The nurse had the pale, washed out look of someone who spent too much time in a hospital. Lines were beginning to creep along her face and they weren't laugh lines. She wore the white uniform of the Sisters of Mercy but this quiet place of rest couldn't be a sharper contrast with the dirty, noisy public hospitals depending only on donations forced them to operate. The city must have set this place up for the victims of the Nightmare Plague.
How generous of them. The Divers Tendency party must be having a bad year.
She led him down the corridor, lit softly by gaslamps. Each bed was seperated from the others by heavy curtains though visible to him. On them was a quiet figure each. Their eyes, when they were open, were nothing more than shallow pools of whatever color, blank and unfocused. Sometimes there were thin lines of drool on their cheeks. Each of them responded on the most autonomic levels, breathing, swallowing, hearts beating. But there was nothing resembling a mind in any of them. Nothing but empty husks that had once been people.
He noticed his wyrman (http://homarusrex.deviantart.com/art/Sketchbook-Wyrmen-1-48399988), TeaForTwo, ridiculously tiny on one of the beds. What a waste. A mind as tiny as TeaForTwo's couldn't have even been a snack for a Slake Moth.
Then humans in the beds as he followed the nurse. Lemuel Pidgeon, who he had a hard time dredging up sympathy for. Derkhan Blueday, who he didn't. Men and women he had seen only once or had known for years. Enemies, friends, coworkers, lovers. There was his old roommate. And in a bed with a special sling for his great mantis-claw arm, the folk hero Jack Half-a-Prayer. A militiaman still wearing his mask. Yagharek (http://saltmarsh.deviantart.com/art/Perdido-Street-Station-Yag-45866126), the disgraced Garuda he had been hired to help to fly again. Bellis (http://trabbold.deviantart.com/art/Bellis-Coldwine-122544177), his old flame. His mother and father, dignified Gnur Kettians even in this half-death, with their hands folded over their chests.
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How generous of them. The Divers Tendency party must be having a bad year.
She led him down the corridor, lit softly by gaslamps. Each bed was seperated from the others by heavy curtains though visible to him. On them was a quiet figure each. Their eyes, when they were open, were nothing more than shallow pools of whatever color, blank and unfocused. Sometimes there were thin lines of drool on their cheeks. Each of them responded on the most autonomic levels, breathing, swallowing, hearts beating. But there was nothing resembling a mind in any of them. Nothing but empty husks that had once been people.
He noticed his wyrman (http://homarusrex.deviantart.com/art/Sketchbook-Wyrmen-1-48399988), TeaForTwo, ridiculously tiny on one of the beds. What a waste. A mind as tiny as TeaForTwo's couldn't have even been a snack for a Slake Moth.
Then humans in the beds as he followed the nurse. Lemuel Pidgeon, who he had a hard time dredging up sympathy for. Derkhan Blueday, who he didn't. Men and women he had seen only once or had known for years. Enemies, friends, coworkers, lovers. There was his old roommate. And in a bed with a special sling for his great mantis-claw arm, the folk hero Jack Half-a-Prayer. A militiaman still wearing his mask. Yagharek (http://saltmarsh.deviantart.com/art/Perdido-Street-Station-Yag-45866126), the disgraced Garuda he had been hired to help to fly again. Bellis (http://trabbold.deviantart.com/art/Bellis-Coldwine-122544177), his old flame. His mother and father, dignified Gnur Kettians even in this half-death, with their hands folded over their chests.