Chapter 18 #2
"After. Every time."
I wrote it down. When he says run — run. My handwriting went smaller on that one, the way it does when I mean it.
"Deal," I said, and put out my hand across the pad, formal as a closing, because if I didn't make it a joke I was going to make it something else entirely.
He took it. His hand closed around mine, warm and enormous and careful.
"That's the deal, Raq."
"Caterina," he said.
Then I took the pad and stuck it to the refrigerator with the St. Anthony magnet, where this family has always kept its important documents.
So I did the thing I'd been circling since the couch instead.
"I need you to see something," I said, and stood, and my hands had gone professional-steady, the way they do when the panel is fragile and there's no undo.
"The panel was censored, Raq. Somebody painted over the original — four hundred years ago, thick, deliberate, a burial.
What hangs on my easel is the lie they put on top.
" I took the drive out from where the drive lives.
"My cameras see through paint. That's the job — that's what the imaging is for.
These came back two days ago. Nobody alive has seen what's under that surface. Nobody, in four hundred years."
I put six prints down the length of the workbench in working order, the way I'd document a treatment, because it was the only liturgy I had that fit: the robe, ash going white.
The pooled hem. The kneel that belongs to no ceremony I know.
The face — the whole ruined face, mouth open on its held note, looking out.
And last the raking-light frame: two long symmetrical scars, shoulder to mid-back, painted by the same hand that had painted the grief.
"Raq," I said, quietly. "Just look at this."
He came to the bench, and he looked.
I have watched a great many people see things for the first time.
It's my trade's one sacrament; I sell it.
I have stood next to dealers and widows and one archbishop at the unveiling of the freshly cleaned, and I know the whole taxonomy of the human face meeting the uncovered thing.
I have never in my life seen what happened to the face of Baraqiel of the ninth name, chief of ten, when his eyes went down the row of prints and arrived at the wingless angel and stopped.
Everything stopped. The stillness he does instead of everything else — that was gone; this was under it, past it: a stillness like the panel's, like a thing that has held one note for so long the note has become its body.
He did not speak. The deep blue flared and stayed, burning steady, and his eyes went across the ruined face the way my swabs had, inch by inch, like it might come off if he was careless — and then down, to the raking-light frame, to the two long scars, and one of his hands rose off the bench and reached toward the print — and stopped an inch above the paper.
And stayed there. Perfectly still. The stillest thing in the room, in the borough, maybe in the world — a hand that folds knives one-handed, that put itself between me and a bus, arrested an inch over a photograph like it had met a ward, and the man attached to it could not say one word.
And then I put down the last one, and my hand was not steady anymore, because this was the one that had kept me on Nina's couch staring at the ceiling.
The full field. The widest frame the imaging could pull, the whole composition under the burial layer — and the kneeling figure was not alone.
There were others. At the edges, in the ash, small with distance: more kneeling forms, heads down, wingless, a field of them going back into the dark of the panel like a harvest.
And over each kneeling figure, where the imaging burned brightest, a small pale form.
Rising. Leaving. Painted with terrible care, one per figure — like light being drawn up out of them, all of it streaming the same direction, toward the winged one, toward whatever its hands were doing out of frame.
And standing over the near one — over all of it — one figure upright.
Winged.
Wings whole and enormous and folded, its back to the painter, face out of frame, and every line in the composition bending toward what its hands were doing, and its hands were out of frame too, and four hundred years of burial paint had been thickest there — over the winged one — like whoever buried this painting buried that part first.
"Who is the winged one?" I asked, very quietly.
The silence had a different quality than any silence he'd given me all day.
"I don't know," he said, finally, and there was something underneath the words with edges on it. "I have been looking at it since you set it down, Caterina, and I do not know."
The face in the print looked out at both of us. I knew that expression. I'd known it from the first swab — I'd cried into my solvents over it — the mirror-over-the-dresser face, the how is everyone still walking around face. I had uncovered it once already this month.
I had just never seen it breathing.
"Raq." Careful. Both hands quiet. The voice I use at the easel when a passage is lifting. "Did you know him? The painter."
The silence went so long the work light ticked as it cooled, and when the answer finally came it did not sound like his voice. It sounded like the bottom of it, the floor under the floor, the register the block only ever felt through glass.
"No," he said. "But he knew us."
I let that sit as long as it needed to. Then I put my finger down over the pale rising forms, careful not to touch the paper.
"And this. They're losing something else — it's not just the wings. Look. It's leaving them, whatever it is. Being taken, along with everything else." I looked up at him. "What else did they take from you, Raq? Besides the wings."
He didn't look away this time. He looked at the small pale lights streaming up out of the kneeling, and the silence had weight, and edges, and when he finally spoke his voice came from somewhere I had never heard it come from.
"I—"
He stopped. And when he started again, he went the long way, like a man walking a route he had never once let himself walk.
"You're asking what an amputated thing was.
I can tell you what it did. It was the certainty.
Orders arrived and they were right — right the way falling is down.
I never wondered. I never weighed. Nothing in me, in all that service, ever once had to decide anything.
" His eyes stayed on the small pale lights, streaming up out of the kneeling.
"And then it was taken. And I have spent every hour since doing the thing you were born doing, Caterina, with nothing underneath me while I do it. "
The work light ticked. The kitchen was very far away, and the ash field was very close.
And then he said it, plain, the way the worst true things get said.
"They took our grace, Cat. That is what they took."