The Brave Men and Women of Borisch & Sons Extermination Company
Guy Moulène has once again, due to a blue moon or a bad mood, trapped himself in a child’s body.
He is ten years old and blindfolded, tasked with ushering a theatergoer to her balcony seat.
His ears are stuffed with cotton and his shoes too big for his feet, but he can recognize the sloped carpet under his toes, and he can, by counting his steps, escort any patron to any seat in the theater.
As he gropes his way down the aisle, the old woman’s hand softens in his own.
He comes to realize her fingers are earthworms. Obliged by courtesy, he plucks them from her palm.
She adorns him with a lily boutonniere he can smell but can’t see, and the overture begins.
Guy twitches on his foam mattress. A hum escapes his throat, and his elbow escapes his dream, driving into his little sister.
She wakes; he wakes; both moan the same complaint, but her will, like her jaw, is just a bit stronger than his.
Tyro reclaims the linens and curls against the wall, spinning tight as a fly in spider’s silk.
Overpowered by a child and exposed to the damp morning, Guy has no choice but to rise.
Bare feet streaking dew, he squeezes across the tiny, gnarled apartment and pulls his under-uniform from the slitted closet.
He dons his clothes, washes, shaves, retrieves his mask and helmet.
With the end of a spare razor, he picks out a clump of yesterday’s neurotoxins from a tubule in his respirator.
Guy’s employment contract, a thick stack of papers he hasn’t seen since pressing his thumb to it years ago, lists his title as Exterminator.
This amuses him, since the vermin, despite all his fumigants and traps and serrated blades, never seem to die.
They make a grand show of it, shrieking from a thousand mandibles as they scatter, bristles raised and pincers gnashing, but they always come back.
The small ones wait out the massacre in kitchen cupboards or garden pots, the larger ones retreat to the depths of the river to convalesce.
But inevitably, in a week or a month or a century, they return.
Guy’s bunkmate, Dawn, is awake well before his namesake.
By the time the sun rises under their feet, a green-white coin reflected on the surface of the Catoptric River, he’s already oiled his pesticide syringe and polished his blade.
Pyrethrin grenades line up at the narrow crack of their window, janky things far below industry standard and dating, Guy guesses, from before the Great Patent Skirmish of 1509.
What their arsenal lacks in modernity, Dawn makes up for with an almost supernatural diligence.
Nozzles never jam in his presence, fuses never snuff out, an apple cut with his knife never seems to brown.
Plants grow better in his proximity, a discovery that has led the company hedge witch to sow herbs, several of which are carnivorous, in the gluey substratum of their front door.
While Guy hunches over the mirror and tries to assemble himself, Dawn flattens the paper on their little table, mulling over the news of an assassination attempt in the overcity.
As usual, his eyes have much to say on the subject, and his mouth nothing.
Heads will roll like fruit, but he knows those that fall will be the ripest, not the rotten.
“Captain Three says we’re climbing down the Root of Abrupt Ends today,” he says instead.
“Portentous,” Guy answers. He gives up on taming his curls and rattles out his suit, humming away the last notes of his dream.
“Abrupt doesn’t mean final,” Dawn reassures him.
“But it can’t mean pleasant.” Guy steps into his suit and rolls down the sleeves.
The weave clings to him like rubber, sucking at his neck, his chest, at the loops of debtor’s ink that circle his forearms. Threaded with iron vine and plated with woody alloys mined from Tiliard’s core, the suit is a hand-me-down from an exterminator who saw sirens in the Catoptric and, one lovesick night, decided to follow them. Only his armor survived the swim.
Dawn offers what is left of the coffee, a lukewarm cup garnished with a struggling fruit fly.
Guy swallows both, pulls on his boots, buckles his overcoat, and throws on a bandolier of sulfluoride shells.
Impervious to the rattling morning routine, Tyro sleeps soundly on.
Even the early chill that gusts through the door does not wake her, though the soot mites will soon enough.
Guy and Dawn slip onto the gangways of the Borisch they have lived all their lives one misstep away from a long drop and a short swim.
Clinging to the creaking handrail, Guy follows Dawn toward the main boulevard.
They drop onto solid wood and join the upward stream of bodies, spiraling past carven saloons and pleasure houses, past clubs for the gentry’s banished sons and a tavern whose hostess will, for a decent tip, read one’s fortune in the smears of his orts.
Captain Three waits with their tanks at the crotch of Joyous Healing and its neighboring root. She lingers at a war memorial, a tangle of weeping angels carved with the names of those lost in the Battle of Broken Horse. A cigarette glows between the wooden fingers of her prosthetic left arm.
“Got an ugly one, boys,” she says, patting her stub against a cherub’s anguished forehead. “Moulène, no halving your ass today. Make sure you remember what end of your nozzle the poison comes out.”
“I think it’s the long one,” Guy replies. “Wanna take a glance down it and check?”
She laughs and flicks her cigarette at him.
It patters harmlessly against his iron vine.
“If you can believe it, the report claims we’ve got a bug the size of a horse,” she says.
“Might be a loose swarm. Apparently someone got a good view of it down by the old tobacconist. Put out his own eyes with a compass needle.”
“What did it look like?” Guy asks.
“To him?” She grins. “Nothing, now.”
She leads them onto the net of catwalks diverging from Joyous Healing.
They walk twisted but familiar paths, which Guy had learned in the womb as his mother trudged to and from work on swollen feet, then mastered as an errander, tracing her steps with deliveries or messages in hand.
Three doesn’t know these walkways like Guy or Dawn, but she’ll gladly die before she lets an undercity man lead her.
The Root of Abrupt Ends curls into view, tucked between two larger, sturdier sisters.
The thing is made of septic capillaries, and smells like it, a sweet mix of rot and rhizotoxins that comprises the atmosphere of the undercity.
They trudge past waste-disposal ducts and moldy apartments and bridges half a squirrel’s weight from snapping, until they come to the tobacconist’s shopfront.
A small market of dubious legality bustles inside.
Three turns her attention to a gnarled alleyway behind the shop. Fireflies scatter at her approach, spilling light into a narrow, viny corridor.
“Place your bets, boys,” she says. She cracks her wooden knuckles, shedding a few splinters. “What’ll it be today? My money’s on chimera millipedes. Gotta be an ugly swarm to make a man take his own sight.”
“Pleasure hornets,” Guy offers hopefully. He’s not a fan of chimeras, testy things who squirt hallucinogenic toxin from bristles along their backs. (From far away, he’s scribbled in the margins of his Manual, dellusions are scary. Up close, kind of sad.)
“Poltergeists,” Dawn says, as usual. Every few months, during a job in the dark of the midcity, he catches a ghost or two in the corner of his eye. Ghosts of what, he doesn’t know—or at least doesn’t say.
Three bends over a mossy manhole cover. She feels for its edges, then, arm valves hissing, pulls free a human-sized plug. A service shaft appears in a column of fetid air. “Whatever it is, it’ll be nesting in the phloem,” she says. “Masks on.”
Her team descends after her, dropping into the tunnel with dampened thuds.
The daylight weakens but does not disappear; it glows brown and gold where the wood thins, tracing the winding vermiculations of pipelines overhead.
They crawl through sap-clogged passages and pockets of fungus, until the pathway opens into a steamy transpiration chamber.
Gargantuan fans turn on the walls, eternal cogs in some ancient, unknowable mechanism.
Whatever their original purpose, they do nothing about the stench.
As Guy creeps along the streaks of fan-filtered light, he can count six abrupt ends in this room alone—seven, if he’s creative, and on these oddly named roots it does a man good to imagine the unimaginable.
A lesson Borisch & Sons learned from a string of bizarre employee deaths on the Root of the Old Dog’s Chase Dream.
They circle the room for a while, until Three stops to disturb a cluster of toadstools, unearthing a dark, round burrow, big as a maintenance passage.
She kneels to run a glove across its rim, noting the etches of mandibles, its halo of silvery frass.
She frowns at its size, the fasciated bubbles in the wood, as if the creature had boiled the root rather than chewed through it.
When she shakes the frass from her glove, it bends the light in dreamy loops.
“Not your usual termites,” she mutters.
Anxiety cinches Guy’s waist. “Should we turn back?”
“Sure, if you want your little sister to eat out of a beggars’ trough tonight.” She removes her torch and shakes it to life. “Hey Corporal, what’s the color for desertion? Red? It’d look good against all that black on your arms, Moulène.”
“Captain,” Dawn says stonily.
“I’m kidding. Hackles down, soldier boy.”