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“Thomas told you he would return, that he would come back from the dead?”

“Who can remember? He said it, or someone else. No matter. So much digging to do before he comes, la!”

John threw up his hands. “That’s heresy!” he cried helplessly. “We await Christ’s return! When the dead shall rise and the world shall be remade in the likeness of paradise!”

Knyz dug on placidly. The rest of us tried fervently to be somewhere else while John drew nearer to tears. “That sounds lovely,” Knyz said in a conciliatory fashion. “If you’re hungry while you wait, I can make a fair mist-pie, with some mist-tea, even a good roast mist.”

“Who is the queen you spoke of?” I said quietly, and John peered off in the direction of the chapel he could not reach, could not touch. “The world has gone by while Thule stood still. We do not remember a queen of this city.”

“I met her when I was a small beast, la,” smiled Knyz. “Great big hands, the biggest you ever saw. She could have squeezed me into milk and a scrap of fur if she’d had a please to. She knew just everything—when Magog first stumbled towards us she saw his shadow fall on the boulevards. She spent weeks practicing sitting still, so she’d be ready.”

John begged for the shovel. I tried to put my hand on his shoulder, to hold him back, but he just kept babbling for it, grasping for it, and if we’d let him stay he’d have dug forever, I think, for the promise of a church at the other end of his digging. He dug furiously, sweat pouring off of him and drifting away, to become part of the mist.

“No,” Knyz kept saying, becoming more and more confused. “It’s mine. It’s all I have. If I didn’t have it, the fog would stop me, too. No, no.”

But John would not stop. He wanted the church, any church. More important than anything, that church. I stood behind him and it stood before him and he crawled like a child and never looked at me once.

We did nothing. We stood aside and let John break himself against the fog. With children, sometimes that is all you can do.

“Did he die here?” the priest asked finally, helplessly, his fists wet and ugly, clenched at his sides. “Is he buried here? God showed me this place, God led me here. He must be here.”

“He left us living—we kept his church. You don’t tear down churches. Oh, la, it’s just not done. He went back home with his wife, who sent word when he died. I think we must have disappointed him somehow.”

“Saint Thomas did not have a wife,” spat John, incredulous.

“If you say.” Knyz seemed quite done with our priest. Goats and fauns have a highly developed sense of propriety, and John had trampled all over it.

“We could take you with us,” I said to the faun. “Out into the world.”

“Oh, la, blemmye, there’s worlds within worlds. If I left, who would dig?”

“You said there were others.”

“But I can’t be sure of them. And all my progress would be lost. I appreciate the conversation more than you know—the quickest thing I’ve done in ages. But no, la, I live here. I see why you wouldn’t want to stay, but the queen needs me, and so does the city. Me and my shovel, and that’s all anyone can want. To be needed.”

We flew up the slow, clingy walls of the bubble, out of the misty well. John wept. I looked into the brume—and saw an arched window come briefly into view, and a dark-haired woman inside it, staring down at hands as huge as wings.

THE SCARLET NURSERY

In those heavy days that came rolling toward us like thunder, the al-Qasr bustled and hummed. The queen planned her great work, and ordered a great bronze barrel made, so big the smiths brought it in shards, to be assembled in one of the judgment rooms, which on warm spring days served as ballrooms, when the green shoots yawned and dancing seemed happier than the law. Chamomile blossoms garlanded the great statues that stood watch outside the door: two great serpents carved in sard and ebony, their tails twisting, their mouths open, and in each mouth a golden apple with a ruby embedded in its skin like a bruise. When the sun burned hot and no one