Tulip Food
Gorslung’s Chancellery, like all the predecessors on whose corpses it was built, stands at the very heart of Tiliard.
Surrounded by the concentric rings of architecture and history, it is a playground for tyrants’ aesthetic whims as erratic as their reigns.
It is the Chancellor’s greatest ongoing project, a sky-bound orchard of stained glass and gold leaf cultivated over seventeen years.
A monstrosity, in Sorav’s opinion, an opinion which stays safe in his throat.
He stands tight-lipped in his master’s office, as always, boots sinking into the obscene lushness of his Ostlerfell Blue carpet.
The walls are clothed in art and artifacts, bookshelves stuffed with classics, from Aufhocker’s original handwritten libretti to the first edition of The Borisch Manual of Catoptric Pest Species.
The only bare wall is the one behind his desk, perpetually empty in anticipation of his portrait.
Gorslung reclines in his leather chair, shoes crossed leisurely on his desk. The Surgeon General stands over him, wielding a tweezer fashioned from the pincers of a domestic beetle. She prods his wrist, prying loose a thin piece of flesh. Whistling, she twists open a jar and drops it inside.
“I think someone’s aiming for my seat, Max,” the Chancellor sighs as Dr. Whyck retreats with her sample. “They missed, but it was still a good shot. A lesser man might’ve died.”
A better man might’ve died, Sorav thinks.
“Not much to look at, is it?” He lifts his arm to show off the injury, a jagged black eschar running from his thumb tip to his wrist. The adjacent skin is red, swollen over his engagement jewels, but the truly striking thing about the wound is its smell—or the lack of it.
The Chancellor’s perfume ends where his hand begins, an angry, pestilent negation that draws the eye and unsettles the stomach.
According to Crypsis, the attack had been swift, sudden, and silent.
Despite the chaos outside the Chancellor’s box, the thrown objects, the impoverished tycoons pounding at the doors and the newly enriched gamblers taunting them from their upgraded seats, the show, as they say, went on.
The victory lily was blessed by the impresario and tucked into the Laurel Dame’s crown, as per tradition, and A House Call proceeded wonderfully.
By the time Karlotta’s descent into libertinism culminated in a rapturous orgy, everything had been in place: the infinitely talented soprano Fae Blush onstage, the Chancellor’s infinitely beautiful fiancée on her knees, a bottle of Dagdrun ’88 open on the table, and the Perfumer Laureate in the corner with his traveling organ, ready to spritz him with a virile afterglow.
The night was poised to end in intense, palpable climax, like any good drama.
The first sign something was amiss had been the moths.
The Chancellor had caught a sapphire flutter in his peripheral vision, lowered his lorgnette and watched the bug die in Elspeth’s bobbing coiffure.
Shortly after the first, another twitched to stillness.
Then a third. The Chancellor, who had paid a fortune for Elspeth’s living tiara and was quite sure this was grounds for a refund, felt a twinge of annoyance.
A seam ripped open in his weave of interlocking pleasures.
Suddenly, his wine left a bitter aftertaste, his perfume struck him as cloying.
The high note of Karlotta’s orgasm arrived dismally flat.
The Chancellor, at the very edge of the final cadence, felt himself soften.
Though he couldn’t save his erection, he tried to save the moths.
Not because they were a worthy investment, but because deep in his heart, he felt that stir of pity, that pathos, that pure love of life that had driven him to revive Tiliard by any means necessary.
He reached out, scooping a handful of the poor things, and noticed the flower wilting in his fiancée’s hair.
Whatever allomone had killed the bugs appeared to work twofold on the lily.
Its petals, sculpted so impeccably from the paper-thin flesh of the dancer’s wound, wilted; its bony stamen cracked to dust, its stem browned, still tangled with the shredded red threads of the victor’s cravat.
Its leaves came apart in long, fuzzy strings, curling against the Chancellor’s fingers as he brushed by them.
It wasn’t until he lifted his hand and saw his thumb that disappointment turned to panic.
He felt no pain, at least not until he laid his eyes on the swollen red papule, a bump no larger than a pea.
Suddenly, a cold jolt shot to his elbow.
He dropped his wine and ripped the tiara from Elspeth’s hair in a shower of moth dust and wilted threads.
His glass shattered, his perfume decayed.
Elspeth, terrified but unharmed, groped for her fiancé, begged him to tell her what she had done wrong—but for the first time in his reign, if not his life, he was utterly speechless.
Crypsis sounded the alarm. Lights were lit, exits secured, Tender Guard called.
The venue bloated with fumigants, vomiting a deluge of theatergoers.
Ushers and security men flooded the Chancellor’s box to find no assassin, no weapon, no blood—only a confetti of moth wings and wilted petals, and the Chancellor cradling a sore thumb.
“I swear to God something bit me,” he sighs.
“Look at it, Max. Tell me that’s not a sting of some sort.
” He leans back in his chair, examining his skin.
His sutures are decently done, for a Surgeon General with far more experience in entomology than human medicine.
“Can’t tell when I got it. I shook a lot of hands.
Touched a lot of glass stems. More than a few moths.
” He lifts his thumb to his nose. “There’s a toxic stink to this.
A familiar stink. Someone tried to send me a message. Well, Max?”
“Well, what?”
“You’re the only other man in this city with access to bioalchemic weaponry. You’re first on my list.” There is a sarcastic edge to the Chancellor’s scent. “And I hear you’ve been getting cozy with our scandalous new debutant.”
“Prophet? I’ve questioned him already.”
“Questioned? My dear, you sponsored him. Crypsis tells me your perfumer offered forty thousand marks and a short-term contract for him.” His grin is hardly softened by his scent. “Been lonely lately?”
Sorav says nothing. He’s wearing thin armor today—bilge musk and liver tree ash. He will not get away with denial.
“Oh, Max, you poor dog,” the Chancellor laughs. “That’s an old wound. It’s sad really, seeing you still licking at it.”
Sorav grits his teeth. “If I intended to kill you, Eir Chancellor, I’d have done it more directly.”
“So you would. You’ve always lacked imagination.
” He extends his wrist so an apprentice scent-maker can adorn it.
“The Neo-Repressionists are taking credit. Those washed-up hacks still think they have a foothold in my opera. And with all this chatter about Extemporism or what have you nowadays—” He brings his wrist to his nose, brow furrowed.
“No good,” he tells the girl. “No fucking good. God, at the very least my perfumer should’ve seen this coming.
He should’ve smelled it, he’s the goddamn Laureate.
” A streak of anger penetrates his scent.
“Hang him, Max. I’m done with him. And Demetrius. I want Demetrius.”
“Dead?” Sorav asks.
“No, you brute. I want him paid. I want to slap my name all over him and shower him in diamonds.” He stands and paces, his good hand tapping an almost cheerful beat against his leg. “I want him to play me onstage, Max. I want him to dance at my wedding. So hand him over when you’re done with him.”
Sorav narrows his eyes and considers the possibility this is a rigged affair.
The Chancellor is known to put on theatrics for political gain, to turn the tide against a rival, or for his own amusement.
Everything in his vicinity is tightly controlled, every accident a happy one, every misfortune a seed of a blessing.
“‘Great beauty is sown in great strife,’” he likes to say, quoting his favorite Vrenecker platitude.
“I don’t know, Max,” the Chancellor says.
“The impresario had quite a bit riding on Ludovico. Shake him up a little. The Sreckt brothers, too—there’s a pair who knows a thing or two about moths, and they’re still bitter about that whole acquisition business.
” He sighs, leaning over his desk. “Pests everywhere. They don’t die easily, do they? ”
“If they died easily, they wouldn’t be pests,” Sorav offers blandly.
“Still! After all this work! All these years. Still in-fucking-fested.” The Chancellor moves in a blur.
Sorav is fairly sure he is throwing his arm across the table, sweeping everything to the floor, but his scents only project him straightening a stack of papers, each stamped neatly with the sigil of BGS.
“I won’t let it happen to me, Max. I refuse to be just another dead ring in this tree.
Unlike you, I’m not going to wait until my assassination is done before I pursue the culprits. ”
“Yes, Eir Chancellor.”
“This is first and foremost a failure in species management. This is your responsibility. So take care of this, and do it before my wedding. I promised this city the show of a century and it has to be flawless.” He sighs and sits once more.
“If anything goes wrong, I can’t guarantee dear Aufhocker will get to keep his thumbs.
And that would be a pity, after he wrote such a beautiful duet for us. ”
The Marshal’s heart, or the cobbled-together parts of it, sinks in his chest. “What would you have me do?”