The Lovers of Old Viennt #2
The mattress is already occupied. Groping through the dark, Guy finds a small body rolled up in the blankets, nose barely exposed.
Unsure if it’s anger or cold that drives him, he grabs Tyro’s shoulders and tugs the blankets loose.
He intends to bully an apology from her, an explanation for her brief disappearance, but when he tears the sheets away, she doesn’t fight him.
She only clings, desperate, to his sleeves.
“Tyro…” he mutters, unable to bring himself to scold her.
The mattress sags as Dawn slips in on his other side. “You worried your brother, grub,” he says. “Don’t do that again.”
Tyro doesn’t answer, only nestles into Guy. “You smell like puke,” she whispers.
“Still better than you, grease-beetle.” As he draws her close, they tremble, with cold and—both can tell—with something else. Her throat bobs against his arm, readying a question, then swallowing it again.
“I won’t ask if you don’t,” she whispers eventually.
“All right, princeling,” he sighs. “Tale for another night.”
Her hair tickles his chin. Without the weight of length, her ringlets have tightened just like his own.
They’ll grow out well, he thinks. She’ll look just like the last tenor he’d seen play the lead in The Lovers of Old Viennt.
And, he can’t help but think as he drifts off, a little bit like the curly-haired spaniel that accompanies him onstage, to whom he sobs his final aria, when he realizes he and his true love will never meet, in this life or the next.
At first, Demetrius is sure he’ll be killed.
He’s sure he’s served himself on a platter to a man with no love of music, and even less of dance, a torturer whose sadism is rivaled only by that of his protégé, the little Impaler of the Tender Guard.
But half a dozen performers have gone to the Marshal Revenant this year so far, and all have returned without a scratch, and, tellingly, without anything to say about their visit.
It seems, if only by the deafening silence surrounding the matter, the worst danger in accepting the Marshal’s invitations is to talk about them.
What Maximian Sorav does, even in his spare time, is confidential business.
Demetrius endures his own ordeal wordlessly.
He holds his head down, performs as expected, and when the Marshal’s private car drops him off at the end of Petunia ten thousand marks richer, his only blemish is the smear of ink on his thumb swearing him to silence.
He has no intention of keeping it, of course, and frankly, Sorav should know better than to trust a man who makes his living with grand displays of untruth.
He waits at his favorite table at Bean Pulp with the Lunar Herald splayed over his face.
The Marshal is out playing with his guns today, since the weather will only dampen his fumigants.
The streets are empty but for the patter of enfilades and acid rain, the lunch crowd more cockroach than human. And still, Mal is nowhere to be seen.
Demetrius glances through the paper, then again, occasionally lifting his eyes to search the room before they return to the photograph on the second page.
There he is, skewering his opponent, off-kilter with a smile on his face, holding his body in a position so novel he hasn’t named it yet.
Inspired by Thomas the Younger’s recent victory, he reads again and again, scholars reexamine the outcome of the ancient War of the Lilies.
And his father assured him he’d never make history.
“Dee.” Finally, Mallory’s thin glove crinkles the top of the newspaper. “It’s not decent to stroke your ego so hard in public.”
“Oh, let a man indulge. You’ll be seeing a lot more of me soon enough.” He takes one last look at the photograph before folding the paper. “Tastes are changing. I’ll be principal next season.”
“If the stage survives that long.” When the waiter comes around, Mal shakes out his napkin with a prim little flick. Even after all these years he’s still got some of that old chaplain’s dainty habits. “What’s this I smell on you, Dee? Bilge musk?”
“Awful, isn’t it? A gift from the Chancellor. Trying to woo me with his pheromones. Wants me to play him at his wedding.” He grins. “I hear you’ve been quite busy yourself, Eir Mallory. That you’ve got your thumb on the Marshal’s perfumer.”
“And hers on me. Hasn’t turned me in yet, though.”
Demetrius lowers his voice as the waiter delivers their coffee. “Is she good?”
“Very good.”
“That’s what Elspeth tells me. And she would know, poor woman. Have you seen her latest sketches? Each one an Extemporist cry for help.”
“She’s going to get herself arrested,” Mallory sighs.
“Well, that’s fine.” Demetrius leans his chair on its back legs. “Once you’re Marshal, you’ll have the keys to every cell in the city.”
“I have no desire to be Marshal.”
“And that’s qualification enough. This place could use a Grand Marshal Reluctant.”
Mallory turns his eye to the rain outside. “Who is he after today?”
“Chancellor’s nephews, I think. He’s out in his stupid headdress again. Must think it makes him look serious.”
“He finally learned a little showmanship, didn’t he?” Mallory’s lip curls. “I’d pity him, if he were a little less pathetic.”
Demetrius laughs. It always pleases him to see that bitter smile, a relief to know that Mongfestun Correctional College for Recalcitrant Boys and Young Men hadn’t, after all, corrected his recalcitrance.
When they’d first reunited in Tiliard, when Mallory found him after a particularly bloody show in the ruins of the Argland Theater, he had worried that their years apart might have chiseled him into the respectable gentleman-soldier Mongfestun promised.
But he had slipped effortlessly into the gutters of the midcity, back into the twisted roots with the ease of a man who had been born there.
Mallory traversed Demetrius’s darkest social circles, exchanging money and information and flèches as diligently as any upstart.
A risk that will not go unrewarded, when Demetrius holds the laurels.
If not Grand Marshal, Mal will have to settle for Seamster Laureate. Demetrius will always need a friend who can manage to measure once and cut twice.
“How was your performance?” Mallory asks.
“God, Ludovico was thrilling. The way the routine just grows from him—truly the last bastion of Revivalist dance. It was almost a shame to end his career. And that lily! Just fantastic how it turned out. I heard it gave the Chancellor quite the scare.”
“I meant your private performance, Dee.”
“Oh, that.” He waves his hand, feigning dismissal.
“Where did the Marshal take you?”
“Not to bed.”
“I told you he wouldn’t.”
“No, no, you win that bet. He picked me up on Petunia and we just drove around for a while. I thought it’d be, I don’t know, a back-seat fondle or something. Nothing. He didn’t even make eye contact. It was kind of rude, honestly.”
“So, where did he take you?”
“Hard to say. Windows were draped. Couldn’t see out the windshield.
We went through a gate into the midcity, I don’t know which one.
I had no idea where we were when we finally stopped.
He opened my door for me and took me down this …
passage. There were these metal doors on either side.
A few of them barred. Tender Guard everywhere.
The moment I realized he brought me to some sort of prison, I started shitting myself.
I was sure he’d found us out, that you betrayed me. I was so mad at you for half a minute.”
Mallory, unoffended, rests his chin on his hand. “How far down were you?”
“Deep enough for Strangleroot, considering the sap leakage. The whole place was sticky. And the stench. Utterly vile. Blood and shit and something else. He took me down a hall, past a few cells—couldn’t see inside, but you could hear what kind of monsters they had locked in there.
One sounded like a person vomiting, over and over.
Another was clicking its teeth—or maybe just a typewriter somewhere, I don’t know. It was nasty, Mal.”
Mallory closes his eyes and takes in a little breath, short and silent, just as he used to at Mongfestun, always right before he began to cry. He doesn’t cry now, thank God—the soup has just arrived.
“So he leads me down into this xylem shaft,” Demetrius continues when the waiter is gone.
“Hits the lights. The place is huge, and he’s built this—platform across it.
Empty, except for a phonograph. Takes me a moment to realize it’s a stage.
This pervert has a fucking stage in his prison.
I would’ve laughed if I wasn’t so sure I was going to die on it. ”
Mallory’s mouth is a thin, taut line. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”
“No, worse. He put on Tasarte. ‘Aubade.’ Told me I’m going to dance to it. No warning, no time to prepare. Which was no problem for me, of course, but—well, he left for a few minutes, brought in someone else, and I shit you not, it’s—”
“Aufhocker,” Mallory says.
“Not sure who else it could’ve been. Didn’t look much like the posters—the man was a wreck. And he just … sat, and the Marshal put the music on. And they watched in silence. Fucking terrible. It was like those nightmares that third-eye dust can give you. Worst audition of my life.”
“Well,” Mallory croaks. “Did you do a good job, at least?”
“What? Of course I did. You know me, Mal, I can improvise. At least well enough that the Marshal spared my life. And gave me a tip big enough to guarantee I’d never speak of this again. Speaking of. Here.” He fishes an envelope from his jacket pocket, but Mal ignores it.
“Is he heavily guarded?” he asks.
“Heavily guarded and hard to find. And neck-deep in toxin.”
Mallory pinches his brow, a little too pensively for Dee’s taste.