Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy (23 page)

It has not been easy, Linette. It is true, yes, that I have not been in the best health, but your hatred towards the advancements in our society have made our lives — our illnesses and injuries — more difficult than they should be. Neither of us can heal with your attitude.

For you, it is your arm that bothers you. Why would it not? The machete of an escaped prisoner splintered the bone and it is now held together by steel rods. It will take years to heal, if ever it does, and it bothers you greatly. The obvious solution to your injury was a replacement, which was offered by the army Surgeons, but you rejected this — and you have since rejected anything that the Surgeons have been able to offer that takes away what you are born with. You tell them (and you tell me) that it is unnatural, that it is not right.

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 in between a dozen smaller houses of varying brick colour. Her building had three bronze windmills around it, two on the roof, and one larger piece cemented at the back, and which towered over all others on the street.

At the bronze door, Mrs. Fraé, whose hair, it appeared, had only 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 pleasure to see you.” Mrs. Fraé’s deep voice sounded as if it should emerge from a larger woman. “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 door, 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 them. “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 that the elderly had. Had she arrived later, and the woman had been engaged, she would have had to wait, for once a Mortician began leaving 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 and 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 mostly. 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 rationalise 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 that 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 pointlessly. 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, for which 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 of 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 only served 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 and 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 else 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 it’s 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 past, 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 corner of her eyes, then she would know it was the pain in her arm, and nothing else.

•

For all the differences we have, for the 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, the period that put everything into perspective for her. The 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.