The Price of Beauty #6
Aster’s shape is not made of light, or sound, or even odor.
It doesn’t meet Elspeth’s eyes so much as tunnel directly into her mind, refusing to be filtered or modified by flawed human senses.
Streaks of color pour straight into her blood: lips burning a sordid pink, a curl of gold hair, a blue-green jolt of relief when Aster raises one arm and beckons her downward.
She laughs and follows, until her shoe meets the lip of the stage’s infamous trapdoor.
Don’t you dare, she tells herself. Don’t you dare do something so goddamn Vaughnian as running off in your wedding dress.
But she can’t help it. The floor creaks under her, and joy squeaks up her throat.
Chaos rustles every frill and bead in her gown, wilting the flowers at her waist, dissolving the spiderwebs in her hair.
She spins to face upstage, watching the clouds billow and glow, bullets arcing overhead like shooting stars.
She sees the lunar priest stumble across the stage with her vows, perforated with light; she sees a pair of bridesmaids fall, glowing souls shaking loose from their bodies.
And she sees the Marshal Revenant. She can make out his features for the first time, the somber angle of his jaw, his high cheekbones, the glint of blood pouring down his arm, burning silver as he roars for order.
Furious, he thrusts his saber into the stage and plucks a rifle from the Guard beside him, turning toward the crowd and lifting it to his shoulder.
Elspeth doesn’t know if he aims at her or beyond her, but she never finds out.
A crack deafens her, and the floor disappears.
Blinded once again, she tumbles down—straight down, encased by the metal walls of the immolation chute.
She is sure the heat on her face, boiling her perfume, is her death, that the pressure fluttering against her skin is the lick of flame, but as her feet burst through chicken wire and soft feathers and flesh, she realizes she is only tumbling through the captive doves.
She shrieks, racked with horrified laughter, tears flying in crystalline streaks from her eyes, until she lands, unharmed on a bed of mangled birds, in hell.
Aufhocker watches the chaos unfold, wine in one shaking hand.
Clouds of ecdytoxin swallow the stage; the curtains ripple, the scene warps, gas glows down the proscenium.
Flower boys dance away from the percussion of gunfire, and the Marshal appears, one hand holding a saber, the other reaching for a rifle.
Though not as young as he had been during the Revival, he is just as beautiful, lit perfectly by the scintillations of ecdytoxin and gunpowder.
Resisting every urge to run, Hock watches the clouds rise in his direction. He closes his eyes, flinching at the burn of his own perfume in his nose.
“Fuck,” he mutters, just as the Tender Guard beside him does the same.
The soldier lifts his carbine and clicks open his cannulas, and Hock turns to see gaseous streaks of light spill from under the door.
He gasps, steps back, grasping the balustrade as a strange, glowing smoke curls from the jamb.
The ghostly fingers close into a fist; a dark line runs up the center of the wood, and splinters start to peel away, soft and thin as thread.
The Guard raises his nozzle and fires. A small ecdytoxic canister flies from the barrel of his firearm and burrows into the widening crack.
The fingers of scent alight, instantaneously burning backward through the bullet’s trajectory, all the way to the mouth of the gun.
The carbine rips in half, splitting from the sight to the stock—then continues splitting, straight through the Guard’s shoulder, his neck, the tank on his back. He screams, falls, torn nearly in half.
Hock covers his face against the bite of acrid air, white-hot sound ripping through the scar on his ear. When the throbbing relents, he dares to lower his hands, to open his eyes and squint into the hall. Someone is there; someone is speaking to him.
“Em.”
There, enveloped in warped shadows and glowing dust, is a gentleman: handsome and wiry and a bit haggard, he is everything Guy had promised Tyro, and everything Hock had hoped for. His bearing is elegant, his smile lopsided, and he is soaked in blood.
Hock blinks, sure the world is lying to him.
He considers the possibility he is already dead, fallen from the balcony, choked to death on the strange gas.
This image, this silhouette is only another trick of the light, a hallucination in the chaos, cast from the dissolving stone and wood and floristry around him.
But he can’t deny the smell, strong, familiar, beloved.
“Oh. Mal.” A laugh and a sob battle in his throat—he can’t move, can’t blink, can’t find the words to ask any of the questions searing through his mind. For the moment, he doesn’t care to. “Oh, princeling.”
When he finally takes his brother in his arms, he is astounded by the solidity of him, the reality of him. “God,” he breathes. “Shit. God. God dammit.”
“Words of a Laureate,” Mal mutters.
Hock can only squeeze him tighter, breathing him in as the balcony rumbles. His scent is perfect, clear, stronger than the streaks of gas devouring the walls, tearing apart everything in their path. “Shit, grease-beetle,” he says. “All this blood—”
“Tale for another night, Em.”
Hock dares to release his brother. “God, look at you. I’m so … so sad I didn’t get to see you grow. But I’m so glad I get to see you grown.”
Mallory holds Hock’s hand against his cheek. “I’m sorry I didn’t come back sooner. I wanted to come sooner.”
“Oh, Mal. No, I’m—I swear I tried to keep you out of all this. I really tried.”
“Don’t beat yourself up. It wasn’t wrong. Just pointless.”
Somewhere behind them, a ruff of gunfire precedes a chorus of screams. Olaf glances back to the clouds of ecdytoxin, the bodies trampling the scenery. “I didn’t write this, Mal,” he feels compelled to say.
“I know. You’re witnessing the first piece of Extemporist theater.”
“Not to my taste.”
“Then let’s go. There will be a lot more like this to come.
” He glances toward the splintered door and the glowing fumes beyond.
“I’ve got a cabin waiting for us. A whole boat, actually.
Not the Bastion Rose, but it’s nice enough.
” He takes his brother’s hand in his own.
“Come on. We’re already quite a few years late, Eir Emmory. ”
As Mallory pulls him gently, firmly, toward the doorway, threads tickle his skin, crawling out from the lacerations in his brother’s palm.
They twist up his sleeve, gently brushing his burning tattoos, but they do not bite.
The brothers step into the blazing hallway right as the next volley of gunfire rings out, and the balcony lurches, creaks, and gives way.
Light closes over him. He expects to be deafened by dissonance, for his head to flare with that violent, ecdytoxic music, but as he holds Mallory’s hand and descends into the fumes, for the first time in many, many years, there is only blessed silence.
Swarming with panic and gas and bodies, the Tiliard Opera swells from the front of house to the back.
The stage doors swing open, the loading-dock gates rattle upward, but not fast enough to prevent a fatal bottleneck.
The crowd tramples and claws their way to safety, backing up to the wings, to the stage.
Spectators leap from the boxes, the balconies, into the orchestra.
Technicians climb up the catwalks to smash the rear windows; the cast dissolves into the secret passageways of the crossover.
Speechless with horror, a young Bertram Gorslung watches his older self stumble from the dark, tripping over the groundrow toward the doors.
Escorted by an entourage of Crypsis and Tender Guard, the Laurel Chancellor barely stays afloat in the sea of bodies.
He claws toward his Marshal, moaning over the screams of his guests, through the blood gurgling from his lacerated mouth.
The bleeding is profuse, and his orders even more so, wordless and animal and muddled in a soup of rotting perfume and sheer panic.
He holds one broken arm to his chest and swings the other, commanding Sorav to clear the way for him.
The Marshal sweeps the fleeing crowd, unsure who to kill first. Crypsis agents fire blindly, agonized by their igniting perfumes.
Traitors and opportunists and Extemporists peel from the cast, from the audience, rallying, dying, falling and rising again.
Even Franz Sreckt, looking both horrified and ecstatic, emerges from the crowd as one of his cronies adorns him with a golden respirator.
Margraves, betting men, and usurpers howl in terror or triumph. The entire house is filled with vermin.
Sorav raises his eyes to the boxes. His rifle follows, and briefly, before the next gust of fumes overtakes him, he sees Hock. The man has his back to the stage, and before him stands his little brother.
Blind to the chaos around them, the two embrace, and for a moment, Sorav has both in his sights.
Carefully, he shifts his aim to Mallory.
When the brothers part and turn toward the doorway, his finger curls over the trigger.
His hand burns. Blood writhes through his palm, threading hot along every tendon.
He readies, waits, metal bending in the tightening crook of his forefinger.
Then, right before he fires, Hock turns.
He shifts, looking over his little sibling, and Maximian sees his face—too clearly in the flickering toxins, he sees his tearful eyes, the wide smile under his beard, the same that he used to wear in the barracks when he and Tyro would count the boats passing underfoot.
For the first time in many years, he sees Guylag alive.
Trapped on the apron of the stage, Dawn lowers his firearm.