Afternoon Riverscape with Boat #3
Mallory rubs between her shoulder blades, gently as Elspeth. “You’re worsening, Vost.”
“Always this bad,” she lies, fumbling in her purse for her pills.
“That’s quite a bit of blood.”
“You want me to sing in your arms about it?”
“If that comforts you.” He leans over the balustrade as she shakes her bottle. She swallows half a dozen pills, then applies a touch of medicinal perfume to her trachea.
“Aster…” Mallory starts. “How did you get…”
“Fumes. BGS grenades. I was in a taxi. We got caught up in the Overture Skirmish.”
He watches her shake out a cigarette. “Inhalation is a bad route.”
“Could be worse,” she answers. “Hard to hide, though. Elspeth has it easier. You can’t even tell she’s contaminated unless she cries. And she never cries.”
He takes her offered cigarette and leans to let her light it. “I’ve heard the ear is the worst.”
“Oh, no. That’ll be oral ingestion. Ones who drank the untreated water, or who ate sewer meat during the shortages. Hideous things. And the appetites they had. True vermin.”
“Ecdytoxin can really change you.” He brings his smoke to his mouth, and Aster’s heart hiccups.
“What about you, vant Passand?”
“What about me?”
“How did you get contaminated?”
He ashes into the Catoptric. “Stung.”
“Stung?” She reexamines him for the dozenth time since they’ve met, taking in his oddities, his normalcies, his little scars. There is nothing particularly monstrous about him, at least on the surface. “Straight from the source, then?”
“I told you. I was an exterminator.”
“An exterminator and a Mongfestun graduate? You had a busy youth, Eir vant Passand.”
Two columns of smoke emerge from his nose. “It’s a long story.”
“Longer than a cigarette, I know.”
He says nothing for a while. Hailstones disappear soundlessly into the river, as if into a cloud. A bridesmaid whimpers from the bow. “Do you blame him?” he asks eventually.
“Blame who?”
“The Marshal. Do you blame him for what happened to you?”
“I … I can’t.”
A shadow darkens his gold eyes. “Forgiveness is in the terms of your contract?”
“Not at all. Maybe some of what he did back then was in poor taste … but he’s better than the rest. He took me out of—” She hesitates, half tempted to go into the torture of the Sanitarium, the brutal treatments, the lavages.
The Chancellor’s eyes watching his crop of new citizens grow, the click of his polished shoes as he walked down the line of survivors, picking out those whose afflictions showed potential, deciding what strife-sown seeds would beget great beauty.
“The Marshal treats me like a daughter,” she says.
“He’s a good patron. I owe everything to him. ”
Mallory sighs, raising his eyes as Tiliard resolves in the distance. “Me too, I suppose. Without him, I would still be moving from job to job, gathering tattoos up to my neck. I wouldn’t be standing on a goddamn riverboat.”
“His graduation speech was that inspiring?”
“It was awful. Not a single war story. And this was the man who got shot in the head by the Marshal Exultant and just spat out the bullet.”
“Is that what they say about him at Mongfestun?”
“That, and when he looks at the sun, the sun goes blind.”
“Well, see, that one is true.” She flicks her butt away. “He’d never admit it, though. He never talks about his life. And he’s shot anyone who’s tried to write a biography. You should see what he did to the librettist of Deep Canyon.”
Mallory laughs. “He never was fond of pageantry.”
Aster’s gut turns. “Mal,” she starts, thinks better of it, then discards that better thought. “This person you’re looking for. All this debt business. If it’s got something to do with the Marshal…”
She doesn’t finish, and he doesn’t finish for her. He stares into the Catoptric, and a little thrill of terror lights her heart.
“You know,” she continues carefully, glancing to the Guardsmen pacing the stern.
“You’re not the first. We used to get an avenger every few seasons.
Sons of deposed ministers. People who lost family in the Revival.
Debtors, sometimes. Or just fanatics who want the Marshal’s attention.
Some might try to kill him for it. Some may even try to get to him through his perfumer. ”
“Give yourself more credit, vralen. I really do like you.” A cautious smile parts his lips. He turns to the water and takes a long, final drag. “Though it worked, didn’t it? I just got a much clearer view of his heart than his last assassin.”
“Well, go ahead, vant Passand. Try it. By all means. And you will very much have to resort to all means.” Her laugh catches in her throat. “He might appreciate the gesture, if you’re clever about it. He might even wear your skull when he’s done with you.”
Mallory glances at her. “He’s not the one I’m after, vralen. He’s only in the way.”
“In the way of what?”
He says nothing, only flicks his butt overboard.
She watches the filter spiral down into the water, and as she returns her cigarette case to her purse, her fingers brush her firearm. “You know I could get you killed,” she whispers. “I could scream. Right now. They’d toss you into the river, no questions asked.”
“You could,” he admits. “But then you’ll never get answers to your own.”
His boldness bewilders her; she has spent so many years watching the Marshal crush usurpers, conspirators, entire movements, sometimes by each individual windpipe. None of those roaches was brash enough to crawl under the boot and dare it to stomp.
“Now’s your chance,” Mallory says, eyeing the Guardsmen. “You could get rid of me. Prove you’re a pleasure and not a pest.”
“I might,” she says softly.
“They’re looking our way, vralen. We’re being suspicious up here, whispering so intimately.”
She removes her hand from her purse and directs it instead to his embroidered collar. “We’d better kiss, then,” she says.
“Am I going to get tackled by those Guards over there?”
“If you’re willing to find out, you’ve got about four seconds.”
“I’ll take it,” he says, and does.