The Borisch Manual of Catoptric Pest Species, 100th Ed. #2
Cautiously, she takes another. Her eyes move down to the sink, where Mallory’s handkerchief lies draped over her bloody cast. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the embroidery crawls from the fabric, drawn upward as if by a slight draft.
The strings fray from their patterns, loosening Mallory’s initials, the river and the dragon and Guylag.
As Aster watches the hundreds of tiny, wormlike movements, unsure if what she sees is real or the conjurations of an anoxic brain, she can’t help but think of his joyless smile, his scarred fingers picking at the lacy edge of the handkerchief. Some things are made to unravel.
“What the fuck, Mal,” she mutters.
A knock rattles the door. Aster jumps at the Marshal’s muffled voice asking her if she’s all right.
“I’m fine,” she answers, twisting on the hot water.
Hands shaking, she struggles to extricate the handkerchief from the mucinous cast, trying to wash away the proof of her worsening illness, of Mallory’s strange threads.
“I’m fine!” she calls again, but that doesn’t stop the next knock, or the next.
Hopeless, she rolls the cast between her fingers, trying to stuff it down the drain, all the while tangled with the unraveling embroidery. She gasps, takes another breath—another clear one, God, what a feeling—and tries to gather her wits.
She should throw it in the toilet, she knows—her cast, and the handkerchief too.
She should brush up and compose herself, walk back out to the Marshal, but despite her exhaustion, all she wants is to break a window and crawl away, slip down the side of the building with her running eyeliner and frizzed hair, flee across Conundrum, all the way to Mal’s, collapse at his feet, throw herself into his arms or her fist into his face, demand to know what the hell he’s threaded through this batiste, demand to know what he’s done to her.
The door rattles open, and Aster freezes.
She glances into the mirror, at the Marshal standing over her shoulder, and for a moment, she sees the same reflection he does: a sickly girl bent over the sink, blood on her blouse, mascara down to her chin, shredded handkerchief clenched in a white-knuckled fist. In the span of a second, she shrinks back into herself, this utterly deranged, foul creature, looking as if she’s just crawled from some contaminated sewer.
He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t need to. His eyes flicker to the bloodied thing in the sink.
“I’ll go,” Aster rasps. She straightens. “I’m sorry, Eir Marshal. I’ll go see her.”
He nods. “I’ll make the call.”
“Can I … can you get me a car?” She balls what’s left of the handkerchief in her hand, then into her pocket. “Not a lorry. Please. I don’t want to go like a prisoner.”
Sorav’s face softens. “Of course,” he says, then turns away.
Bertram, unlike the Borisches who came before him, isn’t a lounger. He sits at his desk only when necessary, or only for show—he’s less of a fat cat than a stalking tom. He has a hungry gait, a sign of the kind of ambition passed down in families with historied thumb names.
Three recognizes him from the old days, though she’s not sure if he can return the favor.
She’d run into him a handful of times before her exile, always at some Chancellery event or another, back when she was an operative for Wherewithal, Inc.
, and he was just his uncle’s nephew, some parvenu only close enough to power to feel the sting of its distance.
Now, at least in everything but name, he is a different man.
Then again, so is she. The past is only ever populated by strangers, Guy had told her once, referencing some pompous corpse or another. Albrecht Vaughn, maybe. Or God.
She watches Bertram pace the Borisches on the wall. He hasn’t removed his predecessors’ portraits, nor added his own. Just a mirror at the end of the line, as if he can’t settle for anything less than a perfect reflection.
Bertram reads her report standing. She’s tried her best to clean up some of the imagery in her sitreps, to make the descriptions comprehensible, but she’s no Poet-King.
The Contaminated Srecktman has a morphology that’s difficult to pin down.
Some are found dead, so decayed they’re nothing but a shallow mound of bones sprouting from the cobblestones.
Sometimes they still seem utterly human, just angry layoffs in tattered uniforms, stalking the streets with knives and harsh words in case they run into their rivals from Borisch-Gorslung.
“How many so far?” Bertram asks.
“Twenty-eight. And a half. The half we found was … budding, though.”
“Budding.” There is a tone of delight under his terror, like a child about to swing across a vine bridge for the first time.
“Maybe more like a molt. You’d know if you saw it.”
“Well, be sure to take a photograph next time.” He closes her report and tosses it onto his desk. “Any word on Franz? He’s holding up the paperwork.”
“Still barricaded in the factory under Eighth. Rallying the troops. A gang of them tried to jump us when we were clearing out Finch Street.”
“Oh, Franz. Stubborn little Franz.” Bertram sighs. “Won’t take Erik’s calls, but he’s got a line straight to the Rhizosphere. Spewing nonsense about how we infested his company. As if I have these bugs trained like dogs.”
“Well, that might hold water if there were any bugs in the place. No one’s found anything. Not that the damage makes it easy. Can’t tear through a wall to look before another one grows in its place.”
“Fascinating.”
“No end to the surprises with these things.” Three pauses, taking in the complacent glint in his eye. He wears his menace with the grace of a dinner jacket. “Not your everyday bug that learns to aerosolize its venom. Or to deploy it remotely, for that matter. And against a competitor.”
Bertram smiles. “Do you have a question you’d like to ask, Arimand?”
His tone is so amicable, so straightforward, even her thumb name does not sound like a threat in his mouth.
She’s unsurprised he has it; though she’s signed under a number, she’s easy enough to trace.
Easier than Dawn, who is dead by every other name, or Guy, who has such an arsenal of pseudonyms she’d be surprised to learn he has a real one.
“It just makes me wonder,” she says, “what all this bustle is at R&D. And this new face you hired. Relative of yours, I think. It took me a while to recognize him. Looks just like the man who was arrested after that bioalchemical scandal at the University.”
“Proceed carefully, my dear,” Bertram says. “A sinking boat is not a good one to rock.”
“I’ve no intention of rocking anything. But I’d appreciate some idea of what kind of rapids we’re about to cruise into.”
“Well.” He places his hands in his pockets and shrugs. “In that case, ask away.”
She waits for the prickle of paranoia, for the familiar feeling of being led on and sold out. She senses no thugs in the doorway, no gun in his pocket, nothing but the creaking of thin ice under her feet.
“You’ve been at this a while, haven’t you?” she asks.
“This?”
“All this teratopod shit. You knew about it well before Conundrum.”
“I should hope so. That’s part of Species Management.”
“Right. But you haven’t been in Species Management for a while now.”
“Well, no. I left about the same time the teratopod crawled out of the river. Coincidentally.”
“Sure.” She crosses her arms, tapping a finger against her wooden elbow. “Do they know about this bug?”
“Not nearly as much as I do.” His shrug is boyish.
“Though, I’ll be honest, that’s still not enough.
Hard to grasp, this thing. Even harder to hold on to.
We kept it contained in the septic capillaries for a while, keeping it fed and happy.
A little too fed. It got greedy. It wanted a taste of the top.
” He laughs, gently, genuinely. “Like we all do.”
Even as a shiver runs up her spine, even as her oaken arm aches a warning, she can’t help but glance through his window. She takes in the open sky, the view of God Himself setting over the valley, dying and rising and dying, endlessly renewed even as the husk of the world shrivels to dust.
“You know,” she says, eventually, “I’ve seen a few ambitious men pass through the undercity. Some of them even manage to strike up from below. Never this far below. Usually they commandeer a mercenary outfit. Something a little more straightforward.”
“Come on, Arimand. Where’s the art in that?”
She snorts. “Smuggling guns isn’t as easy as it used to be, huh?”
“Hah! Certainly not—but it doesn’t matter. I have no interest in those tired conventions.”
“Just how high are you aiming, Eir Bertram?”
“Oh, not too high. I’ll settle for Chancellor.”
“Nothing less than the worst job in Tiliard.”
“Yes,” he sighs. “I know. Chancellorship is a labor of love. But I love this city. It’s a thing of such beauty and yet—the rot, Arimand.
It’s been decaying for so long, and no one’s bothered to do anything about it.
I want to see this place alive again. I want to see it live.
” He leans over his desk. “I won’t bore you with a speech.
Every two-bit hack has some grand vision for this city.
But none have had the means to see it through.
Even the best Chancellors have only ever been painting with mud. ”
“And now you’ve got yourself some oils.”
He smiles, a joyful, insane light in his eyes, the same that Guylag gets when he takes his informal rehearsals a little too far. Hell is a room full of washed-up thespians, she thinks. And God help me, I’ve thrown in my lot with them.
“Well,” she sighs. “If you’re already gonna hang for it, might as well commit the crime.”
Bertram raises an eyebrow.
“Or whatever. From Faustech. Guy says it sometimes.”
“Bless that boy. It’s close enough.”
“You’d better save him a seat in your box, Bert. You better give him everything he deserves.”