The Lovers of Old Viennt
The city reeks. The stench drips along the cracks in the stained glass of the Palas solarium, seeping through caulk and wood and the outcroppings of Revivalist statuary.
Tiliard noisily soaks up the rain. The maples in Hart Park wilt with relief, canals foam and flood, and the machinery in the midcity moans as its rust is washed away.
The Marshal Revenant can almost hear the din rising from the vaults of the Surgeon General’s terraria, wet wails of a new ecdytoxin harvest, each drop squeezed with agonizing devotion from scarred and overtaxed glands.
Though, that could just be the Neo-Repressionists Florian has strung up in the Palas torture theaters.
As Aster kneels before Sorav, depositing rough little coughs into one hand, the other dabbing swiftness on the tendons of his heels, he finds himself longing for the days of the Revival.
The cleaner, dirtier days, when he didn’t need to stand for hours and endure adornment, when ecdytoxin flooded from vats of enzymes straight to the streets, flushing enemy hideouts, billowing in clouds so monstrous they paralyzed assailants in their tracks.
Those had been perfumes of a higher caliber.
He doesn’t recall the exact moment when his canisters became atomizers, his saber a letter opener, his artillery a mist of droplets.
It was a slow decline, the notes of each fume decaying over the span of years.
It shouldn’t have surprised him. It shouldn’t have felt like a betrayal, to see the same toxins that concealed his advance on the Palas reduced to a mask for the foul odors of politicians, to see the fumes that had split open the tanks in the Row for Splinter Row used only to edge ladies’ eyebrows slightly farther apart.
Tiliard has always been hungry for the spoils of his violent art.
Even those who had rallied most against the horrors of Ostlerfell still wore cravats dyed with its magnificent blue.
“Wrists, Eir Marshal,” Aster says. He extends them, and she dots the base of each thumb with a formula to steady his hands. She does not ask who he is killing today. She seems pensive, trapped in some internal maze.
Not that Sorav is much better, after fielding so many calls from the Chancellor following the riverboat fiasco.
The Marshal had tried to reason with him, assure him Florian’s feral, undirected violence was only an effect of the acid rain.
Gorslung would have none of it, insisting it was another attack, if not on his person, his image, which is far worse.
Sorav is still unsure if he would rather validate his boss’s paranoia than admit that Aster’s work is slipping.
It frightened even him, the way Florian had broken into a heinous stench, toxic fury burning through his scents as if he wore none at all.
He’s only relieved the boy had not been armed.
“What have you been putting in Florian’s perfume?” the Marshal asks.
“What he wanted, Eir Patron. Liver tree ash. And bloodwort.”
“Well, deny him next time. Cool him off. The Chancellor wants to incorporate a beheading into the wedding ceremony and he’s eyeing Florian for that role.
” Aster nods, wheezing as her applicator touches his skin.
When she rises to her feet, Maximian pulls a loose thread from her collar.
His eyes follow the length of silver to a bulge in her breast pocket. “Did that man give that to you?”
Her scent widens like her eyes, the rush of adrenaline that always quickens her heart notes. “Which man?”
“Please, Asteritha. It took two of the Tender Guard to pull him off you.”
She tries, and fails, to hide a smile, and a spark of irritation flickers in Sorav’s gut.
He’s seen her lovestruck before, mostly during those tumultuous teen years when she pined for normalcy, obsessed with her role in that old ritual in which bodkins and handkerchiefs are exchanged.
But each time she falls prey to a passion a little hotter than her smoldering infatuation with Elspeth, she is burned.
And always, her work suffers for it. Young artists, Aufhocker reminds him (as if he needs reminding), are all too eager to draw inspiration from a poisoned well.
“You’re not to see that man again,” he says. “If it’s company you need, I’ll hire it out. There’s a plague of idle young men looking for such contracts. And with this rain, it’s safer to stay inside, anyway.”
“Yes, Eir Patron.” She still doesn’t meet his eyes. She seems feverish, flushed in a way that heartache alone can’t explain.
“Aster,” the Marshal says. “I can hear you breathe. You need a lavage.”
“I’m all right, Eir Patron.”
“I’m going to call the Surgeon General.”
Her gaze meets his. There’s that scent again, that flicker that to any other nose might mask terror. He smells through it. He’s no perfumer, but he’s known her a long time.
“I feel fine,” she says. “Besides, you need me—”
“I need you alive and functional.” She flinches when he brushes her cheek. “You’re unwell. My bath oils aren’t working as they should. I’m having trouble sleeping.”
A furrow appears on her forehead. “I’m sorry, Eir Marshal. I’ll fix that. I promise.”
“Do so. I don’t want to make that call. I know you have no love for the Sanitarium.”
She bobs her head and excuses herself, disappearing back into the foliage of the solarium.
As his seamster enters with his uniform and the mortician his headdress, an ache of suspicion percolates his bones, a bodily memory not even mayfly can obscure.
He can’t banish the image of vant Passand on the riverboat—his face, blurred and discolored in the acid sun, dressed like a spoiled lordling and smelling, conspicuously, like nothing at all.
A thought strikes the Marshal as he clips on his cuff links.
It seems clear to him now that the man was lying about Mongfestun.
Likely a Crypsis agent of some sort, by the uncanny subtlety of his smell.
The Chancellor has been trying to entice Aster into his service for years, baiting her with scented breath.
And now, with his Laureate hanged and his wedding coming up, he’s desperate enough to approach from a different angle.
Sorav sighs and wraps the thread around his glove. Before he summons the Tender Guard, before he takes to the streets to round up the Chancellor’s least favorite nephews, he stops at the telephone. Because the sap-lines don’t grow outside of Tiliard, he calls the post office.
As he waits for the line to respond, he twists the silver thread in his fingers. It’s a sturdy, thick silk, frayed along its length by a soft fuzz. As it curls and sways in an imperceptible draft, a shiver runs up his spine.
“Good morning, Eir Marshal,” the operator says.
“Good morning. I have a records request I need you to send to Mongfestun.”
Guy almost makes it back to bed. He holds his composure as they march from Sreckt headquarters to the barracks, as they hose off their suits and decontaminate their equipment, as they sidle across the planks to the apartment.
Then, a dozen paces from the door, he succumbs to the ring in his ear, leans over the handrail, and vomits.
He trembles, head throbbing, while Dawn loosens his collar and rubs his neck.
Shapes blossom under his eyelids. The vision of the dying Srecktman wilts and regrows, cycling with the pulsations of his vertigo. His scar throbs, though he can’t tell if it’s only because of the retching. “Shit,” he breathes. “That was weird, Dawn. Too weird. That gas—”
“You’re all right,” Dawn says. He wears the same calm face as when he laid the bayonet on the Srecktman’s neck, the same spot where he now rests his hand on Guy’s. “You’re fine.”
Guy shivers. In his mind, the blade glides too smoothly through skin. “Oh, God. That Srecktman—where was the bug? Where was the goddamn bug?”
“It’s there, Guy. The team on the next shift will find it.”
“There wasn’t one. There wasn’t. There was nothing. Just the toxin. And it was flat. I expected a big one. A brood-parent or something.” A cold dread seizes him, an uncanny confusion, like seeing a rush of blood and being unable to find a wound. “What were we supposed to—oh, God.”
He retches over the railing again as the weight of the past few months crashes over him.
Dizzy with visions of Conundrum, of Bebber’s corpse, of hallucinatory landscapes of brick and flesh and poison, he sinks against the handrail.
He tries to tell himself it’s always been like this.
There’s always been some threat, some bizarre pest that, without the aid of hindsight, appears inexplicable.
He knows the stories of Old Dog’s Chase Dream, with the dismemberments, the disembodiments, the alien lights that haunted all who set foot on it, until they sawed off the infested root entirely.
He knows the stories of slithering albino giants, of mind-altering lichens, of the Mammoth Stag, the closest thing to a dragon the city has ever seen.
It is all just another trough in the wave, he tells himself, another turn of Tiliard’s biological seasons.
He’s been through worse. This is only half as bad as his first day of meatpacking.
“Shit.” He shivers in the biting wind. “I can’t do this. I can’t do this, Dawn.”
He leans over Guy, offering his hand. “Just rest. You need rest.”
“That toxin. It’s in me. It’s still in me.”
“It’s in me, too. It’s all right.” Dawn pulls him to his feet. There is a strange exhilaration in his touch. “I won’t let anything happen to you. I swear, Guy.”
He helps Guy through the freezing wind, arm around his waist, steadying him as he would when a delivery might take them over a slippery rootlet. It’s barely warmer inside; they take off only their jackets before crawling into their sleeping nook.