Faustech #2
A noise echoes through the hollow, the wet shift of moving rot. Life returns to Guy’s muscles, and he retreats to the headless horse. He flattens himself against its belly and holds his breath, peering between its kicking forelegs.
A dance approaches from above, syncopated on a hundred insectile feet.
A huge, wrinkled head emerges from the nest, glistening in the sparks of chewed wiring.
A segmented body follows, one pair of legs after another, after another.
It’s larger than Guy remembers, its bristles more numerous, wet with congealed venom.
Fragments of an exoskeleton peel from its bulging segments, sheaths of chitinous armor from its legs.
The thing, he realizes with cold horror, is molting.
He freezes, one hand on his nozzle, the other in the pin of a phlogiston grenade.
As the monster slithers above him, music dripping in its wake, guilt and terror wrestle in his head.
He wants, so badly, to run, but he knows he will not make it far.
Even ill-equipped and alone, he must take his chance.
He’s survived this thing once, and this time he’s caught it mid-molt.
It will never be softer, more vulnerable.
His toes curl, his trigger finger shifts, and his glove emits a tiny squeak.
The creature snaps its attention downward.
It detaches its front legs from the ceiling, spines shivering erect, and lowers its head to the statue.
Slowly, its face unfolds, black void of its throat dilating and contracting like a massive pupil.
A silver proboscis glides from its mouth, gathering airborne flecks of paint and dust. The appendage creeps down the horse’s flank, then to its underside, tiny barbs undulating against the marble.
Pearls of liquid stone run like blood wherever it touches the statue.
Guy holds his breath, ear throbbing with his heartbeat.
His finger curls over his trigger, but he can’t move.
Panic rings so loudly in his ear he doesn’t hear the clatter of falling canvases, nor his name shouted through the dust. He doesn’t even know Dawn has found him until a nozzle flashes and a string of sulfluoride pellets detonates in the murk.
The monster retracts its tongue, blinks its throat, and then, swifter than a creature of that size has any right to be, launches itself toward Dawn.
Like any good leading man, Mallory is happy to exit through hell.
Aster leads him by the wrist, slightly too drunk to manage the stairs alone, not too drunk to accept the snifter an usher boy places into her hand.
Hell is overcrowded, as usual, packed with theatergoers and cast and crew.
Little devils and unbaptized children flit between tables, introducing flaming cocktails to outstretched hands and unsecured strands of hair.
Aster points out the historic props, the artwork deformed by Revivalist ecdytoxin, the chute up to the proscenium that swallows Faustech or Don Javunech or Dante in a column of fire.
Audiences may watch from hell as the funnel deposits the damned directly onto a stool at the counter, and any performer who survives his immolation gets free drinks for life (truncated though his life may turn out to be).
“They don’t write about this place in the tourist pamphlets, do they?” Aster asks Mallory.
“I imagine not,” he says as she leads him between a game of pillbug dice and a pair of increasingly nude lovers, through the throng of newsmen giddy about the fall of Ludovico.
As they order cocktails, a reporter in a red coat climbs onto a table, offering a wager to the crowd on how soon Demetrius will be made Danseur Laureate.
A woman with a monkey on her shoulder shouts him down, taking bets on how long before he’s killed. The monkey takes bets on the method.
“Not the worst stir Dee’s caused,” Mallory mutters, blowing out the flame on his drink.
“Well, the Chancellor seemed to enjoy it,” Aster replies. “Which means Demetrius will get to survive the evening.”
“Evening’s not over, vralen.”
“Here’s to hoping the next show goes well, then,” Aster says.
Suddenly, guilt pricks at her, and she wonders if she should confess to him that she’s bought Demetrius for forty thousand marks, that by Acid Moon Mallory’s friend or lover or acquaintance—whatever the man is to him—will find himself a hireling of the Marshal Revenant, if only for a single, secretive night.
“I’m sorry,” she mutters, without knowing why.
Mallory doesn’t hear her. The first bright chords of A House Call are already tumbling down the shaft. “God,” he breathes, lifting his drink to his mouth. “Strong stuff.”
“It’s only sulfur gin,” Aster says.
“No, I meant the Chancellor’s perfume. I’m just now screwing my head back on.” He sniffs at his glove. “This is going to leave a rash.”
“The Chancellor is known to spread a certain type of rash. Though it usually takes more than a handshake.”
Mallory laughs. “You were right, though. He is a difficult man to resist.”
“It’s that sleepbug pheromone. And kilterwort. You know, like they use in Parish ceremonies. Tends to induce compliance.”
“You’re spilling state secrets, vralen.”
“State secrets—those are Fauniche recipes. Sandalwood for strength, myrrh for equilibrium, et cetera.” When she glances at his crooked smile, the honey rings of his eyes, she can’t help but think how fetching he’d be in a cloud of linnetwood.
“You don’t have much perfumery down in plum country, do you? ”
“Not like they do here.”
“Well, show me your wrists, vant Passand,” she says. “And I’ll tell you what to wear on them.”
He only smiles and throws a silver mark to a passing usher.
“Still chaos in the foyer, Eir Patron,” the child reports. “Rowdy playlet tonight. Chancellor’s got his box locked down. Maybe take the back stairs.”
Mallory glances back to Aster. “What do you say, vralen?”
“There’s an old corridor that can take us to the alleys by Conundrum,” she says. “Supposedly built by Sigmund the Torturer, during the Demirealist days. Or maybe just termites.”
“Quite the termites.”
“This place used to be overrun with all sorts of things. Urea wasps in the toilets, hellrats in the walls. Revolutionaries in the dressing rooms.”
“Teratopods in the basement.”
“Well, not since the Revival.” She finishes her drink. “The Marshal cleared out every pest in the vicinity.”
Mallory’s laugh is dark, self-satisfied in a way Aster can’t find anything but conspiratorial. “Does he really think so?”
“What would you know about bugs, country boy?” she asks. “Do you even have mosquitoes out in the dead world?”
“Sure we do. And plum weevils. Even a few beetles exported from the city. Most of our pests are human, though.”
Aster takes in his wicked smile. She knows she shouldn’t ask.
She’s already drunk far too much, stayed out far too late, and the Marshal will need scents for his bath.
At the very least, he’ll need something from her in the morning, for a state breakfast, for a meeting, for a confrontation with whatever parliamentarian will play his antagonist this season.
He’s probably already sent agents to collect her, but tonight, freed by drink and the chaos of The Lilies, she can’t bring herself to care.
“Well, Eir vant Passand,” she starts, “would you like to see what a real infestation looks like?”
In the Sreckt lorry, lopsided on the steps to the Ministry’s portico, Three listens to the chatter on the other side of the telephone, growing less pleased by the second.
When she’s heard enough, she uncrosses her boots on the dashboard and throws down the earpiece.
A few Sreckt men gaze at her through the windshield, and because Guy is nowhere nearby, she directs her ill will toward them instead.
“That wasn’t fucking Sanitation,” she concludes.
Before Guy can fire, before he can even scream, the monstrous centipede is already barreling toward its new assailant. Its hulking shadow threads through the murk, arcing over statues and canvases. As it closes in, it unfurls its silver tongue in a luminescent spume of mucus.
Dawn backs up against clattering canvases and shoots the thing again, burying a canister in its belly.
While it reels, he cranks open another cannula.
His muzzle cracks, spraying a mist of pesticidal buckshot, but that doesn’t stop the creature.
Legs screeching like rosined strings, it crashes into him, and he disappears under a flurry of spines and flailing proboscis.
Dawn’s name is agony in Guy’s mouth. His legs spring forward without his input, his fingers unlock every emergency stopper on his nozzle.
Breathless, terrified, he drains half his tank into the reserve sac before clicking a canister into place.
Vitriol of Lun, phlogiston, every corrosive, every fulminate, every poison his fingers can reach—he doesn’t pause to consider if a layer of iron vine alone will protect him against the incendiary cocktail in his tank.
He thinks nothing of the hundreds of years of history accumulated around him, nor of the busy street above, but only of Dawn, crushed in the grip of the monster.
He raises his carbine and showers the facility in a deathly yellow haze.
The centipede howls in the flood of burning fumigants, abandoning Dawn and lurching up to its nest, fragments of its exoskeleton sloughing from singed limbs.
The walls warp in the heat of cross-reacting chemicals; paint runs down the solemn faces of Chancellors and marauder queens, statues bend and grimace as flames of volatile toxins lick down the tunnel.
Guy’s iron vine burns around his chest. A crack snaps across the glass of his mask, bisecting the creature’s belly as it writhes back into the ceiling.
Globules of blood or venom run down its legs, and its tongue whips against the walls, dislodging splinters of wood and paint and music in streaks of iridescence.