Ink in the Blood

by Kim Smejkal

  When it was done—​an hour or ten days later—​she checked the time again, put her face in her hands, shaking, and severed the ties, giving it to him fully. “It’s finished.”

  She didn’t have the courage to watch his reaction, but she heard his intake of breath. Then a bark of laughter. “What the hell?” More laughter. Not the particularly good kind. “I expected a feather or a flame, not my own face!”

  Covering most of his calf, stretching from ankle to the back of the knee, the plague doctor mask tattoo stared with dark, beady-eyed intensity. The lines lay perfectly crisp except where necessary shadows smoothed them out. Sinister and ethereal, it was easily the most beautiful tattoo she’d ever done, Celia thought.

  “It’s not your face, Griffin.”

  He laughed again. “For someone who thinks my ego is gigantic, you just fed it.”

  “Stop.” She looked at him, contorted in a sitting position as he examined the mask, and didn’t speak again until his eyes met hers. “It’s important to you, but it’s not you.”

  He dropped his gaze back to his leg. Just as before, when she’d traced his constellation without touching it, his fingers danced over the image. There was no blood, but his skin was a vicious, angry red from all her pokes and jabs, raw enough that it didn’t look suspicious. His gaze moved from his discarded mask to Celia’s face, the stone walls of the buildings around them, and back to his calf. He’d interpret the art however he wanted—​if he thought it was a little too on point, so be it—​but Celia had tried to give him something special. Freedom from some of his lies. A reminder that the plague doctor was a public image, not the sum of him.

  The last thing she remembered him saying was a growled, “And you call me infuriating.”

  But also, maybe a bit later—​or did she imagine it?—​a whispered “It’s beautiful . . .” which sounded a lot like Thank you.

  Chapter 23

  The land of Badidea spirited Celia away for another two full days and nights. Anya and Kitty Kay called it “inking a mountain of orders,” the rest of the Mob called it fever, but Celia knew. Her memories had melted into a kaleidoscope, but she remembered entering Badidea with the plague doctor, then dallying there with Griffin, even if she remembered little after.

  Kitty Kay wouldn’t allow Celia to be ill any longer. She came into their wagon just before sunrise and sat at Celia’s feet, wringing her hands and whispering a lecture. The devil had performed each night, but Kitty Kay spoke of mania and mistakes. “Get it fully together by tonight’s show, Celia. We need to get everything under control again.” For the first time, Kitty Kay sounded more panicked than thrilled. The crowds had ballooned, fights had broken out when they’d had to limit entrance, and every inn and hostel in Malidora was booked to capacity. “We’re walking a precarious tightrope between perfection and chaos.”

  With Kitty Kay so invested, their plans to fight back against Diavala had come together and hardened. Ironically, part of their goal now aligned with Diavala’s: make sure everyone was paying attention.

  After the run ended in Malidora, the Mob would continue on toward Kinallen as Diavala wanted, amassing fervent followers along the way. The planned route included a strategic swing through Wisteria Township so they could learn how Halcyon Ronnea had survived the Touch.

  Then, when the whole of Illinia was watching them, listening hard to what they had to say, and they could protect Vincent from Diavala’s wrath, they would expose the lie of the ink.

  The seed of the idea had been born after their very first show. The manic crowd, the confused blur between fantasy and reality, the smashed glass. How the people had turned against the angel and had wanted, had needed, to free the manipulated devil trapped in the bell jar.

  For their grand finale, they would flip what the crowd saw again, with one significant alteration: instead of hiding how they performed their act, Celia and Anya would let the world see it.

  That would become the new canon—​a trickster who cons you into thinking she’s angelic and pure; a lonely, trapped fool robbed of free will; and all that manipulation because of tattooed orders. The ink was not divine.

  Tattoos would be the star of that show.

  They didn’t expect to live long enough to see the fruit, but if the roots were deep and strong enough, if the people truly equated the Rabble Mob with truth and illumination, they hoped the message of corruption and control would spread from one stage all the way to the consciousness of a nation.

  Celia would have been the first to deny it, but it actually felt possible.

  Lecture completed, Kitty Kay swept out of the wagon that morning, muttering under her breath and a bit more stressed out than Celia found reassuring. A little predawn light shone, the borderline between nighttime Kitty Kay and daytime Kitty Kay. Still in a Badidea-tinged world of unclear thinking, Celia tiptoed around sleeping bodies and roused Anya. With a finger to her lips and a shhhh, Celia whispered, “Let’s watch the phoenix combust.”

  But when they emerged, Anya wiping her eyes and yawning, Kitty Kay had already vanished. Dumbly, Celia stared at the fog lying low over the Rover field, wondering where it hid its secrets.

  “She lives!” Vincent called, emerging from the shadows, dressed and made up as the Palidon, though their show was hours away. “I’m glad to see you fully lucid again. I’ve been waiting to commend you both on your work.”

  Not Vincent.

  Diavala linked her arms under theirs without question, taking one on each side. Anya’s sleepiness had vanished, her eyes as wide as moons. Her gaze raked over Celia, head to foot, as if assessing her fitness for the impending conversation and how much she should allow Celia to say. With tight lips and frown, she settled on, Let me do all the talking.

  Celia tried to match her strides to Vincent’s and Anya’s long-legged ones, loping beside them with ridiculously huge steps as they sauntered.

  “Impressive work with the commands, Inklings. Every tattoo fulfills the order. Yet none of these people have taken the order to heart.”

  “They took it to heart—​only their own, not yours,” Anya answered.

  Diavala showed no reaction. “Putting the Rabble Mob aside for a moment, did it ever occur to you that people accept my ink because they need to?”

  “They accept it because they don’t know anything else,” Anya said. “And because they’re scared.”

  “Isn’t damnation something to fear?” It seemed that Diavala wanted to speak philosophy that morning.

  Celia eyed her and Anya warily as they walked, feeling that this particular conversation would go as well as rams fighting during rutting season.

  “Imagine,” Diavala said. “Someone has a choice to make—​flee the temple or don’t, ink the orders or don’t, walk with me or don’t—​and they know, with absolute certainty, that their choice hides a right path and a wrong one. One leads to heaven and the other to the pits of hell. If something like a little picture nudged them in the right direction, how can you say that’s not a blessing?”

  Anya clenched her teeth. “If it worked like that, it would be a blessing, yes. But it doesn’t. The picture leading them is random, not a nudge in any right direction. It’s a whim of yours, not a path toward heaven or hell. It’s meaningless. It’s manipulative. You take away their choice, their free will.”

  “Human stupidity is infinite. Why is choice lauded as something so wonderful? People want to be guided: it’s reassuring and calming, it settles the chaos inside. That’s why it’s never mattered how people respond to the ink, as long as they do.”

  Settles the chaos inside . . . Diavala held her fist between two large black buttons on Vincent’s Palidon costume, animating her words with a gesture, and Celia had to admit she heard something appealing there.

  But Anya was laughing. Hard. “You’re saying your deception is noble?”

  “It’s a kindness, yes. My ink puts tortured minds at ease.”

  “You’ll never convince us that faith is bette
r than choice.”

  “Oh, don’t say never, Anya. It’s such a final, absolute stance, and only the biggest fools deal in black and white.” Diavala clicked her tongue; then her gaze caught something over her shoulder.

  Her gaze went to Celia. “You should stop toying with that plague doctor of yours. Vincent’s been getting such an aggravating earful.” Across the field, the plague doctor inclined his head in a long-distance greeting as he sauntered toward Seer Ostra’s wagon for his breakfast. “You’ve stirred up quite a tempest inside him, something I find regrettably relatable.”

  “I’m not about to chat romance with you,” Celia said. The plague doctor saw only Celia, Anya, and Vincent in that field, but as the seconds ticked on, something slowed his strides. He watched them more closely, his head tilting as he puzzled it out.

  Diavala sighed and dropped her head in defeat, a gesture human enough to startle Celia and Anya both. “It was a confession of the heart, Inklings. A part of me wanted this to go a different way. This dance with you began as a charming comedy, but with the black staining Griffin Kay’s calf, it’s leaped into the pits of tragedy.”

  Sensing that something bad was coming a moment before Celia did, Anya dropped Vincent’s arm and shoved her way to Celia’s side, clutching her free arm with both hands.

  Diavala leaned in closer, the gleam of Vincent’s pale eyes lighting her next words on fire. “I truly, truly can’t suffer my ink being so bastardized.”

  Time halted. Anya’s grip got tighter. “Bastardized?” she said. “The card clearly had Griffin Kay’s name on it; he was due a Divine tattoo. All we did was fill in the blanks.”

  But Anya’s argument didn’t matter.

  They’d gambled and they’d lost.

  “It’s gone!” Vincent stepped back, his mouth slightly open, eyes wide as he looked between Anya and Celia. And a smile, not Diavala’s menacing one, but Vincent’s pure one, began to twitch at the corners of his lips. Celia’s lips started to follow them, lured by the sheer joy of a burden lifted. “My bones are quiet again!”

  At the very climax of his smile, it crashed.

  He crashed.

  To his knees, hands covering his face, a howling scream cutting through the air between them.

  Anya dropped too, struggling to pry his hands away from his face. “Oh no, no, no . . .”

  It was Anya’s desperate whispers that made it real, her choking sobs. Celia took a reflexive step back, shaking her head. This isn’t happening. The plague doctor ran at full speed toward them, his raven cloak flapping behind him as if he was trying to take flight. His shouts sounded like harsh caws, and Celia could make no sense of them.

  “Celia!” Anya’s hands cupped the sides of Vincent’s face as he tried to wrench free, smearing his black teardrop. His body was tight, ready to run. His screams mixed with sobs.

  And then, another scream. High-pitched. Unfamiliar.

  Daytime Kitty Kay, the unspeaking reaper, let out an ear-piercing shriek of alarm, a hundred distorted sounds following on the heels of it. For Kitty Kay to lurch out of character so hard and so fast pulled the Mob out of their wagons as if the world burned.

  Marco and the plague doctor ripped Anya away from Vincent when she wouldn’t let him go.

  Between shredding his voice box with unearthly screams, Vincent moaned as if his soul were on fire and mumbled nonsense exclamations. No one could calm him. Head in his hands, ripping at his pale hair, he paced and rocked and cried. By degrees, his Palidon costume broke with him. White and black fabric hung in tatters; his makeup bled. Vincent’s symphony played the familiar notes of the Touch.

  Collective shock and grief pinned most people in place. Balancing out the stillness, Kitty Kay, moaning, pacing back and forth, Remy beside her. Between Kitty Kay’s hunchbacked form and Remy’s full-body shivers, it wasn’t clear who held up whom. Remy glanced up, tears making her face shine, and met Celia’s eyes. A silent plea of Help him! over Kitty Kay’s guttural noise.

  I’m sorry. I can’t. Not with this.

  “There’s so much pain, so much,” Vincent moaned and sobbed. “I’d like the humming back, please? Lilies and snowdrops. No, no, no . . .”

  The cluster of people around him grew. Eyes widened. As they tried to string his nonsense together, they realized that this was more than a little drunkenness, more than being upset.

  They bore witness to a fissure. A stretching apart.

  And with no mistico around to silence it, his torture went on for hours.

  Vincent met no one’s eyes and responded to no questions, too lost in the torment pulling him under. Lilac made him a tea that might have steadied his nerves, if this had anything to do with nerves, but he flung it to the ground with an angry shout. Marco tried to get some warmed rum into him; Vincent only tightened his lips and turned away. His skin gleamed with sweat, his eyes shone with fever, his hands trembled, and his knuckles threatened to break through his pale skin.

  The plague doctor pulled Vincent’s hands from the roots of his hair, wrapped his arms around his shoulders, and rocked with him in the grass. “Shhh . . . Vincent.”

  Celia met Anya’s gaze, her eyes red-rimmed and swollen, and said a hundred things without words. What have we done? screamed the loudest. Repeated, repeated. What have we done? Every one of Kitty Kay’s moans echoed it. What have we done?

  “They killed me,” Vincent whimpered. “They pushed me under the water and held me there. I tried to help—​they killed me.”

  “Who did?” the plague doctor asked.

  “He liked me at first. But I tried to escape him.” He laughed: a poisonous, lecherous sound. “He didn’t like me then. Only he could push you out. And he pushed me, hard and fast. A thousand years later, and he still pushes me out.”

  “Who does?” the plague doctor asked again, more urgently.

  One of the diavoli, Celia thought. This was the bargain with the devil Diavala told me about. She took a long swig from her flask.

  For the first time in hours, Vincent looked up. At Celia. “The true prison is here,” he whispered. “But at least he left me my toy to play with, in a way. And I’ll play with the blackness forever . . .”

  Just as Diavala had used Vincent’s memories to become a convincing copy of him, some of Diavala’s memories had strayed to Vincent. The rambling story he told was so similar to Celia’s: loneliness, trying to escape, bound by a powerlessness so absolute it was a looming, inescapable shadow.

  Diavala had reproduced her origin story over and over again through inklings. A thousand years ago, this had started.

  “You want to go back?” Celia’s voice cracked. It sounded as though Diavala wanted to find her way back to the afterlife but couldn’t get there.

  Vincent grabbed his head again, bending over and moaning. “Stop it. Stop talking! My bones hummed, my skeleton sang, but everything’s so quiet now.” Everyone was soaked from the rain, and Vincent shivered as if he’d never know warmth again.

  He screamed about ink. About drowning. About nine-tailed whips.

  He fought anyone who tried to comfort him.

  When he began viciously scraping at his skin, ripping and tearing and drawing blood, the plague doctor tied his hands together. He cradled Vincent’s head in his lap even as Vincent snapped at the plague doctor’s fingers with his teeth.

  “She actually can’t do this very often.” Anya’s words trembled as she fought to make sense of everything. “She wouldn’t want her whole flock to go mad.”

  For the first time in her life Celia loathed Anya’s practicality. “Well, won’t that comfort Vincent?” she screamed.

  Anya stepped back, glared, then grabbed at Celia’s drink. “This isn’t helping. It never helps, Cece!”

  A sob pushed out of Celia’s throat, burning in its intensity, as Anya flung the flask. It hit the outside wall of the wagon and flopped into the mud.

  They stared at it. And listened. The screams carried better in a field than in a temple, with no st
ones to swallow their sound.

  The plague doctor pulled Celia aside. He grabbed her shoulders, pressed his beak down between them, and growled at her. “This is the storm, Celia Sand, and did your cursed silence help?”

  Everything in Celia’s body shriveled. “It is. And it’s my fault.” She staggered away from him and thought of Lupita. How smart she’d been to get rid of her sight, how lovely it must be to live at the bottom of a bottle. Lupita knew exactly how to blur the jagged edges of reality so they didn’t cut.

  Celia put her face in her hands and mourned her soft-spoken Palidon.

  At the temple, Celia had put her initials on some tattoos, marking them as hers instead of hers, and it had been like waving a flag under Diavala’s nose. Diavala had noticed her, but Vincent was the first to truly suffer for it, and now Celia didn’t even know where Diavala was.

  Who Diavala was.

  Interlude

  The sign on the Rover gates that night reads CLOSED.

  The crowd waiting outside doesn’t appreciate that. Not after investing so much time and effort for this spectacle they’d been promised.

  When it looks as if a riot will knock the gates down, a new sign is added: CLOSED DUE TO TRAGEDY.

  Still not good enough.

  Finally, one of the fire-masters adds a disclaimer: WARNING: THE DEVIL HAS ESCAPED THE BELL JAR.

  The people of Malidora now understand.

  From the now-infamous Rabble Mob of Minos, that message makes sense.

  The people don’t disperse quietly to nurse their disappointment.

  They hear the screams and moans rising from behind the gates, and they flee.

  Chapter 24

  The chloroform they’d stolen from the apothecary in Malidora numbed Vincent long enough for Lilac to brew a strong tonic of jipep seeds and pour it down his throat. An evil weed that grew in barbed clumps, it induced a barren, voidlike sleep. It was the preferred poison for fairy-tale villains, and Celia had never heard of anyone vile enough in real life to use or abuse it. Not even Profeta.