Chapter 7 #2
Undu set her hand to Lucia’s cheek: an almost tender gesture. Bek’s flesh crawled at the thought of laying her own palm against that cooling, discoloured skin.
“But until she has crossed the river—whose name we do not speak within the hearing of the dead—she remains within reach for those who have the touch for it.”
Undu laid her other hand on the corpse’s forehead. Lucia’s eyes remained fixed on some distant point on the ceiling, glaring, her anger palpable, as if at any moment she might lunge upwards, seeking a mouthful of some enemy’s flesh.
“She wasn’t sleeping. She was ready to act.
Ready to fight. The noose around her neck surprised her…
” Undu closed her eyes as if looking for more answers in the darkness.
“Yes, surprised. Anger came next. She raged. If she had been able to make a sound it would have been threats, and then curses. The fear came only at the very end. There was a brief moment in which she would have pleaded. And at the last, in the heartbeats between knowing and unknowing, there was…sadness…a complicated sadness of many parts. Too many for her to…and then she was standing beside the river, gone from her flesh.”
Undu opened her eyes and withdrew her hands. “I have amplified her last feelings to the point where some of you, those few with aptitude, might get a hint of them. Who would like to try?” She moved away, gesturing to the body on the table.
Nobody advanced. Most stepped back. Four or five girls, forgetting they were on a table, tumbled to the floor with screeches of surprise that in turn provoked ripples of nervous laughter. Some, like Bek, who didn’t shuffle away were left like rocks revealed by a retreating tide.
“You, girl.” Kindness Undu beckoned in Bek’s direction.
Bek looked behind her in the hope that someone else was advancing at her shoulder. The closest, a small, black-haired girl she’d heard called Brooth, was too far back for it to be her.
“You, the mousy girl with the nose.” The Kindness gestured impatiently.
Bek stepped forward with a sigh, making a mental note to keep to the rear of proceedings in future. She stopped shy of Lucia’s glare, out of reach of her dead arms.
“Well, touch her, girl. We haven’t got all day.” Undu’s childish trill carried an uncomfortable weight of command.
Bek set a tentative hand to Lucia’s forehead.
“Touch her! This isn’t a first date!” Undu shook her head in disgust. “You’re rooting out the secrets of the dead here. If she had wounds I’d have your fingers under her skin. Touch her!”
Steeling herself, Bek moved her hands to Lucia’s neck, finding the livid flesh unpleasantly cool and waxy.
“Listen. Try to hear the river. It’s flowing all around us. Through us and her alike. Really listen.”
“I can’t—”
“Listen!” Undu barked.
Something happened then, an explosion of violence, slow in the frozen heartbeat that trapped Bek, that kept her prisoner in an awful moment.
Without a “between” she found herself hitting the opposite table, the wood biting into the small of her back.
She ended up on the floor, gasping for breath, clutching at her neck, desperate to breathe, suffocating despite the air pumping frantic from her lungs—in—out—in.
Two other acolytes hauled Bek to her feet at the Kindness’s urging.
“Bring her here, quick as you like,” Undu shrilled.
The girls started frog-marching Bek down the aisle but as her strength returned she shook them off. Since Undu’s “quick” had not sounded as though it was optional, Bek scooted under the table, scraping her head as she stepped over the divider.
“Here,” she announced self-consciously as she popped up on Kindness Undu’s side.
Undu studied her with eyes so deep-set and glinting that Bek couldn’t even guess their colour.
“Did you kill her?”
“What? No!”
Bek’s shock seemed to convince the Kindness. “Such a connection is highly unusual even between murderer and victim.” She held out her hands.
“I don’t…” Bek patted her shirt as if expecting to find what Undu wanted.
“Hands!”
Bek reached out and let the woman take hold of her. It required a greater effort of will than touching the dead body had, and she failed to suppress her shudder, though Undu didn’t seem to notice.
Undu was short, though still taller than most of the acolytes.
Her strength came as a surprise when those soft, clammy hands began to squeeze.
Bek struggled not to cry out. She felt her bones grind together and a strange fire began to flow through her veins.
When it reached her lungs the fire pooled there, filling both with that maddening scratchy itch that the dropsy had started to torment her with at night, only worse.
She coughed, coughed again, wheezing as she drew in breath for another cough.
“Enough.” Undu let her go. She stepped back, addressing the class.
“The young struggle to connect to the dead. Life has you in its teeth and is shaking you too fiercely for you to hear the river’s flow.
Most of the lessons I teach you here will go to the river with you unused.
But for the three who leave this place wearing the black as I did…
those three at least have a chance—a small chance—of growing old.
And the old dip their toes in the river every night.
When you’re old, with the right training and a bit of aptitude, any of you might do what little Bek did here in front of us. ”
She knows my name, Bek thought. She must know all our names. And in an instant she was forced to reframe her view of the woman yet again.
Undu returned her gaze to Bek, staring at her as every other girl was. “To find this power in a child means that we have had a true necromancer break her fast with us. That or she’s close to her own death, dipping her toes in the river to test the temperature.”
Beneath the glitter of those small eyes, Bek’s lungs burned again, but she refused to cough and instead snarled at the Kindness, who turned away with a small smile.
“Who else would like to touch your dead friend here?” Undu raised her voice.
Silence. At least nobody fell off a table this time.
“Anyone?” Undu humped her shoulders at the sides of her head in a shrug.
“All of you will do it, then. Form a queue. Make sure it’s a good feel—it’s the last she’ll ever get.
” The Kindness watched as they shuffled, pushed, and finally began to take their turns.
“Get used to it, ladies. Death will be your companion here. You’ll be carrying the dead out or you’ll be carried out yourself. ”
Eventually all of them had set hands upon the dead girl, some trembling, some sullen.
Sharp grinned her wide grin, Mollandra crept by quiet as a mouse, Einsa stone-faced, Tmanga bored.
Some girls sniffed and cried—for themselves, Bek thought, since Lucia had given nobody anything to miss her by.
Little Brooth, almost as pale as Undu, spent longest, fascination in her dark eyes.
Undu shooed the last acolyte away. “There’s more…” She set two fingers to Lucia’s throat and rolled her eyes up into her head till only the whites showed. Strangely, it was this, not the corpse and its stink, that caused a dark girl towards the back to lose custody of her breakfast.
Undu wrinkled her pale forehead in discomfort and reached for where her own throat was lost in folds of flesh and the black of her hard-won robe. She coughed, croaked, and spoke as if her voice had first to force its way through a straw:
“Some little bitch came at me! Me! In the night. Tried to choke me…”
A pause in which horrified glances were swapped back and forth. Bek stared only at her feet, trying to forget the awful constriction she’d endured as she shared Lucia’s last moments.
“No, I didn’t see which one it was! That just means I’ll have to punish them all! I’ll grab—”
Kindness Undu took her hand from Lucia’s neck and blinked as her eyes resumed their normal positions.
She coughed, swallowed, and coughed again.
“As you heard, Lucia is still quite angry about last night’s events and not yet reconciled to the fact that she is dead.
She remains on our side of the river, her discontent blinding her to its presence, leaving her deaf to the muted rush of time’s passage, dark and liquid, ever flowing. ”
Bek noticed that Einsa on her right and Mollandra on her left were both considerably closer to her now, pressed up for comfort.
What part she’d played herself in closing those gaps she didn’t know, but she was glad of the press of warm bodies and hoped it would erase the memory of Lucia’s cooling flesh.
Undu made to take up the sheet and cover Lucia again. An audible sigh hissed out of the audience, part of it Bek’s own relief.
The Kindness paused. “But wait,” she said, smiling as if at some old joke.
“There’s more.” She made a pale fist and raised it above Lucia’s chest. “It would be a crime to let all that anger go to waste, would it not, children? Perhaps a greater crime than the murder itself, for we here at the Academy are agents of retribution, daughters of anger, forged to remind the world of its duties.”
And with that she struck down, hard, fist striking Lucia’s breastbone.
Once! Twice! Three meaty impacts, each jolting the corpse, until on the third, Lucia sat up sharply, turned her bloody eyes towards the rows of watching acolytes and, in the same voice that Undu had used when speaking for her, demanded, “Which bitch killed me?”