Chapter Deep Canyon #2
The boy is hesitant, as they all are. But unlike the others, who scramble back up as soon as they hit the bottom, begging until Reames clicks his tongue and shuts the hatch, he remains calm.
As he crawls through the nests of paper and glass and shredded canvas, he slows to admire the creatures.
He is different, Reames thinks, from the dangling monkeys from Orphanwell, different from the bucktoothed little prodigies at the University, who play at eagerness until it comes to real bioalchemy.
This one, he can tell, recognizes beauty.
This one understands that he is witnessing what others will only ever see in hindsight: the slow, dark birth of a new Tiliard.
Reames decides he likes this lad. If he lives through this first trial, he’ll be worth a contract.
“Mind the spiracles,” he says. The boy kneels in a corner, bending over one of the creatures. “The pure stuff is under the proboscis. At the base. Don’t let it touch your skin.”
The child pries open the radial mandibles, circled like numbers on a clockface around the teratopod’s mouth.
“Good,” Reames whispers to the dark. “Use the collection vial. The glands by the stinger. That’s what we need.” The boy inserts his hands between the barbs of the creature’s folded tongue. “Use your thumb. And don’t gather too much. Then it won’t have enough to molt.”
The kid fidgets, stills, then turns to the light. If he is stung, he doesn’t flinch, he doesn’t cry out. Slowly, he makes his way back to the ladder.
“Let me see,” Reames says.
The boy holds up a thimble’s worth of silver fluid. Just enough for a few canisters.
“Not bad for a first pass. Come on up, let’s have a look at it.”
The kid crawls up the ladder, hands shaking.
Reames takes the vial and raises it to the light, looking for contaminants, for emulsion, for any sign it may backfire after processing.
Even this small amount, this little droplet, more gray than silver, moves him nearly to tears.
He can almost feel a monologue coming on.
“Hey, boy,” he says. “Do you know the third rule of Catoptric bioalchemy?”
Before the fumes dissipate from the ruins of Metaldrip Defense Industries, its allies begin to fall.
In a single night raid, Clearwater Pest Solutions is brought to its knees.
Placid Sewage Treatment Company preemptively surrenders, and an envoy from Wherewithal, Inc.
, collapses on the steps to the Judicial Palas with a plea for aid.
The Marshal Exultant responds. He gathers his associates in Sanitation and the Cabinet, including the fraction of Gorslungs still loyal to Mendel’s memory, and makes his move.
His counterattacks are vicious, brutally efficient, and often successful—mostly owing to, historians will later say, early Revivalism’s dependence on a volatile and experimental new mode.
But even his soundest victories are undermined by the insidious advance of ecdytoxic refinement.
Neo-Repressionist propaganda is uninspired, its strategies poorly choreographed, and the buildings leveled in the wake of the skirmishes regrow in quintessential Revivalist style, as awe-inspiring in their novelty as they are profound in their deformity.
Tiliard, both repelled and riveted by the ascension of the ragtag exterminators hell-bent on re-forming the city, buzzes around the greatest underdog story since Little Orphan Clevette.
Awed witnesses recount tales of the creatures fleeing the onslaught of BGS fumigants.
The Manual burgeons with new entries: 401: The Common Defector.
402: The Crypsis Informant. 403: The Toxic Nightbeetle. 404: Collateral Damage.
A revived Corporal Flint appears onstage and on the page, played by a handsome baritone intent on extracting justice from the Marshal Exultant, who violated their contract and conspired to have him killed for it.
One journalist becomes famous for her photographs of him; the same woman who had first captured him descending the plank of the hospital ship now captures him toting his carbine, directing rebuilding efforts on the canals, embracing a lieutenant who will be identified, many years later and through the tireless efforts of complete obsessives, as Olaf Aufhocker.
Weeks stretch like months. Guy follows Dawn across Tiliard, camping in ruins and marching under the toxic sky with the Manual under his arm.
He no longer vomits after every skirmish, but then again, he rarely eats.
He no longer dreams, but he rarely sleeps.
Every night, when BGS sets up camp in a looted gallery or burnt-out hellrat nest, he finds a quiet place, steadies his shaking hands, and writes.
He writes in the margins of his Manual, he writes on the hotel notepad, he writes all the stories that he can’t tell Tyro on these lonely days of siege.
Stories she can take with her when, the moment he scrapes up enough cash, he betrays her, throwing her on a riverboat and shipping her off to Dagdrun with nothing but a handkerchief and vague instructions to seek out a stranger’s villa.
Every word pains and satisfies him, like pushing a loose tooth.
He pours his nightmares, his guilt, his fear, into the stories.
He hums the tones Dawn’s nozzle makes as he sweeps ecdytoxin down the streets, he taps his foot to the repeating fire, melodies built from the terrifying cadences of bursting phlogiston grenades.
He invents a role for Tyro in each one. All her favorites—the stoic mercenary, the kid revolutionary, the sinful priest, the embittered gentleman with a lily boutonniere.
Each is a little gift, a little piece of him that will stay with her when the worst should happen to him.
Maybe, down the line, when she finally learns to read, she will appreciate them.
If not, she might be able to sell a few to a theater in the countryside.
The night after the Row for Splinter Row, Dawn’s masterwork of battle that will start to turn the tide in the Revival’s favor, they set up camp in a deposed slumlord’s ruined manor.
Dawn, glowing with victory, is paraded before the press while his men occupy their latest stronghold.
Ancillary staff take over the kitchens while the extermination workforce piles up the bodies in the courtyard, allies and enemies, the dead and those changed enough to count as such.
As Rickhardt sets his torch to the flailing mound, Guy has to turn away.
He retreats through the shattered archways and up the stairs, to the quiet interior of the manor.
He moves from room to room for a while, checking closets and opening the splintered remains of drawers for anything the BGS appraisers may have missed.
As with all seized properties, they have been thorough in their sweep.
Everything of value or beauty has been counted, categorized, sent for safekeeping or down to the teratopod tanks as fodder for their next skirmish.
The only treasure he finds is a typewriter in an office on the highest floor, and even then, its ivory keys are warped and browned, unable to be pried loose.
Beyond the arched window by the desk, a column of smoke rises, carrying a peal of moans.
A cheer follows, striking a dissonant chord in Guy’s head.
He leans against the glass, watching the burning pile contort and solidify, iridescent flakes of ash peeling away to reveal a blooming bouquet of marble bones.
He swallows his awe, and the sickness stirred by it, and sits at the typewriter.
Ignoring the shouts of revelry and the howls of the injured, he feeds paper into it and tests out the malformed keys.
He flinches at the clack of metal, then tries another.
The feel is strange, but each letter is functional, a brief, resistant weight before a swift snap.
He finds an odd sort of relief in each stroke, and before he knows it, a sentence sighs out of him.
In the dusty bower of exfoliating gold leaf and bloated leather chaises, one finger at a time, he begins clicking away at the first lines of what will become Fleeting Lodestar.
“Guylag.”
He starts. Dawn enters in a tide of distorted light, scrubbed clean and resplendent in his formal uniform. He closes what’s left of the door, lifting his rifle strap over the silver trim of his epaulet. He’s wearing a new pin, and pomade in his hair.
“You look nice,” Guy says.
“Bertram dragged me in front of the cameras again. Made a whole ceremony of it. Impossible to get away.”
“Did they give you another ribbon?”
“Worse, a promotion.” He pulls off his gloves and lays them on his rifle. “Why weren’t you there?”
“Sorry. I didn’t…”
“I looked for you. I wanted to— What are you even doing up here?”
“I’m … writing things.”
“What things?”
“The things I—” He pauses as Dawn approaches. “I can hear. In my head. They’re so loud. It—almost hurts, until I get it out.”
Dawn hovers over him, leaning on the back of his chair. Then, he takes Guy’s cheeks in his hands. “What are you—” Guy tries to laugh. “Hey—”
Dawn only moves his head, one hand tilting his jaw, the other brushing his earlobe. Guy shivers, tries to pull away, but Dawn is firm, running his bare thumb over the cartilage of his helix. As he draws it along the scar, a muffled chord comes to life.
“It’s reshaping you,” Dawn breathes. “Like it is me. Like the rest of Tiliard.”
The light in his eyes is silver as the Catoptric. It’s an odd spark, a glint of certainty, of rightness—one that had died for a long time after Ostlerfell.
“Are you okay?” Guy asks.
“I want,” Dawn starts, quietly, “to know your name.”
“I—” He swallows. “I’m still in debt.”
“You’re paying it back right now, Guylag.” Dawn smiles; his eyes flit to the glowing window. “BGS will forgive it all. You’ll be free. Soon—when all this is over.”