Viscera

by Gabriel Squailia

  She kept a smile plastered on her face. It wasn’t worth panicking over. She just had another ball to keep in the air, because if Hollis found out, all of this was for nothing.

  “Something we can do, Ram?” asked IV.

  “Oh, yes! Some breakfast, I think. Just for Ashlan—I ate already.”

  Ashlan looked at the walls again as Ram and the students talked over the menu. This was no manmade tunnel. Everything was covered in protruding, finger-shaped bumps.

  Villi, for the absorption of nutrients.

  She was looking at the lining of a calcified intestine.

  That’s where they were—up the asshole of Eth.

  In the catacombs, near the God-Gland, where they were mining their tlak, then selling it off to build their army.

  A thousand little men.

  This had to be the Puppeteer. It wasn’t as good as an admission, but she could probably convince Hollis that she had enough evidence.

  Now she just needed him alone—and close enough for Hollis to strike.

  III and IV were mouthing pleasantries, taking their leave. “Nice to meet you, too,” Ashlan said.

  Forget the food—she had to get Hollis in gear while they were making her meal, then knock them out in the kitchen.

  “So,” she said, propping herself up on her elbows, “you were about to tell me what I’m here for. Right?”

  “Right! Sorry for the delay. Let’s set you at ease, shall we?” Ram sat, all the way over by the wall. “I just want to start by saying—I mean, you called yourself our ‘prisoner,’ but that doesn’t feel accurate, considering.”

  “I don’t get your meaning.”

  He cocked his head. “Considering—you, Ashlan.”

  She stopped smiling. “I’m—a very private person, Ram. But what I really want to know is who you are.”

  “Okay.” He smiled, clearly making a concession. “Let’s put a pin in that conversation, then. We’ll talk about me! You have every right to ask. I am a student of history. Not a student at the Uni, though my parents would have loved that, may they rest in peace. They were both tenured professors, and they had very—specific ideas about what I should be. A ruler, for one. But can you imagine me on the throne? Just like Ram III, because that went so well! Anyway, I ended up—going another way.” He folded his hands. “I always had the feeling that this, all of this, had to change. Eth, for starters. This carnival of slaughter, you know? We’re better than this!”

  This was better than talking about her, she supposed. But he was still too far away.

  Maybe if she could get him talking about her insides. He seemed—enticed by her, somehow.

  Like he was really looking forward to watching her regrow.

  “You know, I guess what I’m really wondering is what you want with my—”

  He held up a finger.

  Damn it, he was midway through a rant.

  “Ambition, that’s the problem! That, I came to believe, is the drive that’s hurting us. But is it learned—from our parents? Or is it innate—in our bodies? Well, it was while I was really digging into that question that I learned about you, Ashlan. I found you down here,” he said, waving at the walls, “buried in the catacombs, in a pile of junk under the stacks at the Uni, when I was barely more than a kid. Not you yourself, of course! I found your notebooks. Your designs.”

  Fuck.

  She lost control of the heat.

  The tiny cluster of her organs surged, swelled.

  Hollis was crammed down, toward her pelvis, the point of his knife shoved up against the inside of her navel.

  Nothing builds appetite like forcible regeneration.

  She had written those words, a century ago.

  She had to distract both of them, fast. She could cover this with Hollis later—but how?

  She’d come up with something. She had to.

  “Ram,” she shouted, grinning. “For fuck’s sake, buddy, level with me. You’re the Puppeteer, right? Isn’t that what they call you?”

  She felt Hollis’ entire body tense.

  The point of the knife was rising, coming through the skin, a tiny bump under her leather shirt.

  Ram sat back, taking a deep breath, rolling his tongue against his lips as he slowly crossed his legs.

  “The Puppeteer?”

  He stood.

  Started pacing.

  Come on, she thought. A little closer.

  “That name, that concept—I mean, we have to give them something, right? The Assemblage. The Uni. The people of Eth. They expect certain things. A man—well, usually a man, almost always a man—grasping for control, power, coin. They’re not ready to see that paradigm change quite yet. They will be, that’s what all this is about! But for now, what we do is, we always send the same fellow to meet them. I don’t mean to be cruel, but he has, let’s say, a very distinctive face! And then we let them think what they think. So, am I the Puppeteer? Is he?”

  He was five feet away. Looking right at her, smiling.

  Then he turned, pacing the other way.

  “There are twenty-four of us, mostly students or graduates of the Uni. We have all sorts of enterprises—the sale of enchantments, the refinement of tlak from a spot around the corner we call the God-Gland. The whole kit and caboodle is known, informally at least, as the Puppeteer Initiative. So, if you want to be reductive, you could say I’m one-twenty-fourth of the Puppeteer. I don’t know, does that answer your question?”

  “Sort of.” She tilted her head. “I mean, are you the one who’s going to pull out my insides?”

  His cheeks got ruddier.

  He must’ve been thinking about this for years.

  He was walking over.

  “Over and over again?” she said softly. “I mean, you’ll make all the little men you can dream of. Right?”

  Here he came.

  “And they’ll take over everything. A thousand little men. All full of me.”

  “Ashlan.”

  A few feet more.

  “I am so glad—”

  Another step.

  “—that you invented those mannikins.”

  “Father,” she barked.

  There was an awkward silence.

  Hollis didn’t move.

  Ram looked confused. “Your—father? Inspired the design?”

  She closed her eyes.

  Everything was over.

  Except that it never would be, now.

  “Well. They inspired me, anyway. But you only got the chance to make one, isn’t that right?”

  “Let’s not dwell on the past.”

  “A prototype, just to test the waters. Rune-work bound in leather and cloth. But the Uni sold it off, before you’d even given it life, to some backwater kingdom miles and miles from here. The Kingdom of—what was it?” He snapped his fingers. “Oh, right! The Kingdom of Cru.”

  The knife inside her dropped.

  She could feel its point, stuck near the base of her spine.

  She laid her head back on the table.

  “But Ashlan, we’ve taken it so much further, now. After a few trial runs, with the little guys! They’re tough to control, though, at that size, and with that much zeal—a few ran amok, I’m afraid to say. That’s not to pooh-pooh your design. It’s still an absolute marvel, I want you to know.” He leaned over the table, his eyes twinkling. “You made the mannikin. And now, together, we’ll make the Kin of Man. I am—so eager for you to meet him. A little later! After a bottle of wine, maybe? Maybe—” He lit up. “I know! I’ll bring your notebook, the one where you first sketched the design. That’d be a kick, right? And I think it would help you to get reacquainted with the Ashlan I know.” He walked away, smiling. “This must seem unfair. You’re here against your will, I get it. It’s just that I—I don’t think she would be. The old Ashlan, I mean. Deep down, who you really are—well, gosh, I just can’t believe you wouldn’t want to make the world better!

  “So we’ll start here. With the gentlest possible r
ough stuff. We’ll take your guts, yes. But I have every faith, Ashlan, that you’ll want to give them before long. You and me, we’ll end up as friends.”

  Pleased with himself, as he always seemed to be, he winked.

  “Stranger things, right?”

  Ram left her.

  Ashlan lay in silence for a long while.

  So did Hollis.

  She came close to speaking, a number of times.

  Twice, she felt Hollis take up the knife.

  But neither of them did a damn thing.

  After a long while, the students brought in her food—a ptarmigan, stuffed with bread and mushrooms, which they set on a crooked tray. They let out her restraints enough that she could reach it. But they didn’t speak to her, and she didn’t move, even after they’d left.

  She just stared, her mouth watering. There was no fork, no knife. Did they expect her to gnaw the meat off? Her hands were still covered in her own blood, the cuffs of her shirt dangling with veins.

  But none of that would have stopped her, normally—her head was splitting, her stomach groaning—and that was what pushed her over the edge.

  She owed Hollis an explanation, and forcing him to listen to the symphony of her digestion seemed one cruelty too many.

  When the bird had stopped steaming, she sighed.

  “I was working for the Uni,” she said. “Just graduated. I was in Reparative Anatomy. Regenerative techniques for a proposed unit of battlefield medics. Truth is, I was never really that good at school. I’d just been in it so long, I learned to fake it.

  “I was going for tenure, anyway. I had plans. Wanted to make a better Eth, from the inside out. You’d be amazed how naïve I was, even with my hundredth birthday around the corner. Or maybe you wouldn’t.

  “I’d just gotten my first big grant. I was celebrating with my research team when some faction or another set off a building-sized enchantment in the middle of the Market. They could never figure how many it killed. Hundreds, maybe thousands. There was a quake, a sizable one. The pub we were in was right at the edge of the destruction. We walked out to see dust in the sun. A whole neighborhood went under. People buried in the rubble, everywhere.

  “So we went to work.

  “I could see pretty quickly that my blood was more useful than I was. I had a good cover in my research—I’d been running tests on myself for so long that everyone thought I was inventing the stuff. They thought I was a genius, I guess. But it wasn’t my work, just—what I am.

  “I went off to get my supplies. So I said.

  “What I really did was requisition all the bottles I could find in the Lidless Market, then cut myself open. Emptied my heart three or four times before I was done.

  “We put it to good use. By the time the guards arrived, there was nothing left to do. Nothing but kill the looters—and those were mostly merchants, taking supplies out of their own shops. Good old Eth.

  “Anyway, there was one guy I met, an out-of-work actor. Fillibrand Drinkwater, he called himself. The whole time, he kept everyone laughing. I started writing down the things he said, all this archaic language he used. We all started writing things down, in my notebook.

  “It was a joke, at first. Someone saw my notes about battlefield medics. So they drew all these tiny Fillibrands, running around and fixing people up, feeding people vials of my blood while they talked this endless stream of fancy-sounding bullshit.

  “By sunup a group of us, Uni folk and civilians both, were planning out how we’d build these replicas. Give them strength, intellect, medical knowledge. Ram thinks it’s my design, but there were a dozen hands in there, at least.

  “So I took it back to the lab. Soon enough, the city changed hands again. Things got—tense. But I kept working on the mannikin project.”

  She picked at the bird, chewing. She couldn’t help herself.

  “I built you, Hollis,” she said. “I sewed you by hand.

  “They gave me organs, and I never asked who they were from. I went down to the lab late at night and replaced them with my own. I—wanted you to last.

  “Then you were gone. They took you, and made a bunch more. The first wave, the cloth generation, they were all sold off to the wealthy. Toys for kings and rich toddlers. Jesters and nannies. Not a one of them made it onto the battlefield. But they raised funds for the next wave—and those ones did.

  “The Uni confiscated everything, and I thought it was lost forever, until now.

  “I turned one hundred. Things started to—get to me. I didn’t have interest in much. Except drinking.

  “I don’t know what happened. It felt like it was the project slipping out of my hands. But maybe that was just an excuse. Maybe I just got tired.

  “My work slipped. They busted me down to professor’s assistant, learning students’ names just in time to hear that they’d died.

  “And I started hearing stories, toward the end. Little men with poisoned blades, dropping out of trees. Sturdier than you. Armored. Running around the killing fields, slitting the throats of the wounded.

  “The next build. Same as you, they’d found a way to break the one thing I really did write into the rune work: Do no harm.

  “Whatever you learn about saving a life can be used just as easily to destroy it. But nobody knows that better than you, right, kid?”

  He’d been still so long she wondered if he’d come unraveled midway through.

  She couldn’t bear the thought.

  “Hollis,” she whispered.

  She rested a hand on her belly.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She saw the flash before she felt the pain.

  The thin tip of his boning knife was jutting through the back of her hand.

  She yanked it away, less angry than startled. He’d stabbed up through her navel, and now he worked the blade down, sawing through her skin.

  There was no sense in fighting. Reaching to the edge of her restraints, she tugged her shirt up.

  Hollis crawled into the light, his burlap skin wet and dark. He dropped to the floor, his shoulders bowed, the knife in his hand. “I knew something was wrong. The way these people were talking about you when we arrived—”

  “Hollis.”

  “What was I thinking?” He shook his head violently. “That anyone who could bring a puppet to life must be able to make himself live a long while, I suppose. A century—what trouble could it be to survive a century, for someone who could create life out of whole cloth? And I was right, wasn’t I? My mistake was assuming that the Puppeteer and my creator were one and the same.”

  “Look, I should have told you. I just—”

  He turned, his button eyes shining with her blood. “You’d only have broken me sooner. What I dreamed was that I’d find him—and for some reason he was always a man, in my mind—in the same workshop where he made me. A workshop! All of this came straight from a fairytale, and I never questioned it. An actual puppet-maker—can you imagine? I thought I’d catch him in the act of sewing up one of my brothers. ‘I’m home,’ I would call—and then the two of us, my brother and I, would hack him into pieces small enough that we could tie them all to strings.

  “And then, Ashlan Ley? We’d make those pieces dance, just as he made me dance, all these years.”

  “It shouldn’t have been this way,” she said. “You were—misused.”

  “Me? Misused?” Laughing, he shoved the chair over to the side of the table and climbed atop it, waving the knife in her face. “Whatever your intentions, I am precisely what you made—a sad little echo of yourself!”

  She kept her hands down.

  Let him do what he liked.

  She wouldn’t risk hurting him to save herself a little pain.

  “Look at you,” he snarled, waving his blade. “Immortal! Invulnerable! And what are you, Ashlan Ley, but a great puppet? What do we do, either of us, but make the same mistakes, time and time again, as we lurch toward some grim and unattainable fantasy? Look!”

 
He held up his arms, doing a grotesque little jig on the seat of the chair.

  “I’m dancing for you even now! Helpless to do anything else. All I ever wanted was to murder my creator,” he said, thumping his chest, “for telling a joke this bad. But I can’t even do that, can I? Here we are! Here’s my knife! I could carve you to gleaming ribbons, right now—but you’d only laugh at me, like you laughed at Rafe Davin.

  “You’re sick enough that I’d get my vengeance—and you’d enjoy it. How’s that for a punchline?”

  Turning, he dropped from the chair.

  She felt a manic urge to rip herself from her restraints—to chase him, to catch him, to pull him close—

  Then Hollis stopped, standing in shadow.

  “There’s only one sort of vengeance I can take, I suppose,” he said softly, “and that’s the truth. That you could’ve fixed this mess you’ve created, years and years ago—that you could’ve told me the truth, and fought beside me—that you could’ve built yourself a life worth living, had you not been so damned busy. Even now, you’re too busy, aren’t you? Too busy to pick yourself up and stop the madman strolling down the hall. Too busy—on your endless quest to nowhere.”

  “What is it you think I could do, Hollis?” The words sounded hollow even as she said them. “Kill him? Kill them all? Bury the whole city, just to—”

  “Oh! Oh, yes.” He sounded happy, suddenly. “There’s one more thing I’d have you know. That this,” he said, pausing to let her hear a tiny pop, “is the only thing of value I have left.”

  He rolled it across the bumpy floor. She caught a glimpse before it fell through the cracks.

  It was the last gold button on his vest.

  The red pouch came sailing after, its seeds spilling everywhere, bouncing down.

  “The enchanters at Cru called this trick the Shining Future. They were full of cons, those fellows! The Court itself was bereft, by the time my babies were grown. Twenty acts of fratricide—all over an empty treasury. That nugget of gold I gave you was all that remained, and you couldn’t even hold onto that, could you?”