Prism Storm
The waxing light of Rut Moon eases piecemeal over the fronds and steeples of the city.
Its fractured face flushes pink, casting a lustrous glow over the Opera’s marquee as workers strike through the name of Demetrius Prophet and raise the understudy’s in its place.
It brightens the scandalized and delighted faces of passersby, who sow rumors all along the street.
Whispers travel outward from the square, down the gash of Conundrum, across the curve of Nineteenth, all the way to the Sanitarium, to its highest, most luxurious cell, where Elspeth Scholin stands for her gown fitting.
When she overhears the Seamstress Laureate mutter Demetrius’s name, she strains her ear for details, for any mention of Mallory or Aster, of the Extemporist movement at large.
Unsurprisingly, she gets nothing. Of course the gossips are tight-lipped; half the seamsters pinning her dress are Crypsis.
She turns on her marble dais, at once blanketed with silk and completely naked.
The Seamstress Laureate directs her gaggle of tailors, pinning her gown to her waist, her hips, laying ribbons of silk over her shoulders.
Though all Elspeth sees in the mirror are disembodied patches of her own goosebumped skin, the Laureate assures her the gown is stunning, its white so pure it casts an almost supernatural glow over the room.
Devoid of snail shells or avant-garde embroidery, it blossoms as a Revivalist work should.
White satin roses grow from her hips, white mums at her breast, white lilies in her headpiece.
Vines woven fine as hosiery crawl down her legs, secured with anklets of ivory filigree.
The Chancellor’s perfumers kneel under the hem of her dress, testing out an olfactory philter of sleepbug and cantharidin.
A veil of pale butterfly wings is draped over her face, then, when the Seamstress isn’t satisfied, substituted with a gossamer web of the silver-milk spider.
“Oh, no,” Elspeth mutters. “There’s a louse caught in this dress.”
“Vralen?” The Seamstress freezes. “Are you sure?”
“It’s a pity,” Elspeth replies. “I liked this one, too.”
They strip the silk from her body, searching through the folds and petals for carousal lice, pulling the veil from her face, the shoes from her feet. They find nothing, but can’t risk it. The gown is scrapped, the veil burned, and Elspeth is led away by a nurse for another bout of decontamination.
Seven floors below her, the corpse of Demetrius Prophet is delivered to the Sanitarium morgue.
The Surgeon General wheels the body to her table, delighted by his lean symmetry, the beauty of his long nose, his dark hair.
As she eviscerates him, she sets out to prove the Vrenecker platitude that any man is far more enchanting dead than alive.
Seventy floors below that, in the dank labyrinth of the midcity, the door to Olaf Aufhocker’s cell slides open.
He steps into the sap-sticky tunnels of the Strangleroot prison system, guards at his sides, and follows the Laurel Chancellor up the sloping corridor, toward a waiting car.
As they approach the vehicle, a Tender Guardsman takes his wrists, pulling them behind his back.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” the Chancellor barks. “Don’t cuff him, you animals. Do you even know who this is?” The officer drops Olaf’s hands and instead opens the car door for him. “These Tender Guard, Hock. I’m telling you. Max lets them run wild. At least Autotomic had some discipline. Well, get in.”
Olaf stares into the car while Gorslung slides in the other side. The smell of new leather wafts up from the seats.
“I said get in, Hock.”
Finally, he musters the will to climb inside, flinching as the door slams shut. The engine rumbles, shedding a sweet smell, and the car begins the corkscrewed journey upward.
“God, you reek of sap,” Bertram says. “And that beard. Dire need of a trim, my friend.”
Olaf can’t reply. He watches the green lamplight of the midcity ease past. A distant boom rattles the wood under the wheels, and the compass-chimes sing in response.
A drone thrums in his ear, in his nose, instantly recognizable even attenuated through the years.
The Marshal’s ecdytoxin is sharp, refined, a far cry from the crude weaponry he had employed during the early months of the Revival.
It is the smell of a movement in its maturity.
He shivers, knowing that somewhere the teratopod still clings to life, a dragon not slain, but tamed.
“Where’s Mallory?” he asks hoarsely.
“Well, you see, that’s the problem.” Another rumble shakes the compass-chimes. “Max is trying to flush out your little sister—or brother now, I suppose. I’ve run into him a few times. Unrecognizable, honestly. You know he’s made quite a gentleman of himself.”
“Has he?” Olaf croaks.
“Well, of a certain type. A real Caspian, I’d say. All brooding and mysterious and what have you. A couturier. Bit of a ladies’ man. Even my bride was smitten with him, for a while.”
Olaf takes a shaky breath. He doesn’t know whether he can manage to laugh.
“She wanted him to design her wedding dress,” Bertram continues. “The thing was a monstrosity, I’m afraid to say. We had to throw it out.”
“Never could teach him to work a needle,” Olaf says, because it’s the only thing he can.
“Oh, but he’s popular,” Bertram sighs. “Single-handedly brought embroidery back in. Everyone’s got those handkerchiefs now.
You know, the ones our grandfathers used to carry around.
The topographical ones.” Bertram pauses as they pull up to a gated checkpoint.
“It pains me to say, Hock, but he’s mixed himself up with some bad people.
Your little grub has left quite a few corpses in his wake.
The Marshal’s son, foremost. Or the boy he hired to be his son. ”
“Florian,” Hock breathes. “Oh, God.”
“Evidently Mallory is good with a sword. Graduated Mongfestun, can you believe it? Spent a decade there. How he ever managed—well, that’s a story we’re both eager to hear, I bet.”
A shiver runs up Olaf’s spine. He glances to the Chancellor, to his soft smile, his arm draped over the back of the seat. “What are you going to do to him?” he asks.
“Nothing he doesn’t make me,” Bertram replies. “Oh, don’t frown like that. I thought you’d be happy to hear the news.”
Hock curls in his seat, resting his head between his knees.
“Come on,” Bertram says. “Save the tears. This isn’t a funeral—or it doesn’t have to be.”
Olaf only tightens his grip around his knees, straining to conjure an image of Mallory alive, of him emerging from the river, making it all the way to Dagdrun, all the way to the bishop’s door, being taken in as a son of Davide Bateusse.
What an utter fool Mallory must’ve grown into, to come all the way back to Tiliard, to throw himself into the monster’s mouth for a brother that did nothing but fail him.
Hock would like to think he had taught him better than that, but he knows his little sibling.
Even as a toddler, Mal was fueled by righteous spite.
“You’ll love the Chancellery, Hock,” Bertram says. “I’ve completely remade the place. I’ll give you a tour, and a suite. Get you some nice clothes. Wash off the soot mites—dear God, there are quite a few, aren’t there?”
The throat of the midcity opens to a maw of sky. Sunlight spills through the windows, and Hock squints against it. As the Chancellor prattles on, he grips the car door, battling vertigo.
A terrifying city crawls by, lush, beautiful, the gold geometry of Neo-Repressionism warped and choked under Revivalist floridity.
His stomach turns at the hugeness of it all, the unrelenting assault of color and sound and movement.
Without the close proximity of stone walls, the grounding pressure of the dark, he feels himself falling upward, unmoored from gravity.
He shakes, waiting for the car to rise from the street and sail into the infinite sky.
“I think I’m going to vomit,” he says.
“Ah, poor man,” Bertram sighs. “Well, hold it in until we get to the Chancellery. I’m not stopping for you.”
“They fumigated the safe house above Joyous Healing this morning,” the errander girl says. “This was the only thing they left.” She extends an envelope toward Mallory, its crease fanned and bubbling with ecdytoxin. “It’s for you.”
Mallory holds the invitation in one hand and his scabbed forehead in the other.
He reads it once in silence, then once aloud.
A few stragglers from other safe houses stand nearby, listening to him recite the casting changes, the new choreography, the alterations to the Revival scenes, as well as alterations to the bride’s dress.
An understudy will be playing the role of Bertram Gorslung, since the principal has been, to the Chancellor’s great surprise and regret, added to The Borisch Manual of Catoptric Pest Species.
His cadaver, however, taxidermized in Revivalist style by the Surgeon General, will still play a prominent role in the celebrations, featured as the wedding buffet’s centerpiece.
Mallory rests a hand over his eyes. Under his small, sorrowful sighs, Aster can make out a hint of laughter. “Fucking Dee,” he mutters. “Always true to form. Won’t let his own death upstage him.”