Faustech #3
Then, violently, fatally, it sheds its exoskeleton.
Plates splinter, ribbons of burnt flesh bubble between shattered terga.
The creature peels apart, budding, sprouting heads and legs and long, segmented bodies.
With one great, mortal shriek, it unfolds, expands, and releases a wriggling, wet mass of progeny.
Guy cries out, aiming an empty nozzle at the animals as they dart along the sugar-wires, dissolving into the haze of flames and fumes.
The air blurs with heat, with pressure, and Guy manages only a short gasp and a shorter prayer before the bloated mass of half-formed centipedes bursts into the bustling square above.
Aster leads Mallory through the narrow corridors of the Opera, stumbling past the lavatories and ushers’ quarters and private dancing suites, into the maze where the hallways end and the alleyways begin.
Step by drunken step, the boundaries of the theater dissolve.
The lights flicker, the smell of incense and perfume makes way for electric sap.
Gold leaf morphs to bare brick, carpet tangles with moss, sequins and candlelight glint into firefly lamps.
She guides him up a staircase of rotting wood, steep as a ladder, and hot night air fills her lungs.
They emerge into a backstreet by Conundrum Square, a winding thicket of wood and brick and iron.
Remnants of disaster line the street. Under their feet runs the tip of the plaza’s great scar, an old wound healed with a plaster of jewels.
Above their heads twist the pillars and gargoyles of the Opera’s former facade, deformed with toxic runoff.
Statuary springs up around them, warped fragments of history commemorating the Incident that began the Great Revival.
Considered noxious by the Tourism Bureau, visitors caught staring for too long at the monuments are issued a fine of thirty marks.
“This is it,” she tells Mallory, leading him between the deformed bronze legs of the Grand Marshal Exultant. “The first works of Revivalism, they say.”
Mallory says nothing for a long time. She expects him to react as all the tourists do, speechless with equal parts disgust and awe, but he seems more somber than anything.
Boldly, almost angrily, he runs a hand over the lobulated rump of a rearing horse.
His eyes follow the deformity up its side, to its withers, where its neck bubbles into empty air.
“Were you there when it happened?” he asks.
“No. Though that didn’t matter in the end.” She sighs, looking over the chewed busts, the cluster of kings sprouting from a huge bronze rose, the hound frozen mid-leap, marble melting from its sides as if it had just jumped from water. Its tongue glows behind its smile, toothy as Guylag’s dragon.
“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” Aster asks. “You have to admit.”
“Sure.” Mallory falls quiet, radiating heat. “Though, you know, vralen. I don’t care much for beauty.”
Aster can’t help herself. Driven by his strange solemnity as much as her jealous image of Demetrius’s lips against his cravat, she grips his embroidered collar and gently pushes him against the leg of the Marshal’s statue.
Fire expands behind her sternum, and for half a second, she dares to imagine forcing her poisonous mouth against his, wet with the toxic particles of her breath.
Just beyond the sculptures, the crowd bustles through the square, oblivious to her fingers at his neck, her perfume licking greedily at his edges.
As she leans toward him, she knows he will turn away from her in disgust. She knows he’ll try to escape, this poor stranger.
He’ll run, and she’ll chase him, shambling and wheezing like the monsters from Tulip Food—or he’ll fight, knocking her to the ground and wrapping his hands around her neck, covering her mouth with his glove, desperate to keep her poison from touching him.
She is doomed to a breathless death anyway, so better that Mallory do it—and isn’t it a bit romantic, so classically Vaughnian, Elspeth would say, to get murdered by one’s impassioned lover?
Better than dying like Larbella, coughing out her final trills in a huge bloody clot, or like the Chancellor’s perfumers, overworked, bled dry, and thrown to the centipedes.
Aster wants her last breath to be clear, and full, and terrified. She wants to be alive for it.
“Vralen,” Mallory asks. “Are you all right?”
Her eyes snap open. The fantasy flees, and she slumps against the statue.
“I feel sick,” she whispers.
“Need me to hold your hair while you hurl on the Grand Marshal’s shoes?”
“Not that kind of—”
She stops, ears perked. Behind her, a rumble of panic takes hold of the square. Someone shouts. The crack of wood follows, then the shriek of huge hinges.
Aster glances toward the plaza, peering between distorted marble limbs to see a frantic crowd stumbling from the Opera.
She glances back to Mallory, meets his widened gaze, then ducks under the Grand Marshal’s statue.
She pushes through the thicket of half-eaten art and staggers into the light of the square.
She braces herself against the oncoming crowd, craning her neck for the source of the panic.
A bright, familiar smell meets her nose, and a quartet of alarm bells rings out from the towers of the Judicial Palas.
A cloud of fumigant pours into the square, eliciting another wave of screams. A man shoves past her, shouting at her to move, and she has no choice but to fall in with the crowd.
She turns, head spinning, and only gets ten or so steps into a trot when her breath catches, snagged in a net of phlegm.
She stumbles, holding her constricting throat as bodies bump past her, fleeing the thickening stench.
Yellow smoke swallows the farthest edge of the square, and the crowd begins to disappear in the haze.
Someone grasps her wrist and pulls her upright. Teary-eyed, she struggles to make out Mallory’s face.
“What’s happening?” she coughs.
He glances over his shoulder with a blurred grimace, something a little too close to a smile.
“Can’t say I’d like to stay and find out,” he says.
Later, witnesses will describe the Conundrum Incident not as an explosion, but a hatching.
The event is never clearly elucidated, but it is printed in the tabloids within the day, and set to verse within the week.
In eight months, the Dramaturge Laureate will produce a poorly researched and poorly received adaptation of the disaster, entitled Sons and Brothers: A Summary of the Battle for Conundrum in B Miniature.
The actual bioalchemic mechanism of the event will never become public knowledge, though it will be described in great detail in a cryptic monograph by venerated polymath and notorious felon Dr. Reames Gorslung, written entirely in his sleep.
It lasts for half a minute, but it is felt half a mile away; it propagates through the ground as a tremor, and through the air as a burst of sound, a mutilated orchestral stinger.
A fissure splits the square from the Ministry to the Opera.
The street peels away, shedding cobblestones like scales.
Marble kings and patrons deform in the rising heat, foremost among them the new statue of the Grand Marshal Exultant, melting into a bulge of chitin and wriggling legs and bronze.
Sap-wires break and bleed. Partially digested art is buoyed up from the vaults on an effluvium of burning fumigants.
It’s impossible to tell what exactly emerges from the rancid murk.
It boils and howls along the square, oozing new appendages until a dozen long-bodied creatures, young and soft and hungry, detach from it.
The city warps under them. Wood splits at the touch of their venomous forelegs, polyps of brick bloom under barbed tongues, unlucky citizens crumple and deform in the onslaught of mouthparts.
Dripping with toxic afterbirth, the monster’s progeny scatter, squirming through broken windows and sewage grates and chimney pipes.
The moment before the street opens and vomits a deluge of paint and insects, a photojournalist struggles under the marquee of the Opera, waiting for a shot of the debutant that has stunned the audience with his flawless performance of Sigmund the Torturer.
Ludovico Pelagos holds aloft the severed thumb of his victim, grinning, until a rumble nearly shakes his prize from his hand.
The photographer turns her eye to the source of the chaos; her stint as a reporter in Ostlerfell has taught her to muster her will in a dangerous pinch. She kneels, focuses, and though she doesn’t capture the event itself (no one does), she does capture the aftermath.
She sweeps the scene, passing over fleeing bystanders as they hike their skirts above the flood of paint and sewage, wading in either blood or a perfect mixture of Oxid Brown and Bastard Crimson.
She focuses on the heart of the square, on the debris of aesthetic flotsam, and spies two survivors emerging from under the splayed legs of the Marshal’s felled statue.
Dressed in the dull brown of Borisch & Sons, a hireling pulls another from the wreckage.
The larger man lifts the smaller away from the column of fumigants before he drops to his knees and pulls off his mask.
As the respirator falls, the journalist feels a twinge of recognition.
She knows this man. She’s captured his broad jaw and crystalline stare before, though he had been wearing a different uniform then.
The image was printed in sepia on the front page of the Lunar Herald and delivered to every doorstep the day the Ostlerfell War ended.
As the man lays his partner down in the rubble, kneeling over him like a devotee over a martyr, she captures him again.
Perfectly timed, perfectly composed, the picture immortalizes a moment of profound tenderness in the chaos.
She has no idea what is happening, but realizes with painful clarity that this is the photograph she has grasped for her whole career, this is the reason the camera was rediscovered, the reason light itself bends through a lens.
It is the best picture she will ever take.