Bruno could hear the slight tremor in the doctor’s voice. He must have had something pretty solid to be bargaining like this with Magnus. Or perhaps he sensed Magnus’s weakness. His approaching downfall. He heard a sigh from Magnus.
‘All right, Doc, you can have your toys but only if, at the end of our meeting, I feel satisfied that what you’ve told me is worth it.’
Bruno heard the other man take a seat.
‘I’ve been doing a nursing job over at the Cathedral.’
There was excitement in Magnus’s too-quick response.
‘The Grand Bishop?’
‘No, Magnus, not him. Give me a chance. There’s a Parson he must think rather highly of.’
‘Oh, yes? Male or female?’
‘Female.’
‘Hm. That’s a surprise.’
‘She’s got the Shakes and the canker. Serious case. She won’t last much longer. Anyway, the Grand Bishop called me in specially and told me to spare no expense in treating her sickness. Turns out she’s been doing some kind of investigation and she’s found some irregularities. An incident record is missing from the archive. To listen to them it sounds like it must be a serious infringement.’
Bruno heard the sound of a cheroot being lit which was a sign that Magnus was already losing patience with the doctor’s story. Might mean his boss would have reason for a second bath.
‘I trust all this waffle is leading somewhere juicy, Doc.’
‘I’m getting to it. The individual the Parson was investigating is one of your top men. Richard Shanti. Ice Pick Rick. His whole family, in fact, going back through generations.’
‘They’ve been a great line of stockmen. So what?’
‘So, whoever made that record disappear from his father’s file was covering up a crime or the allusion to a crime so serious that no one could ever be allowed to read it or hear of it. It’s of such concern to the Welfare that they’re going to bring Shanti in for questioning.’
‘They can’t do that. He’s my best stunner. With the power down we need him now more than ever.’
‘Magnus.’
‘What?’
‘They’re comparing him to Prophet John. John Col–’
‘I know who you’re bloody talking about,’ Magnus shouted. ‘What’s the connection?’
‘I don’t know. But they don’t know either. Whatever information Shanti has, you need to get it before they do. And you’ve got better access to him so it shouldn’t be too difficult.’
There was a silence in the room that Bruno couldn’t decipher. He considered moving away from the door and down to his quarters but he couldn’t let it go like this.
‘I’m not really sure this is worth three bullocks, Doc.’
‘I’m not finished. I’ve saved the best part.’
‘Get on with it.’
‘The Grand Bishop has every Parson he can spare out searching for Prophet John. He intends to get to him before you and make an example of him. A religious example, if you know what I mean. He wants to use the destruction of Prophet John to re-establish religious control over the town. He wants you, and the Meat Barons of the future to be the lapdogs of the Welfare like it was in the old days.’
Bruno had heard enough to know that Magnus might explode out of the room at any moment. He slipped away down the hall.
Behind him he heard the rants and screams of his master. The man sounded more like an animal every day.
Parson Mary Simonson was dying and she knew it very well.
In the small white convalescent room, she sat up in the cot and leaned her head back against the whitewashed wall. The Grand Bishop had been extremely kind. In the end she felt his reasons were more of a salve to his own guilt than they were out of compassion for her. Still, she was grateful for his care.
Doctor Fellows had come to see her at least twice a day and she had taken his meals and remedies patiently, though not without nausea. She knew the doctor meant well but she also knew that she was beyond his powers to heal. She could have lain comfortably there – comfortable, were it not for the pain in her abdomen and the jitters that now rattled inside her very bones – and let death come for her in its own time but that was not how she wanted it to end. One last time she wanted to be outside, about the town, anywhere but in that room.
There had been a lot of time to think while she’d lain there, sleeping, dreaming, imagining. She thought a lot about Parson Pilkins and what kind of man he might have been. She thought too about what it was he had discovered that was so dangerous or offensive or secret that he had removed it from the archives. But she had no access to records or witnesses or any other source of information and so she merely lay there and wondered.
Her mind scouted where her body could not. She imagined. She let herself fly above the landscape of all she knew to look for patterns on the ground. She swooped and upturned artefacts of memory. In facing her own death, she thought about the deaths of others, of all deaths. Her inner wanderings took her to unexpected grottos of peace and caverns of terror. She considered the nature of truth for the first time and was crushed by how little she knew.
The time had come for her to make one more journey, this time in the real world. She would walk the streets of Abyrne and where her feet led her she would finish her life. She felt certain that she might find one tiny truth out there that would comfort her on her way.
She swung her legs out of the bed.
It was hard. Harder than she’d expected and for a moment she thought about lying back and forgetting all this nonsense in her head, all this diseased madness, and sleeping her life away to the end. But the moment passed and her bare feet touched the cold, gritty stone floor. She examined her legs beneath her bed-shift. They were thin and wasted. Her arms were the same. But her stomach was bulging and firm. She was pregnant with disease. On standing she had to reach for the wall with both hands and lean there for several minutes until the whirling of the world and the whiteness across her vision receded.
Finally, she found her robes and gowns in the small woodwormed closet and dressed. She put on her Parson’s boots, laced them loosely for she did not have the strength to do more, and slipped away from the room and the Cathedral. Her small footsteps took her away from the centre of the town, away from the dirty, scrawny townsfolk.
She found herself on the road out to Richard Shanti’s house.
Trucks brought the men to work as usual but when they arrived it was chaos. Without power there were still plenty of jobs that could be done but no one was sure how to organise it. The electricity occasionally went out in the town but it never, ever, went off at MMP.
Even Torrance was stumped. He stood in a circle of worried men.
‘We can move the carcasses along by hand from station to station, I suppose. But skinning’s going to be harder.’
‘Fucking understatement,’ said one of the skinners.
‘What’s the word from Magnus?’ asked someone else.
‘Well, it’s two words in fact,’ said Torrance. ‘Keep working.’
‘How’re we going to stun them?’ asked Haynes.
‘Right,’ said another. ‘We can’t just haul ’em up and slit their throats. It’s against the teachings.’
Torrance had that one covered.
‘We’ll do it by hand. Lump hammer and steel peg. Same effect exactly. A little more elbow grease.’
There were shrugs around the group. Most of them weren’t stunning so they didn’t mind one way or the other.
Then there was general chatter among them.
‘Did you see the explosions?’
‘No. Heard them, though.’
‘They say it can’t be fixed.’
‘I heard that too. We might be working manually forever more.’