Intermezzo
The prison lorry is the property of the Judicial Palas, secured physically by bands of metal and hardwood, metaphysically by hexes carved under the headliner.
The logograms are shoddily done, and the mesh of the slitted window is a good spritz of formic acid away from disintegrating, but it makes little difference to the prisoner inside.
He is devoid of his alchemical implements.
His large, hirsute hands are bound, tingling under the raised scars where his captors had removed his thumbs.
The carriage rumbles along a curved acclivity; he can tell by the small shifts in force and the creak of machinery that they are spiraling up one of the main corkscrews of the midcity.
It has been a winding, nauseating drive from the prisons deep in the core, so low they almost meet Strangleroot.
He is relieved to know he will break the surface of Tiliard soon.
The stale air drips through the crosshatched bars of the window, cool, damp, with cloying notes of sewage and sugar-motor exhaust. A hint of ash makes him think it is Smoke Moon outside; a little sour, but far preferable to the stench of his lightless cell, where the atmosphere of shit and blood is only thickened by the moans of those driven mad by decades in the dark.
“The Symphony,” the Grand Marshal calls it.
The Exultant does have a unique appreciation for music.
Reames doesn’t know why they’ve dragged him from his cramped, wet cell, escorting him past the assassins and perverts and howling cultists stacked like animals in their cages.
The bloody notches his fingernails have left on the wall, one for each approximated day of captivity, don’t add up to his sentence.
He is not, as far as he knows, scheduled to be executed, in private or onstage.
A retrial, maybe. A transfer, a pardon, a chance at appeal.
A scheme of some sort. Whatever it is, it smells like his uncle.
He smiles when the trickle of damp midcity air relents, and the pound of machinery softens.
There is smoke, the usual seasonal kind, but it has a dark tint to it, a soupcon of panic.
A surge of vanity assures him that it must be about himself.
The city has learned of his release, and terror is spreading from the University outward.
Faculty are locking their doors, hiding their protégés; older students are escorting the younger ones to and from the dormitories, lest they fall prey to his genius.
(“Genius!” cried the provost at his trial.
“A scientific libertine who plays with his alchemy set like a child and children like alchemy sets.”)
The provost is, of course, the most blatantly envious of Reames’s breakthroughs.
Even he, especially he, with his army of mutilated white rats, knows there are no organisms better suited for the volatility of alchemy than children.
It is in their nature to change, on a chemical and metaphysical level.
Reames had done nothing but direct the process.
Driven to emphasize this (once again) to the world, he leans his face against the wooden bars of the window and screams it into the overcity night.
Like the lawyers and magistrates and the librettist who refused to put his discoveries to music, no one listens to him, least of all the two officers driving him.
Isolated in the cab, fully armed and incredibly bored, the soldiers exchange a cheerful and increasingly explicit conversation.
One is too old to have served in Ostlerfell, the other is too young, but that doesn’t stop either from waxing poetic about their sexual conquests in the canyons, the trail of broken hearts each has left in that arid valley.
They paint vivid pictures of shrubby gorges they’ve never seen, complain of the harsh, dry air and the harsh, dry girls who have grown up too far from the verdant blessings of the Catoptric.
They pick up speed as they round the bend, talking of their pampered rivals in the Crypsis secret police, of the recent infestation below Conundrum Square, of the elder’s career as a hellrat-catcher before his service.
“Not bad meat on them, really,” he tells the kid before suddenly slamming on the brakes.
The vehicle lurches, and the passengers pitch forward from the impact.
Neither man (nor their prisoner) sees what they hit, or what hits them—helpless in the explosive whorl of gravity, the driver flies headfirst through the windshield.
The glass shatters; he tumbles over the hood of the lorry and onto the cobblestones, split skull releasing a wrinkled blossom of brain.
His younger companion, blinded by the shower of glass, reaches for the wheel, but the vehicle is already rolling.
It spills onto its side, then heaves belly-up in a heap of twisted metal and splintered wood.
When the young man’s head stops spinning, when he realizes all his limbs are intact, he crawls from the broken windshield on bloodied hands.
Arduously, he extricates himself from the accident, then struggles to his feet.
Dazed, he looks around, then looks again.
He stumbles toward an approaching gentleman, who asks if he is all right, if the driver is dead, and if he has the keys to the back.
As soon as he answers, a sidearm appears in the man’s hand.
Investigators from Crypsis will find the soldier the next morning, a strange little poppy growing from the bullet hole in his forehead.
The occupant of the armored cell is bruised, shaken, but ultimately unhurt.
He bangs against the back of the lorry, first with his head as the vehicle rolls, then, as it comes to a stop, with his shoulder, then with thumbless fists.
He gropes for the splintered door, clawing at the wood until his rescuer undoes the latch.
It is, to his delight, exactly who he expects.
“God, sorry,” says his uncle. “Still fine-tuning those detonators.”
They embrace, rocking in the scent of gunpowder and poppy-seed extract.
Reames wants to say something nonchalant, something lifted from one of those ostensibly witty playlets, an It took you long enough, or Is that a new Fauniche you’re wearing, but he knows there is no better way to get a box to his ear than to spurt a cliché in front of his uncle.
“I need new thumbs,” he says instead, because at the moment, it strikes him as the most important.