Headless Over Heels ch 2.36 - Little Lovelies (Patreon)

The trolley rattled and roared its way across the cityscape. Seth held onto the fabric of his handsome new Legion topcoat and tried not to gawk at the verdant streets full of desaturated citizenry as they gathered and gabbed and drank chaya atop terraced cafés. Annalise sat on the timeworn bench next to him and chattered cheerfully about the neighborhoods they sped through as she cramped him against the rattling windowpane.

“That’s the haircut place I took Feeli there, on the second catwalk down Rover Street. They do such lovely work, but eventually she said ach maw I’m a socialite yanno and took her bony self to a real salon. I’d go there myself if I ever needed a cut. More’s the pity. There’s a grand spice store down that corner there past where that shitebird’s got his schooner double parked. We’ll drop in and it’ll pop your eyeballs out, they’ve got so much. Hold tight, now. We’re hooking.”

Seth blinked the wonders away. “We’re…?”

With an artillery ka-thunk, the trolley hooked to a wire that drew it skyward. The bottom dropped from Seth’s stomach.

Seth flattened himself against Annalise. “Fucking Saints.”

“First ride, young fellow?” a gent in a frilled chaperon asked from across the aisle, his soft shoes up on the rail of the row in front of him.

“Uh, yeah.” Seth tried to pry his white knuckles off the lip of his seat. “It’s, uh… a lot.”

“It’s terrifying for a while, eh?” The man chuckled. “And then it becomes quite unremarkable.” He got up from his bench and strolled to the trolley’s sliding door, surefooted despite the grinding of the casters and the swaying of the car. “Like life.”

The trolley halted at a garden terrace that jutted from a skybridge thirty spans into the air. Vines and roots dangled precariously through grilles by the exit, wrapping around a copper sign with 81ST/SKYSTREET hammered into it in brutalist monospace. The man tipped his chaperon to the incognito Verdugo and her thief, and departed, whistling into the evening.

A bell gonged twice; the door wheeled shut again and the trolley thundered on, away from the terrace and winding between the lofty artificial peaks of the Bastion District. They were alone in the trolley car now with a half-asleep barrister leaning over a sheaf of casebooks and a pasteboard cut-out of a smiling Legionnaire with a legend written across his chest saying HE’S FIGHTING FOR YOUR CITY—KEEP IT CLEAN!

“He’s right, y’know.” Annalise sat her chin atop Seth’s head and watched the cityscape swoop past them. “Take the wonder while you can reach it, boyo. You’re only new to the soulless city the one time.”

“I’m trying to avoid being clocked as a bumpkin,” he said.

“There’s no rush, love,” she said. “I’ve stopped feeling it so much, the awe. You make me see it the way I used to see it.”

The bright green stamp asserted itself across reality, driving all other colors and qualities of light away with its brilliant eyeblink of green. The world returned as quickly as it had been banished. The barrister across from them coughed and turned the page of his folio without looking up.

Annalise kept on like nothing had happened. “And you’re cute with your jaw dropped.”

Seth clamped it shut again and leaned into her as the trolley kept on. Two skyway stops with no boarders, then it coasted down to street level again and its wheels squealed as the earthbound rail received it. The sleepy barrister departed at a stop called FISHBURN, onto a plaza painted in swirling seafoam motifs and penned in by gaunt-looking rowhouses.

Annalise spoke up over the trolley’s groaning acceleration. “We’re meeting a friend of mine, two stops from now. Library of St. Kykoris. A sorceress named Magra al Vhziz.”

“You trust her?”

“Oh, yeah,” Annalise said. “No hesitation. She’s the one helped me understand the Darkness I was saddled with. I reckon I told you this already--the day it happened was a hard one. My head fell off.”

“I remember this.”

“Magra’s one of the finest in the Necropolis when it comes to understanding this whole… condition we have,” Annalise said. “There’s records, see. Of every Darkness everyone’s had, going back… well, as far as there’s been big bleeding monsters turning people into unlit. Magra’s one of the few with the level of access you need to read ‘em all.”

“You think mine is in there?”

“Maybe. Plenty of Darknesses ain’t, of course, on account of there’s no way of, uh…” Annalise trailed off and stared out the window at the climbing and falling city skyline.

“No way of?” Seth prompted.

“No way of knowing someone’s Darkness until they lose their light,” Annalise said. “Maybe let’s actually talk about something else for a while, huh? I’m being a silly old coot, but there’s…” She waved her hand around the near-empty trolley. “Ears.”

There didn’t seem to be any to Seth, but then again he had a hexentatua on his back specializing in exactly the kind of skulduggery Annalise was fearing, so he kept quiet.

The Library of St. Kykoris grew forth from the sacrosanct reef-creep of the Bastion, its roof ribbed like a cockle shell. The trolley’s metal brakes screeched them to a halt in its shadow, and Annalise scuse me’d through a cloud of white-clad kindred—students, scholiasts and sorcerers, clocking out and rolling home.

The Library’s halls were thin and tall, capped with hammered tin roofs from which hung flocks of paper, fluttering now and then in the airflow as a lecture hall or cavernous library sent eddies of vellum-scented air through their opening doors.

“Those pages up there,” Seth said. “What’s on them?”

“Spells,” Annalise said. “The staff here, it’s mostly apprentices. Working their way through the early castings and trying to learn their siege spells. First perfect diagram a Sorcerer draws, they hoist it to the rooftop. In tribute, like. So it’s mostly fireballs up there. A flight of dragons.”

"So everyone here’s a sorcerer or a would-be sorcerer?"

"Well, they’re all part of the sorcerer’s corps, but not everyone who joins up is hyperphantasic enough to learn how to sling a fireball,” Annalise said. “If you can’t get the siege spell and you ain’t willing to take up chortweed, the Library might take you in anyway. Teach you how to be a scriber or an infuser.”

“Legion scribers all flunked out of fireball school?”

“Don’t be nasty, now, Seth. No shame in knowing your limits. I’d never take chortweed, it’s bleeding terrible for you. Jessika did through her education and kicking the habit nearly ended her before my sword got a chance. Anyway, Magra didn’t flunk out. She served her time. Once upon a Winter War the feathers overwhelmed her siege line and slaughtered half her section, and she got the Flyaways.”

She tugged him against a wall and exchanged hasty hellos with a sarkanian student wheeling a squeaking gurney that surely couldn’t have had a cadaver atop it, could it have? It went around the corner before Seth could double-check.

“That’s what they call it when you get the siege spell and lose it again,” Annalise said. “She went down far and bounced right back and now she’s one of the best bleeding infusers on the planet, siege spell or not, and a great friend. So be your friendly self, aye?

“I’ll make sure I’m wearing my nicest head.”

“Good lad.” Annalise let him off the wall and rubbed the nape of his neck protectively. “And I’ll make sure she does, too.”

“You brought him?”

From a teetering standing desk heavy with memo books and readouts, the Kari-kine sorceress scowled. As he shadowed Annalise into her laboratory, she stepped away from it, and Seth got his first good look at the sorceress Magra al Vhziz. She was as diminutive as any member of her species. Moreso, even—her slouchy belted salwar was tied off at the right knee, where a clawfooted brass prosthetic took over from the scar-shiny skin. But there was something about her bearing, some evident pride, probably related to her ability to shoot fireballs from her hands, that pressed the run-and-hide button in Seth’s brain.

There was plenty of opportunity for it in this room, to be sure. They’d arrived in a workshop torn from the pages of a mad scientist in one of Ofelia’s tawdry serials. Every corner of the room moved; turning wheels, steaming vats, spindly machines that chittered and expelled ticker-tape reams of opaque data. Towering alembics speckled with alchemical patinae and briny fermentation jars and mirrored lenses reflected Seth back in a dozen blinking mutants—wide Seth, skinny Seth, green Seth, fragmented Seth.

The greatest curiosity occupied the opposite wall, from floor to lofty ten-span ceiling. Odds, ends, and mechanisms sat in a great honeycomb of labeled cases, each sealed with a glass pane. A brass corkscrew as thick as a ship’s mast occupied the room’s center, with a decadently cushioned egg-shaped seat fastened to it by a gleaming gearbox. Magra was perched within it, in a draping and defiantly un-ergonomic posture.

Magra certainly didn’t look like a sorceress. No stark white for her—the smudges of machine grease and resin marred her tunic. She lifted the boxy infuser goggles she’d been wearing when they came in. One eye tracked Seth; the other followed Annalise. He hated when kari-kine did that. She adjusted the scarf she wore wrapped at the hairless top of her head, where some of her species chose wigs. “I thought this was a discreet appointment, Madam Verdugo.”

“Seth’s an unimpeachably discreet lad.” Annalise said, breezily unaware of Magra’s clear eagerness to get some impeaching done. “We gotta keep some particulars from him, sure, for his own safety, but he’s content to take some stuff on faith. Right, Sethy?”

“Right on,” he said. “Saintspeaker Seth, that’s me.”

Annalise smiled and ruffled his hair and he felt his feet on the solid ground again. “I trusted this fella to retrieve Alice—”

Magra picked a chipped chaya mug out of the forest of papers she’d left behind. “After he stole her.”

“Shush.”

Seth squinted. “You told her?”

“Double-shush. I trust her, Sethy. And I trust him, Mags.” Annalise removed her overcoat and draped it over an inert smokestack sprouting from a lattice of tubes. “It’ll be good for there to be a friendly face here on my first emergence. It’s a right rattle when you come out the first time. You remember.”

Magra pinched the bridge of her nose where her infuser goggles had left kidney-shaped impressions in her skin. “Do I not count?”

Annalise chuckled. “You’re one of my best friends in the whole bleeding city, Magra, but you are proudly unfriendly.”

“Oh, fair enough.” Magra tossed her infuser goggles toward a stand that held a half-dozen extra pairs. Did Seth imagine that it shifted a couple fingerlengths at its base to catch them? “I have her ready for you.”

Annalise beamed. “Brilliant, Mags. I’ll take her.”

The expression on Magra’s face was familiar, Seth realized. He surely looked the same every time Annalise al Ydris called him something like brilliant. The sorceress stepped to her egg chair, her prosthetic leg clacking with each step, and stuck her mug into a cupholder on her seats arm. Her slippered foot pedaled the pipe-organ controls, and the chair whirred into the air, gearbox humming. It coasted on its casters to the wall of projects. Magra took hold of a hexagonal drawer and pulled it free like a safe deposit box.

A fat beetle sat atop the glass hex. Magra clicked her tongue with an affection heretofore absent from her and it clattered away.

“That there’s her Darkness,” Annalise whispered.

“She can command beetles?”

“She can talk to them. Them or any insect. Command isn’t in the picture but it turns out bugs are feckin’ easy to influence when you’ve got enough sugar cubes. She fed a few queens, resolved a few longstanding colonial rivalries, and whizz-bang. She’s got herself a living laboratory.”

“Oh.” Seth took a closer look at one of the frosted glass tubes that ran the lab’s length and saw the indistinct shapes of a chitinous swarm moving through it. “Eugh.”

“That’s the thing with Darknesses,” Annalise said. “The less impressive they are, the more you can do ‘em. Tiago’s bird trick takes a lot out of him. Magra can talk to bugs all the day long. Runs her whole workshop on beetles and ants. Genius, she is.”

Magra unscrewed her jar’s lid and smiled, for the first time in Seth’s brief association with her, at the teeming carnivorous beetles that filled it. She slipped a pair of sugar cubes from a canister built into the chair and dropped them into the scrambling thicket. She removed the bleached bone of a skull from the jar, brushing a stray bug from its orbital with motherly tolerance.

“One skull.” Magra winched her seat back down to eye level. “Chemically treated, wired, hollowed, and stripped of its former flesh by my little lovelies. I’ve put a few enchantments on it to ease the passage.”

“You’re a fecking marvel, Mags.” Annalise gratefully accepted the skull and tapped her lacquered nails against the wiggly seam in its cranium. “Is there a spot a body might get some privacy, please? Gotta melt my head.”

Magra pointed outward from her brass-shod nest to a wooden door, with a tapestry hanging on it of a bored-looking man getting executed. “There’s a WC for you there.”

“That’ll do lovely. Than you.” Annalise held the skull up and stared into its eyes as if waiting for its jaw to unhinge and provide permission. “Right,” she finally concluded, and strode through the door.

Seth was alone with the Kari-kine sorceress, who regarded him coolly as the flesh-eating beetles she kept chittered and clicked in their jar.

“Evening,” he finally said, in absence of any conversational shelter making itself evident.

Magra peered at him coldly, both eyes aligned. “The woman you travel with is the greatest Verdugo of her generation.”

“I know.”

“You do not,” she snapped. “It is no exaggeration to say that she will be the most consequential soldier of the ninth century.”

“You are absolutely in the room with a fellow fan,” he said, and tried not to snap back. This noisome frog wizard was making him testy.

Not from her, the Fox whispered. What?

Take nothing from her. You won’t get away with it.

He’d never intended to, of course—what would he lift? A bug?—but no sooner had he thought as much than the Fox’s shitty little snicker echoed in his brain. Sure you didn’t.

Little furry bastard. Why was it so talkative lately?

Magra frowned and sat back, retrieving her cup of chaya from its holster. “She thinks highly of you, sir, and I don’t take her to be careless with her physical affections. Not after the life she’s led. In trust of her judgment, I must logically be in trust of you.”

“Thank you,” he said. “That goes for me, too, I guess.”

“Only don’t distract her.”

“I won’t.”

“And don’t hurt her.”

“Saints, lady, I won’t.”

His exasperation seemed to satisfy her. She squinted, sat back, and allowed him twenty seconds of blessed silence.

It was broken by the scream from the bathroom.