Chapter 34 of 78 · Book 5, The Butcher's Masquerade

Chapter 34 — How to kill a mantis

Book: The Butcher's Masquerade · Part: The Unhinged Child · Previous: Chapter 33 — Crawling Through the Ages · Next: Chapter 35 — Ballroom Blitz · Floor: Floor 6 — The Hunting Grounds · Series: the series

Opening

“Poison is good against the mantids,” one audience member said.

Summary

Thirty-nine trophies; 914 hunters. The crowd's advice: poison works three times as fast on mantids but Vrah wears an antidote ring and is immune to clouds now, so it would have to be a blade poison that kills in five seconds; their necks are the least armoured; loud sounds hurt them, which is why other hunters ring themselves with alarm traps — the mantids swoop from above and poach kills, and since Vrah killed a fellow hunter legally in the Hunting Grounds a few seasons back, everyone does what the Dark Hive says. The Nebulars: not a race but a religious cult that augments itself as a sacrament, nomadic pacifists who bioengineer their children for dead worlds and worship a space oddity at the inner system's centre, robed head to foot 'like the sand people from Star Wars wearing bishop hats'; their Sin Patrol sends young priests-in-training to hunt seeded-world abominations as a crusade, targets clerics and paladins, sometimes buys a deity sponsorship, and wants to run a crawl; they fought a war with a hive long ago and just failed an attack on Lucia Mar. Uptown Hal: 'Scarcity breeds increased competition. And competition always leads to violence' — and Drick quotes the nebs' own Ballad of Survival: 'Violence breeds chaos. From chaos we were born and into chaos we will succumb.' In the green room the training room is gone; the tunnels say Carl pushed Circe off the podium with the Apothecary egging him on; inventory cannot be removed here, so the plan is hotlisted. Donut's backstory: Lucia is in the saferoom screaming and punching herself in the face, has traps that teleport people out of the saferoom into the town, and chased Donut inside as the hunters arrived — six or seven mantises and ten Nebulars with 'MAGNIFICENT HATS'. Samantha is tied to Vrah's back among the decapitated heads ('THEY ARE POOR COMPANY'); she gave the hunters Carl's arrival point five metres off, but the dryad snitched, and the bugs and the robes are fighting over who gets him. Katia is shaping a fake Donut from Bautista's stuffed back-alley mouser. No potions before transfer. The river: 'This is where you belong, Carl […] Jump into the rapids.' 'Zev, if I die and Donut gets out of this, please watch over her.'

Characters

• Carl — Takes a war council's advice and goes back with no protections.
• Princess Donut — Trapped in the guildhall by teleport traps and a screaming Lucia.
• Samantha — Tortured on Vrah's back; lied by five metres; slut-shamed by Donut.
• Lucia Mar — Cheats the saferoom with ejection traps; punches herself in the face.
• Katia Grim — Makes a decoy Donut from a stuffed mouser.
• Uptown Hal — 'Just the good ones.'
• Drick — The Ballad of Survival.
• Zev — 'I'll do my best, Carl.'
• Vrah — Legal murder of a hunter; Samantha on her back.
• Daniel Bautista — Owns a stuffed back-alley mouser.

Locations

• Alucarda — Hunters at the door, Lucia inside, teleport traps between.

Motifs

• The hunters — Mantid weaknesses; the Nebular Sin Patrol; the truce collapsing.
• The Nebulars — A pacifist cult on a crusade against the seeded.
• The river in Carl's head — 'Embrace the chaos.'
• The stuffed figures — A back-alley mouser as Donut's stand-in.