Johann studied his master’s cherubic profile. Don’t you feel it, sometimes? As if the world wants to consume itself. Florian’s own eyes were consumed by the flame’s light. It flickered beneath his gaze and flashed blue.
“That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose,” Eleanor replied, trailing smoke through the air as she leant forward.
“But do you believe it, Lady Eleanor?” Florian asked very carefully.
Eleanor’s response was calculated in its tactlessness. She dashed her cigar out on the tablecloth and said, “Goodness me, of course not!”
* * *
“How asinine!” said Florian when he and Johann were alone. The streets were dark and deep, all the mud turned up by the melting snow. Florian stumbled as he walked, unsteady from too much drink and drug. He slipped on a patch of black ice and Johann caught him by the elbow, tucked him under his arm. Florian balked at the contact but did not struggle. There was no one to see them stroll so close. They were taking a route home through the abandoned textile district. Florian despised the shorter path through the city squares packed with the working-class lushes out in full force, and the carriages they could have hailed were occupied by the one thing he hated more: the monied drunks.
The storm had passed. Above them, the moon scattered diffuse light through the crumbling clouds. It made a tattered canvas of the burnt-out factories that lined the streets. As they passed beneath the skeleton of the one Florian had taken Johann to the day they met, where they had first tested his “skills,” Johann wondered if it was the textile mill that Florian’s family had once owned, the one where Daddy Leickenbloom had contracted the plague by playing pretend that he was generous.
“She knows,” Johann said. “That you’re a sorcerer, I mean.”
“Oh yes, yes.” Florian waved the words off. “That’s a problem for tomorrow. Right now, I’m drunk.”
“Aren’t you worried she’s going to break our door down in the middle of night?”
“No. I’m not some common hedge witch. Mage Hunters like to have probable cause before they go storming into an important man’s home with their pistols drawn. She’ll go to the archives first, look up whatever it is she wants to know about my family and the plague. Of course, she won’t find anything, which will stall the investigation. Anyway—” Florian hooked his hand around Johann’s elbow. “Did you see the way Ansley and Gilbert were enthralled by that woman’s fairy tale? Are their lives so stale that they slobber at the bit for stories of doom and destruction?”
Johann smiled at Florian’s drunken lack of inhibition. Sober, he would not be caught dead gossiping. “Did you notice how the ponce asked six whole times about the state of the Ambassador’s body?”
“Absurd.”
“I almost told him. Think he would have been so curious if he knew the man shit liquid when the lights went out?”
Florian snickered and leant his cheek against Johann’s rib cage for a moment. Johann thought he was snuggling for warmth, but it turned out that he was just blowing his nose. He pulled free of the half embrace and went staggering into the street, spinning around with his arms out.
“What a thing it is, to see men hunger for the end times!”
“Heh. Little did they know that they were sitting right beside their imagined apocalypse. Snug with its harbinger, letting him suck down their shisha and paying for his drinks.”
Florian reeled to a stop and his amusement turned to disgust. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? Unwise to dream of death in a world where someone has the power to make those dreams come true.”
There he was: pale and small in the moonlight, smaller even in his fur-lined coat—precisely tailored, tucked at the waist, and bulky beneath the elbows where his mittens pushed against the cuffs. A pinprick of light in a dark winter sky, the nexus around which Elendhaven’s universe revolved. How could this friable child hold the future in his horrible hands?
“Hmm.” Johann snaked his hands out of his pockets and sauntered up to him. “Right now, I bet you could make my dreams come true, too.”
Florian sighed. “Has that line netted you success in the past?”
“Nah,” said Johann. “But this usually works.”
He pushed Florian down with a sharp palm to the breastbone. Florian’s shoes were impractical: cloth showpieces with ribbons on the ankles and wooden heels. They skidded through the mud so smoothly that he made almost no noise when he landed, elbows first, in the gutter. His head bounced off the spongy ground and then he lay still, breathing loud and trembling with silent fury. Johann was on him like a blanket a moment after, the tails of his unbuttoned coat flapping loud as bat wings. He grinned down at Florian, who was lost beneath blue shadows.
“Get off of me,” Florian said quietly.
“I’m always the one getting my hands dirty, buttercup,” Johann purred, drawing a lock of Florian’s wheat-hair up between thumb and forefinger. It fell away streaked with mud. “But I think we both belong down in the gutter, don’t you?”
Florian watched his hair fall. It hit his cheek and smeared the rouged skin. Johann popped open the first three buttons of Florian’s coat and smoothed a hand over the silk shirt underneath. Ah, there it was: a hummingbird heartbeat.
“Don’t,” said Florian into Johann’s mouth. “Don’t,” said the way his arms flew up to bat against Johann’s chest. Johann laughed into the kiss, imagined himself and Florian sinking beneath the mud so that it filled their mouths and their eyes. Such a thing would not kill Johann, but it might be nice to stay that way for a while—until the spring came to melt the top layer of frost-glaze and flowers grew from Florian’s rib cage. A wedding, of sorts.
Florian bit down on Johann’s lips. Not hard enough to draw blood, adorable. Johann drew back to mock him, but he found that when he did he was not moving of his own accord. He flew back, propelled by Florian’s magic in his marrow. Florian was furious in the mud. Piping mad, practically steaming from the ears. In fact, the ground was steaming around him. In a circle tens of feet wide, the frost had melted and the grass was catching green flame at the tips.
“Do you like it when I do this? Is that it?” Florian demanded. Johann could not nod, or shake his head. He was not sure which would emerge if he had control of his body. He had not been puppeteered gently; his spine was over-cocked and his arms pulled back at an impossible angle. The pain was exquisite.
Florian stumbled to his feet and tried to wipe the mud off his coat but succeeded only in dirtying his goat-wool mittens. “Look what you’ve done. My outfit is ruined.”
“Well,” Johann choked out. “At least it’s not one … of your better ones.…”
Florian was struck silent by that comment. Johann could have sworn that he almost smiled. At the very least, he let Johann’s limbs go free.
“You’re impossible. Why should I expect that you would ever learn a single lesson?” He sighed, then flicked his wrist to force Johann to scoop him up bridal-style. Florian released his magical hold and flourished his hands, gesturing with drunken certainty in the direction of the Leickenbloom mansion.
“Now, manservant, you may take me home.”
“It is a credit to me as a ‘bodyguard’ that I don’t drop you right back in the mud, Boss.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Sweetheart.”
“Or that.”
Is this it? Johann wondered. The longer fall I was looking for? To know that I was summoned up from the dark ether to do a monster’s deeds for Hallandrette’s truest son?
And when our work is done, I will carry him to the bottom of the sea, where we both belong. Deep beneath the silt our bones will turn to salt.
* * *
There was a memory that Florian did not dredge up often. He pushed it down, down, down, as far as it would go. It came back sometimes in pieces of jagged, visceral sensation. The sting of the sea breeze against his cheeks. The sound of a body consumed by the sea. The coarseness of Flora’s winter coat under his ba
re hands.
Flora said, “But what if you threw someone in?”
Flora said, “But what if they weren’t dead yet? They’d come back all mutated and strange.”
Flora said, “Florian, don’t you want to know?”
She was joking; she really was. The boy at the docks, he didn’t know what to think about a tiny girl with sun-coloured hair and a fur coat asking to see his paring knife and then holding it to his neck. He was bigger than her, dark hair and dark eyes. No mother or father, just a knife, and a couple of coins in his pocket. She was so bold it scared him to shaking.
She wasn’t laughing when he slipped and hit his head on a rock. His blood was black under the moonlight. Florian thought he might have still been breathing when they hauled him off the dock.
But Flora said, “Now that it’s done, we might as well find out.”
— VIII —
HALLANDRETTE’S SON
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, wolfi
sh 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?”
The Monster of Elendhaven Page 9