Saint Guylag and the Dragon #2
Silver blood spills from the creature’s wounds, musical wails from the void of its throat.
Chains rattle like castanets. A hook snaps, releasing a barbed mandible, and Guy slashes up to meet it.
As his blade cracks through chitin and sinks into muscle, he feels himself cut through the city’s heart, slamming the metal through bark and stone, severing canals in gushes of water; he cracks open the surface of the Catoptric, breaking the mirror through which Tiliard is propagated; he shatters Bertram’s unassailable smile, his mother’s spinning wheel, the bishop’s pearl collar, Dawn’s armored chest, the BGS insignia on his uniform, his heart—
“Stop him! Stop him, you shits!”
Reames Gorslung slams into Guy with his giant hands first, one grasping for his neck, the other his saber.
Guy sidesteps, yanking the sword back in a spray of raw ecdytoxin.
He twists out of Reames’s grasp, and the blade draws across the alchemist’s sleeve, his shoulder, his bare jaw—Guy withdraws in time to spare a fatal strike, but not in time to spare a fatal nick.
The wound appears in a thin, shallow red streak, then blossoms, unfolding from split skin in an upswell of blood.
Reames pitches forward, grasping for Guy, for his teratopod, blinded by the flowering expansion of his flesh.
His jaw breaks, folds back on itself, formless and wet as clay.
His face disappears, obliterated by twitching muscle and a mosaic of growing teeth, row after spiraling row.
He falls to his knees and gropes, moaning, until he finds the proboscis.
He flattens his warped body over it, shielding it from Guy’s next strike.
Guy stumbles back as the alchemist takes the limb into his arms, cradling it even as it violently sculpts him. His throat splits open, releasing a vibrating net of flesh, and a bloodcurdling wail.
Numb, terrified, Guy does not know he’s dropped his saber until Tyro is pulling at his sleeves, urging him toward the door.
Wordlessly, they shed their contaminated clothes, she her iron vine and he his overcoat; they drop their masks, their gloves, leaving a trail of equipment behind them as they rush to the door.
Somewhere above them, an alarm begins to blare.
“We were lucky that night,” Mallory says. “Really lucky.”
“How so?” Aster asks.
“That was the same night BGS made its advance on the Palas.” He gestures to a narrow passageway in the old factory wall.
The tunnel is overgrown with ecdytoxic boils, statues of gnarled wood, knots agape like mouths.
“That’s the route we took, if I remember.
We followed it blindly for a while, until we reached one of my brother’s old errander paths. ”
Aster glances at the witchfruit in his breast pocket. It seems to breathe with him—inflating its petal sacs with the cadence of his voice.
“The Marshal was distracted that night,” Mallory says.
“One of the biggest jobs of his career, it turned out. We wouldn’t have gotten nearly as far as we did if he wasn’t busy ushering in Tiliard’s grand new age.
Still, of course, he came after us. It was easy enough for him.
He knew my brother. He knew the routes he would take.
He knew the places he would hide, the people he would beg for help. ”
“You made it, though,” Aster says. “Or else you wouldn’t be here. You must’ve made it to a riverboat eventually.”
“We did.” Mallory’s voice falters. “I wish we hadn’t.”
Sorav has always suspected there was a Crypsis man or two among his gardeners. His suspicions are confirmed when, even before Demetrius’s body is cold, he receives a phone call from the Chancellor. His hands are still shaking when he picks up the earpiece.
“You shot me,” Gorslung growls. “You ass. You fucking shot me—and when I was young and handsome, too. How am I supposed to revive Tiliard if I’m a corpse?”
“Prophet was an Extemporist,” Sorav says.
“So what? You couldn’t tell, Max? It’s fucking obvious from his dancing—he was still so good! You could’ve waited until after the wedding.”
“You asked me to take care of the bugs in your opera, Eir Chancellor.”
“Not him! He was extraordinary.” He pauses. “Fuck. What to do now? If this flops, Max, if Aufhocker fucking flops—the swine at the Arbuscle will never let it go. I’ll cut off Olaf’s thumbs myself. And I’ll make you hold him down while I do it.”
Sorav clenches his jaw. “Calm down, Chancellor.”
“Fuck you. This is my life here. My entire life! Who’s the understudy? Is he good? And don’t you tell me he’s one of them, too—I swear to God—round them up, Max. Anyone with an Extemporist bent—you see anyone so much as ad-libbing in the chorus, slot them in for the beheading scene.”
Your fiancée included? Sorav decides not to ask. “It will be a long scene,” he says instead.
“Fine. Props will build a gallows. I don’t care. I can change plans. I can improvise as well as they can. Take them out—take out the whole fucking cast, for all I care. I’ll write a check. Make new contracts. I’ve got good perfumes for public apologies.” He pauses. “You find vant Passand yet?”
“No, but…” he starts, and can’t finish. At least he knows where to look now, all those old haunts. The bathhouse, the factory, the routes she and her boys used to take.
“But what? Is he high up in their ranks or something? Do they even have ranks, or do they just switch out like the dancers in The Contriver Worm?” Bertram laughs bitterly. “What about him, Max?”
“He … used to work for us.”
“What?”
“In the teratopod labs. With your nephew.”
The line hushes. For a few seconds, there is only flat static. “Really. One of the kids?”
Sorav’s throat aches. He suddenly can’t speak the name aloud, not the one he knows. “Yes.”
“God,” the Chancellor breathes. “He survived a long time. Tough kid.”
“He’s … Guylag’s little sister.”
“Who?” The line goes silent, then sparks with laughter. “Guylag? Oh, dear. Really?”
“Yes,” Sorav whispers.
Another pause. “God … that’s good, Max. That’s really good. Did you plan for this? Did you come up with this?”
“He killed Florian. Of course I didn’t.”
“No, no, you wouldn’t have. You don’t have that kind of classic Vaughnian sensibility.
” The line quiets, but only for a moment.
When the Chancellor speaks again, Sorav can hear the gleeful gears whirring in his voice.
“God—well, can’t say I was expecting that.
It’s just like Aufhocker—just like him, isn’t it?
Gets thicker by the hour—good God, how on earth…
” One last chuckle. “Mallory, then, is it? I suppose we should send him some sort of invitation.”
Tyro shakes in Guy’s arms, but she doesn’t cry.
As the alarms blare, as the Sreckt factory doors slam shut in squeals of petrified wood, they crawl through the veins of the midcity.
Blind, terrified, with nothing but his under-uniform and his sidearm, Guy leads his sister along a mossy corridor, then out onto a flickering boulevard, guessing and second-guessing his route until he finds a familiar tunnel.
He pulls her through the passageway and diverts to a blind pouch, an old smuggling stopover long since abandoned.
There, he examines her in the fungal glow.
She doesn’t flinch as he runs his fingers across the threads growing from her wounds.
“Oh, princeling,” he whispers. “Princeling. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she answers. “The others have it worse. It’s all right. It’s not bad.”
“Ty, why did you do it? Why didn’t you—”
“I wanted to help us. I needed … I wanted money for the trip. I wanted to prove you wrong. To prove you were a liar.”
Rage burns in his gut. He wants, desperately, to shout at her, to strike her, to tell her once again that working is the worst way to get any sort of money, but he only draws her close.
“You’re so good,” he tells her. “We’re going to do it.
You’re right. I am a liar. Princeling, we’re going to do it. We’re getting on that boat.”
This time, she breaks down sobbing. Sickened, elated, he rocks her in the musty dark, just as he used to when she was tiny, wrapping himself over every part of her, tight as a carapace.
“We’re going,” he says. “Tonight. We’re catching the last boat. I just need to get our tickets. Give me an hour. A few hours—I need to go upstairs for a bit.”
“Don’t leave,” she starts. “Don’t leave me. Take me with you.”
“All right.” He grips her bare shoulders, wider, stronger than he expects. “Stay hidden. They’ll be searching for us—” He swallows. “We can’t come back to Tiliard. Ever.”
“I know.”
“Good.” He takes an unsteady breath. “Who do you wanna be this time? We could be the Overlook Cousins—like in Birth of the Deathbed. By the time we get on that boat, you could be Philippe and I’ll be Wachner. We could brush up our card skills.”
“I want to use our thumb names,” she whispers. “Like gentlemen. Like you promised.”
“Grub. We can’t.”
“I want it to be real, Em. I want it to be real this time.”
“We—” He holds his tongue. It seems obscene to him, a dangerous sort of nakedness, to openly use a name free of debt, given not to refer to his contracts, but to himself.
And yet, after secreting them away so diligently for so long, they may be a safer shield than any names appropriated from the stage.
“All right,” he whispers. His hand trembles as he smooths back Tyro’s hair.
“All right. The moment we get on that boat. Just like we used to pretend. Eirs Mallory and Emmory vant Passand.” He squeezes her tight, daring to imagine his sister not as the terrified grub, but the beautiful young gentleman she’ll become.
“Practice your diction. If you want to be called Eir, you have to speak well. And gamble wisely. And learn the rules of a duel.”
Tyro nods.