by Kage Baker
“Something like that,” Smith said.
“Ooh. Send up that porter quickly, please. And a plate of sausage.” Lady Shanriana rubbed her hands together.
Descending the staircase, Smith crossed her off his mental list of suspects. In his previous line of work, he had developed the knack of reading people’s expressions fairly well. Lady Shanriana might have a kink for bloodshed, but she had been genuinely startled to hear of Coppercut’s death.
He caught New Smith in the lobby and gave him Lady Shanriana’s breakfast order, just as a naval officer came stumbling in from the terrace, struggling into his tunic.
“What time is it?” he demanded wildly, as his face emerged from the collar.
“First Prayer Interval was an hour ago,” Smith told him. He calmed down somewhat.
“Where’s the nearest bathhouse?” he inquired. “I’ve got blue stuff all over me.”
“The Spirit of the Waters…?” Smith prompted him, mentally adding the word alibi next to Lady Shanriana’s name.
“Oh! That’s right.” The officer grinned as memory returned to him. “Gods! She started with the midshipmen at sundown and worked her way through to the admiral by midnight. Drowned us all. Joyous couplings! Great food here, too.”
“We get a lot of celebrity clientele,” Smith said. “Sharplin Coppercut, for example.”
“Who’s that?” The officer dug a sequin out of an unlikely place.
“The writer.”
“Really? Never heard of him. Say, did I ask you where there was a bathhouse?”
“There’s one around the corner on Cable Street,” Smith said. “Joyous couplings.”
“You too,” said the officer, striding across the lobby. At the door he turned back, a look of inquiry on his face.
“It has a prophylaxis station, also,” Smith assured him. Beaming, he saluted and left.
In the course of the next hour, Smith worked his way through the surviving hotel guests as they became conscious. The occupants of Room 4 were an elderly married couple from Port Blackrock who were in their room all evening, except for a foray onto the balcony to watch the fireworks. They had only vaguely heard of Sharplin Coppercut, being under the impression he was somebody who’d run for dictator of their city three terms ago, or was it four? They bickered about whether it was three or four terms ago for several minutes, until abruptly deciding they were both wrong and that Sharplin Coppercut had been the name of their grandson’s first rhetoric tutor, the one who’d had such bad teeth.
“You didn’t happen to hear anything unusual last night, did you?” Smith inquired, whereupon they got into a debate over what could be considered unusual in a hotel like this at Festival, with a lengthy reminiscence on how Festival had been celebrated in the old days, followed by a rumination on hotels both general and specific. Half an hour later, Smith thanked them and left. He was fairly confident they were not Coppercut’s killers.
The occupant of Room 5 was a thickset, sullen businessman who had to be retrieved from under a table on the terrace and revived with a dose of hangover powders. He was profoundly surly even after the powders had taken effect, was missing his purse and sandals and threatened to beat Smith to a pulp if they’d been stolen, and was barely more gracious when Crucible located them safely tucked away under the chair he’d been sitting in the night previous. He ostentatiously checked the contents of the purse, threatening to fracture Crucible’s jaw if anything had gone missing.
When it proved that nothing had been stolen, he ordered breakfast and threatened to break Smith’s legs if it wasn’t delivered to his room in fifteen minutes.
Not the sort of man to employ poison as a means of killing someone.
Returning down the corridor, Smith saw pink smoke curling out from under the door of Lord Ermenwyr’s suite and heard terrifying laughter coming from the room beyond. Shuddering, he walked on and went back to the kitchen.
“…much more digestible,” Mrs. Smith was saying as he walked in. She and Burnbright were bending over another sea dragon, but this one was a dessert with a fruit bombe forming its body and a curved neck and head of marzipan. Lined up on trays on the table were row upon row of sugar scales, like disks of green glass, and Mrs. Smith was carefully applying them to the sea dragon’s back with a pair of kitchen tweezers.
“Hello, Smith,” she said, glancing up at him. “Any progress?”
“Some,” said Smith. He pulled out a kitchen stool and sat down, staring glumly at the sea dragon. “This is our entry for the Festival cooking contest?”
“The Pageant of Lascivious Cuisine for the Prolongation of Ecstasy’,” Mrs. Smith informed him. “I’ve got a good chance of winning, or so my spies tell me. The chef over at the Sea Garden failed to get in a special shipment of liqueurs he was counting on, and the chef at the spa’s entry is simply an immense jam roll frosted to look like a penis. Ought to be quite a subliminal qualm of horror amongst the judges when it’s sliced up and served out, wouldn’t you think?”
“Yes,” said Smith, wincing and crossing his legs.
“We’ll do the wings next,” Mrs. Smith told Burnbright. “Melon sugar, pomegranate dye, and rum, boiled to a hard syrup the same way. I’ll show you the shapes I want it cut once it’s cooled. How’s our little mystery going?” she inquired of Smith.
“None of the other guests did the murder,” said Smith, rubbing his temples.
“It still wasn’t me,” said Burnbright, clouding up.
“Silly child, nobody ever thought it was you for a minute. You know, Smith, anyone might have wandered in from the street and done for Coppercut, in all that pullulating frenzy of lust going on last night,” Mrs. Smith remarked, setting scales in a ring around the dragon’s eye. “And it’s not as though there’s any shortage of people with motives. After the way he told all about the scandalous lives of the well-to-do? Especially Lady Quartzhammer, who, as I believe, was depicted in the best-selling The Imaginary Virgin as having a passionate affair with a dwarf.”
“And a bunch of goats,” added Burnbright, stirring pomegranate dye into sugar syrup.
“Something dreadfully unsavory, in any case. To say nothing of the expose he did on House Steelsmoke! I shouldn’t think they particularly cared to have it known that Lord Pankin’s mother was also his sister, and a werewolf into the bargain.” Mrs. Smith turned the sea dragon carefully and started another row of scales.
“Didn’t he say that all the Steelsmoke girls are born with tails, too? That was what I heard!” said Burnbright.
“He interviewed the doctor who did the postnatal amputations,” Mrs. Smith said. “Thoroughly ruthless, Sharplin Coppercut, and ruthlessly thorough. When his demise is made public, I imagine a number of highborn people will drink the health of his murderer in sparkling wine.”
“But he went after lowborn people too,” Burnbright quavered.
“Quite so. It seems unlikely you’ll solve this, Smith.”
Mrs. Smith leaned back and lit her smoking tube. She blew twin jets of smoke from her nostrils and considered him. “Perhaps Crossbrace could be persuaded with a bribe, instead of a likely suspect? Unlimited access to the bar? Or I’d be happy to cater a private supper for him.”
“It all depends on how—” Smith looked up as he heard a cautious knock at the kitchen door.
“Come in,” said Mrs. Smith.
Willowspear entered the kitchen and stopped, seeing Smith. “I beg your pardon,” he said, a little hoarsely. His eyes were watering and inflamed.
“Was the pinkweed getting to you?” Smith inquired.
Willowspear nodded, coughing into his fist. Burnbright, who had spun about the moment she heard his voice, came at once to his side.
“Would you like to sit down?” she asked, in a tone of concern Smith had never heard her use. “Can I get you a cup of water?”
“Yes, thank you,” said Willowspear. Smith and Mrs. Smith exchanged glances.
“Are their lordships getting along?” Smith inquire
d.
“Reasonably well,” Willowspear replied, sinking onto the stool Burnbright brought for him. “My lord Ermenwyr is reclining on his bed, tossing fireballs into the hearth. My lord Eyrdway is reclining on a couch and has transformed himself into a small fishing boat, complete with oars. They are past speech at the present time, and so are unlikely to quarrel, but are still in fair control of their nervous systems. Thank you, child.” He accepted a cup of water from Burnbright, smiling at her.
“You’re awfully welcome,” said Burnbright, continuing to hover by him.
“It’s very kind of you,” he said.
“Not at all!” she chirped anxiously. “I just—I mean—you’re not like them. I mean, you looked like you needed—er—”
“A drink of water?” prompted Mrs. Smith.
“That’s right,” said Burnbright.
“I did,” said Willowspear. He took a careful sip. “I’m not accustomed to pinkweed smoke in such concentration. I don’t indulge in it, myself.”
“Well, but it’s full of nasty fumes in here!” said Burnbright, pointing at Mrs. Smith’s smoking tube.
“Nothing but harmless amberleaf,” said Mrs. Smith in mild affront. Burnbright ignored her.
“Would you like to step out in our back area until you feel better?” she asked Willowspear. “There’s lovely fresh air, and—and a really nice view!”
“Perhaps I—”
“Would you like me to show you?”
They stared into each other’s eyes for a moment.
“I—yes,” said Willowspear, and Burnbright led him out the back door.
Mrs. Smith blew a smoke ring.
“Well, well,” she remarked.
“I didn’t think she had a sex drive,” said Smith wonderingly.
“It’s Festival, Smith,” Mrs. Smith replied.
“I guess she had to fall in love sooner or later,” said Smith. “I just never thought it’d be with a Yendri.”
Mrs. Smith shrugged.
“They taught her to despise greenies at the mother house, from the time she was old enough to stagger around on her little legs. That would only make the attraction more powerful, once it hit,” she said. “The thrill of the forbidden, and all that.”
She paused a long moment, her gaze unreadable, and took another drag on her smoking tube. “Besides,” she added, exhaling smoke, “it’s in her blood.”
At that moment a small pan on the hearth hissed as its contents foamed up, and Mrs. Smith leaped to her feet. “Hell! She’s gone and left that syrup on the fire!” Muttering imprecations, she snatched it off and dumped its molten contents on the marble countertop, where the red stuff ran and spread like a sheet of gore.
“What on earth?” Smith scrambled to his feet, staring.
“It’s the candy glass for the dragon’s wings,” Mrs. Smith explained, glaring at the door through which Burnbright and Willowspear had disappeared. “Grab a spatula and help me. If we don’t pull this mess into wing shapes before it hardens, it’ll be wasted. Gods and goddesses, I could wring that child’s neck sometimes!”
Smith, being a wise man, grabbed a spatula.
By that afternoon, Smith was too busy to continue his investigation.
Salesh had stretched on her silken couch and awakened once again, blinking through wine-fogged eyes at her lover Festival. After a brief moment of confusion and search for headache remedies, she had recollected who he was and taken him back into her insatiable embrace with renewed vigor.
The solemn bells for Third Prayer Interval signaled the start of the grand Parade of Joyous Couplings along Front Street. Its staging area was just around the corner on Hawser, so guests at the Hotel Grandview had a fine view of the proceedings.
With a shrill wail of pipes, with a chime and rattle of tambourines, here came the first of the revelers, clad in a shower of rose petals and very little else! They danced, they tossed their wild hair, they bounded athletically for the edification of the assembled crowd along the street’s edge. Winsome girls rode the shoulders of bull-mighty boys, and from small baskets the girls tossed aphrodisiac comfits to onlookers.
Behind them, a team of men costumed as angels towed a wide flat wagon. Riding in it were some two dozen nurses who bore in their arms the bounty of last year’s Festival, pretty three-month-olds decked in flowers. The babies stared around in bewilderment, or wept at all the noise, or slept in sublime indifference to the passion that had created them.
Following after, likewise crowned in flowers, were scores of little children born of previous Festivals, marching unevenly behind the foremost, who carried a long banner between them reading: LOVE MADE US. They trotted doggedly along, pushing back wreaths that slipped over their eyes. They stared uncertainly into the sea of adult faces, searching for their mothers, or waved as they had been told, or held hands with other children and laboriously performed the dance steps they had been taught for this occasion.
Next came the Salesh Festival Orchestra, blaring with enthusiasm a medley that began with “Burnished Beard on My Pillow,” continued into “The Lady Who Could Do It Thirty Times Without Stopping” and concluded with a rousing arrangement of “The Virgins of Karkateen.” After them came the parade floats sponsored by the different businesses and guilds of Salesh.
Here, steering badly as it lumbered along, for all that it was driven with ingenious gear ratios by its clockwork rowers, was a thirty-foot gilded galley bearing the Spirit of Love, in her scarlet silks. Her breasts were the size of harbor buoys, and puppeteers worked her immense languid hands as she blessed the crowd.
Here was a float presenting the Mother of Fire in her garden, a towering lady wreathed in red and yellow scarves, which were kept in constant motion by concealed technicians working a series of bellows under the float. Their scrambling legs were just visible under the skirts of the pageant wagon, and now and then a hand would flash into view as it tossed a fistful of incense onto one of the several braziers that were housed in giant roses of flame-colored enameled tin.
Here was a float representing the Father Blacksmith, presented at the Anvil of the World, his sea-colored eyes great disks of inset glass with lanterns behind them, and his left arm articulated on a ratcheting wheel cranked by a technician who crouched under his elbow, so that it rose and fell, rose and fell with its great hammer, beating out the fate of all men, and more incense smoke streamed upward from his forge.
After his wagon came a dozen clowns dressed as phalluses, running to and fro on tiny spindly legs and peering desperately through tiny eyeholes as they tried to avoid falling over one another. They were great favorites with the little children in the audience.
Next came rolling a half-sized replica of the famous war galley Duke Rakut’s Pride, its decks crowded with sailors and mermaids, waving cheerfully at the crowd despite their various amatory entanglements. Halfway down the block between Hawser and Cable its topmast became entangled in an advertising banner stretched across Front Street at roof level, and the parade had to be halted long enough for a sailor to disengage, scramble up the mast with his knife, and cut the banner’s line, for which he received cheers and applause.
After that, more musicians: the Runners’ Trumpeting Corps, long-legged girls resplendent in their red uniforms and flaring scarves, lifting curiously worked horns to blare the Salesh Fanfare with brazen throats. Behind them came the drummers of the Porters’ Union, thundering mightily on steel drums with their fists, so that the din rolled and echoed between the housefronts for blocks. And after them, a contingent from the Anchor Street Bakery came pulling a giant cake on wheels, from the top of which children costumed as cherubs threw sweet rolls to the crowd.
Male jugglers marched after, miraculously keeping suggestively painted clubs in the air without stopping their forward momentum, though each bore a female acrobat with her legs twined about his waist in mimicked intimate union. The girls occasionally leaned far backward and walked with their hands, or juggled small brass balls.
&n
bsp; More floats, more Spirits of This or That relating to the procreative act, more bands, a few civic leaders borne along in decorated carts to applause or execration. Brilliant streamers flew, and confetti in every color, and bird kites towed on ribbons, and banners that flared like the ice lights in northern kingdoms where sunlight came so seldom there were a hundred different words for darkness.
When it had all gone by at last, the throng of merrymakers followed it down the hill, shedding clothing as they went, donning masks, seizing flowers from hedges that grew over walls, lighting scarlet lamps; and it was Festival!
Though householders less inclined to revel at Pleasure’s fountains issued out into the street and swept up the stepped-on bits of sweet roll, or complained bitterly about the flowers torn from their hedges.
“Damned Anchor Street Bakery,” said Mrs. Smith, as she and Smith retreated through the lobby. “I may have some competition! With all those bloody cherubs throwing free treats to the crowd, the voting in the dessert category may be swayed.”
“Are you worried?”
“Not particularly,” she said, lighting her smoking tube.
“Free treats or not, the master baker at Anchor Street uses nothing but wholemeal flour. I’d like to see anybody make a palatable fairy cake out of a mess of stone-ground husks!”
She swept upstairs, trailing smoke, to don her finery for the contest. Smith followed her as far as the landing, where he rapped cautiously at the door to Lord Ermenwyr’s suite.
“Come in, damn you,” said a deathly voice from within.
Smith opened the door and peeked inside. Lord Ermenwyr was sprawled on the parlor couch with his head hanging backward off the edge and his eyes rolled back, so that for one panicky moment Smith thought he needed to be resuscitated.
“My lord?” He hurried inside. But the ghastly figure on the couch waved a feeble hand at him.