A House Call #2
Guy blinks. His heart slows, and the pain in his ear shrinks to a dull throb. “A … apologies, Father.”
“Are you feeling ill?”
“It’s just—” He searches for the creature in the periphery of his vision. “A palpable hit.” The bishop makes to dismount him, and he feels his payment slip away like a bodkin through a suitor’s grasp. He hooks a finger in the man’s pearl collar. “It’s nothing. Please continue.”
“Yes,” says the bishop’s wife. She dangles over the edge of the table, skirt hiked, one chocolate-smeared breast popping from her dress. “By all means, do continue.”
The bishop sighs, then places his hands over Guy’s neck and resumes the murder.
Reinvigorated by the threat of leaving with empty pockets, Guy manages a livelier fight this time.
He wrings his assailant’s wrists, rolls his hips, and, somewhat to his surprise, manages to cough out a few insults of scathing veracity before he succumbs and falls limp.
He lies motionless on the glittering tiles, splayed like a celestial hero in an asterism of feta.
When the bishop is sure his wife’s despoiler will not rise again, he turns to her.
She clambers over what remains of the smorgasbord, prostrating herself, kissing her husband’s rings and vowing to never betray him again.
The bishop, weeping with relief, confesses he worships her more than the moon itself.
United in their faithlessness, they entangle, and the table’s overtaxed bolts begin to squeak.
“I’ll never lose faith again,” she moans. “Oh, never, never—”
“That’s right,” comes the panting reply. “That’s fucking right.”
Guy plays his part, but cannot resist a slice of gruyère that lands next to his face. In the crude fury of their copulation, neither the bishop nor his wife notices the vanquished defiler rise briefly from the dead and slip a few items of charcuterie into his mouth.
When they are finished, they furnish Guy with a hundred marks and a good meal. The lady of the house carves what is left of the pheasant while her husband picks confit from Guy’s hair.
“Apologies, my son,” he says. “I didn’t mean to strike you so hard.”
“It’s all right,” Guy says. A plate slides toward him, a sloppy mélange of meat and sauces pounded together by hips and knees and elbows. It’s the passion that goes into its creation, the bishop’s wife insists, that makes it such a delicious blend.
“Same day next month?” the bishop asks, wiping Guy’s neck with a steamed towelette.
“That’s fine.”
“Next time, something with a little less … sauce. A burglary, maybe.”
“Whatever suits you, Father.” The pleasant thickness of the pheasant on Guy’s tongue is matched only by the banknotes in his pocket. “Truly.”
“A witch hunt? An inquisition?”
“Something gentler, love,” his wife replies. “We ran him a bit ragged tonight.”
“It does look so,” the bishop says. “And you’re so thin. Be sure to take the croissants with you. They’re hardly touched.”
“Thank you, Eir Bishop.” A couple bonbons have survived the onslaught, so Guy slips them into his pocket for Tyro.
With a few extra marks at his disposal, he knows he should stop at a midnight market to find something to replace her trousers.
A dress, maybe—blue, with green trim, elegant and unpretentious and nothing like the frilled, sequined things their mother used to make.
He can already hear Dawn’s wise rebuke: Tyro will outgrow a dress in six months and destroy it in three.
“Why don’t you stay?” the bishop’s wife asks. “At least the night. The Grand Marshal is on the streets throwing some sort of violent soirée, and I don’t want you harassed on the way home.”
“Isn’t he always?” Guy sighs. “What’s this one about?”
“Oh, I don’t know. They’re putting up a new statue of him or something.”
“I have work in the morning. I’ll be okay.”
“Well, then.” She hands him his sidearm. “Don’t forget to clear up the garden a bit on your way out. I was serious about those silverfish.”
The Root of Joyous Healing derives its name from its salutary bathhouse, a collection of a few dozen pitcher plants hanging from its underside.
The flowers cluster over a stack of iron patios, heated by redirected factory exhaust. Barring the occasional snapped suspension vine or accidental boiling-alive, the bathhouse is famously restorative.
Its waters wash away rashes and wounds, and its lovely view of the docks is capable, according to the health columnist at the Rhizosphere, of curing the most obstinate cases of gout.
The bathhouse is also within view of a transparent fungal sac bulging from the Root of Treasures, which hosts the monthly meeting of Tiliard’s Poverty Mitigation Society.
They peer through spyglasses and sort through the bathers, judging employment histories and strength of character by the tattoos circling shoulders and wrists and necks.
They scout for girls with arms long enough to pick dust from the textile machinery in the midcity, for boys to decorate the Laurel Chancellor’s pleasure gardens, for women with sellable curls or strong-shouldered workmen.
Occasionally the bishop’s rivals will stake out the baths with brass ear horns, greedy for the hums of young bathers that could outcompete the choir of the Parish of the Last Monday.
Today, their view is obscured by a band of local boys, who dangle from crosshatched metal beams and jeer at the bathers, one weak finger away from a fatal fall.
They whistle as Guy peels off his tunic and slides down the rubber lip of a pitcher plant.
Tyro rises to defend him, spitting insults at the ledge of the patio.
Her obscenities don’t disperse the boys, but Dawn’s well-aimed pebbles do.
He stretches his broad shoulders at the edge of the pool, four lavender ribbons circling his right arm, a flawless work record his left.
No debtors’ marks, no contract violations, no crimes, no evidence of his dishonorable exile to the undercity; even the wounds he took in Ostlerfell have closed so well they’re barely visible.
When Dawn does not blind the voyeurs outright, he receives the brunt of their propositions: offers for labor or sex or a row on the betting stage. He accepts none.
“Move,” Tyro says, squeezing past Guy. “I wanna see the boats.”
“You can see them from the barracks just fine,” he replies, but still sinks to his chin to let her pass, stretching his feet toward the curled taper of the pitcher’s base, where its digestive enzymes work the fastest.
“Not from this angle.” She likes to point out the gentlemen boarding the ivory liners bound for the fallow countryside, the behemoths of luxury like the old Queensbullet and the Bastion Rose, and remind Guy how he’s promised to take her on one.
He’d used the offer as leverage in some silly argument years ago, and he’s given up on hoping she’ll forget.
Tyro never forgets. If his brain is a sponge, hers is a pair of snap-beetle pincers.
“You just want to holler at your friends in the moss up there,” Dawn says, jutting his chin toward the regrouping boys. He reaches out a large hand, cups her curly head, turns her around, and pushes her across the pool. “Go get the soap for us. No lip. Go.”
Guy shrugs the week’s accumulated smells into the foaming acid.
First goes the stink of factory exhaust, then the wastewater, cigarette smoke, pyrethrin and BSPAF, then the bishop’s cologne.
As he settles into a cushion of steam, he feels Dawn’s gaze on the finger-width marks around his neck.
His bunkmate never misses evidence of his supplemental income, the bruises and little bites and rope burns, but he also never says a thing.
Except today. With Tyro fetching sponges at the other end of the pitcher, he leans in and cuts Guy, sharply but not deeply, with three words. “You deserve better.”
Blood rushes to his face, throbbing in his ear.
He aches to accuse Dawn of envy that he can’t come home with a week’s wages in a day (and another week’s wages’ worth of chocolate truffles), but he knows the blow won’t land.
Guy suspects the man would sooner drown in the Catoptric than trust a rope thrown from a kid glove.
Guy cages his words behind gritted teeth as Tyro returns with the soap. Begrudgingly, she submits to her brother’s touch, letting him rake through her hair and drop a halo of clods at her shoulders. “Where’ve you been, Ty?” he asks. “I’ve slogged through sewage cleaner than you.”
“Around,” she answers.
“Fighting again?”
She pouts and clams up. As he dips her under the white-foamed surface, a hand finds his shoulder. Roughly, silently, Dawn works out the final snarls in his hair, scrubbing away the spores and bitumen and strawberry preserves.
Guy doesn’t notice the steam loosen the scab on his ear, already disrupted by the bishop’s strike.
He doesn’t see the way Dawn narrows his eye at it, nor feel his fingers dab at the droplet of silver that swells at its edge.
Oblivious, he sinks to the bottom of the pitcher to rinse, then makes his way out of the pool.
Tyro follows, hauling herself onto the mesh patio and throwing her towel about her waist.
Dawn lingers, transfixed by the drop on his finger. Its surface is a mirror more perfect than the Catoptric. It magnifies every hair of his furrowed brow, every streak of ice in his stare, the fascinated dilation of his pupil.
He blinks, and sees the bead is only blood—the same that swelled when he and Guy slit their fingers on the razored spines of the pact-rose many years ago, when he had been a runaway from Orphanwell and Guy an errander lost on his latest route.
He flinches at the memory of the pain—so keen, so joyful, it drowned out all others, erasing the ache of feet too big for his shoes, the welts from the housemaster’s belt, the growl of his stomach.
The terror and vagaries of boyhood melted away in that precious moment, making way for the sting of skin opening, the heat of his thumb pressing against Guy’s, the pressure as they sucked away the blood, the beauty of Guy’s laugh, of his singing.
It was the first time Dawn asked Guy his name, and the first time Guy offered a false one.
The droplet ripples under the force of a train passing overhead, and the memory evaporates.
Dawn is twenty-three again, submerged in a steaming pitcher plant with a streak of red running down his finger.
In the years to come, he will attempt many times to forget this moment, to erase it through force of will and chemical compounds, but on those nights when he lies sleepless and alone in his bed, he will turn it over in his head, refitting details like a puzzle box.
He will never understand the perverse force of yearning that brings his hand to his mouth.
He brushes the blood against his lips. He expects a familiar, metallic taste; he does not expect it to electrify his skin, sweet as treacle. He has never tasted anything so lovely, so odd.
His tongue darts against his fingertip, then down his knuckle, then probes the webs between his fingers.
He can’t help it. He opens his mouth over his thumb, latching like an infant.
He sucks at his palms, he scrapes his teeth under his nails.
When one finger is licked clean, he moves onto the next, then the next—then, just in case, he lifts his opposite hand and tries that too.
When there is none left, Dawn feels inspired but helpless, as if he has just witnessed something of pure beauty and will never find the words to describe it.