Shoggoths in Bloom (9 page)

He stopped with his blade in the loaf, looking up. “I’ve not paid.”

“You’ll take my answer,” she said. She took his cup, and dipped more ale from the pot warming over those few banked coals. “I know your contract is good.”

He shook his head at the smile that curved her lips, and snorted. “Someone’ll find out tha geas one day, enchantress. And may tha never rest easy again. So tell me then. How might I mend a lass’s broken heart?”

“You can’t,” the witch said, easily. “You can replace it with another, or you can forge it anew. But it cannot be mended. Not like that.”

“Gerrawa with tha,” Weyland said. “I tried reforging it. ‘Tis glass.”

“And glass will cut you,” the witch said, and snapped her fingers. “Like that.”

He made the cauldron while he was thinking, since it needed the blast furnace and a casting pour but not finesse. If glass will cut and shatter, perhaps a heart should be made of tougher stuff, he decided as he broke the mold.

Secondly, he began by heating the bar stock. While it rested in the coals, between pumping at the bellows, he slid the shards into a leathern bag, slicing his palms—though not deep enough to bleed through heavy callus. He wiggled Olrun’s ring off his right hand and strung it on its chain, then broke the heart to powder with his smallest hammer. It didn’t take much work. The heart was fragile enough that Weyland wondered if there wasn’t something wrong with the glass.

When it had done, he shook the powder from the pouch and ground it finer in the pestle he used to macerate carbon, until it was reduced to a pale-pink silica dust. He thought he’d better use all of it, to be sure, so he mixed it in with the carbon and hammered it into the heated bar stock for seven nights and seven days, folding and folding again as he would for a sword-blade, or an axe, something that needed to take a resilient temper to back a striking edge.

It wasn’t a blade he made of his iron, though, now that he’d forged it into steel. What he did was pound the bar into a rod, never allowing it to cool, never pausing hammer—and then he drew the rod through a die to square and smooth it, and twisted the thick wire that resulted into a gorgeous fist-big filigree.

The steel had a reddish color, not like rust but as if the traces of gold that had imparted brilliance to the ruby glass heart had somehow transferred that tint into the steel. It was a beautiful thing, a cage for a bird no bigger than Weyland’s thumb, with cunning hinges so one could open it like a box, and such was his magic that despite all the glass and iron that had gone into making it it spanned no more and weighed no more than would have a heart of meat.

He heated it cherry-red again, and when it glowed he quenched it in the well to give it resilience and set its form.

He wore his ring on his wedding finger when he put it on the next morning, and he let the forge lie cold—or as cold as it could lie, with seven days’ heat baked into metal and stone. It was the eighth day of the forging, and a fortnight since he’d taken the girl’s coin.

She didn’t disappoint. She was along before midday.

She came right out into the sunlight this time, rather than lingering under the hazel trees, and though she still wore black it was topped by a different hat, this one with feathers. “Old man,” she said, “have you done as I asked?”

Reverently, he reached under the block that held his smaller anvil, and brought up a doeskin swaddle. The suede draped over his hands, clinging and soft as a maiden’s breast, and he held his breath as he laid the package on the anvil and limped back, his left leg dragging a little. He picked up his hammer and pretended to look to the forge, unwilling to be seen watching the lady.

She made a little cry as she came forward, neither glad nor sorrowful, but rather tight, as if she couldn’t keep all her hope and anticipation pent in her breast any longer. She reached out with hands clad in chevre and brushed open the doeskin—

Only to freeze when her touch revealed metal. “This heart doesn’t beat,” she said, as she let the wrappings fall.

Weyland turned to her, his hands twisted before his apron, wringing the haft of his hammer so his ring bit into his flesh. “It’ll not shatter, lass, I swear.”

“It doesn’t beat,” she repeated. She stepped away, her hands curled at her sides in their black kid gloves. “This heart is no use to me, blacksmith.”

He borrowed the witch’s magic goat, which like him—and the witch—had been more than half a God once and wasn’t much more than a fairy story now, and he harnessed her to a sturdy little cart he made to haul the witch’s cauldron. He delivered it in the sunny morning, when the dew was still damp on the grass, and he brought the heart to show.

“It’s a very good heart,” the witch said, turning it in her hands. “The latch in particular is cunning. Nothing would get in or out of a heart like that if you didn’t show it the way.” She bounced it on her palms. “Light for its size, too. A girl could be proud of a heart like this.”

“She’ll have none,” Weyland said. “Says as it doesn’t beat.” “Beat? Of course it doesn’t beat,” the witch scoffed. “There isn’t any love in it. And you can’t put that there for her.”

“But I mun do,” Weyland said, and took the thing back from her hands.

For thirdly, he broke Olrun’s ring. The gold was soft and fine; it flattened with one blow of the hammer, and by the third or fourth strike, it spread across his leather-padded anvil like a puddle of blood, rose-red in the light of the forge. By the time the sun brushed the treetops in its descent, he’d pounded the ring into a sheet of gold so fine it floated on his breath.

He painted the heart with gesso, and when that was dried he made bole, a rabbit-skin glue mixed with clay that formed the surface for the gilt to cling to.

With a brush, he lifted the gold leaf, bit by bit, and sealed it painstakingly to the heart. And when he had finished and set the brushes and the burnishers aside—when his love was sealed up within like the steel under the gold—the iron cage began to beat.

“It was a blacksmith broke my heart,” the black girl said. “You’d think a blacksmith could do a better job on mending it.”

“It beats,” he said, and set it rocking with a burn-scarred, callused fingertip. “ ’Tis bonny. And it shan’t break.”

“It’s cold,” she complained, her breath pushing her veil out a little over her lips. “Make it warm.”

“I’d not wonder tha blacksmith left tha. The heart tha started with were colder,” he said.

For fourthly, he opened up his breast and took his own heart out, and locked it in the cage. The latch was cunning, and he worked it with thumbs slippery with the red, red blood. Afterwards, he stitched his chest up with cat-gut and an iron needle and pulled a clean shirt on, and let the forge sit cold.

He expected a visitor, and she arrived on time. He laid the heart before her, red as red, red blood in its red-gilt iron cage, and she lifted it on the tips of her fingers and held it to her ear to listen to it beat.

And she smiled.

When she was gone, he couldn’t face his forge, or the anvil with the vacant chain draped over the horn, or the chill in his fingertips. So he went to see the witch.

She was sweeping the dooryard when he came up on her, and she laid the broom aside at once when she saw his face. “So it’s done,” she said, and brought him inside the door.

The cup she brought him was warmer than his hands. He drank, and licked hot droplets from his moustache after.

“It weren’t easy,” he said.

She sat down opposite, elbows on the table, and nodded in sympathy. “It never is,” she said. “How do you feel?”

“Frozen cold. Colder’n Hell. I should’ve gone with her.”

“Or she should have stayed with you.”

He hid his face in the cup. “She weren’t coming back.”

“No,” the witch said. “She wasn’t.” She sliced bread, and buttered him a piece. It sat on the planks before him, and he didn’t touch it. “It’ll grow back, you know. Now that it’s cut out cleanly. It’ll heal in time.”

He grunted, and finished the last of the ale. “And then?” he asked, as the cup clicked on the boards.

“And then you’ll sooner or later most likely wish it hadn’t,” the witch said, and when he laughed and reached for the bread she got up to fetch him another ale.

Police Sub-Inspector Ferron crouched over the object she assumed was the decedent, her hands sheathed in areactin, her elbows resting on uniformed knees. The body (presumed) lay in the middle of a jewel-toned rug like a flabby pink Klein bottle, its once-moist surfaces crusting in air. The rug was still fresh beneath it, fronds only a little dented by the weight and no sign of the browning that could indicate an improperly pheromonetreated object had been in contact with them for over twenty-four hours. Meandering brownish trails led out around the bodylike object; a good deal of the blood had already been assimilated by the rug, but enough remained that Ferron could pick out the outline of delicate paw-pads and the brush-marks of long hair.

Ferron was going to be late visiting her mother after work tonight.

She looked up at Senior Constable Indrapramit and said tiredly, “So this is the mortal remains of Dexter Coffin?”

Indrapramit put his chin on his thumbs, fingers interlaced thoughtfully before lips that had dried and cracked in the summer heat. “We won’t know for sure until the DNA comes back.” One knee-tall spit-shined boot wrapped in a sterile bootie prodded forward, failing to come within fifteen centimeters of the corpse. Was he jumpy? Or just being careful about contamination?

He said, “What do you make of that, Boss?”

“Well.” Ferron stood, straightening a kinked spine. “If that is Dexter Coffin, he picked an apt handle, didn’t he?”

Coffin’s luxurious private one-room flat had been sealed when patrol officers arrived, summoned on a welfare check after he did not respond to the flat’s minder. When police had broken down the door—the emergency overrides had been locked out—they had found this. This pink tube. This enormous sausage. This meaty object like a child’s toy “eel,” a long squashed torus full of fluid.

If you had a hand big enough to pick it up, Ferron imagined it would squirt right out of your grasp again.

Ferron was confident it represented sufficient mass for a full-grown adult. But how, exactly, did you manage to just . . . invert someone?

The Sub-Inspector stepped back from the corpse to turn a slow, considering circle.

The flat was set for entertaining. The bed, the appliances were folded away. The western-style table was elevated and extended for dining, a shelf disassembled for chairs. There was a workspace in one corner, not folded away—Ferron presumed—because of the sheer inconvenience of putting away that much mysterious, technical-looking equipment. Depth projections in spare, modernist frames adorned the wall behind: enhanced-color images of a gorgeous cacaphony of stars. Something from one of the orbital telescopes, probably, because there were too many thousands of them populating the sky for Ferron to recognize the navagraha—the signs of the Hindu Zodiac, despite her education.

In the opposite corner of the apt, where you would see it whenever you raised your eyes from the workstation, stood a brass Ganesha. The small offering tray before him held packets of kumkum and turmeric, fragrant blossoms, an antique American dime, a crumbling, unburned stick of agarbathi thrust into a banana. A silk shawl, as indigo as the midnight heavens, lay draped across the god’s brass thighs.

“Cute,” said Indrapramit dryly, following her gaze. “The Yank is going native.”

At the dinner table, two western-style place settings anticipated what Ferron guessed would have been a romantic evening. If one of the principles had not gotten himself turned inside out.

“Where’s the cat?” Indrapramit said, gesturing to the fading paw-print trails. He seemed calm, Ferron decided.

And she needed to stop hovering over him like she expected the cracks to show any second. Because she was only going to make him worse by worrying. He’d been back on the job for a month and a half now: it was time for her to relax. To trust the seven years they had been partners and friends, and to trust him to know what he needed as he made his transition back to active duty—and how to ask for it.

Except that would mean laying aside her displacement behavior, and dealing with her own problems.

“I was wondering the same thing,” Ferron admitted. “Hiding from the farang, I imagine. Here, puss puss. Here puss—”

She crossed to the cabinets and rummaged inside. There was a bowl of water, almost dry, and an empty food bowl in a corner by the sink. The food would be close by.

It took her less than thirty seconds to locate a tin decorated with fish skeletons and paw prints. Inside, gray-brown pellets smelled oily. She set the bowl on the counter and rattled a handful of kibble into it.

“Miaow?” something said from a dark corner beneath the lounge that probably converted into Coffin’s bed.

“Puss puss puss?” She picked up the water bowl, washed it out, filled it up again from the potable tap. Something lofted from the floor to the countertop and headbutted her arm, purring madly. It was a last-year’s-generation parrot-cat, a hyacinth-blue puffball on sun-yellow paws rimmed round the edges with brownish stains. It had a matching tuxedo ruff and goatee and piercing golden eyes that caught and concentrated the filtered sunlight.

“Now, are you supposed to be on the counter?”

“Miaow,” the cat said, cocking its head inquisitively. It didn’t budge.

Indrapramit was at Ferron’s elbow. “Doesn’t it talk?”

“Hey, Puss,” Ferron said. “What’s your name?”

It sat down, balanced neatly on the rail between sink and counter-edge, and flipped its blue fluffy tail over its feet. Its purr vibrated its whiskers and the long hairs of its ruff. Ferron offered it a bit of kibble, and it accepted ceremoniously.

“Must be new,” Indrapramit said. “Though you’d expect an adult to have learned to talk in the cattery.”

“Not new.” Ferron offered a fingertip to the engineered animal. It squeezed its eyes at her and deliberately wiped first one side of its muzzle against her areactin glove, and then the other. “Did you see the cat hair on the lounge?”