Lament for a Lost Soldier
Ever since the Revival, or so it seems to Maximian Sorav, Tiliard has existed without edges.
It has a rim, of course, sloped or sheer or splintered depending on how the ages have shaped the stump, but the city itself sprawls in defiance of physical constraint.
During the smoky season, the concentric neighborhoods seem to expand forever into the gray haze, but it is under the stark green eye of the Mint Moon that it truly becomes clear that Tiliard is limitless.
When it cannot grow out, it settles for down, when it cannot crawl skyward, it turns inward.
An ingrown hair, Maximian might complain to Olaf (the only one who endures his rough and ugly brushes with metaphor).
A shoot curled into itself, half-erupted.
The filth and rot, the centuries of petty tyrants cycling through positions like hands on a clock—symptoms of an organism arrested in its larval stage.
Tiliard is outgrowing its own skin, aching to shed, to emerge as something comprehensible, tangible, governable.
Just as it always has, and, Sorav has come to realize, always will.
He observes the topography of the city from the highest tower of the Palas.
The streets, like the years, blur into a hazy patchwork of green and gold, but he can still make out fragments of clarity: the boulevards where he picked off the last of the Marshal Exultant’s loyalists, the Opera, the Sanitarium, the cloudy wasteland neighborhoods, infected wounds from the Revival he has no desire to reclaim, no matter how loudly the Laurel Chancellor may bitch about eyesores.
Something is amiss. He can’t smell it like Aster, nor hear it like Olaf, but he can still feel it, even from a dozen stories up.
It seeps through his bones like an ache, through every scar he does not have, every death he hasn’t died.
It is a feeling that has not touched him since the Revival, when the streets were filled with raw ecdytoxin.
Deforming, destabilizing, rearranging its surroundings the same way poison might rearrange a victim’s tissue, misfolding membranes, stoppering channels, clinging and cleaving.
Enzymatic, Reames had once told him. Metabolic.
His hand is already on the earpiece when the phone rings.
He lifts it, expecting to hear a report of a skirmish, or of Florian’s violent excesses, but the voice is not his protégé’s, nor that of the officer sent to tail him.
Elspeth Scholin, frantic, incoherent, shouts something into the receiver; the phone then passes to a Crypsis bodyguard, then an usher, then a Crypsis bodyguard disguised as an usher, and then, finally, to the Chancellor himself.
Information arrives in random order of importance: the theater is in chaos, someone is hurt, the orgy scene is ruined—absolutely ruined, Max.
“I’m telling you,” says the Chancellor. “Biggest turnoff I’ve ever seen. Also, I think someone tried to kill me.”
Sorav blinks. “Eir Chancellor?”
“They missed. Some sort of—bite, I think. Something crawled up my sleeve. Slithered right through my perfume—who knows what else is crawling around here—”
“Are you sure?”
“Scents are useless. I’m a sitting duck right now.”
“Eir—”
“I refuse to die in a theater, Maximian. It’s been done too many times. Send the fucking Guard. I’ve only got so many Crypsis agents and half of them are in the cast.”
Even attenuated through the static of ionized sap, the perfumed words of Sorav’s superior compel him. “Yes, Eir Chancellor,” he says, and hangs up.
He taps his finger against his lip. He’s faced plenty of his own assassins, but no one has yet made an attempt on the Laurel Chancellor.
No one has escaped the snare of his ecdytoxin enough to try.
Overcome by his cloud of perfume, a swordsman will sheathe his saber, a poisoner will dump the tainted wine.
A sniper looking down her barrel will see only the city’s beloved curator, and her aim will be blurred by tearful awe.
No, all Tiliard’s violent political impulses, its ugliness and human waste, are funneled through the Grand Marshal.
“The BGS complaints department,” Florian calls him, when he insists on being particularly awful.
An accident, perhaps. The bite of a random insect, or some sort of perfume mishap, necessitating nothing but a firing squad and a short cleanup.
Maximian knows better than to hope. The front lines had taught him that optimism is often fatal.
It’s all that looking forward to the future, his old sergeant used to say.
You don’t see the present blazing in from the flank.
He could walk down there now. He could walk to Conundrum wearing nothing but his housecoat and bone-studded headdress.
He could run the bloodbath, burn the theater to the ground and bathe in the heat and smoke, the sting of alchemic vitriols, the pressure of a bullet.
He could feel that red curtain fall over him, as Olaf puts it, and still rise to bask in the applause.
But his old wounds are aching today. He doesn’t dress, doesn’t rush down to his master’s side like a young, eager dog. He only places a call to the Tender Guard reserves, slips a summons for his perfumer down the pneumatic chute, and pours himself a drink.
Aster is seven years old. She’s glued to the window, transfixed by the smoke sputtering from the taxi’s hood stack. The metabolic engine moans as the cabbie reassures his passengers that yes, that sound is normal, and yes, this is the safest route right now.
Her parents sit beside her, exuding the fragrances of their trade.
Her mother carries the somber essence of the black bastion rose, her father the scent of coronation ivy.
Though they have no pomanders or nosegays with them, having delivered them to some event Aster can’t quite recall—a vigil, a funeral, a meeting that necessitated a uniformed stranger pinching her cheek—the cab will smell of floristry and Fauniche perfume for days to come.
“Spiritual advertising,” her mother calls it.
There’s a military blockade on Petunia, so the driver turns onto the ring of Nineteenth Street, hoping for better luck with the circumferential.
He is telling Aster’s parents about who he’s lost in the past month, and worse, who he’s found: a friend crushed under a fallen building, his landlord strangled in the tails of a hellrat king, an acquaintance running from a gang of Palas soldiers, swollen tongue unfurling from his mouth like a fern.
Then he slams on the brakes. The cab heaves forward, then back—something thumps against it, followed by a muffled shout and a kick to the rumbling hood. The driver rolls down the window, gestures obscenely, then rolls it up again.
“Fucking Borisch shithead,” he grunts, then resumes his stories of taxis overturned, limousines raided, carriages stopped and everyone, including the horses, undergoing torturous interrogation.
They continue past the dancing lights of the blockade, past the stench of conflict between the Palas Infantry and the guerrilla front that will one day become the Tender Guard. The moonset glows a dappled purple as the cab turns, compass-chimes ringing.
Maybe it’s the way she angles herself across her mother’s lap that saves her.
Maybe it’s the way her body is positioned when the impact comes, or the whim of the moon’s gravity.
Years later, the Chancellor will say those who survived the battles of the Revival did so because they were marked for greatness, because they could, consciously or not, spin beauty from strife; they, like the toxin that contaminated them, could reshape Tiliard in the most wondrous ways.
The Marshal will contradict him, telling her that no one survived the Revival, not even himself.
It is only taking some casualties longer to die than others.
They are well past the blockade when the cab swerves again.
This time, the driver is utterly silent—he brakes, turns pale, then puts the vehicle in reverse.
Shouts follow, then the pop of what Aster will come to recognize as ecdytoxin grenades.
A yellow cloud bursts against the slope of the windshield, while metal canisters streak through the gas, leaving open seams of naked sky in their wake.
The cab veers, rocking over the curb with a shriek.
The seats lurch, and the driver switches gears, but the transmission lever splits under his glove.
Metal screeches as the chassis peels apart.
The seats bloat and rip open. The windows shatter, and a swell of foaming gas pours into the cabin, thick as water and oiled with a silvery sheen.
Aster rolls with the current, gasping, her mother’s fist closed around her collar, knuckles against her cheek.
“Hold your breath—” she hears her father rasp. It’s his last command, and the last one she will, as usual, disregard.
The toxin pours down her throat. It tastes surprisingly sweet, like the compounds she feeds to the carnivorous bouquets.
It slithers through her trachea with an almost pleasant heat, and takes root in her bronchial tree, though she will not know this until later, when her first productive cough in the Sanitarium leaves a snake of squirming tissue in her hand.
She can’t cry out, she can only grope for something solid, for loose sleeves or strands of hair as the car and its occupants fatally unfurl. The world deforms like a dream; the street boils, cobblestones pop and bubble, and the taxi begins to sink.
A hand materializes from the cloud of dusted glass, wrapping around her wrist. As she wriggles up through the broken window, she sheds the memory and her smaller skin, crawling fully grown from the disintegrating cab and into Mallory’s arms.
She coughs, bleary-eyed, stumbling against him as he leads her down an alley.