The Price of Beauty #5
“I’m considering … you know. How I’m going to do it. If I want to ritualize this whole thing. I think it’ll feel nice. Drag you onstage and kill you there, so my brother can watch. Get creative with the implements, like The Price of Beauty.”
“Price of Beauty? No, my dear. This whole scenario is much closer to Bast Street Butcher. Take the straight razor there and—right across the throat. No, too quick, isn’t it?
Ease and satisfaction and all that.” Bertram smiles, shaping the air with his tone, with his tongue, readying his sting.
“Well, in any case, do me a favor first. Help me fix this fucking goatee. They can find me dead, but they won’t find me undergroomed. ”
Mallory laughs, compelled by the notes of kilterwort. “All right.”
“That’s the spirit, kid.” The Chancellor’s heart steadies when he feels Mallory’s will start to bend under his words. “Where’d you learn to shave, anyway? Mongfestun?”
“My brother.”
“He was a good man. Well, comparatively, I suppose. He probably never told you about half the shit he did. He was an exterminator at heart, as brutal as the rest of them. He killed men and women, parents, brothers and sisters—but when it came to his own, he was selfish. He loved you. He still does. He dedicates all his works to you. Did you know that? ‘To a lost princeling.’ Printed at the beginning of every libretto. Drives fans mad trying to figure out who it is.” Bertram reaches for the razor on the vanity.
He feels the tendrils of his perfume pull at Mallory’s edges, he feels his anger softening.
“All those terrible things. He did it all for you. He killed and mutilated for you. He shot his best friend for you. He murdered my nephew for you. A love like that is a wonder to behold. Lather the soap, will you?”
Mallory bends under Bertram’s perfume, succumbing to the shape of his words, a sculpture of breath. He reaches for the soap tin, and Bertram releases a sigh.
“You want to see him again, don’t you?” he says.
“And you can. We can make this work out. There, good, that’s enough lather.
” He opens the razor and reaches for Mallory.
“They’re all betting against you, you know.
They’re betting Max will kill you onstage, those bloodthirsty pigs.
You want to prove them wrong. You want this whole show to go well, don’t you?
Reunite with your brother, make everything right. ”
Mallory pauses, suspended over the soap tin. Gorslung tightens his grip on the razor.
Then, Mallory laughs. His scent snaps, falls away—Bertram opens his mouth, trying to redirect the air, but suddenly there is a shoe on his chest. He falls to the floor, and the straight razor flies from his hand.
He gasps, lands on his back, struggling to reclaim the blade.
Mallory’s hand closes around it, and Bertram tries to raise his arms. Mallory catches his wrist, kneels on it, bending it under his weight.
Gorslung shouts, resists, then succumbs to a painful snap.
A fist strikes his face. He gasps, tries to wriggle away, tries to bend his scents, but he can only moan as his lips and teeth are pried apart and the razor enters his open mouth.
“You’re not getting me on that fucking stage,” Mallory growls.
Bertram moans, tongue pushing against Mallory’s fist as it pries his jaw open. He tries to speak, but his voice is muffled in the twisting onslaught of hungry threads. He shuts his eyes, and his tongue is pinched, pulled—then the sharp taste of blood fills his mouth as Mallory begins to cut.
History has proven time and time again that theaters are made to burn.
The truism is one of those rare ones attributed not to Vrenecker, but to Drovick, a defense he offered during his fifth criminal trial, when a particularly charged performance of Faustech left the Opera, and four neighboring buildings, in ashes.
As ominous as it is obvious, that knowledge lies rooted in the heart of every theatergoer, every usher and director and socialite: a seed of anxiety ready to sprout, like the hardy Smoke Moon shrubs, at the first sign of fire.
When the Marshal Revenant pushes his way through the crowd, swatting patrons with his unsheathed saber, the dread takes root.
When, a few moments later, his Tender Guard surrounds the perimeter, closing every door to the auditorium, it springs upward.
Unease blossoms in the Marshal’s wake, spreading from the rearmost orchestra as he pushes up to the apron, leaping to the foreground of bouquets and disappearing into the left wing.
Conversation falls still, glasses cease their clinking.
Every nose lifts for the scent of smoke, every eye for the glow of flames, every ear for the characteristic crack and rumble of boiling Tiliarder wood.
The house lights flicker. A weightless anticipation suspends the guests in silence, half poised to run, half poised to witness what comes next.
For a moment, the fumes circling the auditorium fall still.
They pool in the foyer, along the emptied halls, permeating the staircases like blood in capillaries, ready for the next surge of a heartbeat.
In this suspended second, Mallory exits the dressing room, bloodied to his elbows.
He steps into a haze thick as soup, the externalized distillation of his own essence.
Before he trots up the stairs toward the boxes, before he flees the footfalls of oncoming Tender Guardsmen, he breathes in Aster’s genius for the last time.
He can almost feel his bodiless self spread, curling under every door to the auditorium, grasping at the trails of perfumes inside, brushing farewell against Aster’s lips as she wheezes through the dark.
He drops Bertram’s tongue at his feet. When he releases a satisfied laugh, his breath rends the air.
The house is overtaken, though not by flame; the light that curls from under the jambs is cold, and the smell that billows through the air isn’t smoke, only the stench of a thousand perfumes souring at once.
A feeling of negation, of disintegration, rips through the crowd.
Matter itself bends, uncanny as gravity reversing course.
Order dissolves. Guests in the rear push forward, and those in the front push back.
Wine spills, drunken sways become hurried trots, then panicked sprints.
Crypsis agents emerge from the audience, from the cast, drawing their firearms as the crowd swarms the proscenium.
A wave of bodies crashes against the stage, scrambling up the apron, leaping for the footlights and tumbling into the orchestra pit.
A cluster of cuffed Extemporists escapes captivity, shrieking their rallying cries, and the lucky spectators in the boxes lean in for a better view.
Elspeth sees none of it, but she hears it all.
Trapped in the wing with her wrist in the grip of the Tender Guardsman, she hears a faint rumble, a chorus of gasps, the slamming of doors all around the theater, the hiccup of the orchestra, the Grand Marshal’s resonant baritone.
When a collective gasp rushes toward the stage, when the sound of a hundred bodies drums against the hollow wood, she feels the Guardsman loosen his hold.
She manages to pull away, stumbling center stage, into the heart of the chaos.
The Guard follows, shouting threats at the oncoming crowd, but they ignore him, driving forward to safety.
The Marshal’s voice bellows in from the wing, but the Guard fails to obey his superior’s command.
His nozzle snaps open and the stench of fumigants envelops the stage, an ecdytoxic suspension of aqua fortis and pepperberry.
Elspeth doesn’t run, doesn’t move. She stares to the rear of the orchestra, where threads of light spiral from cracks in the statuary.
Fumes devour the ecdytoxin in the walls, a billion combustive pinpricks running along the topography of faces, of flowers, of Revivalist symbols and stories.
She can see every particle of stone and wood, every line, every shape, every pose and color brighten and die, joyful with decay.
It is no fire, but it burns her eyes like one, and as she devours the cursed beauty, unblinking, she realizes that she does not care if this is the last thing she ever sees.
The fume is perfection. Synesthetic, uncapturable, uninterpretable, irreproducible. A beauty as fleeting as it is destructive, it is without doubt the first real masterpiece of Extemporism.
“Not bad, Aster,” she breathes.
As panic encircles her, she struggles downstage.
She sidles through the crowd, past Guards trying to control them, bodies, and bodies, and more bodies, long-coated and feather-hatted, waving wineglasses and lorgnettes and nozzles.
They are nothing but shadow puppets at the edges of her vision, negated silhouettes against a backdrop of brilliance.
As they scramble past, their fragrances flee with them, thrashing in the onslaught of hungry fumes.
She wonders, as she stares at the scene, if they know what they are witnessing, if they too can see the beauty of this eerie process, a righteous spectacle so ahead of its time it seems to undo time altogether.
She supposes not. If these dunces could recognize good art, they wouldn’t be fleeing it so desperately.
She scans the scene for the woman of the hour, the master of the work.
Her burning eyes dart to her left, then her right, then up to the balconies, searching for Aster, for Mallory, and, a little indulgently, for Aufhocker, just to see what Tiliard’s beloved bard might make of all this—and sees nothing but angry fumes. Then, she glances under her feet.