Twig

by wildbow

  My head bowed. There were shouts of protest, but Gordon and Mary were the fighters, and they weren’t. They were dealing with military men of some experience.

  “I gave you your chance,” the Brigadier said. “I hope you understand.”

  I leaned forward, not caring about the knife, I screwed up my face, and I spit.

  “I have to do what makes the most sense,” the Brigadier said.

  “Hmf,” Melancholy made a sound. “Thank you for being cooperative.”

  “Sy!” Jamie called out. “You—”

  He stopped as Melancholy shoved me. I sprawled, landing on the floor. The Lambs were in front of me.

  I flipped over, because I didn’t want to see them as Melancholy killed me.

  She stood there, arms stretched out to either side.

  I blinked.

  I blinked again, trying to clear my vision.

  Melancholy had a passenger. Clinging to her back, was a blonde girl. Helen.

  I turned, looking at the crowd of people.

  Sure enough, there were three figures who were the right size to be Lambs, and there was one who was definitely Shipman, all with soldiers behind them.

  But… yes. One was the Brigadier’s stitched servant. The firetender.

  They’d noticed the stitched doing a headcount.

  The perils of an expendable soldier.

  Melancholy stood as if crucified, or as a bird in flight might appear, her arms gripped, twisted, and pulled back. Helen perched on her, feet finding purchase in the small of the assassin’s back.

  The assassin shifted her footing. Slowly, but with surety, she contorted, body twisting, head turning as well, to a greater extent. She drew her mouth open, and even my ruined eyes could see the whites of her teeth. Opening wide, as she drew ever nearer to Helen’s face, a bear trap ready to take the front of Helen’s head off. Helen pulled away, contorting in her own fashion, but she couldn’t do more without releasing the assassin.

  The others couldn’t shoot without the risk that a bullet might pass through Melancholy and catch Helen.

  I stood. Going by memory more than sight, the mental image I’d cobbled together as Melancholy and I walked, I went for the woman’s left leg.

  Mary’s wound. I found it.

  I dug the fingers of both hands into the gap, then wrenched it open.

  Melancholy snarled.

  Arms still outstretched, she bent forward, snapping for me. A viper’s movement, compared to the glacially slow contortion as she’d gone for Helen.

  Helen moved, shifting grip, adjusting her own weight, throwing herself to one side.

  I heard the snap, the pop, the cartilage and bone grinding.

  Melancholy’s face, blurred, stretched into something hideous in the moment before she crashed to the ground. She writhed for a moment, solely with her upper body, before she gave up the last gasp.

  Vertebrae separated, if I had to guess.

  Helen remained there, holding Melancholy’s arms.

  “Hello, Sy!” she said, brightly.

  I opened my mouth to respond, then closed it.

  There was a commotion as the others came. Lillian was quick to hurry to my side.

  Everyone, be they the Brigadier or my fellow Lambs, was quick to throw a dozen questions each at me.

  I touched my throat, looking at who I hoped was Lillian.

  “On it,” she said. “Need my bag.”

  Too much to communicate, too little time.

  Gordon and Mary hurt and bleeding out, with enemy forces between us and them. The location surrounded, the city overtaken by armies and fire, and Melancholy’s orders had been the only thing keeping the enemy from assaulting the Lodge. Now she was dead.

  The moment they realized that, we were done for.

  Previous Next

  Esprit de Corpse—5.15

  “Turn your face up,” Lillian told me.

  I did.

  She rinsed out my eyes with something. Liquid streamed down past my temples and ears and the back of my neck.

  “Blink, lots.”

  I did.

  “It’s not helping.”

  “Keep blinking,” she said.

  I did. Gradually, the world became clearer.

  I gave her a thumbs up.

  “Let me know when blinking stops working,” she said.

  “We need to focus on Gordon and Mary,” I said.

  “We need to win this,” one of the men who’d been with the Brigadier spoke, “We’re being overrun.”

  “I’m pretty sure the plague men are immune to poisons, parasites, and diseases,” I said, still blinking. “They have the firepower to gun down your monsters, and they’re zealous. Stitched are falling faster than they should, and your specialists, rank-and-file and officers are getting intimidated.”

  “This isn’t news.”

  “Making sure everyone knows what’s what. I don’t know what you’ve been doing, cooped up in here.”

  “Waging a war.”

  “And being overrun,” I echoed him.

  It was the Brigadier who stepped in to speak. “I have to ask. Was it you who set the fires?”

  “No,” I lied. “They happened. We used them once they began. Spread them further. We felt it was important to divert them, make sure they didn’t have safe ground to fall back to.”

  “I see.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “It was a judgment call on our part, seeing how and where they were moving. I understand if you don’t want to work with me any further.”

  I could make out the individual slats of the boards in the arching ceiling, now.

  “I don’t think we have any other choice,” the Brigadier said, and there was a curious tone to his voice, as if he’d caught me in the lie, and he was hinting he had, while trying to keep his men from grasping that fact.

  I gestured at Lillian, and she rinsed my eyes again.

  This time, as I blinked, I lowered my head, looking around.

  Helen was sitting on the edge of the table with the maps, close to the fireplace, her feet in Jamie’s lap. Shipman was sitting at the far end of the table. The men were all standing.

  I wiped at my eyes and temples with my hands, then ran my fingers through my wet hair to get the worst of the cleansing agent out.

  I looked down at Melancholy.

  “You opened your wound again,” Lillian noted.

  I looked down at my side. The cold rain had washed away a surprising amount of the blood. There were traces, though, a blob of pinker fabric.

  I pulled my raincoat closed. “We’re surrounded, on the defensive, we have two key people who need immediate attention, and if they find out Melancholy here is dead, then her orders to keep certain individuals alive stop holding water.”

  My attention turned momentarily to the Brigadier as I hopped down from the edge of his desk and walked over to Melancholy’s body. One of the commanding officers was standing over it, another was at the window, peering out.

  “You’ve summed it up,” the Brigadier said. “We need solutions.”

  He was being more curt than before. Had we disappointed? Or was something else bothering him?

  “Thinking,” I said. “Believe me, I know we need solutions. Two people I care about dearly are out there, and I don’t know if they’re alive or dead. The sooner we can get to them, the better.”

  I rifled through Melancholy’s pockets, patting her down. Everything I pulled out found its way to the floor. Three rings that might have been wedding bands, except they were the wrong metal, threads, buttons, two torn patches with what looked to be cloth badges on them, two photographs, of all things, badly exposed, showing very normal people. There were also things I expected: a pen, a flask of alcohol, two knives, a tube of something that smelled foul, and three pieces of paper. The firebombs she’d taken from Gordon were on her belt.

  The mementos caught me off guard. This was a person with keepsakes and history. People she kept photos of, both men.

/>   I took the belt of firebombs, unbuckling it, and collected the pieces of paper, along with Melancholy’s pen.

  After a moment’s hesitation, I grabbed one of the three rings. Steel, dark, but it had been polished bright where it had been rubbed. It was a hair too large on my finger, so I moved it to my thumb.

  “—the fireplace?” Helen was asking. I’d been slightly out of earshot.

  “Hm?” I asked.

  “Up the fireplace. Escape route.”

  “Possibly. There are no guarantees you won’t be shot when you pop out the top, or that you have any place to go if you aren’t shot,” the Brigadier said. He gauged the size of the chimney. “You children could squeeze through, but your escape route doesn’t help any of the rest of us.”

  Helen’s face was devoid of compassion as she took in that sentence and continued to stare at him. He looked away first.

  I slapped the papers down in front of Jamie. Helen craned her head around to look at it.

  “What’re these?” Jamie asked.

  “Letters in Melancholy’s possession. Her handwriting.”

  He groaned a little, head bowing.

  “Can you?”

  “I can try,” he said.

  “Explain,” the Brigadier said. His men were looking more antsy, now.

  “Forgery,” I said. “We have some of Melancholy’s handwriting. Someone in their leadership.”

  “There’s a lot wrong with that idea,” the Brigadier said.

  Still so negative. Still curt. He was upset. It felt disconnected from the idea that he was losing this battle. If it had been connected, he would’ve been more vocal during some parts of the conversation thus far, and less vocal during other parts.

  “What am I writing?” Jamie asked.

  “Brigadier Tylor, sir,” I said, choosing the full title to try and curry favor with the man. “You get to be Melancholy. She’s not the direct leader, but she’s next best thing, and she’s in the field, here. Her orders supercede most others.”

  “I can’t order a retreat. They wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Probably not,” I said.

  “Unless—” Lillian started.

  Heads turned, and she fell silent.

  “Go on,” I urged her.

  “Superweapon.”

  I nodded slowly.

  “Westmore doesn’t have a superweapon,” one of the officers said. “They have to know it doesn’t. They controlled the city for a long period of time. They interrogated captives, kept prisoners. I imagine they tortured and drugged those prisoners.”

  I nodded slowly. “Ordering a retreat and claiming we have a mysterious superweapon is pushing it. Jamie. First order. Written to the vanguard, the front line. Furthest up.”

  “That would be the northwestern point,” the Brigadier commented. One of the commanders nodded.

  “Georgie Madsen,” Jamie said. “Probably.”

  “Go for it,” I said.

  “How do you know that?” Shipman asked. “That it’s him?”

  “I read a lot of the correspondence and paperwork that passed over the enemy’s desk, while I was babysitting Ames,” Jamie said. He was already writing. “Madsen is the best fit. Young officer, eager, aggressive. Had a wife, they were expecting, his wife lost the baby. He blames the drug for the loss, and now the sterility throws a wry stitch into things, because they can’t try again. He’s angry.”

  “That’s not how it works,” Lillian said. “The drug.”

  “Doesn’t matter, because it matters to him, and it gives him a reason to push to be at the front,” I said. “Officer Madsen gets a letter from Melancholy. There’s a superweapon in the mines, with caches of weapons. Leave a skeleton crew to man the front, other units are coming to reinforce his position shortly, get to the mine shaft by that one gate—”

  “Southeastern gate,” Jamie said.

  “Have him send some people down. Even if the superweapon is a hoax, the cache is almost a certainty. Paranoia on the Crown’s part, after the near-shortage before.”

  “Tying them up,” the Brigadier said.

  I nodded with vigor.

  I was anxious. I wanted to be gone, and this maneuver wouldn’t be fast.

  “Second letter,” I said.

  “West gate. They have to be there,” the Brigadier said. “They want an escape route with the fires burning behind them, they don’t want to pass us and then get attacked from behind. It’s the only logical point.”

  “Combat fires in the southwestern position,” I said. “Madsen’s group is secure at the northwest and is being reinforced as we speak.”

  The brigadier nodded. Jamie nodded too.

  “Third note.”

  “I can only write so much at once,” Jamie said.

  “To the command here. To be passed on to their superior officers. Melancholy has finished with her task here. She has Tylor. Send two coaches, have two men collect the injured children at… damn it. We were close to here. Within earshot to hear people shouting about the firefight here. Plague men came directly at us from…”

  “Which direction, Sy?” Jamie asked, voice soft.

  “Between the last fires we set and, it had to be a bend in the road, the way foot traffic was.”

  “Hereabouts?” Jamie asked, pointing at the map.

  I looked, trying to gauge.

  “Thereabouts,” I said. “He and the children are to be brought back here and put in the coaches. Prisoners of war, and children of important figures.”

  “That’s almost a bigger stretch than ‘the rebellion forces should collectively retreat,” Jamie said. “Almost.”

  “Our safety was guaranteed in exchange for information about the weapons in the mine,” I said.

  Jamie nodded.

  “They may not buy it,” the Brigadier said. “These missives coming from here? Having us escorted into the coaches with the assassin remaining behind, unseen?”

  “I have an idea,” I said, while still pontificating on what that idea entailed.

  Jamie wrote with Melancholy’s pen. He passed the first paper to me, immediately starting on the second.

  The handwriting matched perfectly. There were individual letters that weren’t in any of her notes, but there were the florid, angular capital letters, even the way the crisp handwriting got messier for words further down the page, as if she’d lost patience with the neat handwriting style and started scribbling out the words instead. A habit in both of the papers I’d given Jamie.

  “Keep in mind,” I said. “If her handwriting gets gradually sloppier, that’s going to carry over across the three messages. If they check it, we don’t want that little oddity to raise alarm bells. Prey instinct.”

  Without looking up, Jamie crumpled up the paper he was writing on and started on a second. “This is not a strength of mine, Sy. I haven’t practiced it.”

  “Do your best,” I said. “Helen.”

  Helen beamed a smile at me.

  “You’re Melancholy, for our little task here.”

  “Wow,” she said, smiling wider. “How does that work?”

  “Well, for one thing, we can be glad her hair covers so much of her face,” I said.

  She nodded. “I’ll need a knife.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” the Brigadier said.

  “You will,” I told him. “Knife?”

  He hesitated.

  Still that aura of negativity. Doubt.

  “Please, sir. We’re short on time. Even if for your own preservation, we can’t have Melancholy’s meeting with you extend too long.”

  The man lifted a foot, and pulled a combat knife from the side of his boot. He extended it handle-first.

  I took it.

  “Lillian,” I said.

  Lillian trotted to catch up with Helen and I.

  “You want to cut off her hair?” Lillian asked.

  “In a manner of speaking,” I said. “I figure it’s easier to maintain her hairstyle if we just take it
all in one go.”

  Lillian blanched a little.

  I smiled at her. “What? You’ve poisoned people. You’ve seen people die. This is cake.”

  Helen made an amused little sound. I handed her the knife, and she bent down.

  She proceeded to scalp our assassin, knife following the hairline.

  In the doing, she revealed Melancholy’s eyes. A little milky in color, with sockets that looked too splayed out, the ridges of cheekbone and brow too accented. She might have looked skeletal, but it was more that her skeleton was an odd shape. Her jawline, too, was strange. Akin to a snake’s.

  Something about it, the large eyes, the disproportionate features, the odd shape of her head, minus half of her scalp, it made me think of a newborn baby. Blind, orally focused, agape, face twisted in emotion she wouldn’t be able to express again.

  Hadn’t she said something about how we were all brought into the world?

  She’d been more focused on the relationships than on the fact that we came into the world bloody and powerless, though.

  I rotated the ring around my thumb with one finger as I looked down at her.

  “Bloody,” Helen observed. “Wouldn’t do if I had blood running down my face.”

  “Rinse it,” I told her. “Lillian, use some powder or something, get the bleeding to stop. Then makeup. This is your chance to shine.”

  “What makes you think I have makeup?”

  “You’ve been wearing some. You were wearing it at the school the last time I saw you there. I know you have something to cover up bruises and cuts. Unless you were a twit and used it all up.”

  Lillian sighed, exasperated. “You’re a real charmer, Sy.”

  “I know you’re not a twit, Lil,” I said. “I just really want to help Gordon and Mary.”

  She nodded. “Me too.”

  We were pulling it all together. There was just one thing we needed.

  I looked at the fireplace tender, and I felt a moment of doubt.

  No.

  “Shipman,” I said.

  She looked a little wary as she turned her full attention to me.

  “Why do I have a bad feeling about this?”

  “You’re learning,” Jamie murmured, still writing. He’d scrapped two drafts since Helen started scalping.

  “We need legs for our new Melancholy.”

  ☙

  It was a bad joke in stage plays, one child atop another’s shoulders, trying to be an adult. But Melancholy had a heavy black raincoat, and Helen was an actress. She already wore Melancholy’s scalp.