Page 2 of Baron Bolt

His body answered before he could stop it. His gorge rose in a long, slow heave. He clamped his jaw and breathed through it.

Silent. Be silent.

The heave crested and broke and left him shaking, sour-mouthed, his heart going somewhere under his ribs in great, slow strokes, like a man beating a carpet. So he had a heartbeat. He noted it as if it were a rumor. Interesting, if true, because he was certain he had died.

He fought the nausea down, reminding himself that a captain in His Majesty’s Army did not cast up his accounts merely because he faced the repulsions of the battlefield.

Damian pressed his palm flat. Smooth, cold stone under him, with a channel cut in it. A slab. A gutter in a slab. He would not think what the gutter was for.

Through the gaps between the dead he could see pieces of a cellar. A wall of shelves bearing jars. In the jars, things floating, pale and folded. He did not look twice. Coils and runs of copper. Wire. A great burnished vessel. More wire climbing the wall toward the singing ceiling. A long table. Candles on it. On the table, a man, lying down. Another of the dead, laid out alone where the rest were heaped. Any camp would have told him the same. This was the one that mattered. The rest were stores.

He had heard men speak of laboratories. Gentlemen’s rooms. Glass and brass and Latin labels. He would not have called this a laboratory. He had no word for what he would have called it.

The mutterer moved into view.

Damian saw him in slices, through the gaps. Dark hair standing wild where hands had dragged through it. Coat off. Shirtsleeves rolled. Forearms stained to the elbow. A face the candlelight made all hollows and shine. Not old. Starved-looking, the sort who forgot meals rather than lacked them.

The stranger was bent over the corpse on the table, doing something at its chest with wire and clamps, talking to it the whole time in that tumbling German, tender and furious at once, coaxing a horse and cursing it in the same breath. He cocked his ear to the dead man’s breastbone and held up one hand for silence, though there was no one to silence but the thunder.

The thunder did not oblige him. It came down like a falling wall. The whole house jumped. The wire-note screamed along the ceiling. Blue light spat and crawled somewhere among the copper with a crack and that flint-and-powder smell. On the table the dead man’s arm leapt.

It leapt. The whole arm, up from the shoulder, fingers spreading. The … anatomist? screamed, a cracked, high sound with words in it. “Es lebt—” He lunged and got his ear down on the chest again and hung there, rigid, listening, while the arm settled back onto the boards as slack as it had been, as slack as it would always be. Damian, from inside his stack of dead men, watched a lunatic’s hope die with a thoroughness he had only ever seen at gravesides.

“Nein,” the man said. “Nein, nein, nein.” He struck the table. He seized the corpse by the jaw and turned its face toward him and said something low and vicious to it in German, then flung away from the table and stood with his fists in his hair. The Latin came again, spat out like broken teeth.

“Dixerunt, dixerunt mortuos non posse resurgere.”

They said, they said the dead cannot rise.

Then he dropped into French so plain that Damian understood every syllable before he could brace himself.

“I do not give up. I will never give up.”

Damian did not move. This time it was not prudence but horror.

Some cold clerk at the back of his mind had been keeping a ledger this while. Now, without being asked, it presented the account. The bodies were battlefield dead. He was among the battlefield dead. He had fallen at … he had fallen. The man at the table was trying to make a dead man live, and grieving that he could not, and had not once glanced at the stack behind him. As far as this man knew, the stack was only stores. He was pleading with the wrong corpse⁠—

Damian did not finish the thought. He put it down as if putting down a letter with bad news in it, unread, for later. For never.

The door at the top of the stair swung open. He had not noticed a stair before that moment. Now yellow light swung down along a flight of stone steps at the far end of the cellar, and boots came down after it, heavy and deliberate, and a voice with them. French, and no scholar’s French. A servant’s growl, long-suffering.

“Come and eat.”

No greeting. The newcomer reached the floor. A sturdy dark man with a lantern, a servant’s shoulders, a face like a closed shutter. He surveyed the table and its occupant as if he were a groom finding his master still in the stable at midnight.

“It is on the table this half hour. The soup is already cold. It will be spoilt entirely, and then you will eat nothing again, and then who carries you up the stairs at dawn? I do.”

The mutterer flapped a hand at him without turning. “The storm,” he said, in French now, thin and distracted. “The storm is not finished. It was close. Did you not see? The arm. It was close.”

“The storm will still be there when the soup is not.”

The servant crossed to the table and simply took up the candlestick, a nurse taking a toy from a child.

“Come. Eat. God knows there is no hurry down here.”

He swung the lantern once at the room at large, at the shelves and the copper and the stacked dead, at Damian lying with his eyes slitted among the dead. The light brushed over them all and found nothing in them worth a second look.

“You have half of Waterloo in this farmhouse. They will keep. They are not going anywhere.”