But what is right, I ask? Tattooing your body for God? Wearing a charm around your neck to capture your soul? To believe the Ocean is a living God? To believe the hundreds of other, unexplainable things in this world? Are these somehow more acceptable to you now than the science that has been developed, the advancements that will allow us to live long, healthy lives?
Though Linette did not believe in a God, she made her way to the men and women who traded in that belief on the Morticians Avenue. Specifically, she made her way to the long, straight building of the Mortician Yvelt Fraé, which was made from caramel-coloured bricks. It had a dark, brown tiled roof, and was the largest building in the street, lying curled between a dozen smaller houses of varying brick colour. Yvelt’s building had three bronze windmills around it, two on the roof, and one larger piece cemented at the back, which towered over all others on the street.
At the bronze door, Mrs. Fraé, whose hair, it appeared, had been freshly dyed a red-brown, greeted Linette. Her skin, however, sagged around her jaw, wrinkled over her face, and continued to do so down her neck until it was covered by the brown gown she wore. Beneath the tattoos across her body there was no tautness of youth, and so the illusion created by dying her hair seemed ridiculous and nothing more than a vanity.
“Linette, it is a pleasure to see you.” Mrs. Fraé’s deep voice sounded as if it should emerge from a larger women. “Linette? Are you—”
“He’s dead.”
“Ah.” A pause, then, “I’m very sorry.”
“There was a letter.” Her voice was short, clipped. She could feel the emotion in the back of her mouth, threatening to spill out over her words. “He—he wasn’t there yesterday.”
“Come in, come in,” Mrs. Fraé murmured, stepping back from the door to allow her entry.
The inside of the house was lit in a warm orange and divided by a set of thick, bronze doors. Over each panel of the door was a pattern of angels and devils at war, naked and carrying weapons. The figures on it were ridiculous: sexless for angel, sexual for devil, and posed in mid action. Behind the twisting battle, Linette knew, lay the private residence of Mrs. Fraé and her family, who were also part of the Mortician trade. She had never seen behind the doors, and never would, but expected it to be different from what she saw now. The side of the house she stood on was plain, but expensively decorated with a floor covered in wooden boards and cushioned lounges made from pale brown leather. There was a real, ash-wood table at the end of the room, with a ledger that was used for appointments and payments. A feathered quill lay on it. It looked as if one of Mrs. Fraé’s angels had made a table out of the dead for her, and left one of its own feathers to write with.
“Would you like a drink?” the elderly Mortician asked.
“No, I—” The emotions from before welled up, threatened her, and she swallowed. “I’m fine. I would just like to start, if possible.”
“Of course.”
Linette had known that there would not be a problem. She had left early, before Issuer fully awoke, and arrived when she knew that Mrs. Fraé would be awake with the early morning vitality of the elderly. Had she arrived later, and the woman had been engaged, she would have had to wait, for once a Mortician left his or her mark on you, another would not touch you until the first had died. Linette knew that she did not have the patience to wait today.
Mrs. Fraé led her to a small room where, with a click, white electric light flooded its darkness. In the middle lay a chair made from bronze with thick cushions on it. The bolts and screws and dials in it ensured that, while the chair was ugly, it could be folded into a number of positions. Mrs. Fraé flattened the chair into a board before turning to the trays that lined the side of the room, filled with needles and pots of ink.
Linette had received her first tattoo shortly after she had moved to Issuer, when her arm had been mostly useless, but it was the memories of the war that damaged her most. She had been in the army for twenty-one years and had seen men and women die, just as she had killed, by her reckoning, more than thirty in various battles. Psychologically, death was nothing new to her. She had always been able to rationalize it, to make it part of her job . . . at least until the campaign against the Empress and her Children began, and she found herself fighting men—always men—armed with mining equipment and rusted machetes and muskets so old they wouldn’t hurt anyone but the owner. It was impossible to look at those men and see a threat. After she left the army with her injury, she had struggled with that awareness, and how to deal with it.
On her back were one hundred and thirteen names in the neat, elegant script of Mrs. Fraé. They were the names of soldiers: friends, some, but a large portion were men and women who she had fought with, peers and comrades before friends. Each one of them, however, had died fighting the Empress and her Children. Each one of them had died needlessly. Died for nothing but the greed of their own country.
“Do you still want this outside the others?” Mrs. Fraé asked, referring to the new tattoo. “On the small of your back?”
Linette nodded.
She did not need to speak his name, and for that, she was grateful. Climbing on to the bench, Linette pulled her shirt up, then curled her arms beneath her chin, and waited. The puckered flesh of her bad arm was uncomfortably warm against her and she could feel her muscles tensing in anticipation for the moment when her skin was pierced—
“So.”
A voice.
His
voice.
“So,” he said, repeating it, drawing it out, letting his very familiar voice sink into her. “This is my funeral.”
I am dying.
Soon, I will be taken into a chamber where two giant tubes hang from the ceiling, and I will be submersed in a green liquid. There, I will die. There, I will be put into a new body. There, I will return. I will return without these weak lungs I was born with; without the holes in my heart; without the pains that stop me from being able to travel this world of ours without having oxygen next to me. When I awake, I will be, for the first time that I can remember, without pain.
You would rather me die. You said that to me, only a week ago, stroking my hair as I lay in our bed, exhausted by the muggy heat, and unable to draw a good breath. You would rather me die than return a man made from bronze and silver and skin. You would rather mourn me than celebrate me.
You defend the right for the Empress and her Children to worship and live as they wish, but it strikes me that their beliefs are not so different than mine. For them, they return in a new body, reborn into their family by a sister, brother, daughter, or son. Perhaps even their own parents. The men and women who believe in God, and who we share our cities with, believe they will be reborn too—given a new life in Heaven (or Hell), after their life has been judged by God. So why is it that I cannot return?
You will be angry, I know, when you read this. You will see it as betrayal. I do not wish for you to do so, but you will.
If I—
I will find you, Linette. I will talk to you—the Surgeon is in front of me right now, and she is urging me to finish, so I must. But I will find you, after—I will.
For a moment, he looked just like the man she remembered: slender, pale, blond, with a blade of a smile that revealed his crooked, yellow teeth. Except, of course, that they were not crooked, and therein the truth was told. They were straight, and white, and he was, she knew, dead.
The room was quiet with the pause between words and action. Linette (and, she assumed, Mrs. Fraé) could hear the faint murmur of machinery that surrounded the man before her, much in the way that insects create a susurration of noise in the evening. If allowed, it would slip into the background, become a familiar, normal buzz; if it could be allowed, that is. To Linette, the sound served only to remind her of the fact that, beneath his pale skin, he was no longer bones, no longer blood, no longer all the things that she was. Instead, he was bronze and brass bones circled by copper and silver wiring with a complex motor in the centre of his chest. The skin, like the pale red pants and black shirt he wore, was just another piece of clothing—a piece of fashion, to allow him to look as if he were part of the world.
“Nothing to say?” he said, finally. He remained standing in the doorway to the room, the orange light behind him bathing him in an artificial warmth. “I came all this way—”
“You should leave.” Her voice was hard. “I don’t want you here.”
“Linette—”
“
No
.”
“I—”
“Mrs. Fraé, please.” Linette turned to the elderly Mortician, who had been watching the exchange calmly. “Can you do nothing?”
“Don’t look to her,” he said, a hint of smugness in his voice. “How do you think I am here? She left the door open. She agreed to my plan to meet you here.”
Mrs. Fraé smiled faintly, apologetically, and Linette felt the betrayal deeply. It was true that she did not follow the same faith as the Mortician, and that her tattoos were about grief, not God. Her words were a closure she could not get elsewhere in life, but she had begun to trust the older woman as she trusted few. As the work on her back drew to an end, Linette had felt a bond with Mrs. Fraé, and to feel that connection severed so sharply, so quickly, so instantly, hurt her more than she would have ever considered.
“I thought seeing him would help,” Mrs. Fraé explained. “You have an irrational—”
Linette jumped off the table and stalked towards the door. Her body was tense as she approached him, but her gaze held his, and she knew,
knew
, that if he touched her, she would lash out.
“Linette, please, listen—” The murmur of his body grew louder when he opened his mouth. “Please. Stop. Listen to us.”
His hand moved to her, but she reacted quickly, slapping it aside. “Don’t touch me,” she hissed. She could feel her grief and anger mixing, close to hysteria, and she fought it back as best she could to retain her control. “Don’t ever touch me. Never. Do you understand?
Never
.
Don’t come anywhere near me. I know your kind and you may think you’re someone I know, but you are not. You’re not him. He’s
dead
. You’re just the copy of him. You’re nothing but a tool—an object. Something to be used. Something to be sent in to kill men with. Something that can pretend that its dead so that you can sneak in like an assassin and kill them without remorse. Something that can switch off every emotion because it is just a wire. Something that lets me switch off my emotions. Something that lets me kill one, kill ten—kill fifty! Something that allows me to kill as many people as I please because—”
“
Linette
.”
“
Because
you make death meaningless.”
Silence. His mouth opened, the hint of growling mechanics growing into an artificial shout, but she shouldered out, bashed past him, threw him off balance with his new, heavy weight, and his voice did not emerge. Her damaged arm throbbed in a sharp, renewed pain. Good, she thought. Good. She wanted to feel the pain. The pain would stop the tears, would hide the hurt, the betrayal, and if, perhaps, while she stalked along the streets of Issuer back to her house . . . if perhaps tears slipped out from the corners of her eyes, then she would know it was the pain in her arm, and nothing else.
For all the differences we have, for all the difficulties that we have faced since your return, Linette, I want you to know that I am still dedicated to us. To preserving us.
Antony.
The tears had stopped by the time Linette reached her house, but her body was covered in a sheen of sweat, as if it had begun to weep silently now that her eyes were dry.
She was conscious of the twin shapes of the Ovens behind her, and the finality that they represented. It was a small comfort, and as she stood at the side of her house and gazed back at Issuer, with its barely populated streets that were threaded together by shadowy lines of electricity and punctuated by bronze windmills, she took that comfort for as much as she could. Even though the city had betrayed her—no, not Issuer itself, but a part of the city, part of its trade, its life—the Ovens sat, unmoving, waiting, a period that put everything into perspective for her. A period that gave her security. She took from the Ovens everything that she could, and when she entered the house finally and saw
his
letter, leaning against the kettle just as it had before, her previous anger and hurt failed to rise.
She could throw it away, and knew, perhaps that she should. She could rip it, cut it up, drown it, burn it . . .
And yet, despite herself, she did not.
The Surgeon arrived atop an old cart drawn by crystal-headed horses.
Mother insisted that we bury her daughter in the dirt and so we did, though we were unable to protect the barren soil she lay in.
On the day of her burial, I stood with my brother, Henry, beneath the red midday sky and dug into the dirt with one of the shovels that he had made. Neither of us had our Mother’s faith, but we worked as diligently as if we did. The air was still and humid and the blades hit the ground with hard, blunt punches. Mother sat in her mechanical wheelchair beneath the shade of a bronze parasol, her thin, pale skin marked with faded words that were tattooed across her in a history of unshed, blue tears. I could read the words, vaguely, as they were words that had been shrunk and combined with others, to the point where, untrained as I was, I became lost in the words that were not the names of my siblings and I. Through her cancer ravaged vocal cords, Mother whispered to the expensive cherry-red wooden coffin beside her and, though she could not raise her voice anymore, her manner of hunching and hand movements suggested a privacy of words that I could only imagine all parents said to their children once they had passed on. Words that are kinder, gentler, and perhaps more wise and knowing in this conversation than any they had had in life. At least, I hoped those words were being passed. Mother’s conversations were without haste as it took Henry and I five hours to dig a grave deep enough for her, but shallow enough for us so that when we returned in the evening, we would not spend the entire night re-digging. My mother, as I said, had faith in a God, a faith that was dying in her, yes, and a faith that Henry and I wished had died before our sister, Fiona. Pragmatists, we knew that dirt burial meant that she would be dug up by body snatchers and sold to Surgeons for body parts. Fiona’s skin, like Henry’s and mine, was unmarked. That meant she had no history. She was clean, but for the wasting that had killed her. It would take a day for a snatcher to arrive. Maybe two. She would be stolen before the week was over, certainly. Yet we did not wish to upset Mother, frail as she was, so we dug according to her wishes, knowing that we would return in the evening to take Fiona’s body down to the Ovens in Issuer, two days away. Afterwards Henry and I would sit outside the soot-encrusted monoliths and watch as the fat ashes of the weekly dead spilled out across the dry, cracked riverbeds that lay in the shadows behind.
The sky was red when we finished, red like freshly spilled blood as we lowered the coffin down, said our words, and wheeled Mother over the dust-stained trails out of the graveyard. And it was red like dried blood when we returned in the night without her.
Henry and I navigated the cemetery silently, the electric brass lamp that I held a weak yellow eye to guide us. My Brother, jingling metal with every step, carried the shovels and stretcher over his broad, muscular back without complaint. My own body ached from the unaccustomed work. In addition to the digging we were about to return to, I had, just before, bribed the man at the gate. He was covered in blue tattoos stronger than Mother’s and had a mechanical monocle over his left eye. My bribe had been to close that eye while we came and left. We did not fear the authorities, but we had no desire to upset Mother should it be reported to her. With the eye closed, she would never know.
That bribe, I was to learn quickly, was not necessary. In the artificial light, and with tombstones stretched like paid mourners around us, we came upon the already opened and violated grave of our sister.
“She’s gone.” Henry spat in disgust and dumped the shovels and stretcher on the hard ground. “She wasn’t here more than a handful of hours.”
I approached the edge of the grave, looked down: the wooden cover had been broken half off and Fiona was truly gone.
“Bastards,” Henry repeated behind me. “Bloody bastards. What’re you looking at?”
Quietly, I said, “Her clothes.”
“What do you mean? Her clothes are still there?”
They lay half in the shadows of the coffin and half beneath the loose dirt. I swung the lamp down and my eye caught the flash of a bracelet.
“She’s naked,” Henry said. His voice had been drained of its anger and in its place was a bewildered, almost naïve sense of disbelief. “What kind of man would want a naked girl who died of starvation?”
I eased my way down into the hole. “Snatchers do not care about the way one has died.”
“Why strip her?”
I could not begin to understand it. I picked up the bracelet. Beneath it was a necklace, the chain broken. “They did not take the jewellery, either.”
“Do you think they’ve sold her?”
Beneath the necklace a ring with a piece of jade in it.
“
William
,” Henry demanded.
“I do not know.” I pulled myself out of the grave with Fiona’s jewellery deep within my pockets. The three pieces that she had loved most stabbed at my thighs. If they had drawn blood, I would have understood. “She has been dead for three days. In another seven she’ll be useless to them.”
“Ten days.” He rubbed his thick hands over his face, trying to push away the grief and concern and anger that ran across him like spilled blood. Lowering his hands, he said, “How will we even be able to find her? I’ve no idea where to begin.”
“We will need a Mortician.”
“We’re not their people. They only look for marked people. They won’t help us.”
Staring into the empty grave, I replied quietly, “I know of one that will.”
He erected pavilions beneath the red sky while we marvelled at the sight of the horses’ brains, clear as our hands in their heads.
Henry and I parted outside the bronze gates of the graveyard. He climbed into a passing carriage, the shovels wrapped in the empty stretcher, and disappeared into the sound of gears and the smell of oil as two mechanical horses pulled his carriage down the paved road. Atop, the driver slowly diminished in a black and greasy smear.
Despite my weariness, I was pleased to see Henry leave. He was my brother, but while we were family, we lived very different lives, and there were parts of mine I did not wish for him to learn about. Henry had earned a fine reputation as a metal artist, his skills in demand more than ever as the population of Ledornn grew and the industrialization of the country rose with it. He was serious and dedicated to his profession and had even bought a small factory to produce his work. I, on the other hand, had none of these traits. I was frequently unemployed, had no real marketable skills outside the odd book review I wrote, and relied, as even I will admit, too readily on Mother’s money for survival. However, unlike Henry, I was a man with weaknesses and loves not supported by society, most of which I had kept private for the family’s sake, and wished to continue to do so. I did not want Henry to meet Jonas, the Mortician, and learn about the aspects of my life that had introduced me to him. He would be able to guess at the first of those reasons, even now, but I did not want him to know how I planned to force Jonas into doing what I wanted.
Jonas lived in a large flat in the City of Ledornn, which, from the graveyard gates, was marked on the horizon by a sharp tangle of fiery red light that sat like a jewel in an uneven black crown. It was a long walk from the gates, but I found a second carriage before long. The short, greying driver nodded at my directions, and pulled his tattered black coat tightly around his thin, tattooed frame. He jammed his foot down on the accelerator and the mechanical horses took off in a burst of steam while he hugged the long steering wheel. Inside the sparse carriage, I dozed off. It was uncomfortable on the flat, ripped cushions and did nothing to improve my physical disposition by the time I had reached my destination, but I did feel somewhat rested. After paying the driver, I stood on the street and stretched and twisted my body, trying to bring it back to shape. Drunken men and women passed me and one of the latter shouted a greeting. I waved, despite not knowing her. Once they had left, I crossed the street and entered a narrow alley.
On either side, soot covered buildings reached up seven floors. Scars of light shone feebly from the wounds. Within minutes I had stepped into a narrow stairwell and was deep inside the building on my left. The railings of the stairwell gave me the impression that I was climbing through a mouth of broken teeth—though if I was climbing out of danger or into it, I was not yet sure, but for Fiona it did not matter. I had shared everything with her—including my relationship with Jonas.
Finally, I reached the fifth floor and a door with the number 86 on it. I knocked. It was late, but I knew Jonas would be awake.
The door cracked open a moment later. A single, dark green eye stared out. “William?”
“Yes. Can I come in?”
A pause.
“It is urgent, Jonas.”
The door swung open.
Jonas was a big man: tall, and made from bones too sizeable for his skin, which had left his body with the taut, stretched impression of undernourishment. He was not wearing a shirt, but even had he been, I would have been able to tell anyone who asked that his whole body was as bony and thin as his arms suggested, for it was a body that I knew intimately. Jonas’ face was similarly formed, and it did not suggest a kind man: it was defined by slashes: cuts made to signal a mouth that was pressed into a straight line, and dark eyes that squinted beneath heavy black eyebrows. He had thick hair that was never combed and a thin, scratchy beard that he was unable to grow into fully, and which he shaved with a straight razor every fourth or fifth day. The cold impassiveness that was in his face was not only contained there, but spread through his entire body, as if the black tattoos that ran across his arms and chest had been burned into his skin as a brand by his parents when he was a child. Certainly it was how the first had been done.
“What do you want, William?” Without waiting for my answer, he turned his back on me and walked down the dark hall and into the pale blue light of the main room. “It’s been three months. I wasn’t expecting to see you again. If you’ve come to buy—”
“No.” I closed the door, followed. “I have not. I did not expect to return.”
He sat down carefully on one of the two old, brown cloth chairs that were in the spartan room. It smelled of antiseptic and dried flowers. The door leading into his workroom was closed. Next to the chair was a small pile of books—his reading for the evening, for Jonas was not a man who slept much. “So,” he said, “we agree. You weren’t meant to return.”
“You are a violent man, Jonas. My mistake was that I did not see it earlier.” I sat on a chair opposite. “But I am not here because of you and I.”
“No?”
“My sister has died.”
Jonas did not react with sympathy or disinterest. Instead, he waited, his green eyes still in patient knowledge that there was more to come. Beneath that gaze, I told him what had happened. At the end, I said, “I will not see her used by Surgeons, Jonas. I will not have her turned into the clothing for someone too rich to know when to die.”
“That’s always been a strange belief for you,” he said. “You’re too rich and too clean to hate it, but yet, like your kind, you are an atheist.”
“I have no desire to live in a body of bronze organs.”
“So you have always said.”
“So I have,” I replied evenly. “Will you find her body?”
“It’s easier to find a body that I have tattooed, or a body that has returned.”
“Is it beyond you?”
His dark eyes disappeared in a slow, thoughtful blink, and then he said, “No.”
“I want you to find her.” I tried to keep the desperation from my voice. “Please, Jonas. I can’t let her be used. She feared it more than death. Name your price.”
“No.”
I continued, “The things that were done—”
“Stop.” The coldness of Jonas’ gaze fractured with thin cracks of an emotion I had not thought to see; but it was mixed with resentment and anger, emotions that were more expected. “I will find her, William. I am not a cruel man, no matter what you’ve thought. I know I treated you badly. I know that I hurt you—hurt you physically. I am not proud of it. But, at the same time, it gives me no pleasure to know that you would use it against me.”
“She was my sister,” I explained. “There is nothing I wouldn’t do for her.”
But before long, he called us inside, where he revealed veins of silver and hearts and lungs of bronze and blades that pierced skin in shapes and sizes that we had never seen before.
I returned to Mother’s house shortly after. There was nothing for me to do, Jonas said, though I suspected that he did not want me around. He talked of regret, but neither of us had touched, and though we had passed close enough to smell each other (he in that blend of oil and chemicals and sharp after shave) the distance between us was indefinable. We stood at opposite ends of the world. We stood as strangers. We stood behind walls. When Mother’s dark house appeared before me, I had listed more than a hundred ways in which we were apart, but it was the barren gardens and barred windows and smooth, soot stained brown stone that sat beneath the red-brown sky that gave my thoughts form. One of us was that house. With a faint sigh, I entered and walked through darkness to my bedroom, but stopped at the bottom of the stairs as Ellie, Mother’s maid, approached. A slim girl, dark haired, olive skinned. She had thin, delicate black words tattooed up her left arm, which disappeared beneath her black shirt. Her bare feet skimmed across the tiles, clean beneath the cuffs of brown pants.
“It’s late,” I said. In her hand she held a glass of water with a faint orange tint to it. “Is Mother fine?”
“She does not sleep well,” Ellie replied. “This will help her.”
We began walking up the stairs. “I want her to have every comfort. She’s—I cannot lose more of my family.” I paused, the emotion embarrassing me. Ellie did not appear to notice. I said, “What is that?”
“A sleeping draught of sorts,” she replied. “A herbalist brought it over yesterday.”
Mother’s room was stuffy and dark. Leaving the pale light of the hall, it took me a moment to find her, lying on her side with a thin blanket over her. I could hear her heavy breathing and her whispered words—a thank you, I believe—to Ellie. The young maid nodded and beckoned me over before leaving with the now empty glass. I sat down next to the bed and gazed at Mother’s old, wrinkled face, slightly slack from fatigue and, perhaps, the beginning of the drugs in her drink.