Phantasm Suite
Conundrum Street carves across Tiliard’s face like a dueling scar, a wayward secant interrupting the concentric rings of nearby avenues.
The gash is a declaration of the city’s violent prehistory, though no one can quite decide how it was made, or when.
True to its name, the street presents a riddle over which academics love to shed blood.
Some attest it’s the wound of an ancient conflict (as in Fran Montresor’s poem “On War”), or a mark left when Tiliard’s glorious forefathers felled their overgrown tree (as in Gilde Vernhardt’s alchemic textbook Goddernackt), or the burrow of some dinosauric termite (as in The Borisch Manual of Catoptric Pest Species).
The southwest end is infested with pedants; they swarm around historical sites, coring the sidewalks and defacing street signs with excerpts of their theses.
Cafés and bars line the canals, boasting names like Bean Pulp and Pierre’s Hole, where researchers and radicals gather to stage their arguments.
Scholars lounge on the University’s balconies and flick cigarette butts onto hopeful suitors below, while grand patrons of the arts amble about in their carriages, scouting for the next architect or florist or playwright of import.
Their litters are both garish and fiendishly stealthy.
A student with the frown of a great novelist will vanish at a crosswalk; a dancer with the restless stride of unrecognized talent will wake in a cab with her thumb pressed to a contract.
Occasionally an industrialist will pass through campus to nip the bud of a promising young populist.
Guy has not set foot on Conundrum since the Museum of Natural History’s last infestation of erosion roaches.
Big as lapdogs and just as eager to chew bones, they’re generally harmless except to mammoth-bone corsets and paleontological displays.
(And lose baby teeth, Guy scrawled in the margins of his Manual the night he found one crawling toward Tyro’s snoring mouth.) The boulevard, predictably, has remained unsolved since then.
Entirely nocturnal, the street wears all shades of night at once, from respectable early evening to the criminal nadir of the witching hour.
Dizzy strings of lanterns hang from awnings, lighting restaurants and galleries and lotus-dappled canals.
On the patio of a cocktail bar, a violinist serenades a trio of lovers, indifferent or oblivious to the Crypsis operative throwing a black hood over a man at the next table.
A geometric arrangement of acrobats rolls past a mugging; students gather to sketch the slavering poodles carved into the canal’s bridges.
The street is tethered to order only by the distant shadow of the Palas.
The eloquent threat of a building looms a few blocks northward, panes of watchful stained glass winking up its turrets.
Golden light threads across armories and prison towers, up the dome that bumps against the broken half-moon like the puffed chest of a rival god.
The chaos only thickens as Guy steps into the emerald plaza, where Conundrum intersects Bast. The square is crowded as always, flanked by libraries and apartments and laboratories.
To his left: the galleries of the Ministry of Aesthetics, porticos decorated with statuary salvaged from the banks of the Catoptric.
And to his right, just beyond a line he cannot cross: the Tiliard Opera.
He slows to stare at the facade, the gargoyles he’d climbed as a boy, whose mossy horns he’d spent hours scrubbing with a toothbrush, and the intricate wood pillars commissioned by the great impresario Albrecht Vaughn.
The marquee’s glow is obscured under a hundred bouquets of bloodred mums. His heart leaps, and the alchemic ink band on his forearm tightens, a warning that will turn to searing pain in the span of a misdirected stride.
Either in his ringing ear or his turning gut, he thinks he can feel the vibrations of the overture to The Price of Beauty.
“Look at this,” Three sneers. Guy flinches, but her words aren’t directed at him. “Looks like the brothers got tired of drowning strays and decided to do some real work for once.”
Guy follows her gaze to the Ministry of Aesthetics, where a lorry idles under the radiant new statue of the Grand Marshal.
Custodians carry canvased shapes down the stairs while men in iron vine wave a crowd of bystanders away from the artillery in the truck bed.
The vehicle’s side is marked in bold, bronze script: Sreckt Brothers Pest Control and Hex Removal.
“Think the dispatcher crossed the lines somewhere?” Three grunts.
She adjusts her tank and approaches the truck.
Guy follows, heat of his tattoo relenting to a faint tingle.
The men on the portico bristle at their approach, lifting their visors to cast evil looks.
What seems to be the company’s hedge witch sours the air with a malediction.
In the nearby crowd, a hustler tries to solicit bets on who will win the inevitable conflict.
Three leads her team to the yawning atrium of the Ministry.
The glass dome opens over them, green light illuminating a disassembled gallery.
Paintings lie draped in burlap, little hints of vant Wron and Rebau exposed at their edges.
Statuary leans in the corners, between stacks of fossilized libretti excavated from the riverside.
Ancient constructs bump down the stairs in the arms of grunting custodians.
The whole room has the frantic instability of a scene change.
“You robbing the place or what?” Three spits toward a Sreckt captain, identifiable by his golden pin. He turns, helmetless, and narrows one eye. Guy half expects a fight, until Dawn steps forward, hand outstretched.
“I’ll be damned,” he says. “Sergeant Bebber.”
The Srecktman’s eyes widen, then crescent over his smile. “Can’t be. Can’t fucking be. Night’s getting weirder by the minute.” His glove meets Dawn’s in the salute of the Palas Infantry. “Well met, Corporal Flint. How long’s it been?”
“Not since Ostlerfell,” Dawn answers.
“And last we saw each other—astonished you remember, the shape you were in.” He laughs, then turns to bark an order at the men struggling to move what Guy surmises is Tasarte’s famous golden piano. “God. Last I heard, the Grand Marshal had you killed.”
Dawn’s lip curls. “On paper.”
“Well, there are worse deaths for a soldier.” Bebber clasps Dawn’s shoulder. “True what they say, though, eh? All of us end up in pest control.”
“At Sreckt, though?”
“Better than Borisch.” He grins, knowing Dawn can’t challenge him. Between the Brothers’ lucrative overcity contracts, their patented equipment and well-stocked manufactories, the sole arena in which Borisch trounces its rival is the relative decency of its company jingle.
“Isn’t there a sack of kittens somewhere that needs doing away with?” Three asks. “What are you doing at our call?”
“Your call?” Bebber raises a brow. “Not if you show up late and with too small a team.”
Three exposes her gold tooth, fingers creaking as she cranks her fist.
“Massive job, then?” Dawn asks pleasantly.
“And a weird one. There’s either a lot of them, or a big one, and it’s hungry.
Already ate through half the goddamn storage tunnels.
Lost some real masterpieces to those things.
” Bebber fishes a cigarette out of his breast pocket.
“We think the nest is somewhere under the square, near the Opera. But there’s a show on, so we’re going the long way. Smoke, Corporal? Suit yourself.”
While Dawn and Three interrogate Bebber, Guy turns his attention to the atrium.
He examines the walls, the stairs, and, leisurely pacing around the perimeter like a viewing gentleman, the art.
With each gold-green flicker of the electric lamps, the statues seem to take on slightly different poses, revealing missing eyes and vermiculated torsos and moth-eaten holes in their marble drapery.
When he pulls back a tarp to reveal vant Wron’s Afternoon Riverscape with Boat, a little water leaks from the frame, damp with insectile secretions.
“You should crawl back home, kids,” Bebber says. “We’re not killing anything tonight. Orders are to evacuate, not eradicate.”
“Orders from where?” Three asks.
“Sanitation.”
She bristles at the invocation. “Really. They stepped off their thrones to call about a bug?”
“If you’ve got a problem, take it up with Species Management.
We’re just securing the goods until they get here.
Biggest pest we’re spraying is the collectors.
” He jerks his chin toward the portico, where a group of gentlemen swarm around a sculpture so dreamily bizarre it can’t be anything but Merrett’s infamous Prism Storm.
“Come out of the woodwork, swear to God.”
Three narrows her eyes. “Dawn, keep an eye on things. I have to make a call.”
She strides down the steps, climbs into the Sreckt lorry, pushes its occupant aside, and commandeers the phone.
She has sharply honed instincts when it comes to these little feints of intercompany warfare.
Her time at Wherewithal has enabled her to spot the kind of petty sabotage that makes up most of the corporate landscape.
Bebber’s men complain, looking to him for orders to expel her from the truck, but he’s got his attention on Dawn. “So, Flint,” he says. “There’re still a few masterpieces down in storage in need of extraction. What do you say? Waltz in, waltz out, just like Broken Horse.”
Dawn releases a bitter laugh. “All right.”