The noodles were hearty, greasy, and soaked in a broth that looked like sothing squeezed out of a theology student’s liver, but by the Saintess, Miss Alba still made them taste like ho. Gael slurped down two bowls before Maeve even finished her first, which made him lean back and pat his stomach like a satisfied corpse in a coffin.
The fact that Miss Alba had relocated her shop directly beside the clinic was, in his esteed professional opinion, the best civic decision since Blightmarch decided to stop throwing corpses in the Umbracross River. Patients would co to his clinic coughing blood and walk out clutching bowls of noodles—horribly unhealthy noodles, granted, but patients lived longer with soup in their bellies, and that was dicine enough to him.
Lunch done, they descended.
As always, the mouth of the Gulch Pipelines under Miss Alba’s old shop yawned like the throat of a forgotten god: arched bricks, sweating moisture, and rust streaks thick as veins. The Vile didn’t linger down here. This separate flavor of doom—the stink of centuries of sewage, rot, and tal—was of a completely different kind, and he didn’t like it a single bit.
Let’s just get this over with quickly.
Maeve held Cara’s carefully inked map, every line precise, every junction marked with neat script. Gael, naturally, had the Gulchers’ map etched onto the tal plate. A masterpiece of cartography, if he liked his masterpieces carved by a drunk with a bent knife. Still, he found its crude scratches more trustworthy than Cara’s map. Nothing honest was ever written that neatly.
He wasn’t going to tell Cara that, though.
Maeve carried a standard lantern on her hip, warm orange light washing over the damp walls as they walked into the pipe. Gael carried the gloam lantern, its pale white glow cold as marrow. The contrast was striking: her side of the tunnel felt like walking through firelight, his like walking through moonlight in a crypt.
“... I don’t like that light.” Maeve shivered, glancing at his lantern. “It’s… cold?”
“How tough you are,” he murmured, looking down at his map to find the right starting direction, “but lanterns in Bharncair only co in two flavors: extrely hot or extrely cold. Unless you want one that’s lukewarm and useless, you’ll have to pick.”
Maeve frowned as they started trudging forward. “Why only hot or cold?”
“Because bugs don’t like extre temperatures, and Myrmurs—despite their bioarcanic abilities and mutations—are still just bugs. Super powerful bugs, yes, but still flesh. Heat makes their proteins cry, and cold makes their fluids stall. Parasitic bugs, especially, are vulnerable to extres.” He paused, wagging a finger. “So. Would you prefer to sweat like a heretic on trial, or freeze in modesty with ten cloaks walking next to ?”
She pursed her lips in thought.
“I think I’d just prefer a different color. Not white. White looks weird.”
“Fuck are you talking about? White is pure. White is rare. White is mine.” He tapped the lantern affectionately. “The gloam lantern stays white.”
“... But you never answered .” Her eyes narrowed. “What does the lantern actually do?”
“As I said, my flower-wrangling flower, we’ll find out later. When it either works marvelously or immolates us both. It’ll be fun.”
Her sigh could’ve extinguished fire.
They pressed deeper. Shafts slanted down, so vertical, so diagonal, like the city had been built by drunk spiders who thought plumbing was a form of abstract poetry. Sotis they floated down with umbrellas half-open, riding stale air like a parody of aristocrats at leisure. Sotis they walked vertically down walls, soles crunching gri, as they traced their way down into the abyss.
Hours passed like that with maps consulted, lanterns raised, and turns debated. At one point, they argued mildly about whether a particular junction was ant to be three squares or four, but the Gulchers’ map, crude as it was, proved surprisingly reliable.
About five hours in, the tunnels widened, and they stepped out into a chamber vast enough to swallow a cathedral. A sewage river churned sluggishly to their left, carrying with it a flotilla of filth, broken branches, and bones worn smooth by ti. The stink was biblical.
Along the riverbank in front of them, though, sat ten figures in patchwork cloaks and gas-mask visors, their eyes blank lenses that reflected the lanternlight. Gulchers. Silent as stalactites. There wasn’t a single lantern among them—only stillness.
Gael lifted his head, recognizing one imdiately. The short one with the brown cloak mottled with pipe grease stood the mont the two of them arrived, waving at them with a gesture almost too girlish for a place like this.
“Well, well,” Gael said, lowering his lanternlight so it wouldn’t hurt the Gulchers’ eyes. “If it isn’t my little friend from the bazaar. You guys still doing okay down here?"
The Gulcher didn’t answer. They never did. But they turned at once, breaking into a sprint along the riverbank, and the short one waved at him again, beckoning him to follow.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
Maeve glanced at him.
He looked back.
They both shrugged.
“Lovely hospitality,” he muttered.
Then they ran again, following the Gulchers down the riverbank and deeper into the pipes, into the echoing belly of Bharncair’s underworld. The sewage river widened gradually as they pressed forward, and as he ran—cane in one hand—his mind started to wander.
The Gulchers could handle Rustwights. He’d seen them slaughter the tal monstrosities with so sort of acid-spitting class before, and anything else they couldn’t defeat, they avoided or sealed off with clever collapses. They wouldn’t be able to survive in the underworks without being efficient and rciless.
So what, exactly, had them scurrying up to the surface, scratching a map onto a slab of tal, and requesting help from him?
His grin widened, though his stomach didn’t
What sort of Myrmur makes the Gulchers call for a Raven and an Exorcist?
Ten minutes into the run, their guides finally slowed, then stopped entirely. The Gulchers bunched at the lip of a stone ledge and peered down a shaft so wide even the gloam lantern’s white couldn’t find the bottom. The sewage river itself went straight over the brink and vanished in a churning thunder of a waterfall that seed to fall forever.
Maeve planted her boots and leaned out just enough for water to spray her cheeks. “This… is an entrance to the Ancient Gulch Pipelines?”
The Gulchers looked at her squarely, and that was her answer. Gael went to kneel at the precipice, cane hooked on his elbow as he squinted down into the dark. At least the Gulchers—bless their muteness—seed like they were actively trying not to be here. Even behind their gas masks, fear had a posture, and every one of them wore it.
Let’s see…
What’s down there?
The shaft wasn’t neat. About a hundred ters below, a dozen thick pipes crisscrossed the chute like ribs in the throat of a sleeping god, each one tunneling away into a different part of the city’s gut.
Around those pipes, though, sothing had woven a web. Not a pretty web. A fortress of webs. Silk threads thick as anchor ropes ran from pipe to pipe, triangulating the space into caged triangles filled with finer shes that glimred when his lantern dragged white across them.
Hm.
He turned his head at the shortest Gulcher. “That the one?”
The Gulcher nodded, then jabbed a gloved finger straight down.
Gael flicked a look at Maeve. Her eyes had already changed—sharpened into work-mode.
He’d learned to trust it.
Together, they stepped off the ledge, and wind rushed up to et them. He grabbed Maeve’s calf in one practiced motion, while Maeve—already holding her umbrella half-open—tilted her canopy to make them glide slowly forward.
Their descent slowed and then stabilized into a diagonally slanted drift, the waterfall’s back-spray peppering them with sour speck. Despite that, he was the one wearing a mask over his eyes, so he stared down at the heart of the webs and pipes.
A man was kneeling, twitching, and peeling at himself. He was talking, too, or whispering, or begging—it was hard to tell with the waterfall’s roar behind them.
Maeve angled hard to catch one of the larger pipes, and the pipe vibrated under them as they landed, walking straight ahead.
They crept closer, the red flicker in their sight confirming what they both already knew: the man was carrying a Myrmur. Gael slowed, taking in the torn finery clinging to the man. Velvet, embroidery, lace at the cuffs—clothes not born of the southern ward. The air of Vharnveil clung to him.
Nobles rotted the sa as paupers, but nobles carried complications.
They drew within twenty paces when the man’s head snapped up. Blood masked his face in grotesque strokes, his skin clawed raw by his own nails, and he stared at them with eyes full of ruin and awe.
His voice rasped like torn cloth.
“... Who’s there?” His voice rasped like torn cloth. “Are you… the Myrmur Doctor? The Spider? The Pale Man? Here to… to tornt again?”
Maeve steadied her voice. “We’re not here to hurt you. We’re here to exorcise the Myrmur out of you. We were told soone was down here harboring one, so—”
At that word—‘help’—the man broke. His breathing hitched into panic, his voice scattering into sobs. “Help? Help… how? If you’re Exorcists and I’ve got a Myrmur then… then… you’re here to kill .”
His nails raked down his chest in frantic gouges, blood spilling fresh. Gael pursed a lip. The man was evidently losing it already—though Evelyn’s case was still the worst he’d seen by far—but Maeve stepped closer, one hand lifted, voice patient as a teacher soothing a fevered child.
“That’s not why we’re here,” she said. “We can draw it out of you without killing you. Please, just lie down on your back. Let my partner examine you. No harm will co if you trust us.”
But the man only whispered harder, fevered fragnts spilling from him, tearing his own flesh as if pain were the only anchor to his mind.
“Deep breaths,” Maeve urged, firr now. “Close your eyes. Calm yourself and—”
The man’s head whipped at her. The word that ripped out of him was ‘no’,but it ca out doubled, echoed—one voice his own, the other a screech like chitin tearing.
“You lie” he rasped, spittle and blood flying. “Exorcists lie. Exorcists kill. That’s your Purity Mandate, isn’t it? ‘Curses do not spare, and neither do we.’ Neither. Do. We.”
Maeve flinched, eyes wide. Gael only chuckled. “That’s exactly what you told the first ti,” he drawled, glancing at Maeve. “Funny how life repeats itself—”
“Shut it already. Get out the elixir. We’ve gotta—”
Then the man started convulsing.
Blood poured from his eyes, nose, and mouth. His body wrenched, muscles ballooning out in wet, pinkish-purple cords that burst through his skin and wrapped around him like so obscene cocoon. The sound was all tearing flesh and straining bone—a grotesque overture—and four more arms unfurled from his back as his two legs bulged as well, anchoring a body looming larger and larger.
Maeve took a cautious step back, lifting her umbrella slightly. Gael simply tipped his head and hat back as he raised his brow at the black chitin plates surging across the giant’s body.
The man’s head warped, mandibles splitting his jaw and eight eyes blinking open in grotesque synchrony.
Oh.
A Blight-Class Myrmur, huh?
No wonder the Gulchers called for help.
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