In a firm, pompous voice that makes some part of him wince, he says: “When first I became a Deflowerer, Miss Monitus, my mentors told me: ‘Remember, young Salus - only lesser men succumb to the temptations of the glimmerflower. That is why you were chosen to serve as a Deflowerer.’ We Deflowerers must be ever strong, Miss Monitus. Ever steadfast. Ever heroic.”
Miss Monitus snorts. “And do it take a stronger, more heroic man to kill something because ‘e’s been ordered to - or to ignore ‘is orders, an’ let it live?”
“That should depend upon one’s understanding of what ‘strong’ and ‘heroic’ mean, I should think.”
“Indeed. An’ words ‘ave a habit of changing their meanings, don’t they, Sir? Take, fer example, the word ‘deflower’. Once, it meant -”
Salus interrupts: “I know what it meant, Miss Monitus.”
“Do ye?” Although her cheeks are flushing, Miss Monitus lifts her chin and bestows on him the defiant look he has come to recognize means she shall not be silenced. “And did ye also know, Sir, that in times past, folk didn’t kill flowers. Instead, they grew an’ harvested ‘em, an’ lovers exchanged ‘em as tokens o’ their affection. A quaint custom, don’t ye think?” “No - a ridiculous, even dangerous, custom.” When her face clouds over, Salus’s heart plummets. When shall he learn to avoid entering into these heretical conversations with her?
He strides to the door. There, he turns back to her, desperate to make peace in the only way he knows. “I shall be gone for some time. You make take the remainder of the day off.” He hesitates, and adds, “Farewell ... Venia.”
After eleven months of adoring her in the deepest, most secret chambers of his heart, this utterance of her first name is the closest he has ever come to flirtation. Waves of thrilling crimson wash over Miss Monitus’s cheeks.
Aghast at his own forwardness, Salus Sententiae spins about, and hurries down the stairs.
~ * ~
Excerpt from a Speech by Duke Duxdurum, given to the Parliament during the Hearing into the Flower Rebellion:
The lower classes shall ever petition we nobles for a return of the glimmerflower, for they lack the moral fortitude necessary to resist such a temptation, thanks to their base parentage. Indeed, it is utterly beyond the lower classes’ capacity to fear for their own souls.
Therefore we must do it for them.
(The Deflowerer’s Training Manual, 17th edition, page 136.)
~ * ~
Salus Sententiae should be planning for his upcoming ordeal, yet he cannot stop recalling the way Miss Monitus’s cheeks flushed when he murmured her first name.
The hansom-cab halts outside 66 Liberum-street. Salus climbs out, his stomach churning.
Soot thickens the air. Factories squat on either side of the street belching smoke and steam. As if from the stomach of some gargantuan beast, interior rumblings issue forth from engines and machines encased within hides of grey brick. No taverns or dance-halls or flowerbeds disrupt Liberum-street’s industriousness.
Salus tugs the hem of his frockcoat into place and smooths his hair with his palms.
The great tambour doors of the factory roll up. The Master Magus-Albiner stumbles out. His face is a doughy oval of fear. He catches Salus’s arm and hauls him forward, into the clamour and steam of the manufactory interior.
“Thank the Grey Man you have made it in time! ‘Tis near the albinizing vats. Follow me, Sir. Quick!”
Salus peels the man’s fingers off his arm. “Compose yourself, man, or you shall be the laughing stock of your workers. We must lead by example.”
Still, the Master Magus-Albiner catches Salus’s arm again, hauling him forward. Salus refrains from repeating his warning. These days, it seems his words fail to inspire confidence.
Inside the factory, Salus and the Master Magus-Albiner stride past tremendous conveyor belts bearing all manner of polychromatic life-forms towards the vats: emerald-green trees, bawling caramel-coloured calves, caged parrots with feathers of scarlet, cerulean, citrine. Those creatures already albinized emerge sodden - yet pure, pale-grey - from the vats at the far end of the belts.
The workers straighten up to stare at Salus Sententiae. Fear and respect mingle on their gaunt faces. Their whispers reach Salus:
“They reckon ‘e’s snipped one fowsand, six hunnerd an’ forty-free in ‘is career. That’s three hunnerd more ‘n any uvver Deflower.”
Four hundred, actually, but Salus feels no desire to boast.
The whispers become more dangerous, more unsettling:
“It’s gotta catch up wif a fella after a time, all that killing. ‘E looks nigh tormented, don’t ‘e?”
“An’ so ‘e should! I reckon ‘e should just leave that pretty flower be. Let it grow, I say!”
“Ye ask me, ‘e looks worse ‘n tormented. He looks like a walking rain cloud! So grey and dour.”
So says a young woman bent over the gauges on a furnace. Sweat glues her hair to her cheeks; she has tugged her grey pantaloons right up over her thin white knees. Many of the female workers, especially those pumping the bellows to heat the furnaces below the vats, are clad likewise. Salus, his face hot, averts his gaze. He wonders if Miss Monitus thinks he resembles a rain cloud.
Then he imagines her bare-kneed, and the image threatens to choke him.
Past the hissing boilers, cackling furnaces and rows upon rows of whispering workers he stumbles, blind to his surroundings.
At the rear of the factory, workers armed with steel tongs seize multicoloured glasswing bugs from a conveyor belt and dip the bugs into steaming cauldrons of albinizing fluid. The Master Magus-Albiner presses the conveyor belt’s black stop button. The conveyor belt hisses, squeals, clunks to a halt. The glasswing bugs awaiting albinizing flop about helplessly. Tiny shackles render them flightless.
Behind the conveyor belt, Salus spies a group of workers hunkered over a writhing grey shape upon the floor. Wild, unfamiliar hooting noises erupt from the shape. It is a man, Salus realizes. A man rolling about and clapping his hands and laughing.
A sudden urge to join in the laughter grips Salus. He bites the inside of his cheeks, hard.
Gazing at the hysterical worker, the Master Magus-Albiner shakes his head. “And this at the start of his twenty-hour shift! Can aught be done to fix him, Sir?”
“I am afraid he’ll not be able to work for days now that he has inhaled,” says Salus. “You’d best send for the asylum cart. The lad must be kept locked up till the effects wear off - such displays of gaiety are oft times contagious.”
The Master Magus-Albiner shudders. “The Grey Man forbid all my workers should be so incapacitated!”
Salus eases behind the conveyor belt to face the flower responsible for the hooting fellow’s loss of control. He clenches his fists. His palms are running with sweat.
Has Miss Monitus noticed how close he is to losing control of late?
And - more importantly - would it perturb her if he did?
Salus thinks not.
~ * ~
An Excerpt from Ruere Pulchrum’s Flowercide: Or, My Ruminations on the Battle against Campanuloideae Luminis.
Campanuloideae Luminis — or, as it is commonly known, the glimmerflower — is a rather innocuous-looking plant. Or so thought I when first I observed its frail and slender stems and serrated oval leaves. But it is innocuous only until it flowers. Then it sets forth a veritable orgy of blooms, each of which features a campanulate corolla of a particularly cloying crimson.
Then, it becomes dangerous.
Our forefathers, barbarians that they were, were given to dyeing their robes a shocking pink with a colourant manufactured from the stamen of the glimmerflower, and to inhaling the fragrance of Campanuloideae Luminis, a scent which temporarily bestows upon the inhaler a powerful state of arousal. They were also given to imbibing an intoxicating beverage brewed from its leaves. Much lascivious and licentious behaviour hence ensued, characterized by prolonged periods of singing, carousing, an
d dancing - oft unclothed. In those days, public fornication was not unheard of. Indeed, the histories abound with tales of wicked and unnatural couplings too grotesque to mention.
And thus a culture locked in barbarism enveloped our fair land of Fugere. A culture in which the widespread existence of sin rendered moral and intellectual development impossible. And if not for the
First Imperator-Grey gathering about him those heroic men known as the Deflowerers, our world would still be steeped in sin. If the Imperator had not given the order for flowercide, for the uprooting and poisoning of those vast fields of crimson flowers, we would still be naught but semi-naked barbarians, as ignorant and superstitious as the southern races remain to this day.
All praise the Imperator-Grey and our staunch Deflowerers!
(The Deflowerer’s Training Manual, 17th edition, page 596.)
~ * ~
The flower dominates the factory floor like a single splash of paint on an otherwise empty canvas. It glows. A brilliant crimson nimbus surrounds the petals, softening their edges, making the flower appear as hazy and glorious as a daydream. A tantalizing scent drowns out the ammonia fumes of the vats. A sweet, musky, thrilling scent. Perchance how a woman might smell after ...
Salus, shocked by the turn of his thoughts, stops breathing. It takes him a moment to recover. He straightens up.
“Back away, lads, lasses, back away,” he orders the workers.
They scuttle backwards and press themselves against the walls.
Salus snaps open his kit and withdraws his mask. He fits it over his face and wobbles it to check the seal. Perfect. Not a mote of fragrance shall reach him. He withdraws his stout leather gloves. Then his secateurs.
He kneels before the flower.
The petals - a deep, purplish-red at their bases - lighten to a pale, perfect crimson at their tips. They look as velvety and plump as flesh.
How would those petals smell, a quarter-inch from his nostrils?
Red as sin, the glimmerflower, so the natural philosophers say. Red as blood, Salus reminds himself. Red as lust.
Red as Miss Monitus’s lips, when she murmured to him that once lovers exchanged flowers as tokens of their affection.
To his shame, Salus freezes, secateurs inches from the bloom.
Shocked curses penetrate his consciousness. He glances up. The wide-eyed workers have crept nearer, and now gape at him. By tonight everyone in Vendo shall know how the great Salus Sententiae hesitated. Rumour-mongers at the rear of the crowd are undoubtedly even now asserting that his steadfastness, his uprightness, is on the wane.
Salus wriggles his fingers in the secateurs handle, seeking a firmer grip. To the nobles you are a hero, he reminds himself. A hero who knows naught of women. Flowers are all you know.
And all he knows is how to kill them.
He lunges at the plant, secateurs open, and severs the stem.
The flower hits the floor with a tiny hopeless sigh, a sound like a kiss missing the cheek of its intended recipient and instead meeting air.
The Master Magus-Albiner slumps in relief.
Before the plant can heal itself, Salus draws his dibble from his kit and drills several holes into the cracks in the floor near the plant’s roots. He pours a phial of lacrim poison into the holes. The poison - made from the tears of violet-winged luna birds as they are albinized - causes the flowerless stem to wither, to fall to the ground in a swoon. There, it shrivels and fades, first to a motley green, then to a spotty brown, and finally, a dead black.
Salus’s eyes are stinging. Blinking frantically, he plucks the limp plant-corpse from the ground with his tongs, and drops it into an iron coffer.
But even as he staggers to his feet, another glimmerflower shoots up through a crack in the floor, three feet to his right. Multiple flowers sprout upon its stems; scents both subtle and arousing penetrate his mask.
Salus flings himself down beside the plant. He snips, pierces, and poisons.
The sounds of scarlet flowers falling brush moth-soft in his ears. Sounds of loss, of ruined love affairs, of colour and laugher banished.
Several female workers have shuffled closer. Yet another glimmerflower unfurls from the floor. Salus shoves the nearest woman out of harm’s way. “Beware!” he cries. “Get back, you cursed fools!”
Flowers reach skywards through a great web of cracks in the floor. Before him, behind him, to his right ... The workers jostle and crane to see Salus Sententiae, who dives at one flower, rolls to meet another, and snips, pierces, poisons.
To Salus it seems he is lost in a forest of bare female limbs. On hands and knees, he shoves a path through them, and snips, pierces, poisons.
Are these commoners trying to hinder him? Frantic, he waves them back. “Move away! Move away!”
Ignoring him, the workers chant: “Let the flower grow! Bring brightness back into our lives!”
Creamy knees and calves crowd his vision. The women’s legs look as smooth, as silky, as the glimmerflower petals. Whimpering, groaning, Salus drags his kit along behind him and struggles towards the next flower.
“Let it grow!” plead the workers.
Salus grits his teeth. “No.”
And he snips. Pierces. Poisons.
~ * ~
Twenty-four flowers fall to Salus Sententiae that day on Liberum-street - the record number of deflowerings in the last two hundred years. Afterwards his name is inscribed in gilt letters six feet high in the Hall of Heroes. But that night, alone in his bachelor’s mansion, Salus dreams of giant flowers marching on him with secateurs of their own gripped in leafy hands. In his dream he skittles backwards, gibbering like a madman. Yet on reaching him, the flowers lay their secateurs at his feet like offerings to a cruel god and stretch out their vulnerable stems. Awaiting decapitation.
Salus wakes to find he is weeping.
Never has he felt so alone.
~ * ~
Five days later, Salus is summoned to a sprouting on Altum-street.
As he prepares to depart his office, the daguerreotypes on his office wall snare his attention. The daguerreotypes depict Salus Sententiae in all aspects of his work. Salus Sententiae, kit in hand, striding forth to do battle against the forces of nature. Salus Sententiae, waving at his legions of adoring well-wishers cheering him to the front. Salus Sententiae, staring unflinchingly into the silky, scarlet face of ruin. Salus Sententiae, thrusting his secateurs heavenward in triumph.
Regarding the man in those images, Salus feels the same intense and visceral dislike one feels on meeting a stranger one instantly detests.
“Salus Sententiae - the great Deflowerer,” he murmurs to himself, and irony sharpens his tone.
Miss Monitus’s perfume envelops him as she steps up behind him. “Countless times I’ve wondered,” says she, soft-voiced, “‘as anyone yet ‘ad the pleasure of deflowering ye, Sir Salus Sententiae?”
His heart somersaults in his chest, then thunders on at thrice its usual speed. Unable to breathe or to speak, Salus stares into her beautiful dark eyes: amusement glitters there. One of her dark brows arches, inviting his response.
Salus seizes his kit and bolts out the door, blood roaring in his ears and setting his face a-fire.
Reaching the kerb, he halts, gasping for air.
To his amazement, an ornate hansom-cab waits outside his office. The coachman and the footmen wear the livery of the Grey Man himself - the Ninth Imperator of Vendo. A magnificent team of four lacquer-coated geldings toss their heads and paw at the pavement. A tiny, mirthless smile curls Salus’s lips. The Imperator has obviously heard of his Deflowerer’s recent hesitations. This must be his way of saying: Chin up, old boy!
“His Greyness himself ordered me to transport you wherever you must go from now on, Sir,” the coachman confirms. He is an unpleasant-looking fellow with a long, oily pigtail and a balding pate. His expression sly, he adds: “His Greyness also informed me that he is exceedingly pleased with you. He wishes to commission another statue
of you to be erected in Tantus-square - once you vanquish the seven flowers that have sprouted on Altum-street.”
Salus stifles a groan. “Seven at once?”
“Aye, seven. A trifling job for the great Salus Sententiae, think you not, Sir?”
“Trifling,” Salus repeats faintly.
One of the footmen relieves him of his kit. Another opens the cab door and unfolds the step. Salus sinks onto the padded seat inside the cab. Alone, he allows himself to slouch against the cab wall and rest his pounding head in his hands.
The cab jerks forward. Hulking grey factories streak past the windows.
Miss Monitus’s words reverberate about his skull: ‘As anyone yet ‘ad the pleasure of deflowering ye, Sir Salus Sententiae?
The Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy - vol 05 Page 32