The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [91]
Trying not to be too rude, Name of the Sun smiled at a few of the comments, promised the girls she would go out with them next time—that it would be a hoot, for sure—and then left as quickly as possible to go to work.
Her roommates stood jammed in the doorway to watch her go. When Name of the Sun was out of sight, Dora said, “What a stuck-up bitch.”
“I can smell that kholic on her,” said Nina. “I never noticed before, but this whole room fucking stinks.”
Polly was touching the door at knee level, where a mark had been painted. When she took her hand away, her fingers were reddened.
“Look at this,” she said, “someone’s gone and painted a ruddy ex on the front of our room.”
Then Dora wondered if she should make herself throw up, to avoid the bedspins that would surely happen when she tried to lay down, but they all piled back inside the room to pick up their snorting and laughing and drunken repetitions where they had left off.
The air, as they closed the door, carried with it a tinge of smoke.
When the boy was asleep, the castellan stripped him, cleaned his body with cold water, rinsed him, and patted his torso dry. The chest was muscular, the tiny nubs where limbs should have been hard and gristled, the brow formidable: a beautiful specimen. Swaddling the body, the castellan went to the back room, to shout at Tuerdian until the servant rose slowly from his cot. Amid flies and the smells of his own decay, Tuerdian coughed and rubbed at his rheumy eyes with grotesquely swollen knuckles.
“Get dressed,” said the castellan.
“I have just fallen asleep,” said Tuerdian. “I was out on the tower until moments ago. I, uh . . .” He shook his head. “Give me a moment to compose myself.”
Tuerdian moved his swollen legs off the mattress, one at a time, gingerly lifting them with his own hands as if he expected them to shatter, or as if they were separate entities.
The castellan returned to his table. In his arms, the boy snored on, oblivious, wrapped in a blanket. The cobali hissed at his approach. Hardly aware of his flickering thoughts, the castellan already suspected he would not follow any of the procedures he had practiced over the years, or consult the diagrams and results he had so carefully logged, or take any sensible precautions whatsoever. Inspiration motivated him. External forces. The processes he imagined, standing there over the sleeping child, were implausible at best.
Tuerdian emerged from his tiny room, wearing the mask and suit the castellan had designed for him. Shuffling over, the ancient servant took his place by the head of the table, racked by a spasm; the cobali screeched and renewed its futile efforts to escape.
Beyond the dungeon tower, the unseen sun had long ago dropped. The boy twitched, as if in dream. With a sense of profound yet detached wonder, the castellan started to work.
When his knife sliced too deeply, exposing grey muscle, it seemed as if the interior of the boy—the meat and nubs of malformed bone, the sinew and cartilage—glowed with an inner light.
Long before he was done, the castellan wept steadily. The eye he had earlier injured to acquire aqueous humours, to try prolong the life of a now-dead cobali, began to flow again, dripping from his face and down onto the table, onto the body of the boy that Tully had brought here.
Tuerdian paused in his work, immobile, holding the strips of leather and thin sheets of metal. His expression, behind the mask, was impossible to decipher.
They came out of the tunnel into the unlit courtyard, with Jesthe steepled on all sides, black and bridging overhead. Glimpsed over the main gates, clouds were tinged an angry red. The air writhed with smoke. In the last stretch of tunnel, Octavia had convinced the monster to let her climb atop its back—or rather, she had vaulted up,