12
OSRIC THE MICROBE
Osric
few days later, in the depths of a forest, Osric wrapped up a job byA dragging corpses into tragic poses next to an upturned carriage. The effect was moving: a terrible accident had befallen the party. There had been a disastrous roll down a hill, resulting in ever so many broken necks. And just like that, the Mercian king had lost one of his chief retainers and Osric had made a fat pile of thrymsas, courtesy of the king of the Danelaw.
Fairhrim had an instinct for catching him post-kill. Her deofol pressed at Osric’s tācn with insistence until it was permitted to come through.
The deofol materialised on the highest corner of the upturned carriage.
From that vantage, it studied the bloodbath, then leapt to Osric’s shoulder.
The genet was only a creature of seith, but Fairhrim’s skill was such that it had weight. And, Osric discovered as twenty pins punctured his cloak, tiny
seith claws.
“Ouch,” said Osric.
“I didn’t want to wade through the blood,” said the deofol.
“That’s barely a puddle,” said Osric.
“A puddle? It’s so big, it’s got its own tide.”
“You share your mistress’s propensity for dramatic overexaggeration.”
“Funny,” said the deofol, switching to his other shoulder. “She accuses you of the same.”
“What do you want? And retract your damned claws.”
The deofol retracted a single claw. “Did you free the horses?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“They’re innocent beasts.”
“And you’re a champion of the innocents, are you?” asked the deofol.
“What do you want?” repeated Osric.
“Aurienne wishes to enquire about your availability for a meet. Noon, two days from now.” With reluctance, and sounding as though it had practised this bit, the deofol added, “She acknowledges your preference for nighttime meetings. However, it’ll be her only chance to get away.”
“Where?”
“Take a waystone to the Moist Oyster. Follow the signs for the clinic for
Pthirus pubis infestations.”
“The clinic for what?”
“Just follow the signs. She’s got something to show you. She asks if you could refrain from committing mass murders on the way, but I see it’s already too late.”
“I’ll be there,” said Osric. “I may have an interesting find of my own to share.”
The deofol made a retching sound. “We’ll have none of that reciprocity
malarkey, thank you.”
“It’s at her request.”
“Oh, is it? Well, that’s all right, then. She is perfect and can do no wrong.
Unlike you.”
With a final squeeze at Osric’s shoulder, the deofol vanished.
FROM THE WAYSTONE AT THE Moist Oyster, Osric followed the signs to the clinic. He discovered, incidentally, that Pthirus pubis were pubic lice.
There was no queue at the clinic door.
Osric knocked. Fairhrim opened the door.
“You had something to show me?” asked Osric.
“No,” said Fairhrim. “I invited you here for the sheer pleasure of your company.”
Gods, she could be dry. Osric’s lips chapped on the spot.
Fairhrim led him in. She looked severe, as though she were about to quiz him on his multiplication tables.
“Are you going to lecture me about mass murders?” asked Osric.
Fairhrim disconcertingly replied, “No.”
“No?”
“You are a Calamity—”
“Thank you.”
“—but we’ve got more important things to discuss.”
“More important than me?”
“Have a look at this map,” said Fairhrim, as though, indeed, a bit of paper was more important than Osric.
On the clinic’s examination table lay a crumpled map of the waystone graticule. A forgettable enough item; everyone had two or three of them hanging about at home or forgotten in pockets, consulted when travelling to
an unfamiliar place.
“Waystones,” said Osric. “And?”
Fairhrim pointed to the wall over the examination table, on which a regular map was hung, dotted with red pins. “Here are the approximate locations of fifty of the stories—those that contained enough detail for me to map them with something resembling accuracy, anyway. Do you see it now?”
Osric compared a few of the red spots with waystone locations. “Some are near waystones—no surprises there; we’ve used them—and some aren’t.
Am I meant to be drawing some sort of conclusion?”
Fairhrim pulled out a dusty projector and slipped the waystone map onto it. The map was thin enough to project a ghost of itself on the wall. After
some adjustments, Fairhrim overlaid the image upon the map pinned above the examination table.
Now Osric could see. The red dots from the fairy stories were clustered not around the waystones themselves but rather where the ley lines connecting waystones intersected.
“The crossing of ley lines,” said Osric.
“Yes. Crossroads have come up in the tales, of course—a classic in- between—but none mentioned the ley lines themselves.”
“You’re brilliant,” said Osric.
Fairhrim gave him an austere look over her silver-sharp shoulder. “Don’t compliment me. It was an oversight not to have noticed.” She drew her finger across the map. Projected ley lines decorated the back of her hand like new veins. “My first clue was these aggregations at crossroads. Loads of our roads were built parallelling major ley lines. And—coincidentally or not—we have these clusters of data locating stories precisely at those intersections.”
“Where’s the lighthouse?” asked Osric.
Fairhrim reached towards the map’s most northern point. “There.”
Three ley lines intersected at the island.
“What about points where more ley lines cross?” asked Osric. He pointed at star-shaped bursts where four or five ley lines crisscrossed. “Is that even better?”
“More might be better. Our excursions to the pond and the hot springs— with only a single ley line nearby—were marked failures. I’ve told you I thought an accumulation of the in-between factors might make the place and time more powerful. However—it won’t be that simple. Look at this.”
She brushed past Osric to the other side of the map. He found himself distracted by the sensation, by the casualness of it. People didn’t simply brush up against Osric Mordaunt. Fairhrim took up a new position a decorous distance away, and Osric focused once again on the map.
She pointed to a spot at the southern tip of the island. Five ley lines intersected there. Osric saw a blurry label for the waystone at the Rummy
Thing.
“The South Downs,” said Osric.
“At a crossing of five ley lines,” said Fairhrim. “Five. And we had no
success whatsoever.”
“Blast it.”
“These findings are aggressively inconclusive. And, of course, we can’t even call the lighthouse a success. We had a—a strange moment, but no result to speak of. This in spite of a full moon, three ley lines, Widdershins’ blackened sun, and every in-between dimension of time and place we shoehorned in.”
Fairhrim stood pin straight in front of the map. There was something metallic in the glance of her eye and in the hard, dissatisfied line of her mouth. She suppressed a sigh; the merest twitch of her nostrils gave it away.
“Where do we go from here?” asked Osric.
Fairhrim did not answer him. She bent over to make notes.
No one ignored Osric Mordaunt. Osric either charmed or terrorised the trousers off everyone in his vicinity. He was never ignored. Who did she think she was?
He glared at Fairhrim’s bun in annoyance. At the baby hairs that escaped it at her nape. At her neck, too, because it was in a perfect position for snapping. What a pity she was his Means to an End; she was so very Endable herself.
He stepped behind her to read over her shoulder. Her notes were nearly illegible, but he made out a few fragments: focus on the crossing of ley lines —in spite of little evidence to support new strategy—pare down locations for June lunation.
“Right,” said Fairhrim, punctuating the final sentence with a full stop.
She straightened. Her bun smacked Osric in the mouth.
“Watch what you’re doing,” snarled Osric.
Fairhrim passed her hand over her bun to check for damage (gods forbid he’d pulled a hair out of place with his chapped lips). “Watch what you’re doing. Why were you so close?”
“Watching what you were doing,” said Osric.
“I don’t require supervision from you,” said Fairhrim.
She glided off into a back room—the very sweep of her skirts bespoke scorn—and, with much rattling, reappeared with the Franklin diffractor and its knots of wires. “Let’s have a look at your progress while we’ve got the equipment.”
Fairhrim pointed to a cabinet and bid Osric to disrobe, and to please, if he would, choose from the adult selection of gowns this time.
Osric was left to study an enigmatic pile of linens. He put a hand in the heap and pulled out baffling bits of fabric: floppy things, long things, things that dangled beyond the three-dimensional, things incomprehensible,
bewildering, arcane.
He tied one on like a toga.
The briskness of Fairhrim’s knock made him snap to attention, but he recovered his flaneur’s slouch in time for her entrance. He leaned against the examination table. His scars cicatrised sexily, his jaw chiselled heroically, his pecs popped manfully—not for Fairhrim, but because that was their usual state. He’d like to see her try to ignore this catalogue of attractions, however.
Fairhrim walked in and did not look at them.
She did observe his attire.
“That,” said Fairhrim, “is a table runner.”
“I think,” said Osric, “it becomes me.”
Fairhrim did not opine on this. She said, “Sit.”
In a hygienic outburst, she whipped out her hlutoform and sprayed it on her hands—and in Osric’s direction, as though he were a handsome microbe that had come too close. Osric sat within the cloud of sanitation. Fairhrim busied herself with her machine.
Osric swept a hand through his hair. She ignored him. He flexed his abs.
No reaction. He bit his lip. Disregarded. He made a deep guttural sound when she wiped cold hlutoform against him. She told him to act like a grown man.
She was the Worst.
The toga was shifted to one side; the hlutoform completed its acrid responsibilities; the diffractor’s tentacle was pressed to Osric’s chest and began its chortling.
“Why are your shoulders scratched up like this?” asked Fairhrim.
“I’m having an affair,” said Osric, sexily.
“With a rodent?” asked Fairhrim.
Osric, who was not actually a rat fucker, was compelled to clarify: “It was your bloody deofol who scratched me up.”
“Oh,” said Fairhrim.
She, notably, made no apology.
Fairhrim attached sticky things on wires to various bits of Osric (not those bits, but other, less exciting bits). (Anyway, he hadn’t any interest in Fairhrim touching his bits.) As before, a shiny silhouette, vaguely man shaped, was projected onto the wall by the diffractor. White lines representing healthy seith channels shimmered; black lines vined through them morbidly.
“Don’t move,” said Fairhrim, as she studied the image.
Osric was disturbed to see bright pinpricks along his seith channels, which certainly hadn’t been there before.
“What are those spots?” he asked.
The image on the wall distorted and flickered as he spoke; the diffractor’s chuckling grew churlish.
“I said, don’t move,” said Fairhrim. “Those are my seith markers.”
Fairhrim stared at the figure on the wall for an eternity lasting two minutes. She tucked a finger under her chin and said, “Hmm,” but Osric did not know if it was a good hmm or a bad hmm.
She took out a complicated silver instrument, took measurements from the figure on the wall, and noted the results in Osric’s chart. The chart was temperamental and twitchy, but grew docile as she began to fill it in. Osric noticed that, under Patient Name, she had inserted an alias, which was fine, but that the alias was U. Ganglion, which offended him.
“You may relax,” said Fairhrim, as she made her notes. She spoke absently as she wrote. “Your seith system is wonderfully robust, barring the disease. Really makes it a pleasure to study. Much of my work involves civilians, who only use their seith for waystone travel or to send a barely formed deofol. Their channels hardly show up on the diffractor. You’ve got
such well-developed lines. Quite juicy.” Fairhrim looked up. “How’s the
torpraxia? The numbness?”
“Persevering.”
“Tell me when you stop feeling this,” said Fairhrim.
Osric answered as she ran a cool finger down his arms, and then his thighs and legs, and down his chest and back. Notes were duly taken. No thoughts were had about the nearness of finger to bits; and if the finger was
soft, Osric did not notice.
Fairhrim went back to her chart.
“Have you anything good to tell me?” asked Osric.
“No,” came the pitiless reply.
“Why not?” asked Osric, in tones that were, admittedly, a bit whingy.
“The rate of the deterioration remains within expected parameters,” said Fairhrim.
“So nothing we’ve done has had any impact?”
“Not a measurable one—not on your seith system, anyway,” said Fairhrim, with the implication that there had been diverse nefarious impacts elsewhere.
“We’ve been wasting our time,” said Osric.
“Yes. As I’ve warned from the beginning.”
“Fuck.”
“There’s not much else I can do at this point.”
“Hold me and tell me everything is going to be all right.”
Fairhrim’s upward glance, begun in scepticism, grew serious, then shifted back to scepticism.
“You almost sounded sincere,” said Fairhrim. “Well done.”
Osric, who had, obviously, not been sincere, inclined his head towards her like a pleased thespian. “Thank you.”
Fairhrim plucked the diffractor’s tentacles off Osric and rolled the contraption away. She instructed him to dress and exited the room, and thus deprived herself of further viewings of his superb masculinity, which was her loss.
When Osric had dressed, Fairhrim returned and boxed up her various maps and notes and things scattered about the clinic. (“I’ll take these home with me—can’t risk someone else seeing,” she said, as though the contents were shameful and perverse.) This exercise completed, she dusted her hands with the air of one moving on to the next item on her list, turned expectantly to Osric, and said, “So.”
Osric, having graduated from microbe to bullet point, asked, “What?”
“My deofol told me that you had findings to share with me.”
“Oh. That.”
“Yes—that. Did you discover something about the intruders at
Swanstone?”
“I did.”
Fairhrim continued to look at Osric expectantly and, indeed, with far more interest than when he was a microbe. Now he had her attention. Now he wouldn’t be ignored.
He would be moderate about it. He wouldn’t power trip.
He power tripped immediately.
“I don’t know,” said Osric. “I’m not certain it’s worth sharing.”
This had been a coy invitation for a bit of cajoling from Fairhrim.
She did not cajole. She unleashed an imperious command: “Tell me.”
“It’s very vague. I’d rather tell you when I’ve got something tangible.”
Fairhrim’s focus on Osric was intense. Her eyes bored into his. For once, it wasn’t Osric who needed something from her, who needed to demand or coerce or beg. It gave him a terrible sort of pleasure to have something that she wanted.
Osric turned away, as if to move towards the door.
Fairhrim took a step sideways to remain in his line of sight. “Tell me.”
Yes. He liked it.
“I may have a contact,” said Osric.
“For who ordered the intrusion?”
“Tss,” scoffed Osric. “That’d be too easy. For someone who might know
something about who ordered it.”
“Who is this contact?”
“You don’t need to know. I’m to meet him tonight. I’ll tell you if I
discover anything worthwhile.”
“Can I come?” asked Fairhrim.
“What?”
“Can I come?” repeated Fairhrim. “Tonight? To meet this person?”
“Absolutely not,” said Osric.
“Why not?”
“For one, a prissy Haelan popping round to the Bunghole would raise far too many questions.”
“The—the Bunghole?” repeated Fairhrim in mild consternation.
“Dodgiest boozer in London. Rough crowd.”
Fairhrim digested this information before gathering herself and insisting anew. “I’d be in a better position to talk to them, to get to the bottom of this.”
“No. You’ll bodge it up.”
“I don’t trust you not to bodge it up,” said Fairhrim. “This is important.”
“Let me do my job, and you do yours. We’ll reconvene when I’ve got the information and you’ve helped some invalids, or whatever it is you do with
yourself.”
“Your job,” said Fairhrim, “is murder.”
“Espionage is one of my many areas of expertise. Besides, the threat of murder leads to interesting confessions.”
“That’s your plan?”
“No. My plan is to leave now and advise you of my findings later.” Osric considered patting Fairhrim on the head for maximum condescension; however, from the way she was looking at him, he thought she might bite him. “You stay put.”
“Find answers without coercion,” said Fairhrim.
“No.”
“I don’t care how you normally do it; this time we need reliable
information.”
“No.”
“I’ve reviewed the literature on the use of torture—”
“Spare me.”
“—and the overwhelming scientific consensus is that coercive techniques don’t work. It’s one of the most ineffective intelligence-gathering tools.
You’ll get false confessions. People will admit to anything under duress. I need you to get real information from this contact. And besides, I don’t want
further deaths on my conscience—”
“Solution: stop having a conscience.”
Fairhrim regarded Osric with queenly hauteur, and Osric, reduced to peasanthood, saw that he had committed lèse-majesté in interrupting her.
“Thank you,” she said, “for that incisive recommendation.”
“Your alternative is to keep clutching at your pearls.”
Fairhrim looked as though, for once, she was wrestling with her temper.
She flung up her hand. “I’m leaving.”
“Good. Go. Stop waving your stupid swan at me.”
“It’s an Aer.”
“An heir to what?”
“An Aer. A-E-R. One of Frīa’s companions. Symbol of purity and healing. Those who try to kill one suffer instant death.”
“Utter tosh,” said Osric.
“Preferable to the singed remains of a dog, anyway” was Fairhrim’s retort, accompanied by a vinegary look at Osric’s tācn.
She sailed towards the door.
“Go back to your House of Pestilence,” called Osric, “though I’m not sure which is the greater Pestilence, you or the House.”
“Go back to your derelict country pile and rot there.”
They parted with the usual levels of esteem and affection.
