"Your sweetheart, boy," he continued. "What is her name?"
"A-Amelthyra," stammered Jakelby. "She's a florist's girl."
"Across the street?" asked the man.
Jakelby nodded, eyes glazing with fear.
"I wager I know her. Is she of green eyes, and a gossamer pale complexion?"
Jakelby nodded mutely.
"How darling," said the gentleman, "I fancy I will visit with her this afternoon. I may have a proposition for her father."
He released my son. A silent moment passed as Jakelby palmed the blood from his chin, looked at the red upon his fingers, then back at the gentleman with a curious mixture of fear and rage. The man looked from Jakelby to me, then began laughing as though he'd just played the most marvelous practical joke in all of Londinium.
"You see," he said to me genially, "I told you I could read the truth in a boy's heart. Perhaps even in a man's?"
I didn't shy. I knew what this was. I had seen it many times before, the cat toying with his meal.
"I'm sure your Lordship can read whatever he so deems," I said, bobbing my head, handing the razor to my aggrieved son, who dashed off to the nearest wall-strop blinking back furious tears.
The man continued laughing as I laid a hot towel on his throat, and brushed the lather across his taut jowls. As I reclined the chair backwards, he burbled throaty chuckles.
* * *
I have cropped the necks of men before such as him. I have decorticated tyrants and scaled the cheeks of rapists. I know the language of the hair, the weft and web of its growth, and I know what it wants.
The man's hair demanded suffering. It grew in even spreads, dappled with flecks of grey despite his luxurious black scalp, and told of the will to possession, the drive that made the Antafrican peoples a slave race, that made the colonials drive their indigenous forbears into the muck, that bent the Abindians double under the yoke of our weighty Empire.
I knew men like him; I had served them throughout my life, learning when to bow and kneel, how to avoid becoming the one they took their pleasure in. I had learned so well they never fully knew what I was. They could not see me for my camouflage, and in so doing let me so close that I could have slit open all of their throats, had I so wished it.
* * *
A sound arose from behind, and I knew the hair-seeds of darkness had already taken hold in my son.
Jakelby charged, the razor blade held before him. Of course he did. It was the touch of that hair that turned a key within. Some quieten at the fear, as I have always done. Some rebel, unwilling to bow their heads, and run to their deaths. They become the examples that quiet the rest.
The gentleman saw him advancing in the mirror, but made no move to escape or defend himself. I watched it in the silver glass too, as though it were a thing dreamed of. Yet it was real.
Jakelby's razor slapped into the side of the gentleman's neck, who only gave a sigh, as though at a love-pat. No mark was left, no sign of blood, no injury at all.
My son stared wildly, struck again, but still the blade did not cut.
The gentleman gave me a knowing glance in the mirror, desquamated the rapier from its berth in his cane noiselessly, then thrust it over his shoulder without once looking back.
The shaft took Jakelby through the mouth, punched up and out of his brain pan. Blood bubbled up over his young white teeth, but his eyes were already dead. His weight sagged, but the man held the rapier steady against his shoulder, and my son's face slid down the blade until his bloody mouth snagged against the chair's leather back.
"Children these days," said the gentleman conversationally, "no tolerance for sport at all, have they?"
I tried to show my fear. I tried to let him feel my panic at such impossible things, but as ever, my pride shone through. Pride was always my weakness. I merely bowed, and nodded my head, and as he looked at me with curious eyes, I knew then that he knew.
He knew I saw his hair. He knew that I recognized him. Yet he stayed. Perhaps he was curious. They often are.
"Tonsor," he said, his voice humming with excitement. "Lay your blade against my throat."
Trembling, I did so.
"Now, shave, man. As close as you can."
I laid my blade against his neck, and began. My hand shook but I forced it still. My son's blood licked down the gentleman's rapier, down his poised arm, into a puddle in his lap, and still I shaved his neck.
"I knew it was you," said the gentleman, jutting out his jaw to provide me a better angle. "When I heard them speak your name at the opera, and speak of your blades, I knew it had to be you at last."
I didn't say anything. There was nothing I could say, now.
"Come now, don't be so bitter," he reasoned cheerfully. "If you could, we both know you would slice my brains out, just as your dead son attempted. Why this pretense?"
"No pretense, lord," I mumbled. "I only seek to serve. My son was impudent, I know it, though I can't say he deserved all you gave him. But it is not mine to judge, lord, no. It is mine to shave, only."
The gentleman guffawed. "You think me to believe your pandering? Was it not you with your Lazarus sword who stood before me at Gallipoli, to beat back my battalion of the Lance? Was it not you who cut out the black pox I laid upon this stinking city with only a sharpened silver spoon stained with iodine? Would you deny that?"
I shook my head, and the hairs on his chin continued to pop, each shedding free of his chin and into the foamy lather. I saw anger stirring in his steely eyes.
"Do you honestly think I don't know my own brother when I see him? Why don't you weep, Carazus, for another slain son? Why don't you sob, for the legion of yours I've slutted away into the black?"
"His Lordship speaks in riddles," I murmured, continuing to shave, hoping his curiosity would hold him until the end. "I know of not what."
"Bah," he spat, "I'll make you remember. I'll gather these hairs, Carazus, and make you swallow them whole. And what then will you do? The black spark will take root within you once more, and from it will grow all kinds of delicious fruit. We will be brothers again, as we once were."
I rubbed his chin with the hot towel, scraped the razor's edge across the cleft of his chin, dipped into the bow of his upper lip.
"Brothers, lord?" I asked, as I dampened the down at the corner of each cheekbone, as I worked the blade around the bone. "I never had a brother. Only sons."
His eyes gleamed with the dancing foils of our conversation. He knew, but still he danced. The cat toying at its meal. They were all the same, all of my fallen brothers. They took joy in the dance.
"Well, you soon shall ride by my side again, brother or no. You will see sights to burn out men's eyes, and learn to love it. The hair speaks, and it will speak to you, I swear."
I worked the blade round the final patch of his cheek, and the last lone flecks of hair were bladed away. They slid down the razor's edge in a slurry of watery foam. Finally, I relaxed.
"It already has," I said.
He frowned, as though disappointed that I had spoiled his sport. "Then you admit you remember? Our glory days over Pompeii, watching those fools scatter to the burn?"
I held the blade before his eyes.
"I remember cutting myself free with Artur's blade, Aggramar, before you broke it on the devil's anvil. I remember searching millennia for the secret to its edge. I know you remember that day too, the day I cut myself from the weft."
He shrugged. "An aberration. Artur's blade is long gone. None know the secret to its edge."
For the first time, I smiled. It was a mirror reflection of his own. He did not know that I had done the impossible, again.
"I found it, Aggramar. Here in Londinium, I found it."
Aggramar eyed the razor before him, speckled with his own beard stubble, and shrugged. "It is but a blade. You can no more cut my skin than I can yours. Only the hairs may be cut."
I shook my head. "That is where your misunderstanding lies, and always did. I h
ave not cut the hairs from you, as I did not cut them from myself all those years ago. Rather I have cut you off from the hairs."
He scoffed. The movement jogged my son Jakelby on his rapier end, and in one rasping motion that sent a welter of blood over his shoulder, he yanked the bloody blade out. My son's head rolled back, his body thumped down to the floor. "There is no difference in the two."
I ran a finger down the flat of the razor, collecting the reduced lather and its baste of small dark stubble. Each of them sighed as they touched my skin, trembling like wingless flies. I held them out for him to see as each slowly fell silent, diminished, and faded away.
He stared at them with the first shades of terror.
"There is a difference," I said, and I flicked the hairs from me with a shake of my wrist. They flew in a clump, landed wetly on the floor, where they lay still and inert.
Aggramar stared after them. "They do not blossom?" he asked. "They do not take root?"
"I have cut them and you from their source," I said, "at your own word, Aggramar. You thought to come here to spread your seed. Rather, you have been gelded."
He stared at my face in the mirror in utter shock.
"It is impossible! Artur's blade is gone."
I turned the straight razor before him so it flashed in a shaft of light. "I have a thousand like them, Aggramar. I can grind a thousand more."
"No!"
"In moments you will feel the darkness ebbing from you. You will remember none of this. You will not know me as your brother. You will awaken in this chair, and think yourself a man stricken with the amnese. When I tell you I am your father, you will believe me."
He spun in the chair, strove to drive the rapier through my middle, but the blade slipped off, as Jakelby's blade had slipped from his neck.
"We are yet brothers," I said, smiling on him. "You cannot harm me, as I cannot harm you."
His eyes were clouding already. I could feel the bile leaving him, beginning to fade away. He looked about himself frantically as the last thousand years of memory left him. "I don't understand. What is happening?"
"You are forgetting," I soothed. "You have been cut from the darkness that turned you."
"I feel so alone," he mumbled, seeming to wilt in upon himself. The rapier fell from his slack hand.
"Shh," I soothed. "All will be well."
He closed his eyes. I sighed, content. Another of my brothers had been set free.
* * *
The man woke in the tonsory, and did not know how he had come to be there.
"I-" he started to say, but it struck him he had no name. He looked in the mirror facing him, and saw a smooth-faced young gentleman looking back, dressed in an expensive grey suit, a copper cane at his waist, a white kerchief set perfectly in his breast pocket.
"Sleeping again, son?" asked an older man in the mirror. "Have you yet stropped the razors?"
4. THE MUD GIRL
The day Maokai met the mud girl he was drunk and ready to die.
He stood at the edge of his spa's mudcrete roof and wondered if the jump would kill him. Before him spread the drought-blasted courtyard of his father's dream, now barren and cracked. He toed the roof's sun-burnt clay, falling apart just like everything else.
"You were right, Shun Foy," he mumbled, taking the last step to the edge. "I am a fool." A dry wind whispered around him, carrying the peat-scent of the valley's arid paddies up through the empty village.
He looked out at the distant city, leering like a mouth full of dirty teeth beyond the hump-backed karst mountains, and spat into the dust. Everything had changed since the Party came for his father. Now the city's silver pipes crawled over the valley's paddies like strangling wisteria vines, flowered here and there with egg-shaped steel water-tanks, ring-fenced by the Party's warning signs.
"Progress," the blue-suited Party men had said, as they coshed his father over the head and bundled him into their loudspeaker van. One of them had winked. "You can't fight progress, son."
Now all the water was gone, and nothing he'd done had made a difference. He'd spent the last of their ancestral money on wells, but they each proved dry as stone. For a time he'd hauled barrels daily from the Yellow river, but the tang of contaminants was growing worse, and already some of the older villagers were coughing up blood.
Without water, the village was dead. He looked back to the courtyard. None of it mattered now, anyway. A short fall, a good solid thunk to the head, and all his troubles would be over.
"I'm sorry, father," he whispered. He closed his eyes and dived, headfirst, to the courtyard.
* * *
Death was wet, and felt like a hangover.
Decorative carp larked through the eternal darkness around him. He reached out, tried to grab one by a hank of fin, but it wriggled away, and with it the darkness peeled back and light rushed in.
He shaded his eyes and saw the crumbly buildings of his spa arrayed around him. He was lying on his back in the courtyard in a puddle of wet mud.
Not dead, then.
He groaned, rubbed his eyes, and mud smeared on his face.
"That was pathetic," came a voice.
Maokai turned his aching head. There was a pretty girl standing on his rooftop, staring at him like an angry school mistress. Her skin was shock-pale and her eyes were a blazing green, bright as fresh lychees.
"Who are you?" he mumbled.
"I am the fool," she said, her voice cold as ground-water, "who walked since the Yellow River to catch you in a fist of mud. But you are a drunk and a coward, Maokai, not worth the effort. Your father would be sick if he saw what you've become."
Maokai felt a flicker of anger rise. Who was she to lecture him, talking nonsense about fists and mud? He pushed himself to his knees, slicking mud off his face.
"Get off my land," he spat. "I'll do what I want. If I want to die, I will."
The girl spat. "So die. But why die by your own hand, when you could rip them down in the process? This shrine could be a turning point, Maokai. Everything can change, if you'll only stand. I'll give you the water, if you'll dig a final time."
He studied her, tried to make sense of what she was saying. Shrine? Turning point? It didn't make any sense. She was too pretty to be here, to be talking to him. But still she knew his name. She knew about his father.
Then he understood.
"Shun Foy," he whispered.
"No," she said sharply.
He began to laugh. Now he understood. It was a joke, the biggest joke of them all, to be mocked even in this. He held his arms wide and spun in a leering circle, like a clown, taking in the roofs of the spa, laughing manically, looking for the glint of a video camera, catching these his last foolish moments.
"Are you laughing, Shun Foy?" he shouted. "Does this amuse you? I have become the fool you always said I was, can't even kill myself properly. Is this what you wanted? Here, I'll try again." He started blearily for the stairs to the roof.
The girl appeared before him, blocking the path, her eyes ablaze and her finger stabbing at his face. "Shut your idiot mouth, Maokai. Shun Foy is not here. Your father is not here. There is only us, and the water."
Maokai laughed. "There is no water! You shut your idiot mouth, woman. There is no water."
"Then what is this?" she snapped, and reached out to his chest, brought her hand back heavy with a thick sludge of mud. Drips fell from it to the ground, and he stared at them fall. Mud meant water.
"It's mud," he slurred, wide-eyed.
The girl flung it back at him, splatting across his chest. He staggered backwards.
"I caught you with it," she hissed, "I saved you, but I won't do that again. I don't have the strength, unless you dig up this shrine."
He scraped the mud from his chest, saw it glinting in his hands. There hadn't been mud in the spa for years.
"It's not a shrine, it's a spa," he said weakly.
"It is a shrine to the land," the girl pressed on, "and you have choked it wit
h stone. Dig it up, and you'll have all the water you can use."
"I tried!" he shouted, staring at the mud in his hands, staring up at her through eyes filling with tears. "I dug a hundred times, and there was nothing."
She gazed down at him, the blaze slowly fading from her bright green eyes. "Try one more time, Maokai," she said softly. "Once more."
Then she was gone.
* * *
Some time in the night he climbed to the roof again, to jump. He stood weaving, looking out at the city as it sparkled like a pretty jewel in the shit. He was too dry even to spit.
Down below was the dark patch of mud, drying. It was in the shape of a handprint.
She'd caught him, she'd said, in a fist of mud. He chuckled. Her lychee eyes sang in his drunken mind. The mud girl. Try again, she'd told him. He laughed. He'd dug in hard-baked soil so many times he'd forgotten what mud felt like.
But then there was mud. He could see it, could still feel it like a hard clay shell on his body. That was real.
Standing in the courtyard with the old pick-axe in his hands, dusty with sand, he felt right for the first time in years. If this wasn't it, if this didn't work, he would throw himself off the roof sober, to prove he was not a coward. This was the last time. He lifted the tool over his head, and brought it down with a resounding crack.
* * *
He woke in a swamp. Cold wet mud surrounded him in a jagged circle, spotted with shards of broken concrete. He stared at it, disbelieving, this pond of freshly risen water.
Water in the spa.
He splashed it, scooped it between his hands, tasted it, and it did not disappear. He laughed and whooped, threw it into the air, splashed himself in it, rolled like a pig, luxuriating. His back and arms throbbed from the long night, his head ached, but there was water, and mud, and what else mattered besides that.
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