Prism Storm #2
Outside their hideout, a sticky but well-ventilated hole where Aster has set up her organ, gunfire patters through the streets.
The hollow drum of the midcity echoes with ecdytoxic detonations, vibrating the tenements, tearing through smuggling routes, louder and closer with each hour.
With two safe houses gone, it’ll be a matter of days before the Palas closes in on the others, clearing out every Extemporist bolt-hole, gallery, bar, and café.
The Chancellor’s message is clear, and the Marshal’s delivery is thorough.
Mallory will come to this event, one way or another.
He can go willingly, or he can wait for Sorav to smoke him out and drag him.
Aster rises from her organ, a slapdash setup of witchfruit, bilge musk, nightshade, and crushed threads pulled from Mallory’s skin. “Are you all right, Mal?” she asks.
“Yeah. Things get a lot harder without Dee, though. He was the real headliner of the act.” He taps his chin.
He is accustomed to plotting, struggling, formulating and discarding his plans with the shifting winds.
He has run with the Extemporists for a while now, and he knows Demetrius’s death will not stop the droning hum of insurgent activity, only change its tune.
Sudden, massive shifts in direction are common motifs in Extemporism.
Losing the head will not stop the body. It is something many of them learned as victims of or witnesses to the Revival.
Scripts curl and decay, they burn, they are lost. New heads grow.
The dead rise. Extemporist strength lies in adjusting to the inconceivable.
“Are you going?” she asks, though she knows the answer already. The last time he tried to hide from BGS, to keep quiet and wait them out, it did not work for him. He has waited long enough.
“We’ll see about the others,” he says. “See who’s feeling brave. But they’re forcing my hand, personally.” He unfolds a note tucked into the crease of the invitation. When he hands it to her, she recognizes the Marshal’s rough, angular script. “My brother will be there.”
Her throat tightens. The message is just as succinct as all Sorav’s directives: Olaf, Box 27. Wants to see you. Very much.
“He might be lying to lure you in,” she says. “He might string you up next to Demetrius as soon as you walk through those doors.”
“He might. He might not. I have no idea. Doesn’t matter.
Alive or dead, I’m walking out of there with my brother.
” Mallory stands and dusts himself off. “I trust you, vralen. I trust your work. I’ve seen what you can do for the Marshal.
You know how to compose a good fog of war.
” He tucks the note into his breast pocket.
“And Dee always insisted that I learn to play things by ear.”
Because of the extensive and unforeseen changes to The Marriage of Bertram, the dress rehearsals grow only more tedious.
Bridesmaids smoke by the loading dock while half-costumed flower boys scurry through the wings.
The understudy, a meticulous young man with half of Demetrius’s good looks and a mere fraction of his talent, finishes his exercises under the micromanaging baton of the Chancellor.
Gorslung paces the proscenium, caked in perfume and all the more horrid for it.
Even from afar, or especially from afar, his olfactory projection seems off, exuding an aura of washed-up rot as he directs the director, conducts the conductor, finalizes the choreography, ensures everything is in its perfect place.
He sweeps his arm upstage, indicating where he wants Mallory to enter, funneled through a maze of backdrops by an escort of Tender Guard: past the gallows, where a gaggle of Extemporists will be hanging, then center stage, where he will be presented to Aufhocker.
The spotlight will move to the eccentric composer-librettist in his box, beautifully groomed and dressed in BGS colors.
A choice will be made—Mallory will renounce Extemporism, will be escorted up to the boxes and reunited with his brother, or he will join the bodies that will, by then, be veritably piling downstage.
The bookmaker will open three hours before the performance and close at intermission.
Justice, restorative or retributive, will only accentuate the triumph of the Chancellor’s wedding.
“Teach them to say that Revivalism is dead,” Gorslung growls.
The Marshal is busy with his own preparations.
The Surgeon General has supplied him the season’s ecdytoxin harvest for this event, every last drop squeezed from the teratopod’s scarred and shriveled tongue, from its half-born progeny, and from contaminated captives in the deepest cells of Strangleroot.
Tender Guardsmen practice their dance, pacing the auditorium with their sidearms and tanks.
A watchman here, a rifleman there, a few dozen Crypsis agents, dressed as guests and cast and ushers.
Not so many as to scare off Mallory, but enough that no matter what hole he crawls in from, no matter what termite track or crack in the wall, he will be spotted.
He is to be subdued on sight; orders are to place a glass of champagne in his hand and usher him to the dressing rooms.
Sorav rolls out the red carpet like flypaper.
He orders windows to be left unlocked, entrances strategically unattended.
Shift changes are frequent and schedules leaked, ensuring security lapses will slip into Extemporist hands.
Most importantly, he spreads the word that Olaf Aufhocker, for the first time in his career, will attend a performance of his own work.
The response from the city is immediate, and overwhelming.
The ticket office fields frantic calls, offers of tens of thousands of marks to outbid the Chancellor’s invited guests, offers of precious artworks, of properties, hirelings, family heirlooms and family heirs.
(Gorslung, ever the savvy businessman, accepts a few of the better deals, muttering gleefully to his Minister of Finance even as he paces backstage.) It will be jovial chaos, and the kind that Mallory should know will work to his advantage.
Sorav hopes it will be enough to entice him, that he will know this is the best, and only, opportunity he will ever have to see his brother again.
And if Sorav knows Mallory—or if he had at least known Tyro—he will not let this chance pass him by.
He looks forward to it. Down below the shame, the rage, some shriveled part of him truly misses that little grub.
“I imagine he’ll try to come in from above,” he says as he enters Aufhocker’s box. “You know Tyro. Always crawling through the passages over the barracks.”
Olaf observes the stage in silence. He too has been costumed and blocked for the rehearsal, placed where the technicians in the catwalks can swing the spotlight toward him.
Despite the best efforts of the Seamstress Laureate, his silk shirt hangs off his bony shoulders, his sleeves seem too wide for his wrists.
Occasionally, he folds back his cuff to scratch at his burning tattoo.
With a touch of subtle perfume, with his trimmed beard and formalwear, he looks like a corpse about to sail off into the Catoptric.
Sorav’s heart wilts. “You look good, Hock,” he says.
Aufhocker returns his eyes to the stage, where the understudy and a flower girl circle one another on a wooden riverboat.
He reaches after her as she climbs the balustrade in her white frock, dressed as if for a funeral.
A noble death for a noble child, a misguided little girl, so terrified of the Revival she would leap into the Catoptric to avoid it.
Despite the understudy’s efforts to sing her down, she climbs, and climbs; when she flops into the pad behind the riverboat, the dancer spins and falls to one knee.
Olaf watches the display, saying nothing for a long time. Then, barely a whisper: “I didn’t fucking write this.”
Sorav lays a hand on his back, and he flinches at the spark of bloodwort.
The Marshal withdraws. He has eschewed mayfly, wearing only the scents that sharpen edges and eyes; keen, cold armor, skillfully made but still, to his nose, pedestrian.
Aster would’ve made him the perfect perfume, something gloriously menacing but still soft, a kind of protective ferocity that Olaf would not shrink from.
Unfortunately, the Chancellery has no spares that can come close to replacing her.
Sorav wonders if she will come with Mallory, as a hostage or an accomplice.
Maybe she’s already dead, taken by her lungs or flayed by the Extemporists.
She may be perfectly fine, dissuaded from attending by Mallory’s chivalric drivel: It’s not safe, I can’t afford to lose you—no, Tyro would gag.
Even breathless without medicine, helpless without access to her solarium, as long as Aster can stand on her own two pumps, she will come for Elspeth.
She will follow her old friend into whatever danger, whatever madness awaits, real or contrived, genuine or self-imposed.
She is enamored, addicted to Elspeth’s lovely poison. She may not recognize it, but Dawn can.
“Would you like some wine?” Sorav asks with what he hopes is a pleasant tone.
He can’t manipulate his perfume with his tongue like the Chancellor, but for Hock, he tries to put forward softness, that faint touch of linnetwood Aster always described as brotherly.
“This may go on for some time. It’s easier with a little sweet red. ”
Olaf says nothing, only picks at his tattoo.