The Birth of the Deathbed
Every night, while Dawn sits at their iron mushroom of a table and shells grease-beetle for tomorrow’s lunch, Guy regales Tyro with a performance.
He sings of Tiliard’s legends and histories, from its mysterious rooting in antiquity to its hundreds of branched and bizarre futures.
He recounts the comedies that gave the streets their names, the classic romances of the great impresario Albrecht Vaughn, the drab Neo-Repressionist monodramas.
Half of them are true and half false, but he doesn’t know which half is which.
It doesn’t matter. Historicity, like everything in Tiliard, depends on what’s playing at the Opera that season.
The tome in which he keeps his stories is the ninety-ninth edition of The Borisch Manual of Catoptric Pest Species.
Buried between the lines in the entry on the six-legged hellrat, whose flinty claws are known to start alchemical fires, burns the legend of Faustech.
In the margins of the chimera millipede lies the bittersweet tragedy of The Lovers of Old Viennt.
Under the picture of Catoptric mimicweed, known for uprooting itself and stalking its victims from house to house, creeps The Bast Street Butcher.
Tyro knows that Guy is not reading the Manual.
She suspects (and is entirely correct) that he is reciting, from memory, the performances he’s seen from his time as an usher.
She doesn’t know that as soon as the curtains rise, the children are blindfolded and deafened with padded strips of silk, forced to guide latecomers to their boxes by touch alone.
She also doesn’t know that these precautions, intended to protect the city’s priceless works from unfit and unpaying viewers, did not stop Guy.
If he had to sweep away the rose petals and broken champagne glasses, mend the velvet seats and clean the whips and lingerie used in the gentleman’s playlets, he could at least witness them in action.
A boy can only scrub so much blood from the set of The Price of Beauty before he starts to wonder what he’s missing.
Guy, though not known as Guy back then, was a good usher and a better thief.
He learned every schedule, every seat, every creaky hinge and trapdoor, the winding catwalks and the hollow caverns under the stage the crew affectionately referred to as hell.
He learned which businessmen liked what wines, who sponsored which ingénue and who might leave a cigarette burn on a careless attendant.
He learned to gracefully accept pinches to his cheeks, and to distinguish the fumbling of a tipsy matron from the fondles of a lech.
He knew where everyone sat and, more importantly, where they didn’t, which allowed him to climb above the balcony unnoticed and devour every production.
He absorbed Don Javenech and Vrenecker’s “Phantasm Suite” and What God Forgot in staggered chunks of stolen time, building piecemeal the city’s glorious canon whenever he could elude the head usher.
He witnessed overtures from their ends backward, finales from their beginnings forward, plots from their middles outward.
He saw symphonies, ballets, burlesques, classics and avant-garde, sleeper hits and total flops, dress rehearsals and matinées.
He replayed every performance in his dreams, humming tunes and muttering soliloquies as he drifted off under the coatrack.
He reconstructed melodies on the backstage piano, and when prima ballerinas were auctioned at the end of the season or rented to a gentleman for the night, he donned their discarded corsages and retraced their choreography.
He remained uncaught for nearly three years, until he was overheard weeping for the loveliness of the titular contralto’s lament in Larbella.
To this day Guy is not allowed within a hundred paces of the theater, but he can still sing every note of the solo that got him fired.
He’ll sometimes use it to ease Tyro to sleep, or, on those nights when Dawn’s dreams drag him back to the ambush of Broken Horse, he’ll hum it in his ear.
By the second verse, Dawn’s eyelids will flicker, and Guy will know by the deepening of his breath and the twitch of his lips that his nightmare has allowed him, finally, to die.
When Guy returns from the Root of Abrupt Ends, his head is full of white-hot sound.
A high drone throbs through his ear canal, then resonates in the dome of his skull.
The hours are dizzy with fever. He is hosed down, then moans through a rag in his mouth while Dawn, plying a technique he’d learned from a battle medic in Ostlerfell, applies a stapler from Three’s workshop to his ear.
He doesn’t vomit, he’s fairly sure, nor does he shit himself, as Three declared he would.
He cradles a cup of tea infused with belladonna and achewort, hypnotized by the way its ripples presage and echo the passing trains.
When he crawls into the sleeping nook, Tyro on one side and Dawn on the other, he passes out before he can even try to pull open the Manual.
He expires around two. He’s sure of it. Right as the last train rattles overhead, his soul exits his body—or something does.
The ring in his ear deforms into a mimicry of music, warping his usual dreams, tangling the stage with proliferating vines of counterpoint.
It grows swiftly through him, first along his ear, then down his throat, tightening around his lungs.
Helpless, he gropes for the bodies beside him, curls his toes, and a half-formed plea emerges from his throat, a shuddering, ectoplasmic moan.
Swollen with song, he expels the sickly noise as one might suck and spit venom from a wound.
To his surprise, he wakes up alive. Shivering with dried sweat, unable to dispel the feeling that something strange has spilled from him, he examines his pillow for blood, then his underclothes for ejaculate.
He finds nothing; no fluid soaking his bandage, no fever, not even that bitter taste that usually accompanies BSPAF exposure.
Aside from a fluttering echo of pain in his ear, he feels fine—better than fine. He feels sharply, startlingly existent.
It’s Dawn who’s had the poorest sleep. Eyes sunken and ringed, he looks Guy over once and once again, then, satisfied with his bunkmate’s health, dissolves into a cloak of coffee steam.
He says little, as usual, but Guy recognizes the slope of his shoulders, the wrinkle at the edge of his frown.
It is not often Guy sees him so worried, so it’s not often he sees him so relieved.
Guy removes his bandages and leans into his mirror, razor in hand.
His ear is a bit red, and a bit sore; a grayish scab bisects his cartilage, punctuated with tiny clips.
It looks less like a wound and more like a trick of the eye, benign as a strip of plaster fastening cracks in a statue.
Swelling, the Borisch Manual assures, is common in many venomous stings, but Guy’s injury doesn’t feel swollen so much as full—a taut, painless fullness, as after a meal.
A shiver runs down his spine when he imagines something growing inside it.
He resolves not to think about it. What can’t be confronted is best ignored, his father told him, a maxim used mostly in reference to his mother, and mostly on the nights drink put her in an ill mood.
Hers had been a hungry fury, always in need of fuel.
Inertness would send her flickering out the door like a flame starved.
Guy combs his hair over his ear and lathers his soap. He spreads it along his jaw and upper lip, then pauses to let a gust of factory smoke rumble through the ceiling pipes. When the apartment stills, he tilts the mirror to reveal Tyro at his elbow.
“You’re up early,” he says.
She sways in thoughtful silence. He hopes she’ll ask how he is feeling, embrace him, or burst into tears of relief, like she used to when he’d return late from a job.
At the very least, she’ll ask him to regale her with his story, to paint a vivid picture of the dragon, even if, in the end, it’s only a millipede.
“You sang last night,” she says. “In your sleep. Something new.”
He lowers the razor, curious.
“It was … really bad.”
Little bastard. “Was it?”
“You just moaned. For hours.”
He turns back to the basin. “You didn’t think I was gonna die quietly, did you?”
“You could’ve tried.”
“Don’t be a shit, Ty.”
She breaks into a gap-toothed smile, a little goblin’s grimace equal parts infuriating and compelling. “Show me how to shave,” she says.
“I showed you last week,” Guy replies.
At eleven, Tyro is an avid apprentice in every matter that should not concern her.
She’ll never need skill with a straight razor, even if, God forbid, she takes up the respirator.
Still, she’s enamored with the ritual. She has always loved the rhythmic stropping, the popping of the soap tin, and, necessary as all the rest, humming the waltz from The Last Poet-King.
“Don’t tempt fate, grub,” Dawn advises from the table. His years in the Palas Infantry have perfected his own shave; his face is smooth as apple skin by the time he leaves the mirror. “You’ll only grow hair where you’re not supposed to get it.”
“Show me again,” Tyro says.
Guy melts at her stare, the way her dark brows squeeze a dimple between them.
“All right,” he sighs. “Watch closely.” He demonstrates how to prepare the soap, how to glide the razor across her chin, how to pause and move with the apartment’s instability.
“‘Hold your blade steady, princeling,’” he sings.
“‘Hold it true, keen to cut the edge of the moon.’”
She hums in response, lips shut tight as the razor passes under her nose.