Chapter Text
The Duchess of Rhodes’ perfume reaches baby fingers down Colum’s throat.
Colum coughs, mercifully swallowed by the heft of everyone’s robes. Hours after the ceremony, her creases are gummy with sweat.
A white lattice of lacquered steel cores the atrium, dangling above the attendees’ headgear; at the perimeter of the reception space, attendants and their doubles slide down eight-story mirrored staircases. Somewhere, party-trick bay windows open to the ancestral commercial harbor. The newly installed mashrabiya diffracts—bricks of light and shadow, stamped across visiting faces.
Servers in short jackets dole out winter sweets: candied iyokan slices, cut into bright orange batons, stirred into thick-cut sugar syrup, daubed with tea towels, twisted into fruity, sinuous chocolate. Envoys haggle over staggered-height tea tables, topped with marble. The light diffraction means that everyone takes turns squinting.
The diamonds, Colum wonders dully. Did she even get the chance to see them, before she was brushed, half-fed and loaded onto this reception?
Bracketed by the spires of her sleeves, Silas juts her chin. They stand at the center of the atrium’s lattice; a slap of shadow across her cheek darkens her infinity drop-earring. “Why are you here?”
“Why, to flirt with your beautiful cavalier, of which I am the authority, having seen far more beautiful women than you have,” Dulcinea winks, extravagantly. The Seventh’s own cavalier, all deference three paces back, has the face of an elbow. Dizzying, sly, offering her wrists for inspection: “My perfumer assured me of the titration. Do you feel ardor eroding your enamel? Newfound perversions in bloom?”
The Duchess’s dress flows from her shoulders, an aria in endive to Silas’s jeremiad. Her hair — a wig, surely? — has been coaxed into plump overtures, like soft chestnut wire baskets dangling from a ceiling. She doesn’t look sick.
Colum thinks, fleetingly, of scrubbing pavers with sandstone, masked against dust: vacuum-sealing garment baggies, prepping fermented soups with algae, plaiting hair. All the duties she’ll be expected to fulfill for Silas, rigid with rage at her own triumph.
The roses smell intrusive, caloric. Sap from a lotus root, spit at a lover's juncture. The handmaidens, in their ceremonial braids, have been released from service. Across the room, Venetia delivers a covetous wave with some heirloom fan. In comparison to this monstrous sillage of personality, Venetia’s eau de toilette is a lollipop swirled in dirt.
Glass amplifies noise; the gabble of bodies is unbearable. “Why are you here?” Silas repeats. Milling in drapery, these souls must flicker so small to her. Like birthday candles in buttercream, awaiting the wish.
Clasped hands, fingering a pendant, bouncing off the judgy gleam of Silas’s earrings. “To visit my favorite spy. Would you like to know which?”
“Why not do a full buyout?” Colum asks, genuinely, vibrating with exhaustion. A music-box memory from training: female lorises practice infant parking, bathing their young with allergenic saliva and leaving them behind in trees or bushes. Even with those defenses, orangutans still eat them.
Dulcinea gestures at her headdress — an ornate dial of giddy acanthus leaves. A hummingbird darts in bas-relief. “This is all made from humbled materials — corn husk, garlic husk, scrap metal, zircon. I wanted to see a miracle, Master Templar, and to offer my congratulations.”
To Colum, sweetly, twirling a sipping-flute: “Did you want to die, medically speaking?”
They’re not supposed to talk about the seaweed. Sargassum is a flavor of brown macro-algae, harmless in open ocean. In shallow waters, though, it smothers coral reefs, guts the water’s pH balance, chokes boat motors, axes native mangroves, drops fishing yield, clogs desalination plants, sickens residents, decays after a day, leaving a bouquet of hydrogen sulfide and eggy rot. With bonus arsenic into groundwater if poorly disposed. Cleanup costs millions while eroding shorelines. Within the past year, island doctors in the Eighth have reported 8,000 cases of acute sargassum toxicity, complaints of migraines, nausea, rashes, insomnia. Silas thinks the Seventh did it, and should pay for the nuisance. The insolence.
{Who is the boy who walks the river with me?}
“I can’t remember,” Colum says truthfully.
The servers continue their determined pirouette: four bonbon varieties featuring warming spices, paprika strawberries, fresh roasted pistachios, crisp rice pearls. Food engineers conjuring Japanese curry caramel in a truffle, grace notes of arctic lingonberry, sea buckthorn. Their four-person play is drawing an audience of tightened shoulders, slit gazes.
Dulcinea’s cavalier hand-feeds her, refills her glass at the marble disc between them; Colum averts her eyes.
“It’s a neat trick, starving your populace,” the Duchess whispers. Her eyes are closed, prayerful. Lash extensions serrated in the afternoon light.
Colum can feel the slippery core of Silas’s smile, sure as lips on her own palm. “Shall I take you on a walking tour of the Third’s CAFOs?”
{“She means ‘Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations,’ Sophia nervously annotates in Colum’s head. “Which means, ‘Shove off,’” Odessa needlessly translates to the business end of a bottle. Meat doesn’t compress very well.}
From where Colum is awkwardly standing, the angle of Silas’s puffed shoulder reads, “Eat diamonds, I didn’t risk our eternal soul-pottery for a policy lever cheapened by democracy or consumer choice.” The inside-thought nearly erupts through Colum’s lips. Another manipulation from the ceremony?
She nearly misses the eighth note, a quaver really, of regret in the Duchess’s voice: “I may as well beg you to stop flooding us with precursors.”
They’re definitely not supposed to talk about the drugs. Chemical precursors, manufactured in the Eighth, used in common household products like cleaning liquids, or aspirin, or for the Seventh, alarming amounts of cheap, colorless, odorless smack. Colum has heard reportage of “end-of-the-line” subway stops in the Seventh, dense with misery, cavernous outdoor stations with metal jaws to the blocks below. Cargo trains to the underworld.
{A pop song of yesterday, spooling from a juke box on a sidewalk: “I want a love that splatters the mirrors…”}
The atrium’s white lattice turns, incrementally, on a gyre. “No one suffers from that affliction here,” Silas says, light sliding off her sneer. She's been sleeping in tooth-bleaching molds for this exchange. “The Seventh must tend to its own house.”
“Oh, Silas,” the Duchess says, and Colum could embroider the exquisite crumple of Dulcinea’s chin, the vein of hurt marbling deathless charm, “It gets so precipitously lonely, being us. Someone with my face takes away the flowers, someone with your face and shorter hair steals sand, the ministry intrudes, we stitch a daisy chain of data-center hacks, embargoes, interdicts, drugs, counter-drugs and gobs of seaweed. Are we who we are, or the gory games we play?”
Dulcinea steps to Silas, palms up, tugs her pouty earring. “I wanted to see a miracle, and embrace you as my sister. Will you permit me?”
Ursula interrupts the tableau, an old-fashioned metal pail threaded on her wrist. “Your Grace,” she stutter-curtsies. Colum opens the lid and peers into a wriggling muff of tails.
“Why are there mice?”
Curtsy completed, Ursula holds the bucket like a shield. “Your Grace, once a conversation with the Master Templar exceeds six minutes, I’ve been instructed to remove one mouse and, ah, pelt you.” She chews her lip. “My aim is not very good, so I could perhaps deposit one in your hair?”
Dulcinea’s giggle-shriek is a suckle of crushed ice on a hot day. “I would be honored to receive a mouse,” the Duchess says, as the lattice heaves one final sunbeam on her halo of husks, her pink wormy skull, keen with forgiveness.