City of Ruin - Mark Charan Newton [113]
In his youth he had tended to the dying needs of a girl from the Order of Natura, a lone worker and a collector of insects, she claimed. As she bled to death on his operating table, she had confided her wish was that someone would continue her projects – perhaps even this enigmatic young doctor who was struggling to patch her up. She died, however, and as requested he had investigated her belongings.
By scrutinizing her journal, he had very quickly learned the arts of the cultist.
His research became assiduous. He soon ascertained how he could enhance and graft insect parts onto living people. It was an inexact science. When purple light sparked and webbed, joining two organic surfaces in unnatural combinations, he did not know how it was done, only that it happened. And it was real.
His skills were at a peak when he had discovered Nanzi at the harbour. He had warned her of the dangers, the vagueness of the science he practised. She simply stared at the stumps that were once her legs, and accepted his offer.
And where she was broken, he had rebuilt her.
Blood had leaked everywhere at first, pooling in worrying quantities on the floor, so Voland calculated he would lose her, there on his operating table. For sixteen hours he worked on her, first extracting the flattened remnants of her legs with surgical precision, then attaching, generating and lengthening the ones originally taken from a spider. Two separate operations were needed before the joining of these new limbs. Sixteen more hours were needed to make sure the tissue connected satisfactorily, the tendons and bone intersected correctly, and that she would not ultimately reject them. With help from the Phonoi, he had applied his system thoroughly and diligently and lovingly.
In the milky light of dawn he had waited until she awoke. Long moments of time, those were, his arm propped against the wall as the warmth of a new day began stirring something primeval within him.
Yet exhaustion overwhelmed him; as if his entire soul had been put into reconstructing her.
A sadness crept across his face, then more concern, but . . . gradually her fingers began to move! Thanks to the power of that ancient race: the Dawnir, a people thought to possess far greater technology than was now known. He was left in awe of what he had done with their help, through this connection of minds effected through tens of thousands of years.
As Nanzi regained consciousness, she had begun to cry.
At first she remained febrile, and wept for days simply because of the pain. Voland was horrified. He had thought he had enhanced her mobility, but what a fool he was to assume she would be smiling from the off. How naive could he have been? While she slowly recovered, he cleared the operating chamber of all traces of blood, mucus, skin, fibrous tissue, hair, and slowly scrubbed the place raw until he felt himself purge the anger within himself.
Surprises followed, eventually. As the pain subsided, there was silence. No clear indicator of her mood, but it seemed something more primitive had now taken control of her emotions. As he quizzed her daily, he feared that she might repudiate his work on her, but she did not. Whoever she had been before the transformation, it appeared she soon forgot. He never really did know exactly who she was before her accident, her family, or where she grew up. It was probable he would never learn.
When she first morphed into a dazzlingly huge spider, it nearly scared him to death. And then she rapidly became at one with her new self, and Voland grew used to her coughing silk from time to time, the occasional and uncontrolled