Afternoon Riverscape with Boat
The belligerent days of Acid Moon creep from the mountains in threads of purple mist. The heat thickens with the clouds, and intercorporate rivalries rekindle as the fiscal year begins anew.
Duels are fought, bankruptcies contested.
Neo-Repressionism makes a modest comeback in the galleries on Splinter Row, which are summarily fumigated and condemned.
The Opera is cleaned out from the rafters to hell, but it does nothing to wash away the rumors proliferating in the wake of The Lilies.
Tales of poisoned wine abound, of weaponized insects, of the growing threat of Extemporist art, of the avant-garde rake Demetrius Prophet trying to kill the Chancellor—or saving his life, because, like any worthy baritone, he refused to be upstaged by disaster.
In an effort to maintain a facade of normalcy, the bridal luncheon proceeds as planned, or as the Chancellor planned, on his personal riverboat, the Clevette.
The old liner, born as a luxury cruiser but having lived most of its life as a smuggling ship, has been fully restored for leisure (including Elspeth’s badminton court, an expensive act of diplomacy her fiancé plans to hold against her for years to come).
The vessel is berthed on the south side of the city, below the Root of Broken Teeth, where the long brass lifts deposit her guests directly onto her deck.
The elevator clings to the city’s steepest precipice, where the tenements balance on brass cantilevers.
Affectionately called the birdcage since its days as an execution device, it offers a straight shot to the outermost docks.
Aster and Florian accompany their patron as the elevator creaks downward, lurching and stalling as it cuts a path through unruly vines and bird’s nests.
There’s little the operators can do about the overgrowth until the rains come.
“I met with Demetrius,” the Marshal says, almost cheerfully. Aster has adorned him with a veneer of amicability today, a pheromone that gets him remembered for his perfect politeness—at the cost of him forgetting most of what he says. A price he gladly pays.
“I hope he was all you had expected,” Aster says.
“Pleasant enough, for a theater creature. I want him again next week.”
Aster bites her lip. “The Chancellor is making noise about sponsoring him—”
“Outbid him. Gorslung can wait.”
Beside her, Florian burns under his perfume. Embarrassed, or envious (Aster can never tell), he fixes his eyes over the river valley, on the silver gash the Catoptric has carved down its middle, verdancy swelling on either shore.
“Do you have your stinger with you?” Sorav asks.
She pats her purse, rattling her pills and perfume bottles against her tiny gun. She feels no safer with it, but she does seem that way, which arguably is preferable. Feeling is subjective. Seeming requires some sort of outside consensus.
“I want you to come to me if you smell anything amiss today,” Sorav says. “Either of you.”
“It’s only a bridal luncheon,” says Florian.
“It’ll start that way. But assassination attempts seem to be in vogue this season.”
“It’d be a stupid time to try it. Trapped on a ship with all the Chancellor’s friends.”
Sorav glances at him. “Do you know the best way to draw out a malcontent, Florian? You put all his fish in one barrel.”
The car rattles to a halt a dozen paces from the water. A gangplank extends from the Clevette’s second terrace; it hooks to the birdcage, and the door opens.
“Don’t embarrass me today,” Sorav says, and steps onto the gangplank.
He makes his way across the deck, tails of his formalwear diffusing his scent.
He greets the ministerium, the industrialists, the bridesmaids, leaving only a whiff of resentment under his unassailable dignity.
As he squeezes the hands of his most despised friends, Aster wonders how many fusillades it would take to stop him if he chose, on a whim, to kill all of them.
Sometimes, on his worst nights, he will admit the only thing holding him back is the burden of cleaning up the mess.
Aster checks the Marshal’s position in her pocket mirror, then the Chancellor’s, then makes her way to the bar.
She’s not halfway there before someone grabs her shoulder and delivers a wet kiss to her cheek.
Elspeth smells of lavender today, armed with a slim racket and a white skirt.
A scorpion tail is twisted in her hair, secured with a band of ivory.
“You should’ve come dressed to play,” she says, though she knows Aster will not get halfway across a court of any kind without coughing up some sort of mutant glob.
“It’s too hot,” Aster says. “I think I’ll swim instead.”
Elspeth laughs, then leans forward, nudging a nearby bridesmaid away with the tip of her racket. “I invited him for you.”
“Who?” Aster asks, though Elspeth has made it more than clear. She wears the same grin she wore at the Sanitarium whenever she’d push her dolls’ mouths together.
“I’ll send him over when I’m done with him,” she says, and glides back into the crowd.
A few minutes later, drink in hand, Aster follows, squeezing through the verbal and olfactory conversations, the kind of lush pleasantries that can only be exchanged between the deeply unpleasant.
She situates herself on a bench by the makeshift court.
Florian lounges on the sidelines, eyes locked on Elspeth’s opponent.
Mallory removes a jacket only half as hideous as all his others and takes his racket from the ball boy.
In his antique blouse and silk shoes, he looks like a garish mistake in an otherwise masterful tableau, a Merrett-style eyesore among the pointillist exactitude of a vant Wron picnicscape.
Even in the mounting Acid Moon heat, he doesn’t roll up his sleeves to serve.
Elspeth responds with perfect form, her veneer of scents smoothing each of her movements, slowing and fanning out the shuttlecock right before it hits her racket. An elegant cheat, and if Aster knows the perfumers at the Chancellery, named something dismal like “Poetry in Motion.”
The ship eases out from the gnarled fingers of Tiliard’s roots.
The curve of the city bends against the violet sky, crosshatched with brass lifts and mossy stairwells.
Aster rarely gets this view of the vertical meadows, the curled rootlets remolded by ecdytoxin.
She is so used to being safely penned in by rings of streets, by the labyrinths of the midcity below her and the blanket of pollen-haze above.
It almost frightens her, to see the city so small, this helpless mote of civilization under the sky’s endless pink maw.
She steadies herself with a sip of her cocktail.
As she watches Elspeth and Mallory play, one like a stanza of metered verse, the other like an honest, if not funny, slip of the tongue, she digs through her memory for all the things he’s said, and all the things he hasn’t.
Sweating in the wet heat, she tries to pick through the web of half-truths woven around him, untangling threads of reality from her own guesswork.
Something foul hovers behind her. She turns, expecting a urea wasp.
“Dearest Asteritha,” the Chancellor says. “So nice to see you’ve made it.”
“Eir Chancellor, what a pleasure,” Aster replies. “I hope you’ve recovered from your ordeal.”
“Thank you, vralen. Doing much better.”
When he sits beside her, it becomes clear he is not.
She can’t see it under his glove, or his sleeve, but there is something wrong with his arm.
No perfume curls up from his wrist. His regalia, a skillful concoction of a hundred scents that hide a hundred others, falls short just below his elbow: an abrupt, offensive incompleteness that the other guests have surely noticed, if only subconsciously.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” the Chancellor sighs.
“You’re good enough to smell that. Probably good enough to fix it, Mam’selle Fauniche.
” He leans back, crossing one shining shoe over the other.
“Yes, yes, I know. Your contract. I was thinking of just cutting my hand off for the wedding. A silver prosthetic would look good, wouldn’t it? Like the lead from Tulip Food.”
“Nothing’s impossible with a good bioalchemist,” Aster says.
“So true. Grab me my snuff, would you, dear? The hand isn’t much good at the moment.”
Before she can even process his request, she fishes the snuffbox from his jacket pocket.
“I hate to ask this,” his tongue continues, breath layered in scents. “Just a little on your thumb. Good girl. Don’t let me make a mess.”
Scolding herself, she obeys. When he’s done, he drapes his good arm on the back of Aster’s chair and watches his fiancée’s game.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?” he asks eventually.
Elspeth’s muscles pull taut in the purple cloud-light. Her bob curls in the humidity, cupping her flushed cheeks. “Absolutely,” Aster sighs.
“It took nearly eight years to refurbish her. I had to get all the materials hauled up from the sludge pits. Used to be a smuggling ship, did you know?”
“Oh. Yes. She’s lovely.”
He shifts, eyeing the match. “That man losing to my bride. Vant Pallont, was it?”
“Passand.”
“I’ve noticed he’s fond of parading around naked. Charming, but bold, in this climate. At least he has no perfume that can mask his lustful intentions toward my bride.”
“I don’t think he has any such intentions, Chancellor,” she says carefully.
“Nonsense—he’s nude, not blind.” He watches the match for a few seconds. “Oh. She’s a bold cheater, isn’t she?”
Aster hesitates, certain someone must’ve noticed a missing hairpin in her boudoir. “Surely not—”
“At badminton, dear. Unless you have a secret to spill.”
“No, Eir Chancellor.”
“Good. That’s a match I’d rather not see him win.” He laughs. “He is odd, isn’t he? I wonder who his barber is. I’ve never seen a man with so smooth a shave. I’m still looking for someone skilled to trim me for my wedding night. So ask him for me.”