When Johann was still an unnamed thing he came across a corpse that gave him pause. It was caught by the fold of skin above its hip on a serrated outcropping of rock, leaking a thread of bile the colour and texture of breakfast custard into the tide that spit it up. The body was bloated and milky from a week’s exposure to the ocean, but the waxy sheen of fat coating the skin did not hide the damage it had suffered before passing. Beneath the skin there were blackened colonies of tumorous growth: on either side of the neck, beneath the arms, up the insides of the thighs, cushioning its curdled genitals. Some of the growths had popped like seed bulbs, making crags and ruin of the corpse’s skin. The thing knelt beside it for minutes, maybe hours—it had been difficult to tell the difference between the two before he had a name—and tried to imagine the circumstances that had caused its body to stop working.
The nameless child was familiar with slit throats and cracked skulls—the things that humans could do to one another, the counterbalance of violence and power—but the weight of disease was inconceivable. A body betraying itself.
At the time, Florian—only twelve years old—was sat among corpses, sewing a stone into the lining of his mother’s favourite coat. A week earlier he’d hoped for nothing more dearly than to be the next one struck dead.
“Would you like to see what I’ve been working on?” Florian asked Johann, fifteen years later.
“More facts and sums? I need something tastier to whet my appetite, Herr Leickenbloom.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that.” Florian tapped him on the wrist comfortingly. “You’ll like this. You’ve done your tricks, Johann. Now let me perform mine.”
For his tricks, Florian required materials.
“Bring me something. Preferably alive.”
Some “thing.” Florian had emphasized the second half of the word with a punctuated press of the tongue to the teeth. Not a person, then. Most of the animals native to the Norden craters were long extinct for the usual reasons: arcane corruption, pollution, the invention of the musket. Some, however, survived. Deer-legged wolves haunted the borders of the city and often lined the space between skin and ribs with man flesh during particularly nasty winters. Johann had empathy for the wolves so he decided to fetch Florian a seal, for which he held no regard. The waters surrounding the city were overfished recently, but the seals were as fat as ever. Probably they feasted on whatever seabed feature made the water bubble and stink in the springtime. There was a metaphor in that, Johann thought, about a city consuming itself, Florian knocking back coins like a shot of whiskey, the ink from his equations bleeding into the soil, what there was of it. If only Florian were the type of man who appreciated poetry, Johann could have flattered him to blushing.
Johann had no idea how to fish, and he spent an awful hour thrashing about the shore tossing knives at fat shadows and getting sand down the backs of his boots. He at last bought a net for two and a half marks and sat on the dock eating a loaf of salted beef haunch. The tide came in so deep that he was soaked up to the knees and he got the tails of Florian’s lovely gift-coat crusted in salt.
At high moon, a drunken sailor wandered by and began jostling him. “Ah, what’s this now? That coat must be worth more than my wife! A dandy fancies himself a fisherman?”
Johann didn’t like sailors much, so when the drunkard attempted to correct the spread of his net he tipped the man into the harbour and set his foot on his back until he stopped struggling. He hummed and licked meat salt off the fingers of his gloves before remembering the cadence of Florian’s voice as he’d said, And please, try not to make me an accessory to murder.
Magnanimously, he flipped the sailor over with the toe of his boot and let him dead-float towards the shore. A fifty-fifty chance, he told himself, that he’d wake up before the water settled in his lungs.
When he finally took a seal home to Herr Leickenbloom, Florian crinkled his nose in disgust and muttered, “I said alive, preferably.”
Still, he had Johann slice the animal open.
“So magic can bring the dead back to life?” Johann asked, watching Florian press a hand to the seal’s lung and fill it with air.
“Not true life,” Florian said. “You can make the respiratory system react, pump the ventricles. But there is nothing going on inside.”
Johann hitched himself up on Florian’s worktable and grinned. “So like me then?”
“Well.” Florian sniffed. “You are a creature of base instincts. I suppose I could believe it. Would you hand me the syringe, please?”
If only Florian knew how base. Johann’s gloved fingers brushed against Florian’s as he handed him the brass needle.
“The plague that swept through Elendhaven fifteen years ago was the result of a pernicious germ, carried on the backs of southern sparrows. The Mittengelt transplants were so certain it was a local illness that their methods for combating it were entirely ineffective.”
“And you’re all steamed up about that, so now you’re trying to re-create it?”
Florian glowered at him from beneath the wisps of his bangs. “Would you let me finish?”
“Sorry, darling, I’m just trying to grease the machinery of the conversation.”
“I am not trying to re-create it. I’ve already done so. I’ve been incubating a strain for some time, but even with magic it’s difficult to replicate the effect I am aiming for.”
“And what effect is that?”
Florian smiled—bright and blade sharp—and said, “Let me show you.”
He splayed and tip-tapped his fingers across the breadth of the carcass like it was a piano. Where the pads of his fingers touched, the flesh bubbled and bulged into horrible shapes, as if Florian were sewing rocks beneath the surface of the membrane. He had his sleeves rolled up to the elbows so that Johann could watch the magic flow through his blood. His veins emitted a faint light between the scab-crust of their wounding, and the light made his arms unnervingly translucent. His skin looked like the flesh of an insect beneath the exoskeleton; the arcane bioluminescence highlighted the dark sleepless ditches under his eyes, making him hollow, unnatural, insubstantial. Johann had to clutch a hand to his throat to keep the flash of affection that rocked through him caged in his esophagus where it belonged. Oh, Florian was a pretty little thing. Too pretty, too aware of the length of his eyelashes and the feminine tilt of his jawline. No one would expect that boyish half smile, that nervous wringing of the wrist, to conceal a monster.
Monster, Monster, Monster, Johann said to himself, the first half a kiss, the second a hiss.
The shoreline down beneath the black cliffs was the warmest place in Elendhaven. There was a narrow stretch of grey and blue sand between the cliffs and the water, speckled with rocks and shells and the soft residue of jellyfish. This was where Johann and Florian went walking on a church-day morning.
The wind whipped their jackets around their knees and the salt in the air raked their cheeks raw, but this far beneath the tidemark the humidity sucked the frost from the air. Florian knelt at the water’s edge and scooped up a handful of frigid water between his palms. It was the colour of coal.
“You’ve never been outside Elendhaven, have you?” Florian asked. Johann shook his head. Florian let the water flow from the gaps between his fingers. “Then you don’t know this, but everywhere else in the world, water is clear. If you pour it into a glass, you can see straight through it.”
Johann couldn’t picture it. He helped Florian to his feet. “So, what? You wanna see what’s at the bottom of the ocean?”
The edges of Florian’s mouth piqued unevenly. He shook out of Johann’s grasp and resumed walking.
“Do you know what a hallankind is?”
“Sure.” Johann kicked at a speckled red shell that peered out through the sand. It crumbled to dust under his boot. “It’s dock slang for lad-whores. For little boy prostitutes.”
“An ancient term transformed into crude modern vernacular. Here.” Florian dipped gingerly, right at the sodden border cut by the tide, and plucked out a stone: perfectly round, an inch in diameter and opalescent in sheen. He held it aloft for Johann’s benefit. “The oldest stories of the North called these rocks Hallandrette’s Roe. She lays her clutch along the beach, and protects them from the destructive hands of mortal beings.” Florian turned on his heel and pitched the stone at the cliff-wall as hard as he could. It bounced off the slate harmlessly. “See? Hard stone. Unbreakable.”
Johann frowned. “How do you crack one open, then?”
Florian smiled, secretive. “A privilege reserved for Hallandrette’s chosen. When a wretched child, one wronged or wounded deep in the soul, throws what they love most in the ocean they may cast a roe against the stone and a hallankind will be born. Keep the stone in their pocket and the Queen sends to them one of her children.”
“A friend for the lonely soul.”
“A companion,” Florian affirmed, “made from the same dark matter that coats the bottom of the Nord Sea. A hallankind will love that wretched child as a brother or sister. They will drag whoever wronged their brother-sister-friend into the sea and wring them through the spines of their mother’s baleen until they are foam and sea particle, forgotten in the cradle of her belly.”
Florian was breathing heavily from the effort of his speech. His eyes were wet and lucid, fixed on some distant point beyond the horizon. He trembled, unnoticed, in the chill. Johann reached out to brush a lock of hair from his face and Florian met his eyes, sudden and fierce.
“Your eyes are black as the sea,” Florian told him. The words were almost an accusation. Johann breathed a few cautious beats before responding.
“That’s sweet, peach. You’re saying that I was made for you?”
Florian let out a snort. “Of course not. My hallankind never hatched, and she would hardly have been a thing like you. No, Johann … you belonged to someone far more wretched than I. More deserving of Hallandrette’s pity.”
“More wretched is right. Poor bastard never got the chance to use me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Florian snapped, suddenly serious. “It’s a story, Johann, a myth. But I will be needing the stones. They contain traces of an extremely rare metal. Sixteen should be enough.”
Johann clicked his tongue in quiet irritation. “Whatever you say, Boss.” He lifted the edge of his jacket to make a sling for the stones. After a moment, he added, “But nevertheless, you know, here I am.”
“I know.” Florian dropped a polished roe into Johann’s coat. “What a perfect and unexpected gift for the child that never grew old.” He rapped a finger against Johann’s chest. “A toy that cannot be broken.”