5.

18-19^TH SEVENMONTH, 277 A.U.

THE LABORATORY OF RESURRECTION JANE ARDAI, THE NORTHERN COMMONS, CORMA

Pain was not the first thing to return to Nasrahiel. The light came before it.

It poured in through his head somehow, seeping into his mind. He remembered it as he remembered the lash wielded by men who made a servant of him long before Regenzi. The light scored a path through his vision. That was when the pain took hold in earnest.

It began with knowing that the light in his head had something to do with seeing.

He struggled to sit up, to pull his legs toward him and cover his eye-heels with his hands, but something bound him in place. A long, heavy strap. A voice bound him, too—soft, strong, and low. A woman’s voice. Human.

“Lie back.”

The chieftain might have laughed at the futility of the order, but pain rang through his body like a bell. If the voice spoke again, he did not hear it. The darkness came and took the place of the light filling his skull.

Pain—pain that flooded his joints and ran in his blood like fire— came the next time he woke, and the time after that. The voice came, too, every time.

“Rest.”

Or “Sleep.”

Nasrahiel knew little of what had happened to him since the Alche-mist wrapped him in a desperate embrace at the top of the Old Cathedral. There was the roof, then the sky, then open air, and then . . .

Ground. There had been the ground.

Later, on some other night or morning, Nasrahiel awoke. There were no straps to hold him, no voice resting on his chest like a purring thing, heavy as lead. He placed his hands right and left, flanking his sides, and pushed slowly up to a seated position.

He noticed, before anything else, that he saw the room wrongly. He should have awoken looking at the dim outline of the door on the opposite wall, for that was the direction he felt his body stretched out beneath the linen sheet. It was where his feet pointed. Sitting up should have changed nothing.

Sitting up, he realized, should not even have been his first instinct. But he had done it, and it had changed everything.

The room was now upright, and so was he, and yet he could detect its dimensions as he might in the pedestal position. He had not curled in upon himself. Why? What did his body know that he himself had yet to learn?

The door opposite his makeshift bed—a high trestle of some kind, improvised, as the beds of Men were far too small to accommodate even an aigamuxa stripling’s form—the door he had seen first not at all, and then head-on—opened.

The woman who entered was short and well-curved, her broad-waisted dress dotted with pockets and sleeves for various implements. Her hair coiled about the crown of her head, held in place with innumerable tiny clasps. Her dark eyes watched him carefully. Dispassionately. She set a metal tray down beside his bed and reached, wordless, for Nasrahiel’s arm. He stared at her.

As the woman’s fingers covered his wrist and her eyes studied her chronometer, counting out the beats, Nasrahiel realized something on his face—no, something in his face—had been moving.

He fumbled back, tearing his arm from the woman’s grip. Though his body felt out of use (how long had he lain there, insensible? how wasted and weak had he become?), he was strong enough to break her meager hold.

His hands covered his face. All at once, he understood why his skull had ached, why the light had poured into it.

Above the flat, flaring span of his nose, something cold and hard pressed against his long, reticulating fingers. He heard a tap-tap-tapping, as if he probed some instrument from the Reverend Doctor’s lab. The sound made him flinch, and with the flinch came another reflex.

A blink.

Something metallic snapped at his fingertips. It sounded like a kinotrope lens snapping shut.

Nasrahiel screamed.

The woman looked upon him with absolute exhaustion. The door behind her opened again, and two humans—a male and female, juveniles—gaped inside. The boy said something and lurched forward, but some little glass vial had already appeared in the adult woman’s hands. There was a sharp pinch at Nasrahiel’s throat.

The darkness came again, blotting out the light.

Eventually—an hour, a day, a year, a century later—gray fog crawled away from the his vision, and he woke, blinking only to wince at the sharp, snapping sound his monstrous eye made.

The woman was there, seated at a writing desk beside the trestle bed, scanning papers. Records. Something. The alchemical lamps ringing the room had been dialed higher. Night, then—almost certainly night. Nasrahiel’s head roared, though the pain was gone. Its absence made his stomach clench. He longed for the pain, for its reassurance that his body had been wronged—that it knew things were not as they should be.

“Why did you do it?” he croaked.

The woman did not look up, now jotting with a tiny, surgical steel ink pen.

“If you uncover yourself, you’ll see why straight away,” she replied, sounding flat and bored. Human voices were expressive, though they lacked all other virtues. Nasrahiel closed his eye. He did not uncover himself, but he did move.

When they were still, his legs felt like his own, but under the sheet and moving, he heard their steel on whetstone ring and knew what the woman meant. He opened his eye and stared at the foreign shapes jutting, still hidden, beneath the cloth.

“After the fall,” the woman began, squaring her papers and setting them aside, “you were scarcely alive. Both legs were broken, though they might have survived purely locomotive repair. The trouble was the particular nature of your fractures damaged the optical nerves running from your brain stem along your spine and into the ocular organs situated in your feet. The left eye-heel was pulped in the fall. Even if the vision in that leg could have been restored by closing the nerve gap, there was no eye left to do the work. Your left spinal array was badly twisted and the pelvis broken, though that in three rather convenient parts not too difficult to reassemble. But your legs themselves were, for all practical purposes, beyond hope, and given your species’ peculiar anatomy, that meant quite a lot of . . .” She paused, searching for a word, as if she had suddenly decided to bother with something like a bedside manner. “It meant a lot of auxiliary augmentation to restore your sight.”

Nasrahiel shifted himself into a seated position and pulled the linens away.

The sheet slithered to the floor, revealing two spindly structures of polished brass and steel—pistons and gears, hinges and springs— attached to his body, grafted into two scarred stumps that terminated just below his pelvis, flanking his sex.

Perhaps the scream he had given before was the only one he had. He stared at the mechanical legs with mute hatred, studying their every detail so he might commit them to memory and damn every Man-forged part.

With a flinch, he realized he was able to count the minute coils making up his ersatz toes. A faint whirring in his head and a buzz like pins and needles told him his eye’s lens had focused and extended, magnifying the image of his monstrous legs.

“You might have left me as I was,” Nasrahiel murmured. “Let me die. What was it to you if another ape died in your city?”

The woman shrugged. “Nothing to me personally, except a challenge. You’d be better served to ask what it was to her.”

The woman nodded toward his left, across the room. Nasrahiel saw they were not alone.

City Inspector Haadiyaa Gammon sat, her long legs crossed and hands folded on her lap. She was not, for once, in the uniform of the office Nasrahiel never believed she’d earned. She wore ordinary clothes tailored for a human male—trousers and jacket and waistcoat.

“You weren’t in a position to give your consent,” Gammon said.

“You might have left me still one of my people,” Nasrahiel continued, rounding on the first woman—a doctor of some kind, no doubt. She smelled of disinfectants and looked as if she knew better how to address her papers than another of her kind. “You took my legs. Why not build them back as they were meant to be? What am I without my eyes turned toward the earth my people were given?”

The doctor sighed. “Your brain, which is here,” she jabbed a finger toward Nasrahiel’s violated skull, “is still where visual information is processed. It’s not as if approximating nerve tissue with bioelectrical conduit is easy, or cheap. The filaments are desperately tiny and tear with the least misuse until they’re properly installed. The farther I had to string the stuff to reach from optic nerve point to occipital lobe, the more likely I would do it badly and leave you blind in any case. It was much simpler to drill you a proper occipital cavity and build up an ersatz with just a few inches of conduit.” She crossed her arms, tossing her head. A bit of her hair fell free from its arrangement. “It’s very likely the finest visual organ I’ve ever made. The telescoping feature is both powerful and only mildly intrusive, and the multistage lens approximates appropriate depth perception to a very tolerable margin of error.”

As if she expected him to ask how she might know this, the doctor added crisply, “I tested it on a cat gone blind with glaucoma. It was quite a mouser again for a while.”

Nasrahiel looked to Gammon, his teeth bared in a snarl. “What is this ghoul you’ve brought me to?”

“Nasrahiel.” Gammon rose, squaring her shoulders. “This is Jane Ardai, Lieutenant Colonel, Amidonian Army Medical Corps, honorably discharged and now serving in private practice.”

Nasrahiel wrinkled his nose. “Resurrection Jane.”

Jane Ardai crossed to a long wall full of cabinets and countertops. She filed her papers in a drawer and reached up, unpinning her hair. Nasrahiel’s eye focused in close without his choosing and saw her drop surgical sutures from her hair, one by one, into a shallow dish of lister.

“It’s a crass nickname.” Ardai sighed wearily. “But it’s good for business. Suggests a certain reputation.” She cast a narrow-eyed glance back at her sulking patient. “It’s earned, you know. You’re living proof.”

“How long since I fell?”

“Eight months.”

Nasrahiel stared.

“You’re easily the most involved reconstruction I’ve ever attempted, in no small part due to your ocular dilemma. It took almost three months to redesign my standard bio-conduit so your immune system wouldn’t reject it, a month waiting for my machine apprentice to finish the design for the legs and another two weeks getting him to hammer out his errors after some basic tests. That’s completely ignoring the time my courier spent fetching supplies from local dealers and standing her ground in negotiations for the really tricky parts. You owe that young lady rather a lot, I should think. After the surgery and installation, you needed weeks for all the grafts to take hold and mend you up again. All the while I had you feasting on my best intravenous and subcutaneous feeding solutions and kept your natural musculature from going flaccid through regular electrical stimulation.” Ardai crossed her arms under her heavy breasts and tossed her head again, as if she’d won some victory and the right to gloat over it. “You’ve been almost the entirety of my professional practice for months now. And I don’t come cheap.”

That last, Nasrahiel saw, was directed past him and toward Gammon.

“We had an agreement,” the other woman answered. Her tone was soothing, almost apologetic. Gammon’s eyes lingered lovingly on Resurrection Jane. Something in them answered a suspicion Nasrahiel had nursed about the officer when they first met.

“Yes, well. If only I knew then what I know now,” Ardai scoffed, though she seemed more playful than put out, “I’d have held out for more.” She dusted her hands off, lifted high in the air, as if to make the point that she was well and thoroughly done. “The sooner Nasrahiel makes his merry way out of my care and into yours, the better. My electrical stimulus regime is quite effective, but those legs will take getting used to and that can’t happen lying flat in my infirmary.”

Ardai marched toward the door, snapped its handle open, and paused on the threshold. Her smile showed teeth, and a little claw, too. “Out by week’s end, Haadi, my love. If I come back from Sabberday lectures and find six hundred pounds of aigamuxa still here, you’ll find out just how much a resurrection can really cost.”

And with that, the woman left.

In the silence that followed, Nasrahiel stared at Inspector Gammon with his alien eye, wondering if he had strength enough to fling himself from his bed and break her neck.

It was a struggle to form the words—a struggle against rage and nature and the horrifying realization that there would be no narrowing tunnel of red in his vision. No rush of blood to color his sight. Never again. He was a creature of passions and they felt more distant than ever, just as he needed them most. He reached for the fury, and it was a cold thing, limp and unfamiliar. He held it, oozing, between his fingers.

Cold as the clipping iris of his mechanical eye, Nasrahiel found his words at last.

“Tell me why you had her save me.”

Jane Ardai’s work had made a freak of Nasrahiel, but he could not deny that reading with an eye placed like a human’s was easier than reading in the pedestal position. His hands were free to lift and turn pages, to leaf and shift. His long, many-knuckled fingers moved shakily, fumbling the ragged pages’ edges. Confidence using his body had yet to return. And so much of his body had been changed. Ardai had been all too pleased to share the notes describing his case. There was a lacing of surgical steel netting over the bones of his spines, mending their breaks and protecting them against further injury. His arms felt changed, too, and he could see the faint tattoos of suture scars near elbow and wrist—some amendment to his musculature.

Focus. The pages. He directed his attention back to the ragged sheaf Gammon had given him as explanation: the reason he’d been saved, lying there before him.

The pages kept slipping between his fingers, but his eye took in the figures and facts quickly. He was no scholar, but among his people, Nasrahiel was known to be wise.

“Does the Reverend Doctor know you have these notes?” he asked the woman standing warily by his trestle bed.

Gammon shook her head, gathering some of the ragged sheets Nasrahiel had set aside. “I left the Constabulary . . . unexpectedly. I haven’t seen Chalmers since the night at the Cathedral—or, rather, he never saw me, up until he left Corma altogether. The Decadal Conference ended in a scandal—his kidnapping uncovered, a mass exodus of much of the EC’s leadership in the dead of night, the final day of programming entirely scuttled. Chalmers refused any interviews, spent a few weeks convalescing at Regency Square, and emerged back on the public scene with a joke of a paper adapted from the talk he was meant to have given for the keynote. He didn’t stay in the city long after that, and no one in the EC is very interested in looking for him. He’d probably have trouble getting work tutoring at a finishing school now, let alone qualifying for grants. There’s been talk of scheduling a new ‘Decadal Conference’ next spring to make up for the loss of this most recent event.”

“None of that matters to me,” Nasrahiel growled.

“I imagine it wouldn’t. As for the notes, I’ve pieced the pages together as best as I can. We seem to have portions of Chalmers’s records related to Subject One, Two, Four, and Seven.”

“We.” Nasrahiel ground the word against the rasp of his voice.

“We,” Gammon echoed. She pulled a sheet out, seemingly at random, and thrust it into Nasrahiel’s clawed grasp. “Focus on the coordinates for this one. What do they tell you?”

“Nothing,” the aigamuxa snapped. “I have no atlas, no map of this . . . Man’s world. You could as well bid me to read tea leaves or find water with a rod.”

“Look again. You should be able to tell something easily, if you try.”

Nasrahiel’s eye clicked and whirred. He bristled at the numbness it rattled into his flesh, but the feeling passed, and he found himself looking at the coordinates on the page, a splash of ink the size of a thumbprint.

“It is far from here,” he announced petulantly.

“Very far,” Gammon agreed. She pulled out another page and compared it against the first, laying it on the trestle beside him. “These coordinates are much closer, still in the western hemisphere and still in the north. Those others are in the east, south of the equator. If you compare them against a proper atlas . . .”

“Leonis,” Nasrahiel murmured. “Deep in the jungles. There are no Men left there. My people saw to that long ago.”

The former City Inspector leaned over the papers now, her hands braced to either side of them. She looked up, her dark Indine eyes locking on his mechanical gaze. She deserved some credit, this frail, human thing. She sees horrors and does not flinch from them.

“Exactly my point,” Gammon said. “Pierce and Chalmers were so busy gathering data and deciphering it, they scarcely bothered examining what it actually showed. They assumed all nine subjects would be human. But here—” she tapped the coordinates that pointed to a faraway home Nasrahiel had never known—the place from whence his father’s father had been dragged in chains. “And here—” she tapped the set on the other page, “It’s clear that can’t be. This region of northern Amidon is still unsettled. The lanyani tribes hold sway there. There are raiding parties to drive off settlers. No human habitation has been founded there and lasted more than two seasons since John Amidon came to the continent with the first Unitarians. It’s all wild game and rivers and mountains.”

“And trees,” Nasrahiel added. “And tree-men.”

Their faces were very close—close enough that Nasrahiel could clutch the woman’s neck, the pulse-point pounding, inviting the pressure he should use to end her.

His fingers ached, not for the first time since his waking.

“When last I saw you,” he growled, “you were shooting down my kinsmen. How much smaller is my tribe now, turncoat? How many body weights shall I tie to your feet, before I throw you to the river?”

“Eleven aigamuxa died at the Cathedral. Three were my doing. I maimed more than I killed, by the time the night was done.”

The woman’s perfectly uninflected ownership of her crime brought Nasrahiel up short. He tilted his head, an old habit of his thinking, and puzzled over the change it wrought. Strangely, his gaze turned, too, unbalancing the woman in his field of vision, shifting her right, then left.

He bared his teeth.

“You,” he said, at last, “are a bold creature, woman. I thought you Regenzi’s puppet.”

“And I thought you were just a pet waiting to bite his hand,” she parried. “But you’re more than that, Nasrahiel. You’re a prophet to your people. Their hope.”

Nasrahiel looked away. He closed his eye. “I have failed at that.”

“How many tribes followed your mission—believed in the theory of destroying mankind by destroying the subjects in the Grand Experiment?”

He turned back, glaring. “You have been gone since the Cathedral. None who were there know where you are, you claim. How do you know of my aims when you were not there to hear my claims?”

“I can make sense of the evidence before me. And I’ve been keeping watch over Chalmers. That’s shown me enough to fill in the gaps.”

“Four other tribes.”

“All in Corma?”

“Two in Corma. Two beyond.”

Gammon nodded grimly. “They’ll carry out your mission, with or without you?”

“They saw me fall,” Nasrahiel observed with a savage snort. “We have laws against retribution after the end of a war, but these are already . . . flexible, in a sense. One could say my quest against the Nine is itself a retribution for the harm done to my people. It might itself violate our law. Whether my fall will be read as proof that I was judged for my retribution, or as a martyr’s death that demands a response, I cannot say.”

“That’s why I needed Resurrection Jane. You set this in motion among your people. You’re the only one who can stop it.”

“Why would I want that?”

“Two of the four subjects in these notes are almost certainly nonhuman. One is clearly an aigamuxa. If there are nine subjects, and three races, it stands to reason all three are being watched, and each race has three representatives. The sample size is smaller than Chalmers ever imagined, but its scope is much bigger. If you tamper with the Experiment by slaying the humans, you tamper with an experiment in which you are actively a part. It’s a risk you can’t afford.”

Nasrahiel sneered. “You saved me so I could save you.”

“There are many things you could save. Who do you think has taken leadership of the tribe in your absence?”

A knot pulled closed in Nasrahiel’s heart. He pried it open with brutal will.

“Rahielma.”

“Among others.”

Nasrahiel studied the woman through a steadily narrowing gaze, like the spyglasses and microscopes he had seen cluttering up the scientist’s cell at the Old Cathedral. He looked for tension in her jaw, or the line of sweat at her brow that could prove this all to be lies.

He breathed deep and smelled the tang of resolve, not fear, surrounding Haadiyaa Gammon.

“You have a plan,” he said. It was not a question.

“The beginnings of one. I’ll need your help. I can’t carry it through without you.”

He nodded slowly. “Be it as you say, then. First, I must know what has become of the girl.”

Gammon frowned. “Girl?”

“The maps Chalmers drew. His notes. What of the girl?”

Gammon pursed her lips. “The one from the Cathedral? Rowena Downshire?”

“Her.”

The woman drew near, leaning over the papers again. Nasrahiel knew he had spoken too soon.

Fool. Idiot.

Gammon appraised him cautiously.

“Does she matter,” she murmured, “for the reason I’d expect?”

“That and more. You’ll need to find her before your Bishop does. The old Meteron.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then none of this—” Nasrahiel gestured—taking in the room, his metal legs, the bedraggled leaves of notes. The world itself “—will matter, after all.”