A Gentleman of the Void #2
“Just a—” She tightens her stomach, but her lungs are more stubborn; she takes the handkerchief and hacks into the embroidery, defacing the elaborate patterns and impeccable monogram.
With one hand, she gropes through her purse for her atomizer, while the other holds the fabric against her face.
As she gasps, a strange, almost soothing air weaves up from the fibers.
Her breath cools, and she uses the lull in her fit to spray two doses of medicinal perfume onto her throat. “Fine soon,” she chokes.
Suits bustle around the tribunal. The canapés have arrived, along with the execution post. The quartet hoists their instruments, and two Tender Guard carabineers wrestle the condemned against the post. The Marshal feeds the strap over his neck and tightens the collar.
“How long does it usually take?” Mallory asks.
“A few minutes—at most,” Aster says. “Less if he struggles.”
“I meant your medicine. Should I escort you out?”
She almost smiles, almost manages to swallow her next cough, but it bursts up her trachea with a flutter of wet wings.
She traps the quivering thing behind Mallory’s handkerchief while he pulls her to her feet.
She is dizzily pleased to note that he is taller than her only by virtue of his hat, which extends a few inches above the highest feather of her headpiece.
Just as they squeeze into the aisle, the music begins.
The Marshal Revenant turns the crank as Mallory pushes past coattails and serving trays.
The crowd parts, muttering words of pity and disgust. He ignores them, hands firm at Aster’s elbows, breath warm against her neck.
She leans into his urgent touch, his scentless collar.
When her next fit comes, it isn’t entirely unfeigned.
The hall adjacent to the courtroom is wide, cavernous, but quiet.
Aster slows among the columns of amber glass, stopping by a fountain to hack a few gray dregs into the handkerchief.
Mallory kneels beside her, hand on her back, either ignorant enough to extend comfort to a walking contagion, or wise enough to know she isn’t contagious at all.
A pair of Tender Guardsmen passes through the hall. The green glass of their helmets glints at the sight of the Marshal’s hireling being manhandled by a stranger, but Aster waves them away. They return to the courtroom door just as a muted cheer spills from under it.
“Don’t let me keep you from the show,” she tells Mallory, clutching the handkerchief to her chest so he can’t see what crawls inside. “I’ll have this washed for you. Go on.”
“It’s fine,” he sighs. “I’ve seen enough. I’m not so eager to watch someone die that I’d just…” He breathes a chuckle. “Watch someone die. Should we find you a doctor?”
“Oh, no. Nothing to be done.”
He furrows his brow. His eyes are dusty gold, like a beam of light in a grain silo. Aster has never seen a grain silo, but this does not deter her imagination.
“Would you like a cigarette?” she ventures.
“I would.” He watches her drop his handkerchief into her purse. “But are you sure you should…”
“Doesn’t matter. A little smoke can’t make it any worse.”
Maybe it’ll kill whatever’s growing inside you, Elspeth used to say, back when they stole cigarettes from the nurses at the Sanitarium and burned through them, one by one, at the open windowsill.
“Whatever you say, vralen,” he says.
Aster leads him up a spiral staircase to one of the Palas’s many balconies.
The pillars are braced in gold, carved with fractal stems and bulging marble petals of Revivalist design, as if they had sprouted spontaneously from the rubble of the last coup.
Dozens of chandeliers dangle from marble branches, a glimmering canopy of soft green light.
Hidden among the glass foliage, Aster fishes through her purse for her pearl case.
She taps out two thin sticks of tobacco and hands one to him.
As he pulls a matchbook from his breast pocket, she wonders if he shares her contamination.
Elspeth always says their kind have an uncanny way of finding one another, especially the ones who hide it well.
“So,” she starts. “What brings you to an execution, Eir vant Passand? Surely there are more civilized distractions for a newcomer to our fair city.”
He leans over the banister and eases into a smoky sigh, staring into the arched jungle reflected in the foyer’s pools. “Is it that obvious?”
“Afraid so. You’ve got the lilt of plum country. And you’re dressed like a tinsel-bug.”
He stills. For a moment she thinks she’s offended him, but when his laugh comes, it’s startlingly genuine. “I’ve got a lilt?”
“Sounds like it’s from Dagdrun.”
“Good guess. My father had a little villa there. Haven’t been back in a while, though.”
“The very lip of the wastes,” she says, a bit dreamily. She knows nothing of Dagdrun but what the old master Rebau painted of it, orchards of twisted wood, jet-black in the wispy sunset. “Why so far from home, country boy? Recreation? Education? Misfortune?”
“Loose threads, mostly,” he answers. “Tying up a family matter. I’m looking—well, doesn’t matter. It’s a story that’ll outlast a cigarette.”
“Have another, then.”
He laughs, stubbing it out on his sole and pocketing the butt. “I should get going, vralen. But let me walk you home, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t—but it’ll be a short walk. I live here.”
He frowns, looking her up and down, as if searching for a uniform under her beaded dress, something that will explain her relationship to the Grand Marshal. “Are you his daughter or something?”
“Hardly,” she sighs. “Just his perfumer.”
“I see.” Refreshingly, there is no pity in his voice, no disgust, but when he turns toward the stairs, she’s sure she’s said something wrong.
“Where are you staying?” she calls after him. “Conundrum Street? The boardinghouse on Petunia? So I can have your handkerchief delivered.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll run into you again, vralen. I know where to find you. Until then, my regards to the Marshal.”
“Wait—” She puts out her cigarette on the balustrade and trots down the staircase after him.
When she reaches the bottom, she is alone but for her own image, flattened in the reflecting pool.
She surveys the empty foyer, wheezing, as something flutters inside her purse.
She does not notice the spindly creature of mucus that writhes from between the silver clasps, falls to the ground, and dies at her feet.