Fist shrugged. “I suppose it was wasteful, but I dared not try to bring here all the way out here. Too risky.” He gazed at Marchey, a malicious sparkle in his eyes. “Don’t look so crestfallen, Doctor. Rest assured that Dr. Izzak is still doing her part to hold up the traditions of medicine. As I understand it, she’s part of the concrete footers under a new hospital complex in Djakarta.”
Marchey absorbed this final hideous detail in silence, feeling utterly lost, weak, and doomed, as if buried up to his nose in concrete himself.
Fist cocked his head and adopted a pedantic tone. “Tell me, Doctor, what happens after one of your patients wakes up?”
“They remember,” Marchey answered, his voice drained of all emotion. “They have nightmares. Any patient who sees me afterward becomes acutely hysterical. In the beginning we had several patients nearly die of fright. One actually did, though we managed to revive him.”
Brother Fist clucked his tongue. “Not the basis for a very good doctor-patient relationship, is it? Such a shame that you’re not equipped to properly savor terror. Think how different your life would have been if you were! But I digress. Your patients must be unconscious while you work. Why?”
“In many cases they are that way to begin with, and most surgery is easier to perform on a nonresponsive patient. For the others we soon learned that what we do, and how we look and act in our working trance is so frightening that it’s easier that way.”
“So I’ve seen. One of my assistants had to be kept from shooting the late Dr. Izzak. A devout Catholic, he thought she was possessed by Satan. This extreme deep trance state you work in. Is it absolutely necessary?”
Marchey frowned. “Absolutely? I’m not sure.”
“Hazard a guess.”
“Well, the trance guarantees total concentration. When you first start out you need it to maintain your limb image.” A shrug. “I guess that technically I might be able to get by in a lighter trance now, but going deep helps shut out the reactions of the other medical people, and keeps me from getting too attached to the patient. But I don’t see—”
“Of course you don’t,” Fist replied archly. “No one did until I came along.” He looked enormously pleased with himself. “It’s really quite a wonderful thing, the way your life has been made so needlessly miserable. The irony is even more delicious because you’ll never get to use what I’ve learned on anyone but me,”
There was no way for Marchey to miss the implied message that he would never leave Ananke alive. But at that moment that didn’t matter. Fist was telling him that there was a way around the Nightmare Effect. All he could think was: What did we miss? What did we overlook?
“That’s it, think,” Fist whispered. “It’s in the air before you. Seize it.”
Marchey didn’t need him to push. His mind was working furiously, going over the hints he’d just been given, trying to put them together into the answer that had eluded them for so long.
“You—you’re saying that if the patient is conscious…”
An encouraging nod. “And?”
“And…” He racked his brain, his thoughts going in circles until they tripped over the obvious. The blood drained from his face. It was too obvious— wasn’t it?
He said it out loud, trying it on for size. “And I do my work in the lightest possible trance…”
Brother Fist nodded approvingly, as if he were a student who had given the correct answer to a difficult question. “Bravo, Doctor! You knew all along that your tightly focused concentration creates psychic scarring on a mind made especially impressionable by unconsciousness. What you failed to deduce was that the problem could be remedied by two simple changes in modus operandi.”
Marchey sagged inside. It couldn’t be that simple.
It just couldn’t! That was as simple and obvious as antiseptic procedure, as manual CPR, as the Heimlich maneuver—
—the oldest of which had been in use for just over two hundred years. The others were even newer than that; relatively recent innovations in the long history of medicine. It made perfect sense, and its very simplicity was what had made it so elusive.
He felt his pulse quicken. If this was true—
Everything would change.
No, not everything. The fear and mistrust and despite of other medical professionals would probably remain. He would still be regarded as a lunatic who had willingly mutilated himself to become some sort of bizarre faith healer. That opinion was too deeply entrenched to be changed quickly, if at all.
But he would no longer be forced to work on a blurry succession of faceless, senseless, unplugged meat machines who would remember him after only in their nightmares. He would be able to look patients in the eye before and after his work was done. He would be able to see them smile, see tangible proof that the price he’d paid had been worth it after all.
And that would make all the difference in the world.
“You must be eager to begin, Doctor.’’ Brother Fist purred, wrenching Marchey back to the here and now. “You want to know if this will work or not, don’t you?” It was not a question.
Marchey’s silver hands closed into fists. He nodded. Yes, I have to know.
A moment later he understood just how steep and high the walls of the crucible were built. The creature that called itself Brother Fist had known all along that he would treat him, if not for sake of his Oath or for fear of Scylla, then to see if his deepest desire was truly within his grasp.
Now that it was, and the moment of wonder had passed, he realized that Fist had turned the gift into garbage—if you could call something purchased with the life of a friend a gift—even as he gave it. There was no way for Marchey to use this to heal him and ever feel clean again.
Fist would methodically strip him of everything he loved and believed. He would probably keep him alive to be his personal physician, and to torment by forbidding him to treat those of his subjects who needed and deserved his services. That would be entirely in character.
He found himself pitying the people of Ananke more than ever. In less than an hour Fist had turned him into a helpless puppet, so entangling him in his webs that there seemed to be no way he could ever get free again. They had endured nearly a decade of his merciless machinations.
The old monster was more than a mere madman, more than another tinpot tyrant. He was like some awful destroyer from myth. A Shiva, destroyer of worlds. A gorgon, whose gaze was death. A brilliant, malignant Midas whose very touch spread corruption and ruin. A Circe who warped innocent beauty into monstrosity, just as she had when she turned Scylla—
Scylla. The fair maiden turned into a monster.
Marchey’s mood had been plummeting like a sparrow sideswiped by a supersonic fighter, the ground rushing up at it while tumbling helplessly end over end. But the thought of Scylla put air of possibility under its wings.
What and who had she been before Brother Fist laid his foul hands on her? Could some fragment of that lost soul still remain behind her horrific mask? Was there any way to reach her?
It was only the flimsiest straw of possibility, but there was nothing else within his grasp.
He remembered what she told him. Even if you are alone with him, I will know what you say and do. Was she listening? Hearing all this?
“Yes, I’m ready,” he said slowly. “But old habits die hard. I want you to talk to me while I work.”
“And what shall we talk about?” A death’s-head grin. “Would you like to hear how Dr. Izzak died?”
“Not that,” he answered curtly. The mention of Keri’s death brought back the feelings of hopelessness and defeat he was struggling to rise above. He tried to make his voice flat, uninterested. “Tell me about Scylla.”
Brother Fist settled back in his throne, hands in his lap still wrapped around the gun. He nodded, looking pleased. “Now there’s a wonderful, heartwarming story. A veritable fairy tale! In some ways she’s my most interesting creation.”
—
Scylla’s attention narrowed at the mention of her name, her blood pounding in her ears.
The talk about trances and the rest meant little to her. She had only half listened, her mind still reeling from the new version of her Master’s advent on Ananke. One day-for-night different than the one she knew.
Could it… possibly be true?
If her Master, the font of all truth could lie about who and what he was, then how could she know truth when she heard it? Furthermore, if his being God’s Chosen One was a lie—
—was she a lie?
Living a lie?
A living lie?
She shook her head. “No,” she whispered, trying to push it all away with that one single word.
She knew that Brother Fist had been sent by God to lead them into the grace of perfect faith and righteousness. Knew it like she knew her own name and face.
She was His angel. God had made her to serve Him.
She sought her reflection in one of the screens. There was proof of this truth. Her very form was gilded with Heaven’s power to make her a living instrument of obedience. Her might was an angel’s might. She had been brought down for the express purpose of protecting God’s Chosen One, and to chastise the faithless and punish the sinful. She knew this the way she knew she needed air to breathe; it was obvious and undeniable.
But—
Why did the story her Master told Marchey have this deeply resonating ring of truth? Why had it set loose what seemed to be remembrances of things she had never seen, of faces, of feelings, of frozen moments from a life she had never lived?
Why did her mind keep coming back to the hazy haunting sense image of a voice that might have been her own screaming, of a woman’s face filled with despair as she was dragged away by something so bright that it hurt the eyes. A blank spot, then that face again, crying, pleading, begging her not to—
—not to…
The fragmented memory ended there, like a high, crumbling cliff edge poised over an abyss of deepest darkest horror.
Brother Fist began to tell a story. Her story. The story of her genesis. And the angel Scylla hung on his every word, seeking and dreading revelation.
—
“I had this place fairly well in the palm of my hand, but knew I would continue to need an enforcer. Unfortunately my pet mercy already had too much power for his own good or mine. Worse yet, he was beginning to get ideas. So I—”
The old man paused to give watching Marchey his full attention. He had waited a long time for this moment. Hopefully not too long.
Marchey ignored him. He stood before a high table, sleeves pushed back to his biceps, his gleaming prosthetics crossed before his chest. He began to breathe deeply, eyes closed, effortlessly sliding into that old familiar pranayama. His hands fluttered like silver doves in rhythm with his breathing. The grim expression darkening his face faded as he centered himself.
But instead of letting himself sink into that subterranean state in which he usually worked, he kept himself at what felt like a usable higher level. The rim of the deep cold well.
His eyes opened. There was a nagging urge to sink deeper, down to where habit told him he should go. He ignored it. Bending at the waist, he rested his arms on the table, palms up, hands still and sleeping. Reclosing his eyes, he took a deep breath and let go.
Breathing a sigh of what might have been pleasure, he straightened up and stepped back. His prosthetics remained on the table, inert and lifeless. The silver plates capping his stumps just below the elbows gleamed like mirrors.
He felt relaxed, oddly detached. In deep trance he’d always felt like the beam of a surgical laser, a straight hot true line of will so potent and tightly focused that neither emotion nor personality could fit into its narrow bandwidth.
This was like being in that state between sleep and wakefulness. For the moment, he was at peace. He turned toward his patient-to-be, a bemused expression on his face.
“Talk, old man.” Speaking in trance was a new thing. His voice came out as a raspy whisper. He held his invisible hands up as if after scrubbing for surgery, feeling faint air currents slide through his fingers like silk. That indescribable sensation of being able glittered clear and bright as a diamond inside him.
Brother Fist blinked up at him uncertainly, then recovered his composure by tightening his grip on his weapon. He kept it trained on Marchey’s belly as he drew near, a single slight tremor the only betrayal of his apprehension.
“Where was I?” he muttered. “Oh yes, I needed someone I could trust implicitly. One of the last holdouts was a Kindred named Anya. She had a daughter named Angel. I took Angel hostage. The girl had a birthmark on her back. When I sent it to Anya all rolled up and wrapped with a pretty pink ribbon she caved in.” He snickered. “Of course my telling her that she would next receive the girl’s fingers and toes strung together like pearls may have had some influence on her decision.
“Anyway, Angel’s name made me think. I had set myself up as the Chosen of God, sent to rule and save them. I needed an enforcer I could trust. What would make a more fitting flunky than a Guardian Angel?”
Marchey leaned over Brother Fist and reached, the silver plates of his truncated arms stopping a handspan from the old man’s sunken chest.
Fist licked his lips, his yellow eyes focused on Marchey’s face. He knew that Marchey was reaching inside him, immaterial hands slipping through the heavy fabric of his cassock, through skin and muscle and bone as if they were not there. He knew all about Bergmann Surgery, about how those abandoned silver arms were nothing, even though they had come to symbolize his misunderstood specialty; it was their being put aside that had meaning. They were but a symbol of the flesh and bone each Bergmann Surgeon had sacrificed. He knew how a surgeon’s hands are everything, and how Marchey and his compatriots’ voluntarily having their own amputated had been the first deep cut of their severance from the rest of the medical community. He knew other things as well, things unknown and unsuspected by even the head of the Bergmann Institute.
Brother Fist smiled to himself. He was well aware of how vulnerable he was at that moment. Marchey could be holding his beating heart in his hands, with only the Oath he had mocked keeping him from turning to dead meat in his chest. The risk was small, but delicious, and the irony pure delight.
He felt no pain. The only sensation was a faint soothing warmth drifting gently through his insides. He returned to the telling of Scylla’s genesis, to add another pleasure to this moment.
“So I turned Anya’s daughter Angel into my angel. I tore her mind down and rebuilt it to my specifications. There was a doctor here. I made him imp the eye that lets me see what she sees, file and bond her teeth so she could bite a steel bar—to say nothing of an arm or leg—in half, then install her in my mercy’s exo. He didn’t need it anymore.” He chuckled darkly. “Someone gassed him like a cockroach while he was sleeping.
Marchey changed position, his hypersensitive ur-fingers tracing the convoluted skeinings of his patient’s nervous and circulatory systems upward. Toward the head. Toward the brain. A tight-lipped, disapproving frown shadowed his face.
Form V or mimetic cancer had turned the old man’s thoracic area into a metastatic jungle of blackflowering malignancies. Lungs. Liver. Spleen. Stomach. Kidneys. The list went on and on.
“I turned her into the perfect enforcer and bodyguard. She doesn’t believe she is an angel, she knows it. Her certainty is absolute and unshakable. Every glance in the mirror confirms that certainty. I was the one who tattooed her face, by the way. A most enjoyable art form, in that it is the canvas and not the artist that suffers. Her loyalty is absolute. She will disbelieve her own senses before she doubts me or my orders.”
He had to pause for breath. For the last few months he had not been able to get quite enough air.
“As for the name Scylla, that was a private joke only I was properly equipped to appreciate. When she was ready, I tested her. The first two tasks I gave her were simple. Fir
st I had her kill the doctor who made her what she was. Slowly, and with a certain bloody flair. Then I had her kill her own mother.”
Marchey shook his head, displeased. One of Form V’s mimetic variations was vascular. It insinuated itself into the structure of the patient’s veins and capillaries, replacing healthy cells and mimicking their function. To destroy or excise it would cause vascular collapse.
That was what it had done inside Brother Fist’s cranium. The old monster’s brain was as rotten and tumorous as the abominations it housed. Remove the cancer and he would begin hemorrhaging in literally hundreds of thousands of places.
As Marchey explored the damage, some mental subsystem heard the story of how an innocent girl had been warped into a monster and felt sorrow. Another felt relief that there was almost no chance he would be able to perform a self-damning healing. But for the most part he was in the position of a fireman who has arrived on the scene only to find the house he is supposed to save already completely engulfed in flame.
Brother Fist could not resist fondling the grim bones of his works. “You should have seen it. The expression of shock and horror on her mother’s face was one of the most exquisite things I have ever seen. She recognized her child. She wept. She pled. She cried Angel’s name, but it meant nothing to my creation. Scylla flayed—”
The rest of that grisly description was blotted out by a wall-shuddering reverberating boom, deafening as the thunderclap riding a lightning strike, deep and foreboding as the first trump of the Apocalypse. Books and art objects jittered from their shelves, crashing to the floor.
It came again, this time bringing a stony rain and the tormented shriek of rending steel.
Brother Fist stared past Marchey, his face turning an ashy gray when he saw Scylla standing in the ragged hole where once there had been an armored door.
She was an apparition to strike fear. Dust swirled around her like smoke. Her demonic face was twisted into a terrifying mask of hatred. Her angel eye was aimed at her Master with the deadly intent of a gunsight while her other eye burned with an angel’s wrath and glistened with an angel’s unshed tears.
Flesh and Silver Page 14
