Chapter Sixteen
'I'm coming too,' Van said. 'I think I owe it to Folken.'
'It's up to you,' Serena said. She was looking nervous. In view of what Rafel had told them about the gangs, it had been decided that Gadeth would stay on the steps to supervise things, and hopefully quell any unpleasantness. She had assured him that she would be all right by herself, and in fact it would be better for her to manage that way, but she still wished he was there, if not to hold her hand at least to be by her side. Van wasn't any sort of substitute, but at least he was familiar.
They went down in the elevators, several parties at once. Others went down the staircases. No-one particularly expected to find anyone, but there was the possibility of booby-trapped security systems to consider, so they were moving cautiously.
It was shadowy down there, even with the lights on. There were operating theatres tiled in cold white, file rooms with still more documents in tall cabinets, offices with heavy black books on the shelves. The monks, who generally had a higher level of education than the Asturian and Fanelian soldiers, set to work reading and collating the documents.
'This could be the work of years,' Brother Ailo said. 'It was obviously the work of decades to create it. They've done things in medicine that we can only dream of.' He seemed fascinated, enthusiastic. It made Van uncomfortable, as though this place was casting a spell on him. For his own part, he was on edge, wishing he had eyes in the back of his head. He thought Serena ought to seem more bothered by the place, but she was rather calm, even in the operating theatres. There were ankle and wrist cuffs on the operating slabs, as though subjects had had to be held down. She just looked them over, frowned and moved on. Cold.
Van found a door labelled 'Morgue' and stood looking at it for a long time. Serena, passing with a folder she wanted to show Ailo, stopped to see what had caught his interest.
'Um,' she said. She looked at Van, the door, and Van again. 'We should probably look.'
'Couldn't we get sick going into a place like that?' Van asked.
'We can just open the door and see if it smells like there's anything rotten inside,' she suggested.
'I will if you will,' he said, and then felt foolish. She nodded, though, so they both put a hand on the handle and pushed. The door swung in a few inches. The only smell that emerged was of formaldehyde. Serena pushed the door further open and Van stepped through.
'It's dark in here,' he said. 'I can't see anything.'
'There'll be a switch in the wall next to the door, probably,' she said. 'At about shoulder height. Feel around for it.'
Van found the switch and pressed it down. The lights came on. He still couldn't get used to how fast that was. He looked around the room. 'Oh God.'
'What?' Serena followed him in. She looked around and her face grew very white. She bit her lip and didn't speak.
The walls were lined with glass vessels, some the size of pickle jars, some much larger. In fact, pickles had been the first thing Van had thought of, and now he was trying very hard to get that thought out of his mind. In every vessel, suspended in spirits, floated a child. Some could have been as old as ten or eleven. Some were so tiny it made you wonder if they had ever been born. They were almost perfectly preserved, only slightly puffed and wrinkled by the solution that held them. Nothing else was perfect about any of them. Some had obvious deformities. A little girl of about three years floating directly in front of Van had one eye in the middle of her forehead, and no lower jaw. Others seemed to have been partially dissected, or mutilated might be the word.
Beside him, Serena began to tremble violently. He could hear her teeth chattering, and the folder fell to the floor with a slither and a clap. It was cold in that room, of course, but when he turned to look at her a trickle of sweat was running down her cheek.
'Thhh,' she said, and couldn't get any further. 'Th-thhh.' There are so many of them, she wanted to say. They're so small. She was clammy all over and her mouth was filling with water. I'm going to be sick. She tried to say so but only managed ''mg' before a spasm went through her and she vomited, hunching over, coughing and blinking as it spattered on the tiled floor and the scattered papers and splashed her boots.
'Damn,' said Van. 'Are you - can I do anything?' He patted her back awkwardly.
Serena choked and spat hard. 'Oh God. This is disgusting.' She waited, panting, for a long moment before she was sure it wasn't going to happen again.
'It's all right,' Van said. 'I don't blame you. It makes me feel sick too.'
'That could have been me,' Serena murmured. 'I could have ended up like that and they did'
'Well you didn't you're all right' Van said, feeling helpless. He felt sorry for her, despite everything.
'I - I know. Thank you. I think I've got it under control.' She sniffed and gulped a little more, still bent over with her hand at her throat. 'Look how tidy I am,' she said, and gave a weak giggle. 'I held this silly cravat out of the way.'
'You should get out of here,' he said. 'There are plenty of other people to deal with this.'
'I thought I don't know, I guess I thought I should confront this place.'
'It's not always a good idea to go back over this stuff,' Van said. 'Sometimes it just upsets you more and you can't do anything about it.'
'I s'pose.' She looked doubtful. 'You wanted to come for Folken, though.'
'Well, he was the one who was here. I bet he wouldn't want to come back. You didn't seem to be upset until now, though. Was it just because this is so sick?'
Serena shook her head. 'I was trying not to react to prove it doesn't have any power over me any more. I couldn't even remember a lot of it before, but it's been coming back as I see things down here. How it feels to be strapped onto one of those tables. You don't know what's going to happen to you. And you know there's nothing, absolutely nothing, you can do. They can do whatever they want to you. They can change you, force you to be what they want. And the cuffs are tight they hurt.' She paused and closed her eyes, breathing slowly, forcing herself to be calm. 'It's feelings I remember, not events. There's so much blind panic. It's so awful for children to be that afraid. They can't understand Folken was about your age when they took him, wasn't he?'
'Yes.'
'Then, I'm sorry, but it wasn't as bad for him. The first shock of finding he'd been changed, yes, but they were saving his life, not destroying it. Not taking it away from him.'
'He believed in Zaibach until Dornkirk sacrificed Nariya and Eriya,' Van said. 'He really believed in it, because they saved him.'
'It would never have gotten as far as it did if people hadn't believed in it,' Serena said. 'There were things about it that you could believe in. Science, medicine, power to change the world instead of just having to accept what it throws at us. Power to choose. But it all comes out of things like this people who didn't get to choose poor little children.' She stood up straighter and seemed to brace herself. She stepped around the mess on the floor and approached the nearest bank of glass. Then she faced the first child, a dark-skinned little wolf-boy, his body bent as though his back were broken. She looked him up and down, closely, seriously. When she had looked him in the face, she moved on to the next child, just a toddler.
'Hey,' Van said, perturbed. 'You're just going to give yourself nightmares. What are you doing that for?'
'I want to know each of them,' Serena said. 'I'm going to try to find their records as well. I want to know their names, where they came from, what was done to them. I want to remember their faces, their bodies.'
'It's creepy,' Van said. 'I know you're weird, but this is too much. Leave them alone.'
'These are my brothers and sisters,' she said. 'Children just like I was. I want to be able to call them by name. I want to be able to promise them I'll remember.' She put her hand to the glass, stroking it gently, as though she could somehow comfort the dead baby. She seemed oblivious to the sour bile smell beginning to fill the room, to the pulpy discoloration of the child's face. Fascinated.
'I'm going,' Van said. 'If you want to dwell on things like this, you can do it alone.' She didn't seem to hear him. He left.
The night came down early, dark and heavy and hungry. The men on the steps packed up the crates, lighter than they had been at the start of the day, although the turnout of people had not been large. Some had accepted free goods gratefully, but many had wanted to pay for at least part of what they took. Gadeth had noticed a tendency for people to be embarrassed about needing a lot of things at once. A lot of families had sent different members up at different times of the day to get a few things more, and it added up. There were already shortages in the supplies; they were right out of shoes, rice and flour. Still, this had been intended as more of a gesture of goodwill than a real solution to anyone's problems. If it tided some people over for a few days, and kept their feet dry for a while, its work would have been done. The real solutions would come later.
He was keeping a close eye on Rafel, who was still supposed to be helping. He had worked more eagerly in the morning, while Serena was there, and after lunch, when she had gone on the underground recce, had kept asking Gadeth about her - how old she was, where she lived, what she was good at, what she was interested in, nodding in apparent satisfaction at some answers and seeming puzzled by others. Little crush there, Gadeth thought. I shouldn't be surprised. He's been lonely for a long time, and she is beautiful. He'd been asking questions in return, but Rafel was reluctant to talk a lot about himself and only gave the bare facts. Gadeth was trying to like him, since he felt sorry for him, but he was finding it uphill work. Rafel tended to be supercilious and uppity, and gave the clear impression that he didn't want or need friendship from the likes of Gadeth.
Meruru had come out to help too, saying she'd done lots of work with the refugees in Asturia, not to mention the reconstruction in Fanelia, and she might as well make herself useful. She clearly wasn't keen on Rafel either, and there had been some quite heated exchanges between the two, on such subjects as whether it was stupid to try to arrange the blankets so they would look nice (Meruru favoured this as cheerful and welcoming, while Rafel said people were going to take them whatever they looked like so why bother), whether someone was getting the right change (they had both been wrong, mental arithmetic being a strong suit of neither), whether Dilandau had been a vicious lunatic or a brilliant maverick, and which of the two of them had more cooties. Although they both loudly decried this insult as extremely weak and juvenile, they still used it quite liberally. Gadeth had asked at one point what it actually meant and for once they had both been reduced to silence by amazement at his ignorance.
It didn't last. 'Nits and lice and fleas,' Meruru said. 'Disgusting dirty bugs.'
'Parasites and germs,' Rafel added, 'especially the kind you get off trampy catgirls. Which would make your king really infested.' This was the last straw and Meruru leapt at him. Gadeth hurried to separate them but she had managed to get a few good scratches in on Rafel's face and bald head before he could drag her off by the scruff of the neck and drop her in the blanket box.
'Cut it out,' he told her tersely. 'Even if he's being a pain in the butt, you've got to think about our position. How does it look if you attack a local kid right on the steps?'
'Give us privacy, then,' she said fiercely. 'I'll teach him to say things like that about Van-sama. He makes me so mad!'
'Because you know they're true,' Rafel said, mopping at his face with his sleeve. Gadeth gave him a swat up the back of the head, not a hard one, just a warning. 'Ow!' he said indignantly. 'You can't treat me like that! It's brutality!'
'You told me I couldn't hit him,' Meruru pouted.
'Consider it payback for last night,' Gadeth said.
'I only have to stay till the same time you caught me last night,' Rafel said. 'Then you can't stop me. Unless you are just a brute.'
'Frankly, I'll be glad to see the back of you,' Gadeth said. He was not only fed up with Rafel and Meruru, but annoyed with himself for not being able to deal with them better. The idea of children in the future was appealing, but he wasn't sure he deserved them if in the present they just made him impatient and irritable. Meruru was normally a sweet little thing, he liked her, but
'Well, I bet Serena will be annoyed with you for driving me away,' Rafel said. 'She sees that I'm useful. You'll notice I told her about Silver Star, not you. Why bother with subordinates when I can talk to the person at the top? Must be an interesting marriage.' He folded his arms and looked at Gadeth coolly.
Gadeth laughed at him. He could see how much it annoyed him. 'You're a little ratbag,' he told him.
'You're a big Asturian idiot,' said Rafel, contriving to make 'Asturian' sound like the rudest word in the sentence.
'Hit him again,' said Meruru.
'No-one is going to hit anyone,' Gadeth said firmly. 'Everyone is going to get along, me included. And I don't want to hear any more about it.'
'Sounds like you had a fairly special day,' Serena said, when he finished telling her about it over dinner.
'What about yours? You look done in.'
'Hard. Bad,' she said, pushing her fingers through her hair. 'I've seen some things I'll show you tomorrow. It's easier than telling about it. I hope he doesn't take off, he's still our only proper contact here. Could you get anywhere with the people who came to the handout?'
'No-one wanted to give their name,' he said. 'Very cautious people. You should talk to him, he'd listen to you.'
'Why me more than you?'
'He has a crush on you.'
'On me? Really? Neat.' She smiled, a sort of private pleased-with-herself smile.
'Why do you think that's so neat? Should I get worried?'
'I just think it's really funny. At least it proves you're not the only person strange enough to like me.'
'Why would you think I was?'
'I don't know. Because I'm strange. I always thought I was unbelievably lucky that life put me down right next to someone who would love me in spite of how I am.'
'It's because of, not in spite of,' he said. He said it a little quietly, because they were not, after all, alone in the mess. Brother Ailo was down at the far end of the table giving about one quarter of his attention to a cup of soup and the rest to a heavy black book he had brought up from downstairs. Serena didn't seem bothered; she smiled and rubbed her foot against Gadeth's under the table.
'Is that discreet enough affection for you?' she asked. 'Although I'll have to love you and leave you - the twenty-four hours are nearly up, and I suppose I should try to catch Rafel before he disappears into the mists.'
'He'll probably just hang around the building,' Gadeth said, 'since he was living here anyway, but I expect he has a lot of hiding places so it'd help if we knew where to find him. Go on and use your feminine wiles on him.'
'Feminine wiles,' said Serena thoughtfully. 'I don't believe I have any.'
'The hell you don't.'
Serena found Rafel almost as soon as she stepped down from Crusade, sitting on the edge of the roof, looking out at the city. She sat down beside him.
'Hello,' she said. He turned around with a start and looked delighted as soon as he saw her, then tried to put together some kind of cool exterior before she noticed.
'Oh, hello,' he said, very casual.
'What do you see out there that I don't?' she asked.
'What do you mean?'
'You live here. You can see things and know what they mean; to me they're just background. Like how a pilot can navigate by the stars, but to a merchant they're just lights in the sky. Dilandau didn't know the capital as well as all that, and it's changed since those days anyway.' She linked her hands around her knees and gazed out at the city, at its little patches of light and deep puddles of darkness. A chilly night breeze ruffled her hair.
'Are you cold?' he asked.
'Not really. Come on. That lighted area over there - the biggest one. That used to be one of the nice residential areas, didn't it? There was that park with the prism sculpture?'
'Yes,' Rafel said. 'I haven't been out there in a long time, though. It's dangerous. Mariel headquarters. They've taken over all the houses and apartment buildings, the family and their friends. That's where they'll come from if they make trouble for you.'
Serena looked at him sidelong, trying to find out what he looked like when he didn't know you were watching. Blank; sad.
'Where did you use to live?'
'Out there,' he said, pointing to one of the dark areas. 'On Needle Street. It's a brown brick house with dark green shutters. I was wondering did Migel talk about me? About Mum and Dad and me?'
'It wasn't encouraged in the Dragonslayers,' Serena said diplomatically. It was true, but the rule had been enforced with particular vigour by Dilandau. 'They were supposed to put their family life behind them.'
'Why don't you say "we" when you were one too?'
'Because I'm not one any more.'
Rafel looked at her wonderingly. 'But you were one of the chosen ones. The best of the best. If I had something like that to look back on, I'd be so proud.'
'I'm choosing to look forward, not back,' she told him. 'So that's where you lived before. I don't understand where you lived up until now, though. One of the rooms downstairs? Where?'
'I'll show you,' he said, eagerly. He got up and shot off in the direction of a heap of rubbish that had collected by the stairwell down to the inside of the building.
'In the fire stairs?' She followed, a few paces behind.
'No, in here.' He lifted a flap of cardboard and showed her the space behind. She peered in over his shoulder. The same smell he had had at their first encounter rolled out. It was a little bedroom, of sorts; one of the mattresses from the Dragonslayers' dorm on the ground. She recognised the weird pattern on the cover; they'd always said it looked like rubella rash, lots of little red dots on a white ground. They had all been immunised against everything possible, but the rubella injections just hadn't been effective and they had all caught it together, all feverish and itchy at once. That had been a really foul week. Only the mattresses in the Capitol dorm had that pattern.
And every inside wall was papered with newspaper cuttings of the Dragonslayers. Glossy coloured ones cut out of magazines stood out on the black and white. Two big ones of Dilandau and Migel took pride of place.
'Do you want to go in?' Rafel asked. 'It stinks a bit.'
'I, um, I don't think so,' Serena said. 'And you've lived in there for months?'
'I've had to keep building new ones,' he said. 'Cardboard always comes to bits after a while, but it's good insulation while it lasts.'
'And this is all you've got to go back to?'
'It's a lot better than what some people have got.'
'Well, I don't want you to.'
He looked up at her, surprised.
'I don't want to think you're living in a poky little hole like this. I'm not meaning to insult your home, I can see you've done a lot to make it yours, but no-one should have to live like this. There'll be a place for you on Crusade.'
'You don't have to do that for me,' he said shyly.
'For you and for Migel, okay? To honour his memory.'
'Dragonslayers take care of their own,' he said, beaming. 'I knew it.'
Serena sighed and sat back on her heels. 'I'm not a Dragonslayer,' she said. 'I'm a Knight of Heaven. I'm sworn to the service of the Crown of Asturia. And if I'm trying to be nice to you it's not a knight thing either. It's personal. I'm sorry about how I treated you before.'
'What do you mean?' he asked.
'Well - how I attacked you at first.'
'But that was amazing. You were ruthless. It's like what you were telling me about Dilandau avenging Migel's death - you'd get anyone who tried to hurt one of your men, right?' His eyes were shining.
Serena pinched the bridge of her nose. 'None of what you're saying is exactly untrue, but I still can't help feeling you're missing the point.'
'I definitely want to stay with you and serve you, Serena-sama,' he said.
'So why were you telling Gadeth this afternoon that you'd be leaving as soon as the twenty-four hours were up?'
Rafel shrugged. 'Well, you know. Gadeth.' He made a face, inviting her to commiserate with him. Serena shook her head.
'You don't seem to be on top of the fact that I'm married to him.'
'Why are you?'
'Because I love him,' she said simply. 'Because he's a dear sweet man who takes good care of me and makes me happy. Why else?'
'I'd thought - I mean, because he's a lot older than you and I don't know, he's kind of grim, and you're just out of his league, so I thought - I thought you must have had to marry him for some reason' The explanation tailed off without ever really getting anywhere. 'I just didn't think someone like you would be in love with someone like him.' He looked crestfallen.
'You think he's grim? I've never seen him like that. I suppose he can come off as gruff' Serena suddenly shivered. 'It's much too cold out here. Let's go in. Have you had dinner?'
'No.'
'Come on. We'll get you something to eat, we'll find you a berth, and we'll get you some clothes of your own so Van can have his stuff back.' She stood up and beckoned to him. He followed her back on board Crusade. He didn't feel he had a choice.
'Looks like you tamed him.'
'I feel rotten about using how he feels about me.'
'It's not even that serious.'
'It's probably serious to him.'
'You worry too much too nice for your own good.'
'You think I'm better than I am.'
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