The Exorcist Doctor

Chapter 159 - of Vile Eaters // And Hidden Rot

Gael turned the little sac over once more between his fingers, watching the green shimmer shift beneath its thin membrane. Then, with a quiet hum of satisfaction, he strode over to the basin and shoved the thing under a stream of clean water, rinsing off the last clinging threads of sludge and blood.

Maeve lingered at his shoulder, arms folded, nose still wrinkled faintly. “What’s so special about it?” she asked, leaning in despite herself. “Are you going have Arnell turn that into something? A new bioarcanic equipment, maybe?”

Gael tilted his head, a small grin spreading as he worked the sac clean. “When you first told me what those milkweed bugs could do, I thought their ability sounded a little familiar. Real familiar, actually.”

“Familiar?”

“Think about it. An ability that allows them to take in toxins, store them, and release them in controlled bursts. Doesn’t that remind you of anything you’ve seen around the city?”

She tapped her chin, eyes drifting upward as she thought.

“Uh… those perfume grenades Cara keeps hoarding? The ones that make people cry and confess their sins?”

“No,” he said flatly.

Maeve snapped her fingers. “Ah. Then—those rotten sewer vents near the Wild Bridge that breathe out poison gas every few hours?”

“No.”

“The blast-plague kettles in Ironwych? The ones that boil toxins into steam and then blast it into the streets so people can build resistance or whatever excuse the shit noodle chefs use?”

“No.”

“What about that cursed teapot you made that turned tea into hallucinogens if you oversteep it?”

“That was art, and you know it, ” he said, affronted, “but also no.”

“The corpse-lamps near the Sallow Hearth? The ones that eat fumes and glow brighter the worse the air gets? One of them screamed at me once when I got too close.”

“No.”

“The fellstar grave leeches that supposedly suck trace metals out of blood and then explode when you squeeze them? Evelyn tried to sell me one as a pet.”

“What?”

“They come in different sizes and colors.”

“They do? Which one did you get?”

“The green one. It exploded when I squeezed it too hard, though.”

“Oh.”

“Oh! The Gulchers’ incense braziers? The ones that supposedly purify air in the pipes, but actually just smell like sanctified vinegar?”

“No, but bless them for trying. What’s sanctified vinegar, anyways?”

Maeve squinted at him. “Then what? I can read minds, but annoying cryptic minds are unfortunately—”

“The Vile Eater,” he said.

Maeve went still.

Then she blinked.

“…Oh.”

Gael shut the tap off with his elbow and lifted the now-clean sac up under the golden lantern light overhead. It was still an ugly lump of bioarcanic nonsense, but now that all the sludge and tendons had been washed off, it almost looked a little bit refined.

“The Church of Severin designs and manufactures all of the Vile Eaters in Bharncair,” he said, “and they don’t talk about how they do it. They definitely don’t write about it in any book they approve for the public, either, because if every gutter rat could make one in their mother’s damp basement, then they lose their chokehold on the city’s sanitation.” He turned the sac in his hand over again, studying it with fond interest. “But now that we know there’s a very good chance that what they’re using to make Vile Eaters are these little shits harvested from milkweed bugs…”

Maeve’s entire expression lit up. “We could make our own.”

His grin widened. “We could use them to clean up the Vile ourselves. We won’t have to rely on whatever scraps we can get or whatever the Church allows through. And we can even sell them for extra business. You think Juno and her Rot Merchants are gonna love getting their hands on cheaper, independent Vile Eaters not stamped with Vharnveil’s approval seals?”

“I think she’d love to buy them cheaper from us.”

“Exactly.” He turned and tossed the organ into a sterile glass container by the side of the kitchen. “Now, I’m still not a hundred percent sure milkweed bugs are actually used in Vile Eaters, so I’ll send them to Arnell first and have him compare it to the Vile Eater in the clinic. But if I’m right—and these organs really are the core material—then I’ll have him work out the glyph structures needed to recreate entire Vile Eaters.”

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“If he can’t?”

“Eh. He’ll get it done. He’s better at etching glyphs than me these days,” he said, bracing his boots against the floor as he grabbed one side of another uncracked torso. “Grab the other side. Let’s bust the rest of these things open already—”

“Gael!” Cara shouted. “Come here! Someone’s got something interesting to say!”

Gael ignored her. Prying the torsos apart was definitely more interesting than—

“Gael!” Cara screamed.

“Coming back!” he screamed back. Muttering curses under his breath, he looked at Maeve and stepped back from the torsos. “You can rip them apart by yourself, right? Just wash the organs and put them into that sterile glass box meant for organ transport. Please don’t put them in the broth pot or the fruit bowl.”

Maeve scowled at him. “I know what the organ box looks like—

“I know, I know. Just in case.”

She opened her mouth to argue, but he was already ducking out of the kitchen, wiping his filthy gloves on a rag as he crossed back into the living room with draggy impatience.

Cara was still sitting in the interrogation chair he’d abandoned earlier, and Fergal sat just beside her with his arms folded. He was going to ask why they were both still sitting there if they were calling him out, but then he noticed—sitting across from them on the sofa—four very familiar figures he’d almost completely forgotten about.

The fat husband, the fat wife, and the two even fatter children.

Or, more accurately, the family of four he’d beaten half to death in that restaurant he’d found Vivi in.

Now they were swaddled in enough bandages to resemble a family of mummies. White wrappings ran around their limbs, jaws, temples, and torsos. The husband had one arm in a sling. One of the children had his head wrapped so thoroughly that only his nose, mouth, and two eyes remained visible. They certainly looked more awake than they had in the restaurant, though. More human too—awake, ashamed, and quite aware that a Raven had just walked back into the room.

The wife saw him first, and she flinched so violently her entire upper body jerked. Then, with frantic motherly instinct, she snatched both children by the back of their heads and pushed them down.

“Apologize!” she hissed. “Apologize to the Raven!”

The two children mumbled their apologies into their bandages, too frightened to raise their eyes. The husband followed a second later, leaning forward on the sofa with his good hand half-lifted in a plea for mercy.

“Please, doctor,” he whispered. “Y-You see, we were sick and weak and hungry and… and really, really hungry after being trapped in those things for so long, so we just- we went a little mad… and we—”

“Not interested, don’t care,” Gael grumbled, shoving Cara off his chair and taking his rightful place again. He did wince when Cara kicked him in the back and trudged back to her dining table, though. “The only question I have is this: do the four of you artificial Myrmur Hosts know anything about what the fuck happened to you?”

The husband swallowed. His eyes flicked to Cara in the back first, then to Fergal, then farther back toward the great sofa where Jin and Vivi sat with a fresher kind of alertness now. Even Evelyn had lowered her book and Liorin had stopped whisper-arguing with her to stare at the family of four, expecting a solid answer after an entire night of nothing.

At last, the husband mustered the courage to nod.

“…Yes,” he said. The man licked his lips, glanced at his wife as if confirming she was still real, then continued in a lower, more uncertain voice. “We… well, I first started feeling sick after the ball a week ago. We all went with several of our other winemaking associates. We ate, we partied, we danced, and I remember leaving with my family that night after we’d eaten our fill, and then… I remember feeling very dizzy on the way home.”

His bandaged fingers twitched in his lap.

“And after that, it was like… I had a dream,” he muttered. “I dreamt I was on an operating table. There was some old man in a coat there in a golden laboratory, glass dome ceiling and all. I couldn’t feel anything properly, but I could see him cutting me open. I remember seeing…” He swallowed again, voice growing thinner. “Something in a vial. He put something living inside me. I saw my wife too—and my children—on the tables beside mine. The same thing happened to them. After that, I… I blacked out, I think.”

Gael rested his chin on the back of his chair. Laboratory, doctor man, and slipping memories—that much, at least, was consistent of Jin’s father’s testimony before he died in Vharnveil.

Jin’s dad said he remembered bits and pieces of what happened to him because the ‘drug’ he was given wasn’t completely effective in wiping his memory.

Maybe this guy also remembers because he’s so fat the dosage of the drug they gave him wasn’t enough.

Haha.

But the husband, unaware of his private amusement, continued speaking.

“The next thing I remember, we were all waking up in a back alley close to our winehouse,” he said. His wife nodded shakily beside him. “We were all in the clothes we wore to the ball, but it was already several hours later than it should’ve been. Obviously, when I got home, the first thing I did was check myself in the mirror. If that old guy had really cut me open, there should be a stitch or a surgery wound or… something, right? But there wasn’t anything. Nothing visible, anyways. My wife and children didn’t remember anything about the laboratory either, so I…”

His shoulders sagged.

“... So you convinced yourself it hadn’t happened,” Cara said coolly from the dining table in the far back.

The husband winced. “I… well, who would? Who’d want to believe Myrmurs, of all things, had been planted inside us? If there were no wounds, and nobody else remembered, then… then I thought perhaps it had really been a fever dream or some strange fit.”

“Until a few days ago when the Myrmurs finally decided to bloom into Blight-Classes and wrap you all up,” Gael finished. “Why a few days ago? Why specifically that time?”

“I-I don’t know. Even now, I don’t—”

“Rhetorical question. I know why,” he muttered. “It’s a trap for us. This old guy knows we’re looking for him and wants us dead.”

“What? But… who are you people?”

“Not your problem. What ball were you talking about, though? Where’d you get nabbed off the streets?”

The fat husband blinked at him. The wife stared too, and so did the children.

“What other ball is there in Bleakhearth?” the wife said. “We’re talking about the Endless Masquerade.”