The Only Good Man in Tiliard
Every time death’s scythe misses Grand Marshal Maximian Sorav, the Tender Guard executes a few of his enemies and throws him a parade.
The ceremony arrives with the pomp and regularity of a holiday, commemorating a bullet sailing past his ear or a poisoned olive garnishing his martini.
The trumpets blow the jaunty “March of the Third Autotomic Brigade” down Rue Petunia, and Sorav climbs atop his dappled horse to lead the tattoo, enduring every chord with a handsome, white-toothed cringe.
Despite his ravenous taste for sopranos, the Marshal Revenant detests music.
In the solarium of the Palas, he steels himself for the pageantry.
As he paces naked across the marble, he doesn’t carry himself like a man exposed.
He has a certain regal solidity that gets him mistaken, if standing still, for statues of himself.
His skin is marked with decades of trials overcome, inked with honors his superiors gave him during his service and the scars they gave him during his rebellion.
“Living proof,” Aufhocker wrote of his longtime friend and once-commander, “that Beauty exacts a price.”
Aster watches her patron over her perfumer’s organ, a miniature cityscape of glass facets and stoppered chimneys.
Prisms of scent capture the light spilling through the stained glass windows and tangles of flamewort vines, unspooling in strings of indigo and green and red.
The topography of the organ defies mapping, a maze of decanters, atomizers, carrier oils, precipitants, herbs and aldehydes and the blended seduction glands of the northern bilge goat.
Her notebook opens to columns of alchemical logograms: formulae to brighten the skin, refine the accent, inspire frenzied loyalty, or make a man, if only for a few hours, completely forget his past.
“Something with voice,” Sorav says. “Something for eloquence. The bastard is forcing me to make a speech.”
“Who is, Eir Marshal?” Aster asks, uncorking her essence of songbird. He won’t need a full coat. Just a dot behind his ear, or under the foreskin if he anticipates ending the day by conspiring with some parliamentarian’s wife.
“Chancellor Gorslung. Who else? The man tells us to kiss his ass and God help us, all we can do is ask which cheek.” The Marshal turns on his heel, muscles tensing in his leg. “Let’s keep it short.”
Aster scoops a thimble of liver tree ash. “Prosaic or poetic?”
“I don’t care.”
“Sincere?”
“Definitely not. Nothing gets those frock-coated pigs squealing more than sincerity.”
“And for Florian?”
“You know him. He’s adamant that he has a mustache.”
Aster sighs. The Marshal’s protégé always demands a scent suffused with strong angles of maturity.
Something for marksmanship, and horsemanship, something to add a few inches to all the right places—and, as often as not, facial hair.
She’s a good perfumer, but nothing short of a miracle can address the fuzz that attempts to grow on Florian’s upper lip.
“Give him something to clear his head,” says the Marshal. “Something to cool him off. He’s been impulsive lately. More than usual. Slit that gunman’s tongue before we got anything out of him.”
“You think he had a story worth listening to?” Aster asks.
“Worth is a strong word. The man was an insect, trying to talk himself up. Said there was something big moving under our feet. He didn’t get farther than that before Florian got … overexcited.”
Aster opens a jar of powdered blackberry thorns, then a tonic of blast mouse fungus.
Finally, she reaches for the catalyst that ties the assemblage together, that makes a bouquet out of scattered petals.
Cautiously, she opens the mirrored box at the center of the organ and retrieves the dropper.
Even metabolized with a cascade of BGS enzymes, a single drop of ecdytoxin is enough to elevate a scent to a strong impression, and a second is enough to elevate a strong impression to a fatal miasma.
A third might elevate one’s workshop twenty feet in every direction and suspend the pieces there for an hour or two.
“Still,” the Marshal continues, pausing to let her dab his lower lip, where his stubble begins, gold with the barest hints of white.
“The thing about insects is that there’s always more than one.
I’ve been in this business long enough to know that much.
He’ll have friends nearby. Maybe even a patron. ”
“You don’t think the Chancellor is involved?”
“Hm. Not his style. He’s theatrical. This was … too straightforward. Almost spontaneous. I suppose I can’t put anything past Crypsis, though.”
Aster shudders at the invocation of the Chancellor’s private intelligencers.
“Here, Eir Patron. For your tongue.” She presents him with the bottle, removing the stopper to let the vapor drift into his nostrils.
His eyes twitch under closed lids. He can’t breathe the essences as she can, he can’t sense them percolating from lungs to blood, where they contort millions of minuscule aspects of both wearer and observer.
While she can see every convoluted root, all he can do is smell the flower.
“This is new,” he says eventually.
“I’ve been playing with citrus elements. Let it sit awhile, Eir Sorav. I think you’ll like it.”
He opens his mouth so she can place a drop on his tongue.
Then she sets to work on the rest of him, dressing him in his usual regalia.
On his breastbone she adorns him with strength, dexterity for his wrists, authority for his jaw.
There is no need for a veneer of invulnerability.
Somehow he has managed to secure that on his own.
She applies each scent with a horologist’s precision, accounting for his natural smells, the shapes of his movements, the evolution and intermingling of each facet.
Like music, or gardening, hers is not a static art; she considers the bloom and wilt of every note, so that by the time the Marshal Revenant steps in front of the crowd, he will embody every virtue the task at hand requires.
The door to the solarium opens. The laundress arrives with his uniform, the jeweler with his medals, and the mortician with the skull of the last man who tried to kill him. Bleached, deconstructed, and brushed with gold leaf, the bones have been fashioned into a tasteful headpiece.
“Before I forget,” he says as the mortician tightens his tooth-studded bolo tie. “I want a dancer. Classically trained. Premier soloist, male or female. Ideally by Acid Moon.”
Aster blinks. “New Acid Moon?”
“Quarter at latest. Is there a problem?”
“N-no, Eir Patron.”
“Good.” Sorav knows, but does not care, that the task of procuring musical talent should fall to an in-house composer.
He hasn’t bothered to sponsor one since the Revival.
Barely a week after he seized the Palas and all its occupants he’d grown so annoyed with the bandleader’s endless rendition of Tasarte’s “Strangleroot Tarantella” he’d had the man nailed into his piano and thrown into the Catoptric.
“I’ll try my best,” Aster says.
“No, you won’t try.” He glances at her as the jeweler clips diamonds to his collar. “You will procure me a dancer by new moon. Understood?”
“Yes, Eir Patron.”
“When does the fitting begin?”
“An hour ago.”
“I shouldn’t delay you, then.” He hangs his pistol at his side. “God forbid you keep the Chancellor’s bride waiting.”
“No hurry. Elspeth won’t be there for some time.” Aster dips her hand in her breast pocket for her watch and finds Mallory’s handkerchief instead. “If at all.”
“Don’t be too long. I’ll need you tonight. I’ve got supper with the Chancellor and I’ll need something to counteract him.” He steps into his boots and makes for the arched door. The laundress throws on his cloak as he passes. “Remember, Acid Moon.”
“Yes, Eir Patron.”
“And Aster.” He stops to glance over his shoulder, and his olfactory ensemble blossoms. His smile is young, vital, his stare piercing and assured.
When he speaks, his voice arrives seamlessly in her head, as if he is articulating her thoughts before she has a chance to think them.
She is not sure if these are his actual words, or only the ones she wants to hear: “This is the best scent you’ve made in years. ”
Aster is monstrously late, but not late enough to upstage Elspeth, who arrives half an hour after her entourage and a full hour after her appointment has ended.
The seamsters and planners are minimally inconvenienced.
Like every artisan in the overcity, their days contort around the nonlinear schedules of their clients.
They circle the suite with food and champagne as Elspeth tries on dresses with earnest disgust.
“Uncouth,” she says, tilting her hips so a milky wave of silk glitters down her leg. “I might as well go naked. Aster, do you see this thing?”
“It’s not great,” Aster says. Bridesmaids scurry back and forth, fetching mirrors and adjusting the lighting.
They exude a harmless bouquet of scents, each catered to a small insecurity: elevating a brow, straightening a smile.
Their perfume is cheap, made not from ecdytoxin but some illusory knockoff, chimera toxin or wizard hazel.
Elspeth turns once more, then announces her verdict. “I wouldn’t bury my worst enemy in this.”
“My apologies, vralen,” replies a seamstress. “We’ll try another.”
“I’m devastated I missed you at the courthouse,” Elspeth says, stepping down from the dais. She’s wearing a strong perfume today, muskrat blood with top notes of clove and contrition. It’s as close to an apology as Aster’s going to get. “But you’ll never guess who I ran over on the way there.”
“Ran into?”
“No, over, dear. It was that country boy. The one who’s been hanging around the Argland Theater. He’s a couturier or something. Mallory…”
Aster’s heart hops. “Vant Passand?”
“That’s the one.”
“You—really, you shouldn’t drive with your condition, El.”