by Heidi Belleau;Ally Blue;Kari Gregg;Peter Hansen;Laylah Hunter;Brien Michaels;Sam Schooler
“The Brotherhood of She Who Turns the Page isn’t much for blessings.”
“Well, my youngest would’ve been born without a soul if it hadn’t been for your brothers, so I can’t think less of you for not being the blessing sort,” she replied, joggling her son on her hip. “We’ve ordered two ducks roasted, and you’re welcome to share.”
He hadn’t brought a change of clothes, but he could brush off his coat, lather his chin enough to shave, and press a cold spoon to the hollows under his eyes; that nearly made him presentable. The women in the next sleeping car were certainly too well-bred to comment on his rough looks, and their children too well-raised.
“My wife says you’re a Bookman,” ventured the slighter of the women as she passed the plum sauce across the rattling table. “Did she tell you, a Bookman found a soul for our youngest? We were always a bit nervous about your order’s work—only because we didn’t understand it, of course—but it’s different when it’s your child. We can’t thank your people enough.”
“Do the Bookmen really kill people?” asked the older child, a little girl seated on Yordan’s right.
“We do kill people, but only the ones that She Who Turns the Page calls us to. Only the ones whose old bodies are hanging on when their souls are ready for the next chapter—and their souls go on to a new life with a nice mama like yours. We’d never kill a little girl like you, with her whole life ahead of her.”
“Are they bad people?” asked the younger child, at which Yordan shook his head.
“Most of them are good people. Very good people. The kind you’d want to see getting to live a whole life over again.” He spread the plum sauce over his duck and cut it small enough to eat, eyes fixed on the meat caught between knife and fork. “I just came back from killing a man I think was probably a very good man. He was a priest, kind to horses, never in any kind of debt—handsome, too, not that handsome means anything when you’re talking about whether a man is good or not.”
“And now he’s going to come back as a baby? Will he remember anything?”
Yordan laughed, putting down his knife and reaching out to fluff the boy’s hair. “A Bookman killed the person you used to be. Do you remember anything about that person?”
The boy wrinkled up his nose. “I guess not.”
“When the body dies, the old life is over. The soul remembers nothing; it goes on to the next vessel and makes new memories.”
“What if it doesn’t go on?” the girl asked. Her duck lay untouched her on her plate. “I mean, what if the baby dies in the mama’s belly, or what if the priest makes a mistake and gets the wrong person’s soul?”
“Bozha! That’s not appropriate conversation for the dinner table,” said the darker woman. “Eat your meal, and let Brother Yordan eat his.”
When Yordan went back to his own sleeping car, though, Bozha’s question lingered on unanswered.
What happens when a priest makes a mistake? What happens when he kills a man who wasn’t supposed to die and says the Prayer of the Last Word to urge his spirit on?
The light from the oil lamp reflected strangely from the mirror by which Yordan had shaved only an hour ago. Perhaps it was only that the sky beyond the blinds had grown darker. All the same, Yordan draped his coat over the mirror before he went to sleep.
Yordan woke in darkness, skin chilled, thoughts still sluggish from strong plum wine. All around him the train clicked on, a many-jointed insect scurrying toward Dushelka and all points west, while he tried to remember what had awakened him.
Then the second bolt slid into the socket, and he knew.
“Hello, Kardam,” he said, calm as though he were handling a serpent. Anticipation pricked up the hairs on the back of his neck, and he slid back his last, thin sheet to bare himself to the cold air. Let the spirit see that he wasn’t afraid.
The third bolt slid home. A ward against the soulless. No defense against a wandering soul.
Yordan sat and reached up to grab a rung of the ladder to the bunk above him, but an iron-cold hand fastened on his wrist like a manacle. “Hello, Bookman,” something said, but it sounded nothing like Kardam Zavachi.
That iron touch sent a spike of heat from hand to heart, and more even than fear, he felt a thrill of wonderment. For a split second all he could think was, So this is what it feels like to touch a soul. His pulse hammered at his ribs, his throat, the base of his cock. He sucked in a breath and tasted ice. “Why are you here? Why aren’t you waiting to be born?”
The spirit laughed, rough as blade on whetstone, and released Yordan’s hand. “There is no body to welcome me.”
His wrist was raw where those chill fingers had clasped him; even the heat of his breath made his skin burn. No body. No unborn child awaiting a soul.
There was no room for dread. Yordan drew back his hand, skating it from clavicle to sternum. His fingers were cold, but they were warm and vital at the core. Gooseflesh rose in their wake. “You’re welcome here.”
Something came to rest against his shoulder, heavier than a hand, and he let it press him facedown on the bunk. The linens were paper-rough under him, each fold and wrinkle dragging against his stomach and his cock until his body forced them flat, and still the pressure did not relent. The spirit’s weight was a granite slab on his back; it bore him down against the bunk as though it meant to crush the breath from him. It should have terrified him to lie so close to death, and he marked the absence where fear should have been. When the spirit stilled against him, though, he knew that his page would not be turned today. He needs me more even than he wants me, Yordan realized, with a thrill that had nothing to do with arousal. He needs my body for the work left undone. “You’re welcome here,” he said again, and he tried to get his hands under him to push back.
He felt cool breath against his shoulder blade, rough-edged as though someone had sawed it through. It smelled of blood and ash and frigid earth; it smelled of iron that had never known a forge. When those dry lips came up to brush his neck, they felt like the husks of autumn leaves. Yordan turned, eager to catch the spirit’s lips with his own, but he found nothing but icy air.
Sharp teeth scraped over his skin, and fingertips thin as winter branches wound through his hair. He arched up into the touch as though it were a lover’s, if a lover’s touch were made of ice and pins, and something laughed against his throat. It slid a nail like a knife across Yordan’s collarbone and to the throbbing artery above it. Yordan felt blood welling beneath his jaw, cold where it poured free.
“Let me touch you,” he said, and canted his head to beg for a stroke from that merciless hand.
This time, the spirit’s laugh was nearly human. It echoed in the close space as though it had come from a human throat, from a man warm and fleshy and yielding—and more than the unsparing, numinous touches, that hint of the human made him shudder. “You haven’t earned it, Bookman.”
He clutched at the rough linens, rose to his knees until he could almost see the white of the pillowcase in the darkness beneath him, and swallowed a please. Four thin iron nails scratched from shoulder to sacrum, leaving tracks of searing cold in their wake. If they’d broken skin, Yordan couldn’t make himself care. He rocked into the touch as though it had been a caress, urging that hand to cleave him open.
An icy fingertip trailed down the cleft of his backside, more threat than promise. “Go on,” said Yordan, bracing himself on spread knees. His skin must have been burning, because the pillowcase felt cool against his brow. “It’s not courtesy to leave a man wanting like this—go on, have me—”
“It’s not courtesy to cut his throat on the road and leave him stinking to the skies,” the spirit answered.
He could almost imagine that Zavachi was giving him a chance to turn back. “Then have me.”
When that cold hand breached him, it felt nothing at all like being fucked. No friction of flesh on hot flesh, no slow stretch and oil-slickness and sudden fullness. No indrawn breath at the sensation of being s
urrounded by a new lover, with a pause just a hair too long before the first hilt-deep thrust.
When the spirit was inside him, its touch was a blade, and it stroked pleasure from the root of him until even pleasure was agony.
This is how soul and body join—in rapture and in blood.
A hand wrapped like a cage around Yordan’s cock, nails pricking the tender skin as it worked his length. Its fingers were bone-dry. They might have been his own.
This time, when he pressed up into the touch, the creature sank its teeth into his shoulder and rocked into him until the cold made him gasp. Everywhere he burned as though his skin had been flayed away. He felt himself peeled down to the muscle, each shuddering strip of meat exposed to the open air, and he begged to be carved to the soul.
He fixed his teeth in his forearm until he tasted blood, and heaved himself back and back and back again into a cold as merciless as a winter gale.
When he came, he felt as though the world had broken open.
Yordan sagged into the goosefeather pillow and said, “Stay. I did you wrong. I’m sorry.”
No one answered.
“You’re welcome here. Stay,” he said again, but by now the warmth was bleeding back into his skin.
The spirit was gone. If it was ever here to begin with, thought Yordan, but he licked the blood from his forearm until he’d banished the thought.
The family in the next sleeping car got off at Dushelka, and a pair of grim, black-coated businessmen took their place. They said little to the coach attendants, less to the Ironmen at the couplings, and nothing at all to Yordan. If the coach attendant told them that there was a priest in the next car, they saw no profit in making his acquaintance.
He lay in his bunk with the blinds drawn all the way to Kozla, but Kardam Zavachi did not come again. The cramped bunk felt empty without him. Even the slight chill in the air seemed blank and impersonal after Kardam’s hands had sliced him open. In the end, Yordan only recited his prayers to while away the long hours before he could disembark.
She Who Turns the Page, watch and safeguard this man whose hour has come. He has read his page to the very end, now the time has come to turn it over.
The Hall of Records in Kozla stood between the train station and the Church of She Who Turns the Page, along the city’s central plaza. This deep in the city, no one barred their windows with iron or sealed their doors with three locks; the Hall of Records was a genteel fortress, designed to shut out a more human class of invader. Its walls were sheer, smooth granite, cool and slick to the touch, and Yordan had to present his identification papers at three separate gates before he entered the Hall itself.
The record-keepers were reluctant, at first, to open the Zavachi family vaults to a man who was no kind of kin, but they softened considerably when he showed them the order for Kardam’s death. He was presented with three leather portfolios and left at a table to complete his research, while the record-keepers fluttered nervously at his elbows like moths around a sugar-trap.
After less than an hour, he returned the records to their portfolios and knocked the dust from his hands. “Now, I’d like to see your birth records,” he said. “Kozla and the surrounding towns, between fifty and seventy years ago. If you can narrow it down to infants with deceased mothers, that would speed things along for both of us.”
It was another three hours before Yordan found what he was seeking, but when he did, he left the records on the table and made straight for the door.
“There was no mother, was there.”
The Father Superior didn’t look up from his ledger, although his fingers twitched on the page. “Brother Yordan. I trust you had a successful trip?”
“There was no mother. No confinement, no baby, no soulless child shredding a woman open to climb out—”
“You did tell me not to paint you a picture.”
“Kardam Zavachi was an Ironman.” Yordan forced the Father Superior’s chin up and met his lead-gray eyes. They were as keen as the eyes of the wolves along the iron fence.
He didn’t so much as shrug. Perhaps he understood that if he shrugged, Yordan would snap his neck. “She Who Turns the Page calls Ironmen, too, the same as she calls everyone else. They aren’t exempt because they’ve taken vows.”
“And does she call Ironmen in the prime of their lives? Rich Ironmen, patrons of their order, who never thought to make out a will because they knew they had decades of life ahead of them?”
“Even them, she calls.”
Yordan looked into those gray eyes and wondered how no one had known. An Ironman would have known; Kardam Zavachi would have taken one look and driven his long knife straight through the Father Superior’s eye socket. “She didn’t call anyone for you, did she?” he said, soft as snow, and he thrust his hands into his pockets. “They cut your mother open when the shock killed her, but if she hadn’t been dead already, you’d have gnawed your way free.”
The Father Superior didn’t so much as blink, but there was something feral in his eyes. “You’d paint me as a soulless child, chewing at the breast of my wet nurse because blood suited me better than milk. A soulless man, murdering political rivals without so much as a twinge of regret—”
“We’re not the kind of men who paint pictures.”
“No, we really aren’t. Now, make your report, Brother Yordan.”
The Father Superior leaned over his desk and gathered up a sheaf of papers already stamped with the seal of the Brotherhood, sifting through them and checking them against his ledger. He set one aside, then raised the lead paperweight to put the sheaf beneath it.
By the time he’d turned with that weight raised like a cosh, Yordan had his garrote around the Father Superior’s neck. As he twisted the handles, he seemed to hear Kardam Zavachi’s last words from a long way away.
Not the same kind of work at all.
The station mistress frowned as Yordan presented his papers. “Didn’t you just go to Lake Liakra?” she demanded. “Got another person to turn the page on already?”
“The order has suspended me from active duty,” he answered, offering her his documentation. “This trip is pleasure, not business.”
“Never heard of someone going to Lake Liakra for pleasure.” She read the suspension notice carefully, glancing over Incalculable service to the Brotherhood and must be allowed to recover his nerves as though there was a secret in it, but eventually she passed it back across the counter with a ticket.
Yordan let his hand fall to his side, where his thumb brushed the pommel of his long iron knife. “Maybe pleasure is the wrong word. I lost someone back there—someone I wish I’d had a chance to know. If I can’t make things right, then at the very least, I want to know who he was.”
He slid his ticket into his pocket and settled on a bench along the platform, gazing across the iron rails to the shining glass windows of Kozla Station. There would be none of that along Lake Liakra, but he found he didn’t mind as much as he’d thought he would.
From a long way to the west, Yordan heard the howl of the approaching train.
Tobias knew something was amiss by the look on Nora’s face when she arrived with his afternoon tea. She didn’t say anything, not at first, but there was a stitch between her eyebrows, and she lingered by his desk once she’d set down the tray instead of bustling onto her next task as she usually did. The rift in her usual diligence was difficult to miss, and Tobias thumbed at the edge of his desk and watched her steadily, waiting for her to reveal whatever was bothering her.
She was silent, so he invited her with a wave of one hand. “Nora? Is there something you’d like to say?”
The girl bobbed a half-curtsey, eyes wide. “Mr. Sinnet, sir. It’s only . . . There’s been a gentleman lurking by the door of the house all day. And he may have been here yesterday, too. Awful odd thing, isn’t it, for a man to be lingering so long? And outside a house for boys, no less?”
Tobias couldn’t help but agree; any man of age who would loite
r in a haven for children, especially in the slums of Whitechapel, was rarely of a mind to do right. “Has anyone spoken to him?” he asked, easing his chair back so he could stand.
“No, sir, no one has.” Nora stepped out of his way with a polite bow of her head, her hands folded over her skirts. They were slightly rumpled there, as though she’d been worrying them between her fingers.
“Well then.” He smiled at her to soothe her frayed nerves. “I’ll have to correct that, won’t I?”
She offered him a smile in return, her face smoothing over with relief. “I suppose you will, sir.”
“Return to your duties,” Tobias said as he passed, his voice not unkind. “I’ll see to this.” No, that wasn’t enough. He paused, looking back at her. “And Nora? Thank you.”
Her smile widened and she curtseyed again, the curls of her hair falling over her shoulders. She was pleasantly flushed when she straightened. “Of course, sir.”
Tobias crossed the narrow hall to the staircase that led down to the rest of the house. His small study and the master bedroom were on the uppermost floor, the boys’ rooms on the second, and on the main floor, the rest of the living area, including the dining room with its three long tables where he and the boys ate their daily meals.
Apart from the dining room was the large drawing room, whose windows showed no man lingering. But Nora was a sensible girl, and if she claimed there was a man outside, there was one. Tobias drew his cloak from its hook and unlatched the front door to slip out into the crisp November air. He closed the door firmly behind him and surveyed the walk.
He saw no one unusual: only a handful of street sellers calling their wares, and Whitechapel’s usual derelicts.
Ah—but there, leaning against the façade of the house, a lean young man in a battered coat, hunched in on himself to ward off the chill. He stirred when he noticed Tobias, his head lifting, and his gaunt face broke out in a smile.
Tobias wished he didn’t recognise him, but he did. He didn’t smile back.
