. He was fourteen, perilously thin when he arrived, dirty. Like a scrambling vermin, his exhausted heart clawed at his insides, but still he lurched with wonder as he drew closer to the palace compound. He had crossed two stone bridges on pylons sunk into the shallow channel between the mainland and the Cape, their surfaces studded with fossilized shells and rocks—coral limestone, he learned later. When at last he sat in the sand at the Atlantic shore he sank to his knees. The sea here was so shallow and so lovely, like stained glass, with shallow panes of pale blue, its variegated green depths and its fleshpink sandbars gracefully lifting themselves like elbows above the water. The young Marvel had never seen anything so strange and darkly beautiful to his eyes, which had only ever beheld wide fields, dirt, skies. To his left and behind him was a sparse row of broken hexagrams, ancient cement markers in the scrub; these were the old shuttle launchpads, watched over now by palace guards with machetes. Still more patrolled in wagons drawn by mules. What they looked for, he hadn’t known then, but they hadn’t stopped him or paid him even a second glance as he’d passed them on his way to the water.
Now those guards did his bidding. Or rather, ignored it. This muddy courtyard.
He sighed.
The interrogation chambers were housed
