Saint Guylag and the Dragon #3
“Tonight, you have to do exactly what I tell you. Exactly. If I tell you to hide, you hide. If I tell you to wait, you wait. If I tell you to leave me behind, you do that. You do everything in your power to stay alive.”
“I won’t leave you.”
“Please, please, Mallory—you have to promise me.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
“How?”
“With words, you dolt. A gentleman keeps his word. Now say a word, and keep it.”
“I promise.”
“You better mean that, Mal.”
“I do.”
“Good—I’ll hold you to it. You’re not a liar.
Gentlemen don’t lie.” He pulls his sibling close one last time.
“Stay behind me, stay hidden. If anyone calls you by any name other than Mallory, don’t run to them.
Even me. Especially me. I love you, Eir Mallory vant Passand.
” He stands. “Stay strong. You’re half iron, on your dad’s side. Never forget that.”
Often considered to be Maximian Sorav’s magnum opus, his march on the Judicial Palas is the grandest, and most destructive, of his works.
While hints of his strategic leitmotifs appear here and there in earlier battles, the themes of Revivalist warfare don’t come to full fruition until this swift and forceful performance.
The Marshal Exultant, in anticipation of the advance, has already pulled out his last stops.
His factories flood the roots with toxic runoff, his prisoners are brought up from the vaults as soldiers and subjects.
Fruitlessly, frantically, his laboratories attempt to re-create BGS’s weaponry, through biomathematics and synthetic alchemy, but nothing, no matter how vile, how caustic, can resist the generative violence of ecdytoxin.
The siege of the Palas begins with a sweeping overture.
A contingent of the BGS Tender Guard, a good deal of it former Palas Infantry, marches through the gates preceded by a flood of ecdytoxic gas.
The Exultant’s gunmen, equipped with respirators and iron vine and staked out on the slitted battlements, open fire.
BGS raises its nozzles against the Exultant’s defenses, dissolving them in showers of silver liquid.
Stone softens; pores appear in the barricades, then widen, welcoming the footmen of the Tender Guard into the Palas courtyard.
A rondo of return fire rattles the air; then comes the grenadiers’ counterpoint.
Light germinates, malignant colors flood the sky.
Soldiers fall like Rebau subjects, draped on stairwells and in one another’s arms.
Dawn sweeps through the Palas, reshaping every hall with violent finesse.
He clears the armories, the garages, the meeting halls, destroying every portrait, every statue, every carpet dyed in Ostlerfell Blue.
He deconstructs the ballistae in the garden, burning the hedge maze and turning the apple trees to glass.
More of a gesture of beneficence than an apology, he spares the parts of the Palas he knows Guy might appreciate.
He leaves the band room untouched; he bypasses a baroque writing desk.
As he marches through the executive suites, killing the Exultant’s servants, his sycophants and concubines, he plants the seeds of a large, elegant bedroom.
The Marshal Exultant holds out in the grand solarium of his audience hall.
As the glowing fumes of ecdytoxin spill across the domed windows, he stands atop the dais with his golden rifle in hand.
Surrounded by the many devoted, expendable limbs of the First Autotomic Brigade, he readies his aim, pointing his sights down the long Ostlerfell carpet.
He recognizes Corporal Flint immediately, even through the haze and his respirator—he recognizes the gait of the upstart, the entitled grunt who had survived Broken Horse at the expense of his son.
When the intrepid corporal advances down the hall, preceded by columns of colored mist, the Exultant adjusts his aim, one foot on the shoulder of his kneeling chief officer.
He does not step out to greet his enemy; he eschews speeches, refuses grand philosophical or aesthetic confrontations—to the disappointment of his eager historian-librettist, who crouches at the edge of the room, scratching down all she witnesses.
With the curt restraint that defines his Neo-Repressionist style, he pulls the trigger and shoots Flint in the head.
His aim is perfect, his timing pristine.
A single bullet passes through the man’s helmet—or appears to—and he staggers.
The Exultant pauses in a cautious swell of victory.
He lowers his rifle, just for a moment, only to see his enemy regain his footing.
Flint lifts his own carbine, woven with cannulas, and fires back.
A shower of ecdytoxic bullets sails through the light, piercing the iron vine of the Autotomic Brigade.
The men fall, stems of ruby sprouting from their wounds.
The Exultant watches his sacrificial limbs break and warp, and then, when only he is left, helpless on a pile of wasted offerings, four bullets tear through his abdomen.
The victorious corporal approaches. He kneels over the Exultant and plucks his medals from his collar, reclaiming the victories that had been stolen from him, the accolades for his service and sacrifice, restitution for the terrible misfortune of surviving.
Then, still enveloped in the swirls of toxin, Dawn removes his helmet and spits on his former employer.
The phlegm is bloody, tinged in silver, and is taken, by the soldiers at his side, for a bullet.
Just before a messenger arrives bearing the news of Lieutenant Moulène’s treachery, Dawn reclines on the dais, lights a cigarette, and breathes a long sigh of relief.
In a few minutes, when the messenger leans down to his ear, he will go pallid, and his triumph will sour in his mouth.
He will listen, wordless, to the extent of Guylag’s betrayal: the damage to the Sreckt factory, the enraged, crippled teratopod spewing raw ecdytoxin along the machinery, the weaponry, all the precious implements of his art.
Then he will stand, toss his cigarette, and without explanation, order a small contingent of Tender Guard to follow him to the cathedral of the Parish of the Last Monday.
For now, he basks in blessed relief, in justice, in the beauty of the Exultant’s blossoming wounds, skin and muscle twisting into lovely little roses to reveal the smooth bone beneath. “Bell,” he says to the nearest Tender Guard. “When you toss this one, keep his skull for me.”