“The Prime Minister wants to meet with you.”
Avery and Layanna joined the others in the lobby—Janx, Hildra and the Prime Minister.
“Rest assured, I summoned you here for a worthwhile reason,” Denaris said. “If you recall, I mentioned having another motive for inviting you into my ranks, and that is this: to get your opinion, perhaps advice, on a most particular corpse.”
“Corpse,” Hildra repeated, and Avery frowned.
Other than used clothes and a slouching hat, Denaris made no concession toward disguise, but disguised she was. She meant to set forth from behind the walls of her siege. Leading them with some authority and flanked by two casually-dressed guards, she led the group down a staircase and into a system of tunnels, explaining that these had originally been built out by the Drakes (the Parliament Building had been erected on the site of the old Palace, destroyed after the Revolution) to conduct their secret business, and she and her people used it now to get around Haggarty. She would teach Avery’s party how to use them and give them access cards so that they could come and go at will.
A car waited for them on the street at the termination of one of the halls and they piled in, Janx asking, “Where we goin’?”
“Why, the morgue, of course.”
After a drive of perhaps twenty minutes, a guard opened a side door of the city morgue for them. Their footfalls echoed off the stone walls and tile floor as Denaris led them through the institution, seeming to know her way around better than she should. The air grew colder as they entered a frigid, medium-sized room lined with cracked marble on two sides and stainless steel banks of body vaults on the other two. Harsh lights lit long tables, and at one a watery-eyed man in scrubs bent over a partly vivisected infected woman. He glanced up as they entered and pulled down his mask.
“Prime Minister,” he said, bowing his head in a strangely lopsided gesture. “Good day.”
“Everyone, meet Dr. Donnel Gehyme. Donnel, everyone.”
“Hello,” he said. “You’ve come to see ... him, I suppose?”
“We have. May we?”
Donnel bobbed his wrinkled, balding head, washed his hands and crossed to one of the banks of body cabinets, moving directly to a certain storage unit, then pausing, as if reluctant for some reason to open it. Was it fear that made him hesitate, or showmanship?
“Is it a pre-human?” Avery asked.
“No,” Denaris said. “It’s human enough, though infected.”
“Is it a particularly odd mutation, perhaps?”
“No.”
“Then why ... ?”
She nodded to Donnel, and he opened the drawer with a flourish—it had been showmanship—and grinned down at the body on the slab. Avery gasped. The body was that of a man in his fifties, badly mutated, with gills on one side of his neck, his nose almost vanished, lips rubbery and large, and webs between the fingers of his right hand—his only hand.
Less than half of the man remained. Everything below his navel was gone, a ragged, strangely melted-looking truncation, and the slash—or wound, or whatever it was—angled up to include his left arm as well, so that all that was left of him was most of a torso, a head and a right arm that had been broken in several places. His whole body, what was left of it, seemed floppy and shrunken. Boneless. As if he had been hurled so hard against something that every bone in his body had shattered. Fish or the like had been at the body, and it had evidently been submerged in water some time, as it was a gnawed and shriveled thing, seemingly about to fall apart. A foul odor rose from it.
“Hells,” Janx said. “What did this?”
“That’s what I was hoping you could tell me,” Denaris said. Then, to Layanna: “More specifically, you.”
Layanna stared at the corpse, seemingly unable to speak. An odd expression had entered her features; Avery couldn’t place it.
“It is a medical mystery,” Donnel said. “Nothing in my experience, even the pre-human races that I know of, could have caused such a death. I’ve analyzed where the body was severed and I believe it was done by some sort of corrosive acid.”
“Acid,” Denaris repeated, as if that were significant. She watched Layanna. “What do you think? Don’t worry, you can speak in front of Donnel.”
Layanna still did not answer, and the Prime Minister frowned.
“Where was the body found?” Avery said. “It looks as though fish have been nibbling on it. Possibly more than fish. And that smell …”
“Near one of the sewer settlements,” Denaris said.
“Sewer settlements?” Avery said, giving Janx a look. “I know you mentioned them before, but, surely … they’re an urban myth.”
“The body was found down there, washed in from a tunnel, drifting on the tide,” the Prime Minister declared flatly, then added, “One of many. Layanna, you still don’t want to say what did this?”
Gazing at the body, that expression only deepened on Layanna’s face—something like sadness, but not, Avery thought, for the dead man.
“The condition of the body closely matches that of several of the corpses found in Janx’s apartment the night you escaped from Fort Brunt,” Denaris said. “Torn apart and melted by acid, hurled with great force. Other bodies were charred, as if electrocuted. More were filled with a type of poison never seen before. I’ve had other doctors than Donnel take a look at this body, and scientists, too. No one can determine what did this.”
“It wasn’t me,” Layanna said.
“I didn’t imagine it was,” Denaris said. “It was found while you were away. But do you agree that it bears all the hallmarks of someone slain by one of your kind?”
Janx shared a long, hard look with Avery, who nodded.
“Yes,” Layanna said. “Though the body is badly deteriorated, it was most likely one of my kind that slew this man.” To Avery, she added, “We have one more problem to contend with, then.”
There was something peculiar in her voice as she said this. It was not worry, he thought, nor fear. It was, once again, sadness. Perhaps even longing.
* * *
