The Price of Beauty #4
Sorav is unsure whether what he is witnessing is a creature, or a process.
The Tender Guardsmen tighten their grips on their nozzles, waiting for orders to fumigate, exchanging timid whispers about what pesticide may address the threat.
Even their commander is at a loss. The more Sorav examines the work, the more it awes him.
Demetrius is a tense nidus of bioalchemy, eruptive, a bloated, glutted monster ready to burst open and daring anyone to help it along.
“That little shit,” Sorav mutters, though not without some begrudging pride. A message, a distraction, a pulsating bomb—whatever Aster has accomplished here is beyond anything she has before.
“Orders, Eir Marshal?” a Tender Guard asks. He steps forward, gesturing toward Demetrius with the tip of his carbine—a little too close. The threads whip upward in response, launching a ripple of sweet-smelling heat toward him.
The Guard stumbles back. Sorav orders him to stand down, but he’s already raised his barrel. He trips on his heel, aiming instinctively for the threads streaking toward him. Just as Sorav throws out an arm to redirect him, the soldier snaps open his cannula and sprays.
Ecdytoxic vitriol billows from his nozzle, and the air ignites.
A constellation of light streaks from Demetrius upward, past his collar, his head, along the stream of the Guard’s fumigant.
The young man stoppers his cannula, but the process has already caught hold.
He drops his nozzle and averts his mask as the reaction sweeps through the cloud of toxin, straight to the muzzle of his carbine.
Sorav throws himself back as the tank ruptures, impact ripping through metal, then leather, then flesh.
He turns, shielding his face. His perfume sears his skin, and something snaps—a thousand little somethings, each a tiny thread of matter.
The fabric of the foyer comes apart. Skeins of carpet pull free, spurting Ostlerfell dye.
Tapestries dissolve, and Demetrius alights, not with flame, but with violent undoing, a foul-smelling combustion that climbs up to the arches, the chandeliers, the statuary blossoming from the marble.
The Guardsman screams, shaking off his tank.
Sorav shuts his eyes against the fumes, grabs him around his shoulders and pulls him away from the reaction, away from the centerpiece, between the columns of disintegrating Revivalist statuary.
The billowing light crawls after them, igniting the traces of ecdytoxin in stone and fabric and glass.
One fist clenched around the Tender Guard’s uniform, the other around Mallory’s saber, Sorav feels the reaction lick at his wounded hand, searing his skin, boiling his blood up to his elbow.
Teeth clenched, he and the two other Guards drag the injured man through the house doors.
He slams them shut, pulling down the gold latch as a wheeze of smoke spills from under them.
Sorav takes a deep breath and rests his throbbing hand against the wood. He examines his broken skin for a moment, still oozing silver-tinged blood. His heart inverts when a single red thread crawls across his knuckles and starts to burrow into the wound.
“Marshal.”
He doesn’t panic. He pulls the thread from his skin and flicks it away.
“Eir Marshal, what happened?”
He turns. The rearmost guests huddle toward him, emitting a purr of nervous pleasure that drowns out the tuning orchestra. Ladies lift their eyepieces when they spy the injured man, gentlemen crane their necks over the hats of their dates. Ushers freeze in their tracks.
“Bar the doors,” he tells the two carabineers. “Every door. No one comes in or out. Spray nothing.” He clenches his burning hand. “Where’s the Chancellor?”
“Still in his dressing room,” says one of the men, leaning over his wounded comrade.
“Escort him out the rear doors. Him and vant Passand, if he’s still there.
” Sorav scans the house. A thousand years of assassination attempts have ensured there are no direct stairways from the orchestra to the boxes.
With his command dispersing through the Guard, with each of them barring the house doors, the only way up is backstage.
He eyes the catwalks overhead, bulbous with lighting, and his exterminator’s instinct summons a picture of a phloem channel and its many decaying walkways.
“You,” he tells the remaining carabineer, “are coming with me.”
“Eir Marshal?”
Sorav straightens, stepping over the injured soldier. “We’re getting Aufhocker to safety.”
The crowd’s antennae perk up at the name.
Sorav pushes his way through them, brushing aside their queries with curt reassurances and the occasional threat.
He weaves between tables and chairs and questions, blood still boiling, furious pain streaking up from his hand to his elbow.
His eyes burn, his perfume smolders on his skin, sparking against every other scent as a hundred guests swarm him, hungry for information, for Aufhocker.
Once or twice he glances over his shoulder, looking for the shadow of Olaf in his box, but sees nothing through the sea of bodies, through the haze of perfume, the echo of Mallory’s scent still searing his brain.
Without fumigants to disperse the crowd, he relies on his voice and the butts of his Guards’ carbines.
His commands to make way go unheeded, his violent nudges barely move them.
Eventually, he unsheathes Mallory’s saber.
When the Sommelier Laureate grasps his shoulder, demanding to know what is happening, he shoves him away, drawing the blade across the man’s arm. Scandalized titters travel from throat to throat as the Sommelier falls back into the crowd, and finally, they part.
Sorav marches past the terrified conductor and mounts the stage. He hurries through the open curtain, through the scrim and into the rear wing, trotting past the bridesmaids and flower boys, until he runs into the Chancellor’s bride.
Elspeth turns in her explosion of ivory and roses, eyes bright. When she speaks, her perfume can’t hide the glee in her voice. “What’s happening?” she asks. “What’s going on?”
“You’re leaving,” he says. “Out the back. My lieutenant will escort you.”
“Oh, no,” she says. “I have to stay, Eir Marshal. It’s my big day—”
“Don’t fucking start, Scholin. Not now.” He grabs her wrist and shoves her to a nearby Guardsman. “Get her out the stage doors.”
She struggles, and almost breaks free of the Guard when a strange sound tears across the theater.
Not a rumble, not an explosion, but something higher-pitched, sharper.
Maximian turns, glancing back toward the stage, up through the catwalks, through the jungle of Revivalist statuary.
For a moment, everything stills. Then, deep in the walls of the Opera, deep inside himself, he feels a seam rip open.
The dressing room is still. Mallory stands over the dead man, brow furrowed, one hand clutching his opposite wrist. Lights ripple past the door, casting striped shadows under the jamb.
“Are you hurt, Eir vant Passand?” the Chancellor starts. “Let’s get you cleaned up. I’ll send for Dr. Whyck.”
“Not necessary, Eir Chancellor,” Mallory says.
Grimacing, he pulls a shard of glass from his hand.
The fabric of his glove tears open—or seems to, until Bertram realizes he is not wearing gloves.
Red as blood, threads spill from the bare flesh of his palm.
They rise in the charged air, and another shiver runs through Bertram.
“Of course,” he continues, tempering his voice, “if you prefer, you can take the stage a bit roughed up. I can see the appeal. You’ve been on quite a journey to get here—why not look it?”
Mallory doesn’t reply. He reaches out, hand steady, and locks the door. A strange scent sours the air, but Bertram can’t tell if it comes from Mallory or seeps in from outside. What he can tell, in only half a breath, is the mastermind behind it.
“That’s quite a fragrance, Eir vant Passand. Did Vralen Vost make it for you?”
Finally, the young man lifts his eyes.
“She’s wonderful, isn’t she?” the Chancellor sighs. “I have thirty-eight perfumers on staff and their efforts combined can barely outcompete her.”
Mallory straightens. “She is talented.”
“I made a mistake letting Max have that one,” Bertram admits. “I didn’t think she’d live. She struggled in the Sanitarium, for a while. A victim of the Overture Skirmish—not many survived that. And the ones that did—well, the things they created were … ugly. That battle wasn’t our best work.”
“I know,” Mallory replies. “I helped Reames make the grenades.” A twitch of a smile passes over his mouth. “That toxin was distilled from Merrett sketches and blight scorpion, if I remember.”
“A bold combination,” Bertram says. He wrinkles his nose as a strange smell passes under the door to the hall. Shadows streak by, too swiftly, like those cast by flames. “The early days weren’t quite as grand as in our stories, were they?”
“No.”
“You know, Eir vant Passand,” the Chancellor begins cautiously, “it’s been a while since we’ve had an avenger. We used to get them every season. Contaminated, or displaced, or what have you. Even some factory kids like you.”
“Really,” Mallory breathes.
“Embarrassing, honestly. Revenge is such a sad attempt to stay relevant.” He smiles, bringing a warm hint of cinnamon to the edge of his tone.
“They dropped off after a few years. The toxin always does its work eventually. But you—you’re different.
Resilient. You took a dip in the Catoptric and lived. Not many can say that.”
“I have Reames to thank,” Mallory says. “A few weeks working under him and I was contaminated to the bone. The water was nothing. Pleasant, even.”
“Please.” Bertram laughs. “You lie just like your brother, kid.”
Mallory smiles. He eyes the corpse, then the door, then the empty gun.
“Well, young man?” Bertram asks pleasantly. “What’s on your mind?”