The Borisch Manual of Catoptric Pest Species, 100th Ed. #3
“You don’t think I pay my debts? Look at my arms if you don’t believe me.”
“I believe you.”
He leans over his desk. “And what do you deserve, Arimand? You want your position at Wherewithal back?”
“God no.” She closes her eyes. At this stage in her life, crawling out of this shithole should be good enough. Just a little taste of the sun again, a little something to ease her aching back, her aching knees, her aching arm. “Half a million marks,” she says. “And a penthouse in Hart Park.”
He grins. “You’re a cheap sell, Captain.”
She leaves his office dizzy. As she descends the stairs to the elevator, her heart flutters with a cautious sort of hope.
Bertram’s already got the perfect black locks for laurels.
A cloud of teratopod toxin might convince the rest of the city of that, too.
In defiance of her better judgment, she believes him.
Either he’s an impossibly good liar, or completely honest, and she’s not sure which is worse.
She exits the elevator and rounds the path to her workshop, only to find Guy sitting at her door, sister at his side.
Next to each other, they look so unlike, to the point where Three wonders if Guylag didn’t just spy her somewhere and steal her, misdirected by his selfish heart, by that boyish urge to tend, the need to always have something to prune and control and care for.
But what similarities their features lack in form they make up for in function.
They frown with the same little wrinkles, their brows knot in the same way, their eyes are forged of the same brass.
When Three approaches, they glance up at her with an identical nervous look. Tyro has been crying, and it takes Three only a moment to guess the reason.
“Ah, hell,” she sighs, unlocking the door to her workshop. “Come on in, grub. I’ve got herbs and shit.”
The car arrives at the Palas just as the afternoon rains pick up.
The Marshal escorts Aster out to the front under a glass umbrella, steadying her on his arm.
To her relief, he’s allowed her to clean herself up a bit, to grab some things from her room and stuff them into her purse, though she will not stay at the Sanitarium long.
Overnight at most, or so he tells her. If she needs anything, he says again and again, she need only call. The Palas is just a short drive away.
“Thank you, Eir Marshal,” she says. She feigns a cough, though when she lifts her sleeve to cover her mouth, the quaver in her fingers is real enough.
Sorav opens the car door for her, and as she steps inside, he lays a firm hand on the back of her neck.
Gently, he squeezes, pushing her into the seat beside the driver.
“You’ll be all right, Asteritha,” he says, though she’s not sure if he is trying to reassure her, or himself.
“You’ve been through this many times before. ”
“I know,” she says shakily.
“When you get there, tell Dr. Whyck I want you prioritized. I need you back before rehearsal tomorrow night.”
“Yes, Eir Patron.”
“And Aster…” He looks at her a moment, mulling something over. Whatever he is about to say, he shuts the door on it.
The car rumbles to life. It pulls away from the Palas, hood stack spitting a sticky cloud of vaporized sugar, and Aster watches the Marshal shrink into the purple mist. As they turn onto Bast, she shakes loose her hood, opens her purse, and searches through it.
She gropes through pill bottles, vials, tubes of lipstick.
At the bottom, wrapped in an extra pair of gloves, lies her little stinger.
“You forget something?” the driver asks.
“No, it’s all here,” she answers. She leaves the gun be, pulling out a silver atomizer instead. She holds her breath and spritzes herself with a warm, bristly scent. A thin mist of flamewort and galvanic honeydew fills the cabin.
“Strong stuff there, vralen,” laughs the driver.
“Good for the weather,” she answers. “It’ll keep you dry.”
“Will it? Even in this downpour?”
“Guaranteed.”
“Oh.” He doesn’t speak after that. The minutes pass, buildings slump by in the violet rain, and the top notes of her perfume peel away.
As soon as the honeydew hits, she lifts the remnants of the handkerchief to her face and pretends to cough into it.
She holds it there, breathing as shallowly as she can, mouthing a prayer through the threads.
The driver doesn’t notice—he watches the misty street with drooping lids, with only the slightest look of disquietude.
She considers applying another coat, then thinks better of it.
She will resort to the gun if she has to.
Her heart twists as the Sanitarium comes into view.
Through the misty haze, beyond the broad pillars of a Wherewithal bank, she can make out its tapered battlements, the fence’s sharp finials left from its days as an arms-factory headquarters.
The stench of misery wafts from every slitted window, fetid runoff from the harvest taking place in its deepest cells.
When the car slows, her heart quickens, and she reaches back into her purse.
The cab pulls up before the gates of the Sanitarium.
Aster holds her breath, one hand hovering over her face, the other over her gun.
The wheels whine, the cab lurches, then continues onward, pulling past the drive and back out onto the ring of Nineteenth.
Aster’s grip relents as they roll along the peach-lined boulevard, then turn, and turn again, making their way toward the winding streets of Fog Hill.
“Where are we going?” she dares to ask.
The driver does not address her. His eyes, to her relief, have taken on the opaque sheen of galvanic stupor. He mutters something under his breath, but she can’t tell what, maybe a to-do list, the names of dead relatives, or a poem he memorized as a child.
She says nothing, but lets him drive. Terrified, exhilarated, she grips the dashboard as they round the hill and descend into the maze of broken glass and mushroom caps that used to be Pleasantview Boulevard.
Blank-faced, he pulls past a quiet park, along a row of abandoned town houses.
He stops, exits the car, and walks up the front steps of what must’ve been his childhood home.
As he disappears into the rotting doorway, calling for someone, Aster steps out of the cab.
She pulls her hood against the drizzle and opens the back, digging for an umbrella.
Heart in her throat, she checks her purse once again, opens the glass panes over her head, and makes her way toward the nearest streetcar station.
The new Ash Moon is the best time to purge heresy.
It must be done before the snows fall, or they will fall black.
For years the Ascetics of Mongfestun have taken on this momentous task, so when the clouds pass over the Sawteeth, they leave them white as an acolyte’s robe.
The purity of the river valley depends on this merciless cleansing, now more than ever.
Apostasy is on the rise, one among the many harrowing signs that the world is trying to begin again.
The rate of Catoptric baptisms is increasing (far more often fatality than salvation), and somewhere in Tiliard, Gilde Vernhardt is laying the foundations for what will become standard alchemical practice.
It’s only a matter of time before the witches take over.
Still, even dressed in the angry red robes of an ancient Mongfestun friar, Guy can’t quite muster the enthusiasm to torture reform out of the sorceress.
She bends over the couch, hindquarters raised in an imitation of her cult’s most sacred ritual, a ritual that has, unsurprisingly, led to their exploding numbers.
Chief Inquisitor Argon the Chaste stands over them, one hand holding the witch’s hair, the other offering his monk a leather paddle. Justice is nigh.
Guy’s arm aches. When he brings it down onto the heretic’s buttocks, all he hears is the crack of a nozzle.
“Harder, my son,” Argon says.
“You’re all fools,” gasps the sorceress. “Your God is gutted. That’s His blood in the river—”
Guy brings the paddle down again, shivering at her gleeful vibrato.
“Harder,” commands the Inquisitor.
“You’re dead,” moans the witch, maddened by her erotic torture. “He’s abandoned you—”
He raises the paddle again. A large hand catches his wrist.
“Son,” the Chief Inquisitor says. “You’re distracted.”
Guy only frowns, because like any dedicated monk, he’s removed his own tongue lest he ever speak a falsehood.
“I know that look, friar,” says the Inquisitor. Gently, he takes the paddle. “Do you have something to confess?”
Guy shakes his head. If this monk has any misgivings at all, they are not about an exterminator born a thousand years in the future, well after his monastery was converted to a military reformatory, changing its function but retaining its propensity for flagellation.
“Confess,” the Chief Inquisitor says. He brings the leather down almost as an afterthought on the heretic’s backside.
“You have doubts, my son. This is natural, in times like these. But without hardship, there is no resilience. It’s what God tells us.
Look at the hardships He’s endured.” He swings the paddle once more, eliciting a giddy shriek. “And yet here He is.”
“Your God is dead,” moans the heathen. “Dead and broken.”
“He dies every month,” the Inquisitor agrees, reaching for a rubber gag on the coffee table.
“But He always rises. Seasons move by the blink of His eye. Kings rise and fall by His watch.” He fits the gag between the blasphemer’s teeth.
“The cycle is fleeting; the cycle is eternal. Transient and permanent. No matter how God may look one day, He will change the next. No matter His shadows, He will always return to His full light. His blood will flow through our valley. His blood gives and takes life. Endless and always.”
The lines are obviously lifted from one sermon or another, recited with the bland confidence of repetition, but Guy finds comfort in them. He can’t help leaning into the Inquisitor’s arms, resting his face against the soft leather of his harness.
“Oh, my son.” A strong arm wraps around him. Lips meet his forehead. “It’s been a tough season for the whole city. Come to confession.”
“Yes, Father,” Guy mouths, though he knows he won’t.
The Inquisitor releases him and turns back to their captive, who moans through her gag, adamant in her heresy. The Ascetics have no choice but to burn her as a witch—lightly, across the breasts, with scented candlewax.
That night, as the shattered void of the new moon crawls across the river’s surface, Tyro lies curled in dreamless sleep, and Dawn lies rigid in sleepless dreams, as he does every month, tormented by the stench of Fauniche perfume and patchouli candlewax wafting from his bunkmate.
Guy is trapped in between, tossing and turning as his nightmare morphs into a distorted memory.
He is twelve. In sixteen months he will be fired, stripped of his contract and sent back to Strangleroot, but tonight, the usher known as Hock is working hard.
He obediently hides himself until intermission, when he is relieved of his blindfold and commanded to bring wine and a cigar to the Secretary of Internal Reform, a man infamous for his exactitude, demanding the same box, the same tobacco, and the same bottle of plum wine, no matter what is playing.
“You plebeian,” jokes the Sommelier Laureate as Hock lights his cigar, “you know the ’88 doesn’t pair well with historical dramas.”
“Sure it does,” says the Secretary. “If you have any taste.”
Hock bows and makes to go, but the Secretary’s hand grabs his collar and wheels him around.
“Wait,” he says. “Garcon. Taste this.”
Hock stares at the cigar thrust toward him, end softened with saliva.
“Taste it,” the man repeats. “Tell me if it’s eastern perique.” Obediently, Hock opens his mouth, and the Secretary places it between his lips. “Go on. Tell me.”
He inhales. His throat burns, his taste buds wince. He pulls back to cough, and the Secretary’s hand follows with the cigar.
“Not like that,” he hisses. “Idiot. Taste it. Try again. There—again—what does it taste like to you? Blacktree? Starkleaf?”
Hock can’t answer. He’s only ever smoked a pinch of third-eye dust, and only as a dare.
“Again. Does this taste anything like eastern perique?”
“I don’t—know,” he hacks, looking to the Secretary’s colleague for help. “I don’t know—”
“All of it. All of it. Tell me if there’s a single fucking leaf of eastern perique in there.”
“Leave the poor kid alone,” says the Sommelier.
“I—” Hock’s stomach turns as the Secretary pushes the cigar back into his mouth.
“Smoke it until you can tell.”
Swiftly, he learns to lie. “No, Eir Patron,” he says through his next bout of coughing. “That’s not—eastern perique.”
“See? It’s not so hard to tell. Now, go get the correct one. I don’t pay an arm and a leg to be served this shit.”
Hock flees the booth, smoke heavy in his throat.
He barely makes it ten steps before he doubles over, mouth burning.
He tries to escape the smell, but the farther he gets from the Secretary the thicker it becomes.
Even as he stumbles past the booths, crawls down the stairs, flattens himself against a stained glass window, mouth searching for a crack, he can’t seem to get a good breath.
A hand grasps his shoulder, shaking him. He jolts, gasps, and rolls to his side to find the apartment filling with black smoke.