What My Husband Doesn’t Know
WHAT MY HUSBAND DOESN’T KNOW
“That’s it? That’s all you got?” Three lifts her goggles to glare at Guy as if he has presented her with a rat’s entrails rather than a stack of crisp banknotes. “Looks like that old preacher managed to fuck you twice.”
“You gonna take it or not?” Guy asks. “I’ll bring the rest by Martyr’s Moon. Apartment maintenance fees were due.”
“Maintenance!” She plucks the bills from his hand and counts them. “Sure, maintenance is due. And yet who do I spy in the mess hall but your little sister in brand-new clothes? Wearing the kind of blue you can only find up top.”
Guy bites his cheek. Dawn eyes him from the corner of the workshop, cleaning rod in hand. A row of polished nozzles grows beside him.
“For being such a compulsive liar,” she continues, “you’re shockingly bad at it.
Here, help me with this. I can’t do this one-handed.
” Three replaces her goggles and returns to her work, laying her wooden arm across the table.
She hands Guy a welding pen and a vial of sap, directing him over the loosened screws of her palm.
Carefully, with gritted teeth, she peels back a fibrous tendon.
“Grab the pliers and hold the flame steady.”
“So I bought Tyro a dress,” Guy murmurs, lifting the rubber annulus of her wrist. “You want her to run around the barracks naked? Dawn, before you start, I bought it two sizes too big.”
“Face it, Guy,” Three says. “It’s past time she earned her keep. I’ll have the Twelfth draw her up a contract.”
“No.” Instinct forces the word from his mouth, though he knows he has no pulpit from which to preach. He’d been younger when he proudly pressed his thumb to paper.
“Perfect time to start,” Three says. “Just old enough to squeeze into the nastier tunnels, just young enough to not know better. Careful—that’s my nerve you’re about to bump.”
“I said no.”
“Then what else, my friend?” Dawn asks gently. “There are worse jobs for a kid her age.”
“Cut her hair,” Three suggests. “Ladies up top’d sell their souls for waves like hers.”
“No.” Guy grips the pliers, knuckles whitening, until something snaps. Three’s flexors hiss, and a tubule hemorrhages electric sap.
“Fuck, Guylag! Cool your goddamn horses.” Behind her, in a knot in the wall, something thumps down the pneumatic tube. “Dawn, get that for me. I gotta clean up after this butcher. Guy, I swear to God, if you force me to call Nic I’m gonna wear your arm instead.”
Dawn sets aside his carbine and pulls the capsule from the tube. “Captain,” he says, “you’ll want to look at this.”
“Doubt that, Corporal.” Her goggles stay fixed on her wrist. Carefully, she manages to reattach her ligament. “Look—this is how you do it. Look at how the trigger finger flexes.”
“Captain,” Dawn says again.
“Fine, fine. One second. Moulène, hold still.” Stool squealing, she turns to take the paper in her free hand. She reads it once and once again, frowning. “It’s eating what, now?” she mutters.
“What is it?” Guy asks.
“Hold still,” she snaps, glancing over the message again. “Actually, drop that and close me up. We’re taking the elevator. I said close up, Guy.”
He kills his flame, and Three’s arm creaks in the sudden cold. “What—”
“Overcity job.” Swiftly, she helps Guy screw on her carpal plating. She stands, taps each of her fingertips, flexes her wrist. “Some bug’s nesting in the pipes under Conundrum.”
“What kind of bug?” Guy asks.
“They have no idea,” Dawn says. He tosses Three her helmet, and the workshop fills with the din of belt-buckling and button-snapping.
“Might be your dragon, Guylag,” Three says.
“Whatever it is, if it’s as big as it sounds, there’ll be a bounteous tip rolling our way.
” She grins in that familiar way she does when she arranges large sums in her head.
It’s a smirk half savage, half generous—she is setting aside a few columns for her boys, whatever she can shield from the Borisch accountants.
“Grab your bow tie, Eir Moulène. And don’t break anything this time. ”
The Marshal Revenant, when in a kind mood, likes to remind Aster that she is too critical of herself. She is obligated, at least by contract, to agree. She is too critical of herself, and this is the least of her faults.
The others are too numerous to count and too broad to name, but like most things, they can be addressed with the right perfume.
A hint of ecdytoxin can fix her drooping eyelid, close the gap between her front teeth, lend her an air of brooding mystery or apply a chemically formulated je ne sais quoi—or, if she feels daring, a frantic sauve qui peut.
Tonight she opts for something defensive.
Bilge musk and plum, for her silk-clad wrists; for her dress of rattling beetle shells, the powder of goliath-crab claw, a steadfast scent that deters ill-intentioned men and wards off hangovers.
She adds a spritz of flamewort to the ensemble, sending the lizard tails in her carcanet writhing with color.
When she is finished, she is a work of living art, a masterpiece of aposematism.
“It’ll do,” she mutters.
She swallows six capsules of cough suppressant, tucks Mallory’s handkerchief into her purse, and takes the trolley down Conundrum Street.
She disembarks at the main square, pushing through the crowd of hucksters and tourists and the Revivalist statuary that sprouts from the cracks like weeds.
Grand pillars branch up the Opera’s facade, threaded with silver stripped from the weaponry of fallen performers.
A banner hangs between them, announcing closing night.
Another rapier will be welded into the collection by morning.
She arrives at the tail end of intermission, when the betting is just ramping up.
The marquee is pinned with fist-sized fireflies: Ludovico Pelagos is reprising his role as Thomas the Elder, and across from him, under the Younger, a name is struck through in black ink.
Sick, or dead, or in violation of his contract.
Ludovico’s antagonist will be an understudy tonight.
The crowd is giddy about the tragedy. It’s not often an ingénu’s debut is also his swan song.
Aster flashes the Marshal’s seal at the ticket office.
When she pulls out an envelope, the impresario materializes like a spirit summoned, stepping from a column of pink cigar smoke to count the bills.
He flips through twenty, thirty, forty thousand marks without a word.
For a moment Aster fears it won’t be enough to buy tonight’s victor, but after counting twice, he slips them into his pocket. The Marshal will have his dancer.
“Acid Moon,” Aster says. “Quarter at the latest.”
The impresario nods, then disappears into the hidden veins of the playhouse.
Finished with her task, Aster joins the crowd in the foyer.
She accepts a coupe of dark liqueur from a passing usher boy and congratulates herself on her success.
There is no way the Marshal, even with his exactitude, will find Ludovico lacking.
The man has spent the better part of the last decade worshipped as a death god onstage.
Something to which Maximian Sorav can easily relate.
The pluck of a harp closes the entr’acte, and the crowd files back into the theater.
Aster tries to catch a glimpse of Elspeth in the bustle, scanning the highest galleries for her admirers, snapping flashbulbs, or a spurned fop trying to claw his way back into her good graces.
She sorts through a slew of familiar faces: the Minister of Finance and his sycophants, the Seamstress Laureate in a gown of golden razors, the Secretary of Internal Reform smoking his usual cigar.
She doesn’t see Elspeth, but, unsurprisingly, she does catch a glimpse of her groom-to-be.
Where other despots might commandeer the printing presses or armories, Chancellor Gorslung prefers a vantage point close to the stage.
While the heart of his city beats in thrums of bass strings, while its history is told and retold and its champions dedicate their victories in his name, he sits in his box and conducts the seedy Tiliard overworld.
Money and contracts and alliances change hands, threats are made, betrayals committed, assassinations performed and swept away by diligent ushers.
Charming and accessible as ever, he moves through the chaos with the ease of a boy in his playground—just as he does when he hosts a gallery opening or his fêtes in the botanical gardens, when the flowers open in gorgeous dapples of the Revivalist party colors.
He juggles tycoons and warlords, rejecting the affectation of gloves, one bare hand flitting from handshake to handshake, the other wrapped around the waist of a bejeweled contortionist. As usual, he eschews the laurel crown in favor of scented pomade, streaked through hair too thick and black for his age.
Aster can smell him even from this distance.
Each clap of his palm against another’s gives off a rich, almost fungal scent.
The Perfumer Laureate has equipped him for diplomacy tonight.
Aster sighs. If Elspeth is a no-show, she ought to catch the streetcar back to the Palas.
The Revenant’s scent-maker doesn’t need to be seen drinking alone and aimlessly, especially in this nest of snakes.
Sorav is already a little too paternal in his patronage; he disapproves of her late-night capers even more than he does Florian’s, though her misadventures, unlike his, have never culminated in any public massacres (as far as she’s aware).
Aster pushes against the crowd, but pauses when she spies a familiar face, half as pretty as Elspeth’s but just as welcome.