Book One – Chapter 19

That small recognition did more than expand Yu’s understanding of the guild layout. It changed his perception of the kitchen itself. The room no longer seemed anchored by the hearth, and it no longer revolved around the center workbench. Its axis shifted and everything got rearranged, until it all pivoted around that narrow slit of glass at the back. Yu’s spinning gaze fell again to the many tools along the back wall. Heavy knives. Iron rods. Saws. Their outlines ran together, edges blurred as though seen through the never-draining water in his eyes. He could not tell one from the next, lest distinguish them by name or function. He could only measure them by scale; in particular the saws: there was a big one, a bigger one, one bigger still, and the grotesquely biggest. Four hung in sequence where there should be five. The second hook on the left was bare. The gap was obvious.

A sick suspicion rose in him. Yu readily believed that the saws could be used for carving through the bodies of beasts, yes, most definitely for handling animals like wapa … Well, for whatever handling needed a saw … But the longer his eyes lingered and his imagination roamed, the harder it was not to notice that the tools in here were … not only cooking utensils. Some did not belong into a kitchen at all. All of this, every twisted thing he saw in here was an instrument. For meat, and for flesh. For food, and for people. Because what stopped you from doing to people what you could do to animals —

Something drove him to act. No, not curiosity, and surely not any thrill in the suffering of others. There was nothing to gain from that, no satisfaction. Yu wanted to believe that he moved because his imagination overflowed. Silence thickened thought, and better to see one truth than invent a dozen. That was what the mask reasoned. But beneath that reassuringly sensible whisper, the wanting self pressed closer. It wanted to know if she was there. And deeper still, peeling past reason, past common instinct and distorted impulse, and down to the oldest stratum of self, the primordial feat still steered. It steered without a sound. It sought company in torment. It would rather see Yu’s own undoing mirrored in the breaking of another than face his silencing with no reflection.