by Dylan Doose
Butcher prevented that from happening by taking the protection money of the citizenship and supplying food for the ghouls both from his own personal stock of fresh meat and by simply returning the pilfered corpses to the mounds he stole them from in the first place.
Butcher dug in a pocket for his key. He placed it in the iron door and gave it a turn. The heavy click of the lock echoed down the corridor.
Torches and lanterns on every wall painted the stone surfaces orange, and the shallow puddle of blood that covered the floor gleamed under the firelight. Stacked in the corners were hundreds of limbs, heads, and torsos. Gaige thought of the many times when he was a student that he had used Butcher’s facility for his own medical research. It was for a greater good, he always told himself, and not some sort of sick curiosity.
He cared for the sick, the sick from the Wastes. He perpetuated this world by keeping its inhabitants alive.
Every time he returned to this place, though, it was harder and harder to convince himself that there was any good in his soul, that there was any good in the whole world. So he told himself nothing.
“Look at the pile, Gaige. He is still alive, the bastard,” Butcher said, followed by a sound that was not laughter, just a terrible noise made in its place.
Gaige squinted, and then he saw the horror. In the mountain of mutilated flesh, there was a torso that still had a head, no limbs. Instead there were iron stumps, burned onto the severed stumps.
“The lads and I have been taking notes when we watch you perform, doctor. It is a marvel, what a man can take before he dies.”
Gaige saved people. Butcher murdered them. But to a man like Butcher, perhaps they were one and the same.
He walked toward the wriggling thing. The eyes were burned out and the mouth was sewn shut. A faint moaning came from the wretch, and at the sound Gaige hated Butcher, he hated that damned city, and he hated himself for the job he still had to do in those dark hours of the morning before the sun rose.
He twisted the handle of his cane, from it drew his sword, and in a surgically accurate and swift motion he slit the mutilated man’s throat. Blood shot from the wound more fiercely than it should have, and Gaige knew Butcher’s men had fed their toy powerful elixirs to keep his heart beating as they chopped him up.
“A bit too far, Butcher, a bit too far,” Gaige said, his voice hollow and without any real reproach.
Butcher stepped beside him. “Nothing is too far in this place, no fate too cruel. One day I will pay for all that I have done”—he gestured at the limbless torso—“just as this shit pile did, and I am ready for that price. I am ready for anything, because in truth, I have come to believe that this is all just some horrid dream, a horrid dream without limits to its depravity.” Butcher indicated the heaps of death around him. “How can this be real? How can any of this be real, doctor?”
Gaige did not answer; he turned away from the corpse with the iron stubs to look at Butcher, who was staring into a torch on the wall. Gaige could see into his eyes and he saw a great fear in them, a great and endless fear.
“I am going to need something fresh if you have anything,” Gaige said, trying to move things along. The urgency of his mission weighed on him now.
Butcher turned from the fire on the wall and looked at Gaige. He made that noise again, the one that replaced laughter. The fear was still in his eyes.
“You can take him.” Butcher pointed to the iron-stumped horror as his feral white smile grew. “For you are the one who just slaughtered him fresh.”
* * *
Note to self: Never again, not ever under any circumstance administer two doses of sanguinum, or mix sanguinum with any other alchemical substance of equivalent, or antagonizing value.
Symptoms: vomiting, haemolacria… my heart is going to burst.
—A note scrawled into Gaige’s Journal by a shaking hand.
* * *
When cooking sanguinum, one must always be sure to not have the slightest bit more than one-tenth of the mixture being Upier adrenal fluid. Every increase will result in furthering severity of haemolacria, bleeding from the eyes, vomiting, heart pain, and sometimes an abrupt stopping of the heart completely. If an adequate dose of adrenallys is administered directly into the heart quickly enough, the heart can return to function.
—Excerpt from The Doctors Cook Book,
by Solomon the Anonymous.
* * *
Chapter Four
The Contract
The wind howled.
“Easy there, Fredrick, easy there,” said Randal in a soothing tone to the mule to keep him from getting spooked.
Fredrick had never gotten spooked before, because Fredrick was chemically altered to be fearless. Randal was not. And so Gaige believed that Randal said this as a way of calming himself before the violence began. It never worked.
The wind howled again, and the things that lived among the shallow graves and sunken tombs howled back.
Randal gave Gaige a weak look, as if asking without words if they could please just stop. Gaige knew better than to allow this, because whenever Randal was given a moment, he started developing severe cases of second thoughts. Though Randal was next to useless, he was better than no second gun at all.
“I gotta fuckin’ piss,” said Randal. “I gotta fuckin’ piss bad.”
“Give me the reins. Piss over the side,” Gaige said.
“The wind. I’ll piss on myself.” Randal shot him a glance. “I don’t want to interfere with the ritual.”
“Don’t call it that.” Gaige growled as he cuffed Randal on the side of the head. “What have I told you about calling it that?” He paused, tamping down his fury. “It is a surgery, a medical procedure, not a ritual of sorcery. Now piss off the side, or piss in your pants, or wait until we get to the location we seek.”
“Which is where, exactly?” Randal asked, despite Gaige’s tone.
“We will mark the bait and put it on the tree that the client specified,” Gaige said, more to himself now than to Randal.
“How did the client get all that stuff for the rit… I mean surgery, anyway? The scent of the man that broke off the engagement with the afflicted? How did he bottle the man’s scent? That is what you told him to do, right? Get you a bottle of the man’s scent?”
“Eavesdropping again, Randal?” Gaige asked without surprise. Randal possessed the stealth of a dawn rooster. “I didn’t tell him to do anything. I told his man that it would be helpful if they could get me the scent of a man that has wronged the patient horribly, and it must be a man she shares a close history with. I did not actually hope that they would provide it, but in my long career I suppose that eventually, everything will happen. So for once, I will not need to track the patient down. The patient will come to us. How the client obtained for me fifteen vials of the man’s blood, sweat, and tears is not our question to ask.”
“Strange thing to say for a man hellbent on discovery, no?” Randal grumbled.
“Obvious question to ask for a man who is a curious idiot,” said Gaige.
“How? How so? You are an asshole, you know that? It is because you are a doctor, so I forgive you. But is curiosity not the foundation of discovery—”
Gaige put up his hand, silencing Randal’s questions.
As if summoned, a low-branched willow manifested from the fog. On its dead arms clung an unkindness of ravens, all of them fine specimens of their species, wide, tall, and menacing. There was an uncanny intelligence in the way they observed, and an impossible union of movement, each head turning in unison, their eyes locked on him. Something nagged at the edges of his thoughts, like he had seen them before, on a tree like this, and it was burning, but the ravens were left unsinged.
He blinked and the thought drifted away.
Gaige pointed Randal toward the tree, off the path, past forty or so sporadically placed tombstones and up a small hill.
“How can you be sure?” asked Randal, unease in his voice, then he dropped
his tone to a whisper. “They’re ominous birds, silently perched, as if they’re the audience waiting for a coming show.”
“I am sure because we were told to find a tree and there is no other tree. Stop the cart,” Gaige said. Randal did, and they stepped down onto the narrow dirt road that ran through the graves. Gaige limped to the back of the cart, which held the bait and the iron casket that Gaige used to transport the patients after their surgeries. Dead or alive.
His leg was aching, screaming at him, and he was glad it was time, for the injection would ease his pain. He opened his coat and took out a syringe filled with the amber fluid that was sanguinum.
“Why don’t you ever let me try any of that fighting juice?” asked Randal as he began loading the five muskets in the back of the cart.
“I thought you had to piss,” Gaige said, postponing the shot. He never took a dose in Randal’s immediate vicinity, for he feared he might lash out at him before he got the effects of the sanguinum under control.
“I do. But I’m curious. I just wanted to see you take it.”
“Do you know what happened to the last man who had your job, Randal?” Gaige asked, as he glowered at his driver. “I’ll tell you. He had a similar curiosity about the sanguinum. He had it for the adrenallys and the moon’s widow, and the Liquanum and the Heccatille, and all my other secrets, Randal.” He paused. “Go piss.”
Randal looked at Gaige, his expression both interested and wary. “What happened to him?”
“He’s dead, Randal, and it was his own fault,” Gaige said, not allowing even a drop of remorse to color his tone.
Randal waited, and when Gaige said nothing more, he finally turned away and hefted the limbless, iron-stumped bait, mumbling that he only got paid to be a driver.
“The vials,” Gaige called after him.
Randal returned, set down the bait, retrieved the vials of scent, set them carefully in the pocket of his coat, and then hefted the bait once more.
“Have a care with the vials,” Gaige said.
“I’m not a child or a fool,” Randal said.
“Debatable on both counts.”
Randal walked toward the tree with the ravens, muttering about bait and piss and doctors who had no respect.
When he was gone, Gaige looked again at the glorious amber liquid before he jammed the needle into his once ruined left leg. It was ruined still, but under the effects of the sanguinum, it was less ruined. He pressed down on the plunger and he thought he might be sick from the severity of the pain that oozed its way into him. It felt like a tide of poison blasted in all directions from the point of the injection.
Then the pain in his leg faded; his heart rate escalated. He began to sweat, bile burning the back of his throat until he fell to his knees and heaved and threw up.
At length he got to his feet, the movement explosive, bursting up like a great bird of prey. It was not merely that he moved as if his leg hadn’t been crippled for the miserable, seeming eternity that was his life, but he had the mobility and capacity that would put to shame a trained sportsman. He could feel every volt of energy shooting through his tendons, and in his vision the world seemed to have been befallen by a redness, so that the gray fog was tinged with crimson, the grass that had been dark green was blackened, every blade of it rimmed in the finest line of red.
His sense of smell changed, not simply intensified but focused, homed in on blood. He could smell Randal’s fear close by, and it was more significant than usual. He could smell the blood of the ravens on the willow. There was no fear in them.
Gaige picked up the hangman’s rope from the back of the cart, approached quickly, his sword cane in his belt now, passing Randal and snatching up the bait as he did.
“Your poor pace is a worrisome blemish on your character, Randal,” Gaige said in passing. Randal said nothing; he just maintained his pace, despite the relief of his burden.
Even when Gaige reached the foot of the tree and tossed the hefty slab of human meat hard upon the exposed roots of the willow, the ravens did not move. They did not caw. And the scent of their blood did not change.
The doctor was not an easy man to unnerve, for in his very particular line of work one must always remain stoic, indifferent to the terrors that reality has to offer. But those staring black-eyed avian watchers beneath the red-clouded sky perched on the dead willow painted the very image of dread; it was the promise of violence, and as Gaige looked at the birds he thought of the lord regent’s man’s words: “She will come to a willow. It will be marked, this tree. Marked with ravens. She will come.”
“I’m coming up there,” Gaige said to the birds as he tied one end of the hangman’s rope around the bait’s neck, and threw the other over the lowest tree branch. Still they did not move.
With the bait twisting in the wind, Gaige grabbed the lowest branch and swung up, then stilled, his gaze on the narrow road.
“What was that, doctor?” Randal asked from a few meters away.
“Hand me one of the vials of scent,” Gaige demanded. “Careful now.”
Randal was at the bottom of the hill and reached one of his hands into his deep coat pocket.
“Got one right here, if I can just…” Randal tried to do three things at once, searching for a thin glass vial in his deep, likely stuffed coat pocket, trying to walk up the hill to Gaige, and looking up at the ominous ravens perched on the willow instead of focusing on the low gravestone in front of him.
As a result he tripped on the gravestone, a stupid look on his face while he fell, his hand still in his pocket. He crashed hard into the ground. There was a hardly audible crack and Gaige winced as he heard it.
It was not a bone—it was the vial.
He could smell the blood that was supposed to be on the bait, the bait with the noose around its neck.
Randal pulled his hand from his pocket and stared at it.
“I’ve gone and cut myself. Bloody thing cracked and cut me.” It was clear by the driver’s tone that he at least somewhat understood the greater implications of what his lazy attention had just brought upon him.
“Oh, Randal, you have really fucked things now,” Gaige said. I can still fix this. He may not have to die.
Gaige sniffed the air and caught it: the scent of infectious rage, his patient, the Lycanthrope.
The information given by the client’s man was correct.
She was coming. She was close.
And Randal was still on the ground.
“Quickly, you damned fool. She is nearly upon us. Arm yourself.” Gaige’s words finally snapped Randal’s focus away from the wound in his hand, his death mark, and sent the driver sprinting with all the effort his young legs could muster toward the muskets on the cart.
Gaige leapt from the tree, and although he felt no pain now, he knew he would pay for these acrobatics later. He drew his sword and his pistol, crouched low, and hid among the tombstones on the hill beneath the tree.
Randal got up onto the cart and shouldered one of his muskets.
Gaige sensed the Lycanthrope coming closer.
This was not supposed to happen like this, Randal, but that is on you.
The last driver had died with malice and treachery in his mind. Randal would die for idiocy. It did not sit well with Gaige.
“Doctor? Where are you? I don’t want to be the fucking bait. That’s what I am now, isn’t it? That’s what the broken vial made me?” Randal cried out as he quickly twisted side to side, looking into the fog for any sign of the doctor or the patient. He was alone with Frederick the fearless, the very mule of stoicism.
Gaige clenched his fists. Every bit of his humanity demanded that he go and save Randal. Every bit of his professionalism demanded that he stay put and see the job through. If luck was on his side, the end of this night would see him do both.
Luck was rarely on his side.
“Shut up. Get a hold of yourself. When she appears, make the first shot count. And don’t fire early.” Gaige scutt
led low, head beneath the wooden crosses and slabs that served as headstones. He paused, taking cover behind one of the large, towering gravestones made of obsidian, monuments to the ones before, thousands of years before. “We must adjust now, because of your incompetence.”
“It was an accident!” Randal protested.
“There are no accidents,” Gaige responded, his every sense attuned to the sounds and smells and whispers of the night.
Enter the beast.
She came at the back of the cart from the fog at such a speed that the vapor shredded and rippled around her. She barreled on all muscle-heaped fours toward Randal, the subject of her fury, thanks to the scent now permeating him from the contents of the broken vial. Gaige had never seen such a Lycan, more a cross between a humanoid and a shaggy golden dog than a wolf.
With his dexterity enhanced, his hands flashed in a blur as he drew from his coat the second syringe of sanguinum and jammed it into his leg. He frothed from the mouth and bit down so hard his gums bled, but the odious effects he had experienced earlier never came with the second dose. The needle came out, the syringe was tossed, and he rose from the graves. With equal speed he charged to intersect his patient.
Randal fired, too early. The musket cracked and the shot was true. The patient’s golden fur streaked red as the musket ball ripped through her shoulder and out the back. Yet she was not slowed.
Gaige moved faster.
Not fast enough.
She leapt for Randal, and with a strike of such speed it was nearly invisible she clawed him in the gut, blackened nails digging deep, and hurled him from the cart.
Gaige was steps behind her. He raised his three-shot pistol and fired all three rounds into the patient’s back before she could rip the incapacitated Randal to shreds. This was enough of a threat to turn her around to face the doctor. He tossed the pistol down and slipped his right hand into the brass knuckles he wore on his belt. The Lycan lunged and slashed a claw. Gaige quick-stepped under the strike and landed a shallow slash on the patient’s belly. She was bleeding profusely already from the four gunshots. He would have to act quickly if he was going to keep her alive.
