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Chapter Text

[God I]

The first thing to strike him is the smell of God.

It settles between his teeth. In the pocket of his cheek, a greasy yellow. God stinks of fish fit for the cannery.

The whole slew of scholars stand in semicircle on the thin moonshape beach, playing at antique theatre without masks nor mouths, a strange-silent chorus waiting for its cue. Scattered about in seeming disorder the prospectors keep hands on hilts and pistolgrips, feet planted deep as can go down that dark sandy muck. Silent, too, save for the shallow breath of one who in a minute will be sick. The youth pays attention to them insofar as he is part of the group, though he stands at its far-left edge some paces away from the nearest man, eyes glued to the thing that could have been a giant’s ruined wedding dress. He narrows his eyes to a squint. What passes for cloth and taffeta from afar catches light the way innards tend to once the chest cavity splits open and it’s time for the surgeon to lay clean-cold hands on his bounty. It does not seem to have beginning nor end, nor strict midsection, but lay there like rumpled silk by some old lady forgotten. It smells foul enough to keep his guts on edge.

For this dead fish that is not a fish he has a thousand questions. Chief of all does God have any bones— those small needle-like things people call fishbones and choke on more often than not, too busy talking, chattering, prattling round the supper table. Looking at the shape-no-shape of it, he wonders, he spins a geometry of hypotheses. It might have a ribcage, it’s hard to tell. It might be closer in architecture to the mollusk, the jellyfish. It might or might not have a face, and eyes, and see them gathered in their long coats, hats, wet boots, it might be dead already. It gives few answers: they will have to pry them out of it.

Blood pools round the creature, or some liquid sheen he thinks must be blood. It oozes at slow pace from a hole in its flank. Where the harpoon has been, where its notched point has shredded skin, muscle, fascia; where man has thought to spear a whale and caught God unawares. Looking at it, he cannot help but wonder what sort of a whaler would confuse this deflated morsel of sea for a leviathan. Had it been a shark, he might have simply laughed the mistake off, but this stringy residue could not be farther from the heavy majesty of the ship’s sworn quarry. An odd sort o’whale, is what brought the scholars round. He’s got a lump in his throat.

No one speaks a word; each man’s face bleeds into the next man’s, he cannot see them, his body moves without his notice, he must have a look— his mother drowned when he was seven, it makes him sick.

He finds it does have a head under such strange collection of gelatinous tissue. A bundle of tendrils much like algae tapers from its head outwards, spread as if a woman’s hair on a fresh pillowcase. And its features, too, might have been maiden’s or mother’s for the plush promise of its lips, its snub nose and roundness of cheek. There are no eyes he can see below the protective wave of a membrane, an upturned collar of sorts— he makes for his pocketful of surgeon’s knives and instruments, would it not be nice if he were to make a name for himself— but the semicircle of scholars is still. He does not realise he has stepped too far forward until a heavy gloved hand closes upon his shoulder. Not unfriendly, simply firm enough he knows not to resist its pull.

“Stay back, lad. Better not touch a thing.”

As ordered he recoils, hangs back in a big man’s shadow. He is a thin-boned youth, graceful when he wills it, otherwise awkward, too long-limbed with a mouth pursed tight and blue eyes widening into clouded skies. A boy is what the older scholars call him and his peers, a handful of students not quite grown into the folds of their robes— him, and the moonfaced archaeologist, clean blonde hair framing his face like blades of wheat, and others whose names history will forget. The motion of his own eyes, searching for the other’s fair head, startles him a fraction; a lurch of the stomach, a bout of sea-sickness on shore; Laurence nowhere, God’s yellowstink. It is lonely hearing it cry.

Later they will start spinning yarns about divinity. About the tree of life and its rotten fruits, the likes of which has washed up on the coast. They will start drafting letters, articles, sketches scientific and not, they will pen stillborn thoughts in leather-back journals and find sleep hard to snare. He will sit with them and write the same. The stink of God will green-turn his stomach. When the other students are asleep, he will skulk a hundred yards away to vomit, will sit down with his knees drawn to his chest, and wonder at the world’s formidable operations.

God is a pearlescent miracle, gifted with the sheen of nacre, the opulence of flesh. God is a dead fish— if they are quick they can fillet it, hack it to pieces and put them into tins— if they are quick they can market it and call it Godsmeat. A part of him is curious to see what will happen. Another, surgically removed, keeps at a standstill in front of the cosmos’s corpse, blue eyes aglint. It stares and comes to conclusions:

looking at God, it is like being born.

Λ

To find God one must walk.

So walk they do, though they are not yet looking for scraps of divinity. An odd sort o’whale, they’ve heard second- or third-hand by messenger at the gates of Byrgenwerth. No letter, no scrawl-upon-newspaper, not from there— some backwater fishing village cultivating its inbred solitude. One must imagine sharp juts of black rock, like titans’ bruised hipbones emerging at low tide; dark, coarse sands; rows upon rows of shacks clothed in barnacles and fishing nets and the green, oozing smell of sea breeze drifting on the air. Above, the star player: waning day-sky, buried beneath strata of heavy rain clouds. The scholars start to conclude the region’s immune to sunlight. He follows at the tail end of the procession, long legs, dragging feet and nervous eyeballs darting left and right. He recalls little of the trip before that; dozed off in the carriage or read from the book he’d stuffed in his satchel before departure.

A few paces in front a moustached botanist, some Dr. Kroy or similar, goes at his own rhythm, here jotting down deadfly scrawl with a stub of a pencil, there crouching to peer at a stalk with boyish gleam behind his lenses. The hem of his coat is already wet with mud. It has amused Micolash a while to watch him scramble such as a fellow half his age, but now the poor man’s antics grow stale, and his brittle boy’s eyes fun-weary. He doesn’t know how many of them have come, he hasn’t cared to count dark robes and red sleeve-trim, even less so the number of leather-hat prospectors serving as escort. A handful of his colleagues he has only met in passing, some never at all— Byrgenwerth as a whole does not share his propensity to blend one science with another, instead keeps that centuries-old will to partition, quarter and catalogue.

Perhaps why Laurence trails his gilded-blonde head behind that master of his instead of walking at the back with him, no doubt gorging himself on old wives’ tales and rumours of charms made of children’s fingerbones. They spoke a half-hour before leaving school, with that levity students like to affect, the water might be cold but wouldn’t it be something to try by moonlight and imagine it’s our lake? He’d retorted with a grimace that seawater is altogether more hazardous (his mother drowned when he was seven). For now stuck on the border between dryland and coast, he has little to look forward to but a moment of respite.

Half a day they’ve scrambled, buried their boots in spongy soil, sometimes knees, sometimes fingers; sometimes noses. He hasn’t, yet. Met toads and bugs, face-down in the mire. Hair plastered to forehead, the faint off-white rasp of bristle on his chin, dirt under his fingernails, he dreams of bathtubs and a gallery of shaving mirrors.

When finally they stop, a decree passes on that it is lunchtime, though by his watch it is half past two and he feels scarce hunger. The shuffle of slowing boots shakes mud and underbrush, sends birds a-flying. Soon after the company scatters, going in twos and threes to bury hands down satchels and empty flasks down dry gullets.

They sit together, Laurence and himself, as if two schoolboys on a field trip. It takes the barrister’s son a while to arrange his lithe body upon a tree stump artfully enough to spare his coat much of the muck. Palecloud sky overhead gives his hair a silver shine. This way he takes after statues of old, the sort that line the halls of Byrgenwerth, pushpapers and pioneers alike, all rendered in marble, some with a villainous tilt of the chin, others with deep-set eyes or wrinkled brows; all the same long dead. Micolash follows, folds his long legs before him and doesn’t mind where his backside lands. A fallen trunk, looks like, perhaps struck dumb from the very stump his comrade sits on. He has little to nibble on but a loaf of black bread, and even then his teeth shy from the work.

Laurence sates his thirst with a groan and click of the tongue.

“All this mud, it’s enough to turn my stomach.”

Forever quick to complain and easy to talk to, it fills the dark boy’s gut with light. He deigns a thoughtful bite, and another. Bread’s awful dry.

“Aren’t you a hunting man?”

“My father is.” Goldenboy smiles his comely smile, the blue one they share at school. Warms him up a touch. “The hounds do all the work, really. I’ve not much taste for the kill, much less the chase, even less all that running about the moor. And don’t you know, horses stink something fierce.”

“So you’ve been telling me.”

“These ones will be our hounds, I wager.”

He casts a lazy green eye towards the senior prospector and his retinue. Gehrman, he’s called, a tall man with a worker’s back and a tinkerer’s hands, all shoulders and sinew beneath his battered brown coat. They say he likes to craft things when not buried deep down a tomb; to plant vegetables, carve little animals from chunks of wood, or if in a fouler mood weapons and traps. He hasn’t sat down. Instead chews on his rations, looking round at his men and beyond, as if scouting for threats. His men, Micolash realises, save for one who seems to be a lady of high birth, so fine the make of her clothes, her hat, her dirty boots, even more so the silk cravat held by a green jewel at her throat. Beneath the leather tricorn he can guess at pale hair, paler still than Laurence’s, and the downturn curve of her mouth. A gilded scabbard lay between her bent legs, feeble daylight catching on the fine basketwork hilt of a slim sabre.

“Who’s the girl, then?”

“Some Cainhurst heiress, as I hear it. I forget her name.” Laurence’s eyebrow shoots up. “The sort an ambitious man might want to strike up a friendship with, anyhow.” He laughs, “Father might like that.”

Friendship pronounced as would vows of marriage. Upperclass folk like their euphemisms. The idea stings behind the eyes.

“I didn’t know Cainhurst heiresses made it their business to wade through marshlands with scholars and outdoorsmen. Somehow I doubt our survey will be the talk of the season.”

“You’d be surprised. Old man Willem and his bursars are counting on it. Listening at the right doors, one hears a lot about debts.”

Micolash shrugs it off.

“Coin is none of our concern.”

“It might be when the college runs out of it. Which will come soon, if we don’t give Yharnam's aldermen cause to keep funding us.” Laurence’s teeth make quick work of a strip of dried meat, taste rinsed up with a sip of water. “Father says it’d be too costly to take a case to court. This party is our best bet, as it stands. We need to find something worth the trek. I daresay the promise of some undiscovered species might just do the trick.”

But he is not listening so much as nodding along. The girl has moved, a hand on her scabbard. He has stared at her too long— she catches him, the barest raise of her head giving him a glimpse of sharp wet eye. He snaps his head sideways, like a schoolboy at fault. The idea of her swordspoint at his throat placates him some as he feels her leftover gaze for a moment more.

He scratches his stubbly jaw to redness, not eating, and still Laurence keeps on applying his poultice of hope to that hourglass hole in the academy’s coffers. Time is money, they say, it runs out eventually. He does not care about treasurers and their worries, or as little as he can: who will pay the prospectors’ wages, who will pay for the carthorses and deliveries, who will ensure the expedition is supplied, kept safe and fed? He is right in that it is not his concern, and whatever the outcome it is another man’s hands that are tied.

Nobody does know if they will find their proverbial whale on the coast, for them a-waiting, open ribcage cornucopia overflowed with the fruit of connaissance. He is not sure himself that he believes in the possibility of sticking his head there below whitebone arcs so as to pluck that shiny pearl of acumen, round as an eye and twice as small.

He will learn quick enough that when nature plays tricks, there is little man can do but kneel.

Λ

[God II]

God, his father says when he is a child, is an excuse.

An idea difficult to grasp for a boy. An excuse for what? is not a retort an adult would like, and so he dives deeper down his silence and takes the aphorism for granted until time and study offer him the tools to dissect it. Along with it, his disappointment. God is a thing people wave, a flag of authority, a ruler in absentia. No evidence to be found. He is of a mind mathematical and will not have it, thus will look for proof in the narrow slats between his certainties.

He has looked for God in many places, first of all the laboratory where death’s door is pried open. He learns they call it a theatre in Byrgenwerth, where men sit on benches in black frock coats to watch the house surgeon perform his magic. He wonders at the house anatomist when he sees her for the first time, wearing her red hair short like a crown of autumn leaves. Much as her knives, her eyes seem made of steel. In Yahar’gul there is no such thing as a woman plying the trade, and so he is curious to see whether her freckled hands can match his father’s; can outmatch them, for that matter, and find God wherever men cannot. It would do her disservice to call her midwife between life and death, for she does prove she is every inch the trained surgeon. And if a few sneers catch the audience early on, she is quick to shut their traps. She’s the provost’s niece, says one. Might be, says another, but she can use a knife alright.

He has looked for God in many places, and not found it, even there transfixed by the music of meat-cutting. He stops searching when she starts to sort organs in labelled jars.

God, he says when he is asked, is an invention.

Λ

They wait for mad-black night, encamped half a quarter-mile from shore.

Under the waning sun, most if not all are a-sitting, still dressed in full to ward off October chill. Strange light gives their faces strange colours, their hands stranger still. It drapes the fishing village and its remnants in some sort of shroud, every shack in feeble watercolour painted, old driftwood encrusted with barnacles, fishing nets yawning widemouth, age-old harpoons collecting rust— of the dwellers there is no trace except for corpses piled up as far as east goes before meeting sea. They’d sent a scouting party before dragging their boots here, and the scouts had returned bloodied as soldiers. Then they’d sent their prospectors ahead and waited ‘til the work be done. He shudders to recall the sheen of red on Gehrman’s blade; the thin streak of it down the girl’s white doll-cheek, and the mechanic of her glove-hand wiping it off. He had known then it would not be a night for sleeping.

Senior scholars promise the tents will be brought along tomorrow with the rest of the prospectors’ equipment, the mapmaker’s tools and medical implements, the empty glass jars waiting for their dead specimens and the crates packed with straw hungry for live ones, an apothecary’s worth of chemicals. The inventory goes on. He does not envy the carthorse’s burden, nor the few workers tasked with its escort. There’s a narrow trade road cutting through the marshlands, he’s heard, a route they have not taken and which might still prove too harsh on wheels: time will tell. Sat down upon a rock he knifes at the crust of mud dried on his boots, if only to stave off boredom. He has a surgeon’s hands (his father’s hands) and makes quick work of it, without so much as letting dirt under his fingernails. The muscle-burn in his legs has dulled, but not the itch behind his ears where his dark curls tickle.

Nearby some have lit a fire and sit round full circle. There is gold-Laurence and his brown-skinned master, a skewer of pale students huddled in their robes, then a few of the academy’s best and brightest warming up on drink and tobacco. Some he knows, some he doesn’t. Mostly men who are merchants’, bankers’ and barristers’ sons; handed over everything save the arcane prestige of their name on the spine of a book. And then Dr. Stoker (do call me Rom— this is my uncle’s name) who outshines them with fall-red in her hair and a mill’s worth of steel in her eyes.

She is not yet thirty and already can boast of a most coveted post back at college, no doubt scorned by rivals much older and lemon-faced. Thinking back at those crusty men’s marble busts in the halls, he wonders whether he’d wish hers to preside over the library or the operating theatre. A sight for sore students’ eyes, not at all unpleasant. She wields her womanhood with a certain cunning, he finds, losing flecks of composure when her gaze meets his too long, when something of her warmth slips under his skin. She smokes with the men and lets it be forgotten that she is a lady, and willingly they fall into her spiderweb.

She trades her cigarette back and forth with a forty-some fellow who might or might not be their mapmaker, a fair-haired devil with an heirloom ring on his finger. If he were a little taller, a touch broader in the shoulders, he might look just as his father— that goldenbrown tint to his hair at sunset sends a cold twinge between Micolash’s ribs, where his stomach knows to sink. He dawdles a moment there, right at the edge of their conversation, hearing little but friendly banter in lieu of scientific notions.

“He never did like me, your uncle”, says the mapmaker. He has a breathy sort of laugh, a warm autumn voice.

“Never did like anyone.” Rom exhales her smoke, with it her greenish tone. Waning sunlight sets her hair on fire. “He hates to admit it, but he is getting old, and is not so apt at dealing with city officials and their pet money-lenders. He is getting desperate. All this might as well be a wild goose chase.”

“I suppose so.”

“Cheer up. At least your work does not depend on a few half-mad whalers’ words.” She hands him the cigarette. “Odd, really. We should have re-mapped this place long ago.”

“I heard the fisherfolk have long been known to scare people away. Now most of them have cleared off, well—”

He leaves them there to share their vice and scrambles onwards to harsher sands, his hair barely ruffled by a shadowbreeze. He passes a group of prospectors half past drunk and a diligent doctor man plunged deep in a book and a biology professor thrice laurelled by his peers who is known across town to proposition sailors on leave when they catch his oblique eye. He passes Gehrman and his scraps of wood and his silent Cainhurst whelp; he keeps his head down. Time comes he has to tighten his coat and his arms round himself to trap offcuts of warmth, and still his hands remain clammy-cold, easy to shiver.

It takes him an age to decide he ought rather to go back and sit by the fire, even though he would prefer not to meet the eye of the stranger with his father’s hair. He might turn his back on him and face Laurence instead, and listen to the dregs of his and his master’s theories, the sort that takes them both prowling down the cursed labyrinths of Pthumeru, looking for histories left to rot. Two years ago the last of his family had died, and he’d followed the goldenboy down the earth and earned his first battle scar. It is still waiting, a long jagged line across his white belly. Often his hand hovers there, a little afraid to touch— what if he has dreamt it, and all the rest?

But when he sits it is not Laurence he faces. Rom’s hair catches his eye quicker, and snares to hold it, and it scares him to immobility. He twists his long fingers into knots. Perhaps his friend will gather their thin bones and make charms of them, and hang them about one of the dead trees they’ve passed on the way through the mire. She glances at him between two puffs on her smoke-stick, making sure he has not crumbled. Nervous he looks back, and risks a shallow smile.

He does not know what it is in her that stirs his flesh to yearning, his mind to wants and wants-to-be-wanted. He knows— when he knows, it’s the colour of her voice, a raspy, smoky green enough to scrub off the grease-yellow-yet-to-happen of God’s own. When he foresees his coming of age, twenty-soon, those are thoughts of histories and anatomies on paper that burn his heart to excitement; now the animal burrowed in his breast tosses and turns for scraps, humiliating if muted. You will be a man, father says over his surgery table, hands picking at bone, and when you are a man— but then father is dead, and God soon will wash ashore into existence.

Today he is twenty-two, tomorrow he will watch it die.

Λ

The stink of whale oil warms him a bit when he sheds his coat and rolls up his sleeves. It casts its piss-yellow light all round, drowning warped wood, rusted iron, barnacles alike.

For this smell he has a thousand questions. Chief of all how do workmen’s hands move to harness the divine essence— how do they turn masses of blubber into illume, into soap, into lubricant for machines and not— he pictures from boyhood reads the act of the hunt itself well enough, the sharp end of the harpoon fishing for flesh, and then the long haul, the hoisting and maneuvering and straining as the beast, the monster, the prize is beaten to submission by a spiderweb of cables and ropey arms. Then he knows only of the noxious fumes from the outskirts of the city, when he peers at the sky and the long upwards mouths of factories exhale their smokes. He is curious to learn what happens in these cathedrals of brick and metalwork. To see the butcher plying his trade as he has seen the anatomist, another sort of theatre strong with fish stinks, frock coats traded for leather aprons, naked hands for gloves; a knife is a knife.

He fingers his father’s razor open, tries out its edge. Whalers call it flensing. He has little fat in his cheeks and doubts it would yield much oil. Enough to light a taper, perhaps, and read by its feeble glow. He has half a mind to try. Hold your skin taut with your thumb, like so, father says, a gentleman learns to give as few strokes as he can. In his long jaundiced hand the blade shines molten gold and invites him to spill his adipose. This is like surgery, father says, only you ought not to bleed. He bleeds often, he cannot help himself. Searches for the hot-red animal lodging in his throat, the croakbird who speaks when he doesn’t find his voice. He has died before. It was in his sleep, he had become a man and wanted nothing more than to return to the boyhood country of his father’s shadow, but the man in the casket was older than him and the key to his house buried in his pocket. He had come home alone and stood at the iron gate, he could not open it. He had sat there until the skin fell from his bones and the bird in his chest flew off. Father left him his name to wear with his old coat; left his education to hang unfinished off a cliff.

In a few years it might be father’s face in the mirror, the same palewater eyes, sharp nose and slack slant of the mouth. Soap thickens in his palms, sticks cold to his jaw. He has never liked meeting his reflection, even on good days when he is well-rested and seems to have eaten his fill. Here stranded in that cold space before dawn, he finds he has rarely looked worse. Some burst vessels crowd the white of his eyes, a bit of rheum at the corners— he thumbs near angrily, makes the skin all round turn red.

He hears a footstep before seeing the rickety door of the shack open in the mirror-scrap. Rom’s red hair drinks all the light offered as would a firepit. She has shed her robes, so that in her shirtsleeves and trousers she might pass for a round-faced boy. He peeks over his shoulder to give her a narrowslit eye.

“Might it wait? I was—”

“At ease”, she says, “your friend told me I might find you here.”

Laurence, who knows him better than he knows himself. Laurence who sleeps in his bed at school. They should have been jabbing at each other with theories and not trampling down some barren coast in search of themselves, and here they are. Young men learn nothing they don’t wish to be taught. What must she think of him? Here that taut-skinned boy-man, livid face halfway to lathered, hungry little thing, with his braces hanging at his thighs, rehearsing at night a touch of morning. One sharp tooth hangs over his lip, needle-sting.

He bites his tongue, spreads more foam on his cheeks.

“I wanted to make sure you were up to the work”, is what she opens with. “You’d think prospectors could handle a carcass, but some of them are no better than queasy schoolboys. I would not have my assistant faint or, heavens forbid, vomit before the task is done.” Her tone softens, then. “I understand you are of a nervous disposition.”

“A nervous disposition.”

This might as well be a diplomatic way of saying he is erratic, too high-strung to be trusted with something as mundane as a knife. Odd thing to tell a man who’s holding a razor to his throat. Still he does not blame her, because she must have heard it from someone with less than his best interests at heart. In the end he decides to brush it off as a slight that is beneath him, instead focusing on God’s deadfish image lying there on the beach, waiting for them and their hungry eyes. He scrapes at the right side of his jaw first, the way father used to, not looking at her in his shard of glass.

“I’m nothing squeamish”, he frets, “I’m three quarters a surgeon.”

He has trouble taming his changeling voice. One moment its neutral no-colour, the next a strange, grating silver, as if he’d come to lick a mirror. The sharp edge scratches at his upper lip, then the left side of his face, his chin. He knows to save the throat for last, in case a fanciful urge forces his hand. Under the bowl’s still water he thumbs at the sticky-black hairs on his blade, near cuts himself open. Her foxhound eyes on the back of his neck, they make him feel somewhat trapped, bristling with nerves too-long dulled.

She is too difficult to ignore, and so he meets her reflection’s stare.

“You’ve no cause for worry. I promise I will not be a burden.”

“In that case, you have my apology. I should not presume only because you are young that you will let me down. I know your father taught you well.”

It irks him a little, to hear him being spoken of by someone who might have met him only in passing, if at all. He has known the sort from boyhood— people who sharpen their teeth in greater men’s shadows better to stab them in the back and seize their place. They say a lot of things about the college’s house anatomist, because she is a woman and ought not to have been offered the seat. They say that she is a cunning rogue, or that she owes her degree to her uncle’s puppeteer’s hand, or yet crueller, uglier things he would rather not dwell upon. What he knows is that she does outmatch every manner of man in the operating theatre and is not sorry for it. He has seen the quick-finger elegance with which she places the first cut; the gestural economy of the hand that folds back a flap of skin.

But respect does not equal fondness. He is rather put out by the animal-shaped heat she tends to stir in him. If he is not careful he will cut his throat.

“Did you know him, then?” he asks, shaving what little grows on his neck.

“Not as such.” In the glass her face is slack with feigned indifference. Her flame-hair falls in her eyes, he wishes she would tame it back. “Dr. Kovacs honoured us with a lecture a few years ago. Remarkable technique. I asked some questions, he seemed pleased enough. Though I suppose he did not approve of Byrgenwerth, as he never came to give another.”

“Teaching was never his calling”, he says simply, knowing it is untrue for the brilliant surgeon has schooled him admirably. He would like to say as much for the old college by the lake, only Laurence has shrugged on the mantle first. A man’s education comes in many shapes. The hiss of cold water rinses his face of razor burn. He folds his father’s blade back on itself and turns, at last facing her. In the flesh she looks more exhausted than her mirror-self. Those freckles on her face disapprove of pungent light. “Will that be all?”

There is behind her eyes the possibility of more things wanting to be said, such as condolences two years too late. For a moment he will dread the coming of it and the thanks he might have to give in turn. Thank you, he has been taught to say without adding, for reminding me he has died. But she does not offer, and so he has no bitter pill to swallow, instead slips a finger at the back of his collar, pulls it taut as a noose. She says,

“Quite so”, with a sharpsting smile and a tilt of her head. “I will see you at eight.”

Silence comes down his shoulders as she leaves him in his shack(les). Small brittle bird in his chest wakes up, rattling at his ribcage. He tongues at his teeth a good seven times and calculates an ideation of sunrise— if he tries he might seize an hour of sleep, then eat-and-vomit, have a change of shirt, ready his father’s knives for apotheosis (whalers call it flensing).

He is a fragile thing, the thinbone butcher-boy in the glass.

He does not believe in God.

Λ

[God III]

At the eighth hour they all meet on the moonshape beach to gaze at the whale.

“This is not a whale”, says the biology professor, and he must know for he has courted a hundred sailors.

At the rear the goldenbrown mapmaker takes notes, looking rather at the steep cliffside, deciphering the patterns of waves yet to crash and the broken masts pointing at the sky, so very like crosses awaiting sacrifice. Somewhere west Laurence and his master trade worried glances. Dr. Kroy the botanist looks, wipes his lenses, looks again. For his part the boy-meatcutter hangs in the anatomist’s shadow, half a head taller than her and twice as thin. Black hair falls in his eyes, black bile comes up his throat. He barely ever feels the prospectors’ arrival, their mudpacked boots coming a-sigh on sandy ground. Distantly he can hear their scabbards knocking at their thighs.

The whale that is not a whale asks them a question.

(it is a question with many answers)

He is not sure if he has heard it, if the others have heard it the same. But one man starts moving forwards, and soon another follows, and another, ferried by their own tide. Some refuse. Some on the contrary go backwards, and he wants to go backwards with them, finding instead that he is rooted to the spot. His long hands are shaking. He watches those scholars kneel by the whale that is not a whale that is God, and plunge their naked hands in its open belly, with every gesture ripping out entrails and the stink of fish. In his coatpockets he wraps bone-fingers round his father’s knives, his knuckles turn white. He watches them gather God in their palms: glistening morsels of offal streaked with silver blood, sticky-pungent with something he will learn, in more than ten years and less than twenty, to call moonscent.

He hears them busy in deep debate, kneeling there, staining the wine-red trim of their sleeves. The word communion flutters between pairs of loose lips and he knows it means putting God in your mouth. It coils round his neck, the thought of it: God who smells of fish, God who dies still this instant by the sea; God, its greasebone voice, God yellow, God made flesh. All of those half-mad sycophants he knows by name, by reputation, by fall-red hair— they spin circles as in the lecture hall. All the while the roiling sea goes sick, the wind picks up, sand gets in their eyes. They decide: they will administer sacraments.

If the lot of them are to science sworn, why then play clerics at the divine’s bedside? Later he will ask Rom, and she will say that theory ought always to precede experiment. His agreement will be bitten back under his tongue. He will not have moved from his spot. He will try not to look at her God-silver mouth and the pinprick naevus beneath. The boy-meatcutter with knives in his pockets will do nothing, and say nothing, as the banquet takes place.

At the eighth hour he does not sink his teeth into God’s open flank;

in his dreams, it is God who bites him in the wrist.

Chapter Text

When they have gorged themselves on the carcass, brains grown fat on God’s juices, the scholars get back to work.

They are steadfast in ignoring the prospectors who, at the fringe of what one might have called a beach, welcome their peers and the horse-drawn cart just arrived. They light pipes or chew tobacco, they trade jokes and punch at each other’s shoulders. Manly greetings, sulks the thinker-boy, the sort to remind him of army men, all muddy coats for uniforms. It’s easier staring at them than at the corpse not far laying, gouged open by hungry hands. He’d not too much balked when seeing Gehrman and his crew come back a-bloodied the day before. Nor does he when his knife makes to slice at some wretch bound for the charnel lane. Yet something about the mass of gelatinous flesh, out of shape and desecrated, disturbs him. Perhaps because he has seen its face, looked for its eyes and not found them. This thing less-than-living and more-than-immense, he takes it in, he drinks it as saltwater. It makes him sick.

He throws a peek over his shoulder, hoping for Laurence, and finds him livid, in debate with his master— instead has to clutch at the sight of Rom’s red hair, second best of his bearings, even though the idea of her God-bloodied mouth has bothered him not an hour past. Others share that same disquiet he feels plastered on their faces, people he knows or doesn’t: a girl-student about to be ill, a fresh-faced prospector’s apprentice, even the mapmaker who’d laughed round the fire. Little to laugh at now but their own expectations. Micolash thinks he would have been relieved to find an ordinary whale beached there, after all. Sometimes the world as you know it can surprise you. But that twist of curiosity making knots of his guts, he does not altogether dislike it.

Eating God is one thing, studying it another.

And so he rejoins the circle of scholars, his boots soft-silent on that spread of wet sand. It is not unlike standing round the operating table in the university’s theatre, where the anatomist and her knives reign supreme. She kneels before the dead whale that is not a whale, now, caring not for the dirt that clings to her sleeves, her pinstriped knees. He blinks at the pinpoint of sun catching a long, slender blade in her grip, which she does not yet raise to cut. If anything she seems placated— not every savant knows to take their own ignorance in stride. She clutches at that shiny omen, like a slash of steel across her blue brocade waistcoat, and says nothing.

Next to her the sailor-loving biologist thumbs at his gold-rimmed monocle, sort of thin glass eye drinking in the light. He wears an expensive shirt and whalebone cufflinks: he will not touch the corpse.

“I notice a swelling”, he mutters, “in a pocket beside the stomach.”

Micolash can see it, yes, if he cranes his neck right: a gibbose mound of silver-white, wet from saltwater and littered with algae scraps, drooping about as if strands of greendark hair. A strong, tinned-fish smell wafts all round (is it not too late to put what remains of God in a can?). Though the pouch’s surface is mostly smooth, he makes out a few uneven lumps and dreads to think it might be hints pointing to another, smaller God who had missed its chance at existence. He has long looked for God and not found it, and left the space where it should have fit comfortably vacant in recent years. He has not thought to ask himself, could God be an animal, even less to question its means of entry into the world. Perhaps the universe is not without its sense of humour. God is a whale, God is a fish; God is dead.

He realises that he alone is still on his feet, every other close-enough scholar now down on their knees, hands either caught twitching or keeping warm in their pockets. He is afraid of standing out, and so kneels with them who have partaken— is it a speck of silver blood, halfway dried on a surgeon’s lip? He forbids himself to shudder.

Too self-absorbed to notice, fingering his eye-glass, the biology professor pushes on.

“Whichever manner of creature it turns out to be, we can at least conclude the specimen is of the female persuasion. And in a very advanced stage of pregnancy. Of course, we will need to perform a thorough examination—”

“Better get on with it”, says another doctor, rummaging in his monogrammed gladstone bag as would some overeager slaughterman. “I hear fish can be quick to spoil.”

His knives shimmer there, in drab morning light, long flat lines of polished steel. Micolash’s hands shift in his coat pockets, clutching at blades also, not daring to draw them out for fear of having to make use of them in front of his betters; for fear of finding himself wanting. Instead his fingers curl tighter round their worn, well-cared-for handles, and he stares at the bubble of pregnant flesh as if itching to see it burst open. Never mind surgery: some things ought to happen on their own. But it is a known fact that birth cannot be given without life.

God has died with child, hence they will play at obstetrics. They will hold their knives to this capsized sea-mother whose hair is tentacles, whose skin pallid jelly, whose eyes are nowhere to be seen. He finds that he is looking for his mentor’s, and clings to them when they meet. She gives him a steady nod; a bead of sweat pearls there at her upper lip.

A moment the circle of scholars closes in on itself: who will do the honours? Some are rightfully subdued, such as flame-haired Rom whose grip on her knife has faltered. For all of her stony countenance she must still digest God, and perhaps finds it hard to swallow. Likewise the biologist licks at his cracked lips with a flat, colourless tongue, as if the idea had not quite occurred to him that he might have to sully his hands with more than eager sailors’ spend. In the midst of his seniors, the anatomist’s assistant knows he cannot assert himself, so lets those who hold the privilege squabble over the cosmos’s corpse, intent on giving the species their name. It lasts long enough for the eldest, a fifty-some surgeon who doubles as the recent heir to an obscure barony, to wave a slim, multiple-ringed hand and claim his idea of a birthright. This is what it is coming to, his father used to say, Lords short of gambling money, playing at work. Only no one protests, because it is said his Lordship has funded the whole undertaking by half, and so the youth does his best to hope he will prove worthy of the task.

There are murmurs rippling about as everyone takes their rightful place— qualified anatomists and naturalists at the forefront, of course, and their students looming at their shoulders— then those who trade other expertise for dilettante curiosity, such as archaeologist, cartographer, geologist— and, strangely, a handful of prospectors loitering a few steps back, hand-to-pistol, as if waiting for the corpse to pounce. Most of them are elsewhere occupied, discharging supplies and pitching tents, and no doubt only too happy to forgo butcher-work for a day.

When it does start, it is without preamble, dispensing with the customary pomp doctors enjoy in the theatre. Silence drapes over the assembly, heavy mantle, almost reverent. The surgeon’s knife draws a careful line at the centre point of the distended belly, his blade going slow and deep enough to split the flesh. A weak trickle becomes a steady drip, fluid clear and smelly oozing down the walls of bluish skin. God’s waters, thinks Micolash, rehearsing his glossary. Many wrinkle their noses, for they are not used to the stench of guts, and there is naught the sea breeze does to help. Even he who has witnessed dissections from a young age has to force himself still, lest he recoils away from the strong mingle.

His Lordship, despite his many rings, displays admirable fingerwork. Micolash knows his father would have approved of it, and it brings a new pang to his chest. There is little else he can admire besides technique, and wishes he could busy himself taking notes; he has left his pens and blank journals in a shack with the rest of his equipment. Thus he devours, hungry-like, each and every gesture as the doctor slowly spreads the two sides further apart.

“Dr. Stoker”, he mouths, not looking at Rom across the gaping maw, “retractors, if you would.”

Quickly she pulls them out of his bag, and with the assistance of another scholar sets to keep the wound open. Her assistant peers with world-wide eyes. He should not be surprised that the chasm is filled with an amalgam of pale offal, instead of the cruel copper-coin red he has learned to find warm, but still it takes him aback. This is the flesh of the dead, there is scant room for life— this is the flesh of God. Do away with your assumptions, father would have said, in science they will not serve but hinder you. Even the professors seem somewhat startled by what they are witnessing; more than one mouth hangs agape, suspended at the doctor’s hands. Only the baron Horn remains unmoved by his task, gathering at his fingertips all of his focus, a sheen of sweat wetting his high brow. The operation is a delicate one, Micolash notes, transfixed by the glistening silver of the creature’s blood. It lasts as long as any surgery he’s come to witness at school, if more subdued, silence only punctured by instructions and whispers hard to catch. Never has he seen such a rapt audience; never has he belonged to one.

God’s child, when it is pulled out of its mother’s womb, turns out to be nothing but a ball of wasted grey flesh, halfway formed into what might pass for the offspring of a woman and a fish. It has a head and the suggestion of uneven limbs, the sketch of a ribcage protruding from its middle, and not much else to identify. It has no eyes either, which unsettles the youth, and prompts him to ask himself: if God cannot see us, then has it no means of judging us? The question will come to haunt him for a while. Then it will be forgotten, for to reach the stars one has to stop worrying about where his feet will land.

Someone calls for the prospectors to bring a large jar in lieu of a bassinet. He bites his lip, knowing that this wrinkled, shapeless excuse of a fetus will drown in a bed of chemicals and gather dust in some private collector’s cabinet. Old Willem’s own, perhaps, which is said to house many an exotic curiosity. He wonders, idly, what name they will give it, and its mother, what name will be penned on a little label, when his attention is caught by an appendage sticking out of the thing’s belly, long and thin and by a thread hanging at the stillborn babe’s front.

It, too, is sticky with silver blood.

“What might this be?” asks an onlooker, fellow scholar but for the lacking medical expertise.

Rom weighs the thick, pungent strand with her metal stare. Even she, marble-hard as she may be, cannot help but wrinkle her nose in distaste.

“Its umbilical cord, I should think. Although it looks peculiar.” She runs her white thumb across its bumpy surface. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Are those eyes all over the wretched thing— do let me see—” pipes the biologist, adjusting his monocle, expensive shirt be damned.

“Surely not—”

“Gentlemen!” The lord-surgeon who has cut God open raises the jewelled hand which is still holding his long, silver-blooded knife. “A little decency. We are not a pack of beasts scrabbling for leftovers. Let us not forget protocol.” He snaps his fingers at his aide, a boy younger even than Micolash, and more skittish if possible. “Please, do fetch me a jar.”

“Right away, m’lord.”

Swiftly the container is brought over. Then Rom hands him a pair of tweezers from his bag, and with them the doctor man plucks the string, daintily so, as if it were the most precious piece of lacework he’d ever laid eyes on. Probably he does not so much fancy the idea of touching it with naked hands— it is an ugly thing, without a doubt, this veiny strip of flesh littered with bulging eyes, dangling over its origin’s open belly. For a few seconds everyone holds their breath, fearing that the surgeon will fumble his grip and send the cord dropping down the cavity, that someone will have to roll up their sleeves and fish it back out, nevermind God’s silver-stink blood. But his Lordship keeps his hold firm and, not without a sigh of relief, lets it fall down the jar before screwing it tight shut. It twitches still, like a lizard’s severed tail, and those blackpearl eyes go on spasming.

There it is, at last,

God’s foreboding stare.

Π

[God IV]

God is a convoluted operation,

(the sum of its parts multiplied by way of all things living; then nestled in a bone case, like a shellfish; it will extend a shy tentacle and shake one’s hand; and rip one’s arm off; it will suckle the blood and the marrow; the law of supply and demand asks that it reaches out for the brain; as a plump merchant it drinks it up through a straw)

the cold calcified boy will spend a lifetime trying to solve it.

Π

On the third day they start fishing for eyes.

It is Rom’s idea that the washing-up of God on their coast is what has turned the locals to animalistic folly, and thus they ought to examine what remains. It is fortunate, he will think over a cup of bad coffee, that the anatomists have rounded up enough corpses and laid them down as neat as they dared after the prospectors’ rampage. He watches, standing very still with his drink, as two leathercoats haul one up on a stretcher and march it off towards the shack they have claimed for their dirty work. A coarse sheet covers most of it from the head down, so that he only sees the soles of a fisherman’s boots, clustered with thick deposits of mud at the heel. He thinks, idly, of scraping it off with his pocket-knife. He follows at a snail’s pace, dragging his long legs, marvelling at the depth of his footprints in the wet sand-muck; wincing at the squelch produced by every step. The same sound those thin, jewelled fingers made when they rummaged at the creature’s insides.

He pushes the door of the little cabin and leaves his coffee to cool on the nearest surface, joining Rom at the large table in the centre of the room. It is a gloomy house, dim-lit and humid, but clean. He is not yet sure what it is she seeks to accomplish here. She has declined Lord Horn’s offer to assist him with God’s autopsy on the beach, instead looking for her own field to harvest. A field, her apprentice ponders, or a pirate’s treasure cove to plunder at their leisure.

Despite the prestige of her position as Byrgenwerth’s resident anatomist, it is clear to him that she nourishes ambitions far greater than her uncle’s; that nobody’s praise means to her as much as her name on the spine of a tome, or the sign of her clever hand on a particularly adroit catgut stitch. In that regard she reminds him of an artist whose brilliance only rivals their egotism.

She is not demure about it.

He, by contrast, is all nerves and stiff prudence: because she overbears him, and seems to see right through him to the marrow. He rolls up his shirtsleeves and pulls garters tight above his elbows, flinching at the chill in the air rather than the morbid tableau. They have claimed a fair amount of the locals’ skulls, flesh and hair still attached but eyes gouged out and gathered in a jar. Their mouths flex in displeased arcs, as if they had foreseen the manner of their death and further down the line, and not liked what they saw. That he cannot fault them for.

“How are we to go about this? Do you want me to fetch the skull saw?”

“Not quite yet. No. This seems to me a touch heavy-handed for a start.” Rom considers, eyeing the eyeless head on the table. “Trepanation, I should think. You are familiar?”

“Of course.” He adds, a touch feeble, “I have never performed it.”

“Well”, she drawls, “you are here to learn.” She gestures, without looking, to the other skulls propped in a corner, flashing their teeth and empty eye sockets. “Besides, you have room to make mistakes. I’ll not begrudge you.”

She is callous, and it suits him fine. It dawns on him his father would dislike her for it. Where in Yahar’gul physicians were quick to turn to cynicism, he had always been quick to advocate for a corpse’s dignity, be it merchant’s or pauper’s. When faced with no other choice, he had purchased from Hemwick’s resurrection men with a slack moue to his mouth, as if spending coin on gravediggers equaled handling the shovel himself. His eyes were soft and watery when he died, and he had asked his son to make sure his body would stay down his burial spot. You are still here, thinks the son when he comes with a bunch of tired, handpicked flowers. You are still here. He does not ask Rom how much she would have paid for such a cadaver, free of bottle, needle and lesser evils. No doubt a hefty sum, pilfered from Old Willem’s own coffers.

As is his assistant’s prerogative, he gathers the operation’s implements. There had been a trephine in his father’s study, very like this one he fishes out of Rom’s case: vaguely hammer-shaped, with those mean little teeth at the end of the drill. It had not seen much use— only once, does he recall, when he’d asked what the strange tool was for and his father had shown him. The empty skull had been a wolf’s, brought back by some poacher camping in the woods, and the drill had left a neat round hole in it, to which he’d stuck his wide fourteen year-old eye. Be careful, smiled the surgeon, it might look back at you. From where he sits now, it seems altogether less amusing.

She is willing to play the mentor insofar as she guides his hand with curt instructions and scarcely more. She tells him which part of the skull is best for their purpose, and why. She lets him know when his grip is too slack, or too strong, or the angle needs adjusting. He takes patiently to her counsel and finds that in all things she is correct, and wonders if he might be, too, the day his turn comes to hire his own apprentice.

He does not stick his twenty-two year-old eye to the neat round hole.

In truth he is afraid his father could be right: it might look back at you. Then there is the matter of the brain, still there nestled, grey nothing-much huddled against the walls of the skull yet to rot. It’s the colour of God’s child when they pry it from the womb, the colour of that revolting string peppered with eyes, twitching between tweezers, then in its glass jar. With a lancet, he pokes at it, gingerly, trying to part the folds of wet tissue bundled over itself as a crumpled handkerchief, seeing nothing there but that which ought to be. A layman could have told them there are no eyes inside the skull. But Rom has her ideas, and part of him wishes to agree with them; to contribute to her designs, to know the world as she wants to know it.

“Is there anything, then?” she asks over his shoulder. Not impatient: she masters her tone, crafty as a diplomat, an undulating green.

“No— well, no eyes, but I think something’s not quite right.” He peers through the neat circle, takes inventory. Something shines there on the surface, a second skin of sorts, not altogether different from that thin layer of jelly between the crust of a pie and the fruit laid all careful atop it. When he risks there the tip of his blade, it seems to burst and drip down, the way of candlewax. A drop catches on his finger. “It’s bloody cold.”

“Do let me see.”

She doesn’t wait for him to move aside, instead leans over his shoulder, cheek-to-cheek. Her ginger curls carry the smoke-scent of her cigarettes, and the proximity of her skin burns his own to shameful yearnings.

“An odd sort of fluid”, he mumbles. “Not lymph, I shouldn’t think. It is somewhat clear but reflects strange colours—”

“Oil?” she suggests.

“I say.” He looks again, deciphering that familiar rainbow glint he’s often wondered at on days when sunlight would ripple across a puddle of spilled petroleum. “Yes, I think you might be onto something. Some manner of thick oily residue, at the least, or an attempt at imitation. Like spermaceti— is that why they called the creature a sort of whale?” He risks his nose a fraction closer, and wrinkles it. Rotten-egg yellow. “It does smell as pungent.”

He makes to scoop some of it in a spoon, and gently deposits the substance in a small phial. Held closer to daylight, it yellows a touch, sending motes of urine-gold in their eyes. A flash of childish recklessness tempts him to test its liquid limits and use it for fuel in a whale-oil lamp, but she is watching, and would no doubt strip him of his flimsy scholar’s privilege. He is not yet one to push his luck.

“Well. Nevermind that.” She gestures for him to abandon the tools and take notes, enumerating a number of reagents they will need to carry out tests. “I wonder what these people were thinking, raving about eyes on the inside. Perhaps it’s altogether less literal. I should have known. It seems quite silly, in hindsight.”

“Or we should simply be wary of second-hand accounts. Whalers and prospectors have their merits but are no scholars— they might have remembered wrong.”

“Granted. It’s difficult to think straight, when you are prepared for the mundane and faced with something that exceeds all expectations. I would not lay the blame at the prospectors’ feet. Many of them have seen worse, down the Tombs. Many of them have not come back.”

He nods in assent. He remembers the day he went down a tomb after dark to humour dear Laurence, and found besides the first stirs of his fascination the taste of danger, and earned a scar for his trouble. He might not have come back either, and it had not even been one of those infamous, bottomless dungeons that made headlines and tall tales alike. Shaking off the memory, he looks up from his scribbling, fever-dream in his eyes, his lips pursing like a boy denied his sweets.

“I will need a photography camera. So that we may keep accurate records.”

“Why not. You may ask Dr. Moncrieff.”

“Moncrieff.”

“That cartographer fellow. He’s had the foresight to bring one. A pastime of his, I understand.” She ups an eyebrow. “Though what he hopes to photograph is beyond me. What with the prospectors’ carnage, the coast is rather more unsightly than ever, and the weather is not helping in the least. There is little I wouldn’t sell for a day of sun. Pity that Lord Horn and my uncle could not afford it.”

He will do as she says, ask Dr. Moncrieff with his golden ring, who looks a little like his father who used to take photographs before he died. Dr. Moncrieff will set up his camera and take pictures of the dead, and then the sullen boy-doctor will walk in his tracks and take pictures inside the dead. He will wonder what they’d think before remembering he has spooned at their thinking matter; he will choke on a laugh high-nervous and bite back his tongue.

Rom leans back and plucks her engraved cigarette case out of a pocket. The neat roll of tobacco slots between her lips, a gesture seductive almost in its carelessness.

“We’ll reconvene in an hour”, she says, lighting it with a match. “I’ll gather the chemicals. You can go and watch the autopsy, if you like.”

The very thought twists his stomach into knots. The stench of God’s fishguts still nests up his nose, foxlike burrowing deep and deeper, and the sight of its wet wedding gown of a body keeps the back of his eyelids company.

“I’d rather not.” His throat bobs sharply. I’m nothing squeamish, he told her before. “Unless you wish me to take notes. I can—”

“No. That’s quite alright. I’d rather not watch a party of pompous men play at scavengers, either.”

When she opens the door and makes to leave, he tries not to lunge and wrap his hand around her wrist. Cold breeze comes in, the thin dark hairs on his forearms stand to attention. Still that sticky-chilled drop of brain matter on his finger, he will scrub it off in a moment, but first needs to ask, to ask, it sickens him— her God-silver mouth, now dried to normalcy— he can but stare at it, and calculate the ideal angle of his own against it.

He does not wrap his hand around her wrist, only calls her brisk piece of a name.

“That thing that you ate.” (that morsel of God that you ate) “What did it taste like?”

She watches him through the grey slit of an eye, pinprick-light catching raw flesh at the corners. Two moles hang full-moon below it. She does not smile.

“Do you know, I have no idea. From childhood I have always loathed seafood.” She works the cigarette around in her mouth, a hint of tonguepink past the seam of her lips. “Like smoke, I suppose. Now everything tends to.”

Π

Later they stare at each other the way of panting dogs.

His shirt hangs open, chalk white skin striped with clawmarks where his heart keeps a-thumping. He does not know what has possessed him, if not God’s stink up his nose (if not the shadowbird nesting in his chest). His hands, his long strong surgeon’s fingers, have bruised her flanks under the dirty white of her shirt, adding red welt to starry freckled flesh. They have kept at it like skittish animals: if anyone heard them he should not wonder. Her nails pulling at his scalp, her teeth at his neck, writhing wrestling bent-over worktable, the shift and shudder, clink of metal, scrape of trousers round his thighs— the rest comes all a-blur, picture out of focus. For a good photograph you ought to stand still, his father says (Dr. Moncrieff says).

Her hand is still on his arm, holding tight to that lean slab of meat between shoulder and elbow. When he will change his shirt and look, it too will be red and streaked with leftover fingers. He leaves it there, because he is afraid of the colour of his voice when his breath does that looping thing, when his lungs become too big for his thin body. Her thumb digs into a vein he knows but can’t summon the name of. He welcomes this idea of mellow discomfort, soon to grow into numbness. Please, it hurts. God might have thought the same as the lord-surgeon picked at its entrails, magpie fingers eager for gems.

In the sort of demi-haze he’s learned in the backroom of an opium den, he has kissed her mouth. He has let her snare his fretful hunger, and thanked her for it. He knows all about the laws of cause and effect but rarely dares to apply them.

For all its futile mundanity the thought comes— that it does not become a student of the physical to take such a hands-on approach. He will white-wipe his shame down the hem of his shirt for lack of cleaner cloth, and for a second too long stand there pallid and terrified. Then fire will creep into his cheeks, that same way it had the first time at school when the fair-golden hunting boy had (nevermind)— he’ll adjust his trousers, hook his braces tight over his shoulders, tuck his soiled shirt in, button up his vest. She will watch him do it, she will do it the same.

He will watch her, too. Her foreign woman-form in men’s clothes that he knows now is littered with stars. It curls up his lip in something of a sneer, this, for the arrogance of skin to think it might mimic the universe! Yet it has proved to make the same music, or very near, that length of breath getting shorter and shorter and higher. It might have been her teeth prodding at his ear. He thumbs at it, not quite sure he will find it whole, and flinches to recognise the indent of her incisors along the lobe.

He does not know what has possessed her, either. It brings scant comfort.

He tries not to look at the mole beneath the arc of her mouth, although it beckons again for a scrap of touch. A spot of blood paints her lower lip. His blood drunk at the source, much as God’s blood on the beach (things have happened, happen, will happen). He points a mute finger. His own mouth opens to nothing, that peculiar silence after a rifle shot. She lets her spidertongue dart, quick-like, and has a taste. Smiles her gentle-green smile.

“For that I am sorry”, she offers. “I did not mean to hurt you.”

He says it doesn’t matter, hardly hearing his own answer. A rash blooms somewhere down her throat, closer to collarbone, to breast. He’s left there some manner of stubble burn, it doubles his shame to bursting. His nails find his chin a repository for cuts yet to happen.

“You are a curious man.” She says it without malice. “Nervous, and very cold.”

“Yes.”

He has tried his hand at sexlessness before, it had not worked out. Something of earlier desire rekindles in his gut, but he knows better than to listen. Instead he will ask for the mapmaker’s camera and photograph tendons in her neck. He will give them stars for names and whisper them in the dark. This is what he thinks the moment it happens— when she licks at the corner of his mouth, when he presses hands to ribcage and searches there for a trace of God— stop moving, you need to drink the light. It catches up with him: they have been watched, both by the skulls’ empty sockets and the eyes soaking in their jar.

With penitent's guilt, he chews at his bloody hangdog mouth.

Rom looks at him, weighing his heavy heart on her scales. There on the table some dregs of light catch their surgeons’ tools by surprise, the trephine that’s pierced a severed head, the lancet he’s used to tickle a fisherman’s brain; the harmless teaspoon, accusatory in its make-believe sheen of oil.

She says,

“It dawns on me you have not eaten. Were you afraid?”

It takes none of his cunning to figure what she means. For he has seen the feast laid out and he has seen all the teeth digging in, cutting like knives at some yuletide roast. It nags at him. What does the fruit of apotheosis taste like? He might have hoped to know it on her tongue in his mouth. At night he dreams of fish melting under his jawbone, remembers how his father used to cook it when mother was gone, how soft it was on his palate. God is an excuse, his father said. And so the taste of fish he gives God in his sleep for lack of proof. Theory ought always to precede experiment, Rom said. There he finds that some things are better left unknown, and chides himself for it. In refusing to eat he has defied his very own purpose. In eating at her banquet instead, he has defi(l)ed himself. On both counts he will learn to live with the shame.

“I don’t know. Probably I was, but I had little time to sort out my feelings. I thought I heard something, a voice, or— well, a question.” His tongue worries at his gums, where she has left her aftertaste. “It’s the strangest thing. I don’t remember what it was.”

She tugs at his stiff collar, so that it sits flat around his neck. Then picks at the dull hang-ribbon of his necktie to knot it, slow and slower, making him recall the way she secures a length of catgut once she’s done with a wound.

“I think I know what you mean.”

“Do you?” It surprises him that she would confide; more so that he is ready to believe her.

“I did feel compelled to… partake, as it were. I heard no voice, and no question, but felt a hand tugging at my strings. I know it sounds like a flimsy excuse.” Her thumbnail scratches at a dried point of blood on his chin, makes him shiver. “But I assure you, I would not have done it of my own volition, without any sort of a push. Some told me they have, although I am hesitant to believe them.”

Gentle, as if attempting to tame a tiny bird, he holds her freckled wrist aloft, so that her fingertip hangs a hair’s breadth from his lips. She is not spooked, nor visibly aroused, only perhaps amused by his boyish idea of romanticism. She who calls him cold is older, and colder still.

“Should we not put a stop to it?” It is naive, he knows. Her thumb rests atop his lower lip, letting him care for the taste of his own blood and more besides, should he want to try out hers. It has never appealed to him. “Give it back to the sea, pack up our things, and observe what little we can send to college for study?”

“We should”, she readily agrees.

Earlier, he thinks she has left a bruise on his collarbone with her teeth. It flares now, that spot of wine-love, it itches. He is afraid God will see it and laugh.

“But we won’t.”

“We won’t.”

She lets her hand drop. Immediately the curve of his lip misses the weight of her finger, fitting to it as had her mouth (as had Laurence’s mouth). Lamplight casts their nervous shadows on the wall, halfway to melded below the waist, so close do they stand.

“If man had known better, would he have bothered to learn how to make fire out of a pair of stones? This is what we are. Man, woman, scholar all the same. We are curious creatures, we can’t only live in our heads.” She shifts slightly, plump hip flexed against the tabletop. Looks him in the eye. “We might be well out of our depth. But we are curious, and so we’ll carry on.”

He knows that she must be right, because if he was not curious he would not have touched her, nor kissed her mouth that has eaten God, much less allowed her to bite at his flesh as only one other had before in a dormitory bed. He lets her do so again, pull at the supple, if slight crackled arc of his lip with her pearlsmoke teeth.

If he was not curious, he would stop wondering at the taste of God.

Π

[God V]

When night comes God is a dream.

In the dream there is a narrow door without a knob. In the door there is a round keyhole, he slots his eye in it. It falls down the other side with a copper-coin clink. When he steps through the door, a many-ringed hand holds it open for him— and a freckled one, and another with a single golden ring— and yet another he has touched many times, which might as well be God’s for the softness of its skin. On the other side of the door there is a ship: a great wooden hull like the belly of a beast, masts thrust up to empty skies, sails billowing in a wind that is not blowing. On the ship there are sailors’ silhouettes moving about, a shadow play for his benefit.

In front of the gangplank between ship and dock there is a single no-face ferryman, with a hand outstretched (a hand with many jewels, or freckled, or wearing a golden ring, or smooth-white as a promise). He gives the ferryman his other eye and follows him aboard.

When he lies down blind below decks, God finds him in slender cracks between the layers of his sleep, and mother-sweet lay a damp finger on his cheek.

Π

At night he goes out to watch the full moon, bright as a hangman’s eye.

What thin sleep he grasps on this coast makes him feel strangely distended, limbs out of order and mind all but thrown to the depths, and so he finds he would rather walk, and catch cold. He has neglected to bring a scarf, can only count on his father’s best coat to keep him warm. If the wind that ruffles his hair bothers him, it is also a relief; a reminder that things are still living, even here at the end of the world as he knows it.

He passes the other scholars’ tents, pitched in a neat row, oil lamps suspended at regular intervals. Most of them dark and silent, all lights out, a few betraying restless minds as shadows pace back and forth. He catches thoughts spoken aloud, further down a debate that reminds him of Byrgenwerth, and then something altogether more heated, voice-mingle punctuated with mellow sighs, the undulating flap of thick canvas. Flushed, he decides to hasten his steps and go beyond, to where the shore meets the sea, making sure to avoid the spot where they have covered God’s body with tarpaulin.

There is scarcely anyone to nod at, only prospectors whose turn it is to freeze their arses off guarding the place. He and every other student has been warned not to wander out of camp, and though he would like to tread as far as the sheltered cove to the east, he stops long before. Here, when faced with nobody but himself, he finally has time to pick at his fears— numerous but formless, those are nasty, paralysing feelings he would gladly do without. Where before they’d been easy to identify, now they melt into each other, into a coalescence of things that might happen, or might not; that might hurt him, or might not. He finds the difference harder to parse by the day.

The voice that plucks him out of his reverie a moment later is so soft he doesn’t have the presence of mind to startle.

“You should stay in during the night.”

He recognises Gehrman’s girl-shadow by the slant of her tricorn, perched low enough on her head it obscures her eyes. Her sword hangs at her hip, an engraved pistol holstered at the other, but despite all that weight added to the bulk of her coat, she does not make a sound. Moonlight turns the jewel at her throat a sick, cat’s eye yellowgreen.

Up close she looms an inch taller than him, taller than any girl he’s met before, taller than many a man for that matter. Perhaps it is a trick of her parentage, of the high-up Cainhurst blood coursing through her veins— as a child he has heard tales of knights in magnificent armour, breastplates and greaves adorned in gold, crystal-studded swords at their hips, helmets pointed as sinister bird-beaks. At school he has seen, hanging in the provost’s office, a depiction of some diplomatic event binding Yharnam’s aldermen of yore to the queens of the castle, and those same knights melded to the background had shined considerably less than in his boyish dreams. Yet they had stood very tall and very strong, and even the ladies’ shoulders had been painted as though the artist had confused them for huntresses. One of them, he recalls, had worn a rapier with her wine-red dress.

He clears his throat and remembers himself.

“Beg your pardon?”

“You should stay in your tent. You know we haven’t killed all the townsfolk.” He recalls, dimly, someone mentioning that most of them had in fact been forewarned of the scholars’ arrival and decided to leave ‘til the intruders be gone. “Some are still prowling around. Watching, for now, but all the same it would be prudent not to tempt fate. I am told a fisherman’s harpoon is quite a formidable weapon.”

He smiles sourly at that, because isn’t that the truth— a whaler’s harpoon has pierced God’s flank and spilled its guts.

“I daresay you’re right”, he concedes. “I don’t much fancy meeting the business end of a rusty blade.”

It does not make her smile, nor move a muscle. She gives him the impression that she is staring, only he cannot see for certain.

“I’m sorry. I can’t sleep, and walking is easier on my nerves.” His hands flex in the pockets of his coat, void now of his father’s knives. “Allow me to stay a few moments. I’ll not bother you.”

“You may. I am to stand guard for a while, and will watch out for you as long as I can see you.” She perches her left gloved hand on the hilt of her sword. “Do not go too far.”

A strip of moonlight catches her face fully, now, so he can better grasp the nobility of her features.

It is without mirth that he realises her dewy eyes are green, of a washed-out hue, and combined with her white-blonde hair it makes her look a colourless mirror of Laurence, taller, sturdier, as if stretched to completion. He knows by the width of her shoulders, the lean length of her legs, the strength of her arms that she too prowls deep in the woods for prey. Only the rifle comes natural extension of her hand and she does not need hounds, nor a pack of noble horsemen in red to lead the chase, nor a father to coax her closer to the kill. She hunts alone, like a cold-blood animal.

“You are with the anatomist”, she says minutes later, breaking a silence almost gone comfortable.

He dislikes the silkwhite quality of her voice, which makes him think of a bride’s veil, although by countenance she seems more suited to mourning. Words crawl under his collar with the thin idea that she must know the anatomist’s expertise to be more than hands-on; that she can see the scrawl of the anatomist’s fingernails, red wounds not quite open, on his bony chest. Later that night, it will keep him awake for an hour during which he will scratch at those stripes and multiply them.

“Her apprentice”, his colourless tone.

“Yes.” The girl’s frown deepens the groove between her platinum brows. They are of an age, yet she appears far older, war-weary before the battlefield has had a chance to knock at her door. “But you have not eaten.”

So she has taken notice of him, and kept watch, for some reason he cannot fathom.

“I have tried talking to some who ate, and they will not acknowledge it”, she pursues. “By design or not, I cannot say.”

“What they do or do not eat is their business, isn’t it? I would rather not acknowledge it, either.”

“You do not approve”, she adds in that tone that brooks no argument. Her accent is slight, like a petal on her tongue.

He does not, but then again it should be none of his concern. Early in his scholarship he has come to understand that no one, least of all a senior, takes kindly to a certain kind of curiosity from their students. The words Rom has uttered before, too, circle vulturine at the back of his mind: I felt a hand tugging at my strings.

“It is not my place to approve or to disapprove. I am only here to assist, and to learn.” He frowns, quite irritated now by her tranquil meddling. “But what about you— why come here at all, why come here and put fishermen to the sword, if you disagree with the whole endeavour? Forgive me if I fail to follow.” He hesitates to add my lady, venom pinpoint at the tip of his tongue, and decides it would only serve to antagonise her further.

She does not seem to mind his harsher edge. Her hand, he is relieved to note, hasn’t moved from the pommel of her sword, and her stance is as relaxed as a watchwoman can afford. The pink arc of her mouth, however, draws a very tight line across her face, betraying how displeased she is, either with him or the expedition as a whole. It is a known fact that scholars rarely show their bodyguards proper gratitude for their service beyond a hefty coin purse.

“Like you, I am here to learn.” Then she looks away and adds, quite simply, “But I do not have to agree with all I am taught.”

Π

[God VI]

At sea God is a whale,

it never stops swimming. It is a flagship-animal, a peace offering. As often as it can it goes slowly, and the world slowly with it, until the vessel of industry catches up at the flank. God is not used to outracing which has ever gone at its own pace, never mind any faster. God learns the notch-point of the harpoon to be a metaphor for man’s arrogance. A metaphor can hurt, it can open wounds. A well-aimed metaphor draws a lot of blood.

It teaches God that it can die from a papercut.

Π

A successful banquet rarely does have leftovers to spare. God’s table is an exception.

On the dawn of the fourth day, the scholars gather once more on the beach to take it all in. Someone has tampered with it, will be the thought itching to burst out of everyone’s mouth. They stare one and the same at the crumpled tarpaulin, only last night laid out carefully over the carcass to shield it from wind and brine. Now it prolongs the creature’s dead body, mimic of a wedding gown’s train stained with silver blood. They approach, then, warily, intent on unmasking whoever would see their work turn to waste. Boots squelch in the muck. Tired legs drag themselves along. Sleepless mouths await their fill of coffee, of tea, of smoke. Clouds hanging overhead are heavy with the promise of rain, and the sky rose-orange shifting fast to grey.

Micolash hangs at the rear, the same way he had on the first day, almost unconsciously looking for Laurence, and Rom, but everyone’s hair is damp and darkened and his eyes crusty with lack of rest. He could try and go back to his tent— he cannot, for curiosity holds him on a leash and yanks him forward, halfway to scrambling on his hands, balance lost and regained with every step. Ahead everyone else has stopped to peer down at the corpse, in semi-circle and mute horror again.

When he is close enough to see, he understands. Crawling all over the tarpaulin and the length of God’s body he counts a hundred, two hundred, a never-ending swarm of slug-like parasites feeding on it, or emerging from it as if birthed to replace what the scholars took from its divine womb, their damp skin reflecting what feeble sunlight dares come down. He covers his nose, the stink so unbearable it brings tears to his eyes and a fearsome urge to retch. In this he is not alone— already a few livid faces contort, feet make to back away, catching on themselves— one student trips on his robes and falls arse-down in the muck, and wriggles to shake off a few of the things latching on to his shoes—

“For heavens’ sake, behave! Someone call the prospectors!”

Because he is suddenly cold and paralysed he does not recognise the voice, nor the leather-men’s faces who come to knife at God’s last supper, nor his own body stuck to itself by that blind, limitless fear he has contemplated only the previous night in the moon’s mirror. He does not feel the hand that clasps his shoulder until it hurts, and pulls him back, and speaks with Gehrman’s warm tobacco-rasp.

He barely realises that he is sitting and bundled in someone else’s coat until a sympathetic student thrusts a hot cup in his hands. With closed eyes he keeps staring at the open wound, wishing he could question it.

Be careful, father had said when he’d peered through the hole, it might look back at you.

Chapter Text

[God VII]

Long into the morning, they will argue about what they shall do with the corpse of God.

A schism operates:

some will have it butchered, each bodypart carefully sealed in a labelled jar;

some will see it sent back to college for study, as whole as can be, provided they find a cart large enough to haul divinity;

some will beg to leave it there, afraid its whale-stink might follow them in dreams;

some perhaps will think to eat its leftovers.

Θ

Before they can hang God by the threads of its fate, they are to cleanse it.

Holding council on the moonshape beach, surgeons and naturalists debate on the nature of the sickness. It cannot be called illness, says one, because the creature is dead already. Most concur and conclude that there will be a time for semantics later, when they are returned to their desks and parchments, when they are to rationalise the divine and make it fit neatly in floor-to-ceiling libraries. For now they consider the swarm of parasites, take notes, pencil rough sketches on every scrap of paper they lay their hands on. The tide has ebbed with the spill of silverblood as soon as the prospectors have drawn weapons and laid another massacre at God’s deathbed. Only this time they have not been as thorough: some of them keep a-writhing near the carcass, or within one cavity or another; suckling sounds hinting at bad business would make a carrion crow’s stomach lurch.

Micolash, forever clinging to Rom’s shadow, observes the proceedings with both frown and sullen eye. He is used to sitting at the edge of things, to listen and absorb the wisdom of his elders, and still he resents the idea that the professors are out of their depth and stumbling as would first-years over surgical diagrams. The rational majority of him thinks they ought to know what they are about and only pretend, for a while, to be dumbfounded; the rest, faithless as if his father’s apostle, wishes to curl into itself and watch them unravel. He wonders where that cruel streak, newborn and itchy, might come from— the sting of the anatomist’s teeth in his lip, or the helpless clench of his fingers around his knives.

At last he can take no more, and so retreats from the ugly-made circle to amble towards the shore. In the air he can taste poor weather coming. For now the sky wears its everlasting mantle of grey, clouds hang-low and agog, as if peering too at the divine’s bloated shell. One, he thinks, squinting hard against the light, resembles an open eye without the reassuring curtain of its lid: a pregnant thing waiting to grow and swallow the world whole. He blinks, looks for it again behind the fog accumulated after so many sleepless nights. He does not find it, only the sun’s pungent glare piercing him through the brain, making there a neat round hole. At once he pictures someone trying to see through it (be careful, it might look back at you.)

He shudders, and keeps trudging. With every step his boots produce a wet, sticky squelch, the sort his tools make when he prods at a cadaver’s insides. For a moment he is worried he might vomit again, then remembers he has not eaten. The very thought of taking food appears to him repulsive, now, as with every mouthful he vividly recalls Rom’s (silver / red) bloodied lips, the blackeye-riddled cord, the lord’s thieving fingertips tickling at God’s insides. Did God eat fish before it died? He stifles his disgust, thinking the question might be asked in lecture halls and debated ad nauseam between hordes of scholars until it grows stale.

Now he finds it hard not to put God in his mouth, if only figuratively.

At times he bothers his gums with the tip of his tongue, chasing after a bellyful of outer space. Then his hand by reflex comes prodding at his chest, at the sinkhole of his stomach, tasting the emptiness there as another’s fingers have tasted each brittle bone in God’s ribcage.

You are thin and getting thinner, said Rom over their morning tea. Shadows had carved hollows into her plump cheeks, making her seem falsely starved. He’d said nothing, merely bundled himself deeper down his coat, aiming to forget that she had seen the sickly skin of his chest and clawed at his bones.

Rather than chewing further on his unease, he pushes it aside and keeps on going up the beach, headed nowhere, everywhere. He does not look at the ramshackle huts crowned in fishing nets like fall-apart wigs, does not look at the scholars’ tents and dead lamps hanging off their poles, does not look at any face from fear of recognising there his own feelings. His hands burrow down his empty pockets. He regrets not having taken the knives, if only for a moment, because holding them has a way of steadying his nerves— he is afraid, in increments, that his hunger will get the best of him as it has with the anatomist. Already his dreams are a cup, full to the brim with God’s pale blood.

There’s a man in a wool coat, narrow-brimmed hat and leather gloves, kneeling by the corpse with an army of glass jars and that nervous apprentice boy who’d tripped and squealed at the things crawling all over his shoe. The lord-surgeon, then, getting his hands dirty in the name of science once more, busy plucking at parasites like a suitor picking flowers in a pleasure garden. The student at his side takes notes as the man drones on in his flat, nasal voice.

“Do make sure none escapes”, says he, bent over the carcass, scavenger-thin. His long hand reaps a sort of shriek from the creature it picks and drops in its own private prison of glass.

“Right you are, m’lord.”

“And”, he makes to grab another, “be careful with the jars.”

“Sir.”

Mildly horrified, Micolash counts them, those slug-ersatz in their neat little boxes. The figure he climbs to is only a fraction of the tide that has swarmed the beach earlier, now washed up in its own waste. A leftover nothing of the divine’s banquet, for those who have arrived too late or been too sick to sink their teeth— would he find the same urge Rom had, if he opened one of those and put the parasite in his mouth? The clench of his empty stomach warns him that the possibility is real, the answer to his question close at hand. He forces himself only to watch, as he has watched the professors eat not a fortnight before.

Bleak sunlight shines on the carcass manifold, seeming to come from everywhere at once, casting itself contradictory. Its once swollen belly now only a wound, its peaceful deathmask of a face concealed behind a square of tarpaulin. It smells all the worse as each day passes; retains that yellowstink on top, and then at the edges a hint of ill-orange. He knows he will be sick if he stands there long, and still the thought of leaving them to their slim pickings troubles him.

A cadaver was once a living thing, father says, you have to respect it.

On this beach respect only goes so far. When it starts to hinder their trampling path towards progress, it’s easy casting it aside. Hasn’t he welcomed Rom’s callousness and drilled holes in the heads of folk who might have lived, if not for their meddling? Yet he is an apprentice, a second-rate pair of hands: his opinion will not be asked for, and so he will shed it like a torn pair of gloves.

He watches. The nervy boy-student watches back, his presence just registered. He tries to say something, he doesn’t,

his mouth heavy with the small, sticky traps of language at war with itself— how do you describe a whale that is not a whale that is God without renouncing your faith in the absence of faith? Father would remind him that no matter how you look at it, God is a clever fabrication, and because it has no angles and measurements cannot be held in one’s hands. He has searched for God in many places and not found it; he has stopped searching for God and found it dead. The idea splits in half that he might or might not kneel there too, not to collect its hivemind offspring, but to study it with the tools of the mathematician and a pair of sleepless pallid eyes.

Now that it can be measured, quartered, stored in jars, he finds himself reluctant to prove its materiality more than a trick of the light.

Θ

He stuffs God’s unsolvable equations in his pocket and walks eastwards to reach a crown of wheat stirred by the breeze.

Laurence, standing alone with a spyglass, studies the old shipwreck closest to camp as if assessing whether or not its hold has been entirely pillaged, and whether a lucky fellow might get his hand on an ancient coin or two for his trouble. His master and himself, Micolash knows, have been disappointed by the coast thus far. Archaeologists will feign not to see the carcass until it is stripped of flesh and reduced to a collection of fragile bones.

“I say”, the golden boy mutters, aiming his monocular elsewhere, higher now, “what a waste. Early century, this. Pity. We should have come when there was still enough to salvage.”

It’s something of a sad sight, this great capsized wooden beast, this beached whale without blood nor blubber to spare; its belly split open, hole large as a cave-mouth, it gapes into broken splints and lie-down barrels, some eviscerated, some intact but for the wash of algae and saltwater. If he squints he might see a few scuttling crabs, greying shells catching the light in blinks amongst the wreckage. A sail has crumpled near, brought down by the fall of its mast, and the wind gently picks at those hollows in its thick canvas, rousing to life its own sort of a song, a coastal moan not unlike God’s own, perhaps, the moment the harpoon pierced it.

He pictures himself surgeon colossus: disproportionate knives and silver-steel implements, a dissection for the ages. The creak of old wood, the whine of spine-masts stuck in the midst of shattering.

“Do you know a lot about ships?” he asks, following the nonchalant sightline of the monocular, higher, higher, to the heavens bound.

“I don’t, really.”

Laurence lowers his spyglass. It hangs deadweight between his fingers.

In the glow of that sickly sun, he seems slight and brittle as a mouthful of air. He huddles in his coat, he slumps his shoulders, he worries at the seam of a glove. Rarely does he show himself nervous, and so it rattles Micolash who wears his own fears close to his chest. They have scarcely spoken since their coming here, one busy foraging deep down fishermen’s skulls, the other hopeless hanger-on in his master’s shadow, looking for proof and superstition carved in bone. It seems long ago, now, the two of them sneaking out past curfew to have a taste of the lake under the moon’s benevolent eye, sipping on wine aged badly, stolen from the cellar of a man aging worse still.

Laurence had asked, once, lip curled with a cat’s playful smile— what would you tell God, if you had the chance? He’d scoffed and pondered it, and then whispered as if ashamed, nothing I would not tell you.

Now God, it looms between them like a third shadow, tall as trees and darker than night. It thrives in the thin space that separates their bodies, here standing on the sand, where no one can see the shape of them. Micolash understands that he is afraid of it; in the same way he is afraid of eating at the divine’s halcyon table, afraid of staining his lips a quick silver.

“I hope you’ll forgive me for saying so.” Laurence smiles as he usually does when aiming for levity, but in his eyes gleams nothing besides a scrap of tender ache, a bruise before it blooms. “You look terrible.”

It is the sort of thing he is wont to shrug off, but he has seen himself in his little scrap of mirror and found his pallor too stark, reminiscent of consumptives come knocking at his father’s door, clumsy-limbed and colourless mouths, for want of a cure. He has poked at the deep-dark pockets beneath his eyes and let his forefinger linger at the curve of his hardbone eye socket. After that had followed the fierce urge to retch and the refusal to eat, for which he remains grateful. He can barely stomach the sight and gurgle of the parasites, the shrill sound they produce as they are plucked, the writhing near feral of their slugbodies trapped in glass.

He knows there is more to this spell of debility than mere lack of sleep. But he is not superstitious and loathes the idea that he should.

“I feel rather sick.”

Immediately Laurence’s forced grin morphs to grimace, and then to a taut, inexpressive line willing itself severe. Thus he resembles his father the barrister, whom Micolash had seen fair and serious on a daguerreotype. Voicing it would make his mouth downturn, his brows knit in frustration, drawing a deep furrow between.

“Tell me you have not eaten of it.”

It, it, it, the God which has become a meal.

They refuse to call it she, to give it rightful ownership of the woman’s plight, even after plucking the fetus from its belly. It makes him think of his mother who drowned when he was seven. Father said, she did not see the weather turn, father said, I should have been there, father had not been there. They had buried her blue body, he had seen her blue body, her black black raven’s hair stuck to her skull, her wondrous eye sockets. He had wanted to pry them open, to hide their sweet coffee-tone jewels under his tongue. He had wanted to put God in his mouth and choke on it.

“No. I heard— well, it beckoned, strangely. But I could not abase myself in such a manner.” God had asked him a question for which he’d no answer to give. His throat bobs with the tide. He is afraid he might retch and does his utmost to keep the acrid taste of bile down. “Not when I saw them knifing at it.”

Knifing at God as if at a roast, eager to share a morsel.

This dead-gone beach makes for one poor supper table. The prospectors have brought flasks of liquor, he knows, and no doubt have ordered some more be delivered along with their potions and sedatives; would it wash the taste away, leave their teeth clean? He steals a sideways glance at their encampment, a bunch of thick canvas tents nestled in the shade of the cliff to avoid the worst of the weather. Busybodies, all of them, coming and going in their leathers with blades at their belts. Only the girl is like a tomb, still and silent, often found sat down upon a rock and gazing at the sea, sabre lean-to between her folded legs. He is curious to see whether she might take root so as to let barnacles crust on her boots and algae roost, serpentine, at her feet. They have taken to speaking when she stands guard and he fails to court the possibility of sleep. Still he does not know her name.

“It’s all bloody strange.” Laurence’s voice has a hint of sick yellow at the edges, to match his queasy smile. “I thought I had dreamed it. Their glistening mouths…”

“I wish that I had”, says Micolash.

Something akin to that understanding they’ve learned to cultivate at school passes between them. When the lecture ends and every student goes keen to drag their shoes and robes down-and-down, alone or in packs, off to the library or to town, to the alehouse or gambling hall; when they join, or don’t, and share the punchline of a joke with the corner of their eyes.

“I wish that, too.”

Laurence leans in to touch his cheek. He frowns at the feel of this warm hand to his clammy skin, the sensation known and not. Closing his eyes he cannot help but bruise the anatomist’s star-studded flank again as her teeth nibble at his earlobe, as her lips stain red with his blood, as all-animal they eat at each other’s table without a care to leave crumbs. It disgusts him that the other might know, by so fleeting a contact with him, to what vile a husk he’s been reduced. She had asked him, or the thing she’d eaten had asked him with her greensmoke voice, but all the same he’d a nagging horror he had taken which ought not have been offered. He is afraid that if he puts his fingers in his mouth he will taste there stardust; that it will turn into fish and leave him with hard-to-swallow scales down his throat. He has scrubbed himself raw and cannot be clean.

“You are terribly cold”, says the archaeologist.

“Yes”, he mouths, although he is not cold and finds his father’s old coat rather stifling and heavy to stand in. His starched collar digs into his neck, he’s knotted his tie too tight. He does not want to look into his comrade’s forest eyes, nor his fair hair starting to grease, nor those hands he has known near another body of water. He wants to lace their fingers and wake up by the lake a boy of eighteen. “I have those dreams”, he whines, feeble-tint voice tight in his throat. “I have the strangest dreams.”

Slow with the snake’s hunger, the golden boy’s hand cradles his jaw.

“Will you tell me about them?”

He wishes that he could refuse. That skin warm against the fever-cold of his face, it spurs him forward, a leash braided in gold. His throat constricts around a lump, growing with each day on this coast a little larger.

“A boatman asks that I give him my eyes, so that I may see God without bias. I do give them without question. It doesn’t hurt. Really, it’s the oddest thing.” He blinks a few times to chase away nascent tears. “My eyes keep hurting when I’m awake, as if I had something there—” He forces himself to pause, to ponder. “Do I have something in my eyes? The truth is, I’ve no idea. I avoid them in the mirror.”

“Well, let us have a look.”

But he is afraid, and keeps his eyes firmly set upon his own hand, clutching at the chain of his watch. Daylight turns those intricate silver links liquid.

“Please.” It is not a word Laurence uses lightly, and so he cannot resist the urge to meet his gaze. “I will not have you be afraid.”

Still it hurts to be looked at: so he closes his eyes.

He lets Laurence kiss his mouth, and reap there what the anatomist has sown, and give in return the earthy flavour of a cheap cup of tea. It curls, his lovely silver tongue— near enough the boy-butcher may forget where he is, if not for the whale oil stink sewn into the lining of his clothes. A hand at his shoulder serves as anchor, another on his thigh as kindling for a fire yet to come. Here they are well alone, thus he is able to hold his nerves on a leash, to let a little of another’s life seep into his marrow, to bite down on it if he so wishes. Between them softness never quite turns to crunchbone pressure, yet all the same he would not begrudge Laurence’s strong thumb a notch bolder at his jaw.

The moment they part his breath shortens and he cannot quite meet the other’s eye, instead relishes in that hand upon his neck, those fingers chasing the hair curling at the nape. When they get back to Byrgenwerth he will cut it short again, so that it doesn’t hinder the warmth of the golden boy’s skin pressed to his own: it would not do to let him walk an overgrown plot. It throws him back to the house in Yahar’gul, to the iron gate that will one day rust; to that backyard his father once called his physic garden, now abandoned to the rule of stinging nettle. It used to bite at his ankles when he was a child scrabbling about in knee-length breeches and stockings. The surgeon would turn to nurse and apply such cold ointment, in low gentle tones warning the boy never to tread the garden without his boots on.

If Laurence sees that he has lost himself to memory, he does not comment on it. Slowly his hand slips from Micolash’s neck to the front of his coat, rests there upon his fast heartbeat.

“What is it”, he asks, honey-dew voice come blue from the heavens, “that you are so afraid to tell me?”

I have found God, but he cannot pronounce the words. To his scientific mind it rings poisonous as any heresy. He will keep them close to his chest until they grow too large to be contained.

Besides it seems irrelevant now, here-alone with that boy’s side profile made of gold, their hands loosely twined. He has only ever cared for godliness one way, it dawns on him: blonde and doe-eyed, an assortment of supple skin and pliant limbs, that warm, pale strip of smooth belly he more than once has laid his head upon to sleep. It is an image altogether hard to reconcile with the tang of rotten fish and afterbirth suspended above the corpse in particles. He is loath to think of sunlight pleasures and those insistent pinpricks of horror in the same breath, to shift, seamless, sick, from dream to nightmare and back again.

Laurence’s finger at the corner of his mouth reassures him, if a little. It slithers along his lower lip, catches a slip of flaking skin he constantly picks at— makes past the seam to reach for his teeth, blind in its terrible faith in the idea that Micolash is not one to bite down. He is not. He lets it, that fingertip, be his tether to the world of men.

“You should come home with me at the end of term. The house will be quite empty— it will be father and I, and a couple of servants. He’ll take us hunting if the weather is kind.”

“You despise hunting. You keep telling me.”

Words curl oddly around that warm, calloused finger. The sharp end of his broken tooth prods at the underside of it, like a pointed question. It makes Laurence smile, gently.

“Mostly I’m bored with his endless carping. Barristers are like professors, they love to hear themselves talk. He tells me about his brother who is an army man, and what good it would do me to go the same path— I daresay looking decent in uniform is as far as I could manage.”

His green eyes grow wide as some dream-ocean, underlined by dark circles. When he takes his finger back it makes a wet sort of a sound.

“I’m in earnest, you know. I’d welcome the company.”

There is nothing more dangerous than the divine in earnest, Micolash will think later, much later, when the moon has come calling. He will have trouble remembering whether it first applied to Laurence or to the gaping-hole carcass of the universe. He works a nervous tongue in his mouth, around the teeth huddled in the back.

“I’ve never in my life held a rifle.”

“It’s quite alright.” A laugh, a burst of sunshine. Clouds pack together all the more fiercely overhead. “You will not have to shoot. You can watch, if you’d rather. My father does like an audience.”

With hesitance he pictures himself sitting by the fire in some rustic hunting lodge built of large stones and sturdy floorboards, a trophy mounted above the mantelpiece. Sitting there with Laurence and his older lookalike, who will teach him to name all the parts in a rifle— another sort of anatomy lesson, balm and stitch for his split-in-two machine heart. He will try to guess at the animal which has shed its skin so that the rug beneath him might be made. He will throw wild guesses so that Laurence might snort, and him in turn, and the both of them become boys again, young enough to warrant a mild-voice scolding.

“I would like that”, he admits, truthfully.

To be there, and to look at things from a distance; to keep the rifle unloaded and the bullets in his tweeds’ pocket; harmlessly to see the woods come alive, to hear the fox cunning with its lithe step, to smell the wet earth and feel it breathing at each footfall. Because he knows that one day, he will be done watching.

Θ

[God VIII]

You’ve a bit of God stuck between your teeth.

It is Laurence, or the idea of Laurence, who tells him. He has yet to mistake the colour blue of his voice. He says that it cannot be so, for he has not eaten. All the same he raises a hesitant fingertip, prodding at his teeth with its bitten-off nail. He finds there God in the shape of a fishbone, a needle white and very fine. Then a pearl with a hole in it, impaled on his broken tooth like a troublesome jewel. When he turns it over and over with finger and thumb, it resembles an eye. His own, if covered by a sheen of nacre rather than streaked with burst vessels, a ball of palewater. He palms it to hide it from sight. Buries it in a pocket, where it will learn to sleep and weigh heavy as most secrets do.

Tonguing at the divine turns out a disappointment. He remembers his father’s adage, God is an excuse, and for the first time in years feels inclined to live by it. An invention does not seem to fit his idea of God anymore, too narrow, too comfortably made for its niche and not to be disturbed. This God which may or may not taste of fish is infinitely larger than his field of view, and it scares him to yield to it his certainties.

The world as he knows it stands uprooted, on its head, upside-down, mirror to a mirror.

↓

Later there is a thick tongue and bitten-back moan in his mouth.

He is not so sure it’s a tongue, it tastes brackish and is littered with round lumps— perhaps God’s tongue prodding at his gums, in the pocket of his cheek— he laps the yellowtaste of it, he gulps it down. There’s a hand down his back, there’s sharp nails clawing at his chest, something else wet and squelching somewhere deeper down, his own fingers perhaps keeping score, then again the half-circle of her teeth and the half-circle of his earlobe. Easy mathematics: the thick tongue and bitten-back moan come full circle. In his mouth it sticks like ferns, like algae, he wants to spit it out and retch, he chews on it, he chews he sickens he splits in halves, he burrows deepdown, he give-and-takes, he lets the skittish bird nest inside of the anatomist

and asks only that she bites its head off.

↓

What is the taste of God? he asks Laurence-who-has-not-eaten.

Three high-piled spoonfuls of sugar in his coffee. He is thirty-seven years old. He has a sweetrot tooth, at the sharp end of it the taste of a golden fingertip. His mouth shyly molds to cold ceramic; to warm tar-pit black.

The other’s cup runneth over: a bronze, carved thing, ancient, dug-up by greedy ringed hands. Spiderwebs gather at the foot, and a bit of moss on the side, aiming to devour the red eye of a ruby there inlaid.

You may find out, says Laurence-who-has-not-(yet)-eaten, if you sit at my table.

The black at the bottom of his cup has turned red, mellow and metallic.

He pushes it away.

↓

He wakes,

he spits from an empty stomach,

he sleeps again.

Θ

God, he hypothesises one morning, is a clever sickness.

It is half-hearted, this observation, more bad joke than aphorism, but he cannot ignore the signs in the mirror any longer. His pallor accentuates, as do the halfmoon shadows under his eyes. Thin blood vessels keep on bursting, sewing red filaments to his sclera, and the bluewater of his irises takes on curious shades at lamplight’s glow. From his mentor’s concerned glances, thrown sideways or over-shoulder, he gathers that it is worse than he’d thought; that it is high time he stops tossing and turning on his bedroll and gives himself to a doctor’s counsel.

When she examines him, Rom’s touch is caught somewhere between the physician’s and the one-time lover’s. He tries not to squirm on his stool. It lasts a long while, he finds, during which she prods at the ever salient curve of his ribs, the knobble of his throat, the delicate paperskin of his eyelids. The shell of his ear, where she has bitten. The flaking lower lip she has kissed, and Laurence has kissed. In the end she finds she cannot help and advises him to ask the prospectors if they might spare him a vial of their sedative.

He has heard of it, naturally— homebrewed mixture distilled from the alembics of senior Byrgenwerth chemists and pharmacists, part medicine part alchemical flight of fancy. Yet for all the made-up tales his fellow students enjoy trading about, it is known to be efficient and to have saved more than one tomb-delver’s nerves from a hard break. Oft he has wondered what the thick honeybrown concoction is made from. The few privy to this secret, it turned out when he asked, are well intent on keeping it.

As he has done countless times since the first day, he wanders across the beach at an aimless pace, looking left and right and measuring, where he can, the lines and angles of disaster still being traced in the sand.

Others like him, who have not eaten, rove about the coast with such ailments the sea has seen fit to reward them with for leaving its God well alone. He recognises a young prospector retching his breakfast, another mumbling to himself, delirious, and even the sickface of mapmaker-Moncrieff bent over his charts, stark white, sleepless eyes, shaking hands and all. Micolash’s stomach takes a nasty turn, staring at him who scratches his scabby, stubbled face absently. He would try and sit with him, he would share his plight, if only the man did look a little less like his father. As it is he can only leave him in a physician’s hands and seek his own relief elsewhere.

He hasn’t ventured so close to the prospectors’ quarters, quite put off by the glint of eyes under the brims of hats and the hint of gunpowder wafting about their leathers. Something like blood, too, copper-coin colour up the nose. He knows they have slaughtered much fisherfolk as a hunting man would a deer back in college woods, and hasn’t flinched more than once at the thought, not even with his fingers down these poor souls’ skulls.

Seeing weapons lying about makes him reconsider. A sheathed sword leans against a crate, right by the open flap of a tent, and although painstakingly cleaned up he can imagine its blade only red, like a wound waiting to suppurate. They might think him mad as the locals were, fever-warm little thing, all limbs and chalk pallor, swaying on his pinstripe sticks-for-legs. They might draw their blades, point their pistols, they might open fire, open wound, open him up— a bead of sweat pearls heavy at his upper lip. He wipes it off with shaking thumbtip, and sweats some more.

First he thinks to look for the girl, because she knows him, and if she doesn’t care for him at least her civility can be counted on. She is not there, however. He has to ask one of the sullen young men huddled round a cookpot, suppressing a fresh surge of disgust at the smell of food. They offer only noncommittal mumbles and point him towards the tent at the far end of the line.

When he peers inside, it is empty and rather dark. A bedroll in the corner, and little else— an overturned crate in lieu of a table, a mirror-scrap, a lamp and old razor, a well-loved book. Weapons, too. Those he does his best not to stare at.

“Shouldn’t loiter, boy”, comes a raspy voice at his back.

He startles and spins on his heel. Gehrman hovers there, for once without his ubiquitous hat and mud-splattered coat. His shirtsleeves are rolled up to muscled, hairy forearms, his naked workman’s hands oddly clean if not for a trace of blood encrusted under his nails. He looks worn-out as the rest of them, every bristle on his chin a stiff needle, two slack pockets under his honey eyes. There is no telling how old he is.

“Forgive me”, he mutters. His nerves are afire. “I was told to come here and ask for sedatives.”

Gehrman says nothing. With an idle hand he scratches at his dirty brown hair, lank and a touch too long, lazily tied up at the nape. Micolash’s tongue darts at his cracked lip.

“I feel out of sorts.”

“Do you?”

“Rather.” He sifts through his symptoms the way his father taught him long ago. Making inventory slows his breath a fraction. “Tremors and sweat, mostly. Restless sleep. Headaches.”

“Alright.”

The prospector gestures for him to enter his tent, and then follows, not bothering to loosen the flap for a modicum of privacy. Inside the air is no less chilly than outside, but the scent of tobacco gives a faint impression of warmth, as if he’d just stepped into the smoking lounge back at college. There is another perfume layered on top, almost like incense, although he cannot swear on it; perhaps one of those sachets the tomb-delvers are said to favour on long descents, packed with herbs to ward off whatever malignant miasma leaks from cracks in the ancient corridors. Superstition, he used to think. Now he is not so sure.

He stands an awkward scarecrow, eyes fixed on Gehrman’s back as he rifles through a leather satchel. He might have been staring very pointedly, for after a moment the man peers over his shoulder at him.

“Didn’t catch your name.”

“Kovacs”, but this is his father’s name and he is yet to outgrow it. It hangs like a coat one size too large. He adds, lamely, “Micolash.”

“Huh.”

Finally Gehrman’s hand closes around a small phial, tightly sealed and filled with the tell-tale brown mixture. At the sight of it, Micolash’s heart takes a leap: in relief or fear he doesn’t know, and is rather loath to find out. He had not realised before that he’d missed the oblivion of real sleep so much; that the idea of closing his eyes frightened him because he could not prevent God’s voice from showing its impossible colours in his dreams. He extends his hand palm up, ready to grab his due and leave, but the prospector’s frown pins him in place.

“You’re one o’ those thinker-men thought it a good idea to take a bite, aren’t you?”

It surprises him, for an instant. It shouldn’t have. Of course he is not the first to come and beg for relief— of course some might have been denied, because surely they have too sparse a stock to indulge every prick bedecked in robes and mighty arrogance. He remembers the Cainhurst girl and her disdain for those of his ilk. It is a known fact that scholars and tomb-delvers have little love to spare each other. Even more so those who pretend to cut the universe open and drink of its insides.

Still, he will not have himself be accused of conceit he has not yet shown. He forces his spine to straighten, standing to full height, chin pointy and defiant.

“As a matter of fact I did not.”

“Huh.” Gehrman hands him the bottle, then stuffs his pipe, sticks it between his teeth. He has good teeth for an outdoorsman, if a bit crooked. “Reckon it’s just as well. Can’t say I fancied it myself. A fool’s notion, that, sitting at a table where you don’t know what’s served.”

On that, at least, they can agree. This is what he tells himself whenever he feels those sharp pangs of hunger— those animal urges, teeth-tongue impulses making him sicker even than the sea’s curse. He utters a word of thanks, near afterthought, and turns on his heel to leave. Gehrman’s rumble of a voice, when it comes, is agreeable if rattled by the edge of his teeth against his wooden pipe-stem.

“You should go home, Master Kovacs.”

As ever the name makes him wince. He will never quite own it. The hand firmly clamped around the sedatives goes white in his pocket.

“I am sorry to say I could not, even if I wanted to. There is something…” He trails off and looks the sun in the eye through the tent's open flap up ‘til it hurts. Sweat drips down his temple, sweat drips down his nose. The sedative will keep his heartbeat in check but he knows it will not last so long as to drown the starved deathbird in his chest, clawing at the ribs of its cage. I want out, it says, and I will not be denied. “I don’t know what, but something calls to me in my sleep. A palewater pearl impaled on my tooth.” He points at his blue eye. Left, right, he’s not sure, it’s all the same. “See? There’s something in my eye.”

How the whine at the edge of his voice disgusts him. It has the same sharp, quicksilver colour as God’s blood.

“Fancy that”, Gehrman mutters. “It’s what one o’ my men said last year down the Tombs. Poor lad was going quite mad, he wouldn’t come home neither.” He puffs on his pipe, looking away now, and adds, more quietly. “In the end he clawed it out, the eye. Nothin’ we could do. He wouldn’t come home.”

Blue-tinge smoke slips out of his mouth with the stain of his memories.

“Might be he’s still there, debating his own shadow.”

Θ

[God IX]

When at last he sleeps riding the crest of a caramel drug-wave and God is nowhere to be found,

he ends up wanting for it.

Θ

A burst of fire catches him off guard when he wakes, well-past sunset and bones aching all over.

“I was starting to worry you would not wake up.”

He props himself up on his elbows, gingerly, trying to remember how his limbs are supposed to be arranged and how to move them at his whim. Rom sits next to him on a stool, her ubiquitous cigarette hanging at the edge of her mouth. It seems extinguished, another sign of worry he’s come to learn when she manages to master the set of her eyes.

Too weak to make it back to his tent after injecting the sedative, he has let himself slumber on the fisherman’s cot in the corner of the shack they use for their experiments. A faint ideation of guilt holds him by the throat— looking about, he is relieved to see the eyeless skulls have been disposed of.

On the table he can see an empty jar: the same had been multiplied on the beach before, when the lord-surgeon had knelt and asked of God some more of its bounty. Next to it an array of instruments, and besides that, one of the parasites itself, although no longer able to indulge in its stubborn nerve-writhing. He knows better than to be surprised— if she cannot preside at the head of the table at the divine’s banquet, then she is gladder to sit somewhere else and find her own sustenance. For a moment he ponders the possibility of her having eaten of that meal, too, but decides against it as soon as he notices the thing’s internal organs, or the silver pulp passing for such, neatly arranged on a dish. It gleams, faint and wet, in the glow of lit lamp oil.

“Perhaps I had a heavy hand with the dosage”, he admits.

She raises an autumn eyebrow. The hint of a smile urges the left side of her mouth upwards.

“I rather think you are underfed.” She gestures at a bowl of soup and a heel of bread, oddly peaceful still life painted on the bedside table. “I’m afraid the soup must be more than tepid by now, but you have to eat.”

Although it sickens him, he knows she is right and has not the strength to dispute it. Each spoonful of broth and mouthful of bread is nearly painful on his numb jaw, but the animal side of him relishes the tastes and textures of which it has been denied, and he has to admit he is grateful for the attention. It still strikes him as odd that she is able to be so gentle when she has always been a stern master, and proved herself a stern sort of lover besides. Perhaps it does him credit as an apprentice that she would rather tend to him than replace him, but he would not dare to presume.

“I am sorry”, he says, “for worrying you.”

“Please. You owe me nothing, least of all an apology.” She seems at last to notice her cigarette has died down, and trades it for another that she lights at the flare of a match. The smell of tobacco is sharper, more acrid than in Gehrman’s tent. “I’ve seen how many of us are taking ill. This is hardly your fault.”

But is it not— when he knows he has not eaten, and the other sick ones have not eaten? It seems unjust that those whose arrogance has soared high enough would be rewarded, that those whose fear has placated them would be punished. But then again he is not a child, and knows better than to trust the universe might gain anything from so fickle a construct as justice. He notices his hands are trembling in his lap. He forces them still, and draws his knees closer to his chest. He is not a child, though he finds in the trappings of youthful avoidance some manner of comfort when he needs it most. It hurts being looked at, but with his ice-eyes he holds the steel in the anatomist’s gaze.

“Do you regret it?”

He hadn’t known what he was about to ask. It startles him more than it does her. He doesn’t need to add: the eating, the consumption, the putting-God-in-your-mouth. She knows, and she purses her lips, and a string of smoke slips down like a hangman’s rope.

“I cannot say.” Her greenish voice, equal as ever. “I have curious dreams and curious urges. Ideas I had never entertained before— ideas I didn’t know I could entertain. As if the spectrum of colours had decided to lengthen a fraction for me, because I have shared in the universe’s substance.”

“The universe”, he mumbles, afraid of a new feverish outbreak, “looks back at me in my sleep.”

The universe-God and its thousand eyes-for-hands, grasping at his mind, etching itself in the deepest recesses of his consciousness. Its outline, even in the weightiness of waking, keeps nagging at the very edges of his sight, as does rheum in aftersleep.

Rom takes a long, pensive drag on her cigarette— twists it around her mouth along with his words, taste-testing, measuring, calculating. She will not think him mad, he assumes, because her mouthful of cosmic knowledge is madder still than his dreams. But neither can she allow herself to take anything he offers as scientific proof. Probably they all feel a new geometry to their dreams, if they dream at all, but none the same as another’s. It stings a little, to think the order of things might be taking them all on intimate terms rather than him only.

Everyone, however meek, wishes one day to be singled out.

“Perhaps you ought to take notes of your dreams”, she says when she is done chewing on the butt of her smoke. “Perhaps we all ought to write of our experience here. Heavens know my uncle will not be satisfied with sick men’s ravings and lacklustre findings.”

“Take notes”, he repeats.

A little dumbfounded: how mundane.

“Language has a way of anchoring things. Of making them seem real.”

“Language seems rather feeble”, he retorts. “I have tried putting words over the aches in my eyes, and nothing will do.”

He has refused to say it ever since having his first whiff of its yellow stink: God. He refuses to say it now, because she would laugh it off— because he might get drunk on it and laugh with her, and wish the world had never veered off its axis.

“I do take your point.” Her eyes flit over to the table nearby, where the remains of a parasite lay glistening in their dish. Where before he has made neat round holes in fishermen’s heads. “But experiment has been less than rewarding thus far. Sometimes all we have is theory.”

Surprising himself, he smiles at that, remembering her adage. Theory ought always to precede experiment. She smiles back, a little modestly perhaps: she does not like to confront her own ignorance, no more than her uncle who gazes at the moon from his rocking chair and pretends he will be able to see the future when the veil of cataract finally shrouds his eyes. A current of smooth understanding passes between them. Because they are of a mathematical mind; because they are curious. He is young and might indulge in his reservations for a while, knowing full well he might be required to toss them overboard when the time comes.

It pleases him to share this smile before his next sleep. In a moment he will wish to rest his black bedhead on her thigh, and she will let him.

Her clothes will smell a little like God.

Θ

[God X]

On the eve of the last day he will meet his father by the sea.

“I have found God”, he tells him, displeased with the thinness in his voice.

His father-not, huddled in his coat, looks to him with the mapmaker’s grey eyes and a brittle smile. Sickness makes him seem lean as a starved dog with a cigarette in his mouth, a golden ring on his finger. From up close the resemblance fades quicker than the youth would like: cheekbones are steeper than they ought to be, chin rounder and rough with day-old stubble. He had been so afraid to look and find the similarities, he had altogether discounted the possibility for differences.

“You seem rather sorry for it. How does it feel, finding God?”

He has only to picture it: it feels as if someone has drilled a neat round hole in his skull, and pressed their eye to it.

“Like a wound.” He spreads his long fingers in an arc in front of him, bends the thumb where stings a fresh razor cut. He keeps happening upon such benign accidents, his limbs growing more liquid by the day. “Like its teeth are prying me open, looking for eyes, the way I have pried fishermen’s skulls open. Looking for eyes there also.”

“Have you found them?” The man’s mouth is pursed round his cigarette, in smoke drawing conclusions.

“In a manner of speaking.”

With a handkerchief he dabs at his stingy left eye. He has found it leaking ever since waking up in the middle of the night, as if overflowing with knowledge at war with his body.

“I don’t know that my sight is very clear”, he admits. Finally the lump in his throat swallows itself. It drags something down with it and settles on its bed of bile. “I keep thinking that you are someone else.”

The man’s eyes are wet, like his father’s had been on his deathbed. He has kind eyes, Micolash decides, although cluttered with burst vessels, the skin red all round as if rubbed to exhaustion. Like his own eyes when the tremors start and he knows it is time for a mild dose of sedative. He might be staring himself down an invisible mirror-time; himself in twenty years or so, given bodysoul to the drug, for oblivion is easier than coming to terms. For once he is glad his father is no longer there— that he cannot see him such, broken open in front of the altar of science, the idea of God leaking from his eye and down his hollowed cheek.

The man’s eyes are wet, and he smiles; something apologetic about it.

“Here.”

The mapmaker hands him the half-burnt cigarette, pungent offering hanging ‘tween two fingerbones. His father never smoked. Not the professor’s pipe nor gentleman’s slim cigar, least of all the common man’s hand-rolled cigarette. He takes it, holds it to his mouth. The taste is hot and acrid, but familiar from many mild transgressions in a dormitory bed, his head at repose on a golden boy’s soft belly, smoke swirling in arcs and rings up to the ceiling beams. The touch of Midas in his hair, a subtle whiff of bliss. He exhales, watching as the smoke eddies and confounds itself with the greypale sky.

He hands it back, the way Rom had handed it back on the first day. They’d been sitting around the fire trading pleasantries and near-jokes, punchlines aimed at old Willem and his ploys to shove his hands down moneymen’s pockets. He’d discussed it with Laurence himself on the way, earlier still, boots caked with mud, mouth full of stale bread and head full of what-ifs. They had all been ignorant, once, and in their ignorance strangely content. Now they know: it hurts to be looked at, by God most of all.

Tomorrow they are to slog back through the marshlands with their findings. The cart loaded with their boxes of specimens has been sent ahead, a group of prospectors as escort. The girl went with them, eager to put distance between the coast and herself, before he’d had a chance to ask her name. She’d been kind enough to him.

As for God, they will leave it on the beach. They cannot afford to haul the cosmos along, even less so the strange influence of its sight on the senses. Some scholars, he’s heard from Rom, are halfway to insane if not catatonic with horror. He has no trouble believing it.

“We should not have come”, he hears himself saying. “It was wrong.”

The animal in his chest beats against its cage in mockery.

“We should have known better.”

“For what it’s worth I do agree with you. But we knew what this was.” The cartographer’s arm swipes in a wide arc to encompass the whole of their expedition. The coast itself, the tents ready to be dismantled, the gaggle of scholars in dark coats and haggard eyes. “Only an old man’s gambit for one more year of grants. To think”, and it is said with wry humour but no real mirth, “that Provost Willem has all but purchased what you call God.”

“It is what the universe calls it, not me— not really. It is what it is called in my sleep. I wish it were not.”

Because God is an excuse, and an excuse is easy to grapple with.

“I wish we had not come.”

“In this you are wise. But if not us, it would have been someone else, likely for the same end result. Man is curious, and greedy.” The man who looks like his father, but not so much anymore, drops the stub of his cigarette on the wet sand, crushes it under the heel of his boot with a slight hiss. “There is nothing we could have done to change this.”

“I suppose.”

Again he spreads his hand in front of him. A long, pale thing full of thin bones, fishbones, crawl-up veins carved in blue. It might not have knifed at the divine’s carcass, but all the same it made holes in skulls and gathered oily stink from brains and prodded for eyes everywhere but the socket; it took notes and photographs. He looks sideways at the mapmaker whose camera he’d used, the mapmaker he’d seen taking pictures of God before illness whittled him down to thin sadness. Probably the man is right, and he ought to take comfort where he can find it. It is no use crying over spilt blood.

There is little good he could have done.

He is but a boy with a tin-can God in his eye.