by wildbow
“You’re not quite that old,” Cynthia said, patting his arm. “There were stitched when you were born.”
“Not so many. I’ve watched it all unfold. The rate of growth has been startling. I worry sometimes that you and the others don’t understand just what you’re facing. The cost, if we don’t get ahead of this.”
“We value your pessimism,” she said.
He smiled. “It’s saved us once or twice.”
“We all have reasons for doing this,” she said. “Greater ones and personal ones.”
“You have your personal reasons,” he said.
“I do?” she made it a question. Not because she wasn’t sure, but because she was wondering why he’d brought it up.
“Will that be a problem, if your search proves successful? Will you be able to understand someone with greater ones?”
“The woman that provoked the war? We’ll have to see,” Cynthia said.
“I worry,” he said. “If this was her first move, what is the next one?”
“And will we be caught up in it? I’ll look for her, Godwin.”
He smiled.
They’d reached his building, which was large but a touch ramshackle, in a less than stellar neighborhood. The important thing was that it was unassuming. Cynthia waited and watched, her pets standing there, heads slowly turning left and right, ears up and out, listening to every raindrop.
He opened the door, and stepped inside. Experiments stood on either side of the doorway. Cynthia’s, again. Sentries, knights clad in armor that grew like a bug’s exoskeleton.
He didn’t like it, but some things were necessary.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” he said.
Cynthia smiled and waved, leaving, her pets following behind.
To all appearances, a coquette. Louis was a soldier’s son, the man had moved on to active military service, lying about his age to get in sooner. Cynthia was different, almost the opposite. She had had no family, no guidance, and she had raised herself on ugly streets overseas, where gutters had literally run red with blood, and where experiments had been piled so carelessly on trash heaps beneath the Academies that they overflowed into the city, some still alive, others dangerous despite being dead.
All she had needed was a little refining.
He walked through the house, casually moving past the myriad traps that he and Cynthia had placed. He was here so rarely, the minor inconvenience hardly mattered. More sentries were stationed throughout the house, many shuffling faintly as they sensed the activity and exited their hibernation states.
He walked into the washroom and stared at himself in the mirror.
Cynthia knew him better than anyone else, she knew how he thought. The inverse was also true—he knew Cynthia better than anyone else. Yet he hadn’t spoken up and said the truth.
The war would get far worse before it got better. The Academy was retaking control, but the rebellions were still underway, and the Academy’s efforts weren’t quelling so much as they were holding things at bay.
Sooner or later, things would reach a tipping point. To retake control, the Academy would need to do something significant. Institutions of this scale had only so many ways they could achieve that kind of control.
Fear was one, and he didn’t want to think about what the Academy might do to generate such a widespread fear.
The only way forward would be to beat them to the punch.
To do something horrific.
For that, he needed the woman who had started the war. He needed those talents, and he needed to be absolutely sure that she wasn’t already doing the exact same thing. Because if his group and her group both acted at the same time…
He couldn’t let that happen.
He bent down to wash his face, scrubbing, feeling old for the first time in a long time.
When he stood straight, he had company.
The man’s skin had been flayed away and reattached, overlapping strips, like the weave of a basket, head to toe, leaving every feature masked, but for a space for a toothless, tongueless mouth and two milky white eyes. The flesh around the edges of each strip of skin was scarred and flaky.
A mummy, wrapped in his own flesh, almost a straightjacket, but not quite. Two oversized hands were already reaching out.
Hangman.
They found me.
Godwin reached for his razor. He was jerked back before he had it, his finger running along the length of the handle.
Long fingers of two hands wrapped around his neck, one after the other. As the fingers fell neatly into place, interlacing, his neck was elongated, vertebrae popping. His fingers scrabbled for purchase on the sink, his legs kicked, but it was to no avail.
Another pop, a flash of pain filling his lower body, and then it all fell to pieces. The nervous impulses ran away from him, signaling motions he wasn’t making, pain and sensations he shouldn’t be feeling, all with a pressure that suggested his entire body had been crushed beneath a one-ton stone.
In the mirror, his arms and legs dropped, limp. He huffed out a breath and didn’t take another one.
The Hangman had dislocated his neck. He was lowered almost dismissively to the ground, as if forgotten, as the Hangman dropped one hand to its side and then let go, letting him fall to the floor, his head cracking against the tile.
He had a view, albeit one that had darkness swiftly flowing in from the edges, of the Hangman leaving much the way it had come in. It touched the door and hauled itself up to the top of the doorframe, as if it weighed no more than an equivalent amount of loose paper. It reached the ceiling, fingers bracing it against the walls on either side of the hallway, and then it was gone, whispering against the ceiling, past the sentries and defenses.
Godwin’s last thoughts were of Cynthia, his last sentiment a quiet horror at the idea that Cynthia might well think along the same lines he had… without the consideration to what disasters Genevieve Fray might have planned.
☙
The hall had an upper stage that overlooked the lower floor, and Cynthia stood astride it, arms on the railing, watching. Her pets flanked her.
From the bottom to the top, she thought. She was with the upper class. The true upper class, she might say. These weren’t nobles, but businessmen, clergy, and pillars of the community. They were people with money who had earned that money, by and large. Those who had been born to money were already beholden to the Academy, hooks long set in.
Men and women in fine dress.
Potential allies.
If they were going to retake Westmore, these were allies they would need. It meant the difference between the Academy having a gun for every soldier or having to do without.
One of her pets reacted, bat-ears twitching as it made a small sound. She wheeled around.
Nervous, since Godwin’s death.
Four individuals. Three men and a woman, standing in the shadows.
She almost regretted hiring them. The mercenaries. They’d turned out to be on her side, but they were… unpleasant, both in methodology and in personality.
“I thought I was alone up here,” she said.
The one in the lead shook his head. He had bug eyes and a custom gun slung over one shoulder.
Choleric, she reminded herself.
“What is it?”
“General Ames just arrived,” Melancholy said. Long hair covered her eyes, and she had a too-wide mouth. Of the four, Melancholy was the only one that Cynthia wasn’t sure about. The woman’s favored murder weapon wasn’t on display. No knife, no gun, no vials.
Cynthia turned to look.
Ames was a big man, in many senses. Proud, boisterous, fat, ruddy-cheeked, with blond hair. He was perspiring. More than normal. He was with his wife and child.
“What about him?”
“The girl,” Melancholy said.
It took a moment before Cynthia could see through the crowd. A young lady, beautiful, wearing an evening dress in miniature. A little blonde that prom
ised to be a great beauty at some point in the future.
When Melancholy spoke again, it was in Cynthia’s ear. Cynthia hadn’t heard the woman approach. “She doesn’t smell like she’s his.”
Cynthia looked, frowning. The girl looked like any young lady should, bouncing with excitement at the fancy dress party. She was saying something, and her father was having trouble keeping up.
“What is she?”
“Not human,” Melancholy said. “She smells like blood.”
Cynthia nodded slowly.
“She smells like other children,” Melancholy said.
Cynthia’s eyes scanned the crowd. She didn’t see any others.
“You know what to do,” she said.
“Mm,” Melancholy said.
Cynthia smiled. She knew as she turned around that the four wouldn’t be there. In four paces, she crossed the room to pick up her gun, slipping it through a hidden pocket of her dress.
She wasn’t excited, she wasn’t proud or arrogant. She knew exactly what she was up against.
She’d come here to fight.
This, surrounded with people she couldn’t trust, was her medium.
Every time she’d faced this kind of situation in the past, everyone else had ended up bleeding or dead.
Previous Next
Esprit de Corpse—5.1
I slowed in my run as I saw a man forced to kneel by a pole. His arms were already bound behind his back, his raincoat was open at the front, and there were smears of blood on his shirt. He fought, struggled, and was overpowered by the four men in similar outfits. Not quite uniforms, exactly, but they were close.
They lashed him to the pole, cords encircling the space where a crude knotted gag covered his his mouth. The cords were cinched tight enough that skin split, blood seeping out past the gag to touch his chin.
Hands behind his back, ankles and head bound to the pole, he was unable to do more than wriggle as a haggard Chinese man approached. One syringe penetrated one side of the throat, another penetrated the other.
Blood drained out, other fluids flowed in. The new fluids would reduce the shock to the system when the man died. The blood would be used for other things, if they didn’t return it to him to make him a stitched.
The pole was one among many, all in a row by the outside wall. The ground had once been hard packed earth, but water collecting around and beneath the people who had been bound to the poles had made the base of each pole a mud pit. The mud probably consisted of more things than dirt and water.
A minute into being drained to death, the man started convulsing. The violent jerks made the cords bite deeper into the corners of his mouth.
A man in a uniform similar to the dying man approached, head bent low so his hood could help protect his pipe. He took shelter under the same awning I was occupying, experimentally puffing before letting himself be at ease. His hood was down, his hair and glorious mustache both wet, small eyes nearly hidden beneath heavy eyebrows.
A rifle with a bayonet hung behind his back. I’d heard people refer to the particular brand of rifles as ‘exorcists’. They were single-shot, heavy, ugly weapons, but they made big holes, they were easy to reload, they were reliable, and they were well made. The name ‘exorcist’ had probably come up because they were supposed to put spirits to rest. Or was it because they were supposed to help the little guys stop the real devils of the battlefields?
I watched the convulsions slow. The man seemed at least dimly aware as he raised his eyes to stare through me.
The head sagged. The Chinese man noticed, craning his head to look, but kept doing what he was doing, fiddling over at a table. He gave an order to an assistant, who cleared things off the table.
If he wasn’t dead, the man at the pole would be dead soon. Within the hour, he would be up and walking again.
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” the man with the pipe asked me. He gestured the bag that hung at my side.
“Waiting for the rain to let up,” I said, adding a belated, “Sir.”
“It won’t. Git.”
I didn’t ‘git’. I watched the dying man rouse, then sag a bit. “What did he do?”
“He didn’t listen to a superior officer,” the man with the pipe said.
“You’re not my superior officer,” I said. “I don’t have any.”
“You’re on a military base, I’m militia. You do what I say,” he told me.
“Oh,” I said, feigning ignorance. Being smaller and appearing younger than I was proved to be a small asset here. I could play dumb. “What did he do, really?”
“Traitor,” the man with the pipe said, puffing. “Tried to help the Crown. Stupid bastard.”
“Why would he do that?” I asked. “The Crown is bad.”
The man puffed on his pipe. “Greed, maybe, or he thought he’d be on the winning side, whatever happened.”
“But our side is going to win, isn’t it?” I asked.
Another puff. “Not about winning.”
“Isn’t it? I don’t really understand about what they did to the water, but shouldn’t we stop them?”
“Can’t stop something as big as that. People wouldn’t have it. We do this right, let them know there are consequences, make them change how they do things.”
The rain continued to pour down. The Chinese man approached the man at the pole, taking a knife to the ropes that bound him. A soldier joined him in hauling the body to the table, each of them holding one of the bags that had been plugged into the man’s throat, one nearly empty, the other half-filled with blood.
It was a better answer to his statement than I could have come up with on my own.
“Don’t you have a place to be?” the man with the pipe sounded annoyed as he addressed me, and his tone suggested he might give me a smack if I didn’t take the hint.
I moved on, pulling my hood down to avoid the worst of the rain.
The soldiers didn’t match, but all of them had exorcists, and the clothing was of the same general style, even if little details differed. I passed one man who wore no coat or jacket, with only an undershirt on. His chest, shoulders, and face were mottled, covered in pustules, and his lower face had a glass mask fit to it, with a tube running off one side, over his shoulder and down to his belt, where he had a small tank in place. His eyes were closed, his face turned upward.
I was seeing a lot like him, with increasing frequency, and I hadn’t gotten any good answers as to what they were or where they came from. People simultaneously avoided them and kept mum when it came to the subject. There were benefits to being young, but there were drawbacks too.
My route took me down a side path. The town was a small one, more quaint than anything, but blockades had been erected, there were as many open flames as people could sustain, lighting the surroundings, and every open space that wasn’t already occupied by buildings was now home to tents, piles of crates, or collections of people. The number of people in this lazy little town had dectupled, easily. It wasn’t weathering the extra presence well. Plants were dying, there was trash in the water that flowed along the gutters, and the aroma of the town was of faint human offal and less faint blood, sweat. It was all laced with the smell of the cheap, mass-produced foodstuff that probably wasn’t fit for proper humans. Starchy, nutrient-packed beans or some such.
I found a house with a makeshift fence erected around the front portion, the gate locked. Looking past the fence and into the window suggested a whole gaggle of kids. They ran around and played. Only a few had ventured outside, their raincoats and rainboots on.
I approached a girl who stood at the corner of the fence, a flower in her hand. She was picking it to pieces.
She didn’t look up as I came to stand beside her, my shoulder touching hers through the fence. A few petals disappeared, drifting down into the water. It looked like the same kind of flower that was growing off of the tree above. A parasitic species, if I remembered right.
“Worst job yet,” Lillia
n said.
“Really?” I asked. “Worse than the whole interviewing thing before Sub Rosa?”
“Worse.”
“Worse than when we had to deal with the creeping mimis?”
“The creeping mimis were interesting,” Lillian told me.
“They were a pain in the ass, crawling on the walls and ceiling, and the parents were screaming, and then one got the family dog, and… ugh.”
“I liked their design, if nothing else,” Lillian said. “And it was my third job with you guys? It has some sentimental value.”
“Sure,” I told her. “I guess I get that.”
She huffed out a sigh, and shot me a death-glare that wasn’t intended for me. It was just Lillian being an unhappy Lillian. “Rescue me.”
“They want you in there.”
“Please. I got into an advanced stream and I still know more than the teachers, Sy.”
“That’s perfect,” I said, upbeat, just to annoy her.
“Sy,” she said. She reached through the bars of the railing to grip me by the front of my coat. “Please.”
She used her grip on my coat to shake me. I let my head loll back and forth for a moment.
She abruptly hauled me in her direction, and my forehead banged the bars of the railing.
“Ow.”
“I’m not joking, Sy. Please.”
“I don’t know what you want me to do.”
“Start something. Set the town on fire. Spread a plague. Murder somebody important.”
“Shhh,” I said. “Keep your voice down.”
“The teacher had to look in the books to remember how the second ratio worked, Sy,” she said, almost moaning. “Please, please. Rescue me, and I’ll do whatever your twisted little mind can conceive of. I will be in your debt, and you can lord it over me for as long as you know me.”
“You’re getting better at negotiating. That’s tempting. But no. The job comes first.”
Her forehead banged the bars just above mine.
She remained like that, her eyes scanning the surroundings, then surreptitiously reached into her jacket and withdrew an envelope.
I checked behind her. “The kids in the window are watching. They can’t see the paper, but they’re watching”