The Cladery Heir
"She works with two scalpels at a time, or with a scalpel and a tined instrument, pinning open the flesh she's working on. Her operations are brisk and yield very little blood."[1]
"My mother was the child of a surgeon in the First City. You might say that knifework runs in the family." There is a wicked quirking smile at the corner of her mouth. "Then there are the rumours about my father. She would deny there's any truth in those."[2]
The Cladery Heir is a surgeon of unusual parentage.
Emergency Amputation
""Most people think that the hard part of surgery is finding what's wrong and taking it out, but any fool could do that. A ship's cook with a cleaver can have that part of the job. The hard part is cutting so you can sew it all back up again afterwards." And she demonstrates on a shark fin, leaving it in a better condition than it started."[3]
The Cladery Heir is an odd lady. Thanks to her experience as a surgeon, she often approaches the other facets of her life with the same level of precision, including eating and... other indulgences.[4] She also has a habit of performing surgical experiments on whatever she can find, such as catches from the Unterzee or willing(?) patients.
Her most notable skill is her ability to amputate unwanted desires by cutting away the flesh that contains them. The Heir doesn't cut away much - a patch of skin, a toe, an earlobe - but she keeps those fragments as souvenirs of her work.[5] She performs these procedures on others, but she also operates on herself.[6]
A Matter of Parentage
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"Did you know my mother operated on the Bazaar itself? She cut away its cladent lobe so that it would be at peace and not have to wander on and on."[5]
"The Heart isn't just a part of the Bazaar – it's a ship! Her voyages were many, reaching all across the Unterzee. Her captain, the Surgeon's Child, would dream of places and then set out to find them. And she was thoughtful enough to write her last dream down here..."[7]
The Cladery Heir's mother, known as the Surgeon's Child, is a now-ancient child of a First City surgeon, belonging to the House of the Knife. Most famously, the Surgeon's Child helped rid the Bazaar of its yearning for travel by cutting off its "cladent lobe", which she then fashioned into a ship - the Cladery Heart, which became the chiefest treasure of the House of the Knife.[8]
The Heart would go wherever it wished, as it was able to move on its own, though the Surgeon's Child saw prophetic dreams of the distant places her ship wished to explore. At some point, the Cladery Heart was abandoned - the details of its location differ between stories - but the Child's diary was eventually discovered by the Third City's worshippers of the God-Eaters, and, later, by the Fourth City's Rosers.[7]
Mr Iron?
"Mother was a favourite with Mr Iron. She says that they only worked together, that Mr Iron sponsored her work and provided her with tools. Sharper tools that do not bend so easily."[9]
"And I know my mother. I cannot see her in any ordinary liaison with an ordinary man, much less a husband. She was in her third millennium when she bore me."[10]
The Cladery Heir insists that her father is Mr Iron, the silent Master of the Bazaar who deals in machines and weaponry. It worked closely with her mother; it would certainly be an impressive enough partner to match the demanding tastes of the Surgeon's Child; and a bit of inhuman blood in her veins would explain the Cladery Heir's unearthly skill with the scalpel.[10]
But since Mr Iron is doubtfully male and certainly not capable of such affairs, it doesn't come as a surprise that the Cladery Heir's father is not really Mr Iron, but an old tomb-colonist engineer. This tomb-colonist's voice was cut from him by the Surgeon's Child, so that he wouldn't search for his daughter, but the operation was not completely effective.[11]
References
- Special thanks to waltzingOphidian
