Liz Williams - Worldsoul

She walked across to the open window and took a breath of desert air, hot and clean, to wipe away the sense of foulness. Odd, how something so cold could yet be putrid. When she turned back to the table, the hand had moved.

“Aha,” Shadow said, tilting her head to one side.

She walked across to the door and drew it shut, then watched through a crack. Sure enough, the hand-she did not think that it possessed intelligence, animate though it might be-scuttled along the surface of the table, leaving a greasy trail of ichor in its wake. Once at the table’s edge, it seemed to be uncertain as to how to get down. It faltered, hesitated, tapped a finger much as Shadow herself had just done. Then, disappointingly, all the life seemed to ebb out of it and it slumped down in a tangle of fingers, unmoving. Shadow was reminded of chickens whose heads had been cut off. Tutting, she went back into the lab and found a small lead box. She picked up the stiffening hand with a pair of tongs and dropped it into the box, then sealed it with a soldering iron and put a binding of spells around it. Magic sizzled and hissed as she did so, flickering indigo-blue about the box, and when she had finished, the box was barely visible, contained in a cloud of magic. That, Shadow thought before she went to bed, would have to do.

When Mercy woke up, the ka was crouched on her chest, breathing out. She felt filled with sudden life, a glittering sense of well-being.

“Perra?”

“I breathe for you,” the ka said.

“Well, thank you.” Perra jumped down, but Mercy barely noticed: the ka was as light as air, weighing far less than a cat. It sat, a small sphinx, on the carpet by the bed and gazed up at her with lambent eyes. “Where am I?” Mercy asked. She blinked. The room was panelled in a faint willow-green. A lamp stood by her bed.

“You’re in hospital, dear.” A nurse appeared, with a white starched cap. “You had an accident.”

“Yes, I remember.” Her head hurt. “My colleague-Nerren?”

“She’s in the next ward. She’s fine. So are you. We’re discharging you both as soon as I get the all-clear from the doctors.”

“All right,” Mercy said, relieved. It struck her as particularly ironic that she should have survived the morning’s encounter in Section C with the thing from the ice, only to be nearly flattened by a falling flower. “Was anyone else hurt?”

“Yes, and one death.” The nurse checked her blood pressure.

“Damn it. Who are these people? Who’s sending these things?”

“If we knew that, dear,” the nurse remarked, “We could do something about it.”

And yet no one seemed to know, despite all the resources of Worldsoul. The Library had set a team on it, the Court had done so as well, and so had a myriad other organisations. The flower attacks had begun not long after the Skein had left: was this some natural phenomenon that the Skein had kept at bay, or was it part of the same thing that had led to the disappearance of the Skein themselves? No one knew. But they were devastating. Mercy felt lucky to be alive.

“I have given you a life,” the ka said, in its reedy, whispering voice.

“Thank you!” Mercy raised herself up on an elbow and peered down at it. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“It’s a spare. I have seven left.”

They had been granted nine originally, Mercy knew. Like cats. She did not like to ask the ancestral spirit how the eighth had been lost. Not given to either of her mothers, evidently: the heritage was wrong. The ka must have come from her father’s line, and who he had been, Greya-her mother-had never told.

“I’ll see you shortly,” the nurse said, giving the ka a disapproving glance, and bustled out before Mercy could ask her why they had given her a private room. Perhaps Nerren had pulled strings? The Library was still rich. But Nerren had no private room. She was in a ward.

Mercy lay back and after a moment saw the ka jump onto the windowsill. Perra gave a twist, and was gone out into the twilight. Mercy thought she might have dozed after that, because when she woke again, it was dark outside and a man was standing over her.

“Miss Fane?” He passed a hand across her eyes and there was a moment where her vision blurred. Then it cleared again. “How are you feeling?”

“A bit dizzy, actually.”

“You had a nasty bang on the head.”

He was dark-haired, pale-faced, ascetic. He wore a ruffed black suit, of expensive cut, a crisp white shirt, round spectacles. This must be the doctor, she thought, and wondered why there was such a sense of familiarity about him. Perhaps he was a frequenter of the Library: it had an extensive medical section.

“I’ve come to give you a final check-up,” the man said. “I am Doctor Roke.”

“Thanks,” Mercy said. “I don’t feel too bad.”

“A few last checks,” Roke said, soothingly. She found that she was lulled by his voice: Everything, it suggested, will be all right. “After all, we still don’t really understand what effects these flower attacks can produce. We need to be sure. I just need to take a quick blood test-” and before Mercy could open her mouth, she felt a needle at her arm and the doctor was holding up a phial of crimson fluid. “There we are. All done. We’ll let you know if there are any significant results.”

Then he was gone, leaving Mercy feeling safe. Ten minutes after that, the door opened again and the nurse reappeared with a small, stout man. “This is Dr Marlain. He’s going to give you a final check-up before we discharge you.”

“You’re very thorough,” Mercy said. “I’ve already had one of those. Dr Roke did a blood test?”

The nurse and Marlain exchanged startled glances. “Who?”

“A Dr Roke? Tall, dark? Nice manner. Very urbane.”

“There’s no one called Roke on the register,” Marlain said, blankly.

“Ah.” She digested this. So someone now unknown had come into her room and, entirely trusting, Mercy had let him take her blood. For what? And from the looks on their faces, they thought she had made it up. “Maybe I was dreaming,” Mercy said, dismayed.

They let her out anyway. Nerren was waiting in the lobby, bandaged and bruised.

“We’ve been told to take tomorrow off,” Nerren said, rising stiffly from her seat. “You didn’t have any appointments anyway.”

“I’m going to need it,” Mercy replied. “Did you? Appointments, I mean.”

“Some northern grad student, but I can put her off.” They began to walk slowly towards the doors.

Then Mercy remembered. “Oh, hell. The Citadel inspection.”

“You know what?” Nerren said. “Benjaya Vrone can handle it. He’s always bitching that I don’t give him enough responsibility, but I prefer to ask McLaren-he’s just good at dealing with crises. Let Ben handle the inspection and if there is a problem, we’ll just have to deal with it later. Having narrowly escaped being blown up, a bunch of civil servants suddenly seems less intimidating.” She pushed open the heavy doors and they stepped out into the warm embrace of the night.

“Agreed,” Mercy said.

They exchanged weary goodbyes.

Mercy walked stiffly through the darkness to a rickshaw row, and took an uncomfortably jolting ride home.

The blizzard had died out over the pass, but in her dream, Mercy knew that winter was coming. She took the clantrack south, heading down through the silent, snow-weighted pines and into the valley. It stretched, both shallow and wide, for three miles until the estuary, which in summer was a place of leaping salmon and flickering eels, white with water-fowl, but which now creaked and groaned with the cascade of ice floes from the further sea. Mercy was heading for the river and for the traps. She ran quickly, running on back-jointed feet across the hard ground, her pack bouncing against her shoulder blades. High above, a pair of ravens bobbed and wheeled, game playing in the first of the snows.