Aimee Ogden - [BCS271 S01] - Blood, Bone, Seed, Spark (html) Read online

  Blood, Bone, Seed, Spark

  Aimee Ogden

  Upstairs, in the little rowhouse on the thirty-sixth meridian of the city of Leth Marno, the scuffling grows louder. Heels ring out against the floorboards, and shouts are muffled; by the rugs, perhaps, or a hand that grasps to cover a mouth.

  Anell Nath sits downstairs by the flower-arrangement pedestal. Her hands shake as she trims leaves from a bundle of pale peonies. She is more certain with the tools of her trade than with the instruments of the gentleperson’s art, but dissection scissors would make slow work of the thick waxy stems. As she works she counts the blows from the level above; categorizes and classifies each cry that makes its way down to her. Cool observation distances her from what is happening up there. That is her job, and always has been: to study, to take notes. To seek understanding, or at least knowledge.

  Hasn’t she had enough understanding for a lifetime by now? How deep must understanding be, before she drowns in it? The blades of the shears snap methodically, and leaves fall to the ground between her bare feet.

  Years of hard, grinding work in the library and the laboratory have honed the great desire of Anell’s heart into a scalpel, a sharp point ever driving toward that goal. The blade is so keen, though, that by its very nature it has flensed away everything else.

  The shears are heavy in her hand. A scalpel would have been defter. She sits, and cuts, and waits.

  At twenty-three years old, a graduate of the Hollow Universities of Kinnam Nath with all high honors and newly granted the privilege of a surname for her academic excellence, Anell Nath knelt and pressed her forehead to the carpet of Countess Liel’s study.

  The Countess’s bare feet crossed beneath the hem of her lily-white robes. Her House color was represented too in the pale petals that littered the ground at either side; lilies, yes, daisies too, and the frail wisps of baby’s-breath. Anell did not dare look up at the massive arrangements that flanked the Countess, nor past her purple-veined ankles; only waited and counted the whispers of pages turned.

  At last even the faint murmur of paper against paper fell silent. Anell’s breath cut through, separating the stiff body of the silence into parts smaller and more manageable. An exhalation, like a scalpel piercing rubbery flesh; a slow inhalation like cold fascia peeling away from the organs within. Until at last the Countess’s decision could be revealed. To secure patronage now would put Anell’s dreams within reach; to secure it here would put those dreams outside the grasp of the doubters at Kinnam Nath.

  “Your credentials are impressive.” A swish of fabric as the Countess uncrossed her legs. Anell did not look up to study her face or guess at her mood. She had researched the customs of Leth Marno and the country of Walchem before coming here, a study no less desperate than what she had poured into any quarterly exam. “And your proposal intrigues me, of course, else I would not have paid your passage here.”

  But was the word that the Countess dangled between them, daring Anell to bat at it with an unprovoked defense. Anell held her tongue, and after several long moments, the Countess stood.

  This was Anell’s signal to sit up. When she rested back on her heels, the muscles in her legs jangled their indignation. She still did not meet the Countess’s eyes; only focused on the belt at her waist, where one liver-spotted hand rested.

  “Intriguing,” the Countess went on, “and also unorthodox. Or perhaps that is part of the appeal.” She paused. “Of course, there is also the matter of the rumors that followed you here from Kinnam Nath.”

  Anell’s breath hitched, but the Countess continued. “I hired an investigator to validate the soundness of such an investment. They uncovered some things of interest to me. A spate of thefts: not valuables, but oddments. Eggs, sprouted grains, pregnant cats.”

  Anell’s tongue lay in the basin of her mouth, as thick and useless as that of a two-week-dead corpse. She felt certain that it would suffocate her, and more certain yet that no answer would roll off it that could please this woman.

  “You were never tied to these crimes with any certainty,” said the Countess. “But there was also the matter of your... proclivities.”

  A spasm of her throat forced a small sound out of Anell. The Countess folded her arms.

  “I know that no matter whom I choose to sponsor, I’m not likely to live to see Victory. I seek only the few additional years that a sound scientist could offer. With the history of cancer in my line, your proposal seems the most likely to offer a return on my money. If, of course, that proposal is truly the vessel into which you intend to pour my patronage.”

  The Countess folded back into her seat. So smooth and sudden was the movement that Anell failed to drop her gaze quickly enough and caught for a moment the Countess’ gaze, sapphire sharp. No; not sapphires but blue diamonds, honed into drill bits and ready to put the test to what fault lines lay beneath Anell’s surface.

  “Well?” the Countess asked. “How do you answer?”

  “Your Grace, I was a child then.” Anell wet her lips and immediately regretted the show of nerves. She’d made this speech before; usually it came more easily. It had been some years, though, and now there was far more than the specter of the Dean’s disciplinary cane at stake. “Interested in childish pursuits. Too drunk on teenage immortality to accept my duty.” All scientists fought for eternal Victory, or at least sought to make their own small scratches in that vast implacable possibility. If the Countess would let her, she would give her House as many years of life as she could scratch out of cold vials and ancient spells. And if she pursued other goals in her spare time, that needn’t trouble the Countess. “I learned from my mistakes. I’m a stronger woman for them. A more resolute champion for you and your House.”

  Behind her, the door opened. A man said, rather loudly, “Mother, are you still tormenting the poor woman? We all know you’ve already decided.”

  “Arantha.” The Countess sighed. The muscles in Anell’s neck twitched, begging her to turn and see who had interceded on her behalf. She held steady. “Will you not let me conduct my business in peace? The House will be your brother’s soon enough. If he’s content to let you pry into his affairs, that’s fine, but kindly wait until I have lost the fight against the After before you treat me as if I have.”

  “Well, you’re delaying dinner, which I think is absolutely my business. And I have a real fear that your scientist’s legs will go gangrenous from sitting all this time and she’ll succumb to sepsis before you get an ounce of use from her.” Footsteps swept past Anell. “Here, have some sherry and come off it already.”

  “You are without shame.” The Countess rustled, an opaque shift of skirts and sleeves. “Rise, Nath Anell.”

  Anell froze before climbing to her feet. She swayed briefly on stiff knees as blood and sensation returned. If she had been bidden rise, the Countess had reached a favorable decision. Anell stared full-on into the Countess’s face, and the thunder of those blinding-blue eyes echoed in the hollow places inside her.

  A flicker of movement behind the Countess stole Anell’s attention. He was of an age that he would be the Countess’s elder son, but his left eye was one of polished black glass. Those born death-touched, with sightless eyes or withered limbs, would see a younger sibling inherit first—at least unless the new Concerns in the capital managed to push their reforms through into law. As Anell gawped at him, he tipped a sherry glass her way, then drank.

  “The remorse is real,” said the Countess, lifting her chin to study Anell’s numb face. “The Universities’ masters did their work well in teaching you not only th
e nature of the world but of your place in it.”

  “I hope I will never give you cause to regret becoming my patron.” Anell bowed in the way she had read of, with her hands folded and pressed to her forehead.

  “Your predecessor’s facilities have been emptied and cleaned.” The Countess plucked the sherry glass from her son’s hand. “My people will provide you with a line of credit to acquire what you need in terms of furnishings or materials that he lacked.” She thrust one finger into the webwire board beside her chair and turned a ring. The study door opened, and one of her household officials appeared. “You may be a risky proposition, but he seemed a safe one. May you fare better than he did.”

  “Thank you,” said Anell, to the Countess, and to her son Liel Arantha as well. The Countess did not respond in any way, but the young man smiled at her as the official led Anell away.

  Anell’s predecessor had died in the line of his work—not an uncommon end for a scientist but still an embarrassing one. Many of Anell’s profession struggled to keep from pouring a little too much of their soul into their work, from testing a new elixir or spell on themselves first. They wanted the glory of a great advance toward Victory, of course, as Anell did too. Glory was not won in a slow hesitant creep of borrowed hours, and the After did not give up its secrets gently.

  In the case of Anell’s predecessor, the issue had been the development of a new mechanism of Permanence. Anell had studied spellcraft briefly at school, before she found her primary interests lay not in the misty probabilities of magic but in the material world of chemicals and moving parts. Alchemy was useful, absolutely, but the perfect clockwork of biology was a kind of magic in its own right. The gentleman in question had, in any case, devised a way to open and stabilize bubbles of Permanence that did not require their contents to be frozen to preserve them. The technique was now used in Temple hospitals across Walchem, to move and store organs for transplant.

  A scientist who served one of the Countess’s rival Houses had explained much of the situation to Anell. At least as much as he knew, from his vantage point outside House Liel, and as much as he wished to tell without inadvertently handing her too many pieces of the puzzle. From what Anell gathered, it wasn’t customary for rival Houses to fraternize much. Normally in the streets of this city, couples and trios showed their affection freely, joyfully, and artfully—in such ways that would make the romantic poets of Camrain blush and turn aside. But this lover only ever met Anell by dark of night. On this side of the Sea, Counts and Countesses jealously protected the fruits of their patronage. What one House gained in mortality abatement was denied to the others, unless their own scientists could unravel the same secrets. No House wanted to fund the longevity of their neighbors, or worse yet, be outlived by them.

  But from Anell’s cursory study of House law, such associations weren’t strictly forbidden. Discouraged, yes, but permissible, especially when they were strictly sexual—or at least appeared to be so. As Anell crouched alone in her rival’s bathing-chamber with a glass vial pressed half an inch up her cunt, she wondered if he too had convinced himself that this was just a brief fling. She certainly didn’t mind the trappings of such a thing. This man, whose name she currently couldn’t quite remember, was a student of psychic alchemy—a far different field from her current official area of expertise, which made it very difficult to stumble together into a work conversation. And what lay beneath the crisp crimson of his House robes made a very pleasant game indeed of the necessary deception. She put one elbow on the rim of the bathtub to brace herself and waited.

  “Are you all right in there?” Anell’s head came up to confirm that she’d shut the latch on the door. But his voice reached her from a distance, as if he hadn’t actually gotten out of bed to investigate her absence. “It’s getting late. If you like I could ring along the webwire for some dinner. There’s a place just down the meridian with Camrainian food?”

  Anell pictured the local take on her fathers’ mushroom dumplings and the runny yogurt that passed for sour cream here. She grimaced. There was a slight shift in the weight of the glass tube. A wad of semen had slithered out of her and into the tube. She pulled the tube free of herself and capped it, subvocalizing a trigger word. The nacreous glimmer disappeared into the bubble of Permanence she’d salvaged from her predecessor’s study. She straightened, letting her undershift fall back into place. “Cabbage pancakes?”

  “Lovely.” She heard the rings of the webwire turning. Ismal! That was his name: Cadist Ismal. She stood, and cleaned her hands, and when she opened the door he smiled up at her. He hadn’t contrived to cover his nakedness while she was out of the room. A sudden impulse tingled electric over her: to share that openness, to be simply what she seemed on the surface and not less and not, and never, more. Her gauzy undershift peeled away. Ismal’s cock twitched against his thigh, and Anell climbed astride him, to taste him once without thought of samples or studies.

  Only later, in the quiet of the study in her own apartment, did she discharge the vial of semen from its waiting-space. With infinite patience, she painted a sample onto a glass slide and inserted it into the viewing-platform of the lightscope she had ordered with Countess Liel’s money. The lightscope was a fine model, better than what she’d used in school. All the better to observe and study the growth of blood vessels, the angiogenetic principles that nourished the inception of cancerous tumors. And all the better to grant the clarity of detail for which she now hoped. She bent her eye closer, drinking in the details of the tiny animalcule sleeping inside the head of each serpentine cell.

  At her side, her hand found a slab of paper, a piece of charcoal. She wasn’t the first to observe and draw the germinative animalcules inside a man’s seed. But as with any field that did not serve the greater goal of abatement, studies into reproduction had fallen by the wayside. And Anell intended, after all, to do more than merely observe and draw. This way lay greatness, the kind that could not be scraped out of a lifetime’s long work tacking minutes onto the sunset days of her head of House.

  With a spiderweb-slender glass wand, she transferred another minute particle of Ismal’s semen to the softly glowing, pulsing balloon that currently occupied the place of honor beside the lightscope. The sheep stomach had been rescued from the local butcher, and while an actual uterus would have been preferable, it would have been much more difficult to acquire without drawing unwanted questions. Then she unbound her predecessor’s Permanence from its bubble and wove its loose ends through the magical catch-points she had embedded in the ex vivo womb. Enhanced with all the science and psychic alchemy she could muster, it should serve its purpose: to not only convert the animalcule into a macroscopic free-living infant but also to inoculate the resulting child against the onset of death and decay. Anell’s hands did not begin to shake until she had finished the transfer, and she set the wand carefully into the decanter of sterile elixir before she could cross-contaminate her working surface.

  Yes, Anell would pass someday into the After, but not this being, not the life she had made with her own hands. She would be the first to put a foot on Death’s neck; it was only that it would not be her own foot she used. The patrons of the great Houses sought to battle sacred Death on Death’s own ground, using their own bodies as fodder; the universities of Camrain did little different except to experiment on those who could not afford to say no. Even if her predecessor had solved Permanence in, well, a more permanent fashion, she had no wish to lock her being away into a waiting-space for a hundred or a thousand or an eternity of years, hoping some clever soul would snatch immortality from its secret halls in the After in that time.

  According to the masters back at Kinnam Nath, her work was deviancy, a perversion of the sacred fight against the eternal nothing. “Your mysteries have been solved by every back-alley bitch in heat,” the Master of Psychic Alchemy had said, when she had presented her proposal on a new grand theory of emboitement. Let them batter themselves senseless on the gates of the After.
She would pass quietly through, when it was her turn, if she could but leave this one thing behind her.

  Sometimes ugly rumors were true. It occurred to her that if her career in Leth Marno ended in tatters, her fathers and grandmother might hear of it even across the sea in Camrain. Perhaps they would be disappointed. Perhaps they’d be relieved.

  When Ismal called on her again, a few days later, she did not answer the door-bell. He left a flower-invitation hanging by its ribbon from the entry pediment. She forgot it there until another week had passed. By then, the thing had dissolved into rot-slick yellow petals on her pavement and a ribbon-tangled gnarl of leaves that crumbled at her touch.

  As the months quickened, the ex vivo womb did not. Sample after sample of semen disappeared into the fleshy maw, and the animalcules inside only withered and died without taking hold. Anell adjusted the alchemical ratios, adding more vitality, but nothing affected the rate at which her would-be creations vanished into the After without ever truly knowing the Now.

  At intervals, the Countess required updates on Anell’s above-the-board work. She did not demand minute accounting of where her money went, but she insisted on six-month reviews in which she could determine to the best of her ability Anell’s progress.

  Anell produced what she was asked for: demonstrated the effects of innovative biochemical substrates to block the development of new blood vessels; showed how, in culture, a tumor would shrivel when deprived of its nutrient source. She was candid too with the project’s shortcomings. Sometimes, as she showed the Countess with a series of drawings and diagrams, a tumor could overpower the chemicals she bathed it in and find new ways to call capillaries to heel. These, too, she could find a way to halt, given more time. It was only ever a matter of time. And money, but the Countess had a far more generous supply of that.

  But there were deeper pits to dig than the biannual justification of her efforts. Most Walchemians hewed far more seriously to the practice of religious devotion than was customary in Camrain or Cowak or Rumannal. Twice a year—the same frequency as the Countess’s accounting—Anell was required to subject herself to temporary Surrender.