Chapter Deep Canyon #3
“When this is…” Guy doesn’t finish—he can’t quite imagine the world of over, a world in which this reaping will not be followed by a sowing, in which Tiliard will not just grow from itself again. A changed but familiar garden, as Montresor says.
Dawn’s grip tightens on his shoulder. “Tell me.”
The man can’t be drunk. There’s nothing on his breath, no scent of smoke, no hint of mad honey, only a glint of inspiration.
Guy tenses in his chair; he wants to laugh, to ask why now, why so suddenly—but he knows better.
Dawn has been waiting for years, eternally deferring, letting each opportunity slip past, never seizing them but only brushing them as they go by, a caress here, a soft word there.
Now, aglow with triumph, with the entire city reshaping to his will, there is no reason he should not claim any of the many things he has been owed for so long.
Not for the first time, Guy is acutely aware of the difference in strength between them.
He is aware of the rifle at the door, of Dawn’s victorious panoply, the glint of justice in his eye, of light and life, the same he wears when he drives his blade through flesh, when he watches ligatures tighten over his enemies’ necks.
Suddenly, Guy is less terrified that his friend could overpower him than he is of the possibility he might be willing to.
He says nothing. He hooks a finger in Dawn’s pressed collar, then guides his face downward. Their lips meet, and they freeze, mouth on closed mouth, neither daring to move for a few agonizing seconds.
“You’re avoiding the question,” Dawn says, but he doesn’t pursue it further.
He pulls Guy’s chair, suspending it on its back legs.
An arm wraps around his waist, another his knees, and he is lifted from the seat, deposited instead on a cushion of overgrown leather.
Dawn follows, hands deft, mouth open. His touch is persistent, firm, and when he traces Guy’s scar with his lips, the toxin between them resonates.
Guy lies back, helplessly permeable, shivering as the noxious particulates enter him from mouth and lungs and ear and skin.
Everywhere Dawn touches him, he feels unmade, a goo inside a chrysalis, a mindless thing subject to the mindless processes of life.
He closes his eyes, music shuddering inside him.
Behind his eyelids, a curtain rises over the Gentleman of the Void, sailing into the dead, wilted world, a wilderness without tulips, nothing blooming or swelling or bursting open, nothing pollinating or copulating or permutating, nothing but stillness, where only nothing is possible. A different kind of paradise.
“Guy.”
He opens his eyes. Dawn hovers above him, stern frown on his face.
“What is it, Guy? What am I doing wrong?”
“It’s all right,” Guy says. “Go ahead. Do what you want.”
“Look at me.” Dawn’s hand redirects his gaze. “Are you even here?”
“It’s okay.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
“I’ll do whatever you want. It’s all right.”
“No, it’s not.” Dawn sits back. “It’s not.”
Guy pushes onto his elbows. “I told you—”
“You think you’re being kind? Humoring me? Not making a rapist of me?” Dawn slips off the cushions. “How much?”
“What?”
“How much do I have to pay you?” Shadows deepen his brow. “So you get something out of this. Anything at all.”
“Dawn—”
“A hundred? Two? How much do you usually charge?”
“Stop.”
“So you can feel like I’ve done something for you. That’s all I want.”
“I don’t—”
“You want a box at the Opera?” Dawn starts to pace, gliding from the window to the writing desk and back. “I’ll give it to you. I’ll give you the whole goddamn fucking theater.”
“I don’t want anything,” Guy says.
“Don’t lie to me. You can lie to anyone but me. I know you too well.” Dawn clenches his jaw. “What’s your price?”
Words snuff out in Guy’s mouth. There are a dozen easy answers—he’s got a price for a burglary, for a door-to-door salesman, for a captured spy, for Fernand and an Ascetic monk and a na?ve country gentleman. But his flat rate—well—he hasn’t thought of that. He can’t help but laugh a little.
Dawn glares at him. “Forget it.”
“Wait,” Guy mutters, but Dawn is already buttoning his tunic and making for the door. He hesitates by the knob, chewing on something.
“I could smell him, you know,” he says.
“What?”
“Every new moon, every time you came back down from the overcity. Both of us could smell him. His cologne. His sweat. His wife’s cooking. You’d reek of him. You’d come home in the middle of the night and crawl into bed next to your kid sister. It wasn’t right.”
Guy blinks at the darkness in his voice.
“Did you ever tell her?” Dawn asks. “Tell her where you got the money for her dresses?”
“Don’t—don’t start this.”
“You spent years shoving her between us. Using a child as a shield against me. And then you’d come home reeking of some stranger. She could tell. She wasn’t stupid.”
“How is that worse?” Guy says. “How is that worse than smelling of pesticide? Of sewage?” He gestures to the window and the statuary burning to life outside. “Of that?”
“That, at least, has a little dignity to it. That is so I don’t have to see you sucking some pervert off in the confession booth—for years, Guylag, you were on your knees for him—and where’d that get you?
Now look where I got you.” He steps forward, and Guy shrinks into the cushions.
“You have no idea what I’ve done for you.
What I’ve signed. This—all this—is only the beginning. ”
“I don’t want…”
“You deserve more—more than sitting at the feet of your betters and begging for them to toss you their scraps. That won’t work, it’s never worked. You’ll never get what they have by groveling for it.”
“I don’t … I don’t want what they have—”
“Oh, sure. You want the countryside instead, don’t you?
You want an escape from all this.” A mirthless smile crosses his face.
“I escaped once. Made it all the way to Ostlerfell. You have no fucking idea. It’s only worse out there.
I killed for them. I died for those bastards—I died so they could have blue.
” He pauses, glancing at the script burgeoning from the typewriter.
“You know it, Guy. There’s no way out. Even if you make it all the way to plum country, you’ll just be spraying aphids in their fields rather than cockroaches in their basements. There’s no way out but up.”
Guy curls on the cushions, inert. For a moment he fears that Dawn will pull the paper from the typewriter and destroy it, but he only rests a clenched fist against the desk.
“I won’t lose you, Guy,” he says. “You’re the only family I have.” He straightens, expressionless. “I’m remaking this place for us. You, and me, and Tyro. Don’t you dare fucking look away while I do it.”