The statue of Lucifer stood where the old square narrowed into shadow, half-hidden behind a low iron railing that had rusted into the stone of the surrounding pavement. He was carved from a pale, almost luminous stone that had weathered to the color of old bone, streaked here and there with darker veins where rain had run for longer than anyone living could remember. Ivy climbed one wing and the outer curve of a thigh, but never quite reached the face; the leaves always stopped a hand’s width short, as if they preferred not to touch him. He was seated, or half-seated, on a rough block of the same stone that might once have been meant to suggest a fallen cloud or a broken altar. His torso twisted slightly toward the viewer, one shoulder higher than the other, the muscles of his chest and abdomen cut so deeply that the light collected in the hollows and made them look wet. A length of cloth, once carved to look heavy and soft, wound around his hips and spilled between his legs in thick, ridged folds; the edges had been worn smooth by centuries of hands and weather, so that the fabric seemed almost to melt into the skin beneath it. His wings were the most careful work. The nearer one rose behind his left shoulder and curved outward, every feather layered and undercut so that the stone between them held real shadow. The farther wing was lower, almost resting against the base, its primaries fractured and darkened as if something had struck them long ago. Where the stone of the wings met the stone of his back, the carving was so fine that it was difficult to tell where flesh ended and feather began. His hair was a mass of tight, deliberate curls, still sharp where the rest of him had softened. They framed a face turned downward and a little to the side, the brow heavy, the mouth closed but not quite relaxed. One hand was lifted to the side of his neck, fingers curled as though he had just finished pushing something away or was about to catch it. The other hand rested lower, half-hidden in the folds of the cloth, the knuckles prominent, the tendons of the wrist standing out as if the stone itself were under strain. Up close, the surface was never entirely still. Tiny pits and tool marks caught the light differently depending on the hour; a cloud passing overhead could make the muscle under his ribs seem to shift, or the hollow of his throat seem to deepen. The places where people had touched him—the center of the chest, the outer edge of the raised arm, the top of one thigh—were smoother and slightly warmer to the touch than the rest, as if the stone there had been polished by more than weather. In certain lights the eyes, though uncarved and only suggested by the angle of the lids, appeared to hold a wet sheen that did not quite match the duller stone around them. He did not move. Everyone who passed him knew that. And yet the longer you stood with your hand against the cool plane of his chest, the more the quiet of the square seemed to arrange itself around the possibility that he was only waiting for the right moment to remember how.