“Out late,” Mother whispered.
“Yes. Sorry.”
Her tiny fingers fluttered in dismissal. “I cannot judge you.”
“Mother?”
“I cannot.” A sharp intake of breath. “I cannot judge any of my children. No more. I have. I have judged too much.”
I could not reply. Her breathing settled into the pattern of sleep, but I continued to sit in the shadows. If Mother had said that earlier to Fiona . . . but no, it did not pay to think that way. I had to deal with realities. With what had happened. Slowly, I rose and left the room, my own fatigue crashing in on me. By the time I arrived in my room, I could only barely remove my clothes. I slept quickly, but it was a fitful, restless sleep. In the morning, I remembered only that I had dreamed of Fiona’s stiff fingers being massaged in oil by warm hands and, later, painted an old sky blue by brushes made from bone.
The Surgeon was white-skinned and white-haired; and he had eyes such a pale blue that they were ice; and his clothes, a black suit, top hat and shoes, with a white shirt beneath, looked as if they had once belonged to a mortician and not a surgeon.
Fiona was born ten years after me, my father’s last child, his only daughter: a dark-haired girl that took after him in looks and personality in the ways that his sons had never done. Partly due to his inability to understand Henry and me, and partly because she was so much like him, he had loved Fiona the most; and it was for her, and her alone, that he enlisted the skills of a Surgeon when he fell ill.
She had not understood that at the time, but in the years after Mother made sure that the knowledge was used in the cruellest way. Neither Henry nor I could stop her, for she hoarded her pain as proof that she had wasted her youth on a man who had not returned for her. In addition, she had been as horrified as all her children when her husband had returned to the house wearing the body of another man—his birth body so ravaged by cancers that nothing new could be made from it—and his chest humming the faint machine growl defiance to mortality. Mother could see nothing but betrayal in his pale skin and veins of silver, and worse, it was Fiona whom he first approached, Fiona whom he first scooped up and held close to his chest . . . and Fiona who had, of course, responded by screaming, horrified by the sound, the coldness of his touch, and the perversity of her father’s words emerging in a new voice.
On the Wednesday two weeks after his return, the servants found Father’s body lying in the entrance of the house, his mechanical heart ripped out.
Not for the first time, I let my thoughts drift in circles about the symbolic nature that the position of his suicide occupied, as I sat outside
The Baroque Moon
waiting for Jonas. It was a small café, made from red brick and with wide, open glass windows, and a series of small bronze and glass tables out front. Above me, the sky was a dull, flat red, and the wind still, just as it had been for the entire season. It was uncomfortable, but that meant that no ash had been blown into the city, and that the sky was not covered in fumes. I would tolerate the heat to breathe an air that did not clog in my throat, as I had with Fiona before the wasting had forced her to her room. Even then, she had kept a set of bent postcards that showed the old sky, and which she pasted to the walls of her room to show a world that didn’t exist, but a world that even if it did, she could not have walked out into. Beneath that sky of this old world, the seasons had been on show. Browns and yellows and greens: each card held a different combination, a mix of colour that signalled an entirely different world to the one that any of us had been born into. At the time she placed them up, Mother had told Fiona that the cards were a silly fancy, a child’s thing, but she kept them at her side as her diseases slowly murdered her.
Her death was a lot more difficult on Mother than Henry and I had imagined. Fiona’s withering was the physical manifestation of what Mother had done mentally and, as Henry had said afterwards, but quietly and only once, Fiona’s death was more a kindness than cruelty. But the death had caused in Mother a sudden realization of her own mortality coupled with the responsibility of what she had done, and it had sent her into a black depression. It had altered all of us, I guess. I had changed, certainly, a sudden awareness of my responsibility—responsibility that Henry had, perhaps, always been aware.
Before he left in the morning, Henry had informed me that Mother wished to visit Fiona’s grave today and that it was all she wished to do; but he had managed to convince her otherwise, telling her that she needed her rest, and that she should wait a day at least. The truth of it, however, was that we had left the grave ripped open, and he planned to return to fill the hole before she did. He had briefly asked about my night, and I had told him that the investigation had begun, though when he pressed for more details, I only shrugged.
Jonas arrived at the café shortly after I did. He was wearing scuffed red and black boots, old, patchwork brown pants, and a dark red shirt, the cuffs of which had frayed and were open; they revealed the black tattoos that ran down his arms and traced around the back of his hands in circling patterns. With one of those hands he pulled back a bronze chair and sat, smoothly, across from me. Without waiting, I poured him a glass of water. Then I asked him how the night had been.
“Difficult,” he replied, his voice carrying a hint of weariness. “A lot more difficult than I had imagined.”
“Is it impossible?” I asked, unable to keep my concern from showing. “If it is impossible, please tell me. We will find other means.”
Jonas’ long fingers wrapped around the glass lightly, tapping against the clean surface with his black nails. “No, it’s not impossible. Just difficult. I’ve never had to find a clean body before. I’ve found men and women in new bodies, and I’ve found marked bodies. There’s a reason behind both of those—a set of rules I can follow to find each. The Returned go back to their families, their old routines, for a while at least, and marked bodies are stolen to change histories, to be taken to another Mortician who is willing to rewrite the original inks for God. Clean bodies are rare. Rarely buried, rarely stolen. Still, I found a Surgeon who was willing to help us.”
“He was sympathetic?”
“No,” Jonas said shortly.
I had no reply, so he continued speaking: “The Surgeon was a woman who operates a small but expensive theatre on the edge of Ledornn. When I first approached it, I didn’t think of it as anything special. From the outside it was a small, white walled building with a bronze, mechanical garden to keep it clean. Dull flowers shined and tarnished dots slipped from leaf to leaf. One of the first creations of a Surgeon, as you know, and hardly an indication of success. On the inside, however, the floors and walls were polished wood, and there was an elaborate pond set into the far left of the floor. Fat silver and bronze mechanics swam in it. A young Returned sat to the right at a desk, waiting for patients.”
“How did you pass him?”
“I am, as you say, a violent man.” Jonas’ fingers tightened around the glass. “Since it was early and no one else was in the clinic, I found the Surgeon in a workshop out the back. Her name was Catherine. She was a large, clean skinned woman with blonde hair and was not surprised when I entered. She continued her work, soldering wires into the bones of the glass-plated hand before her. As I approached, she explained that the hand was nothing more than a fashion piece—something a client wanted to wear at functions. ‘An expensive accessory,’ she said.
“‘You’re fairly calm,’ I told her. ‘Most Surgeons aren’t around me.’
“‘You’ve made quite the impression on my colleagues in the last few hours. Most were quite terrified to find a Mortician standing in their workshops, having broken through doors and destroyed mechanical eyes. News like that passes around. It passes quicker when it’s reported that you’re looking for a clean body. A young woman’s clean body, at that.’
“‘Do you have it?’
“‘No.’ She withdrew the soldering needle and blew dirt from the end. There was the smell of burnt bone in the room. ‘No, I’m too small a clinic for her.’
“‘But you know her?’
“‘I know the body.’ She placed the needle down on the table, and it let out a small hiss as it touched the wooden stand. ‘A man approached me three, four days ago. He was a young man who wanted the body of a girl who had died of the wasting disease—the same girl you are looking for, I imagine. He had the location of the grave and burial time noted. There was quite a lot of money offered for the body, but it was beyond me in this clinic. I would need another five bodies of the same age to replenish what had been damaged in her death, at the very least, and the equipment to return the skin to a healthy cleanness—I don’t have that equipment. I told him so.’”
“Who was he?” I interrupted.
“She wasn’t given his name.” Jonas finished his glass of water, placed it down, refilled. “Since she didn’t ask my name, I’m inclined to believe her. Besides which, she gave me the name of the snatcher who had been responsible for stealing the body.”
“How did she know him?”
Jonas shrugged. “News travels, I suppose.”
“You don’t think it’s a lie?”
“No. I know him.”
I hesitated, then said, “When are you going to find him?”
“After this.”
“I want to go with you.”
He shook his head, said, “It’s better not to know.”
“I must.” I leaned forward and touched his hand—a calculated gesture, a piece of forced intimacy.
Jonas jerked away.
“I must know,” I said quietly.
“It’ll do you no good.”
“I
must
know—
please
.” The desperation in my voice was quite real. “This cannot be kept from me!”
“You will regret it,” he said.
“There’s nothing I don’t regret already.” My hands fell into my lap, heavy and useless weights. “Nothing.”
“Look at the sky,” he cried out from within his tent. “See its colour? It is the sign that we have been abandoned by that which loved us. That we have been left to rot in the dirt.”
Jonas and I left
The Baroque Moon
and headed into the slums of Ledornn. The streets that we walked shrank and the buildings shuffled closer together, a mouth filled with too many discoloured teeth, with each tooth overlapping another. Lines were strung out between each building, leaving a network of coloured washing and sun faded banners hanging limply over us. The deeper we went, the more the noise of the city increased, with people shouting from windows and children running through the streets. There was a marionette play on one corner. The painted background was of an elaborate building on fire and the sky a slow red stain. On the ground stood The First Surgeon: he held broken bones and rotten meat and tried, desperately, to mash the two together, while telling the crowd in a stuttering voice that they need not fear death, that they need not fear anything anymore.
I was self-conscious as I walked down the streets, aware that my skin was too clean for the neighbourhood, and that I had progressed further into the slums of Ledornn than ever before. Jonas had always lived on the edge, the border where people with money and people without could reach him equally. I had naively believed that it would be no different here than there. Still, I had to know who the man was that was looking for Fiona. I trusted no repetition of the words. The memory of my father’s mechanical heart, her disgust with her body, and the self abuse that she put herself through due to our mother’s words . . . all of this weighed on her when men made advances. And while she had not been unattractive when she was healthy, the wasting of her body did not add to the complexion.
Following Jonas, I walked down narrow alleys, through a small market filled with the sound of voices and cooking meat and the air was saturated in a mix of food and spices. As we continued walking, the spices that I could at first identify disappeared, lost beneath others as we passed new stalls and vendors. Finally, Jonas stopped outside a large hotel made from yellow bricks. It was called
Black Rock
, and was covered in thick, heavy black soot blemishes like dirty handprints. It had a paint-peeling veranda attached to the front that was occupied by three elderly men, each with faded tattoos of blue, black and red that ran up and down their bare arms and around their necks. The strongest patterns ran across their faces and skulls.
The inside of the building was defined by a low wooden ceiling. Beneath it were a dozen round tables, half of them full, and there was a long bar on the far wall. A tall woman with red hair and red and black tattooed hands stood behind it. When she met my gaze, she did so with a hint of curiosity, but it did not linger. It drifted to Jonas, and she nodded respectfully at him. He spoke to her quietly—I stood in the doorway, feeling uninvited, the gaze of every figure in the room on me—and she responded with nods and points and by placing an item in his hand. After that, he turned and motioned for me to follow him up the stairs.
The hallway we entered was narrow and stained with shadows. Jonas indicated that I should be silent as he made his way to the door numbered 6. Gently, he inserted the key into the lock and pushed it open. A tiny room lay behind, barely big enough for the narrow double bed and the chest of drawers next to it, much less for the large man that lay on his back on the bed. He was dressed in thick brown pants and a white shirt, and his feet, which stuck out, were covered in blue and black patterns. His tattoos ran across his thick neck and left cheek in flowing script, and though I could read only little of what was recorded, it suggested that for a middle-aged man he had lived interestingly.
With a swift movement, Jonas stepped up onto the bed. Curiously, the man did not stir. Reaching beneath his shirt, Jonas pulled out a thin bladed knife and then dropped into a crouch above the man, the blade held outwards and pressing lightly against his throat. Still, the man did not stir.
Jonas whispered, “Wake up, Ves.”
The man’s eyes shot open and his body tensed, hands curling into fists, feet digging into the mattress for grip . . . but he did not attack. Slowly, his mouth working around the two syllables of the name, he said, “Jonas.”