Viscera

by Gabriel Squailia

  It was barely enough to pull air through. She’d been foolish enough to hope that the spell would break if she managed it, that she’d be able to grab those shears and get free. Instead, the warm weight of the suit pressed down harder, sealing her mouth shut again—and closing her nostrils, to boot.

  Tanka lifted the shears again, her white brow furrowed as she slid a blade beneath the bandages, directly under his arm, where she began, with obvious impatience, to cut him loose.

  “I’ll get you settled in him quickly,” she was muttering, “and we’ll care for your new lungs before too much time has passed.”

  Ashlan couldn’t draw breath. She could only watch as Tanka sliced the stiff fabric open, then began to tug it roughly from his skin.

  Then she saw him, and her body froze.

  She was staring at his breasts, marked deeply by the tight-wound fabric.

  The shears clattered to her side.

  Her face, so impassive all this while that each expression had come as a minor revelation, was roiling with complicated reactions that seemed to chase each other away, then recur. Several times she seemed about to speak, but nothing came.

  Stars appeared in Ashlan’s eyes as she began to suffocate.

  She watched as a bird landed on Tanka’s hunched back.

  Tanka didn’t budge.

  At last, even Umber seemed to tire of her silence, picking up the shears and shuffling off. This seemed to stir Tanka from her reverie. Hearing Ashlan’s body shaking behind her, she covered the boy’s chest with the orange fronds, either with tenderness or a depth of sorrow that amounted, however briefly, to the same. Looking drained, she leaned over Ashlan’s body and plucked at the back of her neck.

  The warmth retracted from Ashlan’s body, all at once, as she gulped down breath. “Fuck,” she shouted. Every muscle in her frame was convulsing from the sudden cold.

  Tanka didn’t look at her. She stared at the walls instead, settling at last on the grand, red mural. “Do you know,” she said, “it is possible that I have been away from humans too long?”

  Ashlan struggled up, rubbing her arms, looking for something heavy to swing.

  “I—I noticed nothing,” Tanka said.

  Ashlan stopped herself. Don’t attack, she thought. Don’t run. Don’t even move. Not without a plan.

  In the meantime, if Tanka was feeling talkative, let her talk.

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it,” she muttered. “The kid’s doing a pretty solid job of passing.”

  Tanka glared at the wall. “I don’t mean his—his body. That’s none of my concern, or yours. Don’t mistake me, Lady Ley; that the boy and I are not like you does not mean that we are like each other.”

  “Okay.” Ashlan was peering at the shadowy folds in the walls, each one covered in a curtain of nerves, trying to determine where Umber had taken the mannikin. “So why’d you stop?”

  She’d found the hall, she thought, but she still wasn’t moving.

  It could only be because Tanka had said she could help her die.

  Ashlan realized that she believed her.

  There might be other enchanters, of course, who could do the job.

  But Ashlan was wondering how any of them would know what she was, when she herself never had.

  Tanka claimed to. And Ashlan believed that, too.

  “I hate the city,” Tanka said softly. “I hate its denizens, in general. In groups, everything they do repulses me. The things that they build. The things that they believe. The men they choose to worship. But its people, alone—I know them not at all. Least of all the youth. And though I would prefer to forget it, I am one of them. I was born in Eth, under the bridge at Tunica Media.” She folded her arms. “This boy is awful, I have no doubt. He has done awful things, at any rate. And yet—he’s done none of them to me. And if I’ve proven anything in my short life, it is that I cannot see the future.”

  “Me either.” Ashlan gave up.

  For better or worse, she needed Tanka.

  Let her call it home, if she liked. But Ashlan prayed that death would be an ending.

  “Umber?” Tanka called. “Free the talking doll. I’ve gone about this all wrong.”

  While the bear shuffled down the hall, Tanka crossed to an alcove, finding a dusty bag of grass-colored velvet. Turning to Ashlan with a thin smile, she pulled out a slender bottle and held it out.

  “Is that—”

  “Greenfellow’s Reserve,” she murmured.

  “Single malt.”

  Ashan was salivating. That distillery had burned down twenty years ago.

  Since then, she hadn’t tasted anything but moonshine.

  “I’ve forgotten most of the manners I knew,” said Tanka. “But I seem to remember liquor being essential to making amends.”

  Much as she hated to, Ashlan turned away. “I don’t know. Let’s see what the boss has to say.”

  Tanka’s face fell. She tucked the bottle under one arm. “Very well.”

  Umber carried a large pillowcase out of the hall and dumped it, without ceremony, in the middle of the floor. Out of the mass of wadded cotton wriggled Hollis, who leapt away from the bear and ran, sputtering, to Ashlan’s side. “There’s more? I thought I’d be ground up by now, and sealed in this witch’s next pie. But what has this despot of droppings and acorns done to you, Ashlan Ley?” He pressed against her leg.

  The fabric of his body was still damp from the rain. She tried to shrug him off, to no avail. “I mean. Not much, in the end. She choked before she got to the good part.”

  “But she was about to do nefarious things. You can see it in her beady little eyes!”

  Tanka snorted. “Am I to be tried in the Court of Almost, then? And who will be my judge?”

  “At the very least, you altered the mind and body of my lieutenant,” he huffed. “Why did you stop?”

  “I’ve decided to let you live, Mister Runt. Explanations are not owed to you.”

  “Well,” said Hollis, sticking out his chin, “what matters is that we’re free to go. Unless you only brought me out to scramble my brains, as well?”

  “Not unless you have the ability to imbibe.” Stiffly, she held out the bottle. “I admit that I headed down a—an unstable pathway. But I hope that we might still—benefit one another.”

  Tanka treated herself to a generous slug of Greenfellow’s, then passed it to Ashlan.

  Ashlan gulped, her eyes watering, her mouth full of peat. “What’s the move, boss?”

  He squinted. “I don’t see why we ought to treat with her at all,” he murmured. “The junkies look stable enough to me.”

  “That all depends on what you want them to do,” said Tanka. “Walking, for instance, is quite beyond them now. But it needn’t be.”

  He looked to Ashlan. “You don’t really trust her, do you?”

  She didn’t.

  But she needed her.

  “Yeah, I think she’s on the level,” Ashlan muttered. “Coming at it a little crooked, maybe.” She swigged again. “If it makes you feel any better, she already knows all my dirt. Might as well tell her what she needs to know.”

  She’d take it anyway, if she wanted it, thought Ashlan, passing the bottle back.

  Hollis scowled, and trotted away from her. “That doesn’t make me feel better at all, Ashlan Ley. What it does is make me wonder whether you’re still dazed from whatever whammy she laid on you while I was indisposed. No, I think I’d rather that Tanka Equinox set me at ease. Tell me—after all this skullduggery, why should I believe that you want to help us?”

  Tanka had raised the bottle to her lips. She let it fall. “I’ve come to understand that Lady Ley and I share a certain—”

  “I told her you want to kill your creator,” blurted Ashlan, glaring over his head at Tanka, who snapped her mouth shut. “That he’s building a, uh—a factory for murder dolls, and the addicts are going to lead us there.”

  He whirled on one platform heel. “That was not yours to tell!”


  “I know,” she said, dropping to a crouch. “I’m sorry, Runt. I was under the influence. Not whiskey, I mean. She—she put a whammy on me!”

  His little shoulders were heaving. “You are both lucky that I have so little time left.”

  Tanka strode to Hollis’ other side, arching an eyebrow. “But it is fortuitous, is it not?”

  He gave a sour laugh. “How’s that? Because you can stuff more of me in pillowcases now?”

  She nodded. “Just so. It may not be pleasant to work with one who loathes all that you are, Mister Runt. But I would gladly join you, for a time, if it means working to eradicate such shoddy rune-craft.”

  “This shit again,” Ashlan muttered, reaching for the bottle.

  Tanka looked startled at her thirst, but gave it up readily enough.

  “You take me for a rube,” he said softly. “As if anyone with such powers would leave her stronghold just for the satisfaction of killing puppets.”

  “Ah, you mistake me,” said Tanka. “Helping you helps Lady Ley. And helping Lady Ley helps me help myself.”

  He looked at Ashlan, shocked. “Do you mean to tell me, Ashlan Ley, that you’ve promised this witch a slice of your inheritance?”

  Ashlan, who’d been wondering how all of this could possibly come to a conclusion, nodded quickly. “Yes,” she said, wondering where she’d put the cork, then deciding that it didn’t matter. “That is what I did.”

  She’d promised her all of it, she realized—whatever it took to get her spellwork up and running, at which point Ashlan would have no use for gold, because she’d be dead.

  Hollis’ enchanted cabinet had seemed like a convenient excuse to keep him close, but it was lucky there was a hefty payoff at the end of all this, after all.

  “Well.” Hollis scowled, but opened his palms. “I suppose it’s yours to divvy up as you see fit, should all this come to a pleasant conclusion—by which I mean the Puppeteer drowning in a pool of his own fluids. Very well, Tanka Equinox! Let us find the man responsible for making more of me, and force him to put down his needle for good. Perhaps you could help me immobilize him with your nerve blankets, so that I might carve at my leisure? I have a particular pattern I’d like to try, a sort of fleshy gammon-board that I think he’d survive for an hour or two at the very—”

  “Hey, time for a cheers! Cheers, everybody.”

  Ashlan drank enough to cover both of them and the bear, then sat heavily on the floor.

  Tanka sized her up, judging her useless. “Tell me, Mister Runt, what you had in mind. The larger pattern, I mean.”

  “Very well.” Hollis was stalking around the cradles, frowning prodigiously. “When I met your Lady Ley, these two ruffians were harvesting her organs on behalf of this vile Puppeteer, tearing the fruit from her basket while she played possum.”

  Tanka looked aghast. “You allowed them to remove your insides?”

  “Easier than fighting,” Ashlan murmured into the neck of the bottle. “Don’t judge me.”

  “Our plan, at first, was to follow them to their lair in Eth, then gain entry with some degree of stealth,” said Hollis, poking at the woman’s charred wristbone. “But all that’s gone to pot. The best we can hope for, by now, is that you might be able to meddle with their minds, so that they wake feeling friendly. That should be a doddle for you, I’d guess.” He gestured at the ceiling. “Just slap a few of your dangling ganglia on their heads, and we’re off!”

  Tanka pursed her lips. “No.”

  “Damn you, Tanka Equinox!” He stamped his foot. “Have we forged an alliance, or no?”

  She took a deep breath, then peered down at him. “Why would you want them to feel friendly toward you?”

  Hollis looked blankly at Ashlan. “I thought you were the one who was drinking.”

  “I think he’s trying to say that we need to know they’ll cooperate,” said Ashlan.

  “No,” said Tanka again, stepping toward the cradles. “You need to know that they’ll obey. It is far easier to compel submission than friendship. Umber, my chalk.”

  Hollis brightened. “Are you going to put little paintings in their chests?”

  “One would think their fellow humans might notice,” murmured Tanka. Umber brought her a stick of chalk and a large shard of slate, and she sat between the sleeping bodies. “No, it would be best if we alter something simple. Like their relationship to what they love most.”

  Ashlan shooed an errant kitten, which padded off to Hollis’ side, sniffing at him with interest. “Which is—?”

  “Tlak,” said Hollis, waving the cat away. “Stay sober enough to keep up, Ashlan, this concerns you, too! But it is tlak,” he said to Tanka, “that is the very problem with any plan involving their obeisance. Should we try to bribe them, they’ll buy an ample supply and nod off before they’re useful. Threaten them, and they’ll be that much more likely to sell us out. To say nothing of their bizarre religion, which seems to inform their every decision, and in consistently unexpected ways. So unless you’re sitting on a veritable mountain of drugs, Tanka Equinox, with a direct pipeline to the whims of Fortuna, I fail to see how you intend to motivate them without mind control.”

  “Not a mountain of drugs,” Tanka murmured, scribbling feverishly. “A valley.”

  “Are you—” Hollis tilted his head. “Are you being purposely obtuse?”

  “It is possible.”

  Ashlan leaned over and peered at the slate. “Is that person—vivisected?”

  “Opened,” said Tanka, pointing. “I’ll draw doors on their backs that will swing wide. All their soft parts will emerge, while your essence, Lady Ley, keeps them alive.”

  She sighed. “You’re talking about my blood, aren’t you?”

  “Your blood,” said Tanka, “and other vital magics.”

  “You’d better have some more of those berry cakes,” said Ashlan, leaning back on her elbows. “At least a dozen. Maybe thirteen.”

  “All fine,” said Hollis, “so long as your kittens don’t get peckish. But toward what end? What valley are you speaking of?”

  “A good spell requires symmetry. They took Lady Ley’s insides,” said Tanka, sliding her slate before him. “So we shall rebuild theirs. When we are through, their metabolisms will be altered, such that they’ll get no pleasure from their addictions. They’ll still need the tlak,” she said, pointing to a labyrinthine squiggle in the midst of her diagram, “to fend off withdrawal. But they won’t feel anything, ever again. Unless, of course, they do just as we say.”

  Hollis paused, dumbstruck.

  “Oh!” he cried, giggling uncontrollably. “I suppose this witch of yours has her good points, after all.”

  Ashlan polished off the bottle of Greenfellow’s as she stared at the sleeping bodies in the cradles, thinking of the hell they’d wake to. “You’re cold, T.”

  Tanka smiled, rubbing the throat of the smallest kitten. “So they tell me.”

  —Pathways—

  Rafe was leading the new girl down Carotid Alley, holding her hand like they’d been friends for years. “You’ll want to step over those purple things,” he told her, pointing down at the paper cylinders scattered on the broken stones. “Bangums, we call them, and you never know when they might have some bang left. Sometimes they’ll just startle you, but Sixty-Leven blew off a pinky toe last night—and kept right on dancing, the fool! He was high as a knob on a flagpole, but so was everyone else. You really did show up at just the wrong moment,” he said, smiling back at her.

  It was the night after the Second Masque, and Rafe could still feel the party in his flesh—a constellation of aches and pains, some sharp, some dull, that aroused sweet memories with every cringe. He was glad when the girl smiled back, though it seemed to take too long for her to hear him, like she had to wait for what he’d said to be translated by some invisible imp flying near her ear. “There’ll be plenty more parties, of course, and I doubt you’ll have to pay for a thing—for a while, anyway. They�
�ll get used to you around the boarding house eventually, so milk it while you can.”

  She was smiling now, all shy and golden, with jet-black hair cut at a steep angle that framed her jaw just so. It was a pity that she kept rubbing at her skin with her fingers—her chin, her upper lip, her forearms, anywhere she’d shaved, he guessed. She was probably worried that her stubble was coming in, but her fingers were so dirty—almost black at the tips.

  Then again, Rafe had no room to judge anyone’s bodily anxiety, not when he couldn’t walk down the hall to the bath without being wrapped up tighter than one of Little Gem’s unsmokable spliffs.

  “Up ahead is Mr. Rue’s. See, with the golden button on the sign, and the tiny dancing man on the button? Rue’s is where you can get fitted for dresses that actually suit your frame. That’s if you ever have any extra coin, mind, because he marks up the mods for our kind. He’s bent himself, but he taxes us for being crosswise! It’s like that, even here—though Gingerbeard’s always telling me it’s better than it’s been for a generation.”

  It looked like the new girl was about to speak, but she just shrugged, almost compulsively, like something was itching under her shirt.

  “Now, speaking of coin, don’t bother trying to borrow at the boarding house. Everyone’s always skint, except for Mrs. Dallow, and she’d rather set you afire than spot you a five. Not that she’s unkind, as landladies go—and she’s one of the only owners in Eth who’ll rent to the bent, as Gingerbeard puts it. But safety’s harder to come by than coin—that’s a Gingerbeard phrase, too. I’m full of those,” he said, glancing back to see if his giddiness was getting on her nerves.

  Then he stopped, fighting the feeling that they’d gone in a circle.

  Hadn’t they just left Carotid? Where was the turn?

  With all he’d taken last night, it wouldn’t be surprising if he was still high enough to get turned around. It wasn’t like the two of them to go so far—Gingerbeard preferred a controlled buzz, and kept Rafe steady even when he wanted to get blitzed—but it had been a Masque, and those only came along so often.

  Here was the turn, up ahead. Rafe had been on track after all.