“Well, Amma, come on over here and give us a hand.”
Carefully making her way across the laboratory, arms pinched in so she didn’t touch anything, Amma stepped up to the table, the smell off of the bag a mix of saltiness and sour copper as Mudryth reached into it.
“Ah, here we are!” The hag pulled a thick limb from inside, revealing a bloody, human arm and a limp hand sans its pinky finger, and waved it at Amma. “Guess I can give you one instead!”
Amma didn’t know why she moved to take the thing—it was instinctual when someone tried to hand one something, even a severed limb, she supposed—but into her waiting palms was plopped the arm, heavier than she imagined, but just as wet and sticky as she feared.
“Couldn’t get the full set,” Mudryth was saying as she dug back into the bag. “Croc must have got the rest of him, but just look at that bicep! Louie will love that.”
Amma’s hands trembled under both the weight and the gore of the thing, and all she could do was glance back up at the woman, or hag, or witch, mouth agape.
“Go on, put it on the slab. We’ve almost completed this one, just need to find the last parts, and I think that’s as good as we’re gonna get as far as arms go.”
Amma glanced back over her shoulder where the amalgam of a corpse was laid out. With a heavy breath, she went over and set the arm where it belonged in accordance with what was already there, trying very hard to not look at the rest of it, but found herself intrigued by the frost forming on the edges of the metal slab and the sizzle off the arm she had just placed down. She turned back, stiff and unblinking to where Mudryth was hunched over the bag and pulling out more severed pieces of people.
“Oh, and looky at this!” Mudryth unraveled a swath of fabric, a splotch of something skin-like falling off of it and back into the bag. “This should fit you. Much better than that baggy, dirty thing you got on.”
Amma looked down at herself, just as dirty as what Mudryth held up but not nearly as covered in gore.
“I’ll clean this up, and maybe we’ll even find some more pieces your size since it looks like some other little lady bit it out here.” She held up a pendant on a chain covered in blood then pocketed it. “Come on, now, help me sort.”
Like her actions were separate from her mind, Amma finally went over and pulled out an indiscriminate body part from the squelchy bag. She swallowed hard, her stomach flipping over, hand shaking as she held whatever she had by a patch of long hair.
Trying her best to keep the vomit down that wanted to push up through her throat, she slapped a hand over her mouth. Mudryth saw her struggle, snapped her fingers, and a bucket from across the room flew into her hands. She shoved it at Amma who immediately filled it up with the day’s meals.
There was the cruel, grizzly laughter of Kaz again from up on the shelves as Amma spit and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “Sorry,” she croaked out, throat burning with bile.
Mudryth glared up at Kaz and then hocked at toe at him, shutting him up when it pelted him right in the face. “Well, sweetie, that’s not what I was expecting in the least.” Mudryth took the bucket from her, squishing up her face as she poked her nose down to Amma’s. “You did come here with Damien, didn’t you?”
Amma nodded, rubbing her stomach. She wanted to clarify it wasn’t by choice, but was too afraid more than just words would come out.
“He almost never brings someone along, just once actually, and she was—well, not much like you, though her stomach was just as weak, but her tongue was a lot sharper. I guess we can’t all be comfortable with anatomy puzzles, can we? Here, check these pockets instead.”
The pile of clothes resting at the table’s other end were like a gift to Amma, and she went for them despite all of their questionable stains. “I can fix this,” she said, holding up a man’s tunic that would be very nice if it weren’t torn completely up its front like, well, she didn’t want to imagine how it got that way. “Do you have needle and thread?”
Mudryth fetched her a surprisingly clean kit of sewing things, and Amma set to work. This was, at the very least, better than being chased by werewolves or huddled up on the floor of an abandoned, foul-smelling cabin in the swamp, and embroidery was a good way to keep her hands busy, her mother always said.
When her stomach settled a bit, she eyed Kaz who was focused on an orb he’d taken off the shelf and was peering deeply into, finally distracted. “Mudryth,” she asked, voice low, “does Damien come here often?”
“Yeah, regular-like. Couple times a year maybe? He and Louie couldn’t be more different, but sometimes people bond when they save each other from drowning in muck, ya know?”
Amma’s eyes flicked to Kaz, still absorbed with the things on the shelf. She prodded for more. “Oh? Who saved who?”
“Hear them tell it, you’d never know. Damien was such a skinny, little thing back then, but I still have to rescue Louie every now and again when he wades too deep. Now they get one another out of jams all the time. See, thing is, Louie doesn’t believe in magic, which is funny considering, ya know, I’ve been his best friend for almost thirty years, and Damien doesn’t really believe much in alchemy, but sometimes it just works out when one of ‘em’s stuck. Louie wanted to make a storm in a box a few years ago, but it just kept getting too wet, and then it’d blow up. Damien conjured him up a spell that does the trick and set it into that machine over there.” She gestured with the point of her elbow to a big box of a thing covered in dials and levers. “Louie insists it’s actually alchemy, he just doesn’t fully understand it—not yet anyway! Won’t let him use necromancy though. It’d be a whole lot easier if he did, of course, but Louie’s too determined to make a real man, whatever that means, not some undead or a walking skeleton or what have you.”
Amma jabbed herself with the needle at that, a mistake she almost never made, and stuck her finger in her mouth before pulling it right back out at the memory of touching dead people parts and, well…everything else. Her stomach turned over. “Damien does necromancy?”
Mudryth shrugged. “Louie won’t indulge in it, so I’m not exactly sure, but demon spawn are full of surprises. But you already know all about that, don’t you?”
As the hag cackled some more, Amma only smiled warily. “Actually, I haven’t known him that long, but you seem to be…friends?”
“Something like that, but he’s a tough bone to break.” As she said this, there was a snap from inside the bag, and her eyes lit up as she mumbled about a perfect fit. “Now, tell me, which do you like better for the man we’re making?”
Amma looked up from piecing the tunic back together. In each hand, Mudryth was holding up the severed heads of what looked like swamp eels. Amma squinted, then gasped when she realized they weren’t eels at all. “Well, if I were him, I guess I’d appreciate that one a little longer—I mean, more.”
Mudryth cackled again. “Yeah, I think this one’s better too, might make up for one leg being a few inches shorter than the other.” She hummed to herself as she went to the slab with an armful of the best pieces she’d found.
Amma focused again on the tunic, coming across something hard in the breast pocket. She pulled out a wooden trinket, and though it was covered in muck, recognized it immediately. It had been carved to look like a bear, jointed at the head and its middle so it could be bent forward to bow, otherwise in the shape of a cylinder and only a few inches long, but it wasn’t the shape she recognized, it was the wood itself.
