March of the Third Autotomic Brigade #3
He pulls it over his face and hacks into the respirator. Before he can recover, Three’s placed a nozzle in his hands.
“Is—” Dawn coughs as a few more shots ring through the weave of roots. “Fire—”
“Don’t think so,” she answers. “No heat, no light. And it stinks of propellant.”
“What’s happening?” Guy asks.
“You should know,” Three answers. “You’re in pest control.”
His grip tightens over Tyro’s wrist. “They’re smoking us out.”
“Picking off—” Dawn coughs. “At the bridge.”
“Yeah, I saw,” Three answers. “Just like urea wasps. Get the bellows hooked up to the pipes and wait at the spigot.” Her tone is dark, tinged with irony.
She’s worked and struck and scabbed in the undercity for many years—she’s seen, or incited, a few massacres in her time.
“The real question is who’s doing this. I have a few guesses. ”
Guy glances out the slitted window. Joyous Healing is enveloped in smoke, so he has to conjure the image of flashing helmets, scoped rifles, repeaters far more effective at clearing out two-legged pests than nozzles or knives.
He imagines a regiment of Sreckt loyalists, faithful hirelings with elongated limbs and enraged, warped intellects.
He can almost hear the company jingle pour from contaminated mouths, from gashes that had once been human lips.
“Moulène—” Three shoves a few phlogiston shells into his hands. “Elevator. Before everyone else gets the same idea. Dawn and I will cover.”
“What’s going to happen—” Ty begins, but Three leans down and grasps her shoulder.
“Listen, grub. I’ve got a job for you. You take your brother upstairs and you don’t let him come back down.”
“No—” Ty starts, but Three flicks her face with a wooden finger.
“I mean it. He owes me a favor still. A big one. And if you let him die, then you’ll owe me that favor. Got it?”
Ty nods, tears in her eyes.
“Don’t stay down here,” Guy says. “The barracks aren’t worth it.”
“Oh, Guylag,” she laughs. “You know nothing. This isn’t about the barracks. There’s a whole collection of contriver worms in R with the bridge to the boulevard of Joyous Healing staked out, those stuck in the barracks are left with few options for escape.
Some try to crawl into the jungle of vines and flee to the next root, others fight back, turning supply closets into armories, lavatories into battlements.
When Guy reaches the suspension bridge to the elevator, the flow of bodies coalesces around him.
He pulls Tyro close, suffocated and exposed in the churning crowd, unable to move and unable to stop moving.
A dozen paces away, in the courtyard, the elevator doors shine through the smoke.
They are shut tight, bronze panels invincible to the fists banging against them, vibrating with the deep, monstrous groan of the elevator descending.
“Careful.” Three stops at the trough of the bridge, firing a blunt canister into the smoke. A response tears through the vines overhead, peppering the throng in shredded leaves. Something snaps—the bridge sways, eliciting a collective shout of terror.
“Go,” Dawn says. “Push your way through.”
“But you—”
“I won’t lose you, Guylag,” he hisses. “Go.”
“Keep on,” Three says, voice as forceful as the wooden elbow jabbed into his back. “Go report to Bertram. We’ll be up after you.” She pauses to fire into the smoky night. “Gotta keep this crowd in line—”
Another volley drums past the bridge, and something whizzes by Guy’s ear.
He ducks, one hand on his sister, the other reaching back for Three’s mahogany arm.
His fingers close over empty air. Desperately, he turns for her, calling her name.
The crowd churns in shadow, obscured by dark smears on his mask.
It takes him a moment to recognize blood.
He cries out, reaching toward the space Three had been moments earlier, filled now with jostling shoulders, elbows, fists.
He gropes along them; none are wood, none are hers.
For a moment, his heart stops. For a moment, he is sure the bridge ropes have snapped; he feels weightless, suspended, a hanged man dangling by a swiftly unraveling noose.
Then he is struck sidelong on his neck, and his knee meets wood. Tyro screams in his ear.
His limbs begin to move again. Numb, ruthless, his arms push forward, his shoulder drives through the wall of bodies, his legs shove their way across the bridge to the elevator doors.
Each second prolongs to an age, and through the daze of panic, he comes to understand the desperation of the sewer fox who chews off its leg to escape a trap, of hellrats trampling their own young to flee the exterminator’s nozzle.
When the elevator doors emit a jagged shriek and rattle open, he stumbles into the safety of the shaft, pulling Tyro after him. As the car fills with terrified hirelings, he cranes his neck, hoping for any sign of Three or Dawn.
The former is nowhere to be found, but the latter stands on the other end of the bridge.
With carbine raised and one knee bent, he looks like an old watercolor of a huntsman gazing over his grounds, adoring sight hounds at his feet.
Even with his view obscured by glass and smoke, even with four years between himself and Ostlerfell, he is still in perfect form.
Guy’s heart turns. Several of Dawn’s names hover on his tongue, then evaporate, unspoken, as the doors close and the elevator heaves upward.
Florian stands at the foot of the dining table, with square shoulders and a rigid back.
Constrained by his perfume, he waits for the Marshal to pour their water with silent dignity.
He looks calm, subdued, thoughtful, just as he had been when he was young, when Sorav still maintained hope he might overcome the contamination that plagued the cohort of babies quickened during the deepest months of the Revival.
Aster has really outdone herself. Florian is a difficult canvas to work with, volatile and uneven, streaked with a wildness that he’s carried since childhood and that has only strengthened with maturity.
The years of discipline, education, punishment, and refinement did not exorcise his violent urges, only made them easier for him to satisfy.
But this new scent wraps expertly around every part of him, tight as restraints.
Just looking at the boy, Sorav feels his old wounds begin to ache. Where did I go wrong, he sometimes whispers into the darkness of the midcity prisons. He never receives an answer, but doesn’t need one. Every garden has a cursed seed or two.
“Sit, Florian,” the Marshal says.
He obeys, removing a roll of newspaper from under his arm.
The front page of the Lunar Herald boasts a picture of the Laurel Chancellor with his pet artists, Demetrius at his left side with lilies in his hair, one leg draped casually over his patron’s knees, and on his right, Elspeth, bare-breasted in white gossamer.
“How are you feeling, Florian?” Sorav asks.
“I’m fine. Thank you for your concern, Eir Marshal.”
A cold smile crosses Florian’s face. The boy has a beautiful parry, a sharp eye, and a knack for interrogation, but acting is, fortunately, not one of his strengths. If it were, the Chancellor would’ve already poached him for Crypsis—or worse, the stage.
The door opens. Sorav expects the cook to wheel in their lunch, but the Surgeon General enters instead, all black mask and long black coat, carrying a wide envelope.
“Dr. Whyck,” Sorav says. “Is something wrong?”
“Wrong?” She waves her envelope in Maximian’s face. “You tell me. You put out an order for the arrest of Davide Bateusse.”
“How is that your problem?”
“It becomes my problem when you try to summon the dead.” She slaps the papers down before him. “The deliverymen left a dug-up corpse in my vivisection suite. Vivisection, Max. That implies they’re alive. It’s not for autopsy. Especially not repeat autopsy.”
Maximian pulls the folder toward him.
“The report is already complete,” Whyck says. “Died a few years ago. Coronary artery occlusion.”
Sorav sorts through the photos as his heir looks on.
“Found stiff in his big leather chair,” Whyck continues. “Nothing too strange, from the outside. Men like him die of those kinds of infarctions all the time. Only one thing was odd.”
As Sorav looks through the photos, a cold sweat pricks at his forehead. Bateusse’s face is sunken, his eyes are closed, his mouth is drawn taut almost in a slight, satisfied smile.
“When they opened him up,” she says, “they discovered a pearl in his coronary vessel. Or something that looked like it.” She crosses her arms. “A Reverend Father killed by a pearl. Maybe came from his own collar. Who knows how it got there.”
Sorav pales. “Are you sure?”
“About the pearl?”
“About him being a clergyman.”
“Well, no. He was laicized.”
Sorav looks back over the pictures. The wisps of mayfly cling to his skin, but it is not quite enough to drive off the resurgence of memory, and of loathing. He is personally responsible for this man’s exile.
“I should’ve killed the bastard,” he growls.
“Well, you might’ve.” Whyck shrugs. “What they found in his heart—they think it embolized from something he carried with him from the Revival. Some sort of plaque, transmuted by ecdytoxin. Who knows. There were stranger deaths in those days.”
“What’s the deal with the corpse?” Florian asks.
“He’s vant Passand’s father,” the Marshal answers.
This seems to pique his interest. “Who’s vant Passand to you?”
“I think he means to kill me.”