Johann awoke to the sight of Florian sitting at his mirror, covering his bruises with thick whitening paste. He mixed his own greasepaint: sweetened vinegar, chalk, goat fat, and a touch of pink paint. All the ingredients were imported.
“I have a job for you,” Florian said, not looking up from his work. Johann rolled out of bed and came to set a hand on Florian’s hair. Their eyes met in the mirror.
“The Mage Hunter, right? You want me to—” Johann did his favourite knifey gesture.
Florian pressed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’d prefer—in general—that you treat that as a last resort, rather than a first.”
“I don’t know, Florian, this whole situation seems pretty ‘last resort’ to me. What do you expect me to do otherwise? Seduce her?”
Florian scrunched up his nose and dabbed a drop of greasepaint beneath one eye. “Of course not.”
Johann grinned wide and slow, walking two fingers up the curve of Florian’s back. “It’s not undoable, you know. I can be charming when I want to be. I could play the humble cobbler, show her around the city, make her laugh. Bring her back here so you can work your magic…”
Florian shivered. “Don’t even joke.” He lowered his eyes to examine his large set of cheek rouges. His eyelashes were so long, like blades of spelt after they were shorn of chaff. “Besides, I’ll be in meetings late into the evening.”
Johann rolled his finger over the bumps in Florian’s spine where it dipped beneath his hair. He had a scattering of pockmarked scars there, and beneath his collarbones as well. Not from plague boils, but pox sores. It seemed obvious that Florian should have been an ill child: no wonder he was so slight and circumspect. There was a sick joke lurking in the air about a boy so often ill being the sole member of his household passed over by the plague. If Johann were not so terribly besotted by the noises Florian made when kissed beneath the jugular he would have voiced it out loud.
“I made tea,” Florian said suddenly.
Johann straightened as Florian handed him one of the silver cups recently liberated from Ansley’s manor. He sniffed it and smelt dates. “What is this?”
“A gift from Gilbert. He thinks to butter me up with sweets if he cannot do it with sums.”
Johann took a sip and wrinkled his nose. It was sickeningly sweet. “Cute. He’ll be dead within the week.”
“Yes. He must have contracted the Ambassador’s illness. I’d not expected it to spread so fast.”
Johann raised the cup to the light, turned it to examine the engravings. Snow orchids, with lines of verse cleaving through the petals. It took him a moment to realize the arched handwriting was in the common alphabet—the lines were written in complete gibberish.
Oh. Of course. I’ve identified the cipher, but I’m missing all the keys, Florian said. Perhaps Grandmama Leickenbloom had not been as senile as Florian thought, to have kept these out of his reach.
“Florian,” Johann began, remembering something. “Is this the … first time you’ve done this?”
Florian’s hand stilled where it was applying rogue.
Johann continued: “When I was at the sick house, I overheard the Ambassador talking about his aides falling ill. Permanently ill.”
“Ah.” Florian fluffed his brush in a darker shade of powder. “I hadn’t realized that they died.”
“You scolded me for being hasty with the Ambassador, but you haven’t been careful, either.”
Florian shot him a withering gaze in the mirror. “Obviously this isn’t the first time I’ve attempted to deploy the plague. I’ve been occupied with this venture for almost half as long as I’ve been alive. It’s my life’s work, my life. Johann, what do you even care if I’ve done this before?”
“I don’t care. I just—” Something crawled down Johann’s throat and gripped him tight. For some reason, his next words felt like speaking through tar. “Are you … ever going to explain to me what that is?” His mouth was dry. Stripped of his artifice, he sounded young. What the fuck. “Your life’s work? Your end goal?”
Florian spun his chair around and smiled up at Johann: the expression was economical, but genuine mischief sparkled in his eyes. There was still mud in his hair.
“Why should I? It’s not as if you’re ever going to tell me no.”
Johann shadowed Eleanor all day. He acquainted himself with his old friends: roofs, eaves, alleys, gutters. Did what he used to do for lunch and swiped an oyster roll from a man who forgot about him in the time it took his mouth to form the word thief. The shadows embraced him, and the citizens ignored him, letting him trail his target with barely a care. This was the Elendhaven he remembered: orphans and prostitutes and hostel owners who watered their ale and hit their children where everyone could see it.
Eleanor’s disguise was almost as good as his. He’d watched her leave the suite that morning in her plain leather duster and her un-whitened skin. She almost slammed into Ansley in the street and he rebuffed her cruelly, as a stranger, without even looking at her face. She had to grab him by the arm to get his attention. Johann slinked along the rooftops to follow them to the alleyway where he watched them quarrel, too high to hear the specifics. Ansley raised a hand to smack her, but she caught his wrist. He left, harried and quick footed, when he saw the bandolier beneath her jacket.
After that, she began to ask questions about the plague. She began to ask the right people, too: the innkeepers, the fishermen, the cobblers. Cleverer and cleverer, thought Johann, this thin-handed, long-legged huntress. She knew that Elendhaven’s elite were a dead end, and that whoever made it that way had likely not stopped to look down.
Johann decided to give her a good knifing before she even entered the archives, no matter what Florian wanted. She emerged with a thin sheaf of paper under one arm, but, unexpectedly, she did not head for Florian’s manor. Instead—just as the sky began to turn pink—she went to the shore. Johann stood for a while in her long shadow, watching her watch the sun go down. She sat on a piece of driftwood, her feet lost in the hair-tangle of white weeds that surrounded it. Quietly, Johann came up behind her and saw that, once again, she had a white stone in her palm.
“Throw it against the cliff, and the thing you love most will come back to you,” Johann said, chin close to her shoulder.
She did not startle. “I’ve heard that myth somewhere,” she said softly. “That these are eggs laid from the mouth of the goddess Hallandrette, that they awaken when filled with tragedy.”
“They’re Elendhaven’s answer to death. No unjust passing goes unpunished here at the edge of the earth.”
Still not looking at him, Eleanor rolled the stone down her fingers and held it up against the sunset. “My mother’s people do not believe in death,” she said. “Not true death, anyway. They believe that people live many times, always learning, always forgetting.”
“‘Everything that has happened has already happened, and will happen again,’” Johann quoted, sauntering around the log so that he was blocking her light. He smiled down at her, wolfish and charming. “Have we spoken before?”
She narrowed her eyes. The stone went in her pocket, and her braid went over her shoulder. “The man who told me the myth. You introduced yourself as Elendhaven.”
Johann’s knife itched against his wrist. “You remember, then.”
“I thought it was a dream. I’ve had many strange dreams since coming to this terrible city.” The look on her face said that she was still dreaming, all liquid and clouds. “What’s your real name, Mister Elendhaven?”
What’s a name? “Johann.”
She smiled and offered a narrow hand. “Mine is Kanya.”
Oh ho. “That’s not the name I’ve heard whispered among the parlour shadows.” Instead of shaking her hand, he slid his fingers under her chin.
“You are the only man in this city who has not lied to me yet.”
She was entranced by him, like a mouse taken in by a snake. Was this an effect of his aberrant nature? A siren song that rose up from his pheromones and unlocked the secret desires of humans who spent too long in his shadow? He’d never really thought about it—the way people talked to themselves when looking at him. Every person he’d ever killed had thirsted for it. Every human had a desperate void churning inside them. The world wants to devour itself, Florian said.
This is going to be so easy it’s practically criminal, he thought to himself. Holding back laughter hurt bone deep. He shucked a knife from his sleeve, and she whispered, “Your master, on the other hand…”
Johann was not shocked. He was nothing at all. He kept hold of her chin, his grip turning from gentle to severe. She showed no pain. When Johann reared back to stare at her, her eyes were dark pools deep as the ocean where Hallandrette waited for the end of the world. Hadn’t she said that the water was clear in the land where she was born?
“That was a very stupid thing you just said,” Johann told her.
“And it is a stupid thing your master has done, placing his servant in view of a Mage Hunter. This is the mistake sorcerers always make, summoning things up from the depths, parading them around in front of strangers, always so certain they’re ten steps ahead. In the right hands, cannot magic do anything?”
“Is that how you were able to finally recognize me?”
Kanya ghosted a finger down the hollow of her throat. “There is a tonic we drink. Mercury and silver. It makes for a short career, but”—she wrapped her hand around his wrist and wrenched it until the knife came loose—“a high enough dose makes magic flow harmlessly through you.”
Johann yanked his arm free, surprised at her strength. His blade clattered on the hard sand, then disappeared beneath her foot. “Did you suspect Florian this whole time?”
She shook her head. “I should have, but there were extenuating circumstances. I was sent by the Crown to investigate a series of rather odd deaths. Ansley, however, issued a contract against your master some months ago. He had no proof, and to be honest, I do not think that he believes Herr Leickenbloom is a sorcerer. What he does believe is that he will do everything in his power to stymie his business prospects. The first thing I heard when I entered the city was this petty feuding over the railroad, and so I dismissed his complaints entirely.”
“It took that little to throw you off the mark?” Johann laughed, easing back on his heels. “No offense, miss, but you’re a bit shit at your job.”
“It wasn’t only that,” Kanya admitted, with an admirable humility. “You must give your master more credit. It’s only very recently that he’s gotten sloppy. His work mendaciously adjusting his family’s records is subtle and extremely thorough. I went and looked at the city’s medical documents a second time, just like he suggested. They were curiously trim for a family with such deep roots in the city. But words are easily manipulated. History lives on in other ways.” She dipped a hand into her pocket and produced a slim ring box. She traced her finger along the silver casing, and Johann could see clearly that it bore the Leickenbloom family seal.
Shit.
“What I did find in the archives were records of Ansley’s father obtaining many of the Leickenblooms’ antiques in an auction nearly twenty years ago. Once I knew to look, I saw this symbol everywhere in Ansley’s manor. It’s the same one your master wears on his left hand. This box looks to have been passed down several generations.” She popped it open to show the inscription under the lid: names, with dates carved beside them. “Aloysia, to Odette, to Magdela, to Flora. That last one—she was born the same year as Florian Leickenbloom, but there was no mention of her in the medical records. I thought, why is it that no one remembers that the Leickenblooms had two children?”
Johann said nothing. He sized her up, slid a hand into his pocket where the railroad spike was still rusting away.
“Johann.” She sounded so empathetic. Adorable. “There is a reason I wanted to know the whole story. Whatever Herr Leickenbloom has put into your head about me, Mage Hunters do not execute without ample reason. This doesn’t have to end with your master shot dead. But it does have to end. You know it must.”
“Yeah.” Johann sighed. “You’re right. I guess we’ll have to do this the hard way.”
He knocked her down with a heel to the stomach. She did not absorb the blow with grace but toppled back to the rocky ground, her legs spread-eagle with knees still hooked over the log. Johann fell upon her. He wrested her hands from her bandolier and tried to pin them against the ground. She bucked him off with a knee to the bladder, but he kept hold of her coat lapel. The weight of his body yanked her off balance and sent them rolling over each other in the sand. This time when he pinned her down, he did it with his forearm to her jugular.
Oh, she struggled. Valiantly, heroically. It had been a long time since Johann had wrestled with something that wanted to live. It was infuriating and exhilarating to feel every part of her body fight him down to the blood. Johann drank the fear in her eyes like it was two-hundred-mark brandy. He wasn’t choking her hard enough to kill, just enough that she’d be placid when he drove the spike into her eye. He choked her until her vision went wide, until he saw that animalistic, euphoric frequency reflected back at him in her shuddering sclera; the chasm that howled in the space between life and death, where creatures lost their names.
“If you stop struggling,” he purred, “I’ll gut your brain in one stroke, sweet and short like a surgeon does.”
He reached into his pocket and found it empty. The shock was enough to still him, a fatal pause. He’d underestimated the determination of a half-dead woman with substantial martial training. Or perhaps he’d grown used to Florian’s performative struggle, so drunk on the hedonistic allure of violence as play he’d forgotten how to listen to his instincts. He’d forgotten to watch Kanya’s hands. She fought space between them and rammed the rail spike into his larynx.
Johann’s vision swam, red and blurry at the edges. He let Kanya go, stumbled back, tripped over the log. Stupid, stupid.The tide was coming in behind him, lapping at the shoreline with its greedy tongue. He rose, bleeding from the neck and still laughing, a terrible, guttural sound. She was shards of black and red against the horizon as she raised her pistol and fired.
By necessity, his revenge began slow.
Florian lived alone in a house full of corpses for two months. He became used to them: to the smell and the bloat, to the rot and the strange colours a human being turned when there was no soul inside of them. He no longer wanted to be a doctor.
The first man he practised wizard’s tricks on was his father’s accountant. A minor noble in his own right, and a distant cousin of the Leickenblooms through marriage on his mother’s side. Unlike the Leickenblooms proper, he had money.
“It says here in my father’s will that you were to be my benefactor were anything to befall him,” Florian said, watching the accountant’s eyes glaze over. It was a lie, but Florian found that if he lied in a certain cadence of voice while twisting his thumb white, people believed him.
Every night he went to the shoreline, a roe in his pocket. So many people were throwing their dead into the harbour that the far end of the Black Moon was thick with their refuse: cracked spectacles, splintered ribs, shoes with the feet still in them, jewelry made blue by the water. No Flora. Not even the ribbons she wore in her hair. Not even her family ring, a perfect twin to the one Florian still wore.
This is what Florian found instead: a boy with black hair, black eyes, clothes ripped by the tide, pale skin with no incisions. A thread of seaweed behind his ear. A face Florian knew and had not wanted to see again.
Breathing.
He poked the boy with a stick to make sure that the rise and fall of his chest was not just nerve endings sending instinctual signals through the chest, like a chicken twitching after its head’s been chopped off. Slowly, like rising from a dream, the boy nudged his elbows beneath him. It hitched up and opened his eyes, one at a time. It stared at Florian in the wash of blue moonlight.
“What am I?” it asked.
Florian dropped the stick and ran, the rock burning a hole in his pocket. He locked all the shutters when he got home and spent all night locked in his bedroom, holding his knees. That cruel lady, the goddess Hallandrette. She had sent him the wrong gift.
The boy was gone the next morning. Florian resolved to never think of it again, but he held on to the hallanroe he’d fetched for Flora. He sewed it into the lining of his mother’s favourite coat.
The monster awoke in pieces, dreams rising like steam from the sewers on a warm spring morning. Memories scattered, glass on the floor. It had to put them together, find the right shape.
A corpse spit up on the tide, caught on the rocks by a fold of skin. Sitting up in the pale moonlight, what is a moon? What is the sea? What is a name? A little Hans, a little Ralf. Little wee dock rat? A spit of a hallankind? Lessons from a large stone. Falling, like a crow with clipped wings, a crash that wants to swallow you whole. What am I, what am I, who—
A shadow in Elendhaven’s gutter. A name said in a certain tone of voice. That’s what makes a thing real. Skin that glows like the part of an insect under the exoskeleton. Hands that do terrible things, work that needs to be done. A hallway that you cannot take another step forward in.
When it’s over, a hallankind must return to the sea where I will sit beneath the silt until my bones turn to salt. A little Hans. A little Ralf. Wee little Johann.
Johann—
Johann whipped upright, delirious, head out of order. The sun was a line shimmering on the sea. He turned to see a halo of blood and bone in the sand. Mushy pink puddles, a single eye bounced out to sit alone among the cracked seashells. He ground the heel of his hand into his socket, pressed against the searing pain of nerves growing back. She’d burst his head like a rotten apple felled from the tree.
“Bitch is a good shot,” Johann heard himself mutter. His voice was still cracked from the stained spike at his feet. His thoughts, soggy. There was somewhere he needed to be. Something he needed to do. Someone he—
“Shit,” Johann said as he staggered to his feet. He said it all the way back up the craggy path to the mansion. He yelled it when he slammed through the door.
“Shit, Florian, we gotta go. And I really mean it this ti…”
Johann trailed off. He saw Florian seated on the chartreuse love seat in the sitting room, holding a cup of tea. He looked very put together all things considered, but Johann heard the cup shaking against its saucer, rattled by his fingers. Johann noticed that there was a second cup set out on the center table, half-drained.
“You might have deferred to your first resort after all. I’d not thought the situation this dire.”
Kanya stepped out from the shadows. Her jacket was buttoned over the bruise Johann had left on her throat. She raised her gun and leveled the muzzle at Johann. To Florian, she said:
“Undo him.”
Florian’s laugh was curdled. “You might as well ask me to sink Elendhaven into the sea.”
Kanya let out a sad, thin breath. “I understand that you are a damaged man, Herr Leickenbloom. I too am an orphan, raised in a city that hated me. A land that I hated. You—”
Florian cut her off sharply. “Do not try to reason with me, Mage Hunter. You don’t know anything about my life, or what I’ve done.”
“Herr Leickenbloom, I am not a cruel woman.” Kanya stepped behind the couch, her eyes trained on Johann’s face. “I do not wish all sorcerers dead. In Mittengelt … in the city where I was trained, there is a treatment. You could be saved.”
“A treatment?” Florian echoed. “I have heard of this treatment. They shove a pike up your left nostril and stir it about until they find the part of your brain that scholars say creates magic. But I know better: magic is not in the brain, miss; it is in the bones. I would sooner die.”
“Is that really what you want?” she asked sadly. Pityingly.
Florian closed his eyes and took a sip of his tea. “At this point, it does not matter one way or the other.”
It mattered to Johann. He almost didn’t feel it, his hand sliding beneath his jacket to snatch out a knife. He threw it on instinct. His nerves moved faster than his brain. But it was not Florian’s power that moved him—it was something deep in Johann’s marrow, a tug like the moon pulling the ocean home.
The blade skimmed Kanya’s left arm, put her pistol off target. Johann leapt the couch and rushed her, taking her to the floor. Florian was caught out and spilt his tea all over himself as he jumped to his feet. Kanya and Johann struggled for a few seconds, primal and desperate, as if answering an aching want left over from their spat at the beach. Kanya rolled them over and slammed his skull into the floor by the hair as Johann scratched at her face with both hands. She staggered to her feet and he grabbed after her, twisting her against his chest. She jerked an elbow back against him, but he had an arm locked around her stomach. She bit his wrist the first time he tried to wrap fingers around her neck. The second time, he forced a knife to her throat, but not before she found her pistol. They swayed together, stalemated: his blade at her jugular, her weapon on his master, who was frozen pale with a tipped teacup in one hand and his hair askew. Florian, who controlled Johann like a puppet, who had the whole city dancing to his tune, confronted with something as simple as a gun all he could do was gape.
“Let me go, or I’ll kill him,” she gasped.
“That’d be a poetic way to sign your own death warrant.”
“You bluff with confidence, Herr Johann, but I’m not afraid of you. I know what you are.”
“And what, exactly, do you think I am?” Johann hissed in her ear.
“A homunculus of some sort,” Kanya answered, voice steady with the surety of absolute faith. “You’re born of his blood, and controlled by it. When he dies, so will you.”
Johann was too slow to stop the shot. The jerk of his elbow knocked it off course by a head and a half. Florian was hit in the gut. His pale eyes fluttered open as the round blew open his stomach. He wobbled on his feet, then collapsed in a crumble of silks and gold and unbrushed yellow hair. He scattered the tea table’s burnt-down candles, its little plates, its lace cup-setters. The metal teapot hit the floor with a hollow clang.
“Bad bet, lady,” Johann snarled, and slit Kanya’s throat. She went down like a gutted fish, boneless and bloody, making a horrible sound from the hole in her neck.
She was dying quick, but not quick enough for Johann, who followed up on his work by setting a heel on her throat until she stopped twitching and lay still. At the front end of the sitting room, the curtains were pulled open an inch. A beam of red light cut through, collecting dust glimmer. It fell across where Florian was laid in a plashet of his own blood, surrounded by broken china and wax.
Johann knelt at his master’s side. His edges still felt light, undefined. Blurry where his eye hadn’t completely healed. What to do when he was dead? Where to go? Should he crawl back into the sea? Drag Elendhaven there with him, like an anchor over his shoulder? What was Elendhaven without Florian? A foul spit of land sinking deeper into the sediment every day. What was Johann without Florian? A name that no one knew.
Who would ever have thought that a thing, once named and held in open palm, would want to curl up and stay there forever? Johann stroked a hand down Florian’s side to feel where his guts were loose and spilling out onto the floor. It was hard to believe it came out of him, the same slippery meat that was stuffed inside everyone else. He pulled off both of his gloves and took Florian’s hand in his bare palms. “Florian, this … this is a stupid way to die.”
Florian struggled to speak, but there was blood in his mouth. Johann gripped his hand harder.
“After all that, you can’t intend to actually die.”
“Goddess … Johann … sh-sh.… shut up.…” Florian coughed up blood all over his chin, over his collar where mud had been streaked the night before. “There is … still one thing I need you … to do. C-come closer.”
Johann obeyed. What else could he do? Florian set his free palm on his forehead. It was fever warm.
“If … a rejected gift comes back to you … when you most need it, wouldn’t it be blasphemous … to refuse it again?”
“I don’t understand,” Johann said, but he did. Not in his head, but somewhere deeper. He understood it in his bones, a stone kept in a lonely boy’s pocket, a toy that cannot be broken. Florian probably waited all these years for Hallandrette to send his sister back to him, but here was Johann. And here was Florian. It had to mean something. To Johann, it meant everything.
Florian’s veins began to glow, bright through the sheer fabric of his tunic. The monster felt his memories come loose under the sorcerer’s beautiful, smooth palm, easy as a tooth unhinged at the root. The glass of his mind flew apart at the cracks and the pieces were sucked under the water, taken by the tides to wash up on distant shores. He would never know their names.
Blue-lipped and shivering, Florian whispered, “A hallankind exists to make its master’s dreams come true. S-so go forth … and do that.…”