Wonderblood

by Julia Whicker

  He wanted forgiveness for murder.

  He had always been a zealous man, in whatever he did, even to the point of martyrdom; he needed to be sure he had the heavens’ favor. The Pardoness was held by every denomination still extant, every carnival on the land, and every sect that worshipped the shuttles, to be an infallible oracle of forgiveness. She was the only connection anyone on earth had to the heavens.

  “Have you seen the light in the sky?” Marvel asked. The room had no windows.

  “I have not. But I have been told of it by my dear Discovery.”

  He wondered if they were lovers.

  “What do you think it is?”

  “It could be many things.”

  He sighed again. “When I was a boy, living far away, I had a vision. Maybe not unlike the visions you have as an oracle.”

  “Forgiveness requires no fortune-telling.”

  “Well.” He grew restless. “I had a vision. Just one. I saw that the True King, the king who will sit on the throne when the shuttles return, the king whose ascendance would create the conditions for their return, if you will, would appear here. The Cape. So I did what I had to do to come here.”

  “We all have megalomaniacal fantasies. It’s quite normal.” The Pardoness lifted her chin so her eyes were even more deeply in shadow, and she tilted her face toward Juniper, who went reddish with embarrassment. “Less normal to act on them, but you seem to have fared well.”

  Marvel narrowed his eyes and began to dig at his thumb again. It was a habit that undercut his authority, and yet he had never been able to break it for more than a few months at a time.

  “I killed a man so I could come here all those years ago. As you may know, I began my service here at the Cape as a lowly priest and rose on my own talents to the position I hold now.”

  “Impressive.”

  “You don’t seem impressed.” He cringed inside at his own petulance.

  She laughed. “Not terribly. I’m sorry. Many men in many guises have lived this story, and none are more special than you. Or less special.” She gestured to her handmaid, Discovery. “When you hear as many tales as we do, they begin to seem similar. Which is for the best. We must cultivate perfect indifference in order to forgive wholly.”

  “Do you understand what I’m telling you?” That smoke she inhaled constantly—surely that affected her judgment. “My vision of the True King reigning at the Cape was so strong that I killed a man. A very, very important man. I was young then—just a boy. And I put poison in his cup and he drank it, and he convulsed and he died, right before my eyes, and all I could think was, ‘I am free now!’ I felt no sorrow. No pain. I left that very evening and crossed the deathscapes to this selfsame palace compound, set myself up as a young apprentice priest, and I rose to power. The acme of power.” He spat his words out like food that repulsed him.

  “Ah,” said the Pardoness, and shifted on her couch. Something bulbous under all that fabric, a part of her body? He saw it, just for an instant. “You feel moved to tell me your story. I am moved to listen.” She glanced at Discovery, who smiled. “Are you moved?”

  The handmaid nodded.

  “I’m not trying to move you,” Marvel growled. “The man I thought I killed. I have reason to believe he isn’t dead.”

  “How unfortunate. But why haven’t you asked for a pardon for that killing? Or, intended killing, as it seems?”

  “Because it was justified.”

  “How so?”

  Marvel grimaced. “I thought he deserved to die because he didn’t recognize the truth of my vision. And other reasons. Back then I was certain my vision was from the heavens. And that he was stymying me wrongfully.” Marvel held his breath for a time. “But not just for those reasons. He deserved to die for … other reasons. He himself has killed many.”

  The Pardoness was now nodding, the iridescent fabric sliding back and forth over her shoulders. “But now you think your vision was merely the fantasy of a fervently religious boy?”

  Marvel swallowed. “In a sense.”

  “And?”

  “Well,” Marvel took a breath. “I have come to suspect that this same man, this very important man, is still alive. That I didn’t kill him after all.”

  “Praise the shuttles,” replied the Pardoness. “You must be grateful.”

  “You don’t understand. Because I must kill him this time. He will never allow me to return to my homeland. He would never accept me back.” Marvel did not say that he still harbored a cold fury toward the Mystagogue, that it had not dimmed after these many years.

  “Why go back at all? Why not stay here, where you have ruled mostly wisely and mostly justly?” Her eyes sparkled. “Where you are mostly respected instead of reviled?”

  Marvel’s destiny, his only purpose, was to serve the True King, whoever he turned out to be: he had been sure of this since his earliest cognizance. This True King would appear in Kansas. It had been so all along. Kansas was where the Disease ruined the world, and Kansas was where salvation would spring forth. He tried to catch the Pardoness’s eyes in a meaningful way, but they were shadowed by her veil and hard to see. Her lower face, cut deep with two smile lines, pulled into a frown or a smile, he couldn’t tell.

  The truth was that Marvel was not sure if it was right to kill the Mystagogue, but he knew it was necessary. In order for Marvel to end his days peacefully in Kansas, the tyrant must die. “Because. I know now the True King is not here at the Cape. My vision was wrong.”

  “You sound sure of yourself. But what of this new light in the sky? Could it not be the shuttles returning?”

  “It could be many things.” He said her own words back to her with a smile. This time she smiled back.

  “And you are a man very convinced of the rightness of your faith. Even when your convictions shift with the wind. Perhaps especially then.”

  Marvel ground his molars together. He had the intrusive thought that he was merely acting out of self-interest, that he’d grown tired of responsibility and the decadence of the courtiers. He had grown tired of his own daughter. Perhaps so tired that he would never be satisfied until he left this place for the solitude of Huldah’s Black Watchtower.

  For the burnished memory of his pious youth.

  Maybe he remembered the Black Watchtower as a place it had never been. It was a distasteful notion. That his deep righteousness could be nothing more than nostalgia.

  “You are not easy to talk to,” was all he said. “I thought I was supposed to confess my sins here.”

  The Pardoness continued to gaze at him. “You are having many thoughts. Let me share one of my own.” She motioned to her hidden lower half without removing the coverlet. “I am a woman in pain. Over the years it has become unbearable. My misfortune was to be born to a very unmixed line, one which maximized the purity of my blood at the expense of my worldly body.”

  His eyes followed her gesture. Juniper leaned forward as though he could see through the blankets. “Well, what’s wrong with you?” Marvel asked.

  “I have tried many remedies. But due to the deformities I cannot bear children. There was never any hope for it, so I never missed it, and that time has passed at any rate. But this means my only heir will be Discovery, and she is not of the correct lineage. She will never be accepted as a new Pardoness.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be. All things must end. But I ask you this: if my line, for centuries unbroken, will now be snuffed out with no legitimate heir, couldn’t it be that this is truly the Return? That the True King will or has already appeared?”

  A buzzing anger rose in Marvel’s throat. Yes, of course that could be, he thought. And yet I still don’t believe it. “Anything is possible. But you have no idea where he might be.”

  The Pardoness folded her shockingly thin hands on her lap. “This is as good a place as any,” she murmured.

  “What is your ailment?”

  “It has no name in the medical books. Surel
y it is the result of inbreeding.” She moved aside one of the blankets momentarily. Discovery dropped her fan and rushed to the Pardoness’s side. “Grace, don’t.” She clapped her hand over her mouth, as though the exposure of her Mistress would cause her physical pain.

  But the Pardoness pulled off a portion of the coverlet to reveal the most hideous mass of tissue Marvel had ever beheld. Her legs, both as grotesquely swollen as skin bags filled with water, were six or seven times the size of a normal limb. The skin was dry, discolored in spots, pink toward the knee but blue and even purple by the toes. It looked dead or dying. The feet as large and bulbous as square stones. How could a person live this way? Surely she couldn’t walk. The agony must have been unimaginable. His mouth fell agape until he was able to close it, which he did quickly, but not before she had seen the horror and confusion on his face. The Pardoness remained sanguine as she re-covered her legs, but in Marvel’s mind’s eye there were only those appendages, lumpy trees of burst capillaries and flaking skin. Every nutrient her body extracted from food must go to feed those bloated overgrowths—that was why her upper body appeared so fragile. “My god.”

  She nodded. “My given name, Hierophant, is Green Butterfly. I’m sure you knew this.”

  He nodded.

  “Like my namesake, I long to be free. I long to fly away from this tower. Perhaps as you yourself do?”

  He stopped nodding.

  “These legs are rotten. They will be the death of me. And yet, I’m not ready to die.”

  He said nothing.

  “I would like to be rid of this prison.” She motioned to her lower half. “Just as you would.”

  “How?”

  She rearranged her sumptuous fabrics around herself weakly. Discovery bent over her and fluffed them up, then went to the sideboard and lit another smoking candle, and yet more sweet-smelling medicine filled the air.

  “That is a question I have long pondered. I have considered many different approaches, but now I have the ear of the second most powerful man in the land. How might I be free, Priest? I will not give the Cape another Pardoness. This light in the sky may portend death for us all, or eternal life. These are the times we are living in. Somehow I knew I would live to see them.” Then she said: “I will forgive your past sin of attempting to kill this man. I will do this if you free me.”

  “I can’t just take you out of the tower, everyone would see—”

  “No. Free me.” She pointed to her legs. Now that he knew what was beneath the fabric, he could not unsee it. They were like sausages bursting their casings. And Marvel had watched many a person be tortured. “I—”

  “That little man. The Walking Doctor,” came Juniper’s voice in his ear. “The one with no ears. From Kansas.”

  “No,” said Marvel, to no one. The word floating up as from the bottom of a well.

  “He said his patients always lived, I thought.”

  “Are you suggesting he take her legs off?” He shook his head. “You’re crazy. The blood alone—”

  Juniper’s clear eyes seemed strangely delighted.

  “And anyway,” Marvel said, disturbed. “With all respect due to your office, Pardoness, I’m not asking forgiveness for my past sins, I want forgiveness for my future sin. And if the sin was once justified, why shouldn’t it be justified again?”

  “I cannot give you that. But if, as you say, this sin is justified, you don’t need my or anyone’s forgiveness.”

  He tossed his hands up. “Why did I even come to you?”

  “Because you are uncertain. You”—she spoke in a solemn voice—“are a man of uncertain faith. And yet you are also a man who deeply needs to believe you are right. Your longing for peace surprises you, am I correct?” She reached for her little glass again and took a drink. “My predicament, though less philosophical, is similar. I wish to be free of this bondage. The end will come, either now or later, but I wish to use my remaining days as I desire. I wish to leave this place.”

  There had been a few, rare moments during his life when Marvel felt he truly understood other human beings. The isolation of his rank and temperament lifted, almost like a mist dissolving, and what remained was his hand in that of another human. Courageous, contented, unified. He glanced about, absorbing all he saw in this dreadful room, so unlike his own chamber: the medicinal smoke, the sallow nude sycophantic attendant, the grim deformities, and indeed he judged this woman’s life to be a prison—and here he had thought she lived in luxury. Everyone did. What did this unsavory truth now require of him, as a man of religion? He could not not help her.

  She gestured to the sky beyond the ceiling. “The world may change forever. This may be the Return. We may soon be transported upward to Heaven. Or we may live in a new way here on earth. No one knows. Not even me.”

  “I don’t think anything is going to happen,” Marvel said.

  “That is your prerogative.”

  “And you say I definitely don’t need a pardon?”

  “Not if you believe what you are doing is right.”

  “But I don’t know.”

  “Then no one does.”

  Marvel had spoken before he even realized it. “Bring the prisoner Tygo here. He will save her if he can.” He paused when Juniper nodded eagerly. “It’s the least we can do,” Marvel muttered.

  Juniper left and returned some minutes later with the news that Tygo was already out of his cell on the order of the Chief Orbital Doctor John Sousa, an ineffectual pipsqueak of a man Marvel had distrusted for years. And yet for the moment he felt untroubled by the hitch in his plans. The order had been issued. Tygo would see the Pardoness soon enough. He would look at her legs. He would do something to free this woman, if he could. Thus, Marvel would use this good deed to set in motion a string of treacheries he hoped were for the common good.

  Just as when he’d left Kansas the first time.

  This circle pleased him, although he could not quite put his finger on why. He bowed deeply to the Pardoness and turned to leave. “Grace, I have done what I can.”

  She nodded, and he strode toward the door, but she said something from behind him that he did not hear. He looked back. “What was that?”

  “I said that faith is both reasonless and the reason for everything. Beware any certainty, High Priest. For not many things are certain, and the ones that are certainly have no reason to be.”

  CHAPTER 6

  THE ANGELS

  John Sousa, King Michael’s Chief Orbital Doctor, knew at once when he awoke that the comet he had seen meant nothing and everything. Likewise, he knew he was not sick but also that he was very unwell, and outside the daylight was escaping and beside his window there chirruped a brushfire of birds, so loud he wondered at their purpose—what could they be saying to each other, over and over, in such screams? He knew by the organ-colored sky that it was late afternoon, for no one had seen fit to draw the curtains. He was naked. He had soaked his bed through with sweat, and he knew also that he had now wasted some un-wasteable amount of time with this wretched bedriddenness, and so he staggered to the window and threw it open, causing the birds outside to blow a fresh wave of sound at him before they ascended and reconvened on the east gate. He stared at the white comet. It was so plain in its thereness. He folded his elbows on the window ledge and squinted. John was so tired, so very tired of his life and everything he had ever done and every thought he had ever thought and now, even now, when faced with this bright and indisputably heavenly artifact, he could not muster a single interesting thought.

  He could think, only, of how much he did not wish to think about it.

  “No, he is awake, look!” came Mizar’s voice from behind him, and also the clamorous unfamiliar footfalls of a group. John turned. In the doorway stood Mizar with one of the king’s elite guards with his lion-shaped facemask pulled down, always a terrifying sight, for the masks the guards wore made them look like deranged partygoers. Beside the two men, or rather with them, was a slight, dark-haired man
in the last gasp of his youth, chained around the ankles and staring at the entire scene with an expression of grateful hunger, the way John might have looked at his instruments after he’d been a long time away.

  Mizar pushed aside the guard and rushed to John, taking him immediately to the bedside and sitting him down again and then easing him into a cotton robe. “Are you all right, sir? You are always so moved by everything, I tell you it’s a curse as often as a blessing—” Mizar looked pointedly at the prisoner in chains, whose every piece of clothing was brilliant blue, or at least had once been so. The prisoner and his garments were presently covered in dirt and what might have been blood.

  John, even in his wretched state, was sure he had never seen this person before. The prisoner met his eyes without smiling or nodding. John pushed Mizar back and pointed. “Who is this?”

  Mizar motioned to the guard to unchain the man’s arms and then to wait beyond the bedchamber, but he flicked his wrist to indicate the guard should remain vigilant to sounds of discord within. Then the prisoner came into center of the room, like an Orbital Doctor called to give a lecture.

  Mizar cleared his throat and said, “This, sir, is a Walking Doctor. A champion of”—he cast his eyes this way and that and lowered his voice—“well, of Surgery.”

  John blankly stared. “And?”

  “He is a prisoner, sir. Really more than a prisoner—he is set to be executed in not many days for his treasonous use of living bodies. But that is not relevant to your cause.”

  John could not make sense of any of this. “And?”

  “Sir, you said to me ‘who.’ And, well, this is the ‘who.’” Mizar beamed and the wrinkles around his eyes bunched. He was strutting about the room in his hennish way, clacking his shoes on the tile. John felt with a lurch the very familiarity of this man, with whom he had forcibly belonged for the majority of his natural life; he understood their unwieldy togetherness as a kind of punishment for his being born in this particular place at this particular time, at an astrological confluence of moments: here, at the Cape, at this time, the Eon of Pain, the ache of the world. Mizar was John’s punishment for being the final preposterous product of his rich parents’ miserable and ambitious begetting. John had been born a seventh son, a lumpy white potato with no heartbeat, but he’d lived despite his nursemaid’s dire predictions, and when it became apparent that he would not expire naturally, they’d squashed him in celebration beneath heavy pearlized fabrics and earrings made from moonrocks. But still he lived on, despite these indignities. Small, delicate, and defiant. In this meek way John had discovered himself strangely invulnerable: sick but never dying throughout his whole endless childhood, until his parents died themselves—together, poisoned with fifteen of their own banquet guests in a stupendous and oft-spoken-of feat of intrigue.