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Chapter 1 - Part 1

A lady’s labors ~ Substitute killer ~ Death of Marianne ~ The murder of the hyena children

Martinet worked as a scullery maid in the City of Bundled Bones. She had no eyes, yet viewed the world through the fading lithographs of half-forgotten memory. Shout down the hall? Father, earliest and noblest martial sir. Call to the dining room? Mother, the roast pig spread open and steaming.

She tended the pigs then on relief duty to Mulhaney the killer, who sickened since last he visited the temple. Still she was, as the virgin with her child, long fingers dancing across pink flesh, sweet and tender until the crunch of the blade.

Squeals of the stock swine expiring ignited the air. Her breath hung as a cloud, slow, steady expulsions in the half-lit blue steel light of the animal pens.

She leaned back, supine in her labors, ebon black arms stained with pig’s blood. “The lady’s own gloves”, she called them.

Mother, or perhaps only mistress called her red-stained frock the swine killer's weeds. She found this funny, if only to spite herself.

It is so terribly difficult to be prejudiced when blind, but she managed. She mastered early the echolocation of the second form, that which Father/Master both likened to a bat's shrill SONAR cry. A thin lightning bolt of nut-colored flesh ran along her right temple. It tingled in the presence of unworthy fops. It burned in the presence of all lords, irrespective of pedigree.

Martinet laid down the blade, which was as long as her arm and curved slightly. They called it “the Falchion”, after a suitor to the young mistress. It steamed in the cold.

Unforgiving winter had again come to the City. Lard wax packed tightly between the bricks in the slave quarters. Her sleeping hours spent with the odor of pigs’ decay. The wind outside howled, sliding between jewel-black heaths of polished agate. Ice rain cascaded down between bulbous protrusions of the chitinous city walls. Every fibrous membrane was a living thing entombed, encased, a bleeding tumor brought to life, and at its most vivid in the warm and moist. But the cold, the winter in the City brought its soul to the surface, with the insidious haunting regularity of a banshee crying morning from the city walls.

Most pernicious is the city, as it is a construct of compressed humanity, and man is not kind.

“Homme muerte est non cardia,” she said, speaking in the slave tongue. She addressed the pigs split open in her arms. Their blood ran between her fingers, into the thin channels in the stone basin. The gurgling of the drain soothed her. The last death rattle of the pigs. Though silent now, their presence she felt most strongly. Her kills, a warm breath of steam upon her flesh, preparing her for another day.

In the night she dreamed of her father’s voice giving daily instruction. Her father had been the temple's man, a parishioner of the old ways. He was not clergy, but devout, and trusted in his labors.

“You must do always what is your duty,” were his words.

“Aye, papa.”

“For thine is the city.”

“For thine is the kingdom.”

“Remember your duty.”

“For life is very long.”

Martinet stood. She yawned. She had risen before dawn to handle the pigs. The former detail was common, though the latter was not. Ordinarily it was the morning candle from the bunk below, lit with the gravel hiss of a match that brought her to life.

“Such is life,” were the words of the old woman in the bunk below. Every morning was the same.

She’d risen to the sound of the candle. The old woman croaked. Blades of ice-cold air seeped in through the unsealed window, dousing the new light.

Indifferent, a blind girl had descended from her bunk, nude but for a tube of tattered cloth.

It was important to be silent in rising. All slaves of her sex slept in common within the barracks, and sound carried with an echo in the stone hall. Each bed was no more than a tooth of flattened bone jutting from the wall, unyielding slate gray, no wider two feet. It was very dangerous to sleep on the upper bunks, as the floor was quite hard. A fall from the highest bunk, and they were stacked twelve high, was instant death. The youngest were given these bunks, and often the stacks descended in age towards the ground.

It was not a matter of any kindness or difference to the elderly, mind. It was merely that the young who rolled over, who slept fitfully and did not keep in place were best culled young. It was thought that if a person was set down every five years to a lower bunk (if available), any who reached the point of a survivable fall would likely rise only in the prescribed manner.

Bunk pillows were hard, but served. Each bunk also had a small shelf just beside the head, where a slave’s one possession was permitted. The old woman below her preferred her candle. Martinet’s held nothing.

Descending that day had brought her to a different duty, and so she perhaps moved faster than ordinary in reaching the ground. Her level was the second, owing to the hazardous cull of the lime vats that were her trade. Ten children slept above her at night, and one old woman below.

The woman caught her with a look that penetrated their common blindness.

“You work the swine today,” she’d croaked. “Lucky.”

She was, she had determined, and the warmth soaked her dress. The blood, which was the scully maid’s duty to soak away. So many years, ever since childhood her life spent over the vats, stirring thick, lousy sheets until the water was stained a milky rose-red. Somewhere within the times her eyes were taken. But she remembered that water, the red milk of the Manor house, the sheets stained with anonymous blood diluted and ugly.

But the blood on her hands…she smiled at the thought of it. The blood on her hands was pure enough to catch the eye. Stained, her frock became a gown. The blade became a scepter. She felt regal, warm, and for a moment, happy.

In the distance a tolling bell called the first hour in a great belching cry. Behind it, and following after came the howl of the Temple banshee, crying for its morning sustenance.

Father walked to the wall without a stop, she recalled. She could not remember his face. Only his voice. Only his walk, the steady, resolved cadence of bare feet hardened with calluses and chitin.

“Must it be you,” she’d asked.

“Eventually, we must all feed the banshee.”

It was the last shape his voice had taken for her. The last word in her memory of father’s voice: ‘banshee’.

It lived at the bell tower built beside the great wall, beyond which is That-Which-Is-Not-The-City. Having never seen it, she could not describe it but by the sound of its painful wail. It cut the nerves. It raised the hells. It spoke on a spiritual level to the City. It was memento mori, that which reminds man that he is mortal.

Its name was unknown, though father said once that it could only be spoken with a split tongue, or by a stylus that wrote only in the blood of an honest man.

She sang her own song in the dark, the light having dimmed.

Petit paw lave you Bo,

Kite yonbo

Martinet cleaned the blade in the basin beside the bloody viscera of the pigs. The great Falchion needed constant maintenance, lest the blood decay its edge.

There was no metal in the city. Its very existence was unknown. To fill its function the city relied on a chitin fiber similar to the stronger lacquer that covered its fibrous membrane walls. It was often black, usually of a glossy, reflective sort, and held an edge well. Its only major shortcoming, to her understanding, was how swiftly it was corroded by blood. To kill with it, to say nothing of finer butchery, required a skilled hand, deft and capable.

Martinet considered this as she laid out the long blade in its receptacle, leaving the pigs for the now-awakened butcher girl to collect.

“Sang belches le,” said the girl.

“Blood rots it,” was all she could manage as response. Somehow, she could not find the words to say it in the slave tongue.

It was perhaps Martinet’s greatest failing. She lacked the social skills of some more prudent slaves. Some spoke only when necessary. Still though, she spoke her mind.

Dawn broke hazily over the mid-winter horizon to the east. The high, jagged teeth of the city wall loomed in the distance, its sharpened crenelation splitting the burning sun to blades. Every reflective surface along the outer wall caught the pale white light of it, and though cold, the blinding sunlight was welcoming vitality and a new day. That much, she insisted, was not to be argued.

Down the path from the stock yard she traveled, swift but certain, the cold clinging to her robes. The heat of pigs’ blood dissipated in seconds, leaving her flesh taut and dry, resistance to the utter insensitivity of the air. Down the path, leading down a mountainside, she traveled with the bucket in hand. The drained blood of the pigs sloshed as her arms swung. She said nothing. There was no sound, save the sloshing of blood and her heels cracking on the ground.

It is a practical matter, or so said the mistress, “to outfit a slave properly to suit their labors.”

Her mistress was not kind, nor were any of the people of any known caste. But the wiser, more practical judgments of the cruel Barons were endurable as often as not. Her world was harsh, knew Martinet, but though her labors made it easier for the Barons and their families, there was only so much mercy could be bought. Shrewd, prudent judgment was the law, natural and perfunctory, and not a single variation went unpunished.

For this she served with a set jaw, unwavering against her freewoman’s pride. Born free? Yes. But the slave to the wheel eats its grains, however few and tardy.

Steps down the mountainside intensified the sharp report of her boots. The practicality of her mistress, she called them. All artifice was named for its wisdom, and her boots, and all such boots were branded for her mistress whom contributed the judgment that boots quickened the stride of slaves.

Victory, she said softly, the brand of her feet. Not her own feet, but what preserved them. Technology was not a word in any tongue of the people. Technology was not a concept. The idea, same as with the blade she carried in her other hand, was the name. The birthing force was the name that typified the tool. The tool was its own summation, the axiomatic immortality of the man, the tool, the purpose. In this way, even the Barons were beholden to the slaves.

Blind though she was, Martinet knew well the staircase leading from the Killing Yard of her master’s house to the Water Garden. It was difficult to navigate for a sighted intruder, but long had she been sightless. Her boots and the howling of morning wind spoke of all she needed. The wind to the left, the shuddering, tinkling of the sand blowing off the heaths, through the lacquer trellises on the property’s edge. To the other side, the distant growling of penned attack beasts at the hill’s base.

She continually sang in her soft, rich contra-alto as the blood bucket kept her tempo. Not a soul seemed to breath, although the City never slept. Not a quarter mile from the edgework plantation where they lay was the city’s nearest neighborhood, the jaden della siside where the trees moaned in the midnight air. But there, feeling the brutal cold drain all moisture from her skin, Martinet felt alive.

She smiled.

In front of her, an unknown party was standing, so quietly they clearly expected to be ignored.

“I can hear you,” she said plainly.

“I know,” said the hollow voice. It was barely a man’s voice, but somehow provoked in her the most keen interest. It lacked any perceivable distinctiveness, yet captivated while repelling the attention.

But still, while a slave may think, a wise slave knows better than to speak.

“I am required to perform this task,” she said, prevailing upon the unnamed man to give her leave.

“Do I prevent you from doing so?”

“It is improper for a slave to walk away from a Baron who has addressed her.”

“You are well spoken.”

“It is the master’s will.”

This was true of the lady and her husband, whose voice so often melded with her memories of her own family. They spoke very keenly of the self-evident value of a well-run plantation requiring the most conversant of slaves. Were it otherwise, the slovenly servant could betray the weak hand of the taskmaster. In this case, he was at best willful, and at worst mortal.

Martinet cleared her throat.

“May I have leave, sir?”

“You’re covered in blood.”

“Pig’s blood,” she said, raising the bucket, “I am the substitute killer this week.”

“I see.” He allowed the sentence to drift off, without a single shred of emotion, kind or ill. “Mulhaney, I believe his name was.”

“Yes, that is his name.”

“His issue?”

“Health, sir. A contracted ailment of religious import.”

“Flayed,” he asked.

“It is not mine to say.”

“Oh?”

“Because it was not mine to inquire.”

In the distance to her rear the Kennel Master was opening his pens to bring out the beasts. It was not her wish to be within scent of them with a bucket of blood in hand.

The man, however, was yet unmoved.

“A substitute killer,” he repeated, “A beautiful turn of phrase.”

She felt the wind shift as the man circled her.

“You are beautiful,” he said. Again, and this to her surprise, was a sentence uttered with blank declarative calm. Not a single investment of humanity. But still his voice ran across her face as the hands would. She felt his eyes address the narrow waist, the full, blood-stained dress slid up in his mind, so clearly that she could swear he was describing it to her. But still not a shred of emotion.

“What is your name,” he asked.

“Martinet.”

“Martinet. It is a pleasure. It is my pleasure to meet you, Martinet the Killer.”

“I am a laundry woman, sir. I am merely—“

A sudden, raucous, horrible sound split the morning calm. It was a scream, a man’s terrible scream backed by the cacophonous horror of the pack beasts in starved frenzy. The voice cried out for help, moving from her with the beasts clearly following after.

“What is this?”

“Mulhaney,” explained the man.

Mulhaney cried out, giving a final, definite punctuation to the moment when they ripped him apart. The sound of the beasts, a bipedal sound of creatures with clawed toes, was quite resonant with the primal instincts of man. It was the voice of the African hunter gone wild and perverted, melded with the canine hungers of the jackal.

She heard a small, wet sound. It was a man clearly licking his lips. At that point she was uncertain if this strange man’s hunger was directed at her or the late Mulhaney.

“Sir,” she ventured, “My labors.”

“Oh yes,” he said, the first brightening his voice had ever shown, “I’m keeping you from your master’s work. So poor of me.”

The sharp report of a thin stone shaft echoed beside her feet. He walked with a cane, she noted.

“My leave, sir.”

“But of course. I will see you later, my child.”

“My labors are long,” she stated.

It was not uncommon, this sort of attention. It could be bawdy to some, a recount of the usury that marked a slave woman’s nights. As a child she’d imagined the wealthy sleeping on softer surfaces, but their beds were as hard and cold as hers. Their lusts, she found, were equally deranged as those of the most twisted, embittered slaves, the sort whom slavers traded to the stages and theaters to perform bawd shows for the Barons. It was always palatable to some, and even a slave was found possibly possessing the flexibility to take pleasure in the role.

Martinet, for her part, was ever-more aware of the blade in her hand.

The man noted this. He said nothing more. She marked only the measured tap of his cane as he walked away.

“Coward,” she dared hiss when not a heartbeat fell within ears’ range.

The only tragedy of the tool is its limitation. That which is the hammer may not become the nail. That which is the rope cannot become the ax. It is a simple truth, but to a people finding life only marked for its excellence in application, the tragedy was the only true horror. That which you do, you are. That which you live through, you know.

Martinet’s failing…oh, how she rued it as she turned to the path, beating out a steady, hard staccato on the round, frost-slicked cobblestones…Martinet, who found the many, many roles of a slave so poorly containing what she was.

All slaves say this. For few it is true. In Haiti, in a time so far past that space itself folded around upon it, such men rebelled, thrusting freedom on the untamed. Liberia, the chaotic hospice founded for freed slaves in that same era. The many faces of a common threat, the knowledge of the cold outside that keeps even the unwilling slave in.

The force that drives one from the warm is never freedom, for that is platitude. It is the emptiness, the unconstrained ferocity of the heart seeking its own center.

Martinet laid the blade down beside the black river, whose humour was of a kind no word exists for. It was the black water of human waste processed with salts and mineral secretions, “the alchemy of the bundled bones”, that which would become fertile in time. For the moment, though, it carried the stench of night soil and the carrion where soon Mulhaney’s few remains would be cast adrift.

“San a dlo,” she said, a morning prayer, “bèl bèt.” Be it for the disposal of lime water or the pouring of pig’s blood, she always greeted the first full hour of daylight at the river. Martinet’s prayer, San a dlo, bèl bèt, piti lanmò, rale a dlo, rivyè —her prayer to the only things she knew for certain. There, where the cold, smooth stones and ribbed carapace ground ended, she knelt, leaning forward to supplicate before the river of decay.

“Mouri…”

Dead, yet from thee comes life.

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