No corpses littered this version of Blackstone Hospital. The halls were empty and silent, lamps burned at even intervals, and doors were shut. The air was cool, without the stench of the balewind outside that whistled around the door and rattled the windows.
“Axton’s here, all right,” Lorencz said. I followed her gaze. The alienist had written a note on the plaster wall, the letters scrawled in charcoal in the unsteady, spidery hand I recognized from his medical reports: Upstairs with Jaspin.
“Well, he’s lucid,” I observed.
“You haven’t had any problems with hallucinations?” Michael asked. I touched the bandages around the side of my head, which ached from the exertion of running.
“Nothing I couldn’t handle.”
“Cocky bastard,” Lorencz snorted.
“What did you see?” Michael pressed. I gave him a crooked grin, intending to say something sarcastic, and then I hesitated, remembering the smell of his steaming blood as it pooled around my boots. Maybe warning them wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
“I thought I’d killed both of you.”
“That’s your hell?” Lorencz raised an eyebrow. “Killing us? Damn, Droit, I’m touched.”
“Yes, you are.” I lowered my fingers and glanced at the blood on them. Head wounds always bleed a lot, but this seemed heavy, to me.
“Is that why you came looking for us?” Michael asked, his voice softer.
“No,” I snapped, annoyed at having told them anything at all. Retirement had made me soft.
“So, upstairs?” Lorencz asked, nodding toward the message.
“Yes.” Michael looked thoughtful. “With Jaspin. Interesting. Do you think he crossed the Line, too?”
“You’re assuming it’s the real Jaspin,” I countered. “It’s probably a Jaspin-simulacrum, like the Elliot-simulacrum.”
“Actually, now that you mention it, any one of us could be a simulacrum.” Michael gave us both considering looks.
“No. We gotta assume we’re real, or we won’t get nothing done.” Lorencz pulled out her cigar case, opened it, and grimaced at the single cigar left.
“Why don’t you just smoke it?” I asked.
“Last one, and I don’t think I’m gonna be able to buy any more around here.” She snapped the case shut. “Jaspin was on the top floor. Let’s go.”
We headed up the stairwell. The wind howled through the cracks in the windows. I tried to look out, but the glass was mirrored from the inside, too. Maybe Far didn’t understand transparency. I paused, looking at my reflection. The bandage around my head was dark with blood.
“You look gorgeous, pal,” Lorencz said, noticing that I’d stopped. “Don’t worry — Axton will sew you up. Oh, sorry, you never worry.”
I would have made a rude gesture, but she’d already turned her back.
We guessed that we were getting close to Axton when we heard screaming.
Many voices, both genders. This was the insane asylum part of the hospital, apparently, magnified through either Far’s or Axton’s distorted perceptions. Lorencz stopped at the heavy iron door at the top of the stairway. It was the only door we’d seen, although we’d walked up several stories.
“I’m really starting to hate this place,” she remarked. Then she pushed down the handle and shoved it open with a great metallic squealing of rusting hinges. I smirked. Between the screaming and the squeaky hinges, it sounded like we were in a bad Cheapside penny opera.
My smirk faded as we stepped into the long, endless hall. The roof leaked blood, leaving long, thin red streaks that ran down the whitewashed stone wall and puddled on the bare wooden floor. Candles burned in niches set every five feet away from each other. Cell doors lined the hall, each door equipped with a barred spyhole. And the screaming here was louder; a cacophony of the damned.
The hallway didn’t resemble anything in the real hospital. It was either a throwback to some earlier time in Blackstone’s history or a complete fabrication cobbled out of Axton’s subconscious. Chunks of flesh pattered on the roof, and balewind whistled through the holes, raising the hall’s temperature above that of the rest of the asylum.
I stepped forward and looked into the first cell.
Somebody had been vivisecting small dogs and cats. The animals hadn’t died yet, although they had been firmly nailed down to scarred wooden tables. The vivisectionist had done a neat job. I’d always made a mess, as a child.
I moved to the next cell. An autopsy, half-finished and then abandoned. The corpse was an older woman. Perhaps her face meant something to Axton. I didn’t know her. I turned and saw Lorencz and Michael recoiling from the room with the tortured animals.
“What is this?” Michael asked, sounding sick. He gave me a hard look, no doubt remembering his kitten.
“Not my madness,” I said, firmly.
“Do you suppose these are Axton’s secrets?” he asked, moving into the center of the hall and looking around. “Why would he to keep them locked in cells but visible to strangers?”
“Well, he is an alienist,” I pointed out.
“Huh.” Lorencz narrowed her eyes. “Well, I ain’t interested in seeing what’s inside the runt’s head. Let’s move.”
“I’ll take a look for you.” I walked up to the next door.
“Swell. Let me know if you see anything we oughta arrest him for when we get out of here.”
“Like murder?” I asked. She flinched. “I think we should agree that anything we see or do across the Line doesn’t count back in Cislunar. Don’t you?”
“You know, Droit, every time I start thinking you’re not such a bastard—”
“Do you agree?”
Lorencz looked at Michael. They hesitated, then nodded.
“Good.” I walked down the hall and glanced through a few more barred windows. I didn’t see anything that shocked me. Then again, I’m not easy to shock. “For all we know, these could be nightmares, fantasies, wishful thinking….”
“I get it.” Lorencz’s voice was icy.
“Let’s go,” Michael said, diplomatically. “It looks like we have a long walk ahead of us.”
It was a long walk, but a peculiarly timeless one. The two sentinels stayed in the middle of the hall, their eyes fixed on the floor as though they were afraid of what the bale might conjure up if they let their minds wander. Screams and balewind howled around us. Blood dripped down the walls, occasionally carrying with it a small scrap of oozing tissue.
I looked into each room, increasingly intrigued by my little glimpses into our quiet companion. Much of what Axton had locked away was distasteful; the kind of thing I’d expect from a man who cut apart bodies as a hobby. Some of it didn’t make any sense, like the room full of broken toys, and the room coated with shit, and the room with nothing in it but a dusty crown. Some of the rooms may have been memories, like the room with the woman whose cut throat was spraying blood all over the walls, or the one with the hanged man dangling from a window sill, or the one with the gang rape. And one room just made me shake my head as I walked away.
“What?” Lorencz asked, studying my face. “Do I want to know?”
“Nothing criminal,” I assured her. The room had been filled with glass cases, and under each case had been a body, tagged and numbered like a taxidermist’s display. The three of us seemed to be the centerpieces of the collection.
At last we came to a door at the end of the hall. It swung open when Michael touched it, revealing stairs winding upward. I remembered them from my visit to Jaspin once before.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Michael murmured, looking up at the leaky roof.
“Forget about sense. I’ll go first.” I dropped my hand to my belt and realized I wasn’t carrying a sword anymore. I pulled out a dagger, instead, and headed up.
The stairs widened and grew shallower. I recognized them as the stairs up to Jaspin’s office in the Ministry of Justice. I’d been there several times, usually to be questioned about some murder or another the constabulary couldn’t solve.
I stepped through the open office door and looked around. The office looked more cluttered than I remembered, and things weren’t in the right places. But Jaspin was sitting behind his large desk, listening to Axton as the alienist explained something in dry, didactic tones. The ministry director looked at me with his one good eye as I walked in. The unscarred left half of his face smiled.
“General Droit. Axton tells me that this is all your fault.”
“It might be.” I walked past the alienist, tucking my dagger away, and studied the investigator. “You look better than you did the last time I visited you.”
“You don’t,” he said, eyeing the bloody bandages around my head.
“Director Jaspin!” Lorencz sounded relieved as she stepped through the door. “You’re cured?”
“Temporarily, at least.” Jaspin stood and held out his left hand, the good one, to shake. I took it, wondering if it was real, and then turned to Axton. The slight alienist looked like he usually did, like a young man dressed in his father’s too-large clothing. His pale, too-old eyes were the same silver-gray as the balesky outside.
“General,” he said, formally. “You aren’t carrying Might.”
“No.” I considered him. Fresh streaks of blood glistened on his stained coat. “You seem well.”
“I am.” His eyes flickered to the door. “I apologize for the mess out there. I’ve been trying to clean it up for years.”
“You seem to have it all neatly compartmentalized.”
“Thank you. I try.”
“Is that really Jaspin?”
“I think so.”
“Why? Why would he be here with us, when none of the other inmates were brought across the Line?”
Axton’s gaze returned to my face, and he regarded me like a teacher whose student has finally asked an intelligent question.
“My working theory is that Far lumped him in with the children because he suffered the same nix poisoning that they did. With Jaspin’s mind regressed so far back, he may have considered Jaspin to be the equivalent of a child, and therefore worthy of his protection.”
“That sounds far-fetched.”
“Exactly,” he said, and then flinched as Michael stepped between us.
“I’m glad to see you again, Axton.” Michael said, squeezing the alienist’s hand. “You cured Jaspin! That’s remarkable.”
Axton flushed. As soon as Michael released his hand, he snatched it back and pressed it, palm-down, against his chest.
“I found Director Jaspin here while I was — e-engaged in s-self-analysis,” the alienist stammered. I felt mildly put out that he was more flustered by my cousin than by me. He took a deep breath. “He had already regained most of his motor functions. Guided recall exercises have helped him retrieve the rest of his memories over the last two days.”
“Two days?” Michael frowned. “We’ve only been here a couple of hours.”
“Really?” Axton’s gaze grew distant and he pulled a slip of paper from his coat pocket and started scribbling notes.
“Are Jaspin and I going to stay cured when we cross the Line?” Michael pressed. The alienist looked back up.
“I don’t know, my liege. If the damage was psychosomatic, then I don’t see why this cure wouldn’t be permanent. However, I don’t believe anybody has experimented with cross-Line healing before.” He tucked his lead pencil and scrap of paper away, then glanced at me. “Would you — would you like me to inspect your wound, General?”
“You might as well.” I sat in a chair and allowed Axton to unwrap the bandages. His fingers were cold but light as he worked.
“What happened?” he asked.
“My cousin tried to crush my skull with a candlestick.”
“He did a good job.” Fingers probed the wound and I winced as a jagged streak of crimson flashed across my vision. “I see bone splinters.”
“Sorry,” Michael said, looking over Axton’s shoulder. “I just meant to stop him, not kill him.”
“An apology at last,” I noted.
“Oh, I’m not sorry about cracking your skull,” my cousin snapped. “I’m sorry to leave Axton with such a mess to clean up.”
I grinned despite the pain. Next to us, Lorencz and Jaspin were comparing notes on the investigation that had cost Jaspin his memory.
“— sentinel named Hargrave said he had information about the attack on Lily Liselle, so I met him at the Rose and Tombstone after hours,” Jaspin said. “He fed me some tale about a cult called the Banished and drugged me.” The director grimaced. “I should have known better than to drink with an informer.”
“Yeah, Hargrave was Banishat,” Lorencz said. “Technically it’s his fault we’re across the Line. Droit killed him. Which still don’t let you off the hook,” she shot in my direction. I ignored her. It felt like Axton was breaking off large pieces of my skull, and it was taking all my concentration not to pass out.
“How bad is it?” Michael asked.
I took a deep breath and felt an overwhelming desire for a stiff drink. I resisted the urge to ask if Jaspin kept a bottle in his desk.
“If the wound isn’t tended soon, he could come down with a terminal brain fever,” Axton replied.”
“Your bedside manner is terrible,” I complained. I wanted to add a lewd joke about beds, but I was in too much pain to think of one.
“It needs to be checked more thoroughly to make sure I’ve picked out all the splinters, cleaned, and bandaged. He should have complete rest for at least two weeks to facilitate healing; quite possibly more.” Axton picked up the bloody bandages and began winding them back around my head again. “Of course, there’s nothing we can do for him until we return to Cislunar.”
“Then we better find Far,” Lorencz said, walking up. “How much do you know about what’s going on, Ax?”
“I realize that we’ve crossed the Line. However, the bale is much less responsive than I had expected. My supposition is that one of you is providing a baseline reality for the rest of us.” Axton knotted the bandages and stepped away.
“Far is, with Kyrchye’s help, if you believe Croix. But they’re losing their grip and things are going to hell out there.” Lorencz paused. “Literally.”
While Lorencz and Michael brought Axton and Jaspin up to speed, I tottered to my feet and investigated the room. Jaspin’s environment wasn’t as neatly compartmentalized as Axton’s, but it was more mundane. Letters from family, political memorabilia, hundreds of case files, a full set of volumes detailing Cislunar’s social register, a number of books on formalist painting, some fishing gear propped up in a corner. A few hunting rifles by a painting of a country estate were all very dusty. I picked up a large box that sat prominently on a side table.
“Be careful,” Jaspin said, looking over his shoulder. “That’s the bomb.”
“Of course.” I set it back down. My head was aching again, the wound irritated by Axton’s examination.
“Regardless of your religious views, my liege,” the alienist was saying to Michael, “our survival hinges on Far’s goodwill.”
“I’m not taking issue with that,” Michael said, scowling. “I’m taking issue with your use of ‘god’ to describe the three transients.”
“I believe Kyrchye, at least, is a god.” Axton walked to a shuttered window and started to raise it.
“Be careful!” Lorencz lunged forward, grabbing him and the sill. Axton flinched.
“I … I only intended to see what’s left of the city for myself.”
“There’s nothing left but the cathedral, the palace, and this hospital,” Lorencz said shortly.
“Oh.” Axton let his hands fall from the window sill. “Interesting.”
“Far’s theoretically divine status aside,” Jaspin said, picking up his black cane and easing out of his chair, “do we have any idea where he is and what he plans to do with us?”
“Croix said Far was searching the city for the children,” Michael said. “But there’s no city left anymore.”
“Well, we better do something soon,” Lorencz said grimly. “Just ’cause Far brought us here don’t mean he’s bringing us back, and if he don’t, we might be fighting hell all on our own.”
Which reminded me….
“I need a sword, Jaspin,” I said, looking around. “Do you have one?”
“There’s one over there, but I don’t think it’s your type of weapon,” he replied, pointing with his gloved, crippled hand. A slender rapier hung on a wall, half-covered by a crooked painting of a country mansion.
“It’s not,” I agreed, unbuckling my empty sword belt and walking across the room. I took the rapier off the wall and weighed it in one hand. I hadn’t used a dueling blade in well over a decade. Still, beggars and choosers. I slid Might’s iron scabbard off my sword belt and searched until I found a leather rapier scabbard.
“What did you do with Might?” Axton asked as I busied myself with the scabbard’s pretentious rows of buckles and straps.
“Michael threw it at the cardinal, and the cardinal threw it at Yzyrchye.”
“Really, Nobilis.” Jaspin turned, his one eyebrow rising.
“I wasn’t aiming at Croix. I was just trying to get Might out of my hands as quickly as I could.” Michael glanced at me. “That was right after I cracked Tegeus’ skull.”
“I may press charges,” I said, buckling the belt around my waist and sliding the rapier around, trying to find a comfortable place for it to hang. The weight and angle were all wrong, and its basket hilt kept jabbing me. “Especially if I come down with brain fever.”
“It was self-defense.”
My hands froze as I remembered my cousin’s corpse lying in a pool of blood.
“Granted.” I gave the rapier one last jerk and walked back.
“Hello? Far? Bale? Is anyone paying attention to what’s going on out there?” Lorencz scowled around at us. “Do we have a plan yet?”
“You’re the sentinel.” I shrugged. “There’s nothing I can do about the Line.”
“We could go back to the cathedral,” Jaspin suggested. “Perhaps we would be safer there.”
“No offense, chief, but your trick leg ain’t gonna get you through Yzyrchye’s obstacle course fast enough. I ain’t even sure Droit could do it a second time.” Lorencz turned and faced Michael. “Having any luck making calls?”
“Yzyrchye’s lock on the bale is absolute.” He tapped his chin. “The best situation for us might be if Carel calls us across the Line.”
“What’s the chance of that?” Lorencz asked. “Blackstone’s probably still under interdiction.”
“How long have we been here? I mean, us, not you, Axton.”
I reached into my pocket to check my watch. My fingers brushed a narrow cylinder.
“Well, we can always try this,” I said, brandishing the piece of chalk Milka had given me. Axton turned from the closed window, looked at the chalk, and nodded with approval. “The girl said Far won’t answer to an adult, but it couldn’t hurt to try.”
“Would the call work if we’re both on the same side of the Line?” Michael asked, sounding doubtful. “Technically, a call always transverses the Line.
“It’s the only idea I have, short of running for it.” I said, handing the chalk to Lorencz.
“What does chalk have to do with a transient?” Jaspin asked, confused. Lorencz explained Far’s hopscotch ritual while Axton, Michael and I cleared a spot in the floor.
“I don’t have to play, do I?” Jaspin asked at last, tapping his cane against his crippled leg.
“Nah, just the person who sends the call,” Lorencz said, crouching and chalking the pattern. She numbered the top square, the “Grave,” with Far’s poorhouse-badge number: 123456789. “The summoner makes a successful jump to the end, lands on the Grave, and whistles up Far. And sometime later, the summoner’s supposed to leave a thank-you sacrifice on a board. Dead animals.”
“Why?” Jaspin asked. “What does Far do with them?”
Lorencz shrugged and handed the chalk back.
“Beats me.”
“Yzrychye loves ritual,” I said. “It’s obsessed with things that resist change. Flesh that can’t transform, buildings meant to last forever, rituals that persist century after century. It loves them and wants to destroy them. Maybe Far is the same.”
“Do you think that’s why Yzyrchye keeps trying to get you back?” Michael asked. “Because it likes the idea of you remaining its Hound?”
“Maybe.” I’d never thought about it before, but it made sense. I certainly didn’t believe Yzyrchye felt any emotional attachment to me, despite its mimicry of human endearment.
“Okay, which one of us plays?” Lorencz asked. We looked at each other. Lorencz was in her mid-thirties and Michael was edging into forty. I was forty-three. Jaspin was probably in his fifties, though his scars made it hard to tell.
“Lorencz is the most immature,” I volunteered. She made an obscene gesture.
“Droit won the game the last time we played,” she countered. “The rest of us broke lines or tipped out.”
“That was before my skull got cracked.” Just the thought of hopping up and down made my head pound.
“I’ll do it,” Axton volunteered.
“How old are you?” I asked, looking at Axton.
“Thirty-six.”
“You look younger.”
“So I’ve been told.” He hesitated. “I’ve watched Milka summon Far before. And the rest of you are hindered either by physical handicaps or pride.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Aronson objected.
“Of course not, my liege. You’re too much of a gentleman.” Axton reached into his pocket and pulled out a scalpel. Coagulated blood crusted its blade. I looked from it to the streaks on his coat.
“Self-analysis?” I asked.
“I needed to get a few of my more disturbing memories under control, General.”
“I hope you had fun doing it.”
He didn’t answer, but a rare, satisfied smile flickered across his lips. The expression vanished as swiftly as it had appeared, and he stretched out a hand to drop the bloody scalpel into square one.
The alienist’s bloodstained greatcoat flapped around his legs as he jumped to the end of the pattern. When he got there, he planted both feet in the Grave and let out one long, shrill whistle that went on and on and grew louder and louder, until we all winced and covered our ears as the walls fell down.