Faustech
The foyer is a battlefield. After what can only be tangentially defined as a curtain call, the audience swarms the ticket office.
Payouts are collected by force, half of which are immediately pilfered by pickpockets.
Accusations of cheating abound. Arguments break out in the galleries, and a long-brewing conflict between an upstart financier and the Sommelier Laureate comes to open-handed blows.
Driven with equal parts adoration and revilement, the press and critics storm the halls to search for Demetrius Prophet. A few adamant theatergoers capture the impresario in the cloakroom and beat him until he announces an investigation into the cast and crew of The Lilies.
“The bastard better survive until Acid Moon,” Aster mutters, struck suddenly by the image of the impresario’s carriage pulling up to the Palas to deliver not a premier soloist, but an understudy’s corpse.
She doesn’t want to think of the look on Sorav’s face.
He endures threats, assaults, death itself with invincible grace, but he reserves a unique loathing for absurdities.
An exhausting inclination in a city where the water burns and the wood boils.
“Should I escort you home?” Mallory asks, returning unharmed from the booking window. When he tucks his winnings into his jacket pocket, she cranes her neck, trying to gauge the thickness of the envelope. “You all right, Vost?” he asks. “You look faint.”
“Could use another drink,” she mutters, before a whip of perfume draws her eyes to the stairway.
A cloud of moths flutters at the landing.
Elspeth is human height again, either because her scent has decayed, or because it’s obscured by the intensity of her fiancé’s.
The Laurel Chancellor wears ecdytoxin heavy enough that Aster would hesitate to strike a match around him, but that doesn’t stop his trail of company men from crawling over each other to light his cigar.
He locks eyes with Aster and parts his beard in a handsome smile. He’s wearing something thorny, something that captures and holds the gaze (essence of pact-rose, she guesses). She stands paralyzed as the Chancellor makes his way down the stairs, Elspeth following like an afterthought.
“Vost?” Mallory asks.
“Hold your breath, vant Passand,” she mutters. “Here he comes.”
“Who?”
“The worst of Tiliard’s many bad men.”
“High praise, in a town with only one good one,” Mallory says, but the moment he glances up the stairs, he too is ensnared.
“Asteritha Vost,” the Chancellor says. Every syllable drips, but none so viscidly as the last, the little t crossed with a gleeful tap of his tongue. His breath is heavy with perfume, layers of scents weaving and winding with each movement of his lips.
“Good evening, Eir Chancellor,” Aster says.
“And what an evening! This is why Aufhocker is such magic—no matter what happens, it’s just exhilarating.
” His smile is radiant, a white, impenetrable wall.
“The reign of Ludovico has ended. Usurped by a debutant! God, I’ve been craving a good underdog tale.
You know, El was just saying that Prophet would be a good candidate to play me at the wedding.
I could see him as a younger version of myself, I really could. ”
“Maybe you should offer him a contract,” Aster says.
“If I can still afford him, after all this!” The Chancellor’s laugh is soft but assured.
No matter how much money he’s lost tonight, no matter how many alliances, he will bounce back.
He is a Revivalist in more ways than one.
“And you’re…” he continues, glancing at Mallory. “I’m sorry, have we met?”
Elspeth leans to his ear, either to whisper or to pose for the nearest flashbulb. They do make a photogenic couple, she glowing with the cynicism of youth, he with the sleek wisdom of middle age.
“Ah, the country boy,” the Chancellor says, offering his bare hand. “Welcome to our fair stump.”
“Honored, Eir Gorslung.” Their palms engage with a friendly puff of hyssop.
“You chose the right night to come to the opera, my boy. You’ve just witnessed history remade.
I suspect quite a few fortunes are about to change hands.
” He spares an amused glance for the corporate alliances unraveling in the balconies.
“Not that I’m complaining. I haven’t had this much fun in years.
You—be a dear and go fetch that lily.” A nearby sycophant nods and disappears.
A Crypsis agent, by the subtle smell of him. “So—will you be staying on, then?”
“On for what?” Mallory asks.
“The next show. You didn’t think we were going to close the night with The Lilies, did you? Not in my opera. I serve dessert.”
“Next up is A House Call,” Elspeth offers, voice subdued under her fiancé’s perfume. “Mal hasn’t seen a gentleman’s playlet yet.”
“It’s a Tiliarder staple.” The Chancellor rolls one of Elspeth’s jeweled earlobes between his fingers, moths crawling down his bare hand. “Fae Blush is playing Karlotta. The orgy scene is truly something special this season.”
“Kind,” Aster answers. “But I can’t. Must get back to the Marshal.”
“The Marshal.” The Chancellor’s brow furrows over fatherly green eyes.
“You know Max is misusing you, my dear. When you’re ready, my offer still stands.
I can put your talents to better use.” He turns to Mallory.
“You know what they say about this one? That she’s the next Madame Fauniche.
And all the Marshal wants from her is to drug him with mayfly.
An utter waste. There are masterpieces inside this one, Eir vant Passand, mark my words. ”
“I’m … thank you—” Aster pauses to disentangle herself from his flattery. “I’m afraid I’m contracted for life.”
“A cheat, when the Revenant has dozens.” The Chancellor sighs. “Well, how about you, young man?”
“Oh,” Mallory starts, “I only embroider.”
“No, I mean, are you going to stay?”
Aster’s heart sinks. The shape of Mallory’s smile is familiar, compliant. The man will spend the night in the Chancellor’s thrall, in a state of scent-manufactured ecstasy—until he wears out his novelty, after which he’ll find himself abandoned in some alley, or hurled from a limousine window.
“Stay,” the Chancellor’s tongue says, in the way that renders the listener unable to do anything but ask for how long, and in what position.
Mallory hesitates. The silence stretches, eruptive, until Aster is sure she’s going to cough.
“I’d love to, Eir Chancellor,” Mallory says, finally. “But Aster promised me a tour of hell.”
The Chancellor doesn’t lose his smile. “Ah, you might as well. I’ll probably spend the evening doing damage control, anyway.” He gestures to a pair of tuxedos entangled on the mezzanine. “I think one of the Sreckt brothers is about to kill my Minister of Finance.”
Bebber lies facedown and motionless. Guy recognizes him only by the gold trim on what’s left of his tank.
The sturdy straps lie shredded; poisons drip from broken glass in thick, viscous fingers.
Even the intricate Sreckt metalwork, unsurpassed in the industry, has been warped by some uncanny force, as if the pesticide sacs had burst from the inside.
“Hey,” Guy croaks. He creeps forward and sets down his torch. “Sergeant?”
Stomach churning, he pushes Bebber onto his back. He rolls on a limp frame, his body too soft, too malleable, bones bending like wet branches. His helmet bobs on a flaccid neck, tongue pressed up against the glass of his mask, swollen and gray.
Guy forces a cry back down his throat. He paws at Bebber’s collar, knowing the futility of feeling for a pulse between the layers of iron vine.
There don’t seem to be any barbs in his suit, no teeth, detached stingers, or other biological weaponry, but Guy can’t know until he gets Bebber back up into the light.
He gropes for the sergeant’s arm, intending to drape it over his shoulder, and only finds a deformed length of softened flesh.
Not so much severed as remade, the man’s arm has burst open, spilling a dark, membranous substance.
It bubbles up from iron vine and leather, oozing between swollen fingers—too many fingers—eight or nine, arranged in a circle, and a dozen stubs blossoming between them, tipped in incandescence.
Guy’s heart lurches, not entirely with horror, but with a kind of breathless awe.
Terrified less by Bebber’s corpse than he is by its strange beauty, he tells himself this is only a trick of torchlight.
In his panic, he has projected a terrible image onto a wax sculpture, a mannequin, a pile of discarded costumes.
But he, more than anyone, knows better than to believe his own stories.
Something drips to the floor by his arm. He flinches, ear ringing with a tremolo of dread. He knows he shouldn’t lift his eyes. He knows that to look up will invite the curtain to fall, the trap to spring.
He can’t help it. He raises his gaze to the ceiling and stares down a wondrous kaleidoscope.
The nest is a wide tunnel, scintillating with color, a huge, writhing honeycomb of iridescence.
Electrical sap drips from gnawed wiring.
Broken crossbeams jut across the hollow, spears on which all manner of objects have been impaled.
Oil canvases dangle by splintered frames, costumes drip with colored secretions, half-devoured theatrical puppets poise rigid like flies on a shrike’s thorn.
A globule of some sort of exudate gathers at the edge of a beam, oozes downward, and drops.
As it hits the ground, an orchestral chord throbs through Guy’s ear.
“How,” he hisses into his mask. As he gazes into the beautiful, uncanny nest, he realizes that, although he cannot know how, he knows, instinctively, what.