by Anthony Huso
Finally the door in the pit swung wide and a man in a white apron, the one who had been talking, came out. A fringe of black hair went around the back of his head from ear to ear but his dome shone like fleshy glass beneath the lights.
Two boys, who appeared to be no more than fifteen years apiece, followed him into the room. All three ignored the whispering crowd. Like debunkers at a séance they unrolled their equipment. Cloth bundles unfurled to reveal an array of glittering blades and forceps. Hooks and sponges.
The crowd murmured excitedly while the man in the apron checked the hoses and then reached down to unstopper a drain in the center of the floor.
A metal contraption in a square frame near the rack of glass bulbs began to hum as one of the boys flipped a switch. Chemiostatic lights flared up like emeralds in the twisted brown guts of the machine. Wires and slender hoses were attached with grim decorum.
Finally the surgeon stepped to the middle of the room and addressed the crowd.
“Ladies and gentlemen.” His voice sounded thin and tired. “I am Dr. Billium. Welcome to this evening’s surgery. I am sure you have all been warned about the graphic nature of what you are about to witness; therefore if any of you should begin to feel light-headed or ill, please remove yourself from the lecture hall at once. There will be no refunds. You are free to talk during the operation but I ask that you keep all conversations to a whisper. Any more and I will have you removed at once.”
As the surgeon spoke a large man wheeled a wooden gurney in.
Everyone gasped except those who had previously been to Grouselich Hospital.
A gray man lay atop the wooden tray like something crammed in a shoe box, arms restfully at his sides. His eyes were closed and his body seemed hairless.
“This man is not dead,” said Dr. Billium, “he has been administered vapors by means of a cloth mask. He is sleeping . . . very deeply.”
The surgeon demonstrated his patient’s insensibility by prodding the bottoms of his feet with a sharp metal pointer.
One of the boys dropped a scalpel into a bottle of antiseptic.
The tension mounted.
In the crowd above, a group of four women huddled together under very deep hoods. They were hardly watching what happened below. They were whispering in the rolling rhyming syllables of Withil.
“Whetoo brithou frumoo Aogi?” asked one of the witches.
Translation was straightforward for those who knew the trick. “Whetoo brithou frumoo Aogi” became: “What breath from Gig?” or, “What did Giganalee say?” The reply spoken by a second witch translated as, “To leave Stonehold. We cannot stay if Megan casts her hex . . . if the Pandragonians fail in their negotiations.”
There were two half-sisters and two Sisters. All of them were young and pretty though their hoods made facial features practically irrelevant.
The Sisters were both in the Fourth House, a respectable position that had taken them between twelve and fifteen years from the age of six. Their names were Miriam Yeats and Kendra Liegh. The half-sisters’ names were completely unimportant. Only one of them even spoke.
“I do not think the Pandragonians will succeed,” Miriam said in Withil. She had golden hair and eyes like beads of polished mahogany. “Giganalee suspects they will buy the transumption hex.”
Though her skin was Pandragonian, Miriam had been born in Miryhr and her only interest in the Empires of the South was finding a way to expand the Sisterhood into them. She had climbed through the Houses with astonishing speed. The Fifth was almost within her grasp. If only she had reached it earlier she might have been a candidate for replacing Megan.
But Megan’s eye was fixed on Sena as Miriam and every other Sister knew. The fact that Sena had reached the Sixth House so young reeked of pseudonepotism but when Sena graduated and Megan welcomed her to the Seventh, shockwaves traveled through the north as though a bomb had been dropped.
Miriam had quietly watched Megan’s favoritist act as she placed Aislinn’s daughter among the Sisterhood’s highest elite. Less than one percent of the Sisterhood resided in the Seventh House. Not even Megan was among them. Sena, talented as she was, had not been tried. Her rank had been gifted rather than earned.
“Trans-what? What kind of hex?” asked the half-sister. Her Withil was rusty.
“It’s nothing you need worry about,” whispered Miriam. She used the slang with expert efficiency, shortening her sentence to three words. A man in a stylish coat overheard it and gave her a curious glance. Miriam noticed him. She didn’t need an annoyed or curious bystander trying to decipher her Withil. She smiled at him and, with a fake accent, told him she was Ilek.
The man took her diversion like a compliment and flirted back, a bit too loudly. He got a look of warning from the surgeon. When he glanced back to grin sheepishly at Miriam, she was ignoring him. He adjusted his arm on the railing and focused once more on the slippery scene below.
The surgeon had slit the man’s belly and clamped it open under the lights. Subtle movements occasionally rippled through the mass of entrails that packed the cavity, causing men and women to swoon.
Large attendants near the doors dragged them quietly from the room.
“This is the liver,” Dr. Billium was saying. “An organ for cleansing the blood.” He pointed to a dark shape while the man’s life ran through tubing, feeding out from his body into the brown chemiostatic machine. Another tube returned the blood after some dubious treatment, sluicing it back in. Several of the glass bulbs had been hooked up to his arms by means of needles held in place with elastic bandages; they dripped clear fluid through the pink-orange hoses to his veins.
From what Dr. Billium was saying, it seemed that a floating rib and a strange ossified mutant rib from his zygomatic process had grown down into his soft organs and was causing him pain.
The surgeon wiped his hands on his lapels and lifted a bone saw from the table.
“There’s something afoot in Isca,” whispered the half-sister. “Something strange going on in the Court.”
“Unless it has to do with the book, forget it,” hissed Miriam. “If Megan is forced to cast the hex . . . you don’t want to be here when it happens.”
“It will look a bit odd if I let a flock of fifty pigeons loose at once,” said the half-sister.
“It can’t be helped. You’ll be leaving anyway. No one will have time to send an inquisitor. You’ll be provided new positions in Wardale or Yorba.”
Miriam watched the half-sisters. She could tell their hearts had sunk. They would take their children of course, bundle them up in the middle of the day while their husbands were working. Some would leave a note behind, others nothing.
“But Ghoul Court!” insisted the half-sister. “There’s something going on. Something to do with the brickyard . . . and the old brewery. A squad of watchmen were sent last Day of Dusk. They found nothing but I’m sure the Willin Droul are holding meetings there.”
Miriam grew interested enough to clarify. “The Vindai brewery?”
The half-sister nodded.
“I’ll look into it myself,” said Miriam. “But I want everyone else out of the Duchy.”
Placated, the half-sister grew quiet. Miriam instructed her subordinates to wait until the surgery had come to its conclusion.
The gray man had endured a much larger incision than was necessary for the sake of showmanship. The good doctor had cut him neck to nuts in order to show off all his vital organs. The poor had no choice. Unable to pay for their own care, they signed papers allowing the hospital to sell tickets to their “event.”
He was stitched up and rolled away while puddles of blood dribbled down the drain in the center of the floor.
Sickened and dizzy and strangely elated or depressed, the spectators were ushered out with a definite feeling that they had gotten their money’s worth.
From the darkened court, lit mainly by the tube of ebbing fluid, the four witches parted without a word. They vanished into alleys and ove
r bridges, becoming part of Isca’s degenerate underbelly, heading off to spread word of their exodus.
Back inside, one of the fifteen-year-old boys began sponging up the rest of the show.
Three miles through the urban sprawl of South Fell and Thief Town sat the Murkbell Opera House.
Only half a mile from Ghoul Court, the opera house stood among the canals of Murkbell with a kind of gray and sinister splendor. Romantics could approach the opera by boat, poled along the avenues.
There were sections of Murkbell that still stood in rarefied grandeur (the opera house being one of them) and many historians and antique collectors lived in crumbling opulence along the borough’s southern stretch.
As the largest borough in Isca, Murkbell had room for diversity. From the black confusion of Vog Foundry—which seemed to crawl out of Growl Mort like something hideous and half-dead—the industrial loll of noxious factories and warehouses full of coal gave way to tenements near the wasteyard in Brindle Fen.
South and west, the numberless network of canals were cleaner, dragging discarded newspapers and empty bottles along their bottoms rather than the sediments of heavy industry. Except for Bragget Canal, which came out of Ghoul Court, the waters were lucid and gleaming and reflected the ostentatious houses of the very eccentric and the very rich.
Like many of the other buildings, the Murkbell Opera House had been built when Isca was young. It rested on enormous stone piers that supported it like a dollhouse on a pair of unseen sawhorses, allowing it to straddle forgotten sewers and vaults that now served to collect most of the city’s rainfall.
The capacity of the vaults was sufficient that Isca’s sewers had never needed extensive redesign. They sucked floods down an ineluctable network of straws like a fat girl at a soda fountain and pushed them through turbines toward the bay where powerful geysers of odious water gushed into the sea.
The same night the witches met at the surgery, after the curtain came down on Er Krue Alteirz and the hundreds of candles in the chandelier had been extinguished, the manager walked the halls of his opera.
Reddish-orange light fixtures cast tangerine glows across walls the color of exotic olives. Russet shadows depended from blackened boxes in the theater walls; frescoes filled plaster ovals across the baroque ceiling.
The masked ladies who sold concessions had gone home. The huge brass beehive with its gauges and pipettes serving flavored soda and whipped coffee had been cleaned out and rolled into a brooding corner. The stage lights were dim. The actors had vanished, scurrying off to various parties held in historical penthouses and rooftop pubs that glimmered across Murkbell’s cruel skyline.
Mr. Naylor, the opera manager, walked his empty establishment with keen pink eyes. Like cheap glassy buttons, they seemed as unreal as they were ugly.
He blinked them constantly, wetting them many times a minute as he searched the opera for a dawdling janitor or any other kind of trespasser. He moved with his hands perched awkwardly on his hips, smacking his mouth as though he needed a drink. His tongue was pasty and sticky with spit. His pink eyes were fiendishly sharp.
He stopped to check his pocket watch. It was after midnight. One-something. He didn’t bother to tell the exact minutes.
He descended a black stairwell without light and walked stiffly across the ornate carpet of the ground floor. When he seemed satisfied that everything was secure he stopped and stood in the foyer for a long time, listening to the quiet.
Finally he turned and stalked down an obscure corridor that led beneath the stairs. It was filled with buckets and mops and push brooms and bottles of wax. Mr. Naylor unlocked a short door, barely four feet tall, at the back of the passageway. Like a grasshopper folding its legs in impossible compression he climbed into the cramped space, forcing his body down between his legs and bending his neck in such a way that it looked like he had been murdered and stuffed inside. His hand reached out and pressed a square button on the wall then quickly withdrew like a tentacle, afraid of being severed.
The button clicked and a dull banging motor that filled the space with the smell of burnt grease slowly unwound the service elevator on its frayed and shaky cable, sinking Mr. Naylor into questionable depths.
He was quite uncomfortable, the descent excruciatingly slow. He smacked his mouth and waited patiently as the elevator trembled slightly and the banging motor strained.
There was no light. His pink eyes couldn’t see a thing.
When the ride finally ended he pushed open a crude hatch, much different than its walnut-paneled twin far above, and stepped into a dark space, grasshopper legs unfolding.
He stood in an immense barrel vault similar to the secret meat rail Caliph had ridden with Mr. Vhortghast. This, however, was better lit with candles and phosphorescent fungus and odd lights that seemed to issue from below the waterline.
Mr. Naylor walked along a cement platform, having picked up a candle box to light his way. He descended some steps into the water and sloshed toward an island of rounded brick that raised its slippery hump above the lake of sewage, shoes instantly ruined.
“Cut that light you muck!” said a voice from the island. It was a hideous garbled voice, barely capable of human articulation. Mr. Naylor tossed the candle box into the lake as if it had been crumpled wax paper from one of the sandwich shops on Freshet Way. It sank almost immediately. The light went out.
A vague stink issued from the darkness at the top of the domed island. Much different from sewage. It stank like rotting salmon—a stench that gripped Mr. Naylor with fear. Perhaps one of them had come. One of the flawless!
“Lift your shirt, muckety,” said the same ruthless voice. Mr. Naylor obeyed. His pink eyes were getting used to the gloom. He could make out dark shapes crouched around the slick crown of the island, buttery with fungal growths. He hunkered down to join them after eyes better than his had found the tattoo above his navel.
Another shape started burping. Hot, reeking blasts erupted noisily into the already close air.
Several eructations followed, resonant and deep. Soon the island was moaning with them, guttural and melancholy sounding. They were like the sounds of strange frogs, sad and pitched. Changeable. Now like something gasping through a reed. Now like great volumes of slow wind yawning through the sewers.
Mr. Naylor knew the sounds traveled for miles. He had overheard a man at the opera telling another man about his singing toilet. How he had felt the reverberations in his ass and leapt up, the Herald and his smoke still in hand, looking fearfully into the water as though something might reach out and grab him. “It sang,” he said. “Like a drafty window, sort of, but I’m telling you: my toilet sang.”
Mr. Naylor pictured the man after several ineffective flushes, watching the bowl continue to vibrate, holding his breath and straining to hear the very faint and secret sounds of the Iscan Council of the Wllin Droul.
Mr. Naylor was not participating as much as the others. His weak body could not produce the sounds that the other Council members could. Thankfully, none of the flawless were here tonight. He did not relish the chance of being randomly eaten.
Mr. Naylor did not participate but he did pay close attention. They were telling a story he had already heard about one of the flawless that had walked lines to the Porch of Sth in search of the book. One of the flawless had been beaten back because the book’s owner had made a pact with The Hidden.
“She has it! She has it!” bellowed one of the black shapes. Its language was not spoken in anything resembling human form, but Mr. Naylor understood.
“How can you be sure?” moaned another.
“I told you, word has come from Yloch. They verified the story.”
“Yes, but we’ve heard nothing from them for decades and now they want us to storm Isca Castle? How do they know she’s coming here? How do they know anything at all?”
“Those in lung know. If those in lung find out we are loath help—”
“We are not loath to help.” The amo
unt of phlegm in the voice made it seem like the speaker would choke. “I do not even want to talk about such a thing. We will help. We must help. We have sat useless for centuries and now when word comes, we try to pretend that we know better? Even these brainless mucks are smart enough to listen and obey.”
Mr. Naylor took no offense at the speaker’s words. His pink eyes could not quite penetrate the gloom.
“So . . . Yloch says she’s coming. Fine. If they say she’ll be in the High King’s Castle, fine. But we’ve already got a muckety in there. Why do we need to organize a raid?”
“The muck is difficult to reach. He has been quiet for years . . . and . . . we don’t want to give away our position.”
Another of the creatures made a bubbling sound. The equivalent of “Hmmmm.” Then it spoke. “I wonder. The opera muck might be able to give us a third chance. Why not let him have a go at getting it for us?” Mr. Naylor grew even more attentive now that they were specifically discussing him. “If she winds up staying at the castle she’ll certainly attend the opera at some point and if not, then at least we’ve got the other two options.”
The whole gruesome obscure assemblage seemed to mewl and smack their mouths together as though tasting the suggestion.
“Yes. Yes. That’s a fine idea. We’ll let the opera muck try his hand.”
Finally Mr. Naylor spoke.
“Who is she?”
The creatures chuckled at his expense because he had come late and missed a large part of the meeting.
“Some Shrdnae Witch who’s been poking around Yloch. She found the Csrym T! Stupid crawler who thinks she can open it and read it like poetry. She has no idea what it means. None at all. We have to get it back and send it to lung—they’ll know what to do.”
“What is her name?” asked Mr. Naylor.
“Name? Name? Stupid muck. We don’t know her name. But she’ll be Sslî if we don’t get it back from her soon. She’ll be Sslî to us all if we don’t stop her from opening the book.” The thing speaking wrung its hands in a horrid parody of human behavior.
