The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [2]
They heard then felt a faint shudder in the structure. The wrecked body of the mother trembled about them.
At dusk, from Black Fields, and coming slowly under the Talbot Lane Bridge, toward the opening that was South Gate—in the direction all flotsam must go, from mountain to ocean—the corpse floated, face down. Four kholics stood knee deep in the turgid water of the River Crane and watched. This was not an unusual sight for them. Paused in the task of skimming shit from the river, the men held their huge nets aloft, like pale flags. Light from a lantern, hooked on a pole, caught on low ripples in the brown water, and on debris, and then on puffy grey flesh.
The body was that of another man, naked and slim. He had not been dead for long; flesh did not last in these waters.
When the timing was right, one of the kholics waded out and extended the pole of his net to intercept, managing to hook the body by its stiff arm and pull it closer. Flipping the corpse was a struggle—a difficult task, but not impossible. Foul water and muck splashed the kholic. He did not flinch.
The dead man’s throat had been cut, body drained of humours. Fat black leeches clung to legs, groin, torso. Across the man’s face was a black tattoo, inked around both eyes and nose, extending—like the gash—back to the ears.
A kholic.
One of them.
Brief looks, exchanged: over the past few nights, working this bend of the river, the bodies of two other murdered kholics had been retrieved. The men knew these dead, had eaten with them on occasion, had cleaned with them, side by side, had stared at the ground together, to avoid the hemos’ eyes.
As if the killer might be watching, they turned to scan the banks. There were a few people there, other kholics, mostly, labouring among the rocks. No one walked the promenade atop the embankment. Torches and street lanterns did little to the shadows of Nowy Solum, looming behind. Nothing in their city appeared out of the ordinary. The night, like most, was warm and humid, the river foul, the clouds close over their heads.
An upside of discovering that the dead man was like them: all they had to do was build a bonfire and toss the corpse of their brother onto it.
But as they began to pull the body to shore, a brilliant and terrible object hurtled across the sky, burning streaks through the clouds. Clay rooftops, mossy brick walls, buildings crammed together: all, for that instant, detailed more brilliantly than any day could ever possibly have illuminated them.
After-images trailed.
Smell of thunderstorms rained down.
The celestial object had vanished.
Warm dusk—for just a second—fell back into place, and as the men turned, frowning, to their work, the air was torn asunder by a roar so loud it seemed the world might have ended; now the kholics darted, clapping their hands over their ears. One fell headlong in the water. The lantern winked out.
Booming echoed briefly off the city, off the palace, off the towers and perimeter walls, off the markets and hovels, before all went quiet once more.
In this profound silence, on this profound night, Nowy Solum now seemed impossibly still, as if unchanged, as if nothing had happened. But the kholics knew better. Rules had shifted, fundamentals altered—
Concerns for the hemos, not them.
Without a word to each other about the incident, the men retrieved the body one more time—which had been trying to continue its way downstream, perhaps to escape—and brought their brother to the rocky shore.
Rolling lazily, laterally, the fecund let out a sigh. She half-closed one red-tinged eye. Her cascading body, strung with the weeds of her cell, was clearly swollen. Ready, it seemed, to burst. She said:
“I suppose we could begin at other points, if you’d prefer. Perhaps we could start with the chatelaine, finding herself, one morning, feeling strangely refreshed and clearheaded for a change?” The monster’s voice could be very quiet when she wanted it to be. “But before we get too far with this story, I’d like to ask you a personal question, if I may?”
The trilling sound