Lament for a Lost Soldier #3
“The air is so clear here,” Aster says, woozy with adrenaline or drink.
She follows Mallory over a fallen column, between trellises of wrought iron, and into a little courtyard.
A canopy of fanned leaves and mushroom caps shields the grove from the street.
By the time they reach the ruins of the porch, the only noise Aster can make out is the chirping of some nearby bugs and the serene splash of broken plumbing.
The place has no front door, but the slab of glassy amber that’s dripped down in its place seems a suitable replacement. Mallory shoves it aside, leading Aster into the blasted husk of the foyer.
The lamps flicker to life, illuminating a house haunted by a ghost of luxury.
Marble twists in cracked arabesques across the floor, from the door to the broad stairway.
Gold leaf trembles through the air like shed autumn foliage.
The opalescent tracks of a Whittleston infestation streak along the oak rafters, lending a lustrous hue to the dust. Something that may have once been a musical instrument slouches in the corner, a stringy black shrub sprouting from its innards.
“I would’ve swept,” Mallory says, “had I known I’d have a guest.”
“It’s … quaint,” Aster replies, as a silverfish the size of a kitten scurries past her feet. One man’s pest is another’s pleasure, she reminds herself.
“It’s much better upstairs,” Mallory says. “It’s still got running water, and it’s always the right temperature.” He guides her up the stairs to a series of melted suites. The east walls have been blown out, replaced by partitions of rhododendrons and broken glass.
“I don’t suppose there’s a phone,” she says.
“I’ve got a thing that used to be one.” He gestures to a wire-bound cluster of brass grapes. “Wouldn’t recommend picking it up. It leaks.”
She releases an exhausted laugh. Maybe it’s better not to inform the Palas of her whereabouts. Florian will sniff her out anyway, if not with his nose, with his interrogations.
“Do you at least have a … Can I freshen up somewhere?”
“Bath is over there. I’ll get you a housecoat.” Mallory moves to a recess in the wall, formerly a closet, and she collapses on a nearby chaise.
“Well, you came at a ripe time,” she sighs. The top notes of her perfume have decayed, leaving only the clinging scent of Tender Guard fumigants. Somehow, she feels both naked and cloaked in filth. “I suppose we were due for a coup.”
“Vralen?”
“Every fifteen, twenty years we go through some crisis or another. Once when I was a child, once when my parents were, once when their parents were.”
“My father fled Tiliard during the last one,” Mallory says. “He never talked about it.”
“Wise of him.”
Mallory guts the closet, pushing aside an emerald suit, a riding cloak, a ball gown. Finally, he pulls out a silk robe, deep crimson and in as poor taste as everything else. “Sorry, it’ll be loose. He wasn’t a small man.”
“I’m surprised any of these fit you.”
“They don’t. But I can handle a needle.” Mallory offers the bathrobe, hooded and encircled by a monk’s golden cord.
“Is this—Mal, is this a costume?” she asks.
“Bath is that way,” he replies.
Aster bundles the robe and makes her way down the hall, where she finds what was once a marble washroom.
A few walls are missing, replaced by foliage.
Two columns gesture vaguely toward what is left of the ceiling, stone dripping like candlewax down their sides.
A smooth depression, carved less by human intention than by ballistic impact, serves as the tub.
Mallory is right about the water. It emerges clear and warm from the faucet, and Aster doesn’t wait for the basin to fill before she crawls into it.
As the suds rise around her, as the grime and perfume and pepperberry drain from her skin, so does her panic.
She sinks into the steam, still uncomfortably drunk, and gazes between the melted fragments of ceiling.
The sky pinkens. She shivers in the heat, trying not to think of what may be transpiring on Conundrum.
Maybe fallout from the ending of The Lilies.
Maybe something worse. Something violent, if the Marshal is dispatching the Tender Guard.
He breaks out the galvanic honeydew only when he needs to clear out a large area, to force entire crowds to lose their bodies, their minds, to revert to helpless childhood, succumbing instantly to the stupor of resurgent memory.
She rises from the bath and reaches for her clutch.
She applies her medicinal spray to her throat, then a defensive scent, a sleepy pheromone that calms both wearer and observer.
She throws on the robe and takes her time returning to the bedroom, examining Mallory’s sink, his emerald razor, his goat-leather strop, exploring the nooks and crannies of the upper floor.
The house carries the remnants of a life richly lived.
Bookshelves stand fused to their contents, spilling bouquets of yellowed pages from leather stems. On a cobwebbed vanity, a row of Fauniche perfumes gathers dust. The scents have long since decayed, but Aster picks one up and loosens its lid.
It stinks of nothingness—almost overwhelming, like a sudden silence to a noise-adjusted ear.
She returns to the bedroom to find the bed made, and unoccupied.
Mallory lies on the chaise by the viny fireplace, jacket bunched under his head.
Exhaustion, or alcohol, has done its work on him; his hands are folded over his stomach, his mouth open in the unrousable gape of the wasted.
Aster knows she should take this chance to flee, to run back into whatever crisis may be unfolding on Conundrum, to watch the Opera burn or witness another insurrectionary assail the Judicial Palas, just as the Marshal Revenant had, and the Marshal Exultant before him, a ritual of succession dating back to the first merchant-kings.
She could watch the carnage unfold, watch Sorav aim his crosshairs at some upstart’s heart, ensuring the skull stayed intact for his next headdress.
Or she could rest. Briefly, she could step outside that ugly circle and let the machinations of Tiliard tick into place around her. For a night, she could forget about her work, about the Marshal’s demands, her sickly breath, forget as much as Sorav does in the throes of mayfly.
A streak of morning sun passes over Mallory’s hands.
Gloveless, Aster sees for the first time the punctate scars covering his fingers, his knuckles, his wrists.
Carefully, she brushes a thumb across them, until she reaches his shirtsleeve.
Under the silk cuff, she spies a wayward shadow.
She hesitates, a cold flutter in her heart, then folds back his sleeve.
An ink band circles his skin. Its details have blurred; the mark is old, the color faded, but between two thin black bars, she spies a familiar insignia.
A trick of the eye, she thinks at first—hallucinations, says Surgeon General Whyck, are common in survivors of ecdytoxic attacks.
But the effects have not touched Aster’s mind nearly so much as her lungs.
She knows her company’s stamp when she sees it.
Not a country boy, then, but an undercity one.
Not an heir from Dagdrun, nor a patron of the arts, nor a reformed Mongfestun graduate.
Nothing but a prolific liar, a pest crawled up from the undercity to infest whatever ruin suited him most, weaving some story about a rich father from the threads he found in the closet.
She wants to enrage herself, to puff up with indignation.
She knows she should shake him awake, demand to see the rest of his arm, to witness the record of his debts, the deed to this property, proof that he is in any way the gentleman he has presented to her.
Instead, careful not to rouse him, she raises his hand and breathes in his scent, dark and natural and chaotic, the scent of a man hiding everything but his odor.
“Who are you, vant Passand?” she whispers, and kisses his knuckle. Then she sets his hand down, turns to the bed, and crawls inside.
She intends to stay awake for a while, to think, to worry, to adjust the bedside radio for updates. But even before she hits the pillow, she is drifting downward, past the soft scurrying of bristletails and blast mice in the floors, and into the void of sleep.