Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,71

slithers, flies, hops, or goes about on two legs fell under their domain.

The forever twilight became a new twilight.

Rarely now do the twins bother climbing the seven hundred steps back to the Gate of Deeper Slumber and the cavern of flame beyond leading up and up and up to those catacombs beneath Mount Auburn. Never except when returning cannot be avoided. Those times come, as Isobel and Isaac are still the rightful matriarch and patriarch of the Snow clan. Too, there are other occasions when their duties force their return, as was the case with the exhumation of their mother. As was the case when the location of the Basalt Madonna—Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb—was discovered in a cave in the Sultanate of Oman, a hole in the Selma Plateau long known locally as Khoshilat Maqandeli and to the Arabs as Majlis al Jinn. Since the “death” of an artist named Richard Upton Pickman, the idol had been lost, as Pickman neglected to bring it with him when he made his own descent into the Underworld of the Lower Dream Lands. It disappeared in 1926, taken from the painter’s effects by some unknown woman or man or something that was neither. How it came to be hidden below the sun-blasted canyons near the southeastern coasts of the Arabian Peninsula no one knows. But the answer to that mystery is hardly important. All that matters is that it is no longer lost. The twins know well enough not to question the winds of Fortune, but only accept her boons when all too rarely they are handed down.

The cobblestones twist and turn, coming at last to the towering gardens of fungi and more unspeakable vegetation. They’ve spent many wonderful private hours here alone in one another’s company. Beyond the gardens rise the fantastic archway framing the entrance to Zin, fashioned of obsidian, chrome tourmaline, and green fluorite. Isaac and Isobel cross the bridge above the moat, and she pauses a moment to observe a ring of bubbles rising from the inky waters. The trumpets of the Guards of the Wall announce the arrival of King and Queen, and the mighty doors to the city swing open on copper hinges. Isobel points into the moat, and her brother is quick to look for himself. It wouldn’t be the first time the moat has whispered a portent. This time, though, the disturbance seems to be no more than gases of decay escaping from the bottom. He looks a little disappointed, and she whispers promises of consolation. Then they pass into the royal city, and the doors draw shut again.

“What if the preparations are not complete?” Isaac asks his sister. They’ve left the gatehouse fortifications behind and come to the first gloomy avenues. Per their standing orders, none have come to meet them, and at the sound of their approach, every ghoul falls to his or her knees, head bowed.

“Then there will be a feast in the dungeon,” she says and smiles. Her smile, like his, is an unpleasant thing: uneven yellow teeth that she had no need to file to cannibal points because she and Isaac were both born with those teeth. “But don’t worry. The preparations will be complete.”

For a reply, he only nods. Isobel is correct more often than she is wrong.

When they reach the palace, there are more trumpets, ordering all within earshot to drop at once to their knees.

The twins stroll hand in hand through the lightless corridors, acknowledging none of the supplicants.

“Are we hungry, brother?”

Isaac doesn’t answer her straightaway, so she asks again.

“Well, are we?”

He laughs and kisses her right cheek. “When are we ever not?”

“There is time before the hour,” she tells him.

“There is,” he agrees.

So she calls for a meal to be prepared, and servants get to their splayed feet and rush off to the larder and busy themselves at the dining table in the Great Hall.

So far as is recorded, the Basalt Madonna first appeared sometime in the fifth century Anno Domini Nostri Iesu Christi. Well, not the lord of any of the inhabitants of the city of Zin or, for that matter, in all the Lower Dream Lands. Nor even the Upper Dream Lands. In Constantinople, a monk happened across one of the Ghul who, in those days, slunk through the alleys and abandoned buildings of so many cities. The few ghouls still inhabiting the World Above were bolder than they are today, and they didn’t confine themselves to graveyards and to sewers. So, the pious monk