Juniper & Thorn(72)

In one hot rush, all the breath went out of me.

And then my eyes were missing, some haze falling across my vision that removed me from the room in small, agonizing increments, like a slow and throbbing exorcism. I watched through the film as the day laborers got the body down with an elaborate rope-and-pulley system, dancers looking on and tittering in their tights. A hard swallow ticked in Sevas’s throat. The body crashed onto the stage like a big dead bird, and the smell that billowed up from it nearly made me retch.

“He must have been dead for near a week, perhaps longer,” one of the day laborers said, pinching his nose shut. “Look how rotted it is.”

A week. What had I been doing a week ago? My days blurred together, rote and near-identical. I had been pouring Papa tea or grinding meat into filling while someone, something, picked off the men of Oblya like a hawk snatching up its quarry. While this man’s flesh was curdling off his bones.

The memory of Papa’s voice struck me suddenly: Oblya will not miss a single day laborer. If anything, it means more work for the rest.

“How could we have gone so long without noticing it?” Mr. Kovalchyk demanded, covering his own nose with his handkerchief.

The day laborer shrugged. “Too high up to smell. Too bright when all the lights are on.”

Where the man’s eyes had been there were only two small pits, opening to an oily darkness. His chest had been flayed open almost precisely, rib cage and sternum split down their centers like the bodice of a dress torn in a moment of great ecstasy, and under it there was the pink of flesh and muscle. But inside his sternum there was nothing, no red withering heart, and his rib cage was absent of gristle and blood, looking as white as taxidermy tusks mounted above some conqueror’s mantel. The liver was absent, the slick garland of intestines gone, and even the stomach had been slit open and emptied. Everything was scraped as clean as a white porcelain bowl.

It reminded me of how I had flayed the monster, carving out its entrails. It had come to me so easily, as if such butchery were as natural as breathing. I squeezed my eyes shut and held my breath until I was dizzy, until when I opened them again my vision was blinkering with false stars.

Two neat wounds grinned above the dead man’s knees, as if someone had used a knife to hobble him so he could not get away. At least, that was what the Grand Inspector said when he arrived, with six of his black-clad men in tow.

“A week or more,” he proclaimed, nudging the body with the toe of his boot. “It’s hard to tell at this stage, before we can get it to our mortician. Sir, I am going to need a list of everyone who has been inside this theater in the past two weeks—dancers, workers, managers. And I’m going to need to see the log of ticket purchases.”

“But who was he?” I pressed, even though a part of me already knew. Papa’s voice returned to me again. If anything, it means more work for the rest. He was any man. He was a man no one would miss.

“Oh,” Mr. Kovalchyk said, blinking from under his sweaty brow. “Some day laborer or another. We hire them at market rate to mop the floors.”

The Grand Inspector nodded grimly and asked if the man had any family, but I could not hear Mr. Kovalchyk’s response over the rushing of blood in my ears. I only heard him laugh, and what an absurd question it was. Men like Niko and Fedir and even Sevas had no family but one another. The Grand Inspector took down some notes on his pad. I watched him through that ghostly haze as Sevas’s hand pressed against the small of my back, thinking of everything Papa had told me about the man before me and his black-clad enforcers.

Since he was Oblyan, and not Yehuli or Ionik or Merzani, Papa could not properly say that he had horns hidden in his hair or silverfish crawling over his suit jacket, but still he said that the Grand Inspector was a demon of a man, and as dangerous as a serpent coiled under a rock. He looked more like a raven to me, in his long dark coat, very tall and with a nose that jutted magnificently over his mustache. When he spoke, his mouth made a snapping sort of motion, as if his lips were veined with a taut elastic band.

He had his men wrap the body in a sheet and roll it up into a large sack, which all six of them together hefted toward the door. As they heaved the body onto their shoulders, two small things tumbled out of the sheet.

I watched them clatter to the floor, dark and grooved and each the size of a marble: plum stones.

“I want the theater shuttered for now,” the Grand Inspector said. “No one in or out. My men will need to conduct an investigation, and it will take days.”

Mr. Kovalchyk’s jaw went slack. He daubed at his forehead. “Do you think . . . sir, is it possible . . . I read a story in the penny presses . . . was it a monster?”

All at once the Grand Inspector’s bird face went pale with anger. “Do not speak another word to me of penny presses or monsters. It is hard enough to investigate the death of a man without everyone in Oblya frothing at the mouth for me to execute an imaginary villain. Say no more of this matter, Mr. Kovalchyk, and do not let slip to anyone the state in which the body was found. I will not tolerate another mob at my door.”

I still had the broker’s card, and the hard edges of the paper pressed cruelly into my breasts. My secret, or Papa’s secret, a suspicion I could not even bring myself to speak aloud. Mr. Kovalchyk shut his mouth and turned away, blushing furiously. The dancers pressed in together, whispers darting around in their tight little circle, and I was sure that, no matter what the Grand Inspector decreed, the penny presses would hear about this by tonight.