The altar itself was also a large flat boulder, and behind it hung an immense portrait of God as a miner.
'When Father Garland gives his sermons do they represent the release of methane gas?' I asked.
She did not seem to understand that I was joking and answered in earnest, 'Well, he does refer to sin as a cave-in of the soul.'
As she went off down a dark corridor to search for Garland, I stood alone, staring at God. According to the portrait, the Almighty's physiognomy suggested he might be well suited for digging holes and little else. To start with, his face was dotted with all manner of fleshy wens. There were hairs protruding from the ears, and the eyes looked in two directions. I could not see his general physiognomy as being influenced by the animal kingdom, but there were certain breeds of dogs and an entire line of simians he might have influenced. He held an axe in one hand and a shovel in the other, and he flew upright, long blue hair streaming behind, through a narrow underground tunnel. He came at the viewer out of the dark with an expression that suggested there had been a recent cave-in in his overalls. Obviously, this was a scene from the Creation.
This was not my introduction to the odd religious practices of the territories. I had read of the existence of a church, out in the western reaches of the realm, built of corn husks. Their deity, Belius, takes the form of a man with a bull's head. These strange Gods scrupulously watch the miserable lives of the out-landers and sit in judgment over them. The illusory guiding the ignorant to some appointed heaven beyond life where their clothes fit and their spouses don't drool. On the other hand, in the City, there was Below, a man, and the Physiognomy, an exacting science, a combination of reality and objectivity capable of rendering a perfect justice.
I heard Aria and Garland approaching down the corridor behind the altar and was about to look away from the portrait when it struck me I had seen that face somewhere before. My mind raced to think, but already Aria was introducing me to the father. Making sure the thought was filed away for later, I turned and found before me an exceedingly small man with white hair. He held out a doll-size hand with tiny fingernails sharpened to points.
He showed us to his study, a small cave at the back of the church, and offered us a liquid derivation of cremat. We kindly settled for a glass of something he said he had brewed himself—an amber-colored liquid that smelled like lilac and tasted like dirt. I couldn't stop drinking it.
Garland's voice had a strange whistling sound behind it that was most irritating. Combining this with his freakish little face and his aphorisms—'When two become one, then three becomes none and zero is the beginning'—he was hopelessly less than adequate. Aria, on the other hand, stared at him with a certain reverence that bordered on the unseemly. I could see I would be forced to shatter her perception of this pretentious runt.
'Tell me, Father,' I said, after we were settled in and he had said a short prayer, 'why you should not be my primary suspect.'
He nodded as though it were a fair question. 'I already know the way to paradise,' he said.
'What about the fruit?' I asked.
'Plump and sweating sugar every minute. I touched it, and it felt like flesh. Did I ever think of biting it? Even having only heard of it, did you not already think of biting it? Everyone here wanted it. But as long as we left it alone, the power of that combined desire kept us on the path of righteousness. Now we are heading for a blizzard of sin.'
'Did anyone show a particular interest in it?'
'One or two,' he said.
'Who took it?' I asked.
He slowly shook his head. 'For all I know demons swept down one night from out of the wilderness and crept into the altar chamber while I was sleeping.'
'I've heard a lot of talk recently about an Earthly Paradise. Can you tell me exactly what that is?'
Garland pinched his nose with the fingers of his left hand and then sank into a pose of deep thought. Aria leaned forward in her seat, waiting for him to speak.
'The Earthly Paradise, your honor, is the one small spot in this enormous world where nature has made no mistakes. It is God's last best work before he was buried alive. It is a place that accommodates all sin and all glory and turns them drop by drop into eternity.'
'God was buried alive?' I asked.
'Every day we dig closer to him,' he said.
'What will happen when we get there?'
'We will have reached the beginning.'
'Of what?' I asked.
'The beginning of the end.' He sighed when he was through and looked over to smile at Aria. She smiled back and he said, 'Tell your mother thank you for that whipped tadberry pie.'
'Yes, Father,' she said.
'I hear from the mayor that your dog was recently taken by a demon,' I said.
He nodded sadly. 'Poor Gustavus, probably rent to pieces by a pack of the filthy creatures.'
'Can you describe it?' I asked.
'It was as Aria's grandfather said, like the way you always supposed a demon would look. It left a strange smell behind as I saw it flapping away.'
'Did it have sharp nails?' I asked.
'What do you mean?'
'What do you think I mean?'
'I think you are equating me with the demon in some way because of my nails,' he said, never losing his composure. 'I keep them sharpened in order to pull out splinters like the one now lodged in my heart.'
'I've got a pair of chrome tweezers you can use,' I said. Then I turned to Aria and asked her to leave the room. 'The father and I have personal business we must discuss.'
When she was gone, I told Garland I would need his church in which to perform my investigations of the townspeople.
'You mean they will disrobe in my church?' he said, standing.
'That is the procedure,' I said. 'You will be on hand to keep the crowd orderly and silent.'
'Impossible,' he said and took a step toward me, thrusting out those two little hands as if he intended to use them.
'Easy, Father,' I said. 'I'd hate to have to enlighten you.'
Then he grimaced, and I noticed his front teeth had also been sharpened. He was turning red in the face and shaking slightly. I put my hand in my coat pocket and around the handle of my scalpel.
'Grace is God's lantern.' He grunted, and instantly he began to relax. He stood very calmly for a few moments.
I nodded. 'You can see this is better,' I said.
'Come with me, your honor. I have something here that will interest you,' he said. He walked over to the wall behind his desk and gave it a gentle push. A door swung back behind which I could see a flight of stairs leading down. He stepped through and then began to descend. 'Come, your honor,' he called back weakly.
My first thought was that he meant to ambush me in some dark alleyway underground, but I followed, one hand on the railing and one in my pocket on the scalpel. I had decided that with the first pass of the instrument, I would take an eye, after which I would finish him with my boot. As I continued down the long stairway, the prospect of a challenge began to appeal to me.
I found Father Garland kneeling in a marble room, well lit by torches lining the walls. Before him sat a huge wooden chair, holding what looked like an enormous and badly abused cigar. But as I drew closer, I made out the distinct features of a long, thin man, with a long, thin head. His skin, though leatherized by time, had remained completely intact. It even appeared that there were eyeballs still behind the closed lids. There were webs between his fingers and one was pierced by a thin silver ring.
'What have we here,' I asked, 'the God of cremat?'
Garland rose and stood next to me. 'This is the one they found in the mine with the fruit,' he said. 'Sometimes I think he is not dead at all but just waiting to return to paradise.'
'How old is it?' I asked.
He shook his head. 'I don't know, but even you must agree there is something unusual here.'
'It isn't the unusual I doubt,' I said.
'What then?' asked Garland. 'The fruit, the Traveler—they are miracles, surely you can see.'
'All I see is a dried-out cadaver with the craniometry of a vase, and all I hear coming from your mouth is superstitious twaddle. What am I supposed to gather from this?' I asked.
'I will turn my church over to you tomorrow, but tonight I would like you to do something for me.'
'Perhaps,' I said.
'I want you to read the Traveler's face.'
I looked up to see if it would be worth it, and I noticed a few tantalizing features. The long forehead was misshapen but gracefully so. 'It might be interesting,' I said.
Garland offered his paw to me and I shook it.
Outside, I found Aria sitting on the bottom step of the church. She was staring out across the huge field that separated the end of town from the beginning of the wilderness. The wind was blowing the long grass, and dark clouds were gathering over the distant trees.
'The snow is coming,' she said without turning around.
That afternoon, I had Mantakis take a message to Bataldo stating that the populace should assemble outside the church the next morning at ten. Then Aria went to my study to make the preliminary readings on her grandfather's face while I took the beauty to bed. As I lay there waiting for the warmth to begin to creep, I thought two things. The first was that perhaps someone had taken Garland's dog so the church would be unguarded at night while the father slept. The second was that the physiognomy of the child the woman had begged me to read in the street the previous day seemed utterly familiar to me. Then Professor Flock appeared with a brief report from the sulphur mines. 'Hot as can be,' he said, puffing and grunting. Sweat dripped from his reddened face. From behind him, I heard shouting and the cracking of whips. 'And my god, the smell, the very elimination of excrement.' He moaned before disappearing. Soon after, I sank into an hallucination involving Aria and the demons that quickly burned the beauty's wick. When I awoke, two hours later, three inches of snow lay on the main street of Anamasobia and more was being driven down on fierce winds from Gronus.
Snow, almost nonexistent back in the Weil-Built City, was an inconvenient little miracle I could have lived without, but as I changed my shirt and freshened up, I felt
