Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 26 (11 page)

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The first corpse they withdrew was a young woman, still wrapped in a blanket. Her left side was a mess of burns, blackened in some places and red underneath. Her left arm ended in a blackened curl.

“You call this decent shape?” Aldram said. He rubbed the sweat from his face, and came away with his hand coated by glistening hair. The air was always hazy with floating strands. “Perhaps she was cremated poorly.”

“They were all like this. But look at her from the right. She could have been a pin-up,” he said.

Reva would be furious if his vessel was less than perfect. Time passed slowly in the Other Realms. But injuries also took centuries to heal, and the agony of old pains could become unbearable. So the fairies crafted new bodies from human corpses.

Like all recycled goods, these bodies deteriorated. Once a fairy had changed vessels, regular transferences were a necessity, or he would eventually wither and fade away. Poor-quality vessels wore out even more quickly.

Aldram became more frantic with each disfigured body that he retrieved. Even those with a full complement of limbs were pockmarked with blisters and covered in burn scars. Some were naked, but many had clothing that was fused to the skin in places. His mood wasn’t improved by Benny’s commentary.

“This one looks like cousin Milton. He’d walk five miles to pitch in during the harvest.”

“This is unacceptable!” Aldram said. “I asked you for the young and beautiful. It would be worth my life to ask Lord Reva to inhabit a damaged vessel.”

“These were the best,” Benny said. He was blinking back tears. “Would you rather have a load of beautiful torsos? I found plenty of those. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen so many banged-up people. Looks like a bomb got most of them.”

“Humans and their wars,” Aldram muttered. He would have to make the best of this situation.

“I need you to get the makeup,” Aldram said.

But Benny was crouched down, staring at the corpses, “What do you think happened down there in the real world?”

“Just another die-off. They go in cycles.” Aldram had seen everything from bubo-covered bodies during the Black Death to oceans of starveling, skeletal remains more than six hundred later. “You only have ten years left in your term of service. When you go back, you can drop a letter in the trash and tell me what’s happened.”

“After a hundred years, will there be anything to go back to?”

“Go get the kit,” Aldram said. He had waited far longer than Benny’s hundred years for a chance to go home. Perhaps, after the ceremony, his wait would end.

Aldram had done his best to prepare for Lord Reva’s arrival. He had washed the bodies and covered their wounds with make-up and concealing clothes. Then he had enchanted the three males and seven females to stand at attention in the center of the transference room, which he had cleaned furiously. But to Aldram’s eyes, the scars were easily visible under the paint.

At the peripheries of the room, wooden pallets heaped high with faerie goods floated up from the bowels of the Tower. The transformed products gleamed, even in the diffuse light that filtered through the dirty windows. Unlike their human counterparts, fairy goods could be enchanted by artisans in distant cities. But for all their beauty, the fairy products were ephemeral things, disappearing after only a few months or years. Without constant replenishment from the human world, the Other Realms would simply fade away.

The most important transformation was that of cold iron and steel into fairy glass, a translucent alloy that held all of its ingredients’ strength and none of their dangers. The pits that held these metals were buried deep within the tower. As a changeling, Aldram was the only fairy that was able to withstand prolonged exposure to such materials.

There was no sound or flash. There were simply more people. The guards appeared with knives drawn and fanned through the room, sniffing for iron. When they were satisfied one of them nodded and spoke a few syllables. The rest of Reva’s court appeared in order of precedence. Aldram fell to his knees as he read the rank insignia on their sashes; they represented some of the oldest houses in the Other Realms.

Lord Reva was the last to appear. He had one hand pressed to a mask that covered his mouth and nose. Reva was wearing a coat of spotless white, covered in delicate golden tracery.

Aldram’s gaze dropped to the floor. He was conscious of his stained human overalls and the hair clinging to his face. He had spent so much time preparing the corpses that he hadn’t been able to change into proper fairy clothing.

Footsteps approached, and he had to strain to hear Reva’s muffled voice. “These ones seem different,” Reva said.

“Oh, but they are very young,” Aldram said. “Good for many more years than the normal lot. I spared no effort in finding you the very best vessels.”

“You handled them yourself?” Reva said, his voice rising in pitch.

“No, no. My assistant, a human, he prepared them for you. I don’t soil myself with …”

“I would expect one of your kind to associate with humans.”

This was going all wrong. “But there have always been indentured humans,” Aldram said. “For as long as I’ve been here. Hundreds and hundreds of years. We need them to do work fairies can’t do.”

“You are a fairy only in name, changeling.”

Aldram had been born in the mortal realm. But he came out wizened and old, withdrawn and given to violent fits. His bewildered parents had tried to drown the fae out of him. Instead the fae came for him. To rescue him, he’d thought.

Reva turned back to the corpses. “The coloring of these vessels is peculiar.”

“I got you only the youngest, the freshest, the best. No one can select a host better than me,” Aldram babbled. In his frantic gesturing, Aldram’s fingertips grazed against Lord Reva’s sash.

He had enough time to hope that no one had noticed before gasps erupted from the court. Reva reared back, his mouth hanging open. He gestured at a guard, who struck Aldram in the stomach.

Aldram collapsed to the floor. He gasped, trying to pull breath from his constricted chest, and scrambled to prostrate himself before the other guards could join in.

The next blow never came. Lord Reva said, “How much human trash has passed through those fingers? If you ever lay hand upon me again, you will not survive the gesture.” One of the courtiers was gingerly removing Reva’s sash. The courtier let it drop and muttered a syllable. It ignited before hitting the floor.

Reva continued, “I would give you to the flames as well. But we need you to handle the filth.”

Reva paced back and forth along the row of corpses. Aldram kept his head pressed to the floor. Reva said, “This one. Destroy the others.”

Aldram heard nine thunderclaps in succession, and then blinked as a scattering of dust blew into his eyes. Reva said, “I cannot go into my next life carrying your touch. I will return after taking purification.” The room was filled with rushing air as the court disappeared from the Recycling Tower.

Aldram levered himself to his feet. He could feel every one of the wounds he had accumulated over years of beatings. Traditionally, changelings weren’t allowed to change vessels. In his youth, his mentors had told him that gaining a new body would eliminate his resistance to iron.

Benny found Aldram slowly sweeping the transference room, wincing with each step. He took up a broom as well, and said, “Why do you put up with it?”

“Reva is the only one who can admit me to the city,” Aldram said. It might be decades, centuries, before another noble of Reva’s standing visited the Dump. His foolishness had lost him his best chance.

“They’ll never let you out of here; they need you to do their dirty work.”

“I know that I can’t
stay
. But I want to see what all this is for.”

Benny leaned in close. “Just get up and go. Screw all of them.”

“I don’t want to sneak in. I want to be welcome.”

“You’re never going to get a red carpet. But they know they need you. Sit yourself down on the steps of the palace and let them try to throw you out.”

Aldram pushed Benny aside. “This is my place in life. Don’t forget yours.”

“Just keep choking it all down, then,” Benny said. He stalked to one of the open doors, where his spider was waiting. He stopped abruptly. “It’s never snowed before.”

White flakes were frosting the ground of the Dump. Aldram hobbled past Benny out onto the platform. This wasn’t right. It was still searingly hot.

They stood there, watching the horizon. The thunder had gotten more frequent. Cars were falling by the dozens, smashing the mailboxes, furniture, and other trinkets already on the ground. A smear of green dropped past the platform. He looked over the edge at a metal board calling attention to “Exit 23A to Woodside.” There was a tremendous thunder-clap as a submarine appeared near the edge of the ravine with water pouring from a tear in its side. As one end hit the ground, the other one smashed into the side of the cliff and the submarine came to rest at an angle.

The flakes covered Aldram’s face and hair. When he brushed them off, they crumbled into grey specks. The sky was raining ash.

For awhile, Aldram tried to keep the dust from clogging the gears and wheels that kept the pallets running. Then the ashfall accelerated, and all of his work was undone within an hour. They spent the next week huddled under a make-shift tent of fairy cloth as the ash blanketed the ground outside. Occasionally, they would hear a clang or scrape as some human object knocked into the tower.

On one of his periodic trips outside, Aldram saw a grey-shrouded figure wading towards the tower, picking his way through the debris. Was it was a reaver, caught unawares, struggling towards a place that had once been his home? When Aldram checked a few hours later, the man was gone and the ash was a few feet higher.

The flies buzzed overhead, circling the tower at high speeds, unable to fill their trained function. More and more of them fell from the sky, exhausted. The unlucky ones landed on the ground, and disappeared. The pallets sent back from the cliffside stacked up underneath cauldrons that produced nothing.

Eight days passed before they saw the sun again, hanging static on the horizon as it traced an eons-long path across the sky. Twitching spiders and flies were strewn across the tower. Unable to die, they waited for Aldram to revive them.

Aldram heard a loud crack. A mass of blackened wood appeared, splintering when it hit a stone footbridge peeking through the ash. Of course the buildings would come next, as they slowly faded from human history. They fell throughout the day: from shacks with roofs of corrugated tin to glass palaces that shattered when they hit.

“Are you coming with me?” Benny said. He was wearing a pack and harnessing one of the spiders.

“We won’t need more bodies for some time,” Aldram said. Dozens were lying atop the ash, within easy reach.

“I’m joining the reavers. There’s no point going home now,” Benny said. His comment was punctuated by the fall of a bronze statue.