by wildbow
Still, I felt like Jamie could at least rest and we could handle the surgery without having to watch our backs as much, if the trail was mostly dead.
I had to put the bucket down before dipping the sodden, dirty mop into it. I moved quickly, mop in one hand, bucket under one arm, and trailed the mop along steps, along drier areas, and into the water.
I had to create the most logical path for a discerning nose and eye to follow. I didn’t know how Tentacles and Arachne tracked people, but I had to cover all bases.
I found a porch with an overhanging roof that was leaking slightly. Droplets fell at a rate of one or two every second. I tipped the bucket, holding the shirt and jacket within, and let the mix of water and blood join that little puddle, expanding it. It was noticeably darker and thicker than the other puddles and bits of water. Not something an ordinary person might catch, but something a tracker would.
Perhaps too obvious. I used the side of my shoe to scrape against the puddle, scattering it slightly.
Blood wasn’t the whole of it. I leaned heavily on one side of my shoe to create a partial shoeprint in a mud puddle, as if I were running.
Then a change of direction. Not into another street or a house. No. I needed to disappear.
I turned the other way, toward the canal, and the massive, twisting network of wood that was lurching up and out of it, as wide as a city street and tall enough to be daunting. Especially, I knew, when there were no handholds up near the top that wouldn’t disintegrate if weight was put on them.
The rain hit the wall and ran down it and into the canal instead of falling in any great quantity here. Pulling shirt and jacket from the bucket, I wrung them out, creating a larger deposit of blood at the foot of the wall, as if we’d spent longer here. The mop let me distort it, as if a person or something had rested there.
I had the mop for a reason. Holding the length of it, I painted further up the wall, shoving the mop into indents to try and squeeze out more bloody water.
The idea was to paint a picture. That we’d somehow made it through or over the wall with our injured friend.
The old picture had been erased. The new one had been illustrated.
Good enough to assist with tracking. I put the bucket over the end of the mop, and moved along the wall until I found a place where the wall was still growing strong. I stuck the bucket with the rags within and the end of the mop inside the wall, and watched as it grew visibly by the second. As lengths of wood wound up and around the already established lengths, growing thicker as it worked its way up, the bucket and mop were caught within, then slowly crushed.
I had to break off the handle of the mop and toss it into another gap to let the wall finish consuming my evidence.
Good.
I stopped there, looking to see if there was anyone nearby. I only saw stark houses with quarantine sheets and other barriers over the windows, rain, and the cobblestone street that was more for pedestrians than for the rare cart.
I was alone, here. No enemies, no friends.
I closed my eyes, and I took a moment to force my hands to stop shaking again.
Jamie being sick was getting to me just as much as it was getting to him. I needed to center myself, or I wouldn’t be useful at all. I wanted to support him, and I knew that leaving him in a moment like this wasn’t the best way to do that. But staying and selfishly breaking down into tears or falling to pieces would be even further from the best approach.
Eyes still closed, I drew out some mental pictures. Faces, bodies, voices, personalities.
When I’d opened my eyes, I’d visualized Helen and Evette.
Helen enveloped me in a hug, no questions asked, no tomfoolery. I couldn’t quite piece together the physical sensations and fool my body into experiencing that. I could summon up the familiarity and the warmth, with the warmer emotional response that seeing her evoked, the little smells and the less-warm play of my natural healthy fear of Helen against the fears I was wrestling with.
I closed my eyes, focusing on the sensations and feelings, and centered myself. I told myself that I did it for Jamie, to assuage my guilt over having left him behind, sick, scared, and off-balance.
I’m terrible at being alone, I thought. Like Jamie said, I need a Lamb at arm’s length.
Even false Lambs would have to do, if and when I was pushed.
“What’s the first step?” Evette asked. “Assess the problem.”
To survey the area, I would have to find a better vantage point. The wall was a dangerous climb, I knew. The exterior and the upper branches would be brittle, the interior denser, closer to real wood.
What had Jamie said?
“If the growth slows, but you can hear it creaking,” Evette said. “That’s when we need to get over, under, or through.”
With two hurt people who aren’t moving as fast as they should, I thought.
Sanguine was still watching, too.
Climbing the wall wouldn’t work. I had to find a way onto a roof.
My jacket did little to ward off the cold as I made my way between houses, looking for a fence or a shack that might serve as a stepping stone.
My first minute of moving between houses didn’t turn up either, but I did find a coil of rope hanging up on the side of what might have been a stable for a horse or a monstrous, Academy-worked pet. I gathered up the rope and pulled the coil over my head.
Another two minutes of searching turned up a small, square table that had been set out on a back patio. Wood and glass, with gnarled legs. I tilted it on its side, and found that the underside had struts and braces to keep everything rock steady.
It served as a poor ladder to get up to a high window. The window shutter, in turn, was a handhold for me to climb up to the gutter.
Helen and Evette were waiting for me up top. I almost told them to get down so they wouldn’t be seen. In the next instant, I chided myself for my silliness.
I climbed a bit further up, until I was on the rooftop of a four-story house. I moved close to the chimney, hunkering down there as my eyes roved over the city, trying to make out details in the downpour.
Motion was easier to see than stillness. I could see five different clusters of people who were out and about in the rain. Three of the five were awfully close to the group of the sick and the wagons we’d seen at the north end of this particular neighborhood. The two that remained were moving in our general direction and were small enough to be a pair of people; Tentacles and Arachne. One moved far slower than the other. I would suspect that it was them, but I wouldn’t make it a concrete assumption.
There were others. One form that I thought was a wagon moved very suddenly, up and onto a rooftop. It moved down the other side, out of view.
“Hey!” Helen said, far too chipper. “It’s Dog and Catcher!”
“And their friends,” I said, gauging the blurry blob that would be Catcher and the recruited bounty hunters he was working with.
Dog reappeared, moving over a rooftop, then down to immediate proximity with Catcher.
He zig-zagged, but if I had to gauge by the general direction they were traveling, they had our scent.
I knew they’d catch up to us eventually, but I’d hoped it would be thirty minutes from now, not five or ten, and that they would be led further astray by the false scent trail. If they happened to make the effort to cross over or pass through the wall and head into the wrong area, it was very possible that they would have trouble crossing back. It was a ruse that could buy us enough time to maybe even find a way out of Tynewear.
But if they were this close, then it left very little time to work with.
I couldn’t help but assign something close to intelligence to the red plague. The way it had chosen to hobble Jamie, it crippled us in the worst way possible, at the worst time. Jamie was sick, he was hurt—
I closed my eyes.
Focus.
“Traps,” Evette said.
I nodded.
“Dog and Catcher li
ke being up high too,” Helen said. “They go up to rooftops, when the streets are narrow. Dog likes to lie down on rooftops and let the sun shine on him, or, more usually, let the rain run down off him. It’s where they’re comfortable. They’ll look for vantage points just like you’re doing. That’s where we want to be.”
“Where we want the traps to be,” Evette corrected.
“I am the trap,” Helen said.
“No,” Evette said, sounding both patient and condescending, “You’re a figment of Sylvester’s overactive and powerful imagination.”
“Stop bickering,” I told them.
They faded into the background as I focused on the task at hand. I imagined Dog and Catcher moving through the street, following the scent trail, which would be obscured by the rain, and finding the dead end, with Jamie and I seeming to have moved through the wall, with the wall growing closed behind us.
They would want to double check that we weren’t climbing over, and they would look for clues as to how we did it.
Dog would survey the area while the rest discussed. He would, like I had, seek a high vantage point, close to the site and the ongoing discussion.
I clarified my focus, and spotted the most likely rooftop they would use for searching the area, then the most likely area of that rooftop.
I’d collected the rope so I could either use it to help climb or to quickly scale a surface. Now I gave thought to snares and deadfalls. Nothing that would kill, only inconvenience.
I headed over to the rooftop where the first snare would be set. I wondered how steady that chimney over there was. Which would break first? It, the rope, or Dog’s balance?
Helen’s smiling face and Evette’s cackle kept me company in the darkness and the cold.
☙
I returned from the outdoors, water streaming off of my body and coat. I was careful to close the door quietly.
“Dog, Catcher, their group, and the pair, all closing in,” I said.
“Should we postpone my surgery?” Jamie asked.
I seriously considered it for a moment. Then I shook my head.
It grew so damn fast. If I ran into a problem like I’d run into with Horace, then I’d never be able to cut back the concurrent growths of two different limbs without amputating them both.
On that note, Horace was looking far more lively than he had, which was a telling sign of how many minutes I’d spent out there, getting things set up. Both Catcher’s group and Sanguine’s pair had been close by the time I’d snuck back to Jamie.
“Fluids helping?” I asked Horace.
“Some,” Jamie supplied the answer. “I think having the wound closed is a big step forward.”
“Yes,” Horace said. He swallowed. “Mentally, if nothing else.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Any spots?”
“Three,” Jamie said. “They appeared on him while I was stitching him up. I got them early, and stitched the gaps.”
I nodded, but the news evoked a stir of unpleasant emotions, ranging from despair to alarm.
Was it not possible to cut back the growths? Would more spots erupt? Was this an endless process? Forever cutting away something that wouldn’t ever die?
“I felt brave after that,” Jamie said. “I sterilized the scalpel and tried to work on my leg. I got three, and I didn’t have the nerve to keep going.”
“Three out of…” I looked at his legs.
“Forty-three spots, ranging from one inch long to three inches long,” Jamie said. “Some on my feet that I only found when I took my shoes and socks off. I don’t think you need to cut that deep, but… not easy to cut into yourself like this.”
“But yeah. I hear you.”
He nodded.
“I think I’ve bought us time,” I said. “Hoping my knotwork is still up to snuff.”
“Speaking of,” Jamie said. “You may have to restrain me while you cut.”
I thought about it, then agreed, “Alright.”
“The feeling when you prod the centers of these spots is the most unbelievably painful thing I’ve ever felt, Sy. If you do it by accident, I might hit you.”
“Right, no, I’m okay with that,” I said. “I’m just sort of disappointed. I always thought Lil would be the first Lamb I tied up, and I figured it would be for completely different reasons.”
Jamie’s expression as he stared at me was somewhere between amazement and the stark horror he’d displayed as he realized he was infected, earlier.
“Too much detail?” I asked.
“I’m just aghast that you even know that people do that, given your naivety in so many other areas, Sy.”
“I—”
“Don’t talk,” he said. “Nope. Let me pretend that you’re going to say something utterly clueless and innocent to contrast and destroy the idea of an adult Sy that you just set up.”
I almost spoke to counter him, then surrendered. “Okay.”
“Okay,” he said. He moved a footstool, and extended his legs so they were out straight in front of him. He patted a pile of sheets that he’d found and stacked on the little tea table beside him. The restraints.
People do that, then? I wondered to myself, as I got to work. I would have to think on it at a future date. I’d just imagined once upon a time that it would be fun to torment Lil to my heart’s content while she couldn’t fight back. Now one of the many tracks in my head was stuck puzzling out how and why that particular thing would be adult in a way that would make Jamie be weird.
Any ideas? I thought.
The specter of Lillian that stood on the other end of the room shook her head.
I missed her voice. I missed her.
She leaned forward, and I thought she was going to say something. Instead, I heard a deeper, reedy, hollow sort of voice, like I might expect to hear from the monster under the bed.
“Anything I can do?” Horace asked.
“No,” I said, terse. The illusion had been destroyed and scattered. It took work to reimagine Lillian. By the time I’d pulled a mental image back together, without the ghoulish voice being somehow associated with it, I was done restraining Jamie.
There were so many spots. Each one would require a tablespoon of flesh, at the very least.
I knelt at Jamie’s knee, so it was at my chest level. Lillian knelt on the other side.
“Work fast,” Jamie said. “The longer we’re here with me getting cut up, the sooner they’ll catch a whiff.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Except—”
I heard a distant rumble and crash.
I imagined it was the chimney snare.
“Except that,” I said. “With luck, Dog is dangling halfway down the front face of the second tallest building on the street, with a snare around his foot. With more luck, it was a back foot, Dog won’t be able to bite the rope, and Catcher will have to get inside the building and walk upstairs to cut Dog loose. If this is a particularly good day, Catcher or his friends will run into more trouble as he makes his way inside.”
“I don’t think this is a particularly good day,” Jamie said. His eyes were on the scalpel.
“Suppose not.”
I began cutting. Jamie jerked in his seat, tension standing out in his neck. I excised the first of the large spots, then stopped, holding a cloth down to staunch the bleeding.
“No follow-up crash to mark Dog freeing himself. First bit of luck we’ve had,” I said.
“Sometimes I think you’re crueler to old friends than your enemies,” Jamie said. “You seem to end up tormenting them.”
It was a dark thing to say. I could see why he was saying it, sitting where he was. Or was there more to him saying that?
I decided not to pry. Not fair, when he was in such dire straits.
“Maybe,” I said. I glanced back at Harold, who had his eyes closed. I had to watch for a second to make sure he hadn’t dropped dead on us. I returned my focus to the spots, and I was thinking about them as I added, “Mercy can be crueler.”
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Cut to the Quick—11.12
I put the scalpel down. It clattered on the table.
Jamie was pressing his upper body back against the cushioned back of the armchair, fingers digging into the arms. He seemed to be taking the reprieve as an opportunity to breathe again.
I used tweezers to hold the needle with one hand while holding a match to the end with the other. I threaded it, tied off the thread, and poised myself.
“That’s the last cut, I’m hoping. Last set of stitches. I’ll have to check after this for more spots.”
“No. If there are more spots, then no more cutting,” Jamie said.
I remained where I was, needle held in the tweezers. I wasn’t sure what to say or do in response to that. I already felt emotionally harrowed by having to take the scalpel to Jamie fifty-three times.
If it was hard for me to cut him another time, I could only imagine what it was like to be on the receiving side.
“Okay,” I said, injecting false levity into my voice. “Needle, then I’m going to check anyway, regardless of what we end up doing.”
“I thought this would get easier to deal with as you went along,” Jamie said.
“I’m getting faster,” I said.
“And I’m getting tired, trying to force myself to stand still when my body wants to do everything but.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay, right.”
He didn’t sum up the energy for a response.
“…Sooner we’re done then.”
Lillian put her hands around the hand with the tweezers and needle. She didn’t say anything, but I knew what she was telling me to do.
Steady hands.
I investigated the wound, then began stitching up the incision I’d made. I had to use tools to keep skin pinched together so I wouldn’t contaminate the wound. I let go of the tools, leaving them where they were while I worked on the other end of the wound. The act of pinching pulled at countless other, nearby stitches. Even with the anti-scarring cream I’d smeared around the cuts, Jamie’s suggestion for increasing the skin’s elasticity, it was hard with the sheer number of cuts and stitches I’d had to apply.
I pushed needle through skin, and began drawing the wound closed.