From the front doors, the nervous ticket holders were ushered by a second man down a narrow gray hallway that smelled of chemicals. Lit by clear gas jets in steel fixtures, the hall felt vaguely threatening. A wooden gurney with tiny cracked wheels stood along the left wall. Draped in hospital white, it looked clean relative to the walls. Its position forced the spectators to squeeze past in single file. They made excited idiotic sounds as they passed, asking each other whether a dead body might at some time have rested on that very spot.
A wider hallway of two-toned olive and beige welcomed them on the other side and more transparent gas jets revealed a pair of double doors that admitted the throng to an austere oval chamber with steep stands that allowed them to hover over whatever happened below.
There was no place to sit. Voyeurs had to remain in rank, each one four feet above the other, separated by low metal railings whose topside had been upholstered with padding meant to cushion the forearms. Unfortunately the padding was like everything else, gray and thin and dilapidated. Its cracked surface had either hardened with age or altogether crumbled away.
Below the dim tiers (which were dark enough to cause the ticket holders to stumble and ask each other why someone didn’t turn on some lights) the central oval-shaped pit basked—a sort of phosphorescent eggshell color under the glare of magnesium spotlights. As people filed in and the tiers filled up, a door in the pit opened slightly and a man could be heard talking behind it.
“Next week . . . sure . . . just send it over there . . .”
The pit had several tables with shiny metal tops. Dubious cloth bundles had been placed on them before the audience arrived.
A rack of glass bulbs ranging in size from miniscule to grandiose stood at attention. Most of them contained various quantities of some clear fluid, reflecting the spotlights through a clutter of curves. Like strange retorts, their necks were screwed with metal caps fit snugly with a jungle of pink-orange hoses. The flow of fluid could be controlled from various knobs.
Finally the door in the pit swung wide and a man in a white apron, the one who had been talking, came out. A fringe of black hair went around the back of his head from ear to ear but his dome shone like fleshy glass beneath the lights.
Two boys, who appeared to be no more than fifteen years apiece, followed him into the room. All three ignored the whispering crowd. Like debunkers at a séance they unrolled their equipment. Cloth bundles unfurled to reveal an array of glittering blades and forceps. Hooks and sponges.
The crowd murmured excitedly while the man in the apron checked the hoses and then reached down to unstopper a drain in the center of the floor.
A metal contraption in a square frame near the rack of glass bulbs began to hum as one of the boys flipped a switch. Chemiostatic lights flared up like emeralds in the twisted brown guts of the machine. Wires and slender hoses were attached with grim decorum.
Finally the surgeon stepped to the middle of the room and addressed the crowd.
“Ladies and gentlemen.” His voice sounded thin and tired. “I am Dr. Billium. Welcome to this evening’s surgery. I am sure you have all been warned about the graphic nature of what you are about to witness; therefore if any of you should begin to feel light-headed or ill, please remove yourself from the lecture hall at once. There will be no refunds. You are free to talk during the operation but I ask that you keep all conversations to a whisper. Any more and I will have you removed at once.”
As the surgeon spoke a large man wheeled a wooden gurney in.
Everyone gasped except those who had previously been to Grouselich Hospital.
A gray man lay atop the wooden tray like something crammed in a shoe box, arms restfully at his sides. His eyes were closed and his body seemed hairless.
“This man is not dead,” said Dr. Billium, “he has been administered vapors by means of a cloth mask. He is sleeping . . . very deeply.”
The surgeon demonstrated his patient’s insensibility by prodding the bottoms of his feet with a sharp metal pointer.
One of the boys dropped a scalpel into a bottle of antiseptic.
The tension mounted.
In the crowd above, a group of four women huddled together under very deep hoods. They were hardly watching what happened below. They were whispering in the rolling rhyming syllables of Withil.
“Whetoo brithou frumoo Aogi?” asked one of the witches.
Translation was straightforward for those who knew the trick. “Whetoo brithou frumoo Aogi” became: “What breath from Gig?” or, “What did Giganalee say?” The reply spoken by a second witch translated as, “To leave Stonehold. We cannot stay if Megan casts her hex . . . if the Pandragonians fail in their negotiations.”
There were two half-sisters and two Sisters. All of them were young and pretty though their hoods made facial features practically irrelevant.
The Sisters were both in the Fourth House, a respectable position that had taken them between twelve and fifteen years from the age of six. Their names were Miriam Yeats and Kendra Liegh. The half-sisters’ names were completely unimportant. Only one of them even spoke.
“I do not think the Pandragonians will succeed,” Miriam said in Withil. She had golden hair and eyes like beads of polished mahogany. “Giganalee suspects they will buy the transumption hex.”
Though her skin was Pandragonian, Miriam had been born in Mir
yhr and her only interest in the Empires of the South was finding a way to expand the Sisterhood into them. She had climbed through the Houses with astonishing speed. The Fifth was almost within her grasp. If only she had reached it earlier she might have been a candidate for replacing Megan.
But Megan’s eye was fixed on Sena as Miriam and every other Sister knew. The fact that Sena had reached the Sixth House so young reeked of pseudonepotism but when Sena graduated and Megan welcomed her to the Seventh, shockwaves traveled through the north as though a bomb had been dropped.
Miriam had quietly watched Megan’s favoritist act as she placed Aislinn’s daughter among the Sisterhood’s highest elite. Less than one percent of the Sisterhood resided in the Seventh House. Not even Megan was among them. Sena, talented as she was, had not been tried. Her rank had been gifted rather than earned.
“Trans-what? What kind of hex?” asked the half-sister. Her Withil was rusty.
“It’s nothing you need worry about,” whispered Miriam. She used the slang with expert efficiency, shortening her sentence to three words. A man in a stylish coat overheard it and gave her a curious glance. Miriam noticed him. She didn’t need an annoyed or curious bystander trying to decipher her Withil. She smiled at him and, with a fake accent, told him she was Ilek.
The man took her diversion like a compliment and flirted back, a bit too loudly. He got a look of warning from the surgeon. When he glanced back to grin sheepishly at Miriam, she was ignoring him. He adjusted his arm on the railing and focused once more on the slippery scene below.
The surgeon had slit the man’s belly and clamped it open under the lights. Subtle movements occasionally rippled through the mass of entrails that packed the cavity, causing men and women to swoon.
Large attendants near the doors dragged them quietly from the room.
“This is the liver,” Dr. Billium was saying. “An organ for cleansing the blood.” He pointed to a dark shape while the man’s life ran through tubing, feeding out from his body into the brown chemiostatic machine. Another tube returned the blood after some dubious treatment, sluicing it back in. Several of the glass bulbs had been hooked up to his arms by means of needles held in place with elastic bandages; they dripped clear fluid through the pink-orange hoses to his veins.