Hunter’s Cantata
HUNTER’S CANTATA
The season of the Smoke Moon drifts from Tiliard’s roots upward.
It rises from the shores of the Catoptric, the pipework of rhizomes and limestone where falling pebbles spark like flint in the reeds.
Green witch-flames burp to life on the water’s surface, both guideposts and hazards to passing riverboats.
A blanket of black cloud rolls in from the fields as farmers light the harvest’s detritus.
Smoke envelops the city, and local mycorrhizae proliferate in response.
Luminescent fingers of mycelia spring between roots, growing and decaying within the span of a few days.
They’re a welcome seasonal convenience, providing erranders with shortcuts, lovers with elopement routes, and Borisch-Gorslung’s nascent research and development team with a clear path to haul mountains of equipment around its undercity territory.
Unfamiliar personnel flood the barracks.
Carpenters hammer new catwalks into place while technicians install electrolyte wiring.
Alchemic apparatuses are wheeled from the elevator, coils and agar grids poking out from under black burlap.
Ammunition floods the company armory: powder kegs of carbamates, darts carved with hexes, burn traps, hunting spears, spray guns.
New uniforms, including formal overcity coats, are delivered to each apartment, ironed with protective runes and steamed in leechbane.
Guy receives, courtesy of the new management, a bronze nozzle, a new set of repellent grenades, and a suit of iron vine reinforced with chitinous plating pried from the teratopod’s back.
It’s a little uncanny, crawling into the exoskeleton of a creature he’s killed, but even stranger is wearing its likeness as a golden pin on his overcoat.
The new sigil of Borisch-Gorslung is beautifully designed, a stylized teratopod that circles, like the unending Contriver Worm, to devour its own tail.
Three can’t stop laughing at it. “Well,” she says, “if I haven’t seen a better metaphor for this whole thing coming back to bite us in the ass.”
Less than a week after the grand restructuring, Bertram appears outside the door to her workshop, carrying a long gunmetal box.
He is a bizarre sight; he wears no armor but his pressed suit and a wide smile, impervious to the smoke and howling river winds.
Exterminators and cleaners and cooks loiter at the perimeter of the gathering platform to witness the spectacle.
No Boris has been seen on the stump’s underside since the Sixth, and even then it was only to carry on dubiously consensual affairs with his female hirelings.
“What a surprise, Eir Gorslung,” Three grunts. She cranks her arm to salute him. Guy, instinctively, follows suit.
“Call me Bertram,” he says. “And for God’s sake, thaw out a little. Just here to deliver some information. Copies of your new contracts will arrive in the common chute tomorrow. Give it a week for the Manual addendum.”
“An addendum already?” Three asks.
“Three ninety-eight should be easy to stitch into the binding. The thing isn’t very bulky.
Not exactly a wealth of information on the subject.
I’m hoping these will help with that.” He places the box at Three’s feet, then clicks it open.
A long tube of metal telescopes from it, barbed and bladed and coated in a sweet-smelling pheromone.
“Some trap,” Dawn mutters.
“Bioalchemic. Best wear these.” He pulls gloves from his pocket and slips them on.
“Aim is to capture, not kill. Lest we forget what happened the last time we got violent with one of those things.” He kneels, demonstrating how to set up and disassemble the trap.
“We’re no longer mindless exterminators.
We’re gardeners now. ‘Tenders of our earthly paradise,’ as Montresor puts it. ”
“Our earthly what?” Three mutters under her breath.
“I’ve got my thumb on the phone lines,” Bertram continues. “Any calls that concern a bug of a certain size or disposition will be relayed through me, to you. Especially overcity ones.”
“Sreckt usually takes overcity,” Guy says.
“Don’t worry about our dear brothers. They’re tied up in court about that whole Conundrum business.
” He removes his gloves. “Do you have your new suits? Good—wear them. Iron vine alone won’t protect you from its venom.
And even then—well, I’d recommend staying away from its mouth.
” He tosses his gloves into the furnace.
“We’ll start in the square, then work outward.
See how far this infestation has spread.
Any questions, concerns, bring them to me.
Any hour, any day. I mean it. I work for you as much as you work for me. ”
“Sure thing, Eir Gorslung,” Three says.
“Bertram, please. I won’t ask again.” He ducks through the doorway. “Stay safe. The integrity of this city’s structure depends on you. The very ground above our heads, gentlemen.” He offers a parting smile and retreats across the gathering platform, progress slowed by the crowd.
“‘The very ground above our heads, gentlemen.’” Tyro drops down from a branch over the doorway, dress soiled and already in need of rehemming.
“Where’d you come from?” Guy says. “How’d you get so filthy?”
“Rickhardt told me we’re all gonna die,” she replies. “That there’s a dragon loose.”
“Just a clutch of small ones,” Three reassures her.
“My size?” she asks, leaning over one of the traps. Barehanded, she fiddles with the mechanism. “Let me catch one.”
“Don’t play with those,” Guy says. She frowns and moves on to the other boxes, snapping open a few buckles before her brother can grab her wrist. “I mean it. Stop.”
“They’re taking weird stuff down to R the only trace of music is an ill-tuned harpsichord playing a solemn rendition of Tasarte’s “Aubade” from a brothel window.
RESIDUAL TOXIN BURDEN UNKNOWN. FULL RESPIRATORS ADVISED, says the telegram handed to Three as they step off the elevator at headquarters. The other Borisch-Gorslung employees, including management, gather in the atrium to see them off, as if to war.
As they approach the site of the disaster, unease knots in Guy’s stomach.
It’s not so much the destruction that unnerves him; always, some part of Conundrum is falling apart, victim to an overcrowded balcony or a showy alchemic trick gone wrong.
It’s the stillness, the silence, the way the square is splayed open like the shell of a giant, unspeakable hatching.