Page 3 of Baron Bolt

Waterloo.

The word went into Damian like cold water into a wound. Not the battle. The battle he had. The battle was his own to recall. Nay, what struck him now was the sense of it. The bodies had come from Waterloo. The carts had come from Waterloo, and the ground he had fallen on, and everything in this room that had once had a name, himself included, had been gathered up off that field like windfall apples, and brought here, and stacked. However far he was from the ridge and the smoke, it could be counted in cart-days. He was still near Waterloo. He had never left. Presumably, only the living had left.

The scholar was still protesting, but weakly now, in scraps of German as the servant drove him up the stairs. He drove him like a sergeant driving recruits, without touching him. The lantern and his own bulk did the work. One talked. One muttered. The light went with them, and the shadows poured back down the steps behind them, like water finding its level. A tallow stub had been left on the corner of the table. It guttered in a pool of its own grease. The door at the top shut.

The latch clicked.

Damian counted a hundred. Floorboards moved overhead. A chair scraped. A voice rose and someone answered. He counted a hundred more.

Then he began to move, and found out what he was.

He had been dead, and now he lived because some madman had done experiments with electricity. And that madman had not noticed one of his experiments was now rising.

Moving hurt. It hurt from stiffness and bruising and the fish-hook pull across his chest. But another wrongness ran through it, something no bruise could explain. His arm obeyed him like a horse obeying a stranger. First came a pause. Then a sullen movement, with the constant threat that it might do something else. He told his hand to close. It closed half a beat late and too hard, wood-stupid, without the fine judgment a hand was meant to carry. His feet were numb to the ankles. His own muscles felt requisitioned. Borrowed. Issued back to him secondhand.

He worked anyway. Working was the only thing he could do. He got the dead arm off his chest. It was cold and heavy past all reason. His skin crawled its whole length, trying to escape the touch. He made no sound. He got a shoulder under the weight above him and pushed. The stack shifted with a soft, dreadful settling. He stopped and listened to the floorboards, in case the men had heard him. Then he pushed again.

He dug himself out of the dead and breathed through his teeth. Every foot of progress woke his body a little more. Blood, or whatever now did blood’s work, moved into the numb places. Pins and needles pricked him like small shot. By the time he rolled clear, got his feet under him, and stood, he was stronger than when he had started. He swayed with one hand on the slab. The cellar tilted around his good eye, then righted itself.

That was worth knowing. Motion primed him, like a pump.

He made himself look at what he had crawled out of.

The stub’s light was merciless. The pile was worse than a pile of dead men. He had not known, until then, that anything could be worse. They were men made from parts. An arm joined neatly at the shoulder, but the flesh did not match. A broad hand sewn to a narrow wrist. A pale, heavy thigh continuing below the knee into a lean, darkened calf. Every part was where God had intended a part to be. They simply did not belong to the same men.

The tidy, dreadful work of cutting dead men apart and putting them back together.

The seams confirmed it. He saw them first on the nearest body, then everywhere. Black waxed stitching, laddered and crossed, joined wrist to hand, arm to shoulder, thigh to knee. Other rows closed chests and scalps where the anatomist had opened them and sewn them shut again. The work was careful as a sailmaker’s and … obscene.

Failures, said the cold clerk at the back of his mind. Attempts.

The pull across his own chest, when he drew a deep breath, had exactly that pattern.

He peered down at himself, gritting his teeth at what he might see. There was no more putting it off.

He was bare, stripped to the skin, every stitch of clothing gone. Candlelight showed him a body in two colors. The brown of his hands and forearms, and whatever the campaign sun had reached. Below the collar line, the pale of a body kept covered. Across that pale ground ran the seams.

They began below his left shoulder and ran down and across his chest. They branched, doubled back, and left black thread in ridged flesh. A road map of a country he had no memory of traveling through.

He put his fingers on it. The flesh on either side was numb in patches and screamingly tender in others. Beneath the thread he could feel where he was joined. Where he had been closed.

But, sweet mercy, he was but one man. He made himself check, grimly, joint by joint, like a quartermaster counting stores after a retreat. His own crooked-knuckled hands. His own legs. His own body. Nothing foreign. Nothing belonging to another corpse. He might have died, but apparently his body was intact.

All present. All his. All wrong.

He read his face by touch. The left side was ridged too. Scars and scabbing climbed up his neck, over his jaw, up his cheek, finer than the horrors across his chest but unmistakably kin to them. It ran toward his brow, toward his eye.

He covered his right eye with his palm and made himself look at the candle with the left alone. The flame swam. A haze clung to it that had no business being there. When he moved his head, the flame smeared and followed late. The darkness around it was not quite dark. None of it was anything he could name or prove.

Something had been done to the eye. Or nothing had, and this was only what the blast had left behind. He could not tell. He took his hand away and stood there while both eyes disagreed about what he was looking at.

He sucked in his breath, beating back thoughts about the unnatural monstrosity he was if he had truly risen from the dead. It was too unholy to consider at present.

He supposed he was fortunate, if one could call anything about this fortunate. But he had been at the bottom of the pile of corpses, and appeared to be in the best condition. Clearly the anatomist had lost his patience on later attempts because the bodies stacked on top of him were in much worse shape than he.

Then he let it go. He could do nothing about it, and there was work.

The garments were stacked against the far wall. Coatees with coatees. Boots in a row. Smallclothes bundled together. The servant’s economy. Dead men’s kit from both English and French soldiers reduced to stores.