Litany of Winter

Brenna did not move the forceps. ”Again,” she said.

Weiss brought the operative diagram closer and set it beside Matthias Kern’s abdomen. The paper had already softened at one corner from handling. He traced the surgeon’s recorded incision with the blunt end of a probe.

”This begins here,” he said, pointing near the left side of the wound, ”then turns toward the midline. The surgeon extended it during the operation.”

Brenna indicated the shallow cut she had just exposed. ”And this?”

Weiss checked the operative diagram before answering. ”Not recorded.”

”Don’t clean any farther yet.”

She straightened and studied the body. Hans had stopped leaning against the wall. Severin stayed where he was, close enough to see the thin lines but far enough that nobody had to tell him not to touch anything. The winter cold still came through the tiles beneath his boots.

Brenna pointed toward a side cabinet. ”Do you have tracing paper?”

Weiss opened the cabinet and checked the upper shelf. ”For copying diagrams, yes.”

”Good enough.”

He returned with several sheets of tracing paper and a pencil, then fetched a ruler. Brenna laid one sheet over the intact skin beside the wound without pressing it down.

”We copy what’s there,” she said. ”We don’t fill in the gaps.”

Weiss nodded, and they slowed down.

Weiss measured from the navel and lower ribs while Brenna marked the positions. Where a shallow cut disappeared beneath the surgical incision, she stopped the copied line at the edge and left the space blank. Another line curved toward Matthias’s side and vanished under dried residue. Brenna cleaned only enough to follow it.

Severin watched the shapes take form on the tracing paper, where they looked worse than they had on Matthias’s skin.

On Matthias’s skin, the cuts could still pass for damage around a violent wound. On the tracing, the angles looked too regular. Several strokes kept similar spacing from one another. One stopped at the surgical incision, and another resumed on the far side along the same line.

Hans came around the foot of the table. ”You think it’s writing?”

”Maybe,” Brenna said.

Weiss frowned at the tracing. ”Writing?”

”Some kind of notation.”

He looked back at Matthias’s abdomen. ”Someone cut it into him?”

Brenna added another short line to the tracing. ”That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

Severin leaned a little to his right for a better look.

A hooked line near the lower edge of the tracing bothered him. He had seen something like it that afternoon on Hermes’s papers, but the shape looked wrong, or incomplete, so he stepped closer.

Brenna noticed. ”What’s wrong?”

”Look at that bit.”

She followed his finger without letting him touch the sheet.

”What about it?”

”I think there’s more.”

Weiss frowned. ”You think?”

Severin looked from the tracing to the skin. ”Yeah. The line turns here. I think if it keeps going the same way, it should come out under that dried patch.”

Brenna did not answer. She changed the cloth in the forceps and worked at the residue Severin had indicated while Hans stayed quiet.

A narrow cut appeared beneath the brown-red crust, and Brenna followed it less than half an inch before it met another shallow line.

Severin knew the shape before Brenna finished exposing it. ”Salt.”

Weiss looked at him, but Hans kept his good eye on the body.

Brenna lifted the forceps. ”Are you sure?”

Severin pointed at the tracing. ”Pretty sure. Hermes had the same sign on the Blackhaven reconstruction upstairs.”

He remembered the book open beneath Hermes’s inked fingers and the signs Neumann had made him hunt down during training. Not long ago, he would have passed over them as something meant for people with schooling.

”Salt for preservation,” he said.

”More or less,” Brenna replied.

The answer sounded familiar enough that Severin almost smiled.

Weiss looked between them. ”You’ve seen this before?”

Hans answered. ”A version of it.”

”That sounds carefully worded.”

”It is.”

Brenna studied the exposed cuts again. ”We need Hermes.”

Weiss went to the door and called for an attendant.

While they waited, Brenna copied the newly exposed section onto the tracing. The shape was incomplete. Part of the Salt sign had been cut through by the surgical incision, and another stroke ended in damaged tissue near the original injury.

Weiss pointed to the broken section. ”If this line continues beneath the surgical cut, then it was already there when the surgeon opened him.”

Brenna checked the operative diagram again. ”At least this part was.”

Severin looked at Matthias’s still face. ”So it could’ve been there before the accident?”

Weiss shook his head. ”Before the operation. That is all I can tell you.”

Matthias had been conscious when he reached the hospital. Severin remembered that from Weiss’s account, but kept it to himself. Before the operation still left too much ground to cover.

Hans asked, ”Could the accident have caused any of these?”

”No,” Weiss said. ”A piece of housing can tear flesh or crush it. It wouldn’t leave cuts this narrow or this regular.”

”What about hospital staff before surgery?”

”I can get the names.”

”Get me the names of everyone who handled him from the heating works to the operating table.”

Weiss gave him a long look. ”You’re assuming someone did this before surgery.”

”I’m assuming these were made before surgery. I want to know who had access to him.”

Weiss considered that, then nodded.

Hermes arrived with the copied symbol sheets from upstairs. He stopped inside the room and took in the corpse before his gaze moved to the tracing and surgical diagram.

”You found something.”

Brenna handed him the tracing, and Hermes studied it beside the table until his attention settled on the lower cluster of lines.

”Where was this?”

Brenna pointed to the lower edge of Matthias’s wound.

Hermes bent closer but did not touch the body. ”Cleaned from beneath the dressing?”

”Yes.”

”And the interruption?”

”Surgical.”

Weiss passed him the operative diagram. Hermes compared the two sheets, then laid the copied Blackhaven pages on the side table.

Severin recognized the crate-face reconstruction at once as Hermes set it beside Brenna’s tracing.

The Blackhaven reconstruction was denser, its marks scattered across the crate face in the corrupted arrangement Hermes had worked out upstairs. Matthias’s cuts followed a different pattern around the wound, but the Salt sign was still easy to pick out.

Hermes tapped the Salt sign once on the Blackhaven reconstruction, then once on Brenna’s tracing.

”Same sign.”

Severin folded his arms. ”Same people?”

Hermes looked at him. ”Not from this.”

”You answered that fast.”

”Because you asked too much.”

Hans gave a quiet snort.

Hermes pulled the sheets closer together. ”Salt is legitimate old notation. It usually means preservation or fixation, depending on what surrounds it. Seeing it in both places matters, but it doesn’t tell us who wrote either one.”

”Or a group,” Brenna said.

”Or a group.”

Severin looked at the two versions. ”The rest is different.”

”Very.”

Hermes pointed to a broken angle beside the Salt mark on Matthias’s tracing. ”This doesn’t match the freight sequence. The placement is different, and the marks beside it are incomplete, assuming they’re marks at all. Whoever did this may have been working from the same alchemical knowledge for a different operation.”

”May have,” Hans said.

Hermes glanced at him. ”Thank you.”

”I’m learning.”

”No, you aren’t.”

Weiss looked toward Matthias. ”Can you tell me what they did to him?”

Hermes looked back at the body. ”No.”

The room went quiet enough for Severin to hear the faint hiss of one lamp.

Hermes touched the edge of the tracing. ”Salt tells me what kind of work they may have been trying to do. It doesn’t tell me what they used or how they did it. And it doesn’t explain why the preservation is strongest around the wound.”

Brenna nodded toward the corpse. ”And what we found in Blackhaven didn’t fully explain the preserved tissue there either.”

”No.”

Severin remembered the dark piece giving beneath Brenna’s probe, dead tissue that still looked fresh months after Hans had taken it from the freight.

He looked at Matthias again, understanding one mark now, and it did not make the body any less bloody wrong.

Hans picked up the Blackhaven reconstruction from beside the tracing. ”What do we do with him?”

Weiss answered first. ”He stays here.”

Brenna nodded. ”No more cutting unless we need a sample. Photograph the marks, make another tracing, seal the dressings, and keep the hospital’s operative records.”

”We don’t have a photographer in the wing.”

”Then send for one.”

Hermes gathered the Blackhaven reconstruction. ”I want the tracing upstairs when you’re finished.”

”You can have a copy,” Brenna said.

Hermes looked offended. ”I was going to say copy.”

”No, you weren’t.”

Hans turned to Weiss. ”I need the accident report, the transport record, the hospital intake sheet, and the names of everyone who handled Kern before surgery. Anything his family told the municipal office about the day he died too.”

Weiss nodded. ”I can request those.”

”Then do it quickly.”

Severin looked at Hans. ”Blackhaven too?”

Hans considered the two sheets. ”We cross-reference the sign. That’s all until we have more.”

Hermes nodded once. ”Good.”

It was less satisfying than Severin wanted. Weeks ago, he would have preferred an answer he could hold, a name or a place, preferably with someone attached to it he could hit if things turned ugly. Now he knew enough to understand why they were refusing to give him one.

Brenna returned to Matthias and began covering the exposed wound with a fresh dressing. Weiss helped her without speaking. Hermes wrote a short note in the margin of the Blackhaven reconstruction, then changed one word before the ink dried.

Severin watched Hermes replace the word with a narrower one, then bend over the pages again.

While Hermes bent over the other pages, Hans handed Severin the Blackhaven reconstruction. ”Hold that.”

Severin took the sheet carefully. The copied lines brought the freight yard back faster than he expected. Under the warehouse lamps, Pike had checked the numbers while Severin and Crowe carried the marked crates over coal grit toward warehouse three. Back then, the shapes on the wood had meant nothing to him.

Hans had been a stranger then, a thief as far as Severin knew, and Severin had nearly died before figuring out otherwise.

Brenna finished securing the dressing and moved her tracing to the side table.

Severin laid the Blackhaven reconstruction beside Brenna’s tracing and saw Hermes had been right: the arrangements did not match. The spacing and neighboring strokes differed, and the purpose might have too.

His gaze settled on the shape he recognized on both pages.

”Same mark.”