In Mercy Rain Read online

  In Mercy, Rain

  Seanan McGuire

  Jack Wolcott was twelve years old when she descended an impossible staircase tucked away inside her grandmother’s old costume chest and found herself in the sort of wild, magical land that people who had never once been to wild, magical lands enjoyed writing stories about. She suspected that some of those people might have had impossible staircases of their own, staircases that ended at doors entreating travelers to “be sure,” as if anyone could be sure of anything after going down so many stairs.

  She further suspected that none of those people had found stairways to the Moors. She’d never been encouraged to read fairy stories, or she might have known better than to open the door, but she’d grown up in a world full of them, and exposure to the background radiation of childhood had been enough to give her the basic shape of the worlds people liked to dream about, worlds where children could fly in veils of pixie dust, or grow bigger and smaller by drinking the right flasks of improperly labeled chemicals, or become royalty by stumbling out of the right wardrobe. None of those worlds looked like the Moors. Children could fly here, if they were gargoyles from the high castles, or if they had masters unethical enough to graft a bird’s wings onto their shoulder blades, where they would inevitably shred muscle and pulverize bone, but might offer a moment’s flight before that messy end. Drinking improperly labeled chemicals might cause uncontrolled growth, fungal and ceaseless, until death was a dream to be aspired to. And as for royalty …

  The idea was repugnant. Jack had seen the people who called themselves lords and ladies, masters and mistresses, and she wanted nothing of them. No: those stories had not been written by travelers to her sweet and bitter land, sharp as a promise, brutal as a thorn. No one who had seen the Moors would encourage children to go through impossible doors, to listen to the entreating of silent signs. Even the ones who loved the Moors, as she did, completely and with all their hearts, couldn’t be so cruel.

  Jack Wolcott was still twelve years old when she left a vampire lord’s castle for the company of a man who would have been called a “mad scientist” in the world of her birth, who did impossible things with dead flesh and living lightning, in whose broad, scarred hands the impossible became merely the ill-advised. Dr. Bleak seemed, at first glance, like the living manifestation of his name: stern and broad-shouldered and unforgiving, with a face no one in their right mind would have called “attractive” or “handsome.” He was a perfect contrast to the vampire lord, whose face was uncomfortably fine, whose teeth were too sharp, and whose hands were utterly pristine.

  She left her sister behind in the castle, her twin and second self, all but sacrificing her to the vampire lord. She wouldn’t have done it if she’d had any other way—or maybe she would have. Even at twelve, Jack Wolcott was not particularly inclined to view herself and her choices through rose-tinted glasses; the veils over her eyes were more likely to be bloody than reassuring. She knew that she was colder than her sister, that while she and Jill both had steel in their hearts, the steel that had gone into making her sister hadn’t been properly tempered, and was likely to shatter if struck from the wrong angle. They had been encouraged all their lives to be rivals before they were friends, to view one another as competition for every scrap of attention or affection, and while they had both taken those lessons to heart, Jack had excelled at them, while Jill had only endured. She wasn’t nearly as sure that Jill would have been able to walk away from her so easily, had their positions been reversed.

  But they hadn’t been reversed. Jill would have her beautiful dresses and her jewels and her doting vampire lord, and Jack would have hard work and harsh lessons and learn to forge the steel her parents had slid so smoothly into her heart into a weapon that she could wield, not merely a spike to impale herself upon. The Wolcott twins had started from the same place. They had never once been the same.

  As for Dr. Bleak, upon meeting the two girls, he had looked at them and seen their weaknesses in an instant, seen them more clearly than the girls themselves could. Weakness is always easier to perceive from the outside, and every good predator knows how to pick out the most vulnerable members of a herd. He would have taken Jill, given his choice of the two, would have taken the girl who seemed so much more likely to break instead of bending, who needed a kind hand wrapped in a cruel shell more than her sister did. Jack would have survived becoming a vampire’s daughter. She would have become something terrible and new, but she, and the Moors, would both have survived the experience.

  He wasn’t sure, as the days turned into weeks and Jack’s arms, weak in the beginning, grew strong and dense with muscle, whether they were all going to survive the arrangement they had landed on. But the choice was the choice, and even if he’d been inclined to unmake it in favor of the experiment left unconducted, he would never have been able to get the others to agree. Jill was happy in the castle with her master, the Master was happy with his dutiful new daughter—and was, by all accounts, a doting father, perhaps having learned from his mistakes with earlier “children.” And as to Jack …

  Sweet Jack, who was so brutally sour in self-defense, who would one day meet the wind that whispered through the cracks in her walls and learn what it meant to soften, he could no more imagine handing her over to a monster than he could fathom slicing off his own arm for a werewolf’s supper.

  That he was also a monster in his own way was irrelevant. He knew he wouldn’t swallow her whole while she was sleeping. He couldn’t say the same for his counterpart.

  So Jack Wolcott, twelve years old and innocent of how much danger she had wandered into, grew into her proper place as a mad scientist’s apprentice. She rarely ventured anywhere without him, not out onto the cool wide spaces of the Moors themselves, not down to the waterlogged and slowly sinking town where the Drowned Gods reigned supreme, and not into the village that spread, septic and foul, at the base of the Master’s haunted, haunting castle. She kept to the windmill, and made appearances when called upon to do so, stepping out by his side. As days stretched on and her strength increased, she began carrying his bag, and so he began packing a second bag, allowing him to carry more medicines and surgical tools.

  The health of the people within their small protectorate improved, aided by tinctures and potions and interventions that would have seemed impossible the year before, when Dr. Bleak had been but one man, constrained to one man’s limitations. The people began to look at Jack as a welcome addition to their number, even as her hands vanished beneath leather coverings, even as the collars of her shirts were buttoned higher and higher, to protect her from the world.

  The Jack Wolcott who had stepped into the Moors at the age of twelve had been averse to dirt and untidiness, had been the first to go looking for hand sanitizer or soap when she happened to brush up against something unpleasant—and the list of things she found unpleasant was expanding, and had been for several years. By the time the incident of the impossible stairs occurred, she could no longer bear the thought of accidentally or intentionally touching raw meat, live animals, dirt, or any sort of bodily fluid. A few months in Dr. Bleak’s care had been enough to add several things to the list, including “dead animals,” “bones,” “any form of lubricant” and “rusty metal,” as well as putting multiple emphasizing lines under “bodily fluids.”

  Her first pair of gloves was a gift on the six-month anniversary of her arrival in the windmill, given to her without comment the morning after Dr. Bleak had watched her throw away her dinner without a single bite taken, unable to stand the touch of her cutlery against her naked skin. “You’ll have to learn to make your own,” he said as he handed them over. “I’m not a wealthy man.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. By the standards of the Moors
, Dr. Bleak was more than merely comfortable, and only the Master and the Abbey of the Drowned Gods could compete with him for worldly goods. But the coin he collected, he kept, claiming that one day it would come in useful. For what, Jack wasn’t sure. She pulled the gloves over her hands, flexing her fingers as they slotted into their individual casings as smoothly as screws into pre-drilled countersinks, and then she did a thing which had never once come easy to her: she threw her arms around the stout, solid pillar of his waist and hugged him as tightly as the span of her arms allowed, stammering thanks that felt too large for her mouth, that felt somehow like learning that something terribly huge and painful wasn’t dangerous after all.

  Dr. Bleak knew he was ill-equipped to treat maladies of the mind. More importantly, he knew that sometimes treatment was better done through support and accommodation. There were asylums in the Moors, terrible, thick-walled places built in other principalities, where his young apprentice could have been sent to learn to mistrust and disbelieve her own natural disposition. A need for cleanliness was not so disruptive as to require excision, and a pair of gloves was a small price to pay for a detail-oriented, tidy-minded girl who cleaned up after herself without needing to be reminded, even under the most chaotic of circumstances.

  Just as Dr. Bleak was not the first keeper of the windmill, Jack was not the first foundling he had claimed as his own and attempted to train in the long discipline of scalpel and storm. The Moors were a place of delicate balances, every principality held by two monsters of equal power and opposing dispositions. Because the Master thrived in hunger and death, Dr. Bleak stood in austerity and in life, balancing the scales, preventing the judgment of the Moon herself from falling on their shoulders.

  He had never seen an out-of-balance principality with his own eyes. He’d heard the stories, of course, of what could happen when monsters were allowed to spiral beyond the Moon’s control, and knew that their fallen domains rarely, if ever, birthed anything but more death, destruction, and decay. He was happy to build the foundations of his own principality’s future on the narrow shoulders of a fair-haired girl who hyperventilated when parts of her meal touched one another.

  All of his former apprentices had failed their tests and trials, when the time came, and all of them had been what the small-minded would call normal in their thoughts, measured and precise in their habits, not ruled by any imbalance of the humors. Perhaps Jack, in her single-minded devotion to cleanliness, was precisely what the Moors had been waiting for.

  Perhaps by teaching her everything he knew, he would be able to pass the windmill along, as his own master had done for him, and rest.

  So Jack grew in the shadow of the windmill and the shadow of her master and the shadow of the vampire’s keep, and none of these shadows were the same, for all that they overlapped each other, one mingling with the next, until anyone who knew them less completely would have thought them all the same darkness. She accompanied her master on his rounds, and if she was squeamish when her hands were bare, she was utterly without fear when they were covered. She dredged nodules from the lungs of iron workers, sliced tumors and rot from the bodies of farmers and farriers, mixed a thousand potions and poultices for healing, administering them with the steady eye of a master in her own right. She learned to heal by learning to harm, and under the watchful eye of the Moon, they were both the same. The land would prosper in her keeping.

  Dr. Bleak began to think that one day, he would be afforded the dearest gift any monster of the Moors could receive: he would be able to stand aside from his duties and retire, giving his windmill and his title over to the girl who dogged his steps, her hands covered and her eyes bright. Her sight was not as keen as her gaze, and she began to fashion and mill her own spectacles, forging the frames in the stormlight glare of the flickering clouds, grinding the glass by the firelight until their concave shapes perfectly magnified the world to suit her. Glasses, a high-buttoned collar, tight-braided hair, and leather gloves became the hallmark of the mad scientist’s apprentice, marking her plainly even for those who had never met her before. Wanderers to their principality began to trust her on sight, which was for the best, as Jill was growing and changing at the same pace, and the mad scientist’s apprentice shared her face with the vampire’s beautiful daughter.

  As the summer of her fifteenth year in the world and her third year in the Moors broke across the horizon like a blood-egg, Jack felt she had found her place and her purpose. She would be the best windmill keeper the Moors had ever known. She would repair and rebuild the bodies of the citizenry, heal their ailments, and keep them as safe as they could possibly claim to be while standing in a vampire’s shadow. And when the time came for her to fight her sister, she would do that as well, with the same clinical precision she brought to the rest of her work. For as Jack grew more advanced in her studies, balance would bring Jill closer to vampirism, closer to the monster she was meant to be.

  It could be easy, when sunk in the dance of herbs and simples, scalpels and stitches, to forget that they were both fated to be monsters if they remained here. It could be easy to treat this as an ordinary life, and it was indeed spattered with ordinary things. Jack found her temper growing wild and impossible to control, sending her from rage into weeping in a matter of minutes, and over the smallest things; she spent an entire afternoon slamming doors and screaming at Dr. Bleak, saying that if she had to be sure about something, she’d be sure that she could find the door back to her real parents, in her real house, in the real world. She wasn’t sure, even as she was doing it, why she was so convinced that the word “real” was a knife for her to throw, or why she would want to go back to a world where she’d be forced into frilly dresses and decorous poses, and denied the calm communion of the body and the blade.

  Puberty was having its way with her, a little more slowly than it might have in the land of her birth, where nutrition was better and the meat on the table was all too often laden with hormones, but having its way with her all the same, as unstoppable as the winter frost, and as dangerous. Dr. Bleak made silent note of the changes in her physiology, bought her fabric and sewing supplies when she requested them, and when her menses began, called the women of the Moors to assist her with a matter that was outside his experience and his purview.

  Once she was convinced that she was neither dying nor ill, and had been lectured by several of the local women about how a natural biological function couldn’t make anyone unclean, had Dr. Bleak given her that impression, they’d smack that patriarchal attitude out of his head if he had, Jack had begrudgingly, grumblingly accepted this as a new aspect of her reality and set her attention to improving it, as much as could be done. She’d crafted better sanitary options within the first month, and mixed several easy, nonaddictive painkilling tinctures, distributing them to the women who had helped her.

  A few of those women asked, delicately, if now that she was approaching womanhood, she had started looking any differently at their sons or daughters. Jack shrugged and replied that she hadn’t noticed looking at anyone any differently than anyone else, and the women didn’t press any farther, or ask Dr. Bleak for his opinion. Dr. Bleak would have had a great deal to say about apprentices with wandering eyes and well-controlled hands, who gathered bouquets of poisonous wildflowers for Gideon in the Abbey of the Drowned Gods, who sighed and swooned when the shepherd girls cast sloe-eyed looks in her direction. Jack might not notice looking at anyone differently than anyone else, but that was at least in part because she seemed to be one of those lucky few who found beauty everywhere she looked.

  He doubted she’d ever act on any of the things she was feeling—she was too disinclined to view the human body as anything other than a field to be harvested or a machine to be repaired—but he also doubted she would ever realize she was missing anything, as that would require her to admit that she wanted to do things she would otherwise view as revolting.

  It was something of a blessing, for a mad scientist in training, to be so
disinclined to enjoy the more traditional pleasures of the flesh. The best of their kind were either attracted to absolutely no one or to virtually everyone, and in either case, close attachments never ended well. Dr. Bleak himself had enjoyed a brief dalliance with a baker’s boy when he was still in the grips of his own training, and while he could remember Peter’s eyes with fondness, he couldn’t think of the other boy’s mouth without remembering the way it had worked in mindless anguish after the necromancer who had come to challenge Dr. Ghast had slain and reanimated him.

  Dr. Ghast had been a kinder woman than the Moors deserved, and a brutally civilized mad scientist who had raised her sole successful apprentice to be the same. Together, they had slain the necromancer before he could establish himself in their territory, and as his body crumbled into dust, Dr. Ghast had planted a kiss on Dr. Bleak’s forehead and turned to walk into the mountains, vanishing from what was now his principality.

  Sometimes he wondered if she had found a new place for herself, a new laboratory in need of a kinder flavor of monster than many the Moors had to offer. Other times, he wondered if, when his own time came, she would have a spare bench set aside for his use, a spare cot for him to sleep upon. It would be a kinder retirement than most monsters were afforded, but if anyone could offer it to him, it would be Dr. Ghast, whose own mentor had been far less kind.

  Dr. Ghast had been one of those who chose to abstain, having what seemed like no interest at all in the idea of sharing her bed and breath with another. In her memory, and the memory of his own lost love, Dr. Bleak had lived an ascetic’s life, alone but never lonely, for what monster could possibly be lonely in the company of so many of their own kind?

  And now there was Jack, scarce fifteen, bright-eyed and nimble-fingered and not yet committed to a life of solitude, even if her own inclinations seemed set to guide her in that direction. Dr. Bleak looked at her and saw that there was still kindness behind the bright, analytical surface of her eyes; she was learning to break the world down like a carcass, but she had not yet forgotten what it was to be merciful. He only hoped that as he taught her science, he could also teach her humanity. He knew that in the keep, the Master was teaching his own daughter no such lessons.