AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Do the autopsy here,” Apollius continued, “and the results do not leave this room.”
A swallow worked down the other man’s throat. Then he inclined his head. “As you command.”
The other Presque Mort in the solar—Alexis and a woman whose name Lore didn’t know—exchanged wary glances with each other, and then with Gabe, asking a silent question.
The Priest Exalted firmed his lips, looked at Amelia’s body again. Then he jerked his chin toward the door.
Alexis nearly breathed a sigh of relief as they and the woman went to exit.
“Alexis,” Apollius called after them.
The Presque Mort turned around, expression carefully nonchalant.
“The orders given you were good,” Apollius said, “but next time, you will wait for mine. We must be of an accord, the Church and the crown. Under one rule. Don’t you agree?”
Alexis nodded. Then they bowed, stilted and quick. With another quick glance at Gabe, they disappeared out the door.
One more challenge, this one less subtle. Apollius marking Himself as the leader of the Presque Mort, not Gabe.
Lore bit her cheek and tried to keep from nervous fidgeting.
The assistant returned with the tools—scalpels, knives, a saw with serrated teeth that made Lore’s bones hurt just to look at. The assistant eyed his employer; the physician gave a nod and a quick jerk of his hands toward the body, a what am I supposed to do? kind of gesture that Lore deeply empathized with.
Still looking skeptical, the assistant handed the physician the saw. The man dropped to his knees, lining up the blade over Amelia’s chest.
Lore looked away. Once the sounds started, she wanted to plug her ears, too, but couldn’t quite make herself, not when Apollius was watching, not when He was clearly doing this for her benefit. She stared at the wall until her vision blurred, trying to tune out the sound of the saw, the snap of ribs and the meaty pull of muscle, the liquid splat of interior matter hitting the floor.
When the sounds stopped, she blinked and made her eyes focus again, looking down at Amelia’s corpse.
Blood gloved the physician from fingertip to elbow as he set the saw aside, trading it out for a set of gleaming scissors. Those sounds weren’t so bad, though the way he brushed bone splinters from his lap before he began made her stomach lurch. Carefully, he cleared out the stringy remains of veins and fat and sinew, opening the cavity of Amelia’s chest farther, folding aside her lungs like wings to reveal the gory knot of her heart.
She was a person hours ago, Lore reminded herself. A person with thoughts and wishes who had people she loved and was loved in return, and even if she wasn’t very nice, she didn’t deserve this. To be made into a mess of blood and flesh and broken bone, to have her organs examined out here in the open like interesting trinkets. For all Lore’s familiarity with death, the savagery still made her head swim.
With a vile squishing noise, the physician grasped Amelia’s heart and tugged it from her chest. He held it up in the morning light, incongruously dark against the pale tile and bright-gleaming glass and pattering fountain of Bastian’s solar. A drop of blood fell from it and spattered on his spectacles. Another fell to the pool of water around Amelia’s head, starbursting from red to pink.
“Hmm,” he said, turning the organ over in his bloody hands.
“Something interesting?” Apollius sipped his coffee again.
“Indeed.” Apparently, the physician had buried his misgivings in his work; he no longer sounded apprehensive, just filled with curiosity. “The muscles are warped. It’s congruent with what happens when the heart spasms, almost, but not exactly.” He brought the macabre trophy closer to his eyes. “It looks almost like the heart… beat too much, too quickly. Cycled through too much blood, then stopped abruptly. Perhaps that wasn’t the cause of death, just the precursor…”
Lore had stopped hearing him before he trailed off into academic wonderings, stuck on what he’d said before. Channeling Spiritum felt like that: too much air in your lungs. Too much blood in your veins. Too many beats of your heart.
Amelia hadn’t been able to channel Spiritum. But if someone manipulated the Spiritum in her body…
Lore’s eyes found Apollius’s again. He was looking at her, His face arranged in the necessary grave stoicism for a King. But there was a cruel glee in His golden eyes.
“This is interesting,” the physician continued, oblivious. He’d set down the heart in a sticky pool on the floor and used the scissors to cut through the muscle of Amelia’s lungs. “There’s water in here. In the esophagus, too, it looks like.” In a move that nearly made Lore gag, he leaned forward so his nose was almost inside the corpse and took a quick breath. “And it smells like salt. At least, the water in the lungs does.”
“Interesting, indeed,” Apollius murmured around His cup.
The physician dipped his fingers into the pool around Amelia’s head, lifted them to his nose. “Not salt water here, though,” he said to himself. He held out his hand to his assistant; the other man riffled through the bag he’d brought and pulled out a small cup, handing it over. The physician scooped some of the water on the floor into it, capped the cup carefully, then did the same to the bloody water in Amelia’s lungs. “I’d have to test them to be sure, but it appears that the water in her lungs and the water on the floor aren’t the same, though the trajectory would make it seem as though she coughed it up.”
“A dry drowning,” Apollius said. “How could such a thing have happened?”
“I’m not sure,” the physician replied, sounding almost excited by the prospect of a medical mystery to solve. “I’ll run some tests, surely, ask around to everyone who spent time with the subject prior to last night…”
Apollius wasn’t listening. Apollius was still staring right at Lore. The cup in His hand tipped forward, just long enough for her to see what was in it.
