From what Dr. Billium was saying, it seemed that a floating rib and a strange ossified mutant rib from his zygomatic process had grown down into his soft organs and was causing him pain.
The surgeon wiped his hands on his lapels and lifted a bone saw from the table.
“There’s something afoot in Isca,” whispered the half-sister. “Something strange going on in the Court.”
“Unless it has to do with the book, forget it,” hissed Miriam. “If Megan is forced to cast the hex . . . you don’t want to be here when it happens.”
“It will look a bit odd if I let a flock of fifty pigeons loose at once,” said the half-sister.
“It can’t be helped. You’ll be leaving anyway. No one will have time to send an inquisitor. You’ll be provided new positions in Wardale or Yorba.”
Miriam watched the half-sisters. She could tell their hearts had sunk. They would take their children of course, bundle them up in the middle of the day while their husbands were working. Some would leave a note behind, others nothing.
“But Ghoul Court!” insisted the half-sister. “There’s something going on. Something to do with the brickyard . . . and the old brewery. A squad of watchmen were sent last Day of Dusk. They found nothing but I’m sure the Willin Droul are holding meetings there.”
Miriam grew interested enough to clarify. “The Vindai brewery?”
The half-sister nodded.
“I’ll look into it myself,” said Miriam. “But I want everyone else out of the Duchy.”
Placated, the half-sister grew quiet. Miriam instructed her subordinates to wait until the surgery had come to its conclusion.
The gray man had endured a much larger incision than was necessary for the sake of showmanship. The good doctor had cut him neck to nuts in order to show off all his vital organs. The poor had no choice. Unable to pay for their own care, they signed papers allowing the hospital to sell tickets to their “event.”
He was stitched up and rolled away while puddles of blood dribbled down the drain in the center of the floor.
Sickened and dizzy and strangely elated or depressed, the spectators were ushered out with a definite feeling that they had gotten their money’s worth.
From the darkened court, lit mainly by the tube of ebbing fluid, the four witches parted without a word. They vanished into alleys and over bridges, becoming part of Isca’s degenerate underbelly, heading off to spread word of their exodus.
Back inside, one of the fifteen-year-old boys began sponging up the rest of the show.
Three miles through the urban sprawl of South Fell and Thief Town sat the Murkbell Opera House.
Only half a mile from Ghoul Court, the opera house stood among the canals of Murkbell with a kind of gray and sinister splendor. Romantics could approach the opera by boat, poled along the avenues.
There were sections of Murkbell that still stood in rarefied grandeur (the opera house being one of them) and many historians and antique collectors lived in crumbling opulence along the borough’s southern stretch.
As the largest borough in Isca, Murkbell had room for diversity. From the black confusion of Vog Foundry—which seemed to crawl out of Growl Mort like something hideous and half-dead—the industrial loll of noxious factories and warehouses full of coal gave way to tenements near the wasteyard in Brindle Fen.
South and west, the numberless network of canals were cleaner, dragging discarded newspapers and empty bottles along their bottoms rather than the sediments of heavy industry. Except for Bragget Canal, which came out of Ghoul Court, the waters were lucid and gleaming and reflected the ostentatious houses of the very eccentric and the very rich.
Like many of the other buildings, the Murkbell Opera House had been built when Isca was young. It rested on enormous stone piers that supported it like a dollhouse on a pair of unseen sawhorses, allowing it to straddle forgotten sewers and vaults that now served to collect most of the city’s rainfall.
The capacity of the vaults was sufficient that Isca’s sewers had never needed extensive redesign. They sucked floods down an ineluctable network of straws like a fat girl at a soda fountain and pushed them through turbines toward the bay where powerful geysers of odious water gushed into the sea.
The same night the witches met at the surgery, after the curtain came down on Er Krue Alteirz and the hundreds of candles in the chandelier had been extinguished, the manager walked the halls of his opera.
Reddish-orange light fixtures cast tangerine glows across walls the color of exotic olives. Russet shadows depended from blackened boxes in the theater walls; frescoes filled plaster ovals across the baroque ceiling.
The masked ladies who sold concessions had gone home. The huge brass beehive with its gauges and pipettes serving flavored soda and whipped coffee had been cleaned out and rolled into a brooding corner. The stage lights were dim. The actors had vanished, scurrying off to various parties held in historical penthouses and rooftop pubs that glimmered across Murkbell’s cruel skyline.
Mr. Naylor, the opera manager, walked his empty establishment with keen pink eyes. Like cheap glassy buttons, they seemed as unreal as they were ugly.
He blinked them constantly, wetting them many times a minute as he searched the opera for a dawdling janitor or any other kind of trespasser. He moved with his hands perched awkwardly on his hips, smacking his mouth as though he needed a drink. His tongue was pasty and sticky with spit. His pink eyes were fiendishly sharp.
He stopped to check his pocket watch. It was after midnight. One-something. He didn’t bother to tell the exact minutes.
He descended a black stairwell without light and walked stiffly across the ornate carpet of the ground floor. When he seemed satisfied that everything was secure he stopped and stood in the foyer for a long time, listening to the quiet.
Finally he turned and stalked down an obscure corridor that led beneath the stairs. It was filled with buckets and mops and push brooms and bottles of wax. Mr. Naylor unlocked a short door, barely four feet tall, at the back of the passageway. Like a grasshopper folding its legs in impossible compression he climbed into the cramped space, forcing his body down between his legs and bending his neck in such a way that it looked like he had been murdered and stuffed inside. His hand reached out and pressed a square button on the wall then quickly withdrew like a tentacle, afraid of being severed.
The button clicked and a dull banging motor that filled the space with the smell of burnt grease slowly unwound the service elevator on its frayed and shaky cable, sinking Mr. Naylor into questionable depths.
He was quite uncomfortable, the descent excruciatingly slow. He smacked his mouth and waited patiently as the elevator trembled slightly and the banging motor strained.
There was no light. His pink eyes couldn’t see a thing.
When the ride finally ended he pushed open a crude hatch, much different than its walnut-paneled twin far above, and stepped into a dark space, grasshopper legs unfolding.
He stood in an immense barrel vault similar to the secret meat rail Caliph had ridden with Mr. Vhortghast. This, however, was better lit with candles and phosphorescent fungus and odd lights that seemed to issue from below the waterline.
Mr. Naylor walked along a cement platform, having picked up a candle box to light his way. He descended some steps into the water and sloshed toward an island of rounded brick that raised its slippery hump above the lake of sewage, shoes instantly ruined.
“Cut that light you muck!” said a voice from the island. It was a hideous garbled voice, barely capable of human articulation. Mr. Naylor tossed the candle box into the lake as if it had been crumpled wax paper from one of the sandwich shops on Freshet Way. It sank almost immediately. The light went out.