Called to Battle: Volume Two Read online

  “No.”

  “Your reason for wanting to see him?”

  “I’m investigating the circumstances that brought him here.” That was true to a certain degree, too.

  “After three years?”

  I found it strange that he knew so much about Toriella, but the gang boss might have been a bit of a local legend. “Yes, after three years. Now are you going to let me see him, or do I have to go get the Watch?” I could see in the man’s eyes that my bluff was working. I doubted he really cared who came and went.

  “You’ll have to leave your weapon here.” He pointed down a long hallway. “Go all the way down to the end and knock on the door. Tell Doctor Ingle what you want.”

  “Thank you.” I pulled my gun, emptied the cylinder, pocketed the shells, and then handed it to him. The sound of my boots on the hard floor echoed down the hall. Just before I knocked on the heavy double doors, I heard the first scream.

  Doctor Ingle turned out to be a young, bright-eyed woman with short-cropped red hair and an easy manner that took me by surprise. Maybe she didn’t mind the screaming. She showed me to Toriella’s room and warned me I wasn’t likely to learn much.

  “I’m afraid he’s not very coherent most days.” She worked the key in the lock and turned the handle of the heavy iron door. “His body endured more than his mind could, you see.”

  “And he never recovered?” She opened the door. The room was about ten feet square, but its only feature was a bed—and the shape strapped to it.

  “Not really.” Ingle indicated the shape. “He has lucid moments, but they never last long. If you don’t stress him much, you might get something out of him. Just don’t touch him. That’ll set him off for sure. If he starts screaming, you may as well leave. His episodes of hysteria last for days.”

  She left, and I looked at the man, or what used to be a man, as I slowly approached the bed. What was left of Korvin Toriella lay swathed in linen and secured in place by two padded leather straps across his chest and hips. He had been a big man once but no longer. Only a torso and head remained. His head lolled back and forth constantly, his eyes pressed tightly closed, his mouth working in quiet whispers. When I was a step away, I could make out his words.

  “Don’t cut me. Just don’t cut me no more. No more… Don’t cut me…” He wasn’t talking to me. He wasn’t talking to anyone, but I don’t think he ever stopped his pleading.

  “Toriella.”

  His eyes snapped open wide, and he stared at me in terror. I probably looked enough like Worthy to remind him of the man who had done this to him. I hoped so, a little.

  “He took them. Don’t cut me no more. Nothing left. He took them.”

  “I won’t cut you. Tell me what he took?”

  “Four. All four. He cut them off and took them.” HIs eyes pressed closed again. “Arms, legs… Took them… Said I took four from him, and he would take four from me. And he did.”

  “What about your men? What happened to them?”

  “He cut them. He cut them down and chopped them up.” His head continued to thrash back and forth. “Bullets, blades, nothing stopped him. He chopped them up like meat for stew.”

  I already knew, but I asked anyway. “Who? Who did this to you?”

  “Man. Big man. Black man.” His eyes opened again. He stared at me. “Looked like you.”

  Strangely, there was curiosity rather than terror in his stare.

  I said, “I need to find him. I need you to help me find him.”

  “Gone. He’s gone, and he took most of me with him.” Tears trickled down his face. “Took all four with him. Put them in a sack and left. One for each, he said. One for Mamma, one for Constance, one for Mercy, one for Faith….”

  There was something else I wanted to know. A savage curiosity. “How did you survive it?”

  “He wanted me to live. He cut me…real careful. When I bled, he tied it up with twine. Said he wanted me to live with the pain…to know what he took from me like he knew what I’d taken from him. So I’d feel the pain he felt. I do… Every day, I feel the pain.”

  Good, I thought, though I marveled at how Worthy had managed to keep the man alive. He’d cut up hogs and gators and a dozen other beasts for stew, but it took a surgeon to take off a limb without the patient bleeding to death. I wondered where Worthy had acquired that skill, or if he’d instinctively known what to do. I only had one more question, and it was the most important one of all.

  “Where did he go? You said he took them. Where did he take them?”

  For the first time there was real lucidity behind those terrorized eyes. “He told me he had to catch a train. Said he was sorry he couldn’t stay, but he had a train to catch. A train, by all that’s holy. A train, I swear.”

  A train? That didn’t make sense—there was no train in Mercir. The Fenn Swamp had claimed every attempt to build a track from Caspia and had even claimed the road in some places. But if Worthy had told him the truth, I knew where I would have to start looking. I could catch a freighter up the coast easily enough. I looked down at Toriella and though I felt no pity for him, I thought he had paid properly for what he’d done to my family. One for each—it seemed a proper payment, indeed.

  Corvis: The University

  I eased through the door and took a seat in the back of the vast lecture hall, trying not to draw attention. I stood out from the university crowd.

  My search had taken me along the rails north from Caspia, following accounts from rail workers, vagrants, and butchers and cooks who had employed Worthy. His skill with knife and cleaver had earned him a living, but he always kept moving. He had left the rails in Bainsmarket, where he’d worked for a meat packer for a few months before he continued north, as if trying to distance himself from what had happened in Waterbourg. The last place I would have guessed the trail to lead me was to the Corvis University Department of Medical Sciences.

  The hall went silent when a door opened down on the floor below. A big man entered pushing a wheeled chair before him. The man in the chair wore a bow tie and a white coat. His hair was white, cut short, and thick spectacles gave him a bug-like appearance. He smiled up at the rows of attentive students as his attendant pushed his chair to the fore.

  “Welcome to Introductory Human Anatomy.” His voice was reedy, but it carried to the corners of the vast room easily. “I’m Professor Hembly, and in this first lecture we will examine the major elements of gross human anatomy.” He nodded to his assistant, and the big man turned to the table draped in a white cloth and situated centrally in the lecture area. As Hembly talked, his assistant turned a crank at the side of the table, and it tilted on its base until it faced the crowd.

  “First, let me assure you that today’s subject was recovered from the local prison after his execution. Though a criminal, he has atoned for his crimes by his donation to science. We will show him respect for his contribution to our learning.” He waved a hand to his assistant, and the man pulled the drape from the shrouded corpse. The pale body was secured to the table by metal hooks and was bereft of clothing. There was a bruised purple ring—the mark of a hangman’s noose—around the dead man’s neck.

  I tried not to pay attention to the lecture or the deft strokes of the assistant’s instruments as he followed Hembly’s instructions for the dissection. Two hours later, the partially vivisected cadaver was covered again, and the students began to file out, muttering to one another and comparing notes. I pushed against that tide down to the lecture floor and spoke up before Hembly’s assistant could wheel him away.

  “Professor Hembly.”

  His big attendant turned first, his narrow eyes taking me in with cold scrutiny. I’d kept my coat buttoned to hide my gun, but anyone who knew what to look for would know I was armed. I wondered if he was more than just the professor’s assistant.

  “Yes?” Hembly’s eyes saw less and more, lingering not at the bulge under my coat but on my face, hands, and worn boots. “You’re not one of my studen
ts.” There wasn’t fear in his voice, just concern and curiosity. “What do you want?”

  “I’d like to talk to you about a man who used to work for you some time ago. A big man. He looked like me. You hired him from a butcher shop down on Dunlevy Avenue. The butcher said he knew him only as Cutter.” I saw in his eyes that he knew who I was talking about but that he was reluctant to tell me anything.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m looking for him.”

  Those astute, scientist’s eyes examined me again, taking in my facial features, my height, the hue of my skin and eyes. “I would know your name, young lady, and why exactly you’re looking for this man.”

  “My mother named me Temperance.” I didn’t like to give my real name, but I thought Hembly might detect a lie and refuse to speak to me. “I’m looking for him…because my mother knew him.” I left it at that. I couldn’t make myself name Worthy as my father, a man I’d never met.

  “I see.” He pursed his lips. “Do you drink tea, Temperance?”

  “Yes.” I didn’t particularly care for it, but I wasn’t about to refuse.

  “Then come with me.” He looked up at his assistant. “Have tea sent to my office, Varis, and then finish up in here.”

  “Yes, Professor.” The big man glanced at me once more before moving away from us.

  I pushed Hembly out of the lecture hall and through the labyrinth of the university to a large corner office. Inside, I gaped in awe at the shelves of books, scrolls, models, and the vast array of specimens that crowded every possible space.

  “I apologize for the clutter. I don’t let the cleaning people in here and—well, let’s just say I tend to get distracted and forget to tidy up.” He gestured to a chair that only had four books stacked on it. “Please, move those aside and have a seat.”

  I did, still taking in the collection of specimens in the room. Organs, hands, eyes, even entire heads of various species floated in jars of murky liquid, and dozens of dried and pinned insects, spiders, and the skulls of large predators were mounted on wooden plaques arrayed around the walls, some of the remains quite large and ferocious looking.

  “And so, Temperance, you asked me about a man I knew and employed two years ago. I knew him as Creb, but the butcher who employed him called him Cutter, as you said. That was where I met him.”

  “At the butcher shop?” I’d never heard the name Creb before. Worthy seemed to change names as often as most people changed clothes.

  “Yes.” A knock at the door heralded our tea. The attendant Varis entered, put the tray down on the professor’s disorganized desk, poured two cups, and departed without a word. Hembly watched him attentively until he was gone then turned back to me. “You see, I was looking for a snake skin. A giant variegated tree viper. But let me tell this from the beginning. Do you take cream or sugar?”

  “Sugar.” I accepted the cup, tasted the syrupy liquid, and settled down to listen.

  The Professor’s Tale: The Graveyard

  I’d heard that the butcher Grunyen trafficked in, shall we say, “exotic flesh,” and I knew I was in the right place the moment I walked through his door. I could see he had a positively monstrous snake in the case, precise steaks of it laid out like inch-thick playing cards. I thought I could get the skin for a pittance. Then he called Cutter in.

  He walked in carrying the hindquarter of an ox on his shoulder and a cleaver dripping blood in his other hand. He wore a dozen different knives, none of them terribly clean but all clearly as sharp as razors, and he handled the meat as if it weighed nothing. When Grunyen asked him about the snake skin, the big man nodded.

  “Yep. In the bin with the other hides.” He looked at me and then at Grunyen. “The tanner wanted it to make some boots for some fella.”

  “Well, Professor Hembly wants it for the university, so fetch it.”

  When he left to retrieve it, I noted the precision of the cuts upon the meat in Grunyen’s case, and I asked the butcher about Cutter. I was in need of a strong assistant, and someone both deft with a blade and not prone to squeamishness would be perfect.

  “Aye, Cutter’s a wonder with a knife. He’s a Swampie, you know. A Morridane from Blindwater Lake. Knows how to cut up a gator like nobody I ever knew and strong as an ox to boot.”

  Thus, I made a snap decision and hired him on the spot, much to Grunyen’s complaint. Cutter simply nodded when I offered to double his pay, wiped his bloody hands on his apron, and said, “Let’s go.”

  When I asked him his name, he looked at me strangely and asked, “Why?”

  “Well, I can hardly call you Cutter in the university setting. What would people think?”

  He frowned, furrowed his brow, nodded once, and said, “Creb.”

  Creb worked for me for six months, and he proved more adept with a blade than anyone I’d ever met. He put half of the physicians I trained to shame when it came to dissections. I never knew exactly how skilled he was until one night when we went to the graveyard. I’d heard they’d executed a criminal, a soldier in the 19th Heavy Infantry Battalion who had apparently gone berserk and killed half his squad before they could restrain him. I wanted to look at his brain, you see, to discern the cause of his violent behavior, but the military refused to allow me to examine the corpse. I was resigned to the loss until Creb suggested that we…um…recover the cadaver before it succumbed to decay. He never spoke much but always seemed willing to help. When I told him that exhuming a corpse without proper permission was against the law, he merely shrugged and procured a shovel. He hardly ever smiled at all, but he always did whatever I asked and never complained. That was his way. And in this way, he was just trying to help me, I imagine.

  Digging up a corpse in the rain didn’t even bother him. Of course, I knew that it would bother the authorities, but I was hopeful we wouldn’t encounter any. With all the problems the City Watch has had in the past with the city’s graveyards, I really couldn’t blame them for misunderstanding our intent when they came upon us. As the four officers of the City Watch emerged from the rain with their guns drawn, carrying on about necromancers and sorcery, I knew matters had taken a dreadful turn.

  When Creb lurched up out of the grave covered in mud with a shovel in his fists, I suppose they were startled. One of them fired his weapon, and the bullet ricocheted off the shovel’s head. Creb then threw that shovel like a spear. It wasn’t sharp, but it struck the guardsman directly in the face. The blade sheered through flesh and bone like an axe, and the man fell. The other three guardsmen began firing at anything that moved, including me.

  I raised my hands and called out to them just as something drove into my stomach. It felt as if someone had bisected me, as if my legs had simply ceased to exist. I caught myself on the cart we’d brought to haul the corpse back. Another bullet blasted a piece of wood from the wheel next to my head, and I heard a guard scream. When I looked up, I saw him falling with one of Creb’s knives imbedded in his chest.

  By the time the two guards who’d fired at me faced Creb, he had drawn his enormous cleaver and stepped over the corpse of the first one he’d killed to bring it to bear. The cleaver went through the first man’s arm just above the elbow. His arm landed in the mud with his gun still clenched in its hand, and the guardsman’s scream tore through the hiss of rain. The final guard tried to back away and fired as he did so. The bullet hit Creb in the leg but didn’t slow him at all. He threw that cleaver so hard it sank into that guard’s chest up to the handle. The poor man stared down in surprise at the haft for a moment, and then he fell. Creb drew a knife and ended the last guard’s screams with a deft pass across his throat. I tried to discourage him, but I was having enough trouble keeping my grip on the wagon wheel.

  Then I looked down, saw the bullet hole in my body, and lost my hold.

  Creb shouted, “Professor!” He seemed more concerned about me than he did about the hole in his own leg or the corpses of the four City Watchmen he’d just killed. “What happened?”

>   I’d like to say I said something witty, but I’m afraid I was a bit panicked. I’m a professor of anatomy, after all, so I knew from my symptoms precisely where the bullet had gone. I was alive, so the slug had not struck my abdominal aorta, and I felt nothing below my chest, which meant my spinal cord had been damaged. I wasn’t even in pain, oddly enough, and I managed to say, “Bullet…spine.”

  “All right.” Without tending his own injury, Creb picked me up and started off toward the university. I remember staring up into the rain and wondering if I’d live, then all else faded, and next I knew I was waking up here.

  Here on this very desk, Creb lay me down and extracted the bullet from my spine. He talked to me all through the procedure, more words than I’d heard from him in six months. He’d been doing dissections with me as long as he’d been here, and he had evidently learned a remarkable amount about human anatomy. And as I said, he was the best with a knife I’d ever seen. I didn’t feel a thing, of course, as there was nothing he could do to repair the nerve damage. I simply clung to his calm voice.

  “Don’t worry, Professor. There’s not much blood. There’s some bone splinters I gotta pull out. You’ll make it.”

  When he was finished, I slept. When I woke again, I was in the hospital. The authorities asked a great number of questions about how I’d been shot. Of course, I told them I remembered nothing. There was no evidence and no witnesses to connect my injury to the deaths of those poor watchmen, and I certainly wasn’t about to tell them what Creb had done. It was a misunderstanding over my need, after all, and Creb had saved my life. The doctors asked which surgeon had removed the bullet, but I told them again that I didn’t remember. Creb did not return to the university, but he left the bullet in a jar for me on my desk. As for where he went, I truly don’t know. We had never spoken much, but on one occasion he did mention sea air, the smell of the ocean, and how he missed it. I don’t know why a Swampie would miss the ocean, but that’s what he claimed just the same.

  If you ever do find him, Temperance, be sure to thank him for me.