“Yes, I’m ready,” he said slowly. “But old habits die hard. I want you to talk to me while I work.”
“And what shall we talk about?” A death’s-head grin. “Would you like to hear how Dr. Izzak died?”
“Not that,” he answered curtly. The mention of Keri’s death brought back the feelings of hopelessness and defeat he was struggling to rise above. He tried to make his voice flat, uninterested. “Tell me about Scylla.”
Brother Fist settled back in his throne, hands in his lap still wrapped around the gun. He nodded, looking pleased. “Now there’s a wonderful, heartwarming story. A veritable fairy tale! In some ways she’s my most interesting creation.”
Scylla’s attention narrowed at the mention of her name, her blood pounding in her ears.
The talk about trances and the rest meant little to her. She had only half listened, her mind still reeling from the new version of her Master’s advent on Ananke. One day-for-night different than the one she knew.
Could it… possibly be true?
If her Master, the font of all truth could lie about who and what he was, then how could she know truth when she heard it? Furthermore, if his being God’s Chosen One was a lie—
—was she a lie?
Living a lie?
A living lie?
She shook her head. “No,” she whispered, trying to push it all away with that one single word.
She knew that Brother Fist had been sent by God to lead them into the grace of perfect faith and righteousness. Knew it like she knew her own name and face.
She was His angel. God had made her to serve Him.
She sought her reflection in one of the screens. There was proof of this truth. Her very form was gilded with Heaven’s power to make her a living instrument of obedience. Her might was an angel’s might. She had been brought down for the express purpose of protecting God’s Chosen One, and to chastise the faithless and punish the sinful. She knew this the way she knew she needed air to breathe; it was obvious and undeniable.
But—
Why did the story her Master told Marchey have this deeply resonating ring of truth? Why had it set loose what seemed to be remembrances of things she had never seen, of faces, of feelings, of frozen moments from a life she had never lived?
Why did her mind keep coming back to the hazy haunting sense image of a voice that might have been her own screaming, of a woman’s face filled with despair as she was dragged away by something so bright that it hurt the eyes. A blank spot, then that face again, crying, pleading, begging her not to—
—not to…
The fragmented memory ended there, like a high, crumbling cliff edge poised over an abyss of deepest darkest horror.
Brother Fist began to tell a story. Her story. The story of her genesis. And the angel Scylla hung on his every word, seeking and dreading revelation.
“I had this place fairly well in the palm of my hand, but knew I would continue to need an enforcer. Unfortunately my pet mercy already had too much power for his own good or mine. Worse yet, he was beginning to get ideas. So I—”
The old man paused to give watching Marchey his full attention. He had waited a long time for this moment. Hopefully not too long.
Marchey ignored him. He stood before a high table, sleeves pushed back to his biceps, his gleaming prosthetics crossed before his chest. He began to breathe deeply, eyes closed, effortlessly sliding into that old familiar pranayama. His hands fluttered like silver doves in rhythm with his breathing. The grim expression darkening his face faded as he centered himself.
But instead of letting himself sink into that subterranean state in which he usually worked, he kept himself at what felt like a usable higher level. The rim of the deep cold well.
His eyes opened. There was a nagging urge to sink deeper, down to where habit told him he should go. He ignored it. Bending at the waist, he rested his arms on the table, palms up, hands still and sleeping. Reclosing his eyes, he took a deep breath and let go.
Breathing a sigh of what might have been pleasure, he straightened up and stepped back. His prosthetics remained on the table, inert and lifeless. The silver plates capping his stumps just below the elbows gleamed like mirrors.
He felt relaxed, oddly detached. In deep trance he’d always felt like the beam of a surgical laser, a straight hot true line of will so potent and tightly focused that neither emotion nor personality could fit into its narrow bandwidth.
This was like being in that state between sleep and wakefulness. For the moment, he was at peace. He turned toward his patient-to-be, a bemused expression on his face.
“Talk, old man.” Speaking in trance was a new thing. His voice came out as a raspy whisper. He held his invisible hands up as if after scrubbing for surgery, feeling faint air currents slide through his fingers like silk. That indescribable sensation of being able glittered clear and bright as a diamond inside him.
Brother Fist blinked up at him uncertainly, then recovered his composure by tightening his grip on his weapon. He kept it trained on Marchey’s belly as he drew near, a single slight tremor the only betrayal of his apprehension.
“Where was I?” he muttered. “Oh yes, I needed someone I could trust implicitly. One of the last holdouts was a Kindred named Anya. She had a daughter named Angel. I took Angel hostage. The girl had a birthmark on her back. When I sent it to Anya all rolled up and wrapped with a pretty pink ribbon she caved in.” He snickered. “Of course my telling her that she would next receive the girl’s fingers and toes strung together like pearls may have had some influence on her decision.
“Anyway, Angel’s name made me think. I had set myself up as the Chosen of God, sent to rule and save them. I needed an enforcer I could trust. What would make a more fitting flunky than a Guardian Angel?”
Marchey leaned over Brother Fist and reached, the silver plates of his truncated arms stopping a handspan from the old man’s sunken chest.
Fist licked his lips, his yellow eyes focused on Marchey’s face. He knew that Marchey was reaching inside him, immaterial hands slipping through the heavy fabric of his cassock, through skin and muscle and bone as if they were not there. He knew all about Bergmann Surgery, about how those abandoned silver arms were nothing, even though they had come to symbolize his misunderstood specialty; it was their being put aside that had meaning. They were but a symbol of the flesh and bone each Bergmann Surgeon had sacrificed. He knew how a surgeon’s hands are everything, and how Marchey and his compatriots’ voluntarily having their own amputated had been the first deep cut of their severance from the rest of the medical community. He knew other things as well, things unknown and unsuspected by even the head of the Bergmann Institute.
Brother Fist smiled to himself. He was well aware of how vulnerable he was at that moment. Marchey could be holding his beating heart in his hands, with only the Oath he had mocked keeping him from turning to dead meat in his chest. The risk was small, but delicious, and the irony pure delight.
He felt no pain. The only sensation was a faint soothing warmth drifting gently through his insides. He returned to the telling of Scylla’s genesis, to add another pleasure to this moment.
“So I turned Anya’s daughter Angel into my angel. I tore her mind down and rebuilt it to my specifications. There was a doctor here. I made him imp the eye that lets me see what she sees, file and bond her teeth so she could bite a steel bar—to say nothing of an arm or leg—in half, then install her in my mercy’s exo. He didn’t need it anymore.” He chuckled darkly. “Someone gassed him like a cockroach while he was sleeping.