We Are Blood and Thunder

by Kesia Lupo

  She crouched, examined a blade dropped near the body, glinting in the faint evening light filtering through cloud and trees. It was a short dagger, the hilt twined with a dragon motif in silver, its eye picked out with a green gem. Hardly thinking, she picked it up, slid it carefully into her belt. As she carried on, she realised the man had been resting on the edge of a small clearing. And she saw another body. A woman, her back turned to Lena, marked out by her perfectly preserved, long red hair, splayed in the mud. And another – a man curled up under his cloak by the blackened remains of a fire. Without meaning to, she glimpsed his face, decayed and ghastly.

  These bodies had been here for a long time. Had they been trying to reach the city? They were strangers, surely. What had killed them?

  She didn’t want to wait to find out.

  She returned to the narrow path and carried on at a stumbling run.

  After a time, it grew so late that she could barely distinguish the trees from the darknesses in between – but soon she began to see other things, shapes in the fog twisting into suggestions of hands, eyes, mouths. She blinked, rubbing her eyes and cursing the loss of her shield-eyes. No one in Duke’s Forest would step outside with their eyes unprotected – the toxic storm cloud caused visions if they were exposed for too long. Every now and then, larger shapes loomed from between the trees, and she could not prevent herself from starting backwards before they dissipated, even though she knew they weren’t real.

  She imagined the strangers’ bodies in the clearing moving, rising up, following her. Don’t. Think. But despite her stern thoughts, and the exhaustion screaming at her to stop, she quickened her pace.

  Eventually, Lena could continue no longer. Her legs gave out, and she felt her fingers burrow into the mossy mulch of the forest floor. The hallucinations were worsening. She knew she was vulnerable out here – to real threats – if she wasn’t able to run. She remembered Vigo’s tales of the giant snakes and wild boar that infested the wood, and screwed her eyes shut against a wave of terror. She took a deep breath. She needed her wits now more than ever.

  But the forest stretched in all directions, and she had long lost the road – how would she escape? And even if she were to find her way out, what fate could a girl like her expect in the wider world? She felt for the birthmark on her cheek, several shades darker than the brown of her skin. Even the people of Duke’s Forest had regarded cryptlings – marked out by their various deformities – with a mixture of disgust and begrudging respect for their duties. Vigo had said the gods were cruel, their followers toying with dangerous magic. What would they make of her? What did they do to Marked people outside of Duke’s Forest?

  Would they try to execute her too?

  Lena felt a sickly chill spread from her throat to her stomach as she considered the most terrible possibility of all: what if the storm cloud had swallowed everything, leaving the city of Duke’s Forest the lonely centre of the universe? What if those people had been trying to reach Duke’s Forest to save themselves?

  No – she could not give up. Lena opened her eyes and dragged her exhausted body upright once more, determined to continue, but now she was surrounded, not by trees, but by a mass of people, each one of them turning towards her – each one of them familiar. These were the dead of Duke’s Forest, the dead the Pestilence had taken, the dead she had helped to undress, wash and embalm, replacing their eyes with the painted stones and glittering gems that now bore into her.

  She was a convicted mage, and an outcast, and the Ancestors were angry.

  She stumbled back against a tree, touched her forehead, lips and chest in a silent prayer, her hand shaking. ‘Please …’ she managed, but the Ancestors’ hearts were hollowed out. The world turned black.

  Lena had been sixteen the first time it had happened, a year before the Justice had condemned her to die. She’d been helping Vigo embalm an old guardsman, dead of the Pestilence, in one of the special preparatory chambers beneath the castle’s gardens. Thick glass bricks had been set in the ceiling, allowing weak light – and the occasional flash of the storm cloud’s blue-green lightning – to filter down on their delicate work.

  She had pulled up the guardsman’s left eyelid to sew it in place with the curved needle and special white thread. Eyes were something of a specialty of Lena’s, with her slender, accurate fingers – and although she had once hated the feel of the cold gems slotting into empty sockets, in time she had come to find it satisfying.

  ‘Have you thought about what you’re going to do?’ Master Vigo had said, in the manner of one who had asked the question a hundred times. He was in the process of removing and potting the organs, a special stoneware jar for each one. The smell of spoiling flesh filled the air, but Lena had grown used to it long ago. ‘You ought to. You’ve barely a year until you come of age.’ He deftly pulled the liver through the small incision he had cut in the body’s side and slipped it into the waiting vessel, already packed with the sharp-smelling preservative oils and herbs.

  ‘I haven’t thought about it,’ Lena lied, trying to sound dismissive. ‘A year is a long time.’ In fact, she’d been thinking about it a lot recently. She’d never chosen this life. The birthmark on her face had chosen it for her – or rather her parents had, whoever they were, when they decided to abandon her to the fate of a cryptling rather than raise a Marked child.

  ‘It’s not, and you’re a fool to pretend you can put it off for much longer.’

  Lena shrugged as she pulled the fourth stitch neatly through the thin skin of the lid. Vigo was a miserable old goat, but she’d come to love him, and she knew he was right. As she leaned forward to make her fifth and last stitch, she felt the weight of the brass butterfly in her pocket. Her secret, ever since she had found it fluttering in the catacombs. She knew if anyone saw it, she’d be accused of stealing grave goods, a terrible crime for a cryptling – but somehow she couldn’t bear to let it go. It was the only thing she had.

  ‘You’d make a good mortician,’ said Vigo, limping around the body to inspect her work as she tied the thread and snipped it with a pair of small, sharp scissors. ‘You’ve a steady hand, Lena – and you’re quiet, respectful.’ She glanced up at him. She could tell his leg was hurting him today – the tension around his eyes and mouth showed itself in hard lines through his pale, papery skin. He had a wooden peg from the knee down to replace the limb they’d had to amputate, but no matter how hard Lena tried to find him the right kind of padding, and the right sort of salve, the place where it met the stub was nearly always sore.

  She smiled at him weakly and shook her head, setting down her needle. She couldn’t tell him the truth. She couldn’t admit that because every option involved working in the crypts for the rest of her life, she didn’t feel like she had a choice at all. Subconsciously, she touched the mark on her face, a black stain as big as a child’s clenched fist. If it weren’t for the mark, she’d be ordinary. Imagine. Where would she be now? Maybe with my parents in a mansion in the upper town, eating sweets and laughing … Lena pictured strong sunlight spilling through tall windows, no cowl to shadow her face. She tilted her head slightly towards the glass roof, imagining how the warmth would feel against her skin.

  ‘Lena?’ Master Vigo shot her a concerned glance. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, returning her attention to her task, slotting more of the white thread through her needle. It was stupid to fantasise as she had done when she was younger. Life was difficult for everyone now: for a year, the city had been under quarantine. Instead of eating sweets in sunny rooms, half the people of the city were dead, rich and poor alike, and the other half lived in fear. As the cloud had deepened and darkened, strange flashes and rumbles disturbing its noxious peace, the Pestilence raged through the population, spreading its fever of hallucinations and shivers that left each victim dead in a matter of hours. The disease had visited three times – always in the warmest months, as if it thrived on the meagre heat of a mountain summer. It was Se
ptember, and the latest flurry of deaths was drawing to an end.

  ‘Why not be a mortician?’ Vigo went on, warming to his subject as he pulled out the intestines. ‘People need us more than ever. We are busier than we’ve ever been. And the Justice knows he won’t find any mages among our number. You’ll be safe here.’

  ‘The Justice,’ Lena whispered. ‘Yes … I am glad to be safe from him.’ Ever since the Duke had fallen ill, the Justice had ruled the city with a cold, hard grip. Like most of his citizens, the Justice knew the unnatural storm and Pestilence could have but one cause: magic. Unlike most of his citizens, the Justice had dedicated his attention to searching for the mage or mages responsible. He was obsessed, the other cryptlings whispered, ordering his guards to search for evidence of magic, burning the few magical books and toys in the city, his vicious hounds chasing suspect after suspect to an early, gruesome grave at the city walls. Lena could hear the dogs sometimes, howling in the kennels at dawn, and the sound chilled her to the core. But the cryptlings, dedicated to serving the Ancestors, had never suffered under his rule. The Justice loved the Ancestors. Since he’d accepted the reins of power, the ceremonies and rituals dedicated to their honour had grown threefold – old prayers and ceremonies resurrected, new ones invented.

  Vigo slid the remains of food from the intestines on to the floor, a system of flowing drains transporting the waste out of the city. ‘But what do you say, Lena? Would you like to be a mortician?’

  Lena wasn’t listening. All right, so she was safe down here – but it still wasn’t enough, was it? What if she wasn’t meant to be here at all? What if this was all some big mistake – like her parents had left her little basket on the steps just for a moment, and returned to find it gone? Or she’d been swapped with another child by accident? What if there was some other life she should be living, some other place where she would belong? She didn’t feel like she belonged here, that was for sure – and yet this was where she was trapped. She found her vision blurring, frustration trembling her fingers.

  ‘Why aren’t you answering?’ Vigo snapped. Quickly he tried to soften his voice, though he still sounded irritated as he packed the intestines into their stoneware grave. ‘If you want to try something else, you only need say.’

  He’d misunderstood her silence completely. Lena felt instantly sorry: it wasn’t his fault she felt this way. She gathered herself together and spoke at last. ‘I would like to stay with you, Vigo, of course I would. I just wish … I just wish there were more options to choose from. Before the quarantine …’ She looked down at the corpse. One eye sewn open, one eye shut, his face was frozen in a grotesque wink.

  Vigo sighed, sealing the intestine jar with a deft twist of his swollen-knuckled hand. ‘Before the quarantine, you would have had the option to leave Duke’s Forest altogether, is that what you’re saying?’ As he set the jar down and wiped his hands, he looked very old and tired, and Lena knew he understood.

  ‘No, I just …’ She shook her head. ‘This is my home, Vigo. But it sometimes feels like a prison too.’

  He sighed. ‘People like us are marked out for the life we lead, Lena – marked out by the Ancestors themselves. I understand your frustration. When I was your age, I wanted to see the world too – but what was I to do, as a cripple? It is cruel, in a way, the fate that we are handed. My parents abandoned me after my accident. I was a child of six, old enough to remember who they were, to remember their love, our home, my brothers and sisters, my name.’ Lena said a silent prayer of thanks that she had been so young when she was abandoned. It was easier not quite knowing what you had lost – and although Vigo spoke briskly, in his usual matter-of-fact tone, she could hear the pain beneath his words. ‘It is cruel,’ he carried on, his voice quickening, ‘to give it all up. But it is also an honour. Our families abandon us, divest us of our names and sever our ties to our own blood Ancestors – but it’s only in order that we might serve all the Ancestors. Think on it.’

  Lena thought on it, but found herself wondering which of the corpses under the mountain were related to her by blood – and whether she’d prepared a body for a grave that was an aunt, or a cousin, or a brother, without ever realising. Had Vigo ever prepared one of his parents or siblings, recognising their faces but unable to acknowledge them for who they were?

  ‘Ordinary people never see the Ancestors,’ Vigo continued, ‘except at funerals. Are we not blessed to be around them constantly? The work we do is the most sacred of all work. I have been here seventy years, Lena, and I feel my life has had purpose, and joy, and sorrow, as much as any other life. I had a wife for many years.’ His eyes grew suddenly watery and he turned aside. ‘I had a child.’

  Despite the sincerity in his voice, the suppressed tears, she wasn’t in the mood to play along. Not today. ‘Seventy years in darkness,’ Lena said, setting down her needle and picking up the green painted eye-stone, not caring if she hurt the old man’s feelings. ‘A wife and child who lived and died in darkness. Sounds bad enough to me.’

  ‘It is not as if we never go outside, Lena,’ he snapped.

  ‘Hidden under a cowl!’ she protested, grasping the eye-stone tightly, feeling it cold and hard in her palm. ‘We might as well be underground. It’s like they’ – she gestured at the frosted glass ceiling, at the city above – ‘can’t bear to see us. Like we shame them. I don’t feel chosen at all. I don’t feel special. I feel the opposite of special.’ She turned to the opened eye, scooped out the eyeball with a spoon and slotted the gem in its place. She sullenly plopped the eyeball in a copper dish.

  Vigo went quiet for a moment, studiously tending the herbal mixture with which he would pack the dead man’s cavities, the whisper and rattle of the pestle and mortar the only sound in the preparatory chamber. In the silence, Lena grew to regret her words about his wife and son, who had died years before she was born, but she wasn’t sure how to say sorry. Eventually, Vigo apologised instead, his voice slightly unsteady. ‘I am sorry you feel this way. If not for the quarantine, you would have had the opportunity to leave forever. But now …’

  ‘I never said I wanted to leave forever.’ Lena hung her head, feeling shame burn tight and hot in her chest. ‘I don’t. No one should have to face such a stark choice – to stay forever or leave forever. What kind of a choice is that? I just … I just want a real choice. I want to feel like I’m in control for once.’

  She picked up her needle again and started to pull back the second eyelid to sew it into place.

  That’s when it happened.

  That’s when the dead man’s eye turned to her face and looked right at her, accusingly. She felt the swivel of it under her touch.

  She leaped backwards, dropping her needle and thread and knocking an urn of priceless embalming oil with her elbow. It toppled and shattered.

  Vigo looked at her as if she’d gone mad.

  ‘He …’ Even as the words started to leave her lips, she swallowed them. The man’s eye was dead and sightless once more. ‘I … I’m not feeling well.’

  It was true: she felt sick. She had imagined it. She must have imagined it. Vigo sent her back to her cell and cleaned up the mess – despite his infirmities – insisting that she rest. Lying on her bed like a corpse herself, staring at the ceiling, she had felt terrible. She played the moment over and over in her mind. Even when Hunter had sat on her chest, purring like a furnace, she’d felt somehow detached from the world, trapped in that moment of horror. Was she going mad?

  Later, in the refectory at dinner, she’d asked the other cryptlings if they had any stories – Ancestors moving or twitching as they were prepared … But it was the usual stuff. The hunchbacked boy who sat opposite Lena told her he’d prepared a corpse that farted. The deaf girl next to her mimed how she’d watched as a dead man’s arm had risen up like a balloon, and everyone laughed. Lena nodded, smiling, pretending her experience had been similar. It was true: the contents of bellies could sometimes flood the body with gas, and that could make a c
orpse move. She told herself that was what had happened. But deep down she knew it was different. Who had ever heard of gas moving eyes? And besides, the man’s eye had fixed on her like he knew what she was doing – what she was thinking. Gas couldn’t do that.

  Next thing Lena knew there were footsteps, and she started from the forest floor, spitting dead leaves from her open mouth, scrambling back towards the protection of the tree trunk behind her. A shadow began to emerge from the fog. Lena tried to raise herself to her feet, tried to run, but she could not, her legs cramped with cold.

  The shadow solidified into a darker mass, holding a bulb of purple light. The figure stopped before her, as if Lena had been its destination all along. She recoiled. There was something wrong with the face of this creature – a smooth brass surface with glassy black eyes and a gaping mouth. A faint tick-tick-tick noise appeared to emanate from the face, a cog turning somewhere at its jaw. Lena’s hands scrambled at the sides of the tree as she pulled herself upright, shivering, and she hurriedly drew the knife from her belt.

  ‘Get back!’ she managed shakily, swiping the blade through the air.

  The purple light sped towards her, and Lena saw it was attached to the end of a long cane, which rapped the back of her hand sharply. Her silver knife went spinning to the ground. She snatched her hand to her chest, her knuckles burning.

  This was no monster, she realised, raising her eyes. The strange face was a mask, and the figure was a woman’s – a rich woman’s, at that. This she could tell by the velvet dress, cinched in at a tiny waist, the golden round talisman hanging almost to her stomach, the gold-tipped cane at her side and the slim kid-leather boots. Long fair hair had been wound into a tight coil at the top of the lady’s head. But she wasn’t just a woman. The light on her cane was no ordinary lantern. How could it be? The light glowed not yellow, like fire, but an unnatural purple.

  She’s a mage. Lena’s stomach twisted in terror.