Part I: What the Moon Reveals
The pits of the corpses never cease to sing.
Elian Voss was taught this when he was only three years old, the first time he went down to the undercathedrals and was armed with nothing but a bone saw and a stomach stuffed with bile. The songs are not music, they are the dying prayers that are stuck in the dead lungs, that they squeeze out when the blessed marrow injections come upon cold flesh. It is what some of the acolytes refer to as the Requiem of Saints. Elian refers to it as evidence that the Church is a lie.
In case resurrection was holy, the dead would not scream.
Now he is creeping on a decayed maintenance gantry, half a hundred feet on the side of the nearest pit, his acolyte robes huddled in against the wind, which whistles through the cavernous chamber. He finds bodies piled down below, one above the other, fresh and fresh, old and old, and all awaiting the sorting of the grave surgeons in the morning to be placed in the worthy and unworthy heaps. The good are sewn into Lazarus Frames. The undeserving are fed on the angel reactor which keeps the city alive.
The shaking hands of Elian can be spotted as he inspects the leather satchel tied to his chest. Scalpel. Bone-saw. Cursed marrow vials, stolen out of the Chapel of Saint Agony. A strand of silver suture line, actually found on an operating-table he had cleaned last week. And the book.
It is the book that made him come here.
It had been concealed in the pages of an old anatomical Bible the type on which the Church was then employing prior to settling on their canon. Elian had discovered it during the process of cataloging relics in the Crypt of Forgotten Texts, a task that no one was willing to take due to the odor of the air down there which was that of decayed corpses, and even more decayed sinners. Even the Bible was a bad thing: dried up vellum, old ink, prayers to God to take all the organs, which had since become obsolete two hundred years before. However, the binding was sturdier than it ought to have been.
He had a scalpeled it open and would do this by candlelight so that no one could notice his hands shaking.
The contents within were not Church teaching. They were something older. Something that was prior to the Sacred Biomedical Church altogether. Lightning engines were wired directly into human nervous systems depicted by diagrams. Recipes to grow meat that recalled being alive. Prayers which did not request God to perform any miracles but required it.
Some one had written in blood that had dried to rust at the bottom of the last page:
The sin that Victor committed was not to create life, but not to love his creation. Do not repeat his failure."
Elian had read the words seventeen times by the time he understood that he was weeping.
Three months later, he finds himself on a gantry over the corpse pits with a skeleton in his satchel and no clue whether he is doing what he is doing is love or another failure.
The skeleton had been readily located. All the acolytes are familiar with the tale of Ser Gideon Lazarus the knight who had killed a dozen exorcists who had witnessed the vivisecture of his lover, whose body had been considered too foul to be interred, and who had been thrown to the pits like waste matter. What none can tell is that the Church never discovered all his bones. The ribcage was too heavy to be carried by the pit workers. His head had fallen down a drain hole and was lost in centuries.
Both of them were found within the same week by Elian. In the Crypt of Saint Whispers the ribcage had been employed as a support beam. The skull had been stuffed in the back of a furnace in the undercathedral kitchens, and it had been smiling at the cooks during three centuries.
He had bumped into the bones when he had reassembled the skeleton in his own workroom a former confessional booth in the acolyte dormitory. A low, ringing tone which shook his palms up to his chest and sat there like a second heart-beat.
The note that he is chasing has been in him since.
Okay, Elian mumbles to himself looking in the satchel again. Scalpel. Suture wire. Marrow vials. Skull. Ribcage. "Okay. You can do this. Death isn't"
"Talking to yourself already? That's not a great sign."
Elian's heart stops. He turns, reaching into his satchel with one hand towards the scalpel, and almost slips off the gantry.
There is a girl sitting on the railing behind him, and her legs are hanging over the corpse pit below. She is young, perhaps twenty, perhaps younger, again it is difficult to actually tell under the dirt and the uncontrolled wild dark hair which has never been done up at all. She wears a ripped acolyte robe, re-stitched with leather straps and what appears to be half a surgical harness, and is smiling at him as she did the priest who is masturbating in the reliquary.
Elian recognizes her. Those who do not work in the undercathedrals know her. It is her who snitches marrow vials off the surgical altars, and activates emergency resurrection cycles whenever the guards get too near. It is she who knows all the maintenance shafts and dead bodies between the under quarters and the sky bridges. She is the one that Dark Order has been chasing since six months, since she fled out of the secret laboratories with half a dozen experimental bioweapons implanted into her body.
Her name is Mio. Or that is what she calls herself. It is perhaps the only thing that belongs to her.
You are the grave surgeon and you have been robbing the Chapel of Saint Agony, which is stealing relic chips, says Mios, and you are still smiling at me. The one who is walking out in the middle of the night to the corpse pits carrying a satchel of bones. This near is the one that the Dark Order are getting to.
And she is holding two fingers, a millimeter between them.
Elian has a tighter hold on the scalpel. "I don't know what you're "
"Relax. Had I wished to turn you in I would have done so last week when you had been almost caught by the night patrol. You know they have dogs, right? Dogs to sniff forbidden scripture fifty miles? You passed them with a skull in your bag and you did not even see them.
She tells this as though it is funny. It is really hilarious the idea of Elian being ripped to pieces by exorcist hounds.
"What do you want?" Elian asks.
Mio's grin fades. Juxtaposed, briefly, briefly, she is young and frightened and empty without reference to the corpse pit below her.
I would like to know how it will work, she says to herself. Could you really bring somebody back. Not like the Church does it not a puppet with a scripture chip in its head. Really bring them back. The way it says in the book."
Elian goes cold. "How do you know about the book?"
I have been trailing you three months. I know about the book. I know about the skeleton. I know you have been working with rats in the sub crypts, and I know you have gotten three successes and one colossal flop of a rat grown on to grow six legs and had to be struck down with a hammer. She pauses. I am not making a judgment about the hammer thing. I'd have used a hammer too."
Elian stares at her. He does not know whether to be scared or impressed. Both, probably. Definitely both.
"Why?" he asks.
Mio looks down at her hands. She has her fingers bandaged in surgical tape, and when the moonlight strikes them at the right moment Elian can even read the dark lines of scripture imprinted under her skin. The Church did that to her. Inscribed prayers on her flesh like a prayer book. Attempted to make out of her what she is not.
Since they did so to me, she says, and they said it was salvation. And I would like to know whether there is any way of returning after being saved that hard.
Elian does not know how to answer that. He does not know how to answer many things. But he has a skeleton in his satchel and a book in his work-room and three months of restless nights telling him that, unless he does this now, he will never do it.
Assist me with carrying the equipment, he says. Whistle, in case somebody comes.
The smile of Mios is again, but this time more natural. "I don't whistle. I scream. It's more effective."
She jumps out of the railing and stands next to him on the gantry light as a cat. At a closer distance, Elian can notice the scars on her wrists, the dim light of her eyes in the darkness. She's dangerous. She's unstable. More likely, she will kill the two.
However, she is the only one who ever volunteered to assist rather than correct him that he is a fool in attempting.
Together they fall down into the pit.
Part II: The First Breath
The resurrection room is not what Elian would have preferred to have, as it is a choice.
It is a repair hole in the lower side of the corpse pit, which is only reached by a broken drainage shaft which Mios was forced to squeeze into headfirst. The alcove is about ten feet across, and the walls of it are lined with rusted pipes dripping a constant stream of condensed water upon the floor. In the middle of it is a broken surgeon table remnant of whatever ill work was done here before the Church closed down upon it and a lightning engine, which Mios stole out of the Chapel of Saint Agony last night, three nights ago.
That is all they are going to get.
Elian puts the skeleton on the operating table, and Mios attaches the lightning engine to the pipes of the wall. The bones are old and yellow, and splintery here and there, but as he sets them in an anatomical sequence they still hum. That low note again. As a tuning fork which has been waiting years to have its stroke.
"Where did you learn to do this?" Mios inquires somewhere behind him. Her voice is reverberating in the minor room.
"The book," Elian says. And following the senior surgeons. And practicing on rats."
"Rats aren't people."
"No," Elian agrees. He puts the skull on top of his table and moves back to see his creation. A skeleton. Just a skeleton. However, he can feel the humming increase below his hands. "But the process is the same. You need a body. To give the spark you require an engine. You have a text to instruct the flesh what form thou should keep in mind.
And you need something to fill in places where the old soul was.
Elian looks at her. She is standing at the lightning engine, lighted half of her face by the moonlight peeking through the cracks of the wall. Her face can not be read.
The book says that the soul does not leave all the way, Elian says. "It leaves traces. Echoes. Being so that the body is ready the echoes will remember to be complete.
Mio nods slowly. "And if you build it wrong?"
Elian contemplates the rat with six legs. The manner in which it had stared at him with four eyes all four of a guilty nature. The noise that it had made when he struck the hammer.
Then it is merely a dead corpse screaming, says he.
Mio doesn't flinch. She's seen worse. She is worse, in some ways.
"Let's do it," she says.
Lightning engine requires ten minutes to warm up. Elian spends the period to insert the stolen skeleton marrow eggs in the recesses of the skeleton one in the chest, where the heart is supposed to be, one in the skull, one in each palm. He cuts the silver suture wire through the small spaces between bones and sews the skeleton up using the same pattern to which he applied on the rats. And with wrapping the bones in wire, A hundred times, and more.
The scripture comes last. Elian picks up the forbidden book to the page he has memorized in the last three months and starts reading.
He doesn't know the language. No one does. It is even older than the Church, than the city, than the poisoned earth beneath. Yet the words are good in his tongue and as the prayers that he has been uttering his entire life without realizing it. The atmosphere in the alcove becomes stifling. The lightning engine performs more loudly. The vials of marrow start glowing.
"From death, life. From silence, voice. The form of what was lost I made, out of dust.
Her hands are on the controls of the engine, and Mios is determined. The light of the moon pouring through the holes in the wall is increasing and washing the skeleton in water. The bones are no more yellow. They're white. Glowing white. The wire encircling them is melting and joining the calcium and becomes a part of the structure.
"Return what was taken. Restore what was broken. And make the echoes of the song.
The lightning engine screams. Mios energy emits out of the cables he has plugged into the wall pipes and into the surgical table, via the skeleton where it ascends to the marrow vials, where they are now like suns in glasses. Elian continues reading, his voice breaking, his hands trembling, so that he cannot hold the book.
"RISE."
The world goes white.
Elian is flung back into the wall. His skull breaks against the stone and for a moment he sees stars, and then he sees all, the fibers of life intricately interwoven all over the city, the prayers which are stuck there like flies in the stone, and the angel reactor beating himself to death like a dead heart beneath. He looks at the bones on the table, but not the bones, the memory, the centuries of anger and love and heartache crammed into a kind of mould that has been waiting to be filled.
And then he sees the body.
It's not a skeleton anymore. It is it of flesh, light, stitched flesh, and on it all the scars are glowing faintly gold. It is muscle and sinew and skin, all pulled together by the silver wire which has become of it, of him. It is a man, youthful, and at the same time, old, with a sharp and beautiful face like corpses have, as they are beautiful, immobile in the state between death and decay.
His eyes are closed.
The lightning engine dies. The light fades. The marrow bones are incinerated and only black ashes are left in the cavities of his chest.
On his ears ringing, his vision swimming, Elian forces himself to his feet. Mios has already sat down at the table, her hand is floating over the breast of the man, but not touching.
"Is he"
The man's eyes open.
They're red. Not the red of blood or the red of fire but the red of moonlight in stained glass. The red of three centuries dead something only just beginning to recall the seeing of it.
He looks at Elian.
He opens his mouth.
He screams.
It's not a human sound. It is the sound of a body that is reviving the pain which it has not experienced centuries before. The re connection of the nerves, the fusing of the bones, the attempted beating of organs that are not there. The voice of a man who was killed looking at the object of his affection being sliced into pieces, and who has now come to know he is alive once again and she is no more.
Elian reaches for him. He doesn't think about it. His hand pushes round the wrist of the man the skin is hot, too hot, burning and he is grip tight.
You are alive, Elian says, because that is the only thing that comes to his mind. "You're alive. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I didn't I couldn't"
The man's screaming stops. His gaze is concentrated on the face of Elian, and there is nothing there, nothing whatever, no more than the blood glow and centuries of nothingness behind it.
Then his hand moves. He fumblingly, painfully, as though he has lost the ability to manage his own body, raises his arm and fits his huge hand on the shoulder of Elian.
He speaks. His voice is a wreck, shattered by many centuries of silence, yet the words are intelligible.
You ought to have kept me to the dark.
Part III: The Hunt Begins
Three hours afterwards, Sister Veyra sits in the corpse pit where resurrection occurred and as she does, the final remains of forbidden writing disappear off the stones.
She does not have to feel them to have the idea of their contents. She is also a twelve year old exorcist. More purity than she cares to forget, More blasphemy than she cares to cleanse. The deposits left on these stones are quite indisputable.
Illegal resurrection. Full body reconstruction. The highest order of violation of the scripture.
The Church has been robbed of somebody. One has stolen that Gods possession and brought it back to life.
The grip of the hilt of her blade becomes tighter in the hand of Veyra. The blade is known as Absolution Edge a six foot coffin sword carved with verses which burn the heretics inside and out. It is heavy and she is accustomed to heavy. She is accustomed to supporting the burden of justice of the Church on her shoulders.
"Report."
The voice is behind her back. Veyra doesn't turn. She can tell who it is through the chill which fills the air, by the silence and stillness which the other exorcists in the pit have already become.
Father Malrec is an actor who comes out of the shadow it has been in all this time. He is also very tall, six seven at least, and gaunt in the manner that implies he has been emptied and filled with something different. His priestly robes are deep crimson velvet, which are open throated down to crotch, and under them the scars can be observed by Veyra. Hundreds of them, perfect black stitches that create verses of the living scripture on his breast, his stomach, his thighs. His speech is a beat in the verses.
The resurrection just happened, maybe three hours ago, says Veyra in a flat voice. One of the subjects, which died long ago, has been completely restored using his bones. Two of the accomplices, one, who had been termed as a grave surgeon acolyte, the other in keeping with the description of the escaped test subject Mios.
Malrec smiles. It is a friendly smile, paternal, that one of his smile that he gives patients, just before he cuts them.
"The acolyte has a name, Sister."
Veyra's jaw tightens. "Elian Voss. Relic ranked grave surgeon. Notorious in his unlicensed scripture studies and looting relic chips in the Chapel of Saint Agony.
Elian, Malrec, I like the name, I likes the name, he repeats. "My brightest son. I instructed him in how to stitch the eyelids of a corpse shut lest the dead person witness what we had done to him. I thought he had potential." He pauses. "I was right."
Veyra turns around to face him eventually. The eyes of Malrec are fresh surgical steel, and they stare at the residual scripture with a sort of expression close to love.
"You know him," Veyra says. It's not a question.
I know all the ones that promise, Sister. My duty is to nurture the future saints of the Church. His smile widens. And sometimes the growing needs are... unorthodox.
Veyra has also heard the gossip concerning Father Malrec. The operating rooms in the hospitals. The specimens who enter in to be healed and never come out again. His attitude towards the youthful acolytes who seek his advice, as a sculptor to raw marble.
She doesn't care. People who are worse have been used by the Church to perform holy work.
The subject they resurrected she says. "What was it?"
Malrec's eyes light up. Something that is hungry flits in the background of his composure, momentarily.
"Not it, Sister. Him. His was the name of Ser Gideon Lazarus. One of the lower houses of nobility. He was killed three centuries ago, when he had murdered a dozen exorcists in the Cathedral of Saint Agony. Towards the fades of the residue of the scripture, he gets himself into a low position to feel it with his gloved fingers. His body was deemed to be too sacrilegious to be buried. Too risky to survive resurrection. Thus they threw him in the pits and forgot about him.
"Until now."
"Until now." Malrec is there, shaking his robes. Would you know, Sister, to resuscitate a man who died three centuries ago? To make of him, out of bones and bible and the reverberations of a soul which must have died centuries ago, a body?
He's not asking. He's savoring.
It is because Elian Voss is more of an artist than the Church knew, the Veyra says.
It is that Elian Voss has done that which I have been attempting to do in half a century. The voice of Malrec is gentle, nearly sweet. He has produced a Lazarus Frame which does not require control. A Frame which recollected what it was. A Frame, which, had it been wrought better, would have been something wiser than all the saints this Church ever had.
Veyra understands now. She knows the hunger of his eyes, the manner in which he is gazing at the scripture that is fading away as if it were the touch of a lover.
"You want it for yourself."
Malrec laughs. It is soft music, nearly musical. "I want to see it, Sister. I would like to know whether it is as pretty as I think it is. I am desirous it should be felt, studied, to know how Elian has succeeded in where I have failed. He turns to look at her and there is a moment when his mask is lifted and Veyra looks at his eyes and she thinks she sees something in his eyes. And, responding, I may retain it. As a masterpiece. Even the dead may be perfected like the dead, as proof of this.
Veyra has heard enough. She looks away to the other exorcists who are waiting on the edge of the pit. There were twelve of them, all dressed in the black armor of the Dark Order, each with the huge gothic weapons that have rendered the justice of the Church so feared in the floating city.
"I will find them," she says. I am going to take the acolyte and the test subject back to the judgment. And I will ruin the Lazarus Frame that it may lead to further blasphemy.
"Destroy?" The voice of Malrec is tender, but a certain edge is now present. Fancy, you would kill a miracle, Sister.
I would annihilate a desecration. The Edge of Absolution is gripped by the hand of Veyra. Resurrection is under the control of the Church. We are the ones who determine the life and death. We determine what is holy, what is not. This... this was robbed. It has no right to exist."
Malrec is silent for a moment. Then, in turn, he smiles and this time the smile reaches his eyes and it is worse than all the other things he has shown her.
Then I guess you had better get them before they can run away, Sister. And before Elian can demonstrate you wrong in his miracle.
He walks back into the darkness, his devouring robes trailing behind him as an injury.
Veyra observes him as he leaves, and there is a time--one moment only--when she feels something which she has not felt in years.
Doubt.
She crushes it. She has a mission. She has a purpose. She is blessed by the Church and the burden of sacred scripture is on her side.
She lifts the Edge of Absolution and the other exorcists come in to ranks behind her.
"We move at dawn," she says. "Find the acolyte. Find the test subject. Find the Frame."
She does not assert to find the miracle. She will never say that word.
However, when she takes her squad out of the corpse pit and into the moonlit streets of the floating city, she still sees the residue of the scripture fading behind her eyes. The shape of it. The manner in which it beat like a heart, like something that would have lived.
She reflects upon the man she is hunting. Three hundred years dead. Resurrected by a boy who had a stolen book and excess hope.
She asks whether he was desiring to go back.
She questions whether anyone among them ever does.