Phantasm Suite #2
“There’s our corporal—always up for a sortie.
” Bebber leads him across the atrium, waxing heroic in his martial patois.
Guy glances back to Three, then follows them to the adjacent hall.
They march past marble galleries, libraries, past portraits of kings and taxidermized Laurel Chancellors propped up behind glass to forever reenact their greatest feats of statesmanship.
“How’s life at Borisch, then?” Bebber asks. “Heard you got fleas in your barracks.”
“Soot mites,” Dawn replies. “They’re more of a mascot.”
“Sure, sure. And the stray kittens are ours.” Bebber stops at the threshold to an ancient stairwell. Fumes rise from the depths, carrying the must of storage halls and sap-soaked power grids. Bebber pulls on his respirator, and Dawn follows.
Guy hesitates at the landing. The stairs descend into darkness thick as water, rippling with an echo of unearthly music. The dregs of the opera, he realizes, leaking through the petrified wood of Conundrum Street. His heart clenches.
“Thing’s been eating the whole place,” Bebber says. “Seems to like early Demirealism. Took out a whole decade of the stuff in that tunnel—you know, the same one where there was that whole business with the Mammoth Stag Cult. It was Sigurd or something. I don’t know.”
“Sigmund,” Guy says quietly. “Sigmund the Torturer. He kept his captives in the tunnels below the Opera.”
Neither Dawn nor Bebber hear him. They proceed down the stairs, chatter muffled by the clinking and sloshing of their equipment, until they fade into the gloom. Guy secures his facepiece and iron-vine collar, strains his ears for the ghostly echo of music, and descends after them.
It’s a sad, odd feeling, to envy a dead man.
As Aster watches the two princes sing and dance the brotherly drama that led to the War of the Lilies, a flush colors her cheeks.
She keeps her gaze fixed on Demetrius and his cravat, groping a passing usher boy for another drink.
The man is a daunting competitor, with his sleek black hair and his fierce voice.
She is almost relieved he will not survive the night.
She glances to Mallory, searching his honey-brown gaze for anxiety, resignation, sorrow. Perhaps it is only the haze of her perfume, but he seems more determined than anything.
“How much do you have riding on Demetrius?” Aster asks.
“Quite a bit, actually.”
She returns her attention to the stage. While the leads polish their rivalry, taunting with bent knees and curled toes, their seconds polish their blades.
Before they are handed off to the princes, the tip of each rapier is dipped, with a harp’s glissando, into a tiny, silver rhyton.
Rosewater, with a touch of ecdytoxin, just potent enough to be fatal.
There is no death more graceful, the Chancellor insists.
“Are you two close?” she asks cautiously.
“You could say so. Mostly when we were younger.”
“How did you meet?”
He hesitates. “A bit like you and Elspeth did. We were in Mongfestun together.”
“Mongfestun?” A thrill leaps to her throat. Her eyes glide over him again, taking in his feathers, his lithe, gaudy frame. He has to be lying—though it would explain his good posture. “I’d never have guessed you’ve been to prison.”
“Military reformatory, technically.” He smiles. “Mongfestun Correctional College for Recalcitrant Boys and Young Men.”
Aster aches to ask him for what offenses, for how long, if he was sent there by his exasperated family or by a criminal judge, if he had been a mouthy prince or a common horse thief. “Demetrius might stand a chance then,” she offers instead. “I’ve heard Mongfestun sculpts quite the duelists.”
“It does. Dee’s tetchy as a blast mouse and a wonder with a saber.” He leans over the balustrade, watching the man take his sword. Demetrius’s body moves like his voice, boldly, with an unpolished edge. “He never graduated, though. Escaped in fourth year.”
“Really? How?”
“We were on mill duty. He made me sew him into a flour sack and send him off with the delivery carriage. He was sold to a baker at Sullen Head. Cut himself free and ran off with a troupe of actors.”
Aster laughs. It doesn’t take a perfumer’s nose to sense he’s toying with her. “You’re not a very good liar, vant Passand.”
“It’s the truth.”
“It’s not the truth, it’s Aufhocker. Olaf Aufhocker. That’s a scene from Sins of Our Patrons.”
“What do you think inspired us?”
“Even if—” She smacks him with her fan. “That one is by far his worst work.”
“It’s a classic, vralen. The one that launched Revivalist theater.”
“A Gentleman of the Void launched Revivalist theater. Patrons is a fantastical mess. I hear even he hates it.”
“You’ve met him?”
“No. Few people have. He keeps his circle tight. He didn’t even come to the ceremony when he was made Dramaturge Laureate. The man is a notorious recluse.”
“Well,” Mallory says, plucking another drink from a nearby tray. “If I had to drag around a name like Olaf Aufhocker, I wouldn’t show my face in public either.”
The cymbal crashes. Variations concluded, the brothers retreat to the corps of the North and South, stretching their wrists while the orchestra retunes. Their seconds present their blades, and they circle one another. Each adopts a bowed pose, front leg straight, back bent. The air tenses.
“Fucking on with it!” someone shouts. The piccolo signals the draw, and on the next downbeat, they begin.
The blades clash. The princes advance across the stage, every step choreographed with deadly precision, every thrust and parry sharpened to a fraction of a beat.
The routine moves with terrible speed, a delicate balance of perfect repetition and minute improvisations.
Aster grits her teeth, waiting for the misstep that will send a saber askew, the mispositioned arm that will prove a fatal opening.
Ludovico dances with hypnotizing flair, each movement blossoming seamlessly from the last. His sword glints with quintessential Revivalist flourish, a beauty so relentless that even his most steadfast opponents die in exquisite poses.
Demetrius is far messier, almost unpracticed; his grunts are ugly, his movement wild, his rhythm syncopated.
The crowd quiets for each second he stays on his feet.
Jeers fade, and as the music mounts a crest, all eyes lock on him.
Time itself seems to clench as the theater intakes a collective breath.
It’s an oppressive feeling, the same Aster gets right before she coughs up something heinous.
Not now, she begs herself. Her throat tightens and a cold sweat pricks her forehead, and as she leans forward, Mallory’s arm encircles her waist. He tenses as the orchestra thrusts out the first violent measures of the coda.
Chords erupt into one another, tympani roll, a fermata stretches open, and suddenly, Demetrius breaks from script.
A legal but still unthinkable move, he improvises a falter, changing position at the last moment.
With his neck exposed, Ludovico wastes no time.
A blade flashes by his throat, splitting open his cravat in a spray of red.
The audience cheers—a curse escapes Mallory’s mouth, but as Demetrius twists, sword whipping through the light, it becomes clear the blood is only the bright threads of his embroidery.
He pirouettes, angling toward Ludovico’s flank.
A dissonant chord resolves, and the pas de deux ends with a solid thrust.
Metal glides into meat. The music dies, the crowd falls still.
Ludovico gasps, held in an elegant lean at the end of his opponent’s sword.
The performers stare at one another for a burning second, then Demetrius withdraws.
His antagonist staggers, then falls to one knee, eyes wide in disbelief, even as the proof of his defeat blossoms on his shirt.
The efflorescence of red expands under the stage lights, and as Ludovico falls onto his back, something unfolds from his wound.
Seeded by the droplet of ecdytoxin, a stem of bone cracks upward from between his ribs.
Leaves of fascia expand from his broken skin, opening to release petals of paper-thin muscle.
The lily unfurls from Ludovico, threading his veins into its bright corolla, growing with each shudder of his final breaths.
Demetrius undoes his torn cravat, wipes the sweat from his face, then plucks the lily from his opponent. Cradling it in a bed of torn threads, he raises it to toast the Chancellor and his bride.
As history may or may not have told, civil order dies with Thomas the Elder.
Insults and cheers roar from every corner of the theater; fights break out; a man is pushed from the balcony.
Hats are tossed in celebration, bottles in fury.
A fusillade of thrown objects picks off the chorus of the South End Army.
By the time the medics arrive in the wings, half the orchestra has defected.
A few of Ludovico’s more ardent fans try to claw their way onto the proscenium, and the stage manager hobbles out to rescue the lily before his admirers can grab hold of it.
Demetrius doesn’t retreat, but basks in the chaos.
Ladies in the front scream for him to throw his cravat, but he denies them, holding it coyly against his lips.
His eyes sweep the crowd, until they settle on Aster—no, not on her, she realizes, when Mallory releases a held sigh.
Demetrius holds Mallory’s gaze, frozen in his victorious pose even as bottles sail by his head, until someone musters the smarts to cut the curtain rope and a wave of silk falls haphazardly over the stage.
The petrified tunnels under Conundrum are anything but silent. Veiny wiring hums along the ceilings, carrying power from the roots to the muffled bustle above. The pounding of distant factories beats through the walls. Water hisses along termite tracks, resonant as organ pipes.
Guy strains his ear and lights his torch, revealing a passage cramped with art and artifacts.
Beneath the din, beneath the mumble of Bebber’s fading voice, a whisper of music spills from the darkness.
He sips at the melody’s edge, pushing through history’s artistic dregs, rejects of memory and good taste, paintings of battles never fought and rulers never coronated.
Fantastical landscapes pass him by, huge canvases of rolling dark water, of pristine forest, of impossibly rectangular skylines.
Oily political manifestos and calls to arms lurk in the gloom, streaked in gray and green and occasionally that gorgeous blue for which Dawn had taken four bullets to the abdomen.
The music throbs across his ear, louder with each beat of his heart.
He gropes onward, desperate for it, but each stride seems smaller than his last, paradoxical, as if the distance between himself and the Opera will only halve, infinitely.
He struggles past grinning busts and shrieks of bright paint, stretching for a memory, for a scrap of the beauty he had stolen in childhood.
His ear rings with pain, with scurrying bowstrings, with tapping snares—and in the darkest reach of the passageway, he stumbles upon a familiar chord.
Not too far above him, he knows, lie the tunnels and pockets of hell.
And not too far above that lies the stage.
He can almost see the lights burning, stoked red for the final act of The Price of Beauty.
They will be dragging out the sacrifice now from stage left; the heroic entomologist will be tied to a dais by Sigmund the Torturer, offered as tribute to the Mammoth Stag.
The role, prestigious but not coveted, is reserved only for the basest and bravest of debtors.
The tragic scientist’s death is never swift, and its method depends only on the prop master’s whim.
Usually a pair of long blades, welded onto the face of the mechanical Stag—once, a terrible and fascinating performance Guy will not forget, a beak of heated metal—but tonight, he knows the insect will be no puppet.
The pincers will be real, as will the venomous forelegs, the long, barbed tongue—
His ear burns, and he staggers, shaking the scene loose from his head. Sure that he has a leak somewhere, he checks and rechecks his vents, running his fingers along the edges of his respirator. All is intact. He takes a few tight breaths, clenching his jaw against the echoes of warped music.
When he realizes he is alone, he tries to retrace his steps. He calls for Dawn, but his voice spills unanswered through the maze of discarded artworks. He turns left, then right, and climbs up a sloping shaft back toward the Ministry.
After a few minutes of wandering the mossy dark, his torch sputters.
He curses, turns, and bumps against a statue of a rearing horse.
He reaches out to regain his balance, but the marble is soft, chewed—it gives way under his hand and he falls to one knee.
Shaken but unharmed, he bats his torch back to life.
In the dampened glow of blue light, he finds he has landed against a pile of flesh and warped tubing that, after a breathless moment, he recognizes as Sergeant Bebber.