Strangleroot Tarantella
The Root Upward, so named by charitable trusts in the overcity, is better known as Strangleroot—not for the foul-smelling vines that cling to every surface, nor its frequent hangings (intentional and accidental), but for the unbreakable grip it has over those who set foot on it.
A pet project of the Poverty Mitigation Society, the root is sticky with philanthropic runoff.
Beggars’ troughs and workhouses line the passages, exuding sap and Palas recruitment handbills.
Its tunnels are netted with mycorrhiza, its bridges splintered, its docks crowded with ticketless passengers.
Those that get out, via employment contract, military service, or guile, inevitably find themselves dragged back, in a day or a decade.
The more time spent on the root, the stronger its hold.
Some insolvents trapped deep in its meat, where the highest floors of the abattoirs meet the lowest cells of the Palas prisons, have not seen the sun in decades.
Guy won’t go back. He won’t perform the debtor’s dance, flitting from forger to tattooist to alchemist, begging for a change of name, of birth, of height or face or sex or work history.
He won’t scrape the honeydew off his boots to crawl into a different bunk every night, lying wakeful as strange bodies rustle around him, weeping, groping, trying to sell a broken pistol or a vial of mad honey to a neighbor.
He won’t stand at the slaughterhouse gates and wait for news of the latest accident or union massacre to free up some contracts.
Tyro can’t go back either. Not at her age. There are few ways for a child to escape that place, and each is uglier than the last.
Don’t make a break for it, Three repeats in his head.
She should know him better than that. If she gives him change and expects him not to gamble it, she’s a bigger fool than he is.
He sneaks out of the infirmary as soon as he can manage it, sidling along the wall to the company phone booth.
The nook is empty. The ungodly hour has spared him the queue of the usual suspects: Margot, who bellows drunken threats to her boyfriend; Bell, who cries to her father; or Rickhardt, who mutters into the mouthpiece with some surreptitious lover, arm pumping to the words on the other side.
Crammed into the nook between the lavatories and the infirmary, Guy fingers his change. True to her miserly good sense, Three has left him only enough for a single call. A single call for myriad problems, and it won’t be to Orphanwell.
He lifts the mouthpiece and demands to be put through to the Bishop of the Last Monday.
“It’s an emergency,” he says. “I’m his son.”
The operator hesitates to transfer a call from the undercity, especially at this hour, but Guy’s lie is just bold enough to force cooperation. The line goes silent, redirecting its flow of ionized sugars, and a brusque voice answers on the other side. It’s the porter.
“Get me Davide,” Guy says. “I need to talk to him.”
“Who is this?”
“His exterminator.”
“Who?” A bustle muddies his voice—a pluck of a harpsichord, a peal of laughter.
“You know who this is,” Guy says.
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
He grits his teeth, every second a coin lost. “From Borisch. Put him on. It’s about the silverfish.”
“I don’t know anything about silverfish.” The line muffles. “I’m sorry, the master is asleep.”
“It’s an emergency,” Guy says. “Just put him on. I need some—” He pauses, unsure if he intends to ask for money, a lawyer, a ticket out of town, lodging for Tyro, or all of it. “I need—”
“Goodbye, eir.”
“Just a place to—”
“Have a lovely night.”
“Fuck,” Guy hisses as the line dissolves into static.
He bites the inside of his cheek, sorting through his options.
If he runs, he won’t get two roots over before they find him and fire him, tackle him to the ground and feed the black needle-tape around his arm, snapping it tight in a burst of pain.
He has even less of a chance at the docks, where any smuggler who sees his bands will know he’s cargo not worth the risk.
“Who were you calling?”
He jumps, wheeling to see Dawn standing in the gnarled archway. He’s in his civilian tunic, unharmed but with a dazed, haggard look, like a boxer after a flurry of blows.
“Are you okay?” Guy breathes. “Where’s Three?”
“Who were you calling?” Dawn repeats.
“Orphanwell.”
His bunkmate sighs.
“I was.”
Dawn looks at his feet. Though he fills the nook tightly enough to hunch, he seems small. “You were begging.”
Guy hangs the earpiece and stares at him. “What did they do to you?” he whispers.
“You don’t have to beg, Guylag.” The calm in his voice is unsettling. He looks to the slit of sunrise beyond the nook’s entrance, where two shadows linger. “They want to talk to you. I assume Three told you to deny everything.”
“You know her.”
“I would recommend against that.”
Guy glances to the uniformed men waiting at the other end of the platform. Not Borisch security, or dressed in the crisp black of the Palas. “What’s happening? Are we fucked? Dawn, are we fired?”
Dawn offers his elbow. “I’ll walk you to the elevator.”
Guy takes his arm, his sleeve starched and ironed, as if he has just returned from a wedding rather than an interrogation.
“I can’t tell if they questioned you or gave you a ribbon,” Guy mutters.
A crack appears in Dawn’s marble frown. “No ribbons.”
“Thank God.” As they walk, Guy tries to shrug off the gazes of the men following them. “You remember what happened last time.”
“You better than me.”
“Of course. You were still conked on laudanum. Sulking in that coffin they gave you.” He attempts to smile, to dress his doomed march as a casual stroll. “Can’t blame you, with the League of Mourners out on the docks. All lined up, singing for you.”
“What was that godawful song…”
“‘Lament for a Lost Soldier.’ And the worst version, too.”
“Even in Ostlerfell I’d never met a group of people so eager for me to die.”
“And your face when you saw them,” Guy whispers, glancing over his shoulder as they approach the bridge to the elevator. “I should dig up an old copy of the Lunar Herald with that picture of you.”
“If you do,” Dawn says, before pushing Guy over to the care of the operator, “I’ll recite your old poems to Tyro.”
Dawn has always resented that photograph.
Nineteen and fresh from Ostlerfell, in it he stands at the crest of the gangplank of the hospital ship, dumbfounded, encased in a crisp uniform instead of a body bag.
A great insult to the Grand Marshal, whose firstborn had been caught in the same ambush at Broken Horse.
With two injuries and one surgeon between them, only by dint of mislabeled paperwork was Dawn wheeled under the knife instead of the commanding officer for whom he had sworn to die.
His unexpected survival was a similarly surprising blow to the League of Mourners, who had already printed his name on their pamphlets, carved it into memorial plaques, and incorporated it into their rendition of the “Lament.” For a hero of the Autotomic Brigade, the celebrated sacrificial limb, to crawl back to the corps alive—it was in dreadfully poor taste.
By the time Corporal Flint descended that plank, the Grand Marshal was arranging his exile and the League his funeral.
Honors not already tattooed on him were stripped.
His compensation was repossessed, his contract voided, his name struck from the roster of the living.
The only one indifferent to the horrendous event of his non-passing had been the handsome lunar priest hired to say his rites.
“Oh dear,” the cleric laughed, walking into the cabin to discover not one dead man, but two living ones, sitting with legs draped over the side of the coffin and passing a stick of tobacco between them.
“Well, might as well lie back and pretend. Let me say a few words so I won’t have wasted the trip down.
Nothing wrong with a little theater, is there? ”
The sun rises over the Opera in a haze of confused violence.
The Chancellor is whisked to safety, concealed in a blanket of gaseous weaponry.
Rumors abound of an assassination attempt, of an arson, of a deluge of giant insects—all disseminated well before the morning poems are printed.
A panicked invocation of the Conundrum Incident is passed from mouth to ink to music, and the vague nightmare of Tiliard’s collective memory snaps suddenly awake.
Before the events at the Opera are even elucidated, a slew of culprits are invoked: terrorists, seditionists, a small, nascent artistic movement known as the Extemporists.
The rear guard of the previous régime attempts to take credit, announcing the resurgence of Neo-Repressionism.
The cast of The Lilies Wretched, still in their leotards, and the cast of A House Call, still in their negligée, are captured and interrogated.
Even Florian Crickshaw, the little Impaler of the Tender Guard, makes an appearance late in the night, cloaked in marksman’s perfume as he picks off fleeing revelers from a nearby clock tower.
By the next afternoon, eight people are killed, sixty arrested, and Aster wakes alone at half past four, leaden and hungover but otherwise unharmed. Birdsong drifts through the halls of rhododendrons and splintered furniture. She rises, head aching.
A kettle whistles somewhere below. She adjusts her robe, buttoning her monk’s brooch, and makes her way down the stairs. Shadows skitter out of her way as she traverses the foyer and enters the ruins of a kitchen.
Mallory doesn’t notice her approach. He sings, not badly, to the Aufhocker ballad playing on the radio. A large beetle simmers in a pan nearby.
“What’s going on outside?” she asks.
He jumps, then smiles over his shoulder. “No one seems sure. An assassination attempt of some sort. A Tender Guard lorry came down the next street over, screeching orders to stay inside.”
“They didn’t stop by?”