What God Forgot #3
As Olaf’s prison expands, so does Maximian’s.
While the more violent works of the Revival wind down, and the battles take place less in the streets and more in the courts and opera boxes and dinner parties, the necessity of fumigants makes way for the necessity of perfume.
The Sanitarium cultivates a ripe new crop for the ripe new age, populating the Chancellery with scent-makers and poets and spies.
Sorav’s advisors tell him he must similarly equip himself, insisting on the necessity of a brass band, a few reserve dancers, and above all, a perfumer.
One is delivered to him from the Sanitarium, a young casualty of the Overture Skirmish.
The day she turns fourteen, Sorav watches her press her thumb to his contract, a move that, when over the next decade she grows to be one of the most remarkable scent-makers in the city, Bertram will never quite forgive him for.
Gradually, the dust settles. Occasional pockets of dissent spring up, stragglers of Neo-Repressionism, or creatures of ecdytoxic runoff, and Maximian fumigates, massacres, clears out one nest of dissidents only to uncover another.
As Marshal, he becomes familiar with the torment of a perpetually unfinished job.
He sits in his office for hours on end, fielding interminable calls; he sits for tribunals, for executions, for his portrait, his striking eyes painted in Ostlerfell Blue.
He sits to read his own exploits in papers and magazines, sorting hatefully through photographs of baritones playing him onstage.
He is the best Grand Marshal the city has ever seen.
He is exactly as a Grand Marshal should be: dashing, competent, tough, ruthless or bloodless depending on necessity.
He expresses the tenets of Revivalism in the sculpture of his own body, in his elegant and irresistible strategies.
Bullets seem to pass right by him. Poison seems not to sicken him.
He is so successful, so well-suited for life, that when in his fifth year of office he writes a solemn note and ingests enough tranquilizers to kill a team of horses, he only wakes up the next morning slightly better rested than usual.
After this, he adopts a protégé, a child from the Sanitarium steeped in ecdytoxin, hoping that naming a successor would set in motion an inevitable succession.
He begins to sculpt this weapon of a boy, sharpening him until the day he is keen enough for a fatal cut.
It is the only thing that seems worthwhile in his parade of tedium.
“Day after day,” he complains to Aufhocker, sliding a cold beer across the table in his cell. “Picking away at the Exultant’s old bullshit.”
“‘Woe,’” Hock mutters bitterly. “‘Woe to the fool who thinks that by virtue of his sitting upon it, the throne itself will change.’”
Sorav is used to Hock’s equivocations, his barbs, his terrible silences, but this quote irks him so badly he has the man strung up and lashed.
Five years after Sins of Our Patrons is performed in the cafeteria, five years after Mallory learns his brother is still alive, he realizes he will not survive graduation.
Not for any misbehavior, nor for aiding in the escape of a classmate, but because, in accordance with some charity agreement between the Mongfestun administration and the Tiliard Poverty Mitigation Society, the Marshal Revenant will appear as the ceremony’s honored guest. His presence, claims the warden, will encourage enlistment in the Palas Infantry and reduce recidivism.
The prison chaplain vehemently disagrees and refuses to attend, citing his heart trouble—an excuse that Mallory doesn’t have the luxury of sharing with him.
One by one, the transformed young men mount the stage, and Mallory is no exception.
His hands tremble as he kneels to receive his saber, sure that Dawn will recognize him, if not by his face, then by the name vant Passand, which surely has been extracted from his brother by now.
He will recognize his tattoo, at the very least, despite the powder he’s used to conceal it.
But the Marshal is not Dawn at all. When he speaks, restless protégé at his side, he does so in a dreamy monotone, echoic as a shell. When he takes the boys’ hands and congratulates them, his eyes are glazed with what Mal will come to recognize as mayfly perfume.
He reaches out for Maximian Sorav’s decorated glove.
(Max, Max—he can’t help but think as he approaches—a poor name, a dog’s name.) He bows his head, and Tyro’s heart burns in his chest. The hand is as warm as it always has been, firm as when it had rested on the nape of Guylag’s neck, or gripped Tyro’s wrist on windy midnight trips to the lavatories.
A surge of white-hot devastation overtakes Mallory, and the threads inside him resonate like harp strings.
“May you serve with grace,” says Maximian.
It’s all Mal can do not to weep, all he can do not to draw his school-issued saber and make an attempt at the Marshal right there.
Every part of him longs to bite, to slither up that sleeve, but he knows he can’t break his own skin yet, not until he finds Emmory.
And so he hovers, tears in his eyes, Marshal’s hand in his own, knowing he has time and obscurity on his side.
The relief pours from him in a long, grateful sigh.
“Thank you,” he whispers to Sorav. “Thank you so much, Eir Marshal.”
“Of course, young man,” he replies dully. “Next up.”
When Mallory is released from Mongfestun, he does not go back to Tiliard immediately, but follows Eir Bateusse to his home in Dagdrun for a few months, readjusting to his freedom.
He gets an odd job here and there, sells his swordsmanship, his tailorship.
For a few years he dabbles again in smuggling, trawling the river for treasures and information, transporting racks of stolen wine, or accompanying caravans bulky with blue pigment from Ostlerfell to the lifeless waters of Sullen Head.
He circles Tiliard several times, closer with each pass, never taking his eyes off it.
When he is twenty-five, on a run from the boiling southern wastes, he finally disembarks.
He makes his way through the undercity, then the mid, then, shyly at first, the stump-face.
His search for his brother is both easy and monstrously difficult.
Emmory vant Passand is not hard to see, but impossible to find.
Evidence of him is everywhere, ubiquitous, delocalized.
Excerpts of his old lullabies pour from the radios, references to his stories appear in artworks and jokes, his favorite platitudes emerge from the lips of passersby.
He is fully absorbed in Tiliard, embedded in its wood, and Mallory has no means to extricate him.
He has no status, no money, no clues to his location.
He can’t afford a ticket to the opera, much less to bribe his way to the reclusive librettist.
But he is patient. He’s good with a blade, better with a needle.
He knows the undercity, knows a few of his street boys from Joyous Healing, now mercenaries and counterfeiters and wine-runners; he knows a fraction of what Reames knew about bioalchemy, which is a great deal more than most, and, after tunneling through the midcity and reuniting with his old friend, he comes to know the deep and seedy network of the upstart Demetrius Prophet.
What he doesn’t know is that a hundred miles south, Davide Bateusse is writing him a letter.
His adoptive father, prompted by his worsening shortness of breath and the intermittent but excruciating pain in his chest, has been getting his affairs in order.
He has been cataloguing and categorizing his possessions and his sins, reliving the night that the Tender Guard came to his house, haunted by the memory of his wife’s terrified face, the gunshots, the clouds of ecdytoxin that chased him down Rebirth, and the guilt that chased him all the way to Dagdrun.
He writes everything, from his first encounter with Hock in the hospital ship to the night the young man died robbing his house.
He tucks his confession into his will, naming Mallory vant Passand as his heir.
He bequeaths his entire life to the foundling: his villa, the ruins of the church property in Tiliard and all contained therein, his moral debt.
When he is finished, he dons his slippers and housecoat and pours himself a glass of wine.
Before the wax seal dries, a great pressure lifts from the bishop’s shoulders, and then asserts itself in his breast.
The next morning, when he does not show up to the market for his olives, the seller sends a girl to his house.
He is found like many men his age, stiff and barefoot in his chair by the fireplace, a bottle of plum wine uncorked on the sideboard.
The local doctor is notified, who opens him up on his dining table to find a thrombus white as the ancient moon, a pearlescent calcification of startling beauty, obstructing his left anterior descending artery.
A few months after Aufhocker turns thirty-eight, or at least as far as he can reckon in the timeless disorientation of prison, he hears the name Mallory vant Passand spoken aloud.
After so many years dreaming of it, hearing it buried in his musical triplets, whispered in the shaking diminuendo of his harpsichord, he knows better than to believe it had come from the Marshal’s mouth.
But he clings to the almost palpable feel of it.
He paces his cell and repeats it to himself, scratching at the soot mites in his beard, conjuring and discarding images of a young gentleman, of a little girl, of a princeling and a mercenary and a factory boy and all things in between.
Every time he crawls into his bed, he tosses with questions, with desperate theories, with the name stuck, burning, on his tongue.
At some point, during neither night nor day but the eternal tedium of their lightless blending, he feels the mattress sag beside him.
At first, he doesn’t open his eyes, figuring it is only the Marshal in one of his moods, drunk or grieving or guilty.
He expects a gentle hand to shake his shoulder, brush his cheek, promising a five-course meal or a golden pen for an hour of intimacy.
But a familiar scent meets his nose, forcing his eyes open, and he bolts upright with a rush of dread.
The Chancellor sits at his side. His perfume clings to him like the stench of rot, but it is his complacent smile, the handsome parting of his beard, that truly curdles Olaf’s blood.
“Is this eiderdown?” he asks pleasantly. “Very sweet of Max. He spoils you—no, don’t get up. Take your time. You need rest. You’ve been working so hard.”
“What have I done wrong?” Olaf whispers. “I told you, Marriage is finished. I’m not putting in the beheading.”
“No, no. I wouldn’t dream of it.” Bertram stands, moving to the bookcase, running his hand along the spines and piled music.
“We’ve settled for a few hangings. And, well, I’ve had quite a bit of the production rewritten.
A few of my composers and lyricists got together and recycled some motifs from the first act.
It turned out lovely. I think you’ll like it.
It’s very different than the original Marriage, but you know, that’s how editing goes. ”
“You’re going to let me out?” A chill crawls up Olaf’s spine. “Have I paid it all back?”
“No, not nearly—but you’ve come so far. You’ve suffered a long time, my friend.
You deserve to see the fruits of your labor—or better fruits than those pathetic little shows the Marshal puts on for you.
You deserve a real production.” Bertram’s smile is as genuine as it is cruel.
“I suppose you’d like to see Tyro again. ”