The Last Page (33 page)

¹¹
A controversial prophetic text said by some to list every year since 337 W.C. by name. Yacob’s Roll ends at 563 “Y.o.T. Sealed Scroll,” supposedly marking the end of the world.

¹²
U.T. Approximate pronunciation: Yillo’tharnah.

¹³
U.T. Approximate pronunciation: Thay’gn.

¹⁴
U.T. Approximate pronunciation: Nayn.

Public surgery happened on a regular basis in Tin Crow. When the gutters of Bloodsump Lane ran thick and red it meant someone had gone under the knife.

Body fluids and knots of clotted blood slithered through little eyebrow grates, dumping directly into shallow channels that bordered the street. Sometimes scrubby strips of flesh would snag on the bars. They dangled stubbornly and slapped about in the ichors that issued from crowded moldy buildings.

Sometimes it was a slow steady trickle. Other times it came in waves as though someone were sloshing hidden mistakes out with a mop.

For a silver bek, a gentleman and his lady could purchase tickets and gain admittance, not through the gory back alleys but through slightly more professional front doors where gaslights flared on the names of well-known surgeons and grime was kept to a minimum.

Large panes of frosted glass glowed with snowy whiteness on all sides of Grouselich Hospital’s doors.

Nearby, a voluminous glass tube, lit from within, hung beside the brass-lettered names and cast unpleasant patterns on the bricks below. Filled with some clear fluid, through which a stream of heavier red liquid fell, the tube gurgled and hummed.

A line of men and women had gathered, the head of which showed tickets to a bald man with a white mustache and a black suit. He had just unlocked the doors. The line of people shifted. Some watched the red liquid ebb through the tube while others whispered about what speculative horrors their tickets might grant them access on this particular night.

All of them had heard about arms being sawn off, eyes replaced with lenses poured from glass, and the gruesome, mysterious term well worth the silvery price of admission: brain surgery.

Everyone was giddy because everyone knew that unlike the opera, where murders and intrigue happened right before their eyes, this was for real.

Slowly, the line edged toward the doors as the mustachioed man examined each ticket with care. He took them and turned them over, peered down his nose like a jeweler examining diamonds. Finally he made a precise tear in each one and handed it back to the bearer, motioning for them to step through the portal and into the unsettling cone of antiseptic light.

From the front doors, the nervous ticket holders were ushered by a second man down a narrow gray hallway that smelled of chemicals. Lit by clear gas jets in steel fixtures, the hall felt vaguely threatening. A wooden gurney with tiny cracked wheels stood along the left wall. Draped in hospital white, it looked clean relative to the walls. Its position forced the spectators to squeeze past in single file. They made excited idiotic sounds as they passed, asking each other whether a dead body might at some time have rested on that very spot.

A wider hallway of two-toned olive and beige welcomed them on the other side and more transparent gas jets revealed a pair of double doors that admitted the throng to an austere oval chamber with steep stands that allowed them to hover over whatever happened below.

There was no place to sit. Voyeurs had to remain in rank, each one four feet above the other, separated by low metal railings whose topside had been upholstered with padding meant to cushion the forearms. Unfortunately the padding was like everything else, gray and thin and dilapidated. Its cracked surface had either hardened with age or altogether crumbled away.

Below the dim tiers (which were dark enough to cause the ticket holders to stumble and ask each other why someone didn’t turn on some lights) the central oval-shaped pit basked—a sort of phosphorescent eggshell color under the glare of magnesium spotlights. As people filed in and the tiers filled up, a door in the pit opened slightly and a man could be heard talking behind it.

“Next week . . . sure . . . just send it over there . . .”

The pit had several tables with shiny metal tops. Dubious cloth bundles had been placed on them before the audience arrived.

A rack of glass bulbs ranging in size from miniscule to grandiose stood at attention. Most of them contained various quantities of some clear fluid, reflecting the spotlights through a clutter of curves. Like strange retorts, their necks were screwed with metal caps fit snugly with a jungle of pink-orange hoses. The flow of fluid could be controlled from various knobs.

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 Mir
yhr 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.