OVERTURE
Tiliard, known as the Deathbed of Tulips, straddles the river gorge like a half-submerged stump. It is a grand bridge of a city, a mesa yawning over a silver tongue of water, underside tangled with a thousand gargantuan roots. From afar, it appears to teeter on its many twisted legs, precarious as a mirage, yet as a traveler approaches, perhaps by horse or riverboat, the city resolves into solidity. The mists clear, the writhing roots fall still, and fissures of petrified bark open to reveal vertical glens, streaks of wildflowers blooming red under the full moon and white under the new. Every season they shed their petals in great sheets; entire meadows migrate, windborne, from the city’s highest spires down to the wheels that churn electricity at the waterline, currents alternating with the lunar tides. The whole of Tiliard, claims the poet Fran Montresor, breathes with the moon. It bloats and wilts and dies and regrows, endless as the dreamy depths of the River Catoptric and the nightmarish creatures that crawl from it.
Streetcars rattle along Tiliard’s mossy boulevards, hotels and belfries twist skyward, shaped as much by choking ivy as by architectural will. Canals whorl like a giant’s thumbprint from the city’s heart to its rim—then beyond, dissolving in misty cascades down the mesa’s trunk. Cafés line their banks, patrolled by beautiful young women in towering millinery. Here and there a dandy will strum his lyre from a passing gondola, hoping one will pull a bodkin from her headpiece and toss it to him. If he catches it, she will make love to him in his dreams that night. If he doesn’t, he is condemned to a lunar month of impotence and dysuria.
Beneath the snaking canals, under the bridges of Conundrum Street and the gash of Splinter Row, the midcity factories pump Tiliard’s lifeblood. Trains and lifts creak through tunnels older than history, along rails dripping with ion-charged sap. Runoff oozes through the capillaries and into the naked rhizomes, down into the dangling sprawl of the undercity, where the deaths are lively and the births grim, where racketeers and outcasts spin the wool to weave their plots, and where, for an extra thirty marks, one’s dentist might plunge his drill into the brain of a rival.
While the larger roots anchor the city to the walls of the verdant gorge, the smaller spiral down to the water, branching out to filter an endless flow of riverboats. Gilded yachts glide past wormy smuggling vessels; trawlers rumble with bulging nets, devoid of fish but filled with ancient artifacts scraped from the riverbed. The docks teem with rats, workmen, pickpockets, hucksters, and silk-veiled ladies bound for villas downriver. Gnarled ferrymen roll cigars and accost passersby with tales of lost loves and won battles. One will claim to have overthrown an illustrious dictator in a coup thirty years ago, the next will claim to have been that dictator, and both will only be half lying.
Under the cover of clouds of pollen and insects, a slim shipping vessel diverts from its course. It peels away from the docks and enters the mouth of a smuggler’s tunnel, a sewage conduit carved into a peripheral rootlet. Its motor dies, and its oars glide into the poison river without a ripple, as if passing from light to shadow to light again. It drifts to a halt in a septic shaft, and a gangplank extends from its gunwale.
Spoils are unloaded and allocated in the rancid dark: perfumes, pigments, porcelain, liqueurs, a burlap-swaddled landscape its seller insists is a vant Wron original. A wine-runner offers a sample of his wares, uncorking a bottle of Dagdrun brandy with a knife still stained in what remains of its vintner. While the scent of sweet plums envelops the dock, aged finely from fruit crushed under the feet of an orphaned child, the last item of contraband descends the plank.
He is a gentleman, or a decent counterfeit, evinced by his lacy gloves and the cuff links barely visible under the sleeves of his traveling coat. He carries no luggage but three blades: an antique saber, which he uses rarely, a razor with an emerald handle, which he uses with some regularity, and an embroidery needle, which he uses constantly—or at least appeared to on his voyage north, pricking away at a square of batiste with such cold focus he deterred even the jolliest smugglers’ harassment.
No one questions the man (a paid fare is a fare paid, as the captain says), and he spirals unfollowed up the slopes carved into the meat of the root. He slips into the narrow passageways of the midcity, keeping the lichenous gloom at bay with nothing but a firefly lamp. Factories thud around him, sickly hearts of wood and rust and moss-clotted valves. A foul draft wheezes at his back.
He follows a familiar path, unerring, unwavering, like an ant following a pheromone trail. He hums a popular aria as he weaves through alleys, down erranders’ routes, past rotting tenements and conduits of steaming wastewater, refusing to slow, refusing to lift his eyes, until he finds what he’s looking for.
He steps into a slitted passage, vine-choked and contorted by bulges of wood. He ducks through the melted grain, through knots stretched open like howling mouths, and emerges onto a defunct factory floor.
The place is quiet, but there are signs of recent activity. A footprint here and there, a broken curtain of vines between two distillation tanks. He steps to the empty center of the floor, tossing his hat on a broken conveyor belt, and lifts his gaze.
A grid of steel curves overhead. Wrist-thick cables dangle from the crossbeams in two parallel rows, a draped outline of a large, long-bodied creature. Hooks curl from the end of each cord, dulled or warped or snapped off in a struggle. A few frayed cables coil on the floor, baring their teeth at the empty air.
The man nudges a hook with his shoe, removes his gloves, then kneels to take it in hand. He squats, listening to the scurrying around him, the musical conversations of rats. Somewhere beyond the factory walls, a bell rings, and metal groans under a rush of sewage. Compelled by a familiar urge, he presses the point of the hook against his thumb. A thread of blood crawls down his skin, followed by a feeling of release. He reclines on his heels and sighs.
It will be a rough search, he knows, in this monstrous anthill of a city. But he will resort to whatever means, for however long. He will not falter. He has already proven he has the tenacity of a roach.
THE BRAVE MEN AND WOMEN OF BORISCH & SONS EXTERMINATION COMPANY
Guy Moulène has once again, due to a blue moon or a bad mood, trapped himself in a child’s body. He is ten years old and blindfolded, tasked with ushering a theatergoer to her balcony seat. His ears are stuffed with cotton and his shoes too big for his feet, but he can recognize the sloped carpet under his toes, and he can, by counting his steps, escort any patron to any seat in the theater. As he gropes his way down the aisle, the old woman’s hand softens in his own. He comes to realize her fingers are earthworms. Obliged by courtesy, he plucks them from her palm. She adorns him with a lily boutonniere he can smell but can’t see, and the overture begins.
Guy twitches on his foam mattress. A hum escapes his throat, and his elbow escapes his dream, driving into his little sister. She wakes; he wakes; both moan the same complaint, but her will, like her jaw, is just a bit stronger than his. Tyro reclaims the linens and curls against the wall, spinning tight as a fly in spider’s silk.
Overpowered by a child and exposed to the damp morning, Guy has no choice but to rise. Bare feet streaking dew, he squeezes across the tiny, gnarled apartment and pulls his under-uniform from the slitted closet. He dons his clothes, washes, shaves, retrieves his mask and helmet. With the end of a spare razor, he picks out a clump of yesterday’s neurotoxins from a tubule in his respirator.
Guy’s employment contract, a thick stack of papers he hasn’t seen since pressing his thumb to it years ago, lists his title as Exterminator. This amuses him, since the vermin, despite all his fumigants and traps and serrated blades, never seem to die. They make a grand show of it, shrieking from a thousand mandibles as they scatter, bristles raised and pincers gnashing, but they always come back. The small ones wait out the massacre in kitchen cupboards or garden pots, the larger ones retreat to the depths of the river to convalesce. But inevitably, in a week or a month or a century, they return.
Guy’s bunkmate, Dawn, is awake well before his namesake. By the time the sun rises under their feet, a green-white coin reflected on the surface of the Catoptric River, he’s already oiled his pesticide syringe and polished his blade. Pyrethrin grenades line up at the narrow crack of their window, janky things far below industry standard and dating, Guy guesses, from before the Great Patent Skirmish of 1509. What their arsenal lacks in modernity, Dawn makes up for with an almost supernatural diligence. Nozzles never jam in his presence, fuses never snuff out, an apple cut with his knife never seems to brown. Plants grow better in his proximity, a discovery that has led the company hedge witch to sow herbs, several of which are carnivorous, in the gluey substratum of their front door.
While Guy hunches over the mirror and tries to assemble himself, Dawn flattens the paper on their little table, mulling over the news of an assassination attempt in the overcity. As usual, his eyes have much to say on the subject, and his mouth nothing. Heads will roll like fruit, but he knows those that fall will be the ripest, not the rotten.
“Captain Three says we’re climbing down the Root of Abrupt Ends today,” he says instead.
“Portentous,” Guy answers. He gives up on taming his curls and rattles out his suit, humming away the last notes of his dream.
“Abrupt doesn’t mean final,” Dawn reassures him.
“But it can’t mean pleasant.” Guy steps into his suit and rolls down the sleeves. The weave clings to him like rubber, sucking at his neck, his chest, at the loops of debtor’s ink that circle his forearms. Threaded with iron vine and plated with woody alloys mined from Tiliard’s core, the suit is a hand-me-down from an exterminator who saw sirens in the Catoptric and, one lovesick night, decided to follow them. Only his armor survived the swim.
Dawn offers what is left of the coffee, a lukewarm cup garnished with a struggling fruit fly. Guy swallows both, pulls on his boots, buckles his overcoat, and throws on a bandolier of sulfluoride shells. Impervious to the rattling morning routine, Tyro sleeps soundly on. Even the early chill that gusts through the door does not wake her, though the soot mites will soon enough.
Guy and Dawn slip onto the gangways of the Borisch & Sons company barracks, a warty collection of bulbs dangling from the Root of Joyous Healing. Wind whistles along the river’s surface, singing through the vines and shaking the planks under their feet. Neither flinch; they have lived all their lives one misstep away from a long drop and a short swim. Clinging to the creaking handrail, Guy follows Dawn toward the main boulevard. They drop onto solid wood and join the upward stream of bodies, spiraling past carven saloons and pleasure houses, past clubs for the gentry’s banished sons and a tavern whose hostess will, for a decent tip, read one’s fortune in the smears of his orts.
Captain Three waits with their tanks at the crotch of Joyous Healing and its neighboring root. She lingers at a war memorial, a tangle of weeping angels carved with the names of those lost in the Battle of Broken Horse. A cigarette glows between the wooden fingers of her prosthetic left arm.
Copyright © 2025 by Hiron Ennes
