Chapter Aubade
AUBADE
The Root of Joyous Healing is reborn beyond repair.
The assault has left the place unstable, uninhabitable.
Bridges lie splintered from fusillades, fumigants percolate its hallways, droplets of raw ecdytoxin drip down canisters lodged in archways and platforms. The floral tubs of the bathhouse wilt and weep, spilling poison from their gutted bellies.
When the wind blows through the vines, a solemn dirge can be heard from several roots away.
On the day of the company’s new christening, a day that should’ve been marked by celebration and confetti of paperwork, Borisch-Gorslung-Sreckt instead finds itself marked by slaughter and dispossession.
As the wind carries dregs of ecdytoxin from the barracks, the workforce gathers what is left of their matériel, their suits and valuables, damaged Manuals and photos singed beyond recognition, and moves to the overcity.
A half dozen at a time, they ride the elevator, and when their headquarters overflow and the workforce spills into the street, the company is forced, by necessity, to annex and occupy the nearby Birdcall Hotel.
The concierge is unprepared for the midnight advance, and it takes only seven shots and a single canister of BSPAF to empty the building of bewildered guests.
“I won’t refuse my people their due,” Bertram Gorslung later explains to a reporter for the Rhizosphere.
“They’ve been fighting this infestation for months now, and what do they get—an underhanded attack by a corporate rival.
And the Chancellery is doing nothing to hold the aggressors to account.
Metaldrip and Franz Sreckt have tried to undermine our service to the people of Tiliard.
They’re the reason this issue has gotten so out of control.
They’re the reason this toxin is contaminating our streets. ”
As his hirelings settle in the hotel, Bertram doubles down on his efforts to fortify Sreckt headquarters.
A strange toxin wafts up from the building, raining particulate over the rooftops.
Creaks of wood and the crack of marble permeate the night, startlingly melodic.
By the time reconstruction ends, by the time the dust seeps into the shifting winds, the building is exactly what Bertram desires.
The foyer sprouts, reborn; stairwells are grown, rather than carved, along the walls.
The front doors stretch and thin to two arched panes of golden glass, translucent as an insect’s wing.
New corridors propagate, budding into offices and workshops and armories.
Bertram’s own suite is a masterpiece, domed ceiling ballooning in stretched glass.
“It’s perfection,” he sighs, seating himself in Erik’s old leather chair, which has twisted to exactly his dimensions.
As he poses behind his desk for the photographer from the Arbuscle, Dawn at his side, he pulls a fountain pen from the drawer and executes his first act as president of BGS Extermination Company.
With a flick of ink and a roll of his thumb, he declares war, on the streets and in the courts, on Metaldrip Defense Industries.
Despite what history will insist, pointing to the wound of the Conundrum Incident and calling it the birth canal of the Revival, it does not begin there.
Like all events that seem sudden and momentous in retrospect, its true beginning is protracted, formless, and aimless.
It begins with the occupation of a mid-tier hotel, and a slew of complaints to the Tourism Bureau.
It begins with a few dozen idle exterminators, momentarily deprived of their regular shifts, gathering in the bars along Fifth Street.
It begins with Guy standing in the luxury of his new room, alone and uncertain.
Bertram has given him a suite to himself, twice as large as his old apartment.
Sap-powered lamps glow against green wallpaper, and a golden cast of Bacher’s dragonfly hovers over a marble tub.
The valuables of its last inhabitant still sit in an open suitcase: silk blouses, a few books, a silver razor, a bachelor’s handkerchief with a small knot embroidered at its center.
This guest had only just begun to sew the story of his travels.
Outside the window, particulates of ecdytoxin coat the glass with a silver sheen. “Don’t worry about it,” Bertram had assured his staff. “It’s processed, and at such a low concentration it should be harmless. Still, I’d close the windows.”
Guy does, flipping the lock and drawing the curtains, but he can still feel the toxin wrap around him, he can still feel it enter him, through his skin and nose and ear—God, his ear.
It echoes with gunfire, with overlapped, disembodied drones and drums and voices.
The cacophony relents only when he sits at the oak writing desk, plucking a fountain pen from the drawer and writing something aimless on the hotel stationery.
The pen glides with the satisfaction of a sigh, and the noise stills.
He writes several of his names, several of Tyro’s.
Then, as he used to in the margins of the Manual, he composes a story for her.
Hunched under the electric lamp, he scratches out the first scene of A Gentleman of the Void.
He pours himself into the words, swept up by his own thoughts, until the moon washes the dusty room with blue light.
Finally, when the clock strikes one, he forces the pen aside and forces himself into bed.
The mattress is achingly soft, the sheets silkier than the bishop’s.
He rolls onto one side, then the other, spreading his arms, probing the emptiness where other bodies should lie.
It takes an hour or so for sleep to drift in, and the moment it does, he enters his mother’s old shop on Broken Teeth, where he returns after the impresario discovered his theft of hundreds of shows and summarily fired him.
Thirteen years old and snapped with a black band worth fifty thousand marks, he comes home to find his mother trying to thread Tyro’s hair into a spool.
“Help me,” she growls with Three’s voice, yanking at her daughter’s curls with a hundred short legs. “Wigmaker will be here any minute.”
When he wakes the next morning, he is called to his first job as a lieutenant specialist in BGS. A nest of Metaldrip stragglers, as toxic and malformed as their Sreckt counterparts, has been uncovered at the end of Finch Street, stocking supplies for a counteroffensive.
Dawn leads the first advance, welcoming Guy into his regiment with a long, tight embrace, assuring him he’s in safe hands. Fresh from his victory on Joyous Healing, Dawn will not let one of his men fall. Not on a routine extermination job.
Armored in teratopod terga and the sigil of BGS, they march down Finch Street, searching for the residue of a soldierly infestation—boot prints, cigarette butts, racy foldouts flapping in the wind.
They begin their sweep with BSPAF, flushing out seventeen hellrats and a lone soldier.
They find the rest in the attic above a haberdasher’s and flood the piping with phytothrin.
The soldiers disregard the warning, staked out in their iron vine and respirators, sniping at BGS exterminators from stairwells and shattered windows.
What they can’t disregard is the ecdytoxin that comes next.
The cloud envelops the building like fire, warping wood and stone and metal.
A few men are crushed in the twisting halls as the building grows and mutates; the others are wrung out as if from a cloth, where Dawn easily picks them off.
Guy does not attempt to follow suit. His nozzle is too heavy in his hands, and his aim too shaky.
His ear throbs, ringing so loudly he does not hear Dawn ask him what is wrong.
As the days progress, waves of fumigants percolate Finch Street.
The advance is one-sided. Metaldrip sends its men into the clouds of toxin with the best armor, the latest respirators, with eager, desperate recruits from Strangleroot, to no avail.
Conventional weaponry wilts at the touch of the toxin.
Enemy gunfire melts in the advancing haze, bullets shed their jackets midair, ballooning from lead seeds in great bursts of petals.
Bayonets resonate like tuning forks, phlogiston grenades leave ashen gardens in their wake.
Newspapermen buzz behind the BGS specialists; bold civilians brave the streets to watch the aurorae of thermal bombs diffuse, the cobblestones shed and molt, traffic lights burst and release fragments of their bulbs like spores.
The battles are beautiful and lively and brilliant, but only half as much as the man who leads the brigade.
Word of the resurrected Corporal Flint begins to spread, the loyal soldier whom the Exultant had deprived of his due.
Midway through the fumigation job that will later be called the Row for Splinter Row, the Laurel Chancellor calls the Marshal Exultant.
The Surgeon General, who has been seeing to the Metaldrip men and civilians caught in the skirmishes, has reported a plethora of beautiful deaths.
The corpses of soldiers affected by the fumigants are so strange, so pleasingly fractal, the Surgeon General hangs them up in the Ministry of Aesthetics.
Crypsis officers observe the works with notebooks in hand.
Many of them have survived enough coups to recognize an unprecedented artistic development.
It seems Mendel Gorslung’s nephew has decided to dabble in the avant-garde.
“Ready the bayonets,” the Chancellor growls to the Exultant over the phone, digging his bare toes into his Ostlerfell Blue carpet. “It’s fucking debut season again.”