by Kesia Lupo
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 September, 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 corpse 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.
Books by Kesia Lupo
We Are Blood and Thunder
We Are Bound by Stars
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kesia Lupo studied history at the University of Oxford and creative writing at Bath Spa. She lives in Bristol with her husband and works as a children’s book editor, writing in the mornings before work. Her debut novel, We Are Blood and Thunder, was a fan favourite. We Are Bound by Stars is her second novel set in her same highly original fantasy world.
BLOOMSBURY YA
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First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
This electronic edition published in May 2020
Copyright © Kesia Lupo, 2020
Maps and Holy Council of the Nine Gods illustrations copyright © Robert Altbauer, 2019, 2020
Kesia Lupo has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: PB: 978-1-4088-9807-9; eBook: 978-1-4088-9808-6
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