trading from Ysla. After recovering from severe frostbite caught on an expedition twenty-something years ago, he was forced to utilize his skills in multi-taxa surgery on mending himself. Such procedures being a bit of a lottery, he had attempted the job with several different mammalian appendages until he had found sufficient benefit from the inert properties of a coleoptera. It had been painful and near-impossible to operate on himself, but with the help of his Phonoi friends he had succeeded in grafting the beetle foot onto the stump that remained of his leg.
He leant over to fetch a brush from under the table and began to remove the loose flakes of shell-skin. The result was a sound like raining toenails on his carpet.
A black cat suddenly darted out from under the chair and turned to regard Voland with utter contempt for his habits. Voland merely chuckled as the feline padded indignantly from the room.
Eventually he finished the task, rubbed his weaker, human foot for comfort, then settled into his whisky. On the table was an envelope from the portreeve, Lutto's embossed insignia bold even in this half-light.
So, then, who might it be this time?
He opened it and set the enclosed document on his lap. Names and addresses drifted towards his vision.
Deltrun, Shanties district, Third Street West. Bacunin, Scarhouse, causes organized trouble for Ferryby's, sleeps in the flat above the Workers' Union headquarters. Bukharin, causes trouble for Coumby's, Ancient Quarter, apartment three of the Tauride complex. Plekhanof, Fourth Street, Scarhouse, next to a nonprotected iren. Sedova, his wife, same address.
Random script filled the bottom of the page, notes scrawled by the portreeve himself. These were to be 'donations' to the cause, with the addition of 'May they be of greater benefit than they are now'. He wondered who these extra people might be, their role in the city's affairs, and why the portreeve had flagged them for attention.
His name was whispered through the air: 'Voland…'
Doctor Voland looked up from his chair as the spider came through the hatch in the ceiling.
'You're back.' He rose casually, as if a guest had entered for dinner.
'Yes.' The voice came as a slur of wind whenever it inhabited this state. 'I have… two more.'
'Grand! Where have you left them?'
'Down below, in the first section of the abattoir.'
'Grand.'
The transformation then occurred in front of him: the spider contorted, bulged a bit… then juddered into her natural shape. Voland walked over to a cupboard, drew out one of his mono-grammed dressing gowns, and handed it to her.
Nanzi said, 'Thank you,' and he noted with delight, as he always did, how she retained the two huge spider legs, those arachnid tendons that joined awkwardly but efficiently with her human hips. It was a wonder she could walk at all sometimes, a wonder due to his own craftsmanship.
He beamed. 'Would you like a hot bath?' Voland suggested. 'The firegrain's been working particularly well this evening.'
'If it's no trouble.'
'It isn't. Not for you, my sweet.'
That soft smile of hers – one that he had fallen in love with long before he had revealed to her his affections – enhanced her natural charisma. She was many years his junior, but this age difference, among other things, generated in him the strong urge to protect her. Voland would have done anything to make Nanzi feel properly cared for.
*
Voland had first found Nanzi five years ago, both her legs smashed up under fallen masonry in the town of Juul, on the other side of Y'iren. It was a quiet place, with an ambience that came from a calm sea, the pungent odour of the fishing boats enhancing his love of that remote town.
Nanzi was lying there helplessly beside the harbour, constant drizzle pooling around her, a flower in her hand that she was taking to her mother, she explained, through gasps of pain. How could he have not fallen for her? A few nearby fishermen and dock labourers had helped him lift the masonry from the wall collapsed through neglect.
They examined her shattered legs as her screams erupted in quiet explosions.
But he then told her he could help.
Voland was a legend among the medical underground, and had even trained with the great Doctor Tarr in Villjamur for several years, before their ethical differences came to light. But what Tarr never possessed was Voland's ability to use other forces in this ordinary world.
Voland was not a cultist by any means: his feeling for relics was one of distrust. People seemed to look back at those ancient cultures with a longing, a sense that things had been superior to what they currently were; but Voland had more than once witnessed cultists manipulating these remnants of ancient technology for purely nefarious means. To him there was nothing great about such misdeeds, nothing great about such abuse of technology, and as a result he had decided to keep his eyes firmly on developing the future. It was still the way he saw the world.
In his youth he had tended to the dying needs of a girl from the Order of Natura, a lone worker and a collector of insects, she claimed. As she bled to death on his operating table, she had confided her wish was that someone would continue her projects – perhaps even this enigmatic young doctor who was struggling to patch her up. She died, however, and as requested he had investigated her belongings.
By scrutinizing her journal, he had very quickly learned the arts of the cultist.
His research became assiduous. He soon ascertained how he could enhance and graft insect parts onto living people. It was an inexact science. When purple light sparked and webbed, joining two organic surfaces in unnatural combinations, he did not know how it was done, only that it happened. And it was real.
His skills were at a peak when he had discovered Nanzi at the harbour. He had warned her of the dangers, the vagueness of the science he practised. She simply stared at the stumps that were once her legs, and accepted his offer.
And where she was broken, he had rebuilt her.
Blood had leaked everywhere at first, pooling in worrying quantities on the floor, so Voland calculated he would lose her, there on his operating table. For sixteen hours he worked on her, first extracting the flattened remnants of her legs with surgical precision, then attaching, generating and lengthening the ones originally taken from a spider. Two separate operations were needed before the joining of these new limbs. Sixteen more hours were needed to make sure the tissue connected satisfactorily, the tendons and bone intersected correctly, and that she would not ultimately reject them. With help from the Phonoi, he had applied his system thoroughly and diligently and lovingly.
In the milky light of dawn he had waited until she awoke. Long moments of time, those were, his arm propped against the wall as the warmth of a new day began stirring something primeval within him.
Yet exhaustion overwhelmed him; as if his entire soul had been put into reconstructing her.
A sadness crept across his face, then more concern, but… gradually her fingers began to move! Thanks to the power of that ancient race: the Dawnir, a people thought to possess far greater technology than was now known. He was left in awe of what he had done with their help, through this connection of minds effected through tens of thousands of years.
As Nanzi regained consciousness, she had begun to cry.
At first she remained febrile, and wept for days simply because of the pain. Voland was horrified. He had thought he had enhanced her mobility, but what a fool he was to assume she would be smiling from the off. How naive could he have been? While she slowly recovered, he cleared the operating chamber of all traces of blood, mucus, skin, fibrous tissue, hair, and slowly scrubbed the place raw until he felt himself purge the anger within himself.
Surprises followed, eventually. As the pain subsided, there was silence. No clear indicator of her mood, but it seemed something more primitive had now taken control of her emotions. As he quizzed her daily, he feared that she might repudiate his work on her, but she did not. Whoever she had been before the transformation, it appeared she soon forgot. He never really did know exactly who she was before her accident, her family, or where she grew up. It was probable he would never learn.
