brain thief
Jul. 25th, 2011 08:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
holliAnother week passed. Sam went out with Meg twice more, each time more successfully than the last; he had dinners with Gordon and Hettie, wrote reports, walked patrols. And another patchwork body was found.
“He’th practithing hith stitching,” Igor mused, looking through a magnifying lens at the corpse. “Look how much better it ith on thith one than it wath on the otherth.”
This one hadn’t been found in the river, which was a first; instead, a Watchman in Dolly Sisters had followed what he thought was a shambling drunk into an alley, seen the drunk collapse, and got a nasty shock when he turned the body over. It was the first real confirmation Sam had that the patchwork people really were walking around, that his monster-maker wasn’t just making increasingly well-sewn dead bodies, but things that could be brought to a semblance of life.
“But it still couldn’t have lived for very long?” Sam asked Igor.
“Oh, no, not more than a few dayth,” Igor said. “He’th thtill not uthing very good brainth. Thith one’s fresher, but it was thtill much too dead by the time he got it in the thkull.”
Sam reflected that it was lucky that coppering earned you an ironclad stomach and a nearly nonexistent gag reflex; otherwise he might have chucked lunch all over Igor’s nice clean morgue. “Any luck tracking where it came from?” he asked.
“We’ve got the K-9 unit following itth trail,” Igor said. “I’ll have Gordon keep you updated.”
“Thanks, Igor,” Sam said. “If we can find out where this one’s been, we might get a hint of where these things are being made. He passed a critical eye over the body. At first glance, it didn’t look too different from Igor himself, what with its network of scars and general lopsidedness, but Igors were different, somehow. Igors made themselves over as part of a campaign of relentless self-improvement: they wanted nimbler hands, sharper eyes, keener ears. The patchwork man on the table was crude and blunt by comparison.
Igors also tended to care a little bit more about appearances. Not that they were anything like conventionally attractive, but they tried for a certain kind of uniformity throughout the Clan, and they cared a great deal about things like neat stitching. They would never have left half a tattoo on one leg, all sloppy, with a crooked line of stitches cutting it off.
Wait. Wait. Sam reviewed the last several sentences that had passed through his brain, trying to figure out which one had sent up the semaphore flags. Ah--!
“This tattoo, Igor,” he said, trying not to sound too excited, “can you get an iconograph of it?” And send copies round to the other Watch Houses? One for me, too.”
“Thertainly, Corporal Vimeth,” said Igor. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Identify the victim,” Sam said. “Or a bit of him, anyway.”
Sam stopped at the canteen for a sandwich-- it wasn’t egg salad today-- and headed out for his patrol, his head full of patchwork thoughts. Before he bit into the sandwich, though, he grimaced, remembering Igor’s comment about brains, and had some second thoughts about eating. He tossed half his sandwich to a small, scruffy street dog who was looking hopefully up at him. The dog caught it neatly.
“Thanks, mifter,” the dog said around his mouthful. Sam nodded at him and walked on.
No one knew how the city had acquired its small population of talking dogs. They had just started turning up when Sam was a lad, and now you saw them all over. There were a few in the Watch-- they made surprisingly good coppers, and the K-9 unit did good work under Captain Angua’s guidance. Some talking rats had come down from a village in Uberwald, as well, and formed a little community around the Underground station in Dimwell; a few of them had joined the Watch too.
The talking cats were another story entirely. They mostly kept to themselves, and they weren’t at all the coppering sort. They made good informants, though: cats saw everything.
Sam’s patrol took him past a few tattoo shops, and he stopped in at each one with the iconograph of the patchwork man’s leg, asking if anyone recognized it. He hadn’t any luck, though one artist offered that it looked like amateur work. “You get fellows doing their own work sometimes, to look tough,” explained the artist, who had a surprisingly delicate rendering of a bird in flight wrapping around one massive bicep. “Or it could be prison work. Down in the Tanty, there’s not much to do, so they tattoo each other. They’re not very good at it, though. This certainly wasn’t done with proper tools. And why’s it cut off in the middle like that?”
“That’s confidential, I’m afraid,” Sam said. “Police business. You’ve been a great help, though-- thanks very much.”
Sam finished his patrol in a thoughtful mood. He decided to walk to Meg’s place, rather than taking the train; it was a lovely night for it and he wasn’t supposed to meet Meg for an hour. She lived off Treacle Street, in an elevator building near Dragon’s Landing. It was a nice neighborhood, full of people who worked in the Street of Cunning Artificers or Merchant’s Street, part of the city’s burgeoning middle class. Sam supposed Meg’s family must be reasonably well-off, for her to live here while she studied at the hospital.*
Sam called for the elevator, and stood waiting in Meg’s lobby, his thoughts still circling round the tattoo. He was sure it would lead him somewhere useful; he just didn’t have the faintest idea where that was. The elevator’s arrival cut him off mid-ponder, though, and he tried to put the Rag-and-Bone Man out of his head for now.
He pulled open the elevator gate and stepped in. “Fifth floor, please,” he said to the imp in its call box, and the little creature saluted him sharply. It was wearing a little jacket with gold braid and tassels on the shoulders, and a tiny hat.
“Right-o,” said the imp, who then pressed a little lever in the call box. Distant hydraulics sloshed, and the elevator began to rise.
Sam knocked on the door to Meg’s flat, and tugged a little anxiously at his neckcloth. He was taking Meg to a play at the Dysk, which meant dressing up a bit; it wasn’t something he’d done around Meg before. He didn’t know why he was worried. It wasn’t as though she’d take one look at him and go ‘aha! I see through your clever disguise, you are actually a nob! Begone, for I have no use for upper-class twits!” For one thing, Meg didn’t even talk like that.
His worry evaporated when Meg answered the door in a dress. It was-- really quite a nice dress. Perfect for the theater. Up ‘til now he’d only seen Meg in practical skirts and shirtwaists, occasionally a waistcoat or spencer over that; this was the first time he’d seen her dressed up. She looked lovely. She had all her curly hair piled up on her head, with a ribbon wound round it, and pearl earbobs. Her dress was a soft sage green, trimmed with pale yellow and white, and as she gathered her shawl around her and looked up at Sam, he found himself smiling foolishly.
“You look-- nice. Really nice. Lovely, in fact. Er. Good evening,” Sam said.
“Hi, Sam. You really think so? I know we’re a bit behind the fashions, back home, but I do like this dress. It’s my favorite color,” she admitted.
“Well, it suits you,” Sam said.
“Thanks. You look nice, too,” she added.
They took a cab to the theater, and Meg didn’t let go of Sam’s hand after he helped her up into it. Sam hoped his palms wouldn’t sweat. He had a bit of trouble following the plot of the play. Not that it wasn’t good-- they were always quite good, at the Dysk-- but he couldn’t help but be distracted. At intermission, Meg had to explain the plot to him.
“You seem a bit distracted, Sam. Are you sure you’re all right? Got work on the brain?”
“Not work, no,” said Sam, feeling a little foolish. “But I have been a bit distracted. It’s just-- been a little while since I took anyone on a real date, and I guess I’m a bit nervous.”
“Oh,” Meg said, and flushed prettily. “Well. You don’t have to be nervous.” And she leaned in and kissed him, just once, a soft brush of lips on Sam’s mouth, right in front of the gods and everybody in the middle of the lobby.
Sam beamed at her. “Right. Well. I suppose I’m not so nervous, anymore.”
When the play was over, they walked together through the nighttime city. Conversation turned, as it always seemed to with the two of them, to work.
“It’s called a Tactican section,” Meg explained. “After General Tacticus, you know; the story goes that he was cut from his dead mother’s belly with a sword. Which is probably nonsense, of course, but there might be a little grain of truth in it.”
“I always thought that story was a myth,” Sam said. “In school they taught us it was probably propaganda, to puff up his military credentials when he started conquering everything later on.” The Watch School had taken a rather skeptical view of Ankh-Morpork’s glorious history of empire.
“Well, it might be,” said Meg. “But the procedure’s real enough. It’s what you do in childbirth when everything else has failed, when the mother’s dead or dying and your only hope is to save the baby. Or at least, that’s what it’s been up until now.”
“But you’re trying to change that?” Sam asked.
Meg waved this off. “Not *me*, I’m just a trainee. I’m happy when I get to observe. But Dr. Igorina’s made a lot of amazing advances in telling when a delivery’s about to go Rimwards, and she thinks she’s close to performing a successful T-section-- one where mother and child both survive. It’s really fascinating work.”
It occurred to Sam for the first time that Meg might be able to, as it were, help the police with their inquiries. He couldn’t tell her the details of the Rag-and-Bone Man case, of course, but he might be able to find out something useful. “Meg, do all the trainee doctors learn to do surgery? Like, the really delicate stuff, the kind you need to know if you want to do something like a T-section?”
“Well, no,” Meg said. “Only the surgical residents learn that. And I’m learning enough that I could do a T-section if I have to, but I’m doing extra training with Dr. Igorina. Why do you ask?”
“It’s a copper thing. Sorry, but I can’t actually tell you the details. I was just wondering how much medical training someone would need to have, say, to stitch up a wound. Or reattach a limb, things like that.” Sam wondered hopefully if his case was about to get quite a bit easier to solve.
“Well, those are two very different things, Sam. I could teach you to suture in half an hour, if I needed to, but it would take you a bit of time and practice to actually get good at it. Reattaching limbs is tricky, though.”
Apparently, it wasn’t. “But someone who practiced a lot-- they wouldn’t necessarily need medical training to do it?”
“Well, I suppose not. I wouldn’t like to be the patient they practiced on, though! There’s a reason we learn on corpses.”
Sam froze. “Wait. What did you say?”
“Oh, I suppose that’s a bit yucky, isn’t it?” Meg said, in the tones of one who had seen every fluid a human body can produce, and been spattered with most of them. “Sorry. It’s not common knowledge, but yes, medical students do practice surgery on dead people-- mostly condemned criminals, but we do get the occasional person who donates their body to science.” In a slightly jolly tone, she added, “We practice suturing on pigs, as well. Isn’t that odd? But when you give it a good shave, a side of bacon’s basically the same texture as a human.”
They were walking across the Brass Bridge by now, and Sam stopped to lean on one of the wooden hippos and collect his thoughts. Condemned criminals-- the prison tattoo? Was his monster-maker getting his parts from the hospital, now that he couldn’t raid the cemeteries? It made sense, if it was someone from the hospital-- he’d have surgical skills, he’d have access to bodies.
Sam watched the sparse traffic crossing the bridge, and tried to put the pieces together. Mag frowned nervously at him. “Sam? Are you all right?”
“Yeah. I think so,” he said. “I think you just gave me a big break in a case, actually.”
“Oh. Well, good for me,” she said. “You’ll tell me what this is all about eventually, won’t you? Because if you’ve got a case involving an amateur surgeon, that’s a bit worrying. There’s a reason we train for so long.”
“Yeah,” said Sam. “The question I’m trying to answer is, how amateur a surgeon is my suspect? Because that’d go a long way towards solving this case.” He sighed, and leaned back on the hippo, taking a long look around.
There weren’t a lot of people crossing the Brass Bridge at this hour, and that’s why the black-shrouded figure caught Sam’s eye. Well, not only that: her walk was off, a little staggered, and she was swathed from head to toe in a face-concealing cloak. He was only guessing that the shape was female, in fact, because it was slight and slim and more or less conical, with a suggestion of skirts beneath the cloak. And she was walking towards the railing of the bridge.
“Meg,” Sam said slowly, “am I mad, or is there something funny about that woman over there?”
Meg looked. “You’re not mad,” she said, “unless I am too-- oh my gods.”
The woman was climbing the railing. Sam was already running before she had one foot up; was shouting “Miss, don’t!” before her second foot left the ground; was reaching for the all-concealing folds of cloth as she swung herself over the side and into empty air. His hands grasped at nothing; the woman fell.
He heard Meg gasp, only half a second behind him, a littler slower in her long skirts, and the two of them watched the figure make the long fall, down to the black water below. There was a distant splash.
“Oh, no,” Meg breathed. “The poor thing...”
“I’ve got to get to the nearest Watch House,” Sam said. “Will you be all right?”
“I’m coming with you,” Meg said, and cut off his protest. “--Don’t argue, I am. If she’s found alive, she’s going to need a doctor.”
“All right,” Sam said. “How are you at running?”
She hitched up her skirts. “Not bad,” she said, and took Sam’s hand. “Let’s go.”
They ran.
*Sam tried not to be class-conscious, but he wasn’t very good at it.
“He’th practithing hith stitching,” Igor mused, looking through a magnifying lens at the corpse. “Look how much better it ith on thith one than it wath on the otherth.”
This one hadn’t been found in the river, which was a first; instead, a Watchman in Dolly Sisters had followed what he thought was a shambling drunk into an alley, seen the drunk collapse, and got a nasty shock when he turned the body over. It was the first real confirmation Sam had that the patchwork people really were walking around, that his monster-maker wasn’t just making increasingly well-sewn dead bodies, but things that could be brought to a semblance of life.
“But it still couldn’t have lived for very long?” Sam asked Igor.
“Oh, no, not more than a few dayth,” Igor said. “He’th thtill not uthing very good brainth. Thith one’s fresher, but it was thtill much too dead by the time he got it in the thkull.”
Sam reflected that it was lucky that coppering earned you an ironclad stomach and a nearly nonexistent gag reflex; otherwise he might have chucked lunch all over Igor’s nice clean morgue. “Any luck tracking where it came from?” he asked.
“We’ve got the K-9 unit following itth trail,” Igor said. “I’ll have Gordon keep you updated.”
“Thanks, Igor,” Sam said. “If we can find out where this one’s been, we might get a hint of where these things are being made. He passed a critical eye over the body. At first glance, it didn’t look too different from Igor himself, what with its network of scars and general lopsidedness, but Igors were different, somehow. Igors made themselves over as part of a campaign of relentless self-improvement: they wanted nimbler hands, sharper eyes, keener ears. The patchwork man on the table was crude and blunt by comparison.
Igors also tended to care a little bit more about appearances. Not that they were anything like conventionally attractive, but they tried for a certain kind of uniformity throughout the Clan, and they cared a great deal about things like neat stitching. They would never have left half a tattoo on one leg, all sloppy, with a crooked line of stitches cutting it off.
Wait. Wait. Sam reviewed the last several sentences that had passed through his brain, trying to figure out which one had sent up the semaphore flags. Ah--!
“This tattoo, Igor,” he said, trying not to sound too excited, “can you get an iconograph of it?” And send copies round to the other Watch Houses? One for me, too.”
“Thertainly, Corporal Vimeth,” said Igor. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Identify the victim,” Sam said. “Or a bit of him, anyway.”
Sam stopped at the canteen for a sandwich-- it wasn’t egg salad today-- and headed out for his patrol, his head full of patchwork thoughts. Before he bit into the sandwich, though, he grimaced, remembering Igor’s comment about brains, and had some second thoughts about eating. He tossed half his sandwich to a small, scruffy street dog who was looking hopefully up at him. The dog caught it neatly.
“Thanks, mifter,” the dog said around his mouthful. Sam nodded at him and walked on.
No one knew how the city had acquired its small population of talking dogs. They had just started turning up when Sam was a lad, and now you saw them all over. There were a few in the Watch-- they made surprisingly good coppers, and the K-9 unit did good work under Captain Angua’s guidance. Some talking rats had come down from a village in Uberwald, as well, and formed a little community around the Underground station in Dimwell; a few of them had joined the Watch too.
The talking cats were another story entirely. They mostly kept to themselves, and they weren’t at all the coppering sort. They made good informants, though: cats saw everything.
Sam’s patrol took him past a few tattoo shops, and he stopped in at each one with the iconograph of the patchwork man’s leg, asking if anyone recognized it. He hadn’t any luck, though one artist offered that it looked like amateur work. “You get fellows doing their own work sometimes, to look tough,” explained the artist, who had a surprisingly delicate rendering of a bird in flight wrapping around one massive bicep. “Or it could be prison work. Down in the Tanty, there’s not much to do, so they tattoo each other. They’re not very good at it, though. This certainly wasn’t done with proper tools. And why’s it cut off in the middle like that?”
“That’s confidential, I’m afraid,” Sam said. “Police business. You’ve been a great help, though-- thanks very much.”
Sam finished his patrol in a thoughtful mood. He decided to walk to Meg’s place, rather than taking the train; it was a lovely night for it and he wasn’t supposed to meet Meg for an hour. She lived off Treacle Street, in an elevator building near Dragon’s Landing. It was a nice neighborhood, full of people who worked in the Street of Cunning Artificers or Merchant’s Street, part of the city’s burgeoning middle class. Sam supposed Meg’s family must be reasonably well-off, for her to live here while she studied at the hospital.*
Sam called for the elevator, and stood waiting in Meg’s lobby, his thoughts still circling round the tattoo. He was sure it would lead him somewhere useful; he just didn’t have the faintest idea where that was. The elevator’s arrival cut him off mid-ponder, though, and he tried to put the Rag-and-Bone Man out of his head for now.
He pulled open the elevator gate and stepped in. “Fifth floor, please,” he said to the imp in its call box, and the little creature saluted him sharply. It was wearing a little jacket with gold braid and tassels on the shoulders, and a tiny hat.
“Right-o,” said the imp, who then pressed a little lever in the call box. Distant hydraulics sloshed, and the elevator began to rise.
Sam knocked on the door to Meg’s flat, and tugged a little anxiously at his neckcloth. He was taking Meg to a play at the Dysk, which meant dressing up a bit; it wasn’t something he’d done around Meg before. He didn’t know why he was worried. It wasn’t as though she’d take one look at him and go ‘aha! I see through your clever disguise, you are actually a nob! Begone, for I have no use for upper-class twits!” For one thing, Meg didn’t even talk like that.
His worry evaporated when Meg answered the door in a dress. It was-- really quite a nice dress. Perfect for the theater. Up ‘til now he’d only seen Meg in practical skirts and shirtwaists, occasionally a waistcoat or spencer over that; this was the first time he’d seen her dressed up. She looked lovely. She had all her curly hair piled up on her head, with a ribbon wound round it, and pearl earbobs. Her dress was a soft sage green, trimmed with pale yellow and white, and as she gathered her shawl around her and looked up at Sam, he found himself smiling foolishly.
“You look-- nice. Really nice. Lovely, in fact. Er. Good evening,” Sam said.
“Hi, Sam. You really think so? I know we’re a bit behind the fashions, back home, but I do like this dress. It’s my favorite color,” she admitted.
“Well, it suits you,” Sam said.
“Thanks. You look nice, too,” she added.
They took a cab to the theater, and Meg didn’t let go of Sam’s hand after he helped her up into it. Sam hoped his palms wouldn’t sweat. He had a bit of trouble following the plot of the play. Not that it wasn’t good-- they were always quite good, at the Dysk-- but he couldn’t help but be distracted. At intermission, Meg had to explain the plot to him.
“You seem a bit distracted, Sam. Are you sure you’re all right? Got work on the brain?”
“Not work, no,” said Sam, feeling a little foolish. “But I have been a bit distracted. It’s just-- been a little while since I took anyone on a real date, and I guess I’m a bit nervous.”
“Oh,” Meg said, and flushed prettily. “Well. You don’t have to be nervous.” And she leaned in and kissed him, just once, a soft brush of lips on Sam’s mouth, right in front of the gods and everybody in the middle of the lobby.
Sam beamed at her. “Right. Well. I suppose I’m not so nervous, anymore.”
When the play was over, they walked together through the nighttime city. Conversation turned, as it always seemed to with the two of them, to work.
“It’s called a Tactican section,” Meg explained. “After General Tacticus, you know; the story goes that he was cut from his dead mother’s belly with a sword. Which is probably nonsense, of course, but there might be a little grain of truth in it.”
“I always thought that story was a myth,” Sam said. “In school they taught us it was probably propaganda, to puff up his military credentials when he started conquering everything later on.” The Watch School had taken a rather skeptical view of Ankh-Morpork’s glorious history of empire.
“Well, it might be,” said Meg. “But the procedure’s real enough. It’s what you do in childbirth when everything else has failed, when the mother’s dead or dying and your only hope is to save the baby. Or at least, that’s what it’s been up until now.”
“But you’re trying to change that?” Sam asked.
Meg waved this off. “Not *me*, I’m just a trainee. I’m happy when I get to observe. But Dr. Igorina’s made a lot of amazing advances in telling when a delivery’s about to go Rimwards, and she thinks she’s close to performing a successful T-section-- one where mother and child both survive. It’s really fascinating work.”
It occurred to Sam for the first time that Meg might be able to, as it were, help the police with their inquiries. He couldn’t tell her the details of the Rag-and-Bone Man case, of course, but he might be able to find out something useful. “Meg, do all the trainee doctors learn to do surgery? Like, the really delicate stuff, the kind you need to know if you want to do something like a T-section?”
“Well, no,” Meg said. “Only the surgical residents learn that. And I’m learning enough that I could do a T-section if I have to, but I’m doing extra training with Dr. Igorina. Why do you ask?”
“It’s a copper thing. Sorry, but I can’t actually tell you the details. I was just wondering how much medical training someone would need to have, say, to stitch up a wound. Or reattach a limb, things like that.” Sam wondered hopefully if his case was about to get quite a bit easier to solve.
“Well, those are two very different things, Sam. I could teach you to suture in half an hour, if I needed to, but it would take you a bit of time and practice to actually get good at it. Reattaching limbs is tricky, though.”
Apparently, it wasn’t. “But someone who practiced a lot-- they wouldn’t necessarily need medical training to do it?”
“Well, I suppose not. I wouldn’t like to be the patient they practiced on, though! There’s a reason we learn on corpses.”
Sam froze. “Wait. What did you say?”
“Oh, I suppose that’s a bit yucky, isn’t it?” Meg said, in the tones of one who had seen every fluid a human body can produce, and been spattered with most of them. “Sorry. It’s not common knowledge, but yes, medical students do practice surgery on dead people-- mostly condemned criminals, but we do get the occasional person who donates their body to science.” In a slightly jolly tone, she added, “We practice suturing on pigs, as well. Isn’t that odd? But when you give it a good shave, a side of bacon’s basically the same texture as a human.”
They were walking across the Brass Bridge by now, and Sam stopped to lean on one of the wooden hippos and collect his thoughts. Condemned criminals-- the prison tattoo? Was his monster-maker getting his parts from the hospital, now that he couldn’t raid the cemeteries? It made sense, if it was someone from the hospital-- he’d have surgical skills, he’d have access to bodies.
Sam watched the sparse traffic crossing the bridge, and tried to put the pieces together. Mag frowned nervously at him. “Sam? Are you all right?”
“Yeah. I think so,” he said. “I think you just gave me a big break in a case, actually.”
“Oh. Well, good for me,” she said. “You’ll tell me what this is all about eventually, won’t you? Because if you’ve got a case involving an amateur surgeon, that’s a bit worrying. There’s a reason we train for so long.”
“Yeah,” said Sam. “The question I’m trying to answer is, how amateur a surgeon is my suspect? Because that’d go a long way towards solving this case.” He sighed, and leaned back on the hippo, taking a long look around.
There weren’t a lot of people crossing the Brass Bridge at this hour, and that’s why the black-shrouded figure caught Sam’s eye. Well, not only that: her walk was off, a little staggered, and she was swathed from head to toe in a face-concealing cloak. He was only guessing that the shape was female, in fact, because it was slight and slim and more or less conical, with a suggestion of skirts beneath the cloak. And she was walking towards the railing of the bridge.
“Meg,” Sam said slowly, “am I mad, or is there something funny about that woman over there?”
Meg looked. “You’re not mad,” she said, “unless I am too-- oh my gods.”
The woman was climbing the railing. Sam was already running before she had one foot up; was shouting “Miss, don’t!” before her second foot left the ground; was reaching for the all-concealing folds of cloth as she swung herself over the side and into empty air. His hands grasped at nothing; the woman fell.
He heard Meg gasp, only half a second behind him, a littler slower in her long skirts, and the two of them watched the figure make the long fall, down to the black water below. There was a distant splash.
“Oh, no,” Meg breathed. “The poor thing...”
“I’ve got to get to the nearest Watch House,” Sam said. “Will you be all right?”
“I’m coming with you,” Meg said, and cut off his protest. “--Don’t argue, I am. If she’s found alive, she’s going to need a doctor.”
“All right,” Sam said. “How are you at running?”
She hitched up her skirts. “Not bad,” she said, and took Sam’s hand. “Let’s go.”
They ran.
*Sam tried not to be class-conscious, but he wasn’t very good at it.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-26 01:38 am (UTC)