The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [94]
The chin-pasi drew its arms back into the cage and sat down. It no longer looked at Beltan. Instead it seemed to stare at one of the walls. Beltan followed its gaze.
The wall was covered with paintings of bones.
He frowned, studying the paintings. The bones seemed to glow against their dark backgrounds, and only after a moment did he realize it was one of the bright white lamps, set into the wall, shining through the paintings.
Beltan had seen enough bones in his life to recognize many of the images. In the middle of the wall was a thighbone, then a hipbone, hands, ribs, and a skull. They looked to be the bones of a tall man.
A shiver crept along Beltan’s naked skin. He looked down at his left hand, strapped next to him. The last joint of the littlest finger was crooked, broken and never reset when he was twelve winters old. He looked back up at the glowing image of the skeleton hand. The littlest finger was also crooked, bent at the last joint.
The bones in the paintings were his own bones. But how could one paint a man’s bones, down to the smallest detail, when they were still in his body? He could see faint outlines around the bones, like the hazy ghosts of flesh. Again, he disliked assuming magic was at work, but it was difficult to see how else these images could have been made. Perhaps if Melia were there, she would have been able to explain it to him.
Or not Melia, but Lady Grace. Except he wasn’t quite certain why he thought this. Only that, for some reason, he felt Grace would understand.
His eyes moved farther along the wall. More bone paintings, glowing like the first, showing hands, skulls, hips. But these bones were shaped differently than his own. One of the skulls was low, its snout protruding, and the hands below it were long and curled. Surely those bones belonged to the chin-pasi in the cage. It still stared at the wall. Was the thing clever enough to recognize its own bones as Beltan had?
His eyes moved to the last set of bone-paintings. Again, a chill swaddled him. One painting showed a skull that was high, delicate, and pointed, like the shell of an egg. The eye sockets were huge and tilted, the jaw tiny. Was it a child’s skull? But it was far too large. Beneath the skull was the image of a hand. The finger bones were long, even longer than the chin-pasi’s, straight, and terribly slender, like the twigs of a willow. Beltan did not know what creature these bones belonged to, but one thing was certain: It was neither man nor chin-pasi.
A metallic chunk echoed on the cold air. Beltan turned his head in time to see a steel door open. A figure stepped through: small, slender. A woman. She wore some kind of breeches, like a man, and a thin white coat. Perched on her nose were a pair of spectacles like the ones Travis wore, only these had black frames instead of wire.
“Well, you’re awake,” she said with a smile.
He recognized her voice. She was one of the two shadows who had spoken over him earlier, the one called doctor. Hadn’t Lady Grace once used the word to describe herself? But that had been a word from her world.…
Beltan stiffened. The doctor hurried to the side of his bed. She laid a hand on his brow; it was cold. “No, don’t worry. There’s no cause for alarm. We won’t harm you, we only want to learn about you, that’s all.” She sighed. “But why am I bothering to tell you that? You can’t understand me.”
But he could understand her. And if they did not mean to harm him, why was he strapped down like a prisoner? He swallowed. It was hard to force the words out, but he did, one by one.
“Let … me … go.”
Beltan knew there was something strange about the words even as he uttered them. They sounded harsh and guttural, just as her words had, and not only because of his dry throat.
The woman stumbled back from the bed,