The entire world narrowed down to a pinpoint with the powering down of his unexpected companion. Watson had experienced a sensation like this only once before. The last time had been when he had performed an open heart massage on a newborn baby to bring it back to life. Calmness imploded through Watson’s center, the cessation of all doubt and the expansion of clarity, making every motion economical and precise as surgery.
While the young man holding the revolver behind the counter determined whether he should plug the doctor, Watson took one step forward, lifted the dangling arm of his robot friend, and jabbed it forward like a spear, exploding the nose on the young man’s face, who howled. Using the robotic hand like an extension of himself, he fish-hooked it and slapped the firearm out of the way. The young man was so occupied with the excruciating pain of his broken and gushing nose that he dropped the revolver. A third shot resounded as the impact set off the trigger, and a bullet hole punched through the wall behind him—
Where cries erupted, with the sounds of moving furniture and pounding feet.
Watson stooped to snatch up the gun, training it on the cursing and yelling boy as he leaned forward, grabbed the door behind him, and thrust it open.
Several people stood with their jaws agape, pale faces flooded with light from the open door, before rows and rows of computer screens flashing endless lines of code, solving mathematical problems. Watson smelled the rank odor of human bodies living in enclosed and unsanitary spaces for days on end, noted the mattresses stacked on the bare concrete floor, saw the men and women, some Chinese and others he thought were Slav, numerous people who fell through the cracks and were lured to this place by God knew what methods.
Watson focused his gun on the young man.
“Call the police.”
“Nyet! Nye—”
“You’ll do as I say. And ask for Detective Lestrade.”
• • •
In the end, Lestrade let him cart back the robot, bullet holes and all. The Tourist Politsya division worked in tandem with the embassies of the victims’ home countries to place them, but in silence in the police car, Watson held no illusions.
“They’re just going to start mining again,” Watson pointed out.
“I’m afraid the Batiushka Bank has more money than I have,” Lestrade replied tartly. “Unless you’d like to start manufacturing some for me and the department?”
At least, he thought, the people were saved. Watson said nothing, but looked in the rearview mirror to stare at the heap of metal in the back seat with a faint sense of emptiness. He gave his regards to Lestrade and refused her offer of help as he opened up the passenger door and lifted the machine out, the robot crumpled and folded in on itself like an envelope.
“It’s a very strange machine you have there,” she pointed out, leaning down to stare into its eyes. The dull and faded orbs gave off no light, vacant and Arctic.
“Isn’t it?” Watson sighed.
“What will you do with it? Seems a waste to throw it out.”
Watson considered his earlier desire to shut it down for good. He did not think he would carry that out.
“Would you like to see him when I have him up and running again?”
“Him? Goodness, Jovan, you’re giving it a pronoun already.”
Thoughtful, he looked at her. “Do you think it’s a she?”
She laughed. “Perhaps you’d do best to ask it what it thinks, when it wakes.”
He shook her hand, and before she left she invited him to call on the politsya in the future. He watched her car pull away from the university, and after a heavy sigh, he lifted the machine and carted it into the building, down the hall, and to his office, returning to the dismal corner where even his abandoned vodka drink still awaited him, with a film of liquor varnishing the bottom of the glass.
He picked it up and drained it, and set it down. A quick inventory of his office produced a set of tools. Selecting a screwdriver, he returned all attention to the machine, opening up the exoskeleton to commence repairs.
In the roots of the machine’s dim eyes, an eerie blue light flickered, and began to glow.
The Hammer of God
BY
Jonathan Maberry
-1-
“Look closely and tell me what you see,” said the nun.
I licked my dry lips. “Blood.”
“And what else, child?”
“Bone,” I said, though at twenty-six I was far from a child, even if I was still a novice. However, my mistress, Mother Frey, was approaching eighty winters, and so was permitted to treat most people she met as children. “At least, I think it’s bone. Pieces, anyway.”
Mother Frey sighed and straightened. She was weary and sore from the long wagon ride along the trail that wound through the mountain passes, over questionable bridges, and up a series of switchbacks that brought us to the pine forests just below the snow line. This was not the farthest point in the province of Sunderland, but it was far enough. Eighteen days of travel by horse, foot, and cart, and that was after three weeks crawling up the coast on a leaky fishing boat that belonged to an order of monks who made—Lady Siya help us all—oyster wine. Frey had never been to this part of Anaria, but I had and she had asked me to accompany her on what was likely to be her last trip as chief investigator of the Office of Miracles. It was my eighth outing with her.
Frey pursed her lips as if inspecting a hairy bug she had discovered on her pillow. I squatted beside the corpse, mindful not to let my shadow fall on the dead man.
“Miri,” she said after a very long time, “you’ve had as much time to examine the body and the circumstances as I have. You know my methods. Tell me what you see. And if you say blood, or bone, or even brain tissue and leave it there, I will do my best to throw you down this mountain.”
She smiled, but I never assumed Mother Frey was joking. If she were younger, she might even have attempted to carry out her threat. The novices all tell stories. So do some of the older nuns and the staff at the convent. Mother Frey was deeply and widely respected, she was trusted and she was depended upon, but she was not very well liked.
I, however, did like her. And although I was old for a novice, having entered the sisterhood after my husband died in the second of the Plantation Wars, I was still a novice, and therefore her servant as well as her assistant. I waited on her, cleaned her clothes, prepared her food, tended to her medical needs, read to her, listened to her. And I also talked with her. Most of the other novices think that strange, but they are young. They don’t yet appreciate the depth of knowledge Mother Frey has acquired over the many years of her life. None of those years, as far as I can determine, have been idle ones. She once told me that she has a ferret of a mind, constantly hungry, constantly agitated, always digging deep and chewing her way through. The food that fed that mind was knowledge.
I have education, having been to the best schools in Tressos and Ballakhan, and even a school of literature at the Temple of Dawn in DuPlei. Until I met Frey I had always taken some pride in my knowledge of the great books, of the plays and dialogues of antiquity, of the metaphors spun by poets and the allegories in the historical epics. I can name a goodly number of the stars in the sky and speak well in three languages and passably in four others. When I came to live with the sisters I applied to the Office of Miracles because I thought it would give me access to many old books, even restricted ones. In my own way I, too, possess a mind that enjoys ferreting out the tiniest and most obscure bits of information.
But it is difficult to take pride in one’s intellectual accomplishments in the presence of Mother Frey. She came from a family whose fortunes had been destroyed by the constant Plantation Wars. Her brothers and uncles had all died in those wars, and the death taxes on the estate stripped it to nothing. Her mother and two of her sisters had been killed when the Ghemites raided their rice farm. Another sister had been taken as a slave and took her own life. It dwindled Frey’s family to her and the oldest sister, who wor
ked as a senior clerk in the offices of the Chamberlain. Frey offered herself up to Lady Siya and was accepted as a novice. There are legends about how much she infuriated the older nuns and confounded all of her teachers. She was beaten frequently but in vain. Her brilliance shone so brightly that wiser sisters took notice and she was moved from the Office of Culture to the Office of Miracles, and there she found herself.
“I’m waiting, Miri,” prompted Frey. “Or are you waiting for the corpse to suddenly begin speaking and tell you all?”
“Sorry.” I refocused my thoughts on the body.
“First,” said Frey, “describe what you see. Omit no detail.”
I cleared my throat and pivoted on the balls of my feet to face the body. “We have a dead man of about forty,” I began. “He is above average height, thin, well groomed, wearing traveling clothes. The clothes are cheap and show signs of wear. They are not very clean.”
Frey sniffed. “Go on.”
It was always impossible to tell if I was making errors. Not until I finished, so I plunged ahead.
“He has a beard, which means he is not a nobleman. He has no tattoos, so he is not a guild trader.”
“Is he a laborer?” asked Frey.
“I…don’t think so.”
She made a small sound of irritation. “I did not ask what you think, girl. Tell me what you know.”
I studied the body, trying to apply the tricks of nitpicking observation Mother Frey was famous for. I bent close to study the man’s hands and even lifted one to look at his palm.
“I don’t—I mean, no. He doesn’t have many calluses on his hands. They’re dirty but the fingers aren’t rough and his nails not unduly thickened. They’re not thick. Not like a farmer or mason. He doesn’t have the scars I’ve seen on the hands of a carpenter or metalsmith.”
“And…? Come on, you’re showing some promise, Miri. Don’t disappoint us both now.”
I licked my lips. “His fingernails are bitten down to the quick.”
“Which suggests what?”
“Nerves?”
Frey gave a tiny, frugal nod of approval. “Tell me about the wound.”
I got up and moved around to the other side of the corpse. He wore a wheat-colored long-sleeved shirt in a coarse weave, belted around the waist with cow leather. In the exact center of his chest was a ragged hole so large I could have barely covered it with the mouth of a wine cup. The cloth was shredded and there was a patch of dried blood that was flecked with shards of white bone.
“He was stabbed, I think,” I said.
“And there is that word again. Think.”
“But I can’t quite see the wound to know for sure,” I protested.
Frey walked in a slow circle around the victim, hands behind her back, her robin’s-egg-blue eyes shaded by the wide brim of her straw hat. Neither of us wore wimples. Those were only required inside the convent and on holy days. For field investigations we were allowed to wear ordinary clothes. Both of us wore simple cotton dresses—deep blue for her, pale blue for me—with bib aprons embroidered with the symbol of our order, a crescent moon shining its light down on the pages of an open book. Frey stopped beside me, dug into a pocket on her apron and removed a small knife, which she handed to me. “Then cut it open. We are not here to investigate the ruination of a shirt.”
I felt my face grow hot as I took the knife. There are times I would love to hasten Frey on her way to her reward in heaven with Father Ar and Mother Siya. I doubt many of the senior nuns would punish me too cruelly.
I kept my face as composed as possible as I used two fingers to pluck the shirt away from the man’s chest and then cut it open. I cut in at an angle, making sure not to damage the hole in the shirt nor the dead flesh beneath. I peeled the cloth back to reveal a gaping wound. The flesh around it was badly torn and bulged outward in a grotesque fashion.
“He was stabbed with great force,” I said. “From behind, I believe.”
“Was he? With what kind of weapon?”
“Something round. An arrow, perhaps.”
“An arrow?” asked Frey, raising one eyebrow skeptically. “You’re quite sure, are you?”
“Well, no. The wound is round but it’s much thicker than a regular arrow. Too thick for a crossbow quarrel, though; it looks thicker than that.”
“A spear?” suggested Frey, though it was clear she was baiting me. Testing me.
“No,” I said decisively. “A spear would create a broad wound, flat on the ends, and be round in the middle.” I considered, then added, “A sharpened pole might do it.”
“Tell me why that guess is wrong,” said Frey. “Look at the chest and then turn the body over, and then tell me.”
I spent a few moments assessing the wound, and then hooked my fingers under the man’s hip and shoulder and, with great effort, rolled him into his side.
“He has been dead for days,” I grunted. “The death paralysis has come and gone. And he is beginning to stink.”
“Some of that is the onset of decay,” agreed Frey, “and some is because his bowels relaxed as he died. He has soiled himself, and from the smell we can infer than he ate a diet rich in spices, particularly garlic and wild onion.”
I gagged and tried to concentrate on the matter at hand. Once the man was on his side I did a cursory examination of the wound on the other side. The cloth was soaked with blood and teeming with maggots. I brushed those away and studied the back of his shirt, and then cut it away to reveal the wound. It was much smaller than the opening on the other side and a silver dime could have hidden it. The edges of the wound were ragged, but only a little.
“It was a definitely a sharpened pole or a spear with a tapered point,” I said. “It definitely isn’t a military spear, because they all flare out to the side in a broad leaf pattern. This is more like a plain pike.”
“The local constable reported that this man was stabbed with a spear from the front and that the size and ferocity of the chest wound was because the barbs of the spearhead tore the flesh as the weapon was pulled out. What do you think of that?”
I was shaking my head before she had finished.
“Go on, Miri,” said Frey, “speak your mind. Why is the constable wrong in his assessment?”
“A leaf-bladed spear has a flatter point, like an oversized arrow. The wound on the front is nearly perfectly round. And here, on the back, the wound is also round. A barbed spear would have torn a broader, flatter hole on the way out.”
“Good. Give me more.”
I hesitated, reassessing what I saw. “The blood…?”
“Yes,” Frey said patiently. “What about it?”
I chewed my lip for a moment. “There is too much on his back and not enough on his chest. If he had been stabbed from behind there would have been a burst of blood pushed out as the spear tip tore through the chest. But there isn’t.”
She positively beamed at me, doing it in exactly the same way she beamed at her terrier when he fetched a thrown ball. I hoped Mother Frey would not toss me a dried goat treat.
She did not. Frey leaned a hand on my shoulder and bent very carefully to study the wound. I heard her give another grunt, this one of surprise. “Very interesting.”
“What do you see?” I asked.
Instead of sharing her own observations, she said, “Tell me about this wound on his back. Forget what the constable reported. Use your eyes.”
“Well…it appears as if the spear—”
“The weapon,” she corrected. “We have not determined that it was a spear, have we? No. Observation requires precision, not prediction or preconception.”
“The weapon,” I said, leaning on the word, “entered his back, not his chest. The edges of the wound on his back are torn and pushed slightly in, suggesting that is where the shaft of the, um, weapon entered. However, this injury is very much smaller than the exit wound, so I judge that the victim struggled or began to fall and that increased the damage.”
“And th
e weapon itself? By your assessment it went in and went through, but where is it? Was it pulled out the other side?”
I looked around. “How could I tell that?”
“Surely you’ve seen a wound from a crossbow bolt. They sometimes pass straight through a body. What do we find on the ground on the side opposite from the point of impact?”
It took me a few moments to figure that out, then I stood and looked at the ground. “There should be a spent bolt.”
“And…?”
“Blood,” I said quickly. “There should be blood spray from where the passage of the bolt pulled it from the body.”
“Do you see that?”
I walked around the body and knelt by a patch of tall weeds. “There’s some here.”
She joined me and with my help knelt to look past the weeds to the body, which lay twenty-five feet away. “It would be a powerful quarrel that could fly so straight for such a distance. But we’ll come back to that. Now, tell me, girl, how quickly did this man die?”
“Almost at once,” I said. “He did not bleed very much except what leaked down from the wound after he’d fallen. This was near his heart and it would have pumped vigorously had he lived for even a few seconds.”
Frey nodded and then lapsed into a moody silence. She went back to the corpse and spent five long minutes studying the wounds, and twice had me roll the body over so she could compare the path of destruction. She held up each of his hands and examined each finger, then bent close to look at the tanned and dirty skin of his face. Without saying a word, Frey turned and walked away from the corpse, stopped, studied the body from a distance, and then walked in what appeared to be a random pattern around the scene. She finally stopped by a small milepost eighty feet from where the dead man lay. Frey bent and peered at the post, grunted again, then straightened and walked back to me.
Thirteen Authors With New Takes on Sherlock Holmes Page 26
