Saint Guylag and the Dragon
For the first time in nearly a month, Guy stumbles back to the Birdcall Hotel.
He ascends the stairs and crawls into bed, where he waits for Bertram’s smoke to wear off, too devastated to cry, too helpless to move.
He watches dusk fall outside the window, unable to close his eyes, because all he sees is Dawn, so sharp in his uniform, watching Tyro’s thumb press against paper, guiding her hand through the loop of needle tape and snapping it, white gloves on black ink.
Giving her a fatherly nod while he strikes at Guy’s heart, a strike swift and precise and irrevocable, like an artful soldier’s should be.
How could he not have known—even from across town, even without seeing her, he should have known.
He should have sensed it, if not in Tyro, at least in Dawn.
Guy rolls to his back, body tingling, mourning all the lost years, all the wasted effort, the miles and miles and miles he’d walked for her that brought him nowhere.
He turns, moaning, for hours, until he feels his mind clear, until his hurt, his confusion, his helplessness all coalesce, funneled through a single channel into a searing pulse of rage.
His ear throbs with percussion, with the grinding of his teeth, the thump of his heart.
In the seething darkness, his head spins, or, his body spins but his head stays still, snapping, like a dancer’s, on a single focus.
He sees past the blur of Bertram’s complacent smile, past Dawn in his golden epaulets, past Three’s ghost clicking her disappointed tongue.
Through the haze of hopeless fury, one thing is still clear to him: He has to see her.
At the first call of the night shift, when the company jingle plays through the halls, Guy rises.
He doesn’t march to the bulletin and read over the day’s allocations; instead, citing Bertram’s generous offer, he takes the shift off.
He returns to his room and sits on his bed, watching the shadows under the doorframe, waiting for the footsteps to decrescendo.
Then, he gathers his effects. He shaves, shakes out his mask, but instead of donning his iron vine, he slips into his formal uniform, white trimmed in silver.
He straps on his sidearm, his ceremonial saber, slings his golden respirator over his shoulder.
By the time he leaves his room, he looks every bit the sanitary specialist he is presumed to be.
He walks down the stairs to the hotel lobby, past the warped piano, the bar, through the front doors, and calls a company car.
He expects to be intercepted, questioned—but the young Tender Guard recruit defers to his rank and seniority.
Without a word, she drives him straight to the lift by the Sreckt factories, then totters around the car to open the door for him.
(He can almost hear Three laugh at the spectacle.) He makes his way to the elevator, and either because he’s seen so often around Dawn and Bertram, or because he’s channeling the tight-lipped authority of General Bianco, the operator asks no questions except where he would like to go.
“Contriver floor,” he says, and the young man, either understanding his request or too embarrassed to admit he doesn’t, begins the journey downward. Guy sits on the leather chaise as the lift descends, clenching and unclenching his fists to keep them from shaking.
He is afraid. Deathly afraid of what he will find, and of what he won’t, what he will do if she’s there, what he will do if she’s not—if he will tear the place apart, looking for her corpse in the ecdytoxic waste, if he will find that madman Reames and torture her location out of him.
Cold, disembodied, he watches himself from afar.
He can almost feel the darkened seats around him, the caverns of the theater; he can feel the gaze of a little usher boy scooting to the edge of a gargoyle to observe Guylag kneeling center stage with his head bowed, a long, monstrous puppet encircling him.
The child watches carefully, and though he’s seen this performance a dozen times, he hasn’t the faintest idea where the script will go.
The elevator doors open. A corridor stretches on either side, strung with Catoptric-powered lights. Machines buzz and mumble in the haze. Somewhere, a bell rings, and a rush of water follows. Guy looks to his left, then right, unsure where to go until he hears faint, malformed music.
He straightens his shoulders and follows the muffled sounds, eyes darting, ear craning for changes in the gradient of toxin. He stiffens when a pair of R&D workers pass by, but they don’t spare him a second glance.
Strange noises spill from the grates and vents above him, pincers snapping, lips forming pleas, threats, insults.
Cascading fractals of ecdytoxic growth spill from the walls, made of human or bug or city flesh.
Unsure if he is walking through a factory, a laboratory, or hell, Guy follows the agonized music, step by careful step, to a wide door of petrified wood.
There, he hesitates, heart in his mouth, unready for whatever lies beyond.
No better way to brave the dark, sings Saint Guylag with a tap to his visor, than completely blind.
He dons his mask and pushes open the door. He steps into the haze of misty fumes, painted in sickly green light, and his heart drops.
There it is, huge and bloated and beautiful.
The teratopod dangles from a hundred hooks, undulating in sedated agony.
Tubes run from spiracles wide as streetcar windows.
Its mandibles twitch, pried open with steel.
A dozen children run along its length, slender wrists gliding into the crevices of its mouth, the chinks in its terga.
Its tongue is clamped, stretched so every dripping barb is exposed, raw under the relentless pull of gloved fingers.
Protected by nothing but iron vine, the children diligently extract ecdytoxin, squeezing strings from throbbing glands, from between splayed mandibles, from the tender underside of its struggling legs.
Some of them harvest with two or three handlike things sprouting from one wrist, some limp around the creature dragging elongated, extra limbs, yet others carry changes almost too subtle for the eye—a strange gait, a heavy wheeze, a vibrating tic.
Guy watches them, speechless, for a minute, for two. An acid heat rises in his throat when he recognizes one of them, a helmeted child whose quick hands he’s seen work in Three’s shop, sewing addenda, embroidering an oversized skirt.
“Ty,” he croaks. His voice is weak, unheard. He removes his mask and calls out again.
This time, a dozen glass visors turn to him, and a few bare faces.
Most of the children see his uniform and resume their work.
Tyro’s hands fall to her sides, and she tenses.
She glances over her shoulder, scanning the factory floor, then the gantries above.
She takes a careful step toward him, then breaks into a sprint.
She barely pulls off her helmet and gloves before she throws herself into his arms. He embraces her, stroking her curls, ignoring her noxious smell, the stains on her sleeves.
“What are you doing here?” she hisses. “You can’t slow us down. Reames will kill us.”
“Ty,” he moans. His heart skips a beat as he squeezes her wrists, thumb pressing against the dark ink.
A few scabs decorate her skin, unhealed wounds from which tiny strings of venom grow.
When he runs his glove over them, they resonate with the toxin in his ear.
His blood boils so hot, so blindingly furious, he can barely push out the words.
“How many times?” he whispers. “How many times did it sting you?”
Tears gather in her eyes. “I don’t know.”
Guy stands, burning, tympani rolling in his ear, and steps toward the teratopod.
He draws his blade and the children scatter, ducking under oozing, broken legs and fleeing to the shadows.
The creature struggles with a peristaltic wave, a bloated, suffering crop heavy for harvest. Its mandibles clench at the glint of his saber, pulling against the cords and hooks.
Guy stares at the stretched proboscis, the carpet of barbs dripping with ecdytoxin, and dons his golden facepiece.
Then he brings his blade down at the base of the creature’s tongue.
Metal sinks into flesh, but not cleanly.
The appendage does not detach after the first blow.
With a spurt of silver blood it twists, struggling to recoil, nearly wrenching the saber from Guy’s hand.
Cables snap taut, children scream, and so does the teratopod, writhing and spilling ecdytoxin from severed ducts.
Guy’s vision narrows—he wrenches back his weapon and brings it down on the helpless tongue again, and again, and again—and when the appendage comes loose, when his blade finally tears through the ropes of muscle, he doesn’t stop.
Mindless, armored only in his leechbane jacket, he hacks at the monster’s mouth, its glands and mandibles, its pinned forelegs, big around as his waist. Soft, pale appendages appear between the chinks in the creature’s armor, raw and unformed, attempts at defense or reproduction—Guy doesn’t know, and doesn’t care.
If the teratopod splits apart, if a hundred more blossom from this corpse, he’ll kill those too, he’ll hunt down every fucking one of them.