The Price of Beauty
On the night of the Chancellor’s wedding, when the Palas’s clock tower strikes four, a swarm gathers in Conundrum Square.
Three hours before curtain, the bookmaker opens, the golden doors swing wide, and the foyer floods with guests.
A harpist on the mezzanine coaxes in the throng with Aufhocker’s greatest hits; commissionaires weave between coattails while Crypsis and Tender Guard stalk the perimeter, sidearms and canisters ready.
Outside the fortress of stone and glass and music, Extemporists lay a soft siege to its walls, setting up their bizarre installations in the alleyways or infiltrating the queues of invitees.
Photographers capture them as they are captured, snapping pictures of the arrests while guests watch from the windows and balconies.
Inside, carapace-studded shawls and lizardskin gowns glint blue and green and yellow, multiplied in the glass rims of champagne flutes.
The halls glow with ecdytoxin. Ministers adorn themselves in their most sinister perfumes; Tender Guard march with it sloshing in their tanks.
Conversation rises on an effluvium of kilterwort and myrrh: comments on the beauty of the ceremony, the lyricism of the vows Aufhocker has written for the couple, the extravagant typeface on the playbill.
Threaded in the congratulations and laughter and false praise, a giddy net of rumors interlaces, knots, and tightens.
Gleeful whispers proliferate about the Chancellor and his strange stench, his struggle to pull off his own perfumes after the upset of The Lilies, about his bride, and her eyes, yes, in bad shape—very bad shape, as evinced by her unfinished portrait, by her recent confinement in the Sanitarium.
Sons of the martial classes start up about the death of the Impaler of the Tender Guard, merchants speak of the downturn in the quality of pigments, artists and critics chirp sotto voce about the decline of Revivalism.
A few upstarts dare to whisper of their own plans, would-be Chancellors exchanging fantasies of Cabinet picks, their thoughts on the recent fumigations, or if there really is something to this whole Extemporism business.
The Secretary of Internal Reform, immovable and crusty as ever, raises his usual cigar to his lips and quotes his usual Vrenecker platitude, something about the ever-changing nature of constancy.
In the gentlemen’s lavatory, Eir Franz Sreckt meets with the Sommelier Laureate to deliver the poison that will go into the Chancellor’s wine at the reception.
He has a good feeling about tonight, and he has been waiting a long time to avenge his brother Hans.
The crowd mills about the massive punch fountain, where Demetrius’s carapace is preserved in dynamic contrapposto.
He is dressed in the regalia of Thomas the Younger, rapier in one hand, the other lifting an ombré macaron tower.
The guests pick his tray clean as they admire his sleek hair, the perfection of his eyes, ivory and scarab-shell, the expertise with which he has been cleaned and pinned, so lifelike with his handsome smile.
Some patrons leave a few of their own offerings to the fallen traitor: a rose here and there, a libation, and in one case, a red pocket square tucked into his blouse.
The gift appears harmless at first, violent only in how badly it clashes with his tasteful color scheme.
Then, a single thread loosens at its corner.
A few minutes later, another squirms free.
By the time the first bell rings and the crowd files into the bar and the orchestra and the balconies, half the weave has come apart, swaying hungrily in the scented draft of each passerby.
Only the impresario notices the odd little kerchief.
A man with an eye as impeccable as his ear, he catches a glimpse of it while overseeing the changing of the macaron tower.
As ushers bustle around him, setting out the chairs for the reception banquet, he squints at the pocket square, assessing its frayed edges, its haphazard stitching, and judges it a piece of poor quality, unworthy of the centerpiece.
He clicks his tongue. “These dilettantes,” he mutters to a passing usher. “They think anything they make is good enough to share.”
The impresario reaches for the square. As he pinches the corner, a strange smell curls up from the fabric.
A little smoke, a little rot. He wrinkles his nose and pulls at it; it resists for a fraction of a second, then comes apart in his hand.
Knots of string unravel, spilling almost liquidly across his palm.
He blinks, rolls a few of the threads between his fingers, then glances back to the remainder of the square, still stuck behind the crest of Demetrius’s pocket.
The impresario reaches in and digs around with his glove, and when the rest of the kerchief refuses to come loose, he bids an usher bring him a stool.
He mounts the dais, spreads open the pocket, and peers inside.
A braid of red thread curls at the lowest corner of the square.
The impresario pulls at it, stripping more and more fibers free, but it seems to have tunneled through the weave of Demetrius’s blouse—and, he realizes after a few more tugs, his flesh.
A shiver runs up his spine, and it dawns on him that a piece so strange, so ugly, could be nothing but a work of Extemporism.
“Get the Tender Guard,” he tells an usher girl. “Tell them something got past security.”
She nods and skitters away. Remnants of the square bunched in his glove, the impresario steps down from the dais. When he glances back up to Demetrius, he releases a gasp of cold shock.
The dancer’s smile is moving. It widens, stretching his parted lips as strings wriggle from between his teeth.
That strange smell, stronger this time, billows from his mouth like breath.
The air heats, roils, and as the impresario stumbles back, he feels something move in his palm.
He glances down—a hundred long, loose threads slither up his wrist, swarming the spot where his perfumer applied the barest spritz of ecdytoxin.
He claws at them, but the threads flail up his sleeve, sparking, negating, devouring.
Just as a Crypsis agent spies a young man with embroidered cuffs slip through the galleries, toward the boxes, a scream echoes in the foyer.
Spectators glance over their shoulders, gasping or grinning at the prospect of another attack.
A few of the braver attendees, sure that the ruckus means there has been a sighting of Aufhocker, rush down the stairs from the mezzanine, ardent fans and bad actors alike.
Of course, the Dramaturge Laureate is already safe in his box, Grand Marshal at his side.
He has been pacing his little booth for the past hour, getting increasingly, miserably drunk.
He has tried his best in the last few days to avoid the dull ache of sobriety, shuffled at gunpoint from his suites in the Chancellery to the bathhouse to the dressing rooms, trimmed and shaved and sculpted and fitted to perfection.
“Look at you,” Bertram had cooed when he exposed Olaf to his own reflection for the first time in the better part of two decades. “Handsome as the Poet-King.”
If his years in the dark have been kind to his face, they have not been kind to his senses.
After so long in his cramped cell, even the house lights are too bright for him.
The champagne is too rich, his perfume too heavy.
He flinches at every distant patter of gunfire.
His stomach turns every time someone ducks in to inform the Marshal of a new development.
He still can’t quite contend with the hugeness of the Opera, the vast maw opening over him, its tongue the lush proscenium, its teeth the chipped glass of the chandeliers.
Dizzy, overexposed, he feels very much like the cockroach from that old Porrain play, who wakes in horror to find itself a man.
Stripped of a shell and tormented by sentience and all its contradictions, agonies, and perversions, it tries to escape humanhood by squeezing under a wardrobe, fatally crushing itself.
Hock has no such escape. With two Tender Guard at the door and Sorav resting a hand over the back of his chair, he has no retreat but into himself, into a maze of memory.
Over and over he tries to vault the quarter of a century that separates him from the Opera, at once so familiar and so foreign.
A thick veneer of Revivalism coats every surface of the place, but under the ecdytoxic statuary budding from the walls, under the new curtains and the haze of perfumes, it holds its familiar shape.
Beneath Hock’s fingers lie decades of wine stains, the ashen gray burns from stubbed cigars.
To his right, hidden among the cornices, sits the gargoyle he had perched on to watch the puppeteers assemble Saint Guylag’s dragon.
To his left are the indelible black scorch marks from the Great Fire of 1159, streaking along the beams to meet the equally indelible yellow scorch marks from the Great Fire of 1480.
Straight ahead, the bricked-in patch above the backdrop where Grand Marshal Nathaniel Thwart crashed in his doomed aircraft, maiden voyage cut short in an explosion of leafy propellers.
He had sometimes dreamed of bringing Mallory here, of showing off his old hiding places, dressing him in a lavender suit and watching his face light up at the overture to Little Orphan Clevette.
Not even in his boldest fantasies had he put his brother onstage, much less trapped in a bastardization of his own script.
As he washes back the last drops in his flute, he realizes this torturous production will be the first he’ll ever see properly, from beginning to end.