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So in core, be it drowning or broken bones, Tria let the humans learn through suffering. Injuries were left to run their course. She intervened only in rare cases, mainly with the very young or those in whom she suspected a trace of tairan blood. Otherwise, her wing extended only as far as culling the deranged, or, if they were left to survive into adulthood, ensuring they would not breed. Before her final refusal to uphold the Reparation Treaty, the castration of males and the sterilisation of females had been routine for those sold or given to bormen.
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It is a strange thing; disturbing, really. How quickly the mind can shear itself from the most horrific immediacy, how stubbornly it can fixate on stray memories or random imagination — on anything else, anything at all, just as one may fix a mask, no matter how unfitting and regardless of what grotesquery it showed, if only not to face oneself, if only this mask was less unsettling than what lay beneath.
There was no end to grotesquely masked things in this guild, nor to raw unsettling truths. There was no end and no escape. Even the faraway memories offered no way out. They began as a distraction but they could only run wild for so long before running into the walls of the pressure-mute silence that was their confinement. Eventually, they brought Yu back full circle, back to the silent drowning of his own senses, and also back to the disquieting memory of what he had seen in the common room. Back to what he had learned about the human.
Amidst all this, his fractured mind had fixated, briefly, on a single piece of paper. The krynn had taken it away, but Yu had seen enough. It was an official document. A contract of purchase and ownership, dated 641. It had listed, in structured formality: -
the token purchase price, as dictated by the Reparation Agreements;
details regarding the identity of Kel-Khadar, borman;
and below, the standardised description of the human female distinguished as A-84R15. -
Born 631.
Hair: red. Eyes: light green and blue.
Height: 1.21 metres. Weight: 26.5 kilograms.
Status: sterilised, with no signs of physical maturity.
Dentition: several teeth missing, see attached table. Second set in growth.
Deformities: none.
Injuries: right ear absent, cut fresh, no infection; superficial scar down right side of neck and shoulder blade.
Condition: otherwise sold as seen. -
And at the bottom: Conceived and born in Settlement 08 through female A-84K14.
Sealed with the Barnstream sigil.
Signed by Tria.
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Yu had read all of it, and he had known, instantly.
It was fake.
A forgery.
It was a forged document.
Yu was certain of that much, and yet this certainty gave him nothing. He had no idea what to do with the knowledge. It solved nothing. It sat inside him like a shard of ice lodged in thought, something he felt but did not know how to handle. The edges pressed in sharp and irritating, but there was nothing to do with it, no way to move or act on it.
Amidst all the humans Yu had watched in the habitat, time and again, he had never seen A-84R15. Though, he would not bet his wing on it, not with the size of the Barnstream population. If you scan one group after another at random – just aimlessly drifting with your field-glasses from the streams to the work yards to the living quarters – without fixing on any particular figure, it happens quickly enough that in front of your eyes, the sheer mass of flat flesh-faces blurs into nothing but crude divisions of male and female, young or old. There is hardly need for more. In the end, they are all the same, living out the same savage routine — fishing, fighting, feasting, fucking. Their stupid heads are full of it.
To distinguish any individuality beyond that blur, you have to pick one out deliberately. You have to consciously select and then repeatedly search for that same human whenever you return, until you can find her each time you raise the glasses. If you follow her long enough, you eventually recognise the patterns that separate her from the rest, and then you know where she will be at any given time of the day; where she sleeps and eats, what paths she walks, where she stands at the nets and where she swims, and when she breaks from the others. And if you keep at it, you begin to know. You know her day before she lives it. The days change of course, when you start with a younger one that then grows into an adult, or with a female that then becomes a mother, but even these changes can be foreseen and traced —
Yu's head whirled around, his upper body twisting sharply as his eyes flickered across the kitchen. Then to the door of the walkway.
No one was here.
He was alone.
Still, he kept staring at the door.
It was not like he had done that regularly. Or too often. It definitely did not happen on purpose. Never with intention. The watching. You could hardly avoid it when you lived on the estate. The humans were just right there, always within reach, all the time, and so what did it matter if he had watched that one girl, sometimes, or another female, or a male, of course, he had also watched males, just as much, or any human, obviously, because their sex did not matter, obviously, why would it? Yu had just watched them at random, when he had been, well, bored or something, because what other option did he have, when everything else was do this or learn that or insult of your choice in Tria's voice.
Yu turned back to the window slit. He looked the female up and down, as though staring hard enough would peel back the forgery and expose her real origin, or the reason to lie about it.
For decades, the habitat had held roughly two hundred humans at any given time. Until seven years ago, when Tria had released the funners, that is. The beasts had decimated half, before the males brought them down. Even so, with the deaths by drowning and childbirth now reduced, and with the young no longer given to the bormen, the population had recovered swiftly. By the time Yu had left, the count had already climbed back towards one hundred and fifty. With such numbers, Yu could of course not recall every face, certainly not from four years past. But if this female had been given to a borman then, for whatever reason, she would have been seven years of age. It would have made her one of the rare children who had survived the funners slaughter. Yu was sure he would have noticed her. He would have remembered. Those distinct tairan features would have marked her apart.
And yet, apart from her tairan traits, there was nothing remarkable about her. Nothing — except that she was here at all. Still, Yu's eyes clung, compelled and repulsed in equal measure, as Bubs drew ever more fragments of bone from the torn leg. Since Yu had started watching, it had been an endless harvest of tiny white shards, one splinter after the other without pause.
Deltington assisted at his side. He fixed compresses on the limb above and below the break. He also managed the frame construction that held the leg, putting pads where the metal bit too close into the skin, and repeatedly adjusting or simply holding onto it. By now, it had grown into a lattice of rods and struts that framed the leg like a complex kyrthic exoskeleton, surrounded by a cage of metal. With its weight and bracing, it held the limb straight and aloft even when Deltington stepped away to check the human's face and chest, to readjust her straps, or to gather more instruments for Bubs.
Between them there was scarcely a word. Yu did not hear, but sometimes saw their mouths move. That was odd in itself. Normally, it was the other way around; Yu heard people talk even when their lips did not move. From what he saw, a few muted words and gestures were enough to carry command and response. Bubs gave the signs and Deltington followed, just like now. As he pulled another splinter free, Bubs uttered a few words. Deltington answered by flushing the cavity with a stream of clear liquid pressed from a leather bladder. The fluid washed across raw tissue, carrying clotted blood into the basin below. The sound did not reach Yu either. He was glad about that.
Meanwhile, Bubs laid his instruments aside. He put them all on the tray with the other used ones, then pushed it away. The gesture felt final, even more so when he stepped off his stool. It seemed like they were done, with Deltington doing the last clean up.
Yu felt a slackening in his own body. He did not understand the process, but surely, that was the end of it. At last.
Back on the ground, now at eye-level with the surgery table, Bubs turned, though not towards his patient or tools, but towards the —
Yu ducked. He hurried off his stool and then pulled it aside from the door with quick jerks of his talons. The legs scraped the stone in spite his effort to keep silent. Out of the way, with the stool and himself pressed into the corner behind the door, he froze, listening to the silence he no longer trusted.
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Nothing happened.
The door stayed shut.
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. Eventually, claw by claw, he nudged the stool back into place and got up again.
When he dared look through the window again, he saw Deltington busy with the bladder and Bubs perched on another stool by the workbench beside the kitchen door, not three steps away from Yu. In front of him lay a long, brown rod, like a twig stripped of its bark. It was a slender, slightly curved piece. There was a tray full of others, though much shorter. They varied from thick pins to fine needles. Since the tray was close to his door, Yu could see them well. He even discerned that, like the twig, the pins had several small holes in them. With the slim ones he could not tell.
All around, the workbench was lined with bottles and flasks. It was not cluttered, though. Bubs had arranged them in precise order along invisible lines, every label turned to face him. Many stood uncorked, their contents portioned into small cups. Bubs drew from them with a set of broad brushes kept in a narrow metal case. With swift strokes, he coated the long twig and a selection of several pins and needles. Right now, he alternated between two transparent liquids. Something yellowish followed, glossy and dark like varnish. Finally, he dragged on a pale, oily draught which clung and filmed over the others like a skin. He worked fast, treating the pieces in a fixed sequence without pause. It took him less than two minutes to return to the human.
Meanwhile, Deltington had produced a fresh tray lined with delicate instruments: fine tweezers, slender probes, and narrow retractors no larger than pins. They were so small and thin that no one but a child or, well, a mianid, could even hold them properly, let alone handle them. Among them lay just one larger piece; a single pipette of blown glass. Yu understood why just then. Deltington picked it up, drew a measure of tincture from one of the flasks, and pressed the tip deep into the exposed leg. Droplets vanished into the torn flesh, seeping inward where Yu's eyes could not follow.
The exchange was seamless. As Deltington withdrew the pipette, Bubs had already put his new tray with the twig and the other treated pieces down. And then he did something Yu could only call wrong. He slid the it into the open gash. The long brown twig. The pipette left and the thing went in. Guided by Bubs' fingers and a pair of tweezers, it disappeared beneath the skin, completely swallowed. It was not something from the leg. Bubs had not taken it out of the leg. Yet he put it in. A foreign thing that did not come from the human's body, slick with all sorts of tinctures. He pressed that inside the leg, and then meddled with it, and then he left it there.
Once the long twig sat where it should, Bubs reached for one of the shorter pieces, a stout pin, and pushed that one in as well. He drove it through the flesh, like pressing a needle into a rotten fruit. He inserted it at a shallow angle so that it crossed the first rod. The end protruded just below the knee, between the metal struts that held the leg in its cage.
Yu's feathers prickled.
He made an educated guess and decided none of these things were actual sticks. He also guessed that there was a strategy behind what Bubs was doing, or at least he really wanted to believe that he was not just spiking the human at random. Yu could not see into the depth of the leg as Bubs now oh fuck no slid in a third pin, yet from the way he angled and adjusted it, Yu reasoned that the pieces fit into each other. You could probably even insert the smaller needles through the holes he had seen in the rod-that-was-definitely-not-a-twig and all of the wider pins. From how he probed around for the proper position, it seemed like Bubs was trying to push in the pin just right. It was as if he were building a new skeleton inside the old.
Could you do that? Could you just … put a new bone where the old one had shattered? Replace a bad one with a good one? Yu had never heard of such a thing. If this had been a tairan's leg, or a borman's from the settlements, they would have cut it off right then and there. If no healer wizard was present, you amputated and made do with what remained. That had been common sense for Yu, a knowledge solid as stone, right until now.
Why did no one know about this? Or did Tria? Perhaps she did. Yu had no idea. It was not like he had ever bothered to talk about worldly medicines — but still, this was beyond worldly. This seemed so impossibly advanced and life-changing, that it should be practiced all over the settlements. If this worked, if this could actually restore a shattered leg, then every village and every den of cripples should know.
Yu's thoughts twisted further. Life in the estate had always seemed isolated, yes, but never … primitive. He knew that the Barnstreams were remote and rarely the first to receive news of whatever the world elsewhere had discovered, but whenever there had been derisive talk about the northern desert peoples or the north-eastern fishing folk, with their crude cultures and simple lifestyles, Yu had never, well, counted himself among them. He had never included the estate in that. It had always been the settlements, with all the backwater people, and, apart from them, the estate, with Tria and him. Tria was everything that Yu associated with knowledge and progress. She was his measure of worldliness itself. But now, the longer he stared, the more that certainty unravelled. Everything in here seemed so much more complex. The tools. The rods. The vast array of tinctures — none of it belonged to Tria's care facility. Yu had never really looked, and yet he simply knew that there were too many things here that he had never seen.
This could not be Bubs alone. He could not be the only one who operated like that. He was just a mianid, and he was way too young to have come up with any of this, to have created this range of instruments and methods all by himself. This was not invention. This was inheritance. It was a fragment of the greater world. Knowledge and skills from beyond the North, the ability to shape bone and reverse loss without a word of magic.
Yu was astonished as much as he was appalled. And then the full extent of it struck him. He really got it, at last, when Bubs slid one of the rods of the external frame through the hole of the pin jutting from below the knee. Yu understood that absolutely none of this was random. He could not grasp the full complexity of the construction, but he realised that all of this worked together. The not-sticks did not only fit into each other, they also locked with the outer frame. Inside and outside aligned: The long brown rod and all its pins shaped the leg from within, the metal exoskeleton held it against collapse, and the cage stilled the twisting of the limb from any motion from above the knee and —
Bubs looked up.
Yu jerked back from the slit and ducked, crouching low on the stool — and instantly realised how absurd that was. Embarrassing. Straight-up stupid. Bubs had seen him. It had been so sudden, so unexpected. His tweeters had hovered over the tray of pins, but instead of looking there, his head had snapped to the kitchen door, absolutely out of the blue. He had seen Yu, clearly. And yet, Yu stayed frozen, hunched like a thief caught in the act, feathers bristling and eyes locked on the metal door, bracing for it to burst open. Half-dreading Bubs would come rushing through. Half-wanting him to.
He did not.
Why, in all earnest, would he?
And what was Yu doing? What could he possibly gain from staring at the human, or from watching Bubs prise her apart and clamp her shut again?
He had no time, no strength, no focus left to question motives or to weigh outcomes. Not about the human. Not about the guards. Not about anything.
He should just …
Yu turned his head, still hunched on the stool. His gaze crawled across the kitchen.
He climbed down. His body turned to the hearth. Toward the pot of stew.
He should just do his job.
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