The Exorcist Doctor

Chapter 119 - Three Bowls // And a Hard Place

Two hours.

It was supposed to be easy. Instead, the next two hours passed in slammed doors, shouted curses, and an indecent collection of kitchenware hurled at his person. A turnip to the head. A cabbage to the chest. One shopkeep even chased him into the street with a skillet. Gael was beginning to wonder if Umbracross had grown a collective memory like a hive of ants. It was like every door, every stall, and every tavern knew him by stink alone.

Do I actually stink?

How the fuck do they all remember me?

And now? Now the two of them were sitting in a newly opened shop tucked into a back alley so narrow it could’ve been mistaken for a coffin slot. There were no windows. The shopowner couldn’t afford any, which meant no view of the Hanging Market’s gaudy hanging shops, and that means all there was to focus on while they waited for their food was heat—thick and wet and suffocating—as the sweating shopowner worked a roaring stove in front of their noses, right over the bar counter.

The bar counter had only four seats, two already occupied by stacks of glass boxes containing living, monstrous fish. Gael tried not to look the fishies in the eye as he ordered their supper before Maeve could even open her mouth—before she could even look at the menu.

He was simply hungry.

And now, in the hell-box of steam and sputtering pans, Maeve sagged in her stool and rested her head against the counter.

“... Just what did you do to be so hated by the locals,” she muttered, face-down on the counter.

Gael leaned an elbow against the counter, grinning through the oily fog. “Ah, my sweet, it’s just unusually bad here. Umbracross is the smallest of Bharncair’s wards—it’s only the size of Vharnveil’s shadow—which means fewer people live here, which means more people remember each other. Faces are sharper when there aren’t as many to blur together in the Vile.”

Then he rested his cane against the counter as well, shrugging and popping his shoulder joints. “Hard to find a shop that won’t kick me out. Unless, of course, it’s a new shop like this one. All innocent. All oblivious. Still unsoiled by my resume. Hehe—”

As if on cue, the chef over the counter took a ladle of hot oil and splashed it in his face.

He immediately jerked back and youched, clutching his sleeves as the oil spat across the wood.

“Don’t think I don’t know who you are, Raven. You’re the guy who…” The chef banged a wok onto the stove as if trying to recall the details, sending a metallic gong through the room. “You’re the guy who tried to ferment rat blood into communion wine, and then tried to sell it to seminarians, right?”

Maeve turned her head on the counter, eyes going wide. “You what?”

“Not my proudest moment.”

The chef jabbed a spatula at them both. “I’m only serving you because I have extra stock I couldn’t cook up today. You’ll eat everything you ordered, every last bone and grain, or I’ll drag you out and gut you for tomorrow’s breakfast myself.”

Gael placed a hand over his heart and bowed his head. “Yes, sir.”

The chef snorted and went back to his orchestra of fire and knives. As the heat wrapped around the shop like wet cloth, hissing and sizzling, Gael turned back to Maeve again.

“Okay, so here’s the plan,” he said. “You’ve noticed how deathly ‘safe’ it is here in Umbracross in terms of Myrmurs and bug infestations. That’s because the Mortifera Enforcers watch this place like a hawk strapped to a clocktower, and a Myrmur in Umbracross is akin to a Myrmur in Vharnveil. Meaning, they’re dealt with extremely quickly. There’s nothing for us to investigate here.”

Maeve groaned, still sprawled out on the counter. “So we’ll be going to the other wards instead?”

“Uh-huh. So decide which one you wanna eat first.”

As she tilted her head, ready to ask what ‘eating’ had anything with choosing, the chef tossed three bowls over the counter.

Each was massive, steaming, and grotesque in its own artistry.

The first bowl was like a chopped up leviathan stuffed into a little bowl. Tentacles curled out, slick with brine and spiced ink, and bulbous, gel-like eyes were still embedded in the flesh, staring upward with a ghastly look. The broth was black-green, oily, and carried a stench that mixed the sea with a charnel pit. Tiny little fishes still twitched in the soup, though they complimented the intestine-like noodles rather well, so he couldn’t say it looked all too disgusting.

Would eat.

The second bowl gleamed like a saint’s chalice. The rice was arranged into a perfect mound in the middle of the bowl, slices of pale fish were fanned like cathedral glass around the rice, and the shallow broth coating only the bottom of the bowl was clear as morning frost. Scallions sat atop the rice in disciplined lines, while the steam wafting from it smelled faintly of lilies and herbs clipped by careful scissors. An elegant dish—surgical in its order, which he appreciated very much—with flavors that promised… purity, if not a wave of oral delight.

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Would eat.

And the third bowls looked like something quarried straight from the ground. Dark meat was hacked into jagged chunks, bones jutted like stalagmites, and the sauce was thick and grey, reeking of iron and stone. Bits of root vegetables floated around the dry bowl like gravel. It looked less like food and more like a punishment—something miners would eat with bloody knuckles and broken teeth—but…

Eh.

Would eat.

Gael tapped the counter. “Choose. Which one do you want?”

Maeve blinked at the spread. She looked from bowl to bowl, then back at Gael with a suspicious face.

“What… are these?” she asked, finally.

Instead of Gael answering, though, the chef took the liberty of planting his spatula on the counter like a flag.

“This,” he said, tapping the seafood, “is my black leviathan noodles. Fresh cut, brined in smoked ink, tentacles, and eyes. The noodles are pork intestine and… some type of baby fish. I don’t remember what I ordered.”

Then he tapped the second bowl. “Glasswater ricewith pale fish, clear broth, clean oil, and herb steam. It’s boring, so I won’t bore you with the details, but this,” he thumped the third bowl with the heel of his hand. “Miner’s Mercy. Ox meat and bone, processed iron sauce, stone-root, and some stonedust. The meat’s the main dish.”

Gael nudged her with an elbow again. “Come on, choose already—”

She gave him a small shove without looking—an elbow to the ribs—and leaned over the seafood bowl first. Her lips pursed, and her eyes watered at the brine coming up like low tide in a graveyard. Very, very reluctantly, she pinched a coil of tentacle with the chopsticks and blew on it; the little fish in the broth twitched as if in sympathy.

“It’s… strange,” she said, and took a bite. Her expression immediately buckled in three places, but she kept chewing dutifully. “It tastes very weird. Very fresh. Almost like—”

“The squid was still alive a few minutes ago?” the chef cut in, smug. “That’s because I just chopped it up in the back. It’s rude not to honor a thing while it still remembers its name… or has its tentacles, I guess.”

She made a small, disgusted face at the bowl and turned to the second. The glasswater rice, indeed, looked like a shrine. She scooped a slice of fish and a bit of rice.

“It looks delicious,” she said, and ate.

Silence.

“... It tastes like Vharnveil,” she said at last, shaking her head. “Clean and… blergh. I don’t—” She put the spoon down carefully, as if it might scold her. “You take this one. I don’t want it.”

Finally, she went for the rock bowl. She took a cautious bite, as if worried she was going to cut her mouth on the dark meat—but then she took another bite. Then three more, all faster than the last.

“It looks messy,” she said between mouthfuls, seemingly surprised by herself, “and… tough. Like I’m about to eat rocks.” Another bite. A small, involuntary hum. “But it tastes… earthy. Strong. It’s kinda like Miss Alba’s noodles.” She dragged the whole bowl closer. “I’m taking this bowl.”

“You sure?” Gael asked. She nodded, cheeks just beginning to glow from the heat.

“You can have the other two.”

“Magnificent.”

Shrugging, he pulled the other bowls closer. With chopsticks in one hand and a spoon in the other, he devoured both the tentacles and the soaked rice as if he had two mouths to feed—and so the three of them ate, the chef humming happily as they chowed down what he would’ve had to toss out anyways.

Halfway through his bowls, Gael finally found the air to speak again.

“We’re going to Ironwych first.”

“Ironwych?” Maeve said.

“These three bowls are prized local dishes from the other cardinal wards,” he said. “The black leviathan noodles are from Wraithpier, the Northern Ward of Spirits. The glasswater rice is from Bleakhearth, the Western Ward of Masks, and the Miner’s Mercy is from Ironwych, the Eastern Ward of Steel. The other cardinal wards are all very, very different from our Blightmarch, the Southern Ward of Plagues, so since we have to visit each one eventually, I thought I’d let you decide where we go first by figuring out which delicacy you like more. It’d be a pity, after all, to stay an extended period where the food hates you.”

She scowled at him so hard it made the neighboring fish in the glass boxes avert their eyes. “How manipulative.”

“Thank you.”

“What if I wanted to go see the fishes first?”

The chef barked a laugh, which turned into a coughing fit. Gael laughed, too.

“You do not want to go see the fishes first,” he said. “Everyone likes the idea of visiting Wraithpier until they actually visit it. Even if you’d chosen the leviathan noodles, I’d have forced you to pick between Ironwych and Bleakhearth first, so…” He tapped her bowl with his chopsticks. “Ironwych it is.”

She chewed on a bone thoughtfully, then set it aside. “You wanted Ironwych anyways?”

“Of course,” he said. “The smiths there could upgrade half my equipment while drunk and blindfolded. There are also fabrication mills for chemical glass and medicine rigs there that we simply don’t have, so if I’m able to charm a guildmaster or three, we might be able to secure a pipeline for future medicine production machines… hopefully for cheap, of course.”

“... And what about the exploding Hosts we’ll be investigating?” she asked, lowering her voice to a whisper so the chef wouldn’t hear. “If we find another person who'd been tampered with, and they blow up after we destroy the Myrmur heart out…”

Gael chewed slowly, swallowed, and let a smile slant across his face.

“I've got an idea to deal with the bombs,” he said. “Already prepared for it, in fact.”

Her eyes lifted. “What kind of idea?”

“The sort that needs a living test case,” he replied easily. “We just need to find a Host first, and then see if my little idea holds.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“... Well, I guess it has to,” he said. “So, how about we finish this meal, find ourselves a place to sleep in Umbracross, and then—first thing tomorrow morning—we go to Ironwych to look for some patients?”