Johann wound his way into the hall, which was decorated just as tastelessly as the sitting room. He could hear faint strains of conversation billowing up from the first floor, so he made sure to walk carefully on the balls of his feet. There was a door cracked an inch wide where the carpet ended, spilling light and the scent of rot into the rest of the house. Johann eased the door open with his palm and slipped in.
It was a guest room, the guest all trussed up in the four-poster bed, curtains drawn shut, incense burning at the four corners of the room as if that could mask the stench. Johann breathed it in: perfume, rot, body odor, and piss. No shit, though. Johann knew what a corpse smelt like, and what a corpse smelt like was a blood-logged ass soaking in the decayed offal matter of its last three meals.
He pulled the curtains open with a sprightly flick of the wrist.
“Rise and shine, Ambassador!”
The Ambassador did not respond. He had a fat hand clutched at the neck of his bedclothes. The sweat-stained cotton was a poor mask for his sickness. The dark plague blisters showed through the fabric, little black islands of disease scattered from his neck all the way down to his pelvis.
“Well, well, my darling dear did a real number on you, didn’t he? Fucking look at you. Absolutely disgusting.”
Johann made a clicking noise with his tongue. That brought the Ambassador to his senses. He blinked his eyes open and turned his head to stare at Johann, glossy and half-present. There was already white filming over his sclera. His tongue was swollen up so big that it lolled out of his mouth. He moved his lips to no avail.
“Oh yes, my delicate snow-flower Florian fucked you up real good. I’m sure you heard all sorts of terrible things about what dwells in Norden, but you never thought you’d fall under the unforgiving eye of its avenging angel. I suppose it’s only fair that I put you out of your misery.”
It was only fair, to dole the duties out this way: for Johann to wipe away the refuse Florian cast behind him, to keep those dainty little hands unmarred by the scars he was raking into Elendhaven raw. Johann imagined himself as the shadow of death in the man’s fraying sight. No reason to be afraid, Johann thought. Death is kind. It’s only life that holds suffering. With infinite kindness, he climbed onto the bed with one knee and knelt at the Ambassador’s side.
Understanding flooded the Ambassador’s gaze. He began to struggle, but he was too bloated to turn over. Johann watched him, all his knives sheathed. Sure, it would be quick to slice him across the jugular, or pike him in the temple, but Johann was feeling magnanimous; he would send the poor sucker off sweetly.
Johann wrapped both hands around the Ambassador’s tumid neck and didn’t let go until he smelt shit.
* * *
He took a strip off the Ambassador’s belly, and another off his back, where the boils were densest. He had to cut around the bedsores. He wrapped the meat up good and tight in three layers of perfumed silk before packing them in leather. Contemplating his work, he rolled the body back over and, on a whim, cut out the tongue. That he put in his pocket.
Florian was not impressed by this offering. “Why would you think I wanted this?” he demanded when he saw it, covering his mouth with a handkerchief.
“I thought you could use it as … research samples? To track the progress of the plague?”
“Johann, you don’t … you don’t understand anything.” Florian sighed and ground his palm between his eyes. “You realize that you’ve just caused us more trouble?”
Johann rocked back and forth on his heels. “You know me, sweetheart. I live to serve.”
Florian let out an ungraceful snort. His look of utter, familiar disdain was so pretty that Johann couldn’t help but kiss him. Florian spun out of his grasp, horrified. “Don’t touch me with that filth on your hands!”
“Fine,” Johann sighed, and peeled off his gloves.
Florian really was as fragile as a new ice, but—
—the thing about newly frozen ice is that beneath it lurk dark shadows. Florian had darkness beneath his pale eyes all week. It was there when he took his morning coffee, when he gave counsel to the factory masters, when he pinched Johann’s ear to make him sit still as he applied kohl and greasepaint to his translucent face.
For most people, a darkness behind the iris was a sign of melancholy. For Florian it bespoke pure elation. Thin ice isn’t a problem for the sea; it’s a problem for the blind idiot who steps out on it. The fool who breaks it gets sucked under; the ice, it mends.
Florian’s eyes were full of drowned corpses as he and Johann dined once again with Ansley and his foreign business partner. In a locked smoking room, Florian daintily accepting a shisha pipe from Herr Charpentier. He took an exploratory puff and came up coughing, much to the delight of his companions.
Another man in the parlour was coughing, too. It was not from the smoke.
“A shame what happened to the Ambassador,” said Ansley. He was chewing on a black cigar that stank of licorice, rolling it from one side of his mouth to the other while he talked, until he was surrounded on all sides by a fog of blue smoke. He folded open his gold-lined snuff case and offered it to Johann. “Smoke for your manservant?”
Florian covered the case with a tiny, soft hand. “Johann doesn’t partake on the job.”
Johann gave Florian a crisp smile and shoved him aside. “First time for everything, Boss.”
Florian puffed right up at the bold defiance, and Johann laughed with joy at being able to flirt under these starched-up bastards’ noses. Half the men in the bar were closet buggerers anyway.
Johann leant down to light his cigar on the kerosene flame at the center of the table. A shadow crossed over him as he inhaled: Eleanor, coming to sit in their booth. She was stunning in a wheat-coloured brocade dress, lined from neck to ankle in hand-stitched doves. For once she was dressed as what she looked like: a girl from the colonies, rather than the Mittengelt nobility she pretended at. Her dark hair was pulled back in a thick braid that brushed her hip.
“May I have one as well, Ansley?” she asked, a hand at her collar and a quiver in her voice.
A shadow fell across Ansley’s face as well. “Of course, my lady,” he said, and moved aside to make space in the booth. She slid in like a fold in paper. There was a fragility about her that bled mourning from every gesture, as she smiled politely at each man in turn. Her gaze lingered on Florian, who, without missing a beat, tipped his head to her in courteous obeisance. But Johann could feel how tense he had gone.
Charpentier—in a show of drunken generosity—offered Eleanor the shisha pipe. Ansley and Florian had been calling him by his forename all night, cozy now that they’d shared a few drinks. Gillèrt, or Gillette, something like that. Maybe he hailed from Gillèrt? It didn’t really matter; he wasn’t long for the world. Johann did not miss the way he was sweating under his ruff. He’d spent the last two hours subtly tugging at his ascot, scratching the skin beneath his stylish muttonchops raw.
“Shisha, mademoiselle? You must be, ah, familiar with it, yes?”
Something dark flashed in Eleanor’s eyes, a momentary crack in her mask. Thin ice, deep waters. Too fast for a lazy noble to catch. Johann cast a look at Florian to make sure he’d seen it. Florian watched her with a knuckle under his chin.
Eleanor giggled almost mechanically and dipped down to light her cigar. She said, “I’ve had shisha before, but I much prefer black tobacco.” Johann caught her stumbling over her Mittengelt accent. Why the performance? He wondered who besides the Ambassador knew she was a Mage Hunter. His death might have left her all alone.
She breathed a smoke ring out from between her pursed lips like an expert. Ansley watched her with dark pupils blown out with lust. Well, that and the something extra laced into the shisha, some drug Charpentier had brought north with him. They were all feeling it by now.
“I am very sorry about—” Ansley coughed, adjusted his silk tie. The cigar made its journey to the other side of his mouth. “About what
happened to the Ambassador. You two seemed … close.”
Eleanor frowned the way she ought. She shuddered against the thought of savage things, the way she was supposed to. The cigar shook in her fingers, scattering ash across the table like the first flakes of a snowstorm. “It’s not what you think,” she whispered. “He was my … benefactor.”
“I see! So this is how you speak the common tongue so well!” Charpentier beamed like he had just paid her a compliment. She bristled, almost imperceptibly.
“She speaks it better than you, certainly, Gilbert,” Florian cut in, reaching for his drink. Shit, Johann thought, and adjusted his mental inventory of doomed businessmen. Florian took an impressive swig of his vodka bitters, then addressed Eleanor sympathetically. “It was really a terrible thing. Such an unusual murder, following his terrible illness … When I told you that you would see colours you’d never witnessed at home, I did not mean blood and blister. Truly, my heart goes out to you and yours.”
Eleanor ducked her head. “Thank you, Herr Leickenbloom. It means much coming from you.”
“I abhor the idea of a lady alone so far from home. Is there anything I can do for you?”
Eleanor looked up at Florian through her lashes. Her hair shadowed her face where the braid was loose. “Well … I’d heard,” she said softly, tears at the corners of her eyes, “that your family, too, died of a plague.”
Charpentier’s and Ansley’s heads spun together to gape at Florian. Johann kept looking at Eleanor. It occurred to him that Florian might have miscalculated—it was possible that the clever little lady knew exactly who she was looking for.
Florian’s neutral expression strained at the edges. Johann could imagine how he’d look if he could: like he’d swallowed a spider. “Yes,” he said, in a high, tinny voice. “That is true.”
“Was it the same as the one that claimed my beloved benefactor?” she wondered, pressing the tips of her fingers to her bottom lip.
“My family passed when I was very young, so I could not possibly answer that question.” Florian took a sip of his drink. There was nothing left in the glass but ice and lime. “Perhaps you can visit the town archives tomorrow and request the medical records, if you are so curious.”
“I’m afraid that my education was not in the sciences, herr. Perhaps we could meet there and discuss this subject further.”
“I regret that I have many appointments tomorrow. Perhaps you would deign to take my manservant with you. He does not look like much, but I assure you that he can read.”
Charpentier shot a bushy-browed gape at Johann, shocked by this confident affirmation of peasant literacy.
Eleanor looked at Johann as well. Really looked at him, in the way few people did. Johann took a long drag off his cigar and hoped the smoke would help cloud her memory of their encounter at the beach. She pulled up and sighed into her own cig. “If it is all the same to you, I would rather not. It is improper, I think, for a lady to travel unaccompanied with a bandit, however reformed he may be.”
Stalemate. Florian’s cheeks were rosier than usual, and not from embarrassment.
“A bandit?” Ansley echoed, analyzing Johann from the corner of his vision.
“That’s what Herr Leickenbloom told me,” Eleanor said, eyes steady through the smoke. “At his party the other night. Correct?”
Florian picked at the lime in his glass. “You must be misremembering. I said that Johann was a cobbler.”
“Is … is that so?” She blinked and scrunched up her nose, lost in the memory. “How strange … I recall the conversation rather vividly.”
“Clearly,” Florian sniffed, “you do not.”
“Ah, enough of this!” Charpentier was swaying in his seat. He dug a cloth envelope out of his pocket and shook a handful of dried leaves onto the table. “Why is it that you are all so … so glum! Less talk of tragedy, more shisha!”
Ansley chuckled. “It’s natural; tragedy is the culture of Elendhaven. One cannot help but be glum when he hardly sees the sun for half the year.”
“I rather like our long winters,” Florian said, head down, running a finger along the rim of his glass. “But then again, I am rather accustomed to them. My family could not afford to run south at the first sign of frost.”
“Yes, but Elendhaven suits you, Herr Leickenbloom. You would detest Sandherst, I’d bet, let alone my family’s villa on the southern coast.”
Florian arched an eyebrow. “Why is that?”
“Well, for one thing”—Ansley tapped ash from his cigar—“the mines are open.”
“You know, I have heard,” Charpentier began, overloud, breaking the tension with the grace of an avalanche, “that the people here say the end of the world will begin in this city. This, I think, is the most glum thing imaginable.” He was picking freely at the boil on his neck now.
Florian was occupied still with Ansley’s smug expression, so Johann spoke for him. “Actually,” he said, reaching for the shisha pipe, “what they say is that the end of the world already began here. Hundreds of years ago.”
“That’s why the water is black, yes?” Eleanor asked with big, shocked eyes. Oh, she was good. Johann could see her effect, knew Ansley couldn’t stand to have all her attention focused on other men. He finally peeled his eyes off Florian and pressed the last of his cigar into the marble ash bowl before gliding a few charming words in right under Charpentier’s long red nose.
“In the age of sorcerers, they say a deadly spell split the silver mountain in two. It turned a thousand men and women to ash, and that ash snowed down all along the shore for ten days. When the ocean rushed in to fill the crater left by the spell, the water was black.” He picked up his empty tumbler and held it to his eye, miming a spyglass. “If you stand on the cliffs outside the city, you can see the harbour is shaped like a crescent. That’s how it earned its nickname—the Black Moon is the first sign of the end times in old barbarian myths.”
“A rather leisurely apocalypse,” Charpentier mused, “if it takes five hundred years.”
Florian set his glass down. “It’s only leisurely if you are tracking time on a calendar,” he whispered. “The world is much, much older than we are, and the Gods older than that. The signs from the Allfather are meant to mirror an eclipse. First is the Black Moon. Second is a plague that will bring a long dark. The third is a war that will burn a circle around the oldest kingdoms of man. When our monuments are reduced to rubble, the Gods will ascend from the Black Moon and begin their final battle. Hallandrette is the watcher of that gate—the Allfather’s favourite daughter. Our city’s guardian.”
“Is that why you love Elendhaven’s long nights, Herr Leickenbloom?” Eleanor ventured softly. “Because of this myth that foretells such savage daylight?”
Florian shook his head and laughed. “Of course not. I’m a rational man. I believe what I see.” He gestured towards the window. “And you can see clearly that the harbour is a volcanic crater; it was formed by geological forces, not mad sorcerers. But magic and war did poison this land, once. The allure of the story is obvious when you’ve lived here long enough. You feel it in every stone. In the way that the horizon bends over the ocean and disappears. In a certain sense, Elendhaven truly is the end of the world. After all, it dwells at the edge of the map.”
A moment of reverent silence trailed Florian’s speech. In the booth behind them, two men discussed the market price of spider silk. On the other side of the parlour, the coughing man choked up his soup. The wind rattled the windows and sleet pelted against the slimy glass like a musket ball shattering bone.
Charpentier broke the silence, clapping a well-groomed hand on the table. “Brilliant!” he said as the glasses rattled. “Glum, but brilliant! How exciting, to live in a land of such sensational myths!”
Florian stared at Charpentier with an expression that could cut diamond.
“In the land where my mother was born”—Eleanor tapped the ash from her smoke into Ansley’s bowl—“they beli
eve that time is like a wheel, suspended from seven celestial chains. It’s, er…” She let out a tired laugh and pretended to be abashed that all eyes were once again on her. “It’s … complicated. I don’t understand it all myself, but my mother told me that time is like a circle that we walk again and again. Everything that has happened has already happened, and will happen again.”
“More exquisite words,” bubbled Charpentier. He was punch-drunk, slumped in his seat so that his shoulder and Eleanor’s met where the leather dipped. He picked up the end of her braid and began twirling it between his fingers. He giggled to himself, enchanted with how the hairs flopped and split as he spun it. She didn’t say anything, but she did snatch it back when he tugged a bit too hard.
Ansley was enchanted not with her words, but with the slope of her neck. “Continue, my dear.”
She set her cigar against the edge of the ash bowl and made a loop with her hands. Smoke spilt up around her and split where her thumbs joined. The lamplight made the smoke orange and her skin a sanguine gold. “We move through cycles that grow shorter with each rotation,” she said, a melodic cadence to her words. “First is creation; then we prosper; then we preserve. Then, decline. Finally, decay. The last cycle is a corrupted world, so far from the light. When this cycle collapses, the world folds in on itself. And then, we begin again.”
“‘A corrupted world’?” Ansley gave a snort and polished off his ale. “Like this one, in which Ambassadors are carved up by some pervert even as they stare down the angel of death?”
“Oh, of course we are living in the last cycle.” Eleanor set her hands down. Retrieved her cigar. “Of that my mother’s people have no doubt.”
“In that case,” Florian said, eyes fixed on the flame at the center of the table, “there’s nothing to fear from the end of the world. Annihilation is a fire that cleanses what it burns. For a corrupted world, apocalypse is the only hope for redemption.”
The Monster of Elendhaven Page 8