Wonderblood

Michael’s Chief Orbital Doctor, knew at once when he awoke that the comet he had seen meant nothing and everything. Likewise, he knew he was not sick but also that he was very unwell, and outside the daylight was escaping and beside his window there chirruped a brushfire of birds, so loud he wondered at their purpose—what could they be saying to each other, over and over, in such screams? He knew by the organ-colored sky that it was late afternoon, for no one had seen fit to draw the curtains. He was naked. He had soaked his bed through with sweat, and he knew also that he had now wasted some un-wasteable amount of time with this wretched bedriddenness, and so he staggered to the window and threw it open, causing the birds outside to blow a fresh wave of sound at him before they ascended and reconvened on the east gate. He stared at the white comet. It was so plain in its thereness. He folded his elbows on the window ledge and squinted. John was so tired, so very tired of his life and everything he had ever done and every thought he had ever thought and now, even now, when faced with this bright and indisputably heavenly artifact, he could not muster a single interesting thought.

He could think, only, of how much he did not wish to think about it.

“No, he is awake, look!” came Mizar’s voice from behind him, and also the clamorous unfamiliar footfalls of a group. John turned. In the doorway stood Mizar with one of the king’s elite guards with his lion-shaped facemask pulled down, always a terrifying sight, for the masks the guards wore made them look like deranged partygoers. Beside the two men, or rather with them, was a slight, dark-haired man in the last gasp of his youth, chained around the ankles and staring at the entire scene with an expression of grateful hunger, the way John might have looked at his instruments after he’d been a long time away.

Mizar pushed aside the guard and rushed to John, taking him immediately to the bedside and sitting him down again and then easing him into a cotton robe. “Are you all right, sir? You are always so moved by everything, I tell you it’s a curse as often as a blessing—” Mizar looked pointedly at the prisoner in chains, whose every piece of clothing was brilliant blue, or at least had once been so. The prisoner and his garments were presently covered in dirt and what might have been blood.

John, even in his wretched state, was sure he had never seen this person before. The prisoner met his eyes without smiling or nodding. John pushed Mizar back and pointed. “Who is this?”

Mizar motioned to the guard to unchain the man’s arms and then to wait beyond the bedchamber, but he flicked his wrist to indicate the guard should remain vigilant to sounds of discord within. Then the prisoner came into center of the room, like an Orbital Doctor called to give a lecture.

Mizar cleared his throat and said, “This, sir, is a Walking Doctor. A champion of”—he cast his eyes this way and that and lowered his voice—“well, of Surgery.”

John blankly stared. “And?”

“He is a prisoner, sir. Really more than a prisoner—he is set to be executed in not many days for his treasonous use of living bodies. But that is not relevant to your cause.”

John could not make sense of any of this. “And?”

“Sir, you said to me ‘who.’ And, well, this is the ‘who.’” Mizar beamed and the wrinkles around his eyes bunched. He was strutting about the room in his hennish way, clacking his shoes on the tile. John felt with a lurch the very familiarity of this man, with whom he had forcibly belonged for the majority of his natural life; he understood their unwieldy togetherness as a kind of punishment for his being born in this particular place at this particular time, at an astrological confluence of moments: here, at the Cape, at this time, the Eon of Pain, the ache of the world. Mizar was John’s punishment for being the final preposterous product of his rich parents’ miserable and ambitious begetting. John had been born a seventh son, a lumpy white potato with no heartbeat, but he’d lived despite his nursemaid’s dire predictions, and when it became apparent that he would not expire naturally, they’d squashed him in celebration beneath heavy pearlized fabrics and earrings made from moonrocks. But still he lived on, despite these indignities. Small, delicate, and defiant. In this meek way John had discovered himself strangely invulnerable: sick but never dying throughout his whole endless childhood, until his parents died themselves—together, poisoned with fifteen of their own banquet guests in a stupendous and oft-spoken-of feat of intrigue.

At that time, John had been only eight. Since then, Mizar had been his sole caretaker. In John’s worst moments, he felt himself incapable of any lasting devotion to another human being. If he could not love Mizar, who had fed and educated him, whom could he love? And now Mizar was an old man, one who soon would be in need of care himself. His face was a place where many things had happened and John suspected his mind was similarly beginning to deteriorate. He watched with some cloudy dissatisfaction as Mizar stood in the center of the room, still talking, gesturing up and down at the blue-clad prisoner. “This prisoner predicted the heavenly manifestation. He is the ‘who,’” Mizar was saying. He nudged the small man forward. The prisoner recoiled at the touch.

John took a breath. “What did you say?”

Mizar nodded once. “Yes, it’s true! This man, a self-taught surgeon and an accused traitor, was discovered by his jailer to have fainted dead away, just like yourself, sir, when he observed the comet in the sky this late afternoon. When he was revived he was heard to exclaim that his…” And here Mizar