BLOODSTAND

1541 4D

The Return Office was an arched, circular, white-polished chamber at the end of a wide corridor off the City radial through the Aswal Narr crossing. Eleven sconces in the wall sprayed yellow-gold light upward onto the nearly-hemispherical ceiling. A door opposite the street corridor led to a warren of offices and preparation rooms.

Martin, Andrew, Raul and Norwell filed into a small square room where Wranmar‘s body lay on a steel carrier panel, covered only with a pale-gray sheet. This room’s walls, floor and ceiling were gray stone, unfinished, the striations and faults of past millenia altered only with a cloudy sealer. The stone carried no decoration or break except for the doorway and a steel hatchdoor. The hatchdoor covered a waist-height wall opening just large enough to admit the carrier panel with its burden.

Andrew‘s head throbbed from the brew and the KP he had patched the night before. Martin elbowed him forward. He stepped to the panel and drew back the sheet to see his father’s face.

It glared with its eyes shut. It was hard and cold and no different from its usual look for many years, as if Wranmar had known how he wanted to look after he was dead and practiced at it until he got it exactly right. It told the world: I don’t want to give you anything because you took everything I had, so go burn in whatever hell you hate the most, and leave me alone.

Andrew bent over the face, and he wanted to kiss its cheek and say, “I love you, father, and I don’t care what you did,” but he stopped because he didn’t want to explain to his young brothers; then he went ahead and pressed his lips to the cold cheek anyway, and it was too late.

His kiss fell away from him into emptiness, and his tears fell on the cold face, and Raul‘s big hands steadied him, and he sobbed, for his father and his mother and the hell they had lived through for their children, and because for the second time he’d come too late for either of them to hear him say he loved them.

The brothers carried the panel out to the white chamber and set it on the stand under the center of the dome. Four Darko Hejj men dressed in black and gray bodysuits joined them; one stood behind each of the brothers. Andrew the oldest son took his place at Wranmar‘s head, Martin the second son at the feet, with Raul at Andrew‘s left and Norwell at his right. Andrew unsheathed his knife, bared his left forearm, and slid the point of the blade into a vein.

This should have been Drin‘s position, as the firstborn, Andrew thought. Or Chanzar‘s. He missed them now; they had been like fathers to him, more than Wranmar ever had.

The blood flowed easily and strongly. Andrew raised his arm to direct the stream of red onto the forehead of his father’s body.

“Father, guardian, protector, I give you farewell,” he said. “Your spirit has vanished from us, your body returns to begin again. We share in its return.” How this had hurt when he’d stood for Chanzar. He swallowed.

“Find your way with new eyes, and new feet, and new hands,” the others said in unison.

“Let my blood tell you the way,” Andrew said, handing the knife to Raul at his left.

“Let my blood write a map for you,” Raul said. He punctured his forearm as Andrew had done, and swung his arm to spread a spatter of scarlet across the sheet.

“Let my blood walk ahead of you,” said Norwell, reaching across to take the knife and add his own red to the sheet on Wranmar‘s body. He turned the knife to pass it to Martin, who dropped it on the stone floor with a clang. A bad omen; Martin grimaced and snatched the knife up in his left hand.

Another error. Quickly Martin changed the knife to his right hand, and said, “Let my blood carry you on the long stream.” He stuck the point into his forearm, but nothing came, at first; then he dug, wincing, and a gout of darker blood weltered out and reddened. He flung it onto his dead father’s feet, turned the knife, and passed it back to Raul, who handed it to Andrew.

“We are your sons,” Andrew said. “When our times come, be father and guide and protector to us, and help us on this way. Wranmar Aganas Treivan Luce Hejj Anassi, our father in Darko Hejji Coll, farewell.”

The four brothers stepped close to the body, touched their fingers to the spattered blood drying on the sheet, and raised their fingers to their lips.

“Farewell,” the four Hejji men chorused, and began a low chant as Andrew and his brothers filed out of the chamber to wait in the small square room once again.

The four Hejjis brought back the body, fully shrouded now in the bloodied sheet, and slid it into the small room’s wall opening. The return had begun: the moisture, the tissues, the bones, all went to the breakdown complex at the fringes of the City, for recycling.

Andrew closed his eyes. To deflect his thoughts, he muttered to Raul, “Did you do those Astrans down in Herindina?”

“What Astrans?”

“Somebody slime-shot three Astran guys.”

“Not me. Norwell and I were at Nexi‘s with his brothers.”

“They’ll think it was us.”

“Let them.” Raul sounded like his father.

“Yeah.” Andrew turned away.