The Price of Beauty #3
“Don’t forget the champagne,” Maximian says, watching Crypsis escort him into the green-tinged dark.
As they disappear toward the dressing rooms, he glances at the saber in his bleeding hand, at the crystals in the curved guard.
With his thumb, he pushes the hilt upward, admiring the glint of a blade forged from the corpses of a dozen others.
A symbol, the warden had told him, of reformation.
Of all the stupid things to remember from that day.
A Tender Guardsman appears at his side. He turns, expecting a new pair of gloves, but the man carries only a carbine and a look of confusion. “What is it?” Maximian asks.
The Guard hesitates. “Best if you see for yourself, Eir Marshal.”
In his private dressing room, the Chancellor dons and doffs his wedding jacket.
Though he will not come onstage for several hours, not until the final act, he feels inexplicably hurried, uniquely unprepared.
Curtain is in half an hour, and there is no sign of his antagonist. Without Mallory, without the catharsis of redemption or the glory of justice, the perfect kind of melodrama only Aufhocker can bring to life, the Chancellor’s wedding will be nothing more than that.
A boring ceremony with lively set dressing.
He walks through his vocal exercises as perfumers adorn him from head to foot.
It does no good—the clouds of citrus and sleepbug pheromone are woefully insufficient.
Though the bite on his thumb has long scabbed over, he feels as if it is splitting open, weeping through his glove.
The Seamstress Laureate follows him as he paces around the room, altering his suit with sixteen deft fingers, each nail sharp as a pin.
Every hem she loosens and redoes sits crookedly on his arm, every comb to his sideburns leaves them more frayed, and his perfumes seem to curdle on his skin. Even his goatee is fucked up.
“This won’t do,” he mutters, slipping from his jacket and handing it to the Seamstress. “Fuck it. Throw it away. Remake the whole outfit—make me a cloak instead. A long one. You can do it by the fourth act, can’t you?”
“Eir Chancellor, I don’t think—”
“I believe in you,” he says. “You’re wonderful, my dear. You’re the woman with magic fingers.” She exchanges a look with the newly appointed Perfumer Laureate. “Now, fuck off. All of you. Get out. And send in my barber. The least you animals can do is give me a decent shave.”
He shoos the Seamstress with a friendly smile.
The makeup artist follows her out the door, then the perfumers.
As they spill into the hall, Bertram collapses in front of his mirror and examines himself.
He is as handsome as he ever was, as young as he can possibly be at his age.
Every blemish is skillfully concealed, every beauty accentuated.
When he speaks, his voice is deep and rich.
“Fucking amateur hour,” he mutters.
A shadow passes outside the door. Someone knocks gently against the jamb.
“Come in,” he says. Three figures appear in the mirror.
Two are suited with the defensive perfumes of Crypsis.
The one between is smaller, leaner, disheveled.
Scowl on his face, champagne in his hand, Mallory steps into the light, and Bertram breathes a sigh.
“Thank God,” he says. “For a minute I was worried you might not show.”
He turns on his stool. He squints to see the little girl in the gentleman, and can’t.
Tyro’s was only one dead face among so many others, unremarkable, a fruit unworthy of harvest. When he remembers that day, he does not remember her.
He remembers Reames, dead and still growing, and the brood-parent, the last and only brood-parent, crippled and mutilated, exuding barely enough ecdytoxin to keep the movement afloat.
“Look at you,” Bertram says, dampening a flare of old anger. “Our little grub grew into quite the stag beetle.”
Mallory’s knuckles whiten over the stem of his glass. “You’re not the man I wanted to see tonight.”
“But you’re the man I wanted to,” Bertram says. “Oh, lose the pout. You’ll see Aufhocker soon enough. Once you’re attired properly, poor boy. I’ve never seen someone so tragically underdressed.”
“Blame your Marshal,” Mallory says.
“Glad to.” He smiles at one of the Crypsis agents. “Go catch the Seamstress, will you?”
The woman bows her feathered hat, conceals her derringer in her purse, and scuttles away. The other agent closes the door behind her, then leans against it, folding his arms.
“Well, Eir vant Passand,” says Bertram. “Sit down. Drink. You don’t come onstage until the end of the third act, so you might as well relax.”
Mallory sneers. “I figured you’d be plotting some convoluted shit.”
“Oh, of course. You know me. I wouldn’t let you just walk up to the Dramaturge Laureate. ‘Ease is the truest killer of satisfaction.’ You know that one?”
Mallory turns his glass in his hand. “No.”
“You disappoint me, young man. Vrenecker, forty-five.” He hums the melody, but Mallory doesn’t join. “Did Olaf not teach you that?”
A muffled shriek rattles past the door. Tempered as it is by glass and wood and the carpets of the twisted hall, Bertram can’t tell if it is laughter, or a scream. The Crypsis agent turns, peering through the tinted glass.
“Your friends are still making a ruckus out there,” Bertram says. “Those Extemporists—silly crowd, really. I’m curious to hear how the great Aufhocker’s kin fell in with the likes of them.”
“I’m sure you are,” Mallory says.
“Well, sit, then—you’re here, so you might as well regale me.
” When Mallory doesn’t obey, Bertram dulls the edge in his voice with a wisp of kilterwort.
“I mean it, Eir vant Passand. I’m eager to hear your story.
Only half as eager as your brother, mind you.
He’ll be so happy to see you. The whole city will.
They’re going to adore you out there. You, my boy, are a Revivalist masterwork. ”
Mallory grimaces, and another noise rumbles outside the door. The Crypsis agent lays one hand on the knob, the other reaching back to the holster on his belt. His perfume sours, suddenly on edge.
“Where is that seamstress?” the Chancellor mutters. “You’ll want to try on what she’s made for you, Eir vant Passand. It’s a stunning three-piece—though we have a gown, too, if you’d prefer that. I can imagine either as a crowd-pleaser. We’ll just see what looks best.”
Mallory says nothing, eyes moving to the door. Beyond the glass, the lights flicker. “It’s about time,” he mutters.
“What’s the matter, my dear?” Bertram asks.
Mallory offers a smile. A toothy, evil thing. “It’s starting.”
“Starting? Curtain’s not for another ten.”
Something rattles down the hall. Louder this time, it is not so much a noise as a kind of heated pressure. A sweet, burnt scent spills under the doorjamb: an odd mix of pheromones and allomones, enticing, negating, like a downward slope. Bertram’s stomach rises as if he is at the crest of a fall.
The Crypsis agent draws his sidearm. He grips the knob but doesn’t open the door, instead narrowing his eyes at the glass, preparing for whatever is on the other side—as he does, Mallory darts forward.
He shatters his champagne flute against the wall and dives for the agent, broken stem outstretched.
The Crypsis man turns, barely lifting his firearm before the jagged glass enters his throat.
His perfume flares, burning with the defensive heat of pepperberry, but Mallory steps through it, withdrawing the glass in a spray of blood, only to thrust again, and again.
“Oh for fuck’s sake—” Bertram growls. “Don’t—”
The agent gropes for Mallory, fires, misses, discharging three bullets into the wall.
They both crash against the door, scent of gunpowder sparking against perfume, enveloping them in a haze of acrid smoke.
Four more shots ring out. Dust showers from the perforated ceiling, and for a moment the two shadows fall still.
“God dammit,” Bertram whispers.
Slowly, one of the figures stands. Mallory unfurls in the dust, and the agent slides to the carpet, leaving a streak of blood against the door. Dazed but unhurt, Mallory drops the emptied gun onto the corpse. Then he turns, shoes crunching the broken glass of the flute.
A thrill of terror runs up Bertram’s spine. “All right, then,” he breathes, smile soft with kinderflower. “I take it the champagne wasn’t to your taste.”
Sorav follows the young Guardsman down the stairs, his bloodied hand clenched around Mallory’s saber.
Two carabineers trot behind him as he rounds the landing and emerges into the green light of the vestibule.
Well before he reaches the last step, he is hit with the strange smells of bloodwort and hellrat lymph and Tyro’s unwashed hair.
His heart drops, but his step doesn’t falter.
The impresario meets them in the foyer, holding his wrist, babbling something about a sudden pop and a radiant heat.
Though there is no blood, no soot or burned flesh, there is no perfume, either.
Deprived of it, the man seems unmade, naked, skinned, almost. Sorav pushes past him, stepping toward the centerpiece, where a few Tender Guardsmen stand, shaking their heads in bewilderment.
Sorav looks over the taxidermy with narrowed eyes.
Demetrius leans, outstretched arm offering an empty plate, his silhouette wriggling with loosened lines, as if he has been thoughtlessly sketched by a distracted artist. As Sorav circles him, the lines resolve to threads, fraying from every inch of his surface, weaving through his costume, through his ecdytoxin-cured skin, down his legs, up his neck.
They unknot, untangle, unmake him, exuding the seething scent of Mallory.
His face ripples with them, smile widening as he decays.