Seventeen: Dr. Soonoo's Black Bag

Nail was furious. With herself, mostly, but also with Marcus Barkle and Captain Marsh, who had sent her on this mission across Piketon.

She sat on a streetcar, rumbling through one of the worker encampments. Pale, dusty faces swept along outside the smeared window.

On a streetcorner, a brass band was playing patriotic tunes from the era of the old Federation, blatting and honking without enthusiasm.

She saw a line of school children, dressed in bright yellow smocks and tricorner hats. Candidates for one of the scribes guilds, she reckoned.

Though she had yet to spend a single day in the rigging of the Blue Oriole, Nail already felt the scorn of the sailor toward worldlubbers.

But it was also true that she had begun to feel the sting of the indentured life. With her family and her distracted, day-dreaming father, Nail had been left to her own devices.

She had sorted for herself and made her own way through life.

Now, she found herself under the thumb of a Captain, whose authority was all but perfect.

Marcus Barkle ordered her about like a servant; and even the boy, Ballko, seemed to think it natural that she should jump when he spoke.

She rattled the pocketfull of coins they had given her and thought about running off. It seemed certain that she could vanish into the alleys and slums of Piketon.

How would Barkle ever find her -- even with this blue tattooo on her shoulder?

She looked at the letter that Captain Marsh had entrusted to her. It was sealed with a blob of blue wax, pressed with a seal from the big ring on the Captain's finger.

"You are to take it to the address I've written on the back," he instructed, hardly botherin gto look at her. "The letter is for Dr. Soonoo, and no one else. If you can't find him, come straight back, is that understood?"

"Yes, sir," she said.

"Off with you, then."

Nail had scampered down one of the gangplanks from the belly-hatch of the Blue Oriole. Barkle was waiting for her at the bottom.

"I can trust you, right?" he said. "I've enough trouble at the moment without any nonsense."

She nodded.

"That letter will bring a doctor who can help the kid in the brig," Barkle said. "Without a doctor, I reckon he'll die in a day or two."

"What's that to me?" Nail said.

Barkle's face darkened. In moments like that, he didn't look like a little boy at all. He looked like some kind of gnome, old and grave.

"He's one of us now, just like you and me. Things are hard on the Oriole, no mistake, but we look after each other. Get it?"

In truth, it was this that made Nail angry: She did care about the sick boy in the brig. She did feel protective of him and of the other children who had been taken by Marcus Barkle.

She thought of them, huddled and frightened, waiting for her to come back. With each passing day, more of them looked to her for help with their problems, for answers to their questions.

The more she tried to push them away, the more they demanded.

"It's not fair," she said to herself. "I just escaped from one family. I never wanted another."

The conductor called out Knife Avenue, which was her stop, and Nail clambered down.

It was a neighborhood made almost entirely of colorless concrete blocks, the road paved with poured macadam.

There was the small of a tannery, sour and thick in the air. On the corner was a saloon, with half a dozen men seated outside on a bench.

Though it was mid-day, they had bottles in their fists and were cross-eyed drunk.

"Hey there, girly!" one of the called. "You must be the Queen of Dream, riding about on a streetcar like that. Got a pocketfull of nibs, have you?"

"Why don't you share with us poor workingmen," said one of his fellows. "Come and buy us a round of drinks?"

Nail ignored their laughter. She had been laughed at plenty when preaching with her father. She knew when men were dangerous and when they were just making noise.

She asked an old man with a vegetable cart for directions and in a few minutes was standing outside a narrow doorway made of plywood and rusty hinges. A tangle of rope served as the knob.

Tacked to the wall beside the door was a scrap of parchment that read, in descending order, "Dentist, Barber, Surgeon, Leech, Priest."

Scrawled at the bottom was a symbol that Nail recognized: an ankh. A cross, with a loop at the top.

She knocked tentatively and said, "Hello? I have a message for Dr. Soonoo! Anyone there?"

A long, low groan came from inside, followed by a cannonade of coughing and wheezing. It sounded like someone was coming apart.

Then she heard a low voice, queerly accented, smooth as fine sand: "There you are, Mr. Keene, all done. Rinse your mouth with this solution and spit in the basin, if you please."

There was more hackery and wheezing and then a dazed looking man, with a great belly and a two-day growth of beard, appeared in the doorway. Dribbles of bright blood showed on the bib of his shirt.

He rested a hand on the wall and said, "Ah, now, the pain's going already. It's a miracle. I believe you have saved my life!"

A second man appeared, dressed in the finest linen suit Nail had ever seen. He wore a cream-colored cravat, with another ankh set in the middle as a tie-pin.

He had olive-colored skin and oiled black hair that was neatly parted down one side.

He looked so out of place in that derelict building that Nail blinked twice to make sure that she wasn't imagining things.

"I have pulled a rotten tooth, nothing more," he said. "But it's true enough that you might have drawn poison into your blood. If next time you feel that something has gone canker in your mouth, Mr. Keene, I urge you to have it removed before it turns green."

"Yes, sir, Dr. Soonoo, no mistake."

The man gave a sort of salute and went wobbling off down the lane. Dr. Soonoo, for that's who it was, turned and looked at Nail.

He was wiping his rather beautiful hands with what appeared to be a silk handkerchief.

"By the look of you," he said, "you can be nothing other than a ship's brat."

Nail bristled and was on the point of telling him to go dunk his head in a bucket of slop when she remembered the letter in her hand and the dying boy in the brig.

"I have a message for you," she said. "From Captain Marsh of the Blue Oriole."

Dr. Soonoo winced visibly. "So," he said. "The fates have sent that devil back to my door, have they? Please follow me inside."

He retreated into the gloomy doorway. She followed and found, to her surprise, that the space inside was spartan but clean and brightly lit with oil lamps.

A curtain led into a back room. "Wait here for a moment, if you will be so kind," said the Doctor.

While he was gone, Nail looked around. She found that the walls were set with curious cubby-holes, half a dozen of them, placed at weird intervals.

From several of these openings, queer-faced cats were staring. They looked at her without blinking, like a jury of felines.

"Ugly brutes," she muttered, and was startled again when one of the animals winked at her.

Next to the surgical table, she saw what appeared to be a small shrine or altar. In the middle was a black statue, six or seven inches high.

It showed a woman, dressed in flowing robes, with the passive face of a cat.

"That is Sekhmet," said Dr. Soonoo, coming back in. "She is my mistress, the patroness of the Healer's Guild."

Nail shrugged and couldn't help pulling a face.

"What, you're a skeptic?" said the Doctor, obviously amused. "I thought children believed in all sorts of things, gods and fairies and the like."

"It's nonsense, if you ask me," she said, "begging your pardon."

Dr. Soonoo laughed and said, "I believe Captain Marsh is recruiting a more clever class of of shroud-walkers than in olden days. Come, give me the old wretch's letter."

He broke the seal and read it quickly through, sighing and shaking his head.

"Do you know what the fool has done?" he said, glancing at the girl. "He has tried to threaten me, lie to me, and flatter me, all in the same paragraph. Unfortunately, our Marsh is a better sailor than diplomat."

Nail couldn't help grinning. She rather liked seeing a point scored on Captain Marsh.

"All things being equal," said the Doctor, "I should send a reply saying that Marsh can walk his own plank and be damned in the bargain. Do you agree?"

This startled her a third time. He seemed to be in earnest, truly asking her opinion. She thought again of the kids in the brig, the sick one in particular.

"Setting Captain Marsh aside," Nail said, as noncomittally as she could, "there are some back on the Oriole who might need you. Who might...die if you don't come."

"Ah," Dr. Soonoo said. "Death is it?" He gestured at the black statue and said, "For my part, I prefer dentistry and philosophical experiments. But my mistress has a particular interest in mortal things."

He produced a large black bag, which opened at the top, and began filling it with blades and clamps and other tools from the surgical table.

The bag seemed to admit an impossible number of objects, including vials of medicine, the statue, and several largish books.

Dr. Soonoo snapped his fingers with a little flourish and one by one thirteen cats emerged from the cubby-holes in the walls.

Several looked like normal house cats or alley cats. But most were tall, lean, black creatures, with pointed faces and ears nearly as large as those of a fox.

The came with a practiced casualness, as if having just decided, independently, upon a course of action. One by one, they leaped into the mouth of the black bag and disappeared.

"Shall I tell you the truth?" observed the Doctor, speaking over his shoulder.

"I would like very much to be a skeptic, too. But last night, while sleeping, I dreamed that I was a cat and a little blue bird came and sat upon my shoulder. And do you know what the bird was carrying in its beak?"

She shook her head, still unable to take her eyes off the magical valise.

Dr. Soonoo turned and looked at her. "The bird was carrying a a small, black nail. What do you suppose we should make of that?"

Next: In the Land of the Breathless