Chapter The Lilies Wretched #4
A shout echoes from the hall. Guy jerks upright, as does Bertram. The voice is joined by another, and another, a flurry of hushed conversation, growing louder, then ceasing with a forceful knock on the office door.
“In,” says Bertram.
Guy’s heart hiccups as Dawn steps into the room, helmet under his arm, a line of bedraggled colleagues filtering in behind him. His face is grimy, the skin around his eyes stark white where he’s squinted against the smoke. Red-brown stains stipple his chitinous suit.
Before Guy can embrace him, he strides to the desk and places something small and pale on it, something that brings a glow to Bertram’s face.
“Oh, wonderful.” He whistles. “Artfully done, Corporal.”
He rounds the desk, takes Dawn’s hand in both of his own, then pulls him into a rough embrace, paying no mind to the stench, the blood, the toxic particulates clinging to his iron vine.
“How was it down there?” he says, falling back into his chair.
Dawn smiles. When he speaks, his tone is pained but energized, a devastation so sharp it borders on exhilaration. “Incredible.”
Bertram holds up the object, turning it in the light as if appraising it. “It’s Franz’s, all right. Bastard always had the worst taste in rings. Where’s the rest of him?”
“You want me to bring that up, too?” Dawn asks.
“God, no. Just wondering.”
“He’s in R every click as impulsive as picking at a scab, each note of his harpsichord a drawn-out moan.
Down in the depths of the prison, among the muffled howls of the incurable, the shuffle of monstrous criminals and the skittering percussion of pests, Aufhocker writes his newest opus.
His cell is larger than the others, adorned with countless luxuries accrued through his many years of imprisonment.
A brass tub stands in the corner, next to a phonograph.
Shelves slump under a decade of collected books.
His sheets are silk, and a little garden of albino flowers crawls from metal pots.
All this, and the makeshift stage down the passage, are Sorav’s doing. Not that any of it has satisfied him.
When the Marshal reaches the bars to the cell and sets his torch in the sconce, he finds Olaf in his usual position, hunched over the typewriter with one ear tilted toward the door.
A small bandage, tinged in red, is taped over it, recently applied by the Surgeon General’s white-coated technicians (or Crypsis agents skilled enough to play them).
They visit him every few weeks, gently pulling him from his desk, two pinning him on his side while a third perforates his eardrum, sliding the needle into the effusion and aspirating the toxic buildup.
Sorav hopes at the very least it gives him some relief.
Olaf doesn’t turn from his work as the bars rattle aside. He doesn’t greet him, doesn’t react until the Marshal gently touches the nape of his neck. Even then, he only blinks. Sorav doesn’t force an embrace. He’s long since learned the ugly pointlessness of that.
“If you have a request from my patron,” Olaf says, candles flickering at his breath, “tell him no. I’m not rewriting it again. Not again. I’ll take the beating, I don’t care. I’m not writing in that fucking beheading. The Marriage of Bertram is finished.”
“He really does insist.” No answer. “We had the first rehearsal tonight. His fiancée didn’t even show. They’re still out looking for her.”
Sorav hopes this at least might get a grunt of schadenfreude, but the indifferent click of the typewriter resumes. Sorav does not know how Olaf can work by such little light, but then again, the man hasn’t seen the sun in the better part of two decades.
“Talk to me, Hock,” he says. “Please.”
“I’m in the middle of something. It’s tormenting me right now.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s not coming together. It’s not working in meter. It might be better as prose. Maybe a novel.”
“Don’t make me laugh, Hock. I’m not in the mood.”
“I’m serious. Time for a new format.”
“Your patron will throw a fit.”
Olaf’s chair creaks. He shifts, then circles his cell.
The place is due for an expansion, too small to house all the years of the Marshal’s bargaining chips, the instruments, artworks, down pillows.
Maybe he will arrange to have another wall torn down, execute or release the man next to him and give him the cell.
That might buy him a few hours of begrudging company, but it always surprises him how difficult it is to negotiate with a man who has nothing left.
“You owe me a conversation, Hock,” Maximian says. “I gave you a dance.”
“Fine.” Olaf sits again at his typewriter. “What do you want?”
“Davide Bateusse. You remember him.”
The darkness curdles at the name. “Sure.”
“He had a son.”
“Did he? He never told me.”
“So I take it you haven’t met him.”
The clicking resumes. “No.”
“Apparently the boy spent a good deal of his life in Mongfestun.”
“Even pious men have unruly sons.”
“Well, this one is out to kill me. He seems a polite enough fellow, though. This vant Passand. Reminds me of you.”
This time, the typewriter stops. The murk shifts, the candles flicker, as if the cell is taking a cautious breath. “Who?”
“Eir Marshal.”
A Tender Guardsman appears at the doorway. He wears a dark look, speaks with a low voice. He knows he is not supposed to interrupt the Marshal on these visits. “A word outside, if it pleases you.”
Sorav withdraws from Hock’s cell, sliding the door shut behind him.
“I’m sorry, Eir Marshal,” the Guardsman begins, and Maximian can guess what he is about to say.
A tendril of dread unwinds in his gut. It is a distinct feeling, the same that overcame him the day Tyro died, that unfathomable blight of rage and guilt and hurt that festers only on the underbelly of love.
“It’s about Florian.”