Chapter The Lilies Wretched
THE LILIES WRETCHED
The rotten little hole on Vaughn Street turns out to be the remains of a felled clock tower, peppered with shattered glass and twisted knots of Revivalist statuary.
The place is a shambles, and all the more fascinating for it.
Rot oozes from every pore; gears creak aimlessly, mossy pendula ease through the churning mix of steam and smoke and the palpable stench of blooming corpse flowers.
Drinkers, artists, the washed-up and the up-and-comers, lounge on reclaimed church pews and cinder blocks, dancers dangle from the warped staircases.
No orders are taken; food and drink are delivered randomly and in abundance, payment is collected arbitrarily.
The brass band is a rotating group of strangers, the music amelodic, ungraspable, diffuse as the liquid-thick clouds of smoke.
Aster, Elspeth, and Mallory swim through the haze, pulling aside dying vines and dangling sap-wires, and find their way to a pile of coffins that passes for a booth. “God,” Aster mutters, “I can’t see a thing.”
“Really?” Elspeth asks. “I can see it all.” She laughs and squeezes Aster’s hand, just as a stranger arrives with a trio of drinks and a leg of hellrat.
“What’s in these?” Aster asks, smelling the first cocktail.
“You’ll never know,” Elspeth says. “They don’t write their recipes down. Enjoy it, because you’ll never taste it again.” She opens her purse and digs through it. “Here. My pick-me-up.”
She produces her emerald pillbox, from which she plucks a few clumps of a greenish substance. In the dim light, Aster supposes it might pass for cocaine.
“That’s … wet,” she says.
“You need a razor, El?” Mallory asks.
She laughs over the bleating of the band and makes do with a dinner fork. “Here. No, no—don’t snort it. You’re both so artless. It goes through the gums.” She divvies the nuggets between them. “And don’t swallow. Whatever you do.”
“What is it?” Aster asks.
“Exudate of the third-eye moth.” She lifts a clump and places it inside her lip, and Mallory follows suit. “Leave it there, oh, five minutes. It’ll last for a half hour or so. Wake you up in more ways than one.”
Gingerly, Aster places the exudate inside her cheek. Almost immediately, her face begins to numb. “Oh, God,” she mutters.
“Hits fast, doesn’t it?” Elspeth asks. “Where are you going, Mal?”
He stands and vaults the pile of coffins, wearing a determined look, like a moth suddenly cognizant of a flame. “I have to check on a few things,” he says. “Have something to eat. I’ll be back in fifteen.”
“He’s always doing this,” Elspeth says when he disappears. “Always skittering around, trying to plan things. Too many friends in low places. It’s a hard habit to break.”
Aster vibrates, feeling brave, optimistic even, snug in this little alcove of decay, this insult to Revivalism. Elspeth is right; she hasn’t felt this awake in a long time.
“How long, El?” she asks. “How long have you been involved with this … Extemporism business?”
“A while, here and there,” she says. “I really took off after I ran over Mallory. Took off with my art, I mean, not my car. I’m not that classless.”
Aster laughs, knowing she should fear for her, for them both, fear the displeasure of the Chancellor and his Marshal.
But here in the embrace of unfettered ugliness, the tyranny of the future simply does not exist. A long bronze hand endlessly taps the same hour on the shattered clock face.
Breath hangs suspended in opium smoke. The band pauses to argue about the next song, then, wills clashing, begins anyway.
“Care to dance?” Elspeth extends a hand to Aster. “Just a quick one. Then I’ll be off to rehearsal. Promise.”
“I shouldn’t,” Aster says. Although a wheeze curls in her chest, she dares to think she can do it.
She stands and spits her third-eye. Elspeth pulls her down the sloped tiles to a patch of dirt, where she removes her shoes and begins to sway.
The music, tuneless, ripples as if through water; somehow, the phases of disparate tempos meet, birthing a complex, uncatchable rhythm.
It is less a song than a state of suspended being, felt in the bones more than the brain.
Stained glass rattles above them, set with motifs of Bacher’s dragonfly.
The insects contort, coupling and disentangling with the music.
“Shit, El,” Aster breathes, caught up in the wave. “This is … really good.”
“You should hear it sober,” El replies.
As Aster sways, she closes her eyes, reaching for Elspeth’s hand, then her hips. She melts into her, dissolving until she is unsure whose fingers are whose, whose feet are whose, whose is the sharp scent of sweat and whose is the whiff of tobacco.
“I’m not going to do it, you know.”
Aster opens her eyes to see something she hasn’t since the Sanitarium. Tears gather at the corners of Elspeth’s eyes, branching, blood-tinged corals of toxin.
“Do what?” she asks.
“Paint the Chancellor. I won’t finish it.” El lifts her gaze to the moss and rot dangling above her head. “I won’t be another of his attempts to be remembered. To outlive himself. That’s all it is, Aster, everything I do—everything I paint. Just fucking baggage to force on a future Tiliard.”
“El,” Aster mutters, hands on her cheeks. When she dares to brush away a tear with a fingertip, it stings her skin.
“I don’t want it. I don’t want to be remembered.
I don’t want to rip off parts of myself and leave them behind.
Picking off a little more every day and putting it up for display.
Like watching your own corpse rot.” Her tears expand, framing her smile like a shimmering mask.
“It’s not worth it. It’s too steep. It’s too goddamn steep, the price of beauty nowadays. ”
For some reason, a memory wriggles into Aster’s mind, of the Marshal sharing a piece of old exterminator’s wisdom, staring out his office window into the infinite green city-glow, running a white glove idly on the sill.
“The smart ones, you know,” he told her gravely, lifting a little exoskeleton the maid had failed to dust away, “they eat their molts.”
Aster takes Elspeth in her arms.
“Listen,” Elspeth whispers as the song shifts.
Aster can’t sense how, or when; she is buoyed along the notes as in a current.
“This is what Tiliard is going to become. One way or another.” Elspeth turns, guiding Aster’s hands to her waist. Aster moves up Elspeth’s back, her shoulders, feeling each hair rise under her touch, a coat of barbs and spurs and stingers, little cruelties she fires blindly at the world.
“Imagine the things we’ll make. Things that can never be captured, or bottled, or used.
Things that are for us, that will die with us. ”
Drowned in the joyful music, Aster sways helplessly as Elspeth presses against her.
She feels a cheek against hers, the streaks of burning toxin, then the corner of a mouth.
She turns her head, following the curve of Elspeth’s lips with her own.
They hover, touching with nothing but breath, until Elspeth opens her mouth over Aster’s.
Sharp as ever, Elspeth’s tongue invigorates her like the snap of a whip.
She is suddenly overcome by the relief that her work, unlike Merrett’s or vant Wron’s, or even the iridescent regurgitations of the Mammoth Stag, will never be strung up and displayed.
She will never be doomed to the celebrated limbo between death and immortality.
Her art will not outlive her, no matter how they might try to flood it with preservative, to screw it tight behind glass; she will leave no monuments, no recipes, nothing but a pile of bespoke, decaying scents and an overgrown solarium that no one else can truly tame.
Life isn’t worth living if it goes on without you, she thinks, unsure if the lyrics from A Gentleman of the Void have emerged from her memory, or if a singer has joined the band.
Elspeth pulls away during a lull in the music, tears solidified to a crystalline sheen. “Dear, is my mascara running?”
Aster wipes a streak of black from the branches of stinging poison. “Not badly.”
“Good. Can’t show up too weepy for my wedding rehearsal. It might imply I care.”
Aster laughs, a little too loud, now that the band has quieted. She squeezes El one more time. When she feels the soft touch of a hand on her shoulder, she turns, Mallory’s name on her lips. Then a scent hits her, her own formulation. Chillbug and argentum.
“Evening, vralen,” Florian says.
Joyous Healing is throttled in smoke. Fumigants and aerosols mix and bind and burst in the darkness; bodies fall from walkways, perforated with lead; seams of blue flames rip where volatile gases meet.
The root blazes with color, with retardants and propellants and toxins.
Canisters are launched from the battlements of R glowing patterns appear in injured flesh; screams rise as a chorus, perfectly in tune and with masterful vibrato.
Some die instantly. Others succumb within minutes, hours, to the overgrowth of their injuries. Some leap from the root to escape the next volley, some fall to their knees, surrendering less to Borisch-Gorslung than to the awe of the spectacle.