Mermaid

Vera wanted to find somewhere like a storeroom. Her first thought was to look for valuables.

Gordon cared more about clues.

He needed to figure out where Harold wrote, where he drew, and where he gave his orders.

After scouting around, he found Harold's office.

The room had originally been the maintenance workers' duty room. It was cramped, with only a desk suitable for writing.

A Montfort Family servant's uniform hung behind the door. He had actually kept it.

Harold had once worn that uniform while cleaning the Montfort Family's collection room and talking to the Silver Fish Casket.

After some effort, Gordon found a few useful things.

[Old notes. Whose childhood dream is to become a monster?]

[Shopping list. Buying things without reimbursement makes faith expensive.]

[Private letter. Describes a bad idea.]

Gordon skimmed them quickly without reading closely, but several words already made him uncomfortable... words like "sacred vessel," "sluice district," and "Fisher King"...

Now was not the time to sit down and appreciate a Cultist's mental state.

He put away everything: Harold's self-indulgent sentimentality, the Blackwater Hermitage's secrets, and all the assorted paperwork.

These things were important, best read slowly over tea back home.

He was sure they would yield something substantial.

"Find anything?" Vera's voice came from outside.

"Paper. One of humanity's greatest inventions."

"Paper won't sell. I've got aberrant materials." Vera held a ragged sack in her right hand.

Inside were cartilage, glands, coral, shells, and the like, all carrying a faint spiritual glow.

"Nice. That sack is definitely marketable." Gordon's eyes lit up, and he abandoned any attempt to explain the importance of paper to Vera.

"What about the corpse?" Vera asked. "If we go down, we won't get back up."

They both looked toward the bottom of the reservoir.

Harold lay where he had fallen on the drained floor. The walls were sheer, and neither of them could fly down.

Vera rested the Black Piercer against the railing, judging the angle.

"I'll go down and cut him open. The most valuable things in Harold aren't going to climb out on their own," Gordon said.

"Dangerous," Vera said.

"Valuable," Gordon said. "Keep watch up here. If anything happens, pull me up."

"..." Vera reluctantly agreed. "What if he's still alive?"

Gordon looked down.

[Harold's corpse. Rest in peace.]

That confirmed it.

Since Harold had become a line of item description, there was little risk of him rising from the dead. Gordon's eyes did not trigger on living people.

Gordon went back to the boat for a rope, tied one end to the hall's iron railing, and secured it with a bowline.

Then he wrapped the rope twice around his waist, gave it a few experimental tugs, and confirmed that the knot was tight enough.

"If anything shows up, just haul me up like a sack of food," he said.

"Be quick." Vera gave him a look, as though weighing whether that joke deserved a punch.

Then Gordon climbed down with the sampling case tucked against him.

At the bottom, sludge rose over the soles of his shoes. Residual black water clung to the floor, feeling like cold grease.

He walked over.

Harold's corpse was truly horrifying, truly ugly.

Gordon crouched down and first examined Harold's chest.

[Multicolored scale. Belongs to no creature you recognize.]

Admittedly, the scale looked quite beautiful, standing out sharply amid Harold's hideous flesh.

Gordon opened his sampling case, cut out the scale with his hunting knife, placed it in a thick-walled glass bottle, and poured Sealing Wax over it.

After collecting the multicolored scale, Gordon examined the corpse again.

Among the gray flesh, a shape resembling a black fish swam slowly deep inside the abdominal cavity.

It had no physical body, yet it slipped from the shadows of the intestines into the stomach, then swam toward the head.

As though Harold's corpse were nothing more than its fish tank.

Keeping his eyes on his target, Gordon cut forcefully into the body, exposing it to the air.

The back of his neck instantly tightened.

[Weak aberrant source substance-"failed birth." The resentment of something that failed to be born correctly. It does not understand living; it remembers only that birth hurt. Failed failed failed failed...]

Those final words were not a static description.

They printed themselves repeatedly over Gordon's vision, as though someone were dipping an infant's fingers in blood and writing them over and over on the insides of his eyeballs.

Gordon steeled himself and dug it out of Harold's corpse.

Ordinary source substance generally fused with a person, but this unformed, horrifying source substance seemed merely to be occupying Harold's flesh.

Still, that was remarkable.

Harold had gotten it wrong, and Gordon had sabotaged it, yet it had still produced a strange source substance. That proved the ritual was truly unusual. Gordon had to learn its secrets.

He struggled to pour it into a bottle, then quickly capped it.

Just then, Gordon heard singing.

At first, he thought it was the pumping station's pipes resonating.

But the sound soon became continuous, soft and delicate.

He listened closely.

It sounded as though someone were singing, through a wet throat, a lullaby that should never have existed on land.

There were no intelligible lyrics. It carried the texture of something from the deep sea, cold and soft, so beautiful it made his scalp prickle.

Then heavy rain suddenly began to fall, beating against the pumping station's roof.

He sensed something uncanny approaching.

There was a vaguely human silhouette, but that was where the resemblance ended.

"Vera!" Gordon shouted.

Vera did not ask why. She simply gave a powerful pull with her right arm.

Gordon shot upward. The rope cinched his waist so hard he nearly lost his lunch.

Halfway up, Gordon saw a hand reach out of a drainage pipe.

The hand was so white it was almost translucent. Something with an almost feminine silhouette crawled out of the pipe.

Wet hair clung to her shoulders and back, gleaming dark green like waterweed.

Below her waist trailed a fish's tail covered in fine scales. Everywhere else was snowy white.

So beautiful...

Gordon's brain honestly stalled for a moment.

But she held a dagger with a narrow blade and a white handle.

[Whalebone Dagger. Careful, it holds grudges.]

[Pipe. Leads somewhere you should not be curious about.]

[Seashell Hairpin. Do not mistake the sea for a river.]

Vera did not exclaim at the sight of the mermaid.

She merely wound the rope once more around her right wrist, then hauled Gordon up.

The mermaid crawled over to Harold's corpse.

Thud.

The dagger plunged into Harold's chest.

Thud.

Another stab.

Thud, thud, thud.

Her movements grew faster and more vicious.

She sang as she stabbed.

Her song was as gentle as a lullaby, but her movements were as savage as vengeance.

Gordon watched, a little transfixed.

After a massive explosion, a mutated Harold, and an emergency discharge of floodwater, he had now seen a sewer mermaid.

To his eyes, the mermaid was coated in dense spirituality, like wet, colorful oils flowing over her skin and scales.

She sang as she mutilated Harold's corpse.

She even sliced open the remaining fleshy growths and bit them off.

After chewing twice, she wore the expression of someone who had eaten a stale gummy.

Suddenly, she looked up at Gordon and Vera. Those eyes were neither fishlike nor human.

"Let's go," Vera said.

"I couldn't agree more." All of Gordon's beautiful fantasies vanished.

[Mermaid. Fairy tales never told you what they eat.]

By the time they returned to the boat, the rain had grown heavier.

Gordon rowed, and the boat glided quietly outward.

As he performed the mechanically repetitive motions, his mind could not help wandering.

This world is so vast.

Incredible, like something out of a dream!

First the Water Monkey and the Silverfish Casket, then the octopus-faced Cultist, then Harold, the clam-man whose birth had failed. Now even mermaids were crawling out of sewers, and they ate corpses.

Yet Gordon had few trump cards. He still had a brand-new source substance to empower, and he had to think about repaying his student loan...

And how to turn everything he had dug out tonight into gold pounds.

But Gordon suddenly wanted to laugh.

Because he was finally certain that these seemingly terrifying things could die, too.

How many other things in this world are just putting on a mysterious act?

Once that thought occurred to him, he felt there was nothing much to fear.

The boat returned to the Blackwater River. Earlier, they had traveled upstream; now they were going downstream, and the little boat drifted toward the city on its own.

Gordon gathered his thoughts, and his attention finally returned to Vera.

Her breathing was so heavy.

All night, she had stood straight as a piece of iron, taking Gordon wherever they needed to go with ease. It was easy to forget that she was human too, that she could be hurt, feel pain, and die.

Now she was clearly struggling. Blood had soaked the left side of her coat and dripped from its hem.

Vera took a small silver tube from her coat and popped off its sealed cap with the thumb of the same hand.

Inside was a pale gray liquid, casting a heavy, cold gleam against the inner glass wall.

[Suppressant Mixture. Rapidly reduces source substance contamination. Also affects the nervous system and suppresses humanity.]

"It's bad enough to need that?" Gordon asked, startled.

"It's important." Trembling, Vera drank it all in one gulp.

A few seconds later, her entire body went rigid, shaking all over.

Then Vera slumped in the rain. Blood ran down, mingling with rainwater.

"...You're hurt." Gordon moved over to sit beside her.

"It's fine." Vera looked at him.

"Were you planning to let your wounds discuss a healing strategy among themselves?"

"That's how I've always done it."

"Not now, not ever again, and not while I'm here."

"You know how to treat wounds?"

"I promise you won't die senselessly because of a wound," Gordon pledged.

He did study biology and medicine, after all.

Vera watched him for a while.

"That's already... a very serious promise," Vera said.

Gordon took off her black coat.

The white shirt at her left shoulder was already stuck to her skin with blood.

Gordon cut the fabric open and found a huge, horrifying purple-black bruise across Vera's left shoulder, shaped almost like a depression left by a hammer blow.

Beneath her ribs was a tear nearly a handspan long, with flesh curling outward and ugly, dark-red wound edges.

Several smaller wounds were hidden along her waist and right forearm, and her back was an utter mess.

Apparently, her original plan had been to let her body handle it on its own, and if it couldn't, leave it for her next life.

"You don't take nearly enough care of yourself," Gordon said.

"As long as I can still move," Vera said.

"You can still blink after your head's cut off. That doesn't mean you're doing well," Gordon said.

"Oh," Vera answered softly.

Gordon sorted through her mixtures and found a narrow-necked glass bottle. Pale red liquid swayed inside, shimmering with spiritual light against the glass.

[Regeneration Mixture. Standard hunter recovery medicine.]

"Drink this too," Gordon said.

"Don't," Vera stopped him. "It's expensive."

She had already used the Suppressant Mixture tonight. Drinking the Regeneration Mixture now was too much of a luxury for her.

"Be good. I'll buy you more when we're back in town." Gordon uncorked the mixture and held it to her lips.

She tilted her head back and drank.

A few seconds after the mixture went down, Vera tensed, her breathing deepened, and her brow gradually relaxed.

"Tell me if it hurts." Gordon readied the Pain-Relief Tincture.

"It doesn't hurt."

"I haven't touched the wound yet."

"I'm telling you in advance."

Gordon went over to the storm lantern, sterilized his instruments over the flame, then tended to her wounds.

He picked out the visible debris with tweezers, sprinkled on hemostatic powder, and used a suture needle to close the long gash below her ribs.

The boat rocked without pause.

Torrential rain battered the canopy, the current slapped against the planks, and the Blackwater River lifted the hull again and again, only to slam it back down.

An ordinary person would not even have been able to sit steadily in such wind and waves.

Yet Gordon's movements remained steady and precise.

As the needle pierced her skin, he could even anticipate which way the boat would tilt.

And so he performed surgery on the rocking water, closing each wound inch by inch beneath his hands.

Vera quietly took in the sensation. It felt so strange... unlike anything she had ever felt before...

As he neared the last stitch, Vera suddenly rested her forehead gently against Gordon's shoulder.

The movement was light, merely checking that there was somewhere she could lean for a moment.

Gordon's fingers paused.

"Don't move around," Gordon said.

"I'm not moving."

"You're leaning your whole body on me now."

"Just let me lean for a moment." Vera closed her eyes, her right arm curling gently around his side. A few seconds later, she pressed her forehead a little more firmly against him.