Prism Storm #3
While Sorav summons an usher and orders a bottle of Weingut Marseea, he watches the understudy help the flower girl up to the riverboat for one last leap before lunch.
Then, he raises a hand to his forehead, leans against the table, over the dice columns and floral centerpiece, and releases a quiet moan.
There is a distinctly musical flavor to it, a kind of lush melancholy characteristic of his works.
“Not again,” he rasps. “I can’t watch it again.”
“Watch what?”
“What do you fucking think?”
“You don’t need to. We’re offering him a choice. An easy way out.”
“For what? Mallory did nothing.”
“He kidnapped my perfumer. Manipulated her. He killed Florian, Hock. They aren’t hirelings to me. They’re my children.” Sorav’s scent flares. “He couldn’t hurt me, and so he went for them instead. They had nothing to do with this.”
His heart twists at Olaf’s bitter laugh. “Neither did Tyro. Tyro did nothing. And you just let Gorslung—”
“I kept you alive.”
“Alive,” he spits. “Fuck you. I should step off this balcony now. Save poor Mal the trouble.”
“Don’t kill yourself just to spite me, Hock. It’ll only excite the gossips.”
Olaf rests his face in his hands. “He won’t come, anyway. He knows better. He knows you’re just going to kill him.”
“If only Bertram were that practical,” Sorav sighs.
“The last Chancellor would’ve had the Exultant shoot him out back before the show even started.
But that’s Revivalism for you.” The usher girl returns with the wine, setting two glasses on two small, embroidered coasters.
“If he dies at this show, it’ll be his choice. ”
A technician crosses the stage, checklist in hand.
A choreographer appears at the vomitorium with Elspeth, helping her count her steps down the aisle, up to the stage, to the trellis and the lunar bishop who will adorn her.
Dressed in a gown of gorgeous white, restrained by silk and scents all the way to her ankles, she hobbles toward her marriage in small, unsteady steps.
Before she can make it to the stage, a half dozen Extemporists are led in from the wings and marched up the gallows.
They are heavier than the pigskin dummies; when the tech cranks the lever and the bodies fall, the beam creaks and bends.
They sway, suspended for a few seconds, then a sharp crack rings through the venue.
“I’ve been wondering,” Sorav says, “where the name Mallory vant Passand is from. Some obscure Porrain or something?”
Olaf doesn’t take his head from his hands. A pyrotechnician hollers from somewhere offstage, and a trail of smoke slithers in from the wing.
“Hock?”
Finally, he lifts his face. “From our grandfather. Malfried.”
“So it really is vant Passand, then. And yours, too?”
He nods.
“All these years,” Sorav says. “All your works. You’ve never put your name on anything.”
“Why would I? It’s the only real thing I have left.”
Sorav sets down his wine. He glances at the coaster through the tinted glass, at the blue-and-green stem-stitching. It looks nothing like Mallory’s, but he still takes it in a gloved hand and tosses it over the balustrade.
The thunder of artillery rumbles through the midcity. The sound vibrates down through the roots, carrying the scent of fumigants, and the barest trace of the Marshal’s perfume. Cinnamon and bloodwort. A hint of kinderflower.
In the safety of the damp stele, Aster rolls out her enfleurage.
The firefly lamps flicker with the thunder of Sorav’s relentless search, but she is so swept up in her work, she hardly notices.
She squints through the dim light, then, when the power lines sputter out, she navigates her bottles and decanters by smell alone.
Devoid of her glass columns and thermometers, she makes do with beetle exudates as carrier oils, with cigarette embers for heat.
Her organ is less of a perfumer’s station than a sorcerer’s, peppered with bits and pieces of a dozen arts, from the old hedge witches to the Vernhardtian alchemists.
As Mallory stands guard, receiving the onslaught of grime-faced erranders, listening to their messages from other Extemporist hideouts and sending off his responses, Aster plies her craft.
She lays out threads of his flesh, pulled from his injuries before they can heal—red, angry skeins from his arm and forehead, a shimmering green from the bites she leaves on his lips and earlobes, and bitter ink-black from the inside of his wrist, under his tattoo.
She pulls them from every part of him, drawing out every hurt, every joy, every desire and disappointment, and murders them under her pestle.
She crushes each of them, stretching their remains over a bath of boiling hellrat lymph.
As they process, a thousand tiny corpses with a thousand unique fragrances of decay, they release a hot, sharp vapor.
“What the fuck am I doing,” she breathes, hands soaked in burning oils. She is used to working with pure ecdytoxin, not a substance that violently negates it. “This is disgusting.”
“I imagine the inventors of paint said the same thing,” Mal says, hugging her shoulders.
He has likewise been working in the dark, aided only by fireflies or a flickering exterminator’s torch.
When he hands her squares of embroidery, tangled little knots or the soft weave of his cravat, she soaks the living threads in the effluvium of the dead, compounding their hunger, their anger, their volatility.
They wallow in the heat, exuding their hungry allomones, until they are ready to be pulled tight around a wearer, ready to burst open or snap shut, frayed fibers poised like teeth for the spark of ecdytoxin.
At night, when the scented rumbling of the Marshal’s hunt dies down, Aster and Mal squeeze into a mossy knot and curl around one another.
The scent of their work burns Aster’s breath, and she buries her face in Mallory’s collar, staving off a wheeze with the weave of his threads.
She runs her hand across his chest, feeling the invitation tucked into his pocket.
A dozen more have rained down on them since, little temptations and taunts delivered by the Extemporists’ dauntless erranders.
Some are addressed to Aster: summonses from the Marshal, or courteous pleas bearing Elspeth’s forced signature.
“As if they need to,” she whispers in the dark.
Mallory pulls her close. “Let’s hope they don’t start sending us severed thumbs, like in Bast Street.”
“Did that happen in Bast Street?”
“In my brother’s version, it did.” He falls silent for a little while, listening to the scratch of insects scuttling through the tubules above them.
“I can’t imagine him, vralen. I’m older than he was when I last saw him.
When I think of him, I think of him as he was.
Like he’s my younger brother. And I know he still thinks of me as a child.
” He pauses. “I’m afraid … he won’t recognize me. ”
“He will,” Aster says. “He’ll know you by your smell. The whole city will.” She opens her mouth over his, breathing in his bitterness, his heat. Gently, she rolls his lower lip between her teeth. Under his thin skin, her tongue follows the movement of his threads.
“Do you need more?” he whispers. “You might not see me again, vralen. If I live, or die, I’m gone either way. So ask now.”
“No,” she answers. “It’s already quite … well, this won’t be something you can wear. At least not more than once. Not something you can bottle, or control.” She pauses, a buzz of anxious pleasure traveling from her lips to her heart. “El will love it.”
“I know she will.”
“Mal … when this is over—” She stops herself when she realizes she’s not sure what she means by over, or, for that matter, this. “You and Aufhocker…”
“Don’t worry about us. I have a boat waiting.”
“You really think you can do it?” she mutters. “You think you can give Tiliard the slip?”
“What I think doesn’t matter. I’ll still try.”
“No one makes a clean break, Mal. The city’s roots span the whole valley.”
“I’ll leave the valley, then.”
She laughs, imagining him sailing to the ends of the Catoptric, scouring the boiling doldrums for its mouth, a passage into the acid sea; she imagines him standing proud atop his disintegrating ship with a tricorn hat.
Or, better, a cap of hellrat fur, dragging his hapless brother over the Sawteeth and into the fume wastes, leaping over peaks so sharp they can sever a bird from its wings.
Maybe he will instead don a sun hat and climb west into the high deserts, the endless maze of manzanitas and the necrotizing fungus that proliferates there.
“Well, wherever you go,” she sighs eventually. “If you survive, be sure to write.”