Give the Dark My Love(44)

“Will it hurt?” she asked, her voice wavering.

“I can make it hurt less,” I promised. “At least for a while.”

I set my crucible on the table. It was tall and narrow, about six inches in diameter. Although it was made of solid gold, it was scratched and dull. I ran my fingers along the runes. Master Ostrum had given me the chunk of gold, but I had been the one to pour the molten metal into its mold, and it had been my fingers that scored the runes onto the surface.

I turned to the tray Marrow had given me. The rats inside were not clean like the ones we used at Yūgen. These rats had been caught on the street, and they stank of garbage and piss. I did not flinch as the nearest one snapped at me when I opened its cage. I grabbed it by the scruff of its neck and dropped it into the golden crucible. It snarled in protest, clawing against the smooth metal interior, but it couldn’t escape.

“Do you know how alchemy works?” I asked Dilada, attempting to distract her as Blye marked her arm with a butcher’s pen.

Dilada lifted her eyes from her deadened fingers and shook her head at me.

“It’s science,” I said.

“My father always said it was magic.”

“So did mine,” I said.

“And mine.” Blye’s deep voice startled Dilada. She’d almost forgotten he was there, but now her gaze drank in the shining scalpel to slice away her skin, the pins to hold the flesh back, the rags to mop up blood. The bone saw.

I shifted, drawing Dilada’s eyes back to me and not the tray of tools.

“But it’s not—not really, anyway. Alchemy exists on the principles of balance.” I was careful to keep my tone even and light. I put one hand on the crucible and quickly muttered the awakening incantation. The runes glowed white on the golden surface.

Dilada gasped.

“Ready,” Blye said in his gruff voice.

I squeezed Dilada’s shoulder, then touched the crucible on the table. The rat inside screamed in protest as the feeling from Dilada’s arm left me and entered its much smaller body. Just existing caused the rat pain now, but when Blye sliced into Dilada’s skin and flesh, she would feel nothing at all. When Blye sawed through Dilada’s humerus, she would only be aware of the motion, the tugging and pulling, but not the pain.

The rat carried her pain for her.

“Thank you,” Dilada whispered.

“Don’t look,” I advised, and Blye turned his scalpel to her skin. All the fear she’d kept tamped down burst through her eyes for just a moment, then she squeezed them shut and turned her face away.

Dilada’s pulse thrummed violently in her throat. I could make her body numb, but I could do nothing for the agonizing anticipation. My grip on her arm tightened. I had to maintain the connection between her and the rat.

“I wish—” Dilada started, but she didn’t finish. Blye made the first cuts, and although Dilada’s arm was numb, she was still cognizant of what was happening.

Blye worked quickly. Marrow jumped in to help, siphoning off the blood even as it splattered over the floor, soaking into the sawdust. I clenched my teeth, past the point of being able to do anything but provide a link between Dilada and the rat. I felt her pain in waves, washing through me and into the dirty gray body writhing inside the crucible.

From inside the golden vase, the rat screeched sharp and high, then was suddenly silent. Its body couldn’t take any more.

“Marrow,” I grunted through gritted teeth. With nowhere else to go, Dilada’s pain whirled inside me. I could feel myself growing dizzy with it, my grip loosening.

Marrow didn’t hesitate to reach inside the cage and dump another rat into the crucible. The connection was remade almost instantaneously, and Dilada only whimpered once as Blye picked up the bone saw. I breathed in relief, letting the pain flood through me into the rat.

After Blye was done, after the hand and part of the arm had fallen with a wet thud against the floor, after Dilada had slipped into a poppy oil–induced sleep and Blye had sewed up her skin to cover the shorn bone—after all that, Blye stood and moved to the next patient, a young boy who was losing his entire left leg. Blye didn’t talk; he let me distract this patient, too.

It must be easier that way. To see only the dead limbs that must be sawn away, not the people attached to them. To have never held the hand before it was severed.





TWENTY-FIVE


    Nedra



By the fourth patient, my body ached, my flesh burned, my bones shattered. No one could see it. Even though I transferred as much of the pain as I could into the rats, there was always a little that lingered inside me. I stumbled, my body forgetting that my feet were still attached to my legs. My fingers bent slowly, as if I had to remind the tendons in my arms and hands that they’d not been severed, too.

When we got to the last rat—and the last amputation—I forced some of my own feelings into the creature before it died. It was easier to do this job wide awake and a little numb. It was easier to get through the day that way, too.

“Are you okay?” Marrow asked, wide-eyed, as I fumbled with the crucible, dumping the last furry, stinking body onto the metal tray piled with the rodent victims.

I shrugged.

Marrow shoved the cart of dead rats and severed limbs at Blye. He wheeled them away without a word. When Marrow saw my face, she added, “There’s a crematorium on his way back to the butcher’s.”