Hunter’s Cantata #2
The wound in the street is still fresh, flanked by peeling scales of cobblestones.
Mutilated artworks, chewed, digested, and regurgitated, rise from the ground as if grown from it.
Charged sap drips from exposed bundles of wiring; pipework zigzags skyward, spurting the purple sludge of spent Catoptric water.
A carpet of dried paint grows mosslike over the square, crawling across twisted statuary and broken facades.
“Goddamn. What a toxin,” Three mutters through her respirator. “Can’t believe you took a dose of that, Moulène.”
A shiver travels up his spine, then vibrates through the scar on his ear. He hopes the venom has evaporated from his body, that he won’t carry it in his bones, sequestered in a rib or wrist until an unlucky fracture releases it back into his bloodstream.
Three kneels at the edge of the gash, boots sinking into the softened ground.
She swings her gunmetal box from her shoulder and pulls out a trap, long and wide as a straightened leg.
She glances down the crevasse, at the oozing columns of paint and sap, at the howling faces of tortured statues, and seems to think better about crawling into it.
Instead, she clips a trap to her ropes and instructs them to send it down.
Dawn counters the weight with what remains of the Grand Marshal’s statue—whose obscene deformities he pauses, in a rare moment of indulgence, to relish.
“‘Hail, Commandant, hail the chisel that carves me,’” he sings to the tune of his unit’s march, using his old commander’s splayed metal legs as a pulley.
They set the traps throughout the square: one by the slumped remains of the Ministry of Aesthetics, in the shadow of a groaning monstrosity that appears to be an oil landscape fused with a giant theatrical puppet.
They leave another two on the east side, near the Opera.
Guy’s wrist burns as he pries one open under the ruined marquee, and Three disappears into the building to set a few more.
She returns to report interior damage as queer as it is extensive.
“Structure’s all right,” she says. “Seats and curtains and all that—melted. It’s velvet soup in there.” She wipes her boots on the cobblestones, leaving streaks of purple goo. “Don’t look so glum, Poet-King. The place has already burned down what, fifteen times?”
“Twelve,” Guy says, though he’s not sure if the incident in which the insane Marshal Nathaniel Thwart crashed his airship through the backdrop technically counts.
The day stretches on. Repairmen come in waves, masons for the stonework, electricians for the sap-lines, a lunar priest for the evil aura.
Midafternoon, when Guy is laying out a trap by Bean Pulp, they get a call.
Something pugnacious is stalking Bast Street, large and stinking and hungry, like the infamous Butcher.
The alarm turns out to be false, just a giant mantis crawled out of the mud vents. It’s an ugly specimen, and mean, but manageable. The brood-parent and eggs are disposed of with a sawblade and a spray of formic vitriol, respectively.
A second call comes a day later, this time from a manor in Fog Hill.
Then a third, then a fourth, each unusual but ultimately dead ends: urea wasps the size of blast mice, blast mice the size of goliath crabs, goliath crabs bizarrely fused into a centipede-like train of claws and chattering armor, and a particularly nasty dung possum that, once captured, turns out to be the client’s lost lapdog.
The most difficult job of the week is a swarm of pleasure hornets escaped from a bootlegger’s hive, and mostly due to the necessity of fighting off the man who found them, whose dozen or so stings have convinced him he is a prophet and the hornets his followers.
Dawn holds him down while Three and Guy smoke out the nest, lingering to squeeze a generous amount of honey into an empty milk carton.
Dawn frowns at the practice out of habit, but Bertram’s permissive contract technically allows Three to bottle some for sale, and Guy to add a dollop to his tea that night, after which he sits under the glowing weave of fungal mycelia, braiding his sister’s rapturous curls.
“It’s so, it’s just so—” he hiccups, tears in his eyes. “I can’t believe it. It’s so pretty when it’s clean.”
“I don’t like it,” Tyro says. “Three says I could get a lot for it.”
“Don’t you dare. Don’t you ever cut it—when this is all over, when I’ve paid everything back—I’ll get you a bodkin. Like overcity girls.” He bunches her hair in his fist, tugging gently. “A silver one. You can wear it on the riverboat, when we go.”
“Em,” Tyro growls. “I don’t want a bodkin.”
“A tiara, then. Like Orphan Clevette, when she transforms into a princess.”
“Not that, either.”
“You’re gonna have to wear something on your head.
” He pulls her into his chest and rocks, slowly, as he imagines a boat rocks, or at least how historian-librettist Otto Lascherhack depicts it in Birth of the Deathbed.
He closes his eyes, recalling the opera’s swaying backdrop, the metal sheets rattling offstage as the storms overtook the explorers’ ship, Tiliard’s brave forefathers who traversed the acid sea in search of paradise.
“How about a tricorn hat, then?” he suggests.
This time, Tyro seems to consider it. “Better.”
While Dawn prepares supper, Guy bends over a sheaf of papers and teases out the contents from the typeface.
The Manual sits before him on the table, splayed to its final pages.
The leather spine is sturdy but soft, nearing the end of its tenure but still wide enough to accommodate a few more entries.
This one is mercifully short and, to both his disappointment and relief, not named after him.
398: The Contriver Worm (Teratopoda ecdyntus)
Because no one has captured a photograph of the thing, the entry’s illustration is hand-drawn—astoundingly well, and by Rickhardt, of all people, who claims to have been a successful children’s illustrator before his exile (probably a lie, though he always dares his coworkers to grab any overcity ten-year-old and ask them his old name).
Carnivorous and highly reactive. Early instars are susceptible to phytothrin, pyrethrin, vitriol of Lun, and Borisch & Sons Proprietary Aerosolized Formulation (BSPAF).
Sexual maturity is reached at approximately a dozen molts, after which a brood of 12–24 clones detach from the parent (see: “Whittleston-Bacher strategy of fissiparity,” pp.
200–202). Toxin is volatile and extremely noxious, AF scale 883.
Direct envenomation is often disfiguring and commonly fatal. Refer to trained unit for disposal.
“Commonly fatal,” Guy mutters. He wonders how many stings have been witnessed, by Bertram or anyone else—surely not enough to prove the trend implied by commonly.
He lifts his head, examining Tyro on the stool across from him. She’s half naked, dress splayed on the table. She picks aimlessly with her needle, occasionally reaching up to pinch a bothersome puff of tissue under her nipple. Guy can’t help but wonder if they’d been there the day before.
“That’s not how you hem a skirt, Ty,” he says, rubbing softness into the binding sap. He pulls a string of hemp from the cover pouch and threads it through the perforations in the gathering’s crease. “Make it even, like I’m doing here. No, that’s not—you can’t just make shit up.”
“You do.”
“No, I don’t.”
Sour-faced, she watches him drive his needle. “So what’s that page say?”
“You’d know if you sat down and learned to read.”
“I don’t even think you can read. What’s it say?”
“The Contriver Worm. See? It’s the ballet, by Drovick.”
“Drovick?”
“You know him. The one in jail all the time.”
“Oh. You haven’t showed me that ballet.”
“It’s not my favorite. It’s too short—well, the story is short, the performance can last for days.
It’s about how the world ended. There’s a plague and some angels and a big worm made of a train of dancers, and every few minutes they switch out, one by one, until it’s a completely different worm.
Or, here’s the question—if it’s the same worm, but with different parts.
It’s a metaphor for something, I think. I dunno. ”
“That’s sounds really boring,” she says.
“It is. Puppets are better. Like they use for the dragon in Saint Guylag.”
“Perfect,” Dawn mutters, bending over the oil-drum lid he’s repurposed into a griddle. He waves away the steam with his red mitt and pulls his grease-beetle from the heat. “Did you hear about Borisch?”
“I thought we were Borisch,” Tyro says.
“No, I mean Eir Borisch. The Twelfth.”
“Hear what?” Guy asks.
“Dead. Fled to his hunting estate upriver, but someone followed him there. Picked off the sons, too.” Dawn delivers the bug to the table and seats himself. His tone is level, matter-of-fact. “Maybe Sreckt. Maybe someone from our own management. Some casualty of restructuring.”
“Is that bad?” Tyro asks. “Should we feel bad?”
“I don’t know,” Guy answers. He turns back to his needlework. “Never actually met the man.”
The bishop’s wife leans over her vanity, wrapped in a gown so sleek and black it resembles a mourning robe more than an evening dress. She streaks dark bands across her eyes while Guy applies perfume to her husband’s beard.
“It really is awful, that infestation on Conundrum,” she says.
“All of a sudden people are seeing bugs everywhere, like it’s de rigueur to be contaminated with something.
It’s biologic-threat this, or state-of-emergency that.
A miracle we could even reserve a table at Pierre’s.
” She straightens, eyeing Guy in the mirror.
“We were worried when we saw Borisch & Sons in the papers.”
“I’m fine,” Guy answers, straightening the bishop’s tie. Neither of them says a thing about his call from the infirmary—obviously the porter had not passed on his message. “And it’s Borisch-Gorslung now.”
“Gorslung,” the bishop mutters with the deep contempt of familiarity. “Of course it’s one of that pestilent brood. They love buying their way into a scandal.”
“Darling, no politics in the bedroom,” says his wife.
“God, I’m only glad they closed the Opera until repairs are done,” he sighs. “The Seamster Laureate invited us to see The Only Good Man, and I’d rather drink the Catoptric than sit through another production of that dreck.”
“It has been awfully stale lately,” his wife admits. “It’s all been Don Javunech and Tasarte ballets since the War.”
“And this utter blight of still life the galleries are having! Neo-Repressionist slop. The only color they use is blue.”
“There’s always the smaller venues,” Guy offers. “I’ve heard the Argland plays What My Husband Doesn’t Know on new moons.”
“Oh dear,” the bishop laughs, affixing a winged boutonniere to his vest. “A man of the pearls can’t be seen at a gentleman’s playlet. Not in this régime. Better to have an ineradicable silverfish problem. Darling, am I wearing this right? It looks crooked.”
“It is. Here—you’ve got to wear it left, here, over the heart, at the angle of Venus.”
“Ah yes, like the chiromancer says.”
“Cardiomancer, darling.”
“Right. The cardiomancer.” The bishop winks at Guy as they follow his wife down the hall. “Reads the arteries like lifelines. Convinced her that angina is a sign of poor character. Each vessel is associated with a different vice.”
“Right coronary for greed,” she says. “Left anterior descending for cowardice.”
“I have no idea what she’s talking about. And neither does that kook. The man’s a radiographer, not a hedge witch.”
“Exactly the kind of thing someone with a stiff aorta would say.”
“Now, son—” The bishop turns to Guy. “The knife and the mask are on the kitchen table. Supper should be over by two. Be sure to really trash the place.” He slips his feet into his polished shoes. “Be positively indecent. Give us a good scare.”
“Of course, Father,” Guy says.
“In the meantime, help yourself to the wine in the cellar. There’s a bottle of ’93 the Grand Marshal gifted to me. Smash that one first.”
“Yes, Eir Bishop.” It is the porter’s day off, so Guy goes to the cloakroom and retrieves their overcoats. “Be careful out there. There really are some nasty bugs around.”
“Of course, lad. We’ll see you tonight.” The bishop hesitates at the entranceway. “We were worried about you, you know.” He dons his emerald mask and opens the door. “You should stop by the confessional sometime. It’s so rare that I’m stuck in that booth with anyone half fucking decent.”