Heaven's Bones (26 page)

Robarts wiped his mouth with his shirt cuff. Trueblood eyed the other hand, the one that held the scalpel.

“It's not going to work.” There was an edge of hysteria in the doctor's voice. “I thought … it made so much sense, when I imagined it. They should just grow right out of them. It should be natural.”

“I think, perhaps, that you might put down your scalpel, sir.”

Robarts looked puzzled, then glanced at the blade trembling in his right hand.

“Oh. I see. Yes.”

With great care he laid the scalpel on a small stand that held several other of his instruments: needles, a pair of long-handled tweezers, wide, flat blades and other tools of the surgeon's art. Some of the other knives were clotted with blood.

“Look.” Robarts gestured at his work lying before him. “It's too flimsy to support the weight; she would crash, just like …” A spasm disfigured his mouth and he struggled to master it while Trueblood waited patiently.

“And if I include more of what lies beneath, enough to make a sufficiently thick wing, one that she could
use
—well, then there's not enough muscle left to support it from below.”

Trueblood looked past Robarts. The Angel who was once a woman named Nellie was watching from the other side of the room.

“They're still missing something,” continued Robarts, oblivious. “I should be able to make them whole again.”

“Respectfully, sir,” said Trueblood. “I believe you must revisit the idea of wings separately and specially constructed.”

“Do you think it's possible?”

“I think anything's possible, in this day and age, sir. An age of infinite resource.”

Robarts gestured at the woman in front of him. “I've ruined this one,” he said, his voice cracking.

Trueblood crouched beside the woman, looking into her glazed, unresponsive eyes.

“I don't know, sir. Is it necessary that all Angels fly?”

“The properties of angels is that they have wings, can fly, and know the future,”
said Robarts. “The Haigaiah says so, also the Talmud and the Menachen Papers.”

“Flying is as flying does,” said Trueblood. “And wings, well, they were taken from them long ago, and it remains for us to give them back. As for the future, and the past, for that matter …”

“The
Gregori,”
came a strange, high-pitched voice at his back. The Angel with the baby in her belly had circled the room, silently, and now stood at his side. Trueblood stifled an impulse to jump.

“Yes,” said Robarts.

“The
Gregori
are the watchers,” continued the eerie voice of the baby. “The
Mishavah
, the destroyers.”

Trueblood licked his lips. “The
Mishavah
can storm heaven,” he said, reflectively. “And the
Gregori
… well, knowing the past is just as useful as knowing the future. More so, sometimes.”

Robarts stroked the tumbled hair of the woman in front of him.

Trueblood raised his hand over her, palm down. He concentrated,
drawing out what he'd had the power to put inside her. From the raw surfaces of her back, a vapor began to rise.

She came out of it slowly, not stirring except to blink her glazed eyes and lick her dry lips. And at first she looked confused, as if the pain were a new sensation not immediately comprehensible. Then her eyes opened wide and she started to tremble.

Robarts' hand stilled on her hair. “What are you doing, Trueblood?”

Trueblood didn't answer and more vapor coalesced from the woman, birthing itself from the tissues and fibers of her bare muscles as philosophers once thought maggots spontaneously generated from meat.

The Angels beside him moved slightly.

“Don't think on it, Tamar,” he told her, sotto voce. “I hold her life between my fingers now.”

“That's not my name,” said the baby.

Trueblood grinned like a feral dog. “What is your name, then?”

The baby said nothing. The woman beneath his hand was shaking.

“Lost it, didn't you? Doesn't feel good, does it?”

Still nothing.

“Answer me.” He made the slightest movement with his hand and the woman on the table screamed.

“Trueblood!” Robarts cried.

“No,” said Tamar. “It doesn't feel good.”

He made another motion and the woman stilled, breathing heavily. Her legs moved, trying to find purchase against the table, and her hands clenched into fists and unclenched again. She made a thin mewling sound, like paper tearing.

Tamar reached under Trueblood's arm and took the other woman's hand in hers.

“Stop it, Trueblood,” ordered Robarts, and there was something different about him, something saner, more
in-the-world
than Trueblood was used to from him.

When he first found Robarts' broken mind, when he reached out to him from his exile in the Mists, there were pieces of Robarts left that were like this—pieces of the man he had been. Pieces his
Margaret
would have recognized.

He could destroy Robarts where he stood, if he wanted. But he needed the doctor, needed his obsession and skill.

He couldn't build his army, his
Mishavah
, without Robarts.

“Not long now, sir,” he said, soothingly.

A layer of vapor, like the smoke of a smoldering fire, lay over the woman's body now, stirred here and there by her fitful movements. Cautiously he removed his hand from its position hovering over her. The vapor remained.

He kneeled quickly beside her, his mouth near her ear.

“Look,” he told her. “Do you see yourself? In the midst of the fog, thicker than any you've ever known.”

“A spring mist,” she gasped. “Out in the fields by the river, when winter came. I was lost there once.”

“Yes,” he said. “You're in the mist, but the pain makes you sharp. Do you see yourself, standing out against the mist?”

Tamar made a small sound.

“You're dissolving,” said Trueblood. “You're dissolving into the fog, and there's nothing you can do about it.”

“No,” said the woman.

“It's taking you. What do you see? Open your eyes and look. It's your only chance.”

“I see …” She was panting. “Color. Every color that was.”

“What else?”

Her voice was deep and resonant now. “Every light that was. Every shape that was. Every person that was. Everybody I've been.”

Her terrified eyes focused on his face.

“Everybody
you've
been.”

“She can't take more,” said Tamar in a low voice. “Even you can't afford to waste another one.”

Trueblood looked up at her and the baby, baring his teeth. The infant regarded him calmly with too-large eyes.

She was right.

“Come out of there,” he said, turning back to the woman. “Grab the pain, pull yourself out of the mist. You're coming back together.”

“Coming back,” she repeated. “Coming back. Coming home.”

Trueblood stood and stretched out his hand again. The vapor gathered beneath it and sunk back into the woman. She quieted and lay still.

“She couldn't go home,” the maimed woman continued after a pause. “Because like you, she was destroyed in her time and place. Too mingled with you, within you.”

“Jaelle.” Trueblood stared down at the woman. “Jaelle.”

“Yes. She loved you, you know. Beneath the hate you created.”

“Where did she go?”

“The Mists brought her here,” she said. “Far from you.”

He bent over her, avoiding touching her raw flesh with his coat sleeve.

“Is she here now?”

He braced himself for the answer.

“Here? Here we're nowhere. But in the place this house once touched, Jaelle walked. And now you can't touch her. She's been dead a hundred years or more.”

Now he understood what he felt in the city called London, making Robarts hunt that last time, when he'd felt that
other
in the fog. A figure that burned bright, but out of reach, like a star reflected in the water. A man with Jaelle's gift.
Jaelle's Breed
.

She must have met a man, bred others like her, who bred others, and so forth. While he lay a shattered prisoner in the Mists, she had
lived
, and loved, and died, and was at peace. Far from home, in exile, but still …

Jealousy burned in him, and fear.

Jaelle's Breed could destroy him. She had laid him open to the Mists, risking her own soul. She had added her curse to the rest of the clan, the final element that triggered his own dissolution. In her blood, which was his blood, was bound Sight and Curse.

No wonder the demesne of Weldon, child of Jaelle's blood, touched the doctor's house. No wonder the Mists had called him here. What game were they playing? Why did they let him hunt for Robarts, for women for Robarts to transform? Why did they allow him passage? For Trueblood knew the Mists had a purpose in anything they allowed to happen, even if that purpose lay dormant for countless generations.

Jaelle's Breed could destroy him, unless he destroyed it first; every branch and root and bud.

Tamar kneeled beside the woman now, still holding her hand.

“What did you do?” asked Robarts. He was his broken self again.

“She is
Gregori
now,” said Trueblood. “A Watcher. She doesn't need wings.”

“A Recording Angel,” said Robarts. He turned back to his tray and picked out a needle and a length of catgut.

Without his asking, Tamar rose and came to his side. Even with one eye stitched shut, she was able to thread the needle with lightning speed.

“We'll have you patched up in an instant,
Gregori,”
said Robarts. “You won't be able to fly, but I'll give you wings of a sort, so you'll remember that you had them once, before you fell, and maybe you'll know to find them again.”

He paused, and bent down to her, curious.

“Do you remember the fall?”

Her dry lips moved.

“Falling,” she croaked. “It was a long way down. The ones in front heard the ropes snap first, but it was too late in that single, horrified moment for them to run back. The old, decayed slats went one by one, and the people spilled into the river below like dried peas from a bowl.”

“I shall return to the Library, sir,” said Trueblood. Robarts barely nodded in reply, but Trueblood was already gone.

Robarts placed careful stitches, one by one, in the woman's flesh, suturing her skin back together, but not as it had been before.

“She needs a name, Tamar,” he remarked. “Seriah. The Recording Angel. That sounds well, doesn't it?”

Tamar made no reply, but Robarts nodded as if she had.

“Seriah.”

London, 1882

A cacophony of knocking woke Sophie from a deep sleep, the product of a day of clinic work where the patients came fast and furious, one after the other, everything from fingers dislocated from factory work to one particularly bad case: a deep-set infection from a botched abortion. Sophie had barely managed a cup of tea and a boiled egg before collapsing, weary and sore, into bed.

She was grateful for the work; she couldn't deny that. It was a chance to prove herself capable as any man in her profession, a chance to show Professor McPherson that his faith in her hadn't been misplaced. A chance to make her parents proud of her in their quiet way; she had been pleasantly surprised that they'd supported her,
both morally and financially, in her endeavors. They'd been worried and concerned, but in the end when she'd proved her determination they'd backed her to the finish.

She knew it was no good to look for validation and support from the rest of the family. All the aunts had been appalled, from Bernice to Marabelle, and Marabelle had taking the further step of disinheriting her—which was only to be expected—to forbidding Sophie's name to be mentioned in her presence and eliminating it from every family record she possessed—which stung a bit. Even gentle Aunt Jane had voiced—or written, rather—her disapproval in a lengthy letter that attempted to reconcile Sophie to her duty as a lady, daughter, and future wife (of somebody-or-other suitable, whenever he should choose to appear), and cited many learned men's opinion of the role of women, the Angel of the House, and the sin of drawing attention to oneself.

As for her brother, Bernie, settled and secure in India with a colonial wife and her family's status and money—he wrote in a tone of mild confusion, bewildered that his little sister, whom he clearly still imagined to be nine years old with a raggedy doll under her arm, should select the medical profession, or any profession at all, for that matter.

It was perhaps for the best that Sophia was not aware of the letter Mrs. Huxley had received from Bernie, pleading with her to dissuade his sister from this path, since it was well known among the medical profession that such intellectual endeavors were too much a strain on the female mind and would inevitably produce malaise, hysteria, and eventually madness. He knew, everyone knew, that Sophie had been a tomboy and been allowed far too much freedom in the company of that saucy Mrs. Blanchard, but she should have outgrown such childish fantasies.