Overture
Tiliard, known as the Deathbed of Tulips, straddles the river gorge like a half-submerged stump.
It is a grand bridge of a city, a mesa yawning over a silver tongue of water, underside tangled with a thousand gargantuan roots.
From afar, it appears to teeter on its many twisted legs, precarious as a mirage, yet as a traveler approaches, perhaps by horse or riverboat, the city resolves into solidity.
The mists clear, the writhing roots fall still, and fissures of petrified bark open to reveal vertical glens, streaks of wildflowers blooming red under the full moon and white under the new.
Every season they shed their petals in great sheets; entire meadows migrate, windborne, from the city’s highest spires down to the wheels that churn electricity at the waterline, currents alternating with the lunar tides.
The whole of Tiliard, claims the poet Fran Montresor, breathes with the moon.
It bloats and wilts and dies and regrows, endless as the dreamy depths of the River Catoptric and the nightmarish creatures that crawl from it.
Streetcars rattle along Tiliard’s mossy boulevards, hotels and belfries twist skyward, shaped as much by choking ivy as by architectural will.
Canals whorl like a giant’s thumbprint from the city’s heart to its rim—then beyond, dissolving in misty cascades down the mesa’s trunk.
Cafés line their banks, patrolled by beautiful young women in towering millinery.
Here and there a dandy will strum his lyre from a passing gondola, hoping one will pull a bodkin from her headpiece and toss it to him.
If he catches it, she will make love to him in his dreams that night.
If he doesn’t, he is condemned to a lunar month of impotence and dysuria.
Beneath the snaking canals, under the bridges of Conundrum Street and the gash of Splinter Row, the midcity factories pump Tiliard’s lifeblood.
Trains and lifts creak through tunnels older than history, along rails dripping with ion-charged sap.
Runoff oozes through the capillaries and into the naked rhizomes, down into the dangling sprawl of the undercity, where the deaths are lively and the births grim, where racketeers and outcasts spin the wool to weave their plots, and where, for an extra thirty marks, one’s dentist might plunge his drill into the brain of a rival.
While the larger roots anchor the city to the walls of the verdant gorge, the smaller spiral down to the water, branching out to filter an endless flow of riverboats.
Gilded yachts glide past wormy smuggling vessels; trawlers rumble with bulging nets, devoid of fish but filled with ancient artifacts scraped from the riverbed.
The docks teem with rats, workmen, pickpockets, hucksters, and silk-veiled ladies bound for villas downriver.
Gnarled ferrymen roll cigars and accost passersby with tales of lost loves and won battles.
One will claim to have overthrown an illustrious dictator in a coup thirty years ago, the next will claim to have been that dictator, and both will only be half lying.
Under the cover of clouds of pollen and insects, a slim shipping vessel diverts from its course.
It peels away from the docks and enters the mouth of a smuggler’s tunnel, a sewage conduit carved into a peripheral rootlet.
Its motor dies, and its oars glide into the poison river without a ripple, as if passing from light to shadow to light again.
It drifts to a halt in a septic shaft, and a gangplank extends from its gunwale.
Spoils are unloaded and allocated in the rancid dark: perfumes, pigments, porcelain, liqueurs, a burlap-swaddled landscape its seller insists is a vant Wron original.
A wine-runner offers a sample of his wares, uncorking a bottle of Dagdrun brandy with a knife still stained in what remains of its vintner.
While the scent of sweet plums envelops the dock, aged finely from fruit crushed under the feet of an orphaned child, the last item of contraband descends the plank.
He is a gentleman, or a decent counterfeit, evinced by his lacy gloves and the cuff links barely visible under the sleeves of his traveling coat.
He carries no luggage but three blades: an antique saber, which he uses rarely, a razor with an emerald handle, which he uses with some regularity, and an embroidery needle, which he uses constantly—or at least appeared to on his voyage north, pricking away at a square of batiste with such cold focus he deterred even the jolliest smugglers’ harassment.
No one questions the man (a paid fare is a fare paid, as the captain says), and he spirals unfollowed up the slopes carved into the meat of the root.
He slips into the narrow passageways of the midcity, keeping the lichenous gloom at bay with nothing but a firefly lamp.
Factories thud around him, sickly hearts of wood and rust and moss-clotted valves. A foul draft wheezes at his back.
He follows a familiar path, unerring, unwavering, like an ant following a pheromone trail.
He hums a popular aria as he weaves through alleys, down erranders’ routes, past rotting tenements and conduits of steaming wastewater, refusing to slow, refusing to lift his eyes, until he finds what he’s looking for.
He steps into a slitted passage, vine-choked and contorted by bulges of wood. He ducks through the melted grain, through knots stretched open like howling mouths, and emerges onto a defunct factory floor.
The place is quiet, but there are signs of recent activity. A footprint here and there, a broken curtain of vines between two distillation tanks. He steps to the empty center of the floor, tossing his hat on a broken conveyor belt, and lifts his gaze.
A grid of steel curves overhead. Wrist-thick cables dangle from the crossbeams in two parallel rows, a draped outline of a large, long-bodied creature.
Hooks curl from the end of each cord, dulled or warped or snapped off in a struggle.
A few frayed cables coil on the floor, baring their teeth at the empty air.
The man nudges a hook with his shoe, removes his gloves, then kneels to take it in hand.
He squats, listening to the scurrying around him, the musical conversations of rats.
Somewhere beyond the factory walls, a bell rings, and metal groans under a rush of sewage.
Compelled by a familiar urge, he presses the point of the hook against his thumb.
A thread of blood crawls down his skin, followed by a feeling of release. He reclines on his heels and sighs.
It will be a rough search, he knows, in this monstrous anthill of a city. But he will resort to whatever means, for however long. He will not falter. He has already proven he has the tenacity of a roach.