Vespers of the Last Monday #3
“You want Dawn to help you?” Bertram laughs.
“That man has already taken a bullet for you. Several, in fact. Some you shot yourself. Oh, no, don’t look betrayed.
” He kneels, twisting Guy’s scarred ear, forcing his face upward.
“Were it not for him, I would’ve already skinned you like a sewer fox.
He’s promised anything to keep you alive.
Things you wouldn’t believe, Guy. And he, unlike you, is a man of his word.
He has a fucking spine.” Bertram lowers his voice, leaning into Guy’s ear.
“You’re lucky that you’ve got a love like his in your life.
The poor man never saw Larbella. He doesn’t know only tragedy can come from falling for a whore. ”
The mist-light shifts, and Mallory materializes by the handrail, flanked by Tender Guard, intact but for a terrified, broken look. Guy’s heart drops. “Please…” he moans.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Bertram releases his ear.
“Don’t you dare beg, Guylag. Don’t you dare.
You’re getting off so easy. So fucking easy, considering what you did.
You destroyed the factory. Hundreds of thousands, millions in damage.
And my nephew. My poor boy. The most precious thing in my life.
You have no idea what that man was worth to me. ”
Guy tries to struggle upward, only to be pulled by pinioned arms back to his knees. “I’ll pay,” he moans. “Whatever you want.”
“No doubt about that,” Bertram snarls.
“The damage—whatever debts—all of it—”
“Yes, I know. I was—”
“I’ll pay—”
“God. Can someone gag him please? Thank you, Rickhardt. There, listen. Listen to me, Guylag. Listen to what you did to my nephew. Do you know what we had to do? We had to collect him. Those poor kids in there—had to pick up all the little bits of him that were still crawling around the lab. You really traumatized them.” His voice breaks.
“God. What a way to go. What a way to fucking go. It sickens me. I adored him. I practically raised him. I invested so much into him. And now—now I don’t even have a body to mourn.
” He takes a breath, straightens, solemn and purposeful.
“You can’t understand, Guylag. You just can’t understand what it’s like. ”
When Bertram turns toward Mallory, Guy begins to scream. Only a muffled, helpless sound spills through his gag as the man approaches the child, offering his hand.
“I’m sorry, kid,” Bertram says. “We have to take your brother away for a while.”
“No,” Mallory answers, eyes wet with tears. “You can’t. Dawn, don’t let them.”
“There, my dear,” Bertram sighs. A pleasant scent spills across the deck as he speaks. “It’s rough, I know. You love your brother very much. He loves you too. That’s why he doesn’t want you all tangled up in his business.”
Guy struggles, begging wordlessly through the dried blood in his nose. He can’t breathe, but he still howls into his gag.
“Dawn,” Mallory sobs, eyes darting from Bertram to Guy and back. “Don’t let them—don’t hurt him—”
Guy strains forward, but the grip over his arms only tightens. Dawn’s breath is cold at his ear. “Don’t, Guy.”
“Oh, darling,” Bertram says. “It’s hard to understand. Your brother’s done a terrible thing.” He takes Mallory’s hand in his own. “A really awful thing.”
Guy twists in Dawn’s unbreakable grip, slamming his elbow into his gut, his head into his shoulder, but it brings him no closer to his sibling.
Choking on his own sobs, blind and thrashing, he doesn’t see Bertram’s arm straighten, doesn’t see the way he rests a gentle but firm hand on the child’s back.
For a fraction of a second, Guy blinks away his tears, and then Mallory is gone.
There is no sound but the creak of the handrail, a breathy little gasp. No splash, no scream. Just an object disappearing into water as smoothly as through light.
Something snaps, but Guy can’t tell if it’s within him or without.
He kicks, writhes, and Dawn’s grip relents.
He stumbles toward the river, slamming his hips into the rail.
He scans the surface; no ripple, no foam, only the endless pink mirror of sky.
He tries to throw one leg over, to toss himself in after Mallory, but he is pulled back onto the boat.
His ear pounds, thick with sound and blood.
Vomit burns up his throat, into his gag, up through his nose.
“There. You see now.” Bertram’s voice is soft. His empty hand hovers over the guardrail, too steady. “I’m glad you see. Empathy is essential for a playwright.”
“On the way down, I had a lot of time to think,” Mallory says.
“The fall wasn’t far, but time, you know—time is as malleable as clay.
It protracted, as it does. I kept thinking, as I fell—thinking about the things Reames had told me.
Those tidbits of bioalchemy, over and over in my head; a thousand of them, a thousand times over.
About volatility, and impossibility, and the rules of Catoptric science—how each is only defined by the ways it can be broken.
And I realized, when I hit the water, that I would keep breathing. No matter what. So I breathed it in.”
Aster wraps her arms around him. “What was it like?”
“It hurt.” His skin smolders with rage. “It hurt so badly. And then it … stopped. I don’t remember when.
I don’t know how long I was down there, unraveling.
Dissolving. I don’t remember much of anything at all—aside from the lights.
Everywhere, endless. Always moving. No space between them, no time. No current, no bottom. Nothing.”
“‘So am I baptized in the blood of God,’” Aster hums. “‘A vessel brimful of Void.’”
“Not quite like that,” Mallory says. “Though Aufhocker does come pretty close in Gentleman. I don’t know how he did it.”
“They say he studied Vernhardtian alchemy when he was young,” Aster says.
“I doubt that. But even Vernhardt didn’t know the river. Not truly. No one knows the river. I don’t, and I was down there. Under the water, I couldn’t really … know anything. I couldn’t think. The only thing I was aware of was that somehow, I survived.”
“How?”
He shrugs. “Same reason you survived the Overture Skirmish, I guess. Same reason Corporal Flint survived Broken Horse. Some of us just have the resilience of vermin.”