A House Call
The Parish of the Last Monday holds its services in the cathedral on the corner of Thirteenth and Rebirth.
Every twenty-eight days, the bishop conducts the vespers, ushering in the quiet glory of the new moon with a tide of choirboys’ voices.
It is a night of cleansing. The Palas pardons a chosen prisoner, the parish is absolved of its old sins, and Guy Moulène commits a slew of new ones.
He begins by sneaking into the overcity.
Hair combed, collar straightened, a shining Borisch sidearm on his hip, he steals through the sweltering steam of the midcity jungles, treading an old smuggling route from his days as an errander, hopping lifts and scrambling up abandoned guard shafts until he emerges onto a peripheral boulevard.
A parade thumps somewhere in the distance, drumbeats rippling through the constellations of city lights in the puddles.
Guy’s path is clear but for wadded newspaper and broken bottles—and a wandering trio of Palas guardsmen, who question him briefly before sending him on his way.
He is wearing his overcity uniform tonight, and the Guardsmen’s pleasure of an arrest won’t outweigh the backlash from whatever manor is missing their exterminator.
Tiliard butlers are not known for their clemency.
Guy turns a corner, and the cathedral declares itself in a rush of light and music.
Every stained window is aglow, a kaleidoscope of martyrs cushioned in blossoms of datura and human blood.
It is, according to Tiliard’s Tourism Bureau, the thirty-first-grandest sight in the city, but Guy doesn’t linger to appreciate it.
Instead, he glances over his shoulder and vaults a wrought iron fence.
The bishop’s house sits in the church garden, so decorous among the rhododendrons they seem to have been cultivated from the same seed.
Guy creeps under statues of martyrs, through the shrubbery, and onto the rectory porch.
The footman has been dismissed for the night, so he enters a side door into the scullery.
He gropes through the pantry, following the smell of roast pheasant and the soft strum of a harpsichord.
In the golden foyer, one hand occupied with a glass of wine and the other with the melody of the “Hunter’s Cantata in E-half,” is the bishop’s wife. She jumps when Guy clears his throat, smile pulling at her lips.
“Oh, you made it,” she says. She stands, smooths out her gown, and takes his arm. “Let’s get started—we have such a dreadful infestation of silverfish, and it’s getting worse by the minute. Little uglies are moving in from the garden. I can hear them in the dining hall.”
She leads him to a room arched in oak, chandeliers multiplied by the mirrored walls. A table strains under an extravagant meal, at least a dozen courses crowded around a peacock-feathered centerpiece. At her command, Guy sits at its head.
“I swear,” she says, lifting a bottle of Weingut Marseea sweet red, “we’ve tried everything under the moon to get rid of them. Everything short of fire.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Vra Bishop.”
“They must have come all the way up from the roots. They’re not normal—the things are the size of my fists. Last week one tried to crawl up the pant leg of a dinner guest.”
“Really?” Guy asks, suppressing a smile.
“Ever since they showed up, everything tastes off,” she says. “The silver has tarnished, and they’re souring the wine. Here, see?”
Guy sips obediently when she lifts the glass to his lips.
“They’re invading my recipes, changing them around. I’m afraid to cook. I can’t even eat—not alone, not without someone to protect me.”
“I’d be happy to assist—” Guy starts, and does not finish, as the bishop’s wife has placed a dumpling in his mouth.
“Would you?” she asks. Her finger eases the pastry back and forth on his tongue. “That would be grand.”
She pinches the dough, and filling spills into his mouth, flavor masked by the pungency of her nail lacquer.
“I had hoped you would arrive earlier, Eir Bug-Killer,” she says. “You really should have been here by the psalms. Is it acceptable now for the brave men of Borisch to dawdle on the clock? Maybe I should call Sreckt Brothers next time.”
“No, Vra—” he says, shaping his words around two of her fingers, then, choking, three.
“Oh my,” she breathes. She withdraws her hand and wipes it on his starched collar. “What happened to your ear?”
“Nothing,” he says. “Nothing fatal.” He glances at himself in a nearby carving knife, but the wound seems unchanged, apart from a few dimples where the staples had been removed.
“It’s rugged,” she says, perching on the arm of his chair.
She takes his hand and places it on her waist, then plucks a chocolate cordial from a nearby pyramid of confectionery.
She pops it into her mouth, sinks onto his lap, and wraps her arms around his neck.
When she opens her lips over his, flavors flood his mouth—first chocolate, then sweet rum, then a minty tongue.
He gathers her in his arms and lifts her from his lap.
Lips locked on hers, slick with filling, he places her on the table, directly atop the gazpacho.
She squeals and falls back, pulling him after her.
Rattling the cutlery, groping for purchase on the roast duck, he kisses her, leaving a trail of melted chocolate from her neck to her bodice.
“Hurry,” she says. She rustles open her skirts with a puff of Fauniche perfume, a delicate, floral scent that perfectly complements the wine lingering on his tongue.
(The bishop’s wife, it’s known across the overcity, is an excellent sommelier.) She clutches his hair and pushes his face into her petticoats, where, diligent as a bee, he burrows through petals of lace and silk.
“Hurry,” she says again, knocking the knob of her pubic bone against his nose.
His eyes fill with tears, but he soldiers on, reminded of a production of The Last Poet-King he’d seen as a boy, during which the leading man had been kicked sidelong by a coryphée and sang proudly through it, blood running down his cravat.
“Hurry, before my husband … oh, my husband…”
Guy still recalls the exact verse. A tyrant conquers with his sword, a king with his tongue, sings the titular hero through his bloody nose, whereupon he proceeds to conquer his rival, the haughty queen of a neighboring province. The bawdy joke, like many others, had been lost on him as a child.
“More—”
He employs his fingers and thinks deeply about what line comes next.
A short recitative before an aria. No, a duet.
The Poet-King enters the queen’s chambers, sword unsheathed and curved upright (another joke that had passed over his head).
His ear rings trying to conjure the song, his tongue stumbles as he mimics the lines against slick skin.
“Oh,” the bishop’s wife gasps, knees trembling at his shoulders.
Now that he thinks on it, that had been the night some enterprising stagehand had sewn luminescent threads into the queen’s gown, bluer than Beetle Moon. A touch of Ostlerfell dye. A rare, expensive color, at least before the War.
“Hurry, oh, hurry.” She stiffens, the little roll of her stomach bulging under her dress. “My husband—”
The music rises, full, grand, remarkable in both its perfection and its perfect clarity.
Guy almost gasps with the intensity of it, more alive in his mind than it has ever been—he remembers every note, every word, the shapes in the counterpoint and the shifts in timbre.
A cadence swells between his ears, drowning out the clatter of cutlery, the moans of an approaching orgasm, the squeak of the door opening.
The bishop’s wife bucks, knocking the charcuterie board from the table. Her legs flex, locking Guy under her canopy of underskirts. He is too engrossed to see the shaft of light spill in from the hallway, or the olives roll past the sideboard, wobbling to a stop at the golden hem of a cassock.
A shout rips through the room—the bishop’s wife stills, then shrieks. Guy has no time to extricate himself before a hand grabs his shoulder, flinging him from the table.
He stumbles and swings his arm, knocking against the bishop like rubber on marble.
The man is improbably built, shoulders too broad for his bookish tippet, muscular neck bulging over his collar, enraged scowl parting the flowers woven into his beard.
When he tosses Guy to the ground, it is in a graceful cascade of silk and pearls.
His wife scrambles to the edge of the table.
Wine spills, plums tumble from golden bowls, and Guy hits the tiles in a streak of gravy.
He gropes for an escape, but the bishop slams a knee into his shoulder.
One hand wraps around his windpipe, and the other draws back.
The blow comes swiftly, snapping against his ear in a shock of white-hot pain.
He goes blind. The bishop disappears, all except his thick fingers, the metal of his rings, his crushing weight.
Guy’s ear throbs, and a wail echoes through the room—not the bishop’s wife, but the final note in the duet, a high, sustained vibrato.
It quavers, then rises, and Guy recognizes the shriek of giant, centipedal segments.
A sudden pressure unfolds in his skull, an expansive force pounding to get out.
His heart stoppers his throat, fluttering in terror.
He claws at the world around him, trying to wriggle away from the terrifying music, out of the bishop’s grasp, the hunched, dreamlike form of a monster bending over him, but his arms are weak, his lungs empty.
He can do nothing but raise a shaking finger and tap a beat on the man’s wrist.
The pressure relents. The song fades, and Guy draws a breath. Blurry candlelight aligns to reveal the bishop’s frown.
“What’s wrong, my son?” he asks. “You usually struggle a great deal more than this.”