all in parts and pieces

The male strapped to the table is a pretty young thing with the wrong coloured eyes. They dart around the laboratory in fretful anguish, leaping from Vizaeth to the workbenches to the door, and if they were the right colour, Vizaeth would resent such excessive rolling, but they’re not, so it doesn’t matter. The arms and legs are what he wants from this one—the rest is so much offal.

On the workbenches—two great slabs repurposed from a grand zurkhwood dining table—his project lies beneath carefully crafted stasis fields, the complex spellwork a weaving of necromancy gleaned from the Thayan tomes lining the shelves he hauled up from the lower levels. The stalactite’s previous owners saw fit to keep their library at the narrow tip of their hanging estate; Vizaeth prefers to work nearer the top. As far from the city as he can get without leaving it.

“Please don’t please no let me go please please let me go—”

The male is babbling. Vizaeth tunes it out. It all gets to be the same after a while. The same words, the same rhythm. He’d savoured it at first, the luxury of being begged, instead of being the one begging. Now it’s just irritating.

“You’re pathetic,” he rasps over his shoulder as he lowers the stasis fields in preparation for today’s work. “You’ve hardly suffered at all, yet you’re whining like a child. You’re Menzoberranyr. Have some self-respect.”

With the stasis deactivated, a great weight lifts from his shoulders and he sighs in relief, stretching until his spine pops. The drain on his magic to keep it running is immense—some days he can’t even stand, it takes so much from him. But without it, the bodies rot, and if they rot, he loses all the progress he’s made, and he can’t start again. He can’t waste more time starting again.

“Let me go let me go let me go!” the male continues, struggling against his restraints.

“Why are you bothering?” Vizaeth asks. “You can’t go anywhere. I severed the tendons in your knees and ankles.”

Apparently the male didn’t realise this, for he takes up weeping—a hideously grating noise that scrapes Vizaeth’s worn-thin nerves. With a pulse of magic that bleeds thin lines through the bandages on his arms, he conjures a scarred and scabbed mage hand and rips the inconsiderate male’s tongue out at the root.

A mistake. The weeping turns to gurgled howling. Spittle and blood spray in a froth from the male’s lips, and he thrashes with such force he’s like to bruise the very parts Vizaeth selected him for. Vizaeth massages his temples. The ragged edges of his Weave scrape the underside of his skin as he crosses to the table, plucks the tongue from the mage hand, and resets it into the spluttering mouth. He’s already bleeding, so he peels back a bandage and provides a few drops that serve to reattach the wretched thing.

“There,” he snaps. “Better?”

The sobs continue, but the volume, blessedly, is greatly reduced.

Vizaeth returns to the workbenches to check all is ready. On the slabs lie a pair of headless, limbless torsos, each containing the culmination of many long, painful months of work. The one on the right is nearly immaculate; the one on the left still a shade too pale. He’s been darkening it in careful stages; in subtle, barely noticeable gradations, because he hasn’t yet worked out how to lighten pigment without the skin turning fragile as old paper. Both contain carefully harvested and re-seated organs, all checked against his own for imperfections. He has no other way of testing for similarity, not now that Pharaun is…is…

He pushes the thought away. He needs to focus. Transplants are fickle magic, and his hands are already shaky.

He starts with the legs. His curved knife slices through the meat of the thigh, well above the knee, the blade keen and swift—he’s down to bone in a matter of moments. Then a bone saw and a brief pause to cast a tourniquet—another bit of elegant Thayan spellwork—to keep the donor from bleeding out. He can and has worked with the dead, but surgical magic is far easier when the parts come from the living.

He learned that the hard way.

Once both legs are severed, he takes a short break to drink and clean his hands, which have finally stopped shaking. The work has that effect. It focuses him. Distracts him. The drag of metal through flesh, the sound of saw teeth through bone, the wet heat and metallic scent of blood—all these are soothing, grounding sensations. They remind him he’s real and alive, even when the face in the mirror he occasionally glances at seems more a corpse than ever.

The male moans weakly, bereft of pleading, reduced to mere animal sounds of suffering. In a rare fit of compassion, Vizaeth offers him water. He swallows it mechanically, wrong-coloured eyes cloudy with pain.

He finds his voice again when Vizaeth starts on his arms. Vizaeth tightens the straps at shoulder and wrist, and even then he convulses to such a violent extent Vizaeth fears he’ll break his own bones. The living might be easier to use, but Lolth’s teeth, the dead are infinitely more cooperative.

In the end he has to cast a paralysis, which makes his nose bleed and his ears ring, but at least the male lies still. Knife, tourniquet, saw—more delicate than the one he used for the femur—and soon he has a set of perfect arms in his. He lifts the left, pressing the palm to his cheek. It’s warm. It could almost be alive.

It will be alive. Soon it and all the other pieces he’s so painstakingly gathered will be alive, and all his long endeavours will be worth it.

Vizaeth carries his prizes to the workbenches, setting the legs on one, the arms on another. The legs match the complexion of the darker torso better; the arms suit the proportions of the other more elegantly. Seeing everything lined up makes his heart beat faster. It’s almost right. Almost complete. But that doesn’t mean he can get sloppy. He fetches the bone needles and suture thread crafted from the remains of the stalactite’s previous owners, opens the appropriate pages of the Thayan surgical manual, and sets to work.

Time passes in a cramped red blur. He sews and bleeds and bleeds and sews, carving off slivers of his Weave to bind into every stitch. By the time he’s done, his throat tastes of iron and his head is pounding; his eyes won’t focus properly, everything blurred and colourless, and his back aches from hunching over the work.

Vizaeth rubs his face. Swallows spit and viscera. Colour and focus return piecemeal, though his left eye feels encased in sand. He casts a critical gaze over his creations, both twitching with the urge towards life. His magic and his sutures—hundreds of them—are so perfectly executed that the limbs might have grown from those exact bodies. No mistakes leap out, but he can’t just call it good enough and move on. This is not an examination he can afford to fail by even a single mark.

“Which, then?” he asks in a ragged whisper. “Which is more you?”

He lifts his eyes to the shelves mounted above the workbenches. In the centre, held within a permanent stasis field that cost Vizaeth a chunk of flesh that left a furrowed divot in his flank, Pharaun’s head watches over him. Once-glittering eyes and a slack mouth—painful to see without their sardonic animation, their sharp intelligence—observe his progress in critical silence.

Wherever the soul has fled—beyond the reach of magical communication; Vizaeth’s tried that, tried and tried and tried that—it can still see him. He doesn’t doubt that it can see him. And Pharaun would never settle for anything less than perfection.

“Alright,” Vizaeth says. “We’ll try it the other way.”

Which means that first, to keep the donor limbs full of life and magic, they need to go back onto their original bodies.

Some hours of careful unpicking later, he’s ready to return them. The male rallies from an apparently inexhaustible well of fear, screaming and writhing—the paralysis having long worn off, unfortunately—as Vizaeth reattaches the limbs.

“I’m putting them back,” he snarls. “Show a little gratitude.”

He doesn’t bother stitching them all the way—blood magic and a few positional sutures will suffice. Cutting them off again will be tedious, but he’s learned from experience that while the stasis field keeps things preserved, it doesn’t keep them as supple as a living source.

It’s yet another problem on his long list of problems to deal with; one to tackle when the bulk of the reconstruction is complete, and he has time to decipher the more esoteric elements of Thayan surgical magic, or to summon forth a spirit or demon or some other entity with answers.

Vizaeth reactivates the stasis fields, wipes his hands on a bloody rag, and leaves the laboratory. The door thumps heavily behind him, blissfully blocking out the relentless screams for mercy and freedom. He rubs his throbbing temples with a trembling hand. His stomach is cavernous. His magic is raw, the ache pulsing and scraping down to the bone. From a narrow window he can make out Narbondel’s glow at the halfway mark—on its way up or down? He has no idea.

It doesn’t matter. How long it takes, how much he hurts, how little he rests or eats—none of it matters. All that matters is completing the work. All that matters is bringing Pharaun back.

And once he does, he’s never going to lose him again.