Chapter Text

REHEARSAL, I

in which the cards are dealt

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THE PLAYERS (in order of appearance)

DANKOVSKY, D.

The POLYHEDRON

An ORDERLY

YAN, E.

The INSPECTOR

A BULL

A HERB BRIDE

An ODONGH

STAMATIN, A.

BURAKH, A.

KARMINSKY, M.

I

In a dream the train rolls itself slow as a poisoned cigarette along the tracks, belching smoke. Its heartbeat goes strong, a hundred horses’ heartbeat, a steam-gallop.

Daniil’s teeth seem eager to rattle in his mouth, to knock each other down. His jaw is clenched so tight, it’s a wonder he hasn’t cracked a molar or two. He’s a young man, coming on thirty; he’s got a few grey hairs and a collection of burst capillaries. He’s head of a laboratory, or has a laboratory in his head. Time will tell.

The train car’s empty, silent as the grave if not for its traincar sounds, its wheezing clanking, its tubercular breath, so thick it turns solid. By a bizarre phenomenon it pushes him to mimicry, and he coughs, a little, checking his own lungs for blood or expectorations, which do not come. He is only sick with the malady of death, which will happen to him, or will not. Time will tell.

On voyages such as these, time is a fickle mistress. Capital to steppe, end of the line, is a long one. He exhausts half of a novel, a good few notebook pages, a cohort of daydreams, which turn into memories, which turn into nothing but the sound of gears at work in his head, until he looks out.

He looks out.

He looks out and the sky paralyzes his reason— the sky, and the huge hole in it, a needle-eye through which an impossible thread passes. A long white scar seems to cut it in two. Minutes go by. Yes, it looks as though a violent tear in a sheet of paper. The tear itself is made of paper. Kilometers go by. Or glass. It reflects light. He can’t get his eyes off it. The town arrives. The town happens to him, soon. His black hands, his gloves, stick to the window. His heart sticks to his mouth, ready to slip out.

The paper-scar points up, like a terrible god’s erection. It must drink a lot of blood. From his seat in his empty train car, he imagines he can hear it. Rustling, creaking. Paper, glass, metal, bones. Something engineered by a beautiful psychopomp, who has seen the other side of death and come back to tell the tale. An immortal man, perhaps…

He smiles:

if he sleeps, he will dream of it.

IV

But he does not sleep, because on day one a plague is carried into town; on day two it blooms on the face of a dead house; on day three it walks on its own legs, goes greedy and takes a whole bite, a whole district.

On day four the outsider is made interim governor and opens a playact hospital in the theatre. Nice set up for a tragedy, this sombre place, with its ubiquitous metteur en scène, its cots and clean linens and orderlies made of beaks and feathers, orange eyes and prophecies. Daniil Dankovsky wishes he could grow these (the eyes, the prophecies) at the back of his head, so as to have a clear vision of where he is going and where he is coming from at the same time.

“Nowhere, sir”, says an orderly-bird as the doctor perches, rigid as a scarecrow, over the shape of a patient huddled on a makeshift bed.

It’s a young woman, covered in rags and bandages from face to hands to feet. She said she didn’t want to contaminate the others. She said she would rather die, keeping her breath close to herself. She has. She will die, in a moment, whether he administers morphine to ease her passing or not.

He registers the aide’s presence a few heartbeats too late.

“Beg your pardon?”

“I said this one’s going nowhere, sir. We can’t move her. Her bones are about to break, and turn to dust.”

Daniil’s throat closes around a mouthful of air, too quick. An hour ago he has seen a man’s skin fall off, like scales; a sinister parody of marble flecks falling off a statue’s naked body. Below there was the blackest of bloods, suggested by the tracery of veins grown fat, tissues bloated and odorous. He’d struggled to breathe then, too.

“Right. We’ll not move her.”

He eyes the clipboard where her name is scrawled, but finds he can’t read it. His assistant isn’t much of a writer, and his cracked glasses let him see all things at a slant.

The beaked omen shakes its mask, left-right-left.

“If I may, sir, offer a word of advice.”

Its voice has changed, and the temperature in the room dropped to a shivering blue. It seems to be wearing a crown of laurels, as long ago had triumphant emperors coming home from their campaigns. It appears taller than its shadow spread out on the wall behind it.

“A word?”

“Of advice.” It bows its head. “Do not bite more than you can chew. A mouthful is a mouthful.”

Doctor Daniil swallows the mouthful, which fits in the whole of his gob and goes down his throat very slowly.

“Which means?”

The beak smiles. Its curve points up, now; it reminds him of a scar, a tear in a blue sheet of papersky.

“One thing at a time.”

III

For the whole duration of the end of the world, Doctor Dankovsky is staying in a house called the Stillwater. He thinks the universe should have been made in the image of the woman who lives there in bare feet and scries the faces of wet clocks to see the future.

They are talking about it, the future, both of them sat side by side on a sofa made from bull-leather. A coffeepot stains the air with its warmth, its smell of better days. Every diluted measure of hope feels as blasphemy in the valley of the shadow of death.

“We’re setting up a hospital”, he says, “in the theatre.”

“How wonderful of Mark to help.”

Mark Immortell first-of-his-name is a colourful man, a bright sticker slapped onto a dour surface by a facetious child. An eyesore in a green coat and falsely bohème haircut. He takes himself very seriously, which is to say not at all, and talks to undulating shadows in white masks. He’s a theatre owner and an intellectual circle all to himself. From a physician’s perspective he seems all too eager to play games of chance with the plague; for the thrill of it and the very thin possibility that he might win and rake the pot.

“I don’t know that he was enchanted by the idea. With me being granted such authority, he had no choice.”

“Perhaps not, but he gave you his permission.”

“He did, yes.”

“That’s rather a lot. I should think the Town will owe him a great debt in a week or so.”

Eva sinks further back into the sofa, halfway absorbed by the suppleness of its leather. Her hands are clasped around her cupful of coffee, as though they are warming it and not the other way around. The scent crawls up to the corner of her eyes, multiplies her beauty by itself.

“He is an enlightened man, you know.” She smiles. “He believes in voices overlapped with static images. He says there is something terribly evil about a moving image without sound.”

“He does seem to despise the art of the motion picture. But you, ah, what do you think?”

She does not look at him.

“I have never seen one.”

What a sad thing to say.

Pity is not good enough for Eva Yan, who like a goddess made of stars has no use for it. So he does not say the words. Instead, dipping his head into the large collar of his coat, he retreats into the city-slick of his persona, a little mocking but not enough that she can’t read through him. It’s only the third day. He doesn’t yet know Eva could read him with her eyes closed, her hands bound and her head smashed in.

“If you’re amenable, I could take you, one day. In the Capital. I’ll show you where I used to hang about and have tea as a student, and then we’ll go and see the movies. If you find them too sad, I’ll convince the rest of the audience to let you play the voices.” The smile he tries on removes a few years off his face. “I would like that.”

She would, too, but he knows a goddess cannot formulate a wish. It goes against her nature, and against the house’s nature.

“You know, it might have been a bright idea.”

She turns her head and peers out the window. To her it only shows another room on the far side of the house. Quieter, then, without moving her lips at all:

“It will never come to pass.”

He pretends he has not heard it. He stashes the idea of a sunny day with Eva Yan in the capital deep down his pocket, where it loses itself between two cigarettes and a snuffbox full of pills.

0

Fatigue has a smell that can be boiled down to a few notes:

old snakeskin, misplaced curiosity, the continuous burning stub of a cigarette with no beginning nor end.

In other words fatigue is a narrow space, four walls, a projector-and-screen, a locked door, a table-desk, two chairs with two men sitting on them. One is blonde and wears glasses, prominent ears, long nose, weak chin. The other, well. Pay him no thought. He’s a liar. An unreliable narrator who like a clumsy spider trapped himself in his own threads. He badly wants a cigarette.

The fair one whose name is ‘INSPECTOR’ produces a crumpled packet from thin air.

“Cigarette?”

Daniil sniffs the way he’s seen old ladies and foreign peeresses do, nose up and mouth all pinched. It’s easy to imitate a diplomat’s wife, even in some dark interrogation room. He should know: he was one in another life, which is to say a stageplay at university, first year. They’d made him wear a blonde wig. He’d been so high he’d messed up half his lines and improv(is)ed the others, and the Stamatin boys had taken to calling him diva divina, in and out of bed.

He badly wants a cigarette, but not that badly.

“No. I’m afraid your brand wouldn’t be my first choice, nor my last.” Smile for the camera. “I’m a bit of a picky smoker.”

“Suit yourself.”

The inspector-man has an interesting way of taking notes, which is to say he does it the way a husband married for twenty years who’s got a mistress or two makes love to his wife— with slow but dishonest application. The outcome doesn’t matter. His pen might ejaculate a thick arc of black, or not, if Daniil says a thing to excite him, which he won’t. The inspector-man is only susceptible to self-engineered excitement. It’s a new side product of inquisitorial methodologies as applied to lowercase-L law enforcement. Interrogation-masturbation: wherein the interrogator may drag his case as long as he desires if he derives from it any sort of pleasure.

Evidently he does. The man in the glasses smiles a lot. It’s a coldblood hound’s smile, with just a hint of teeth.

“Now, you were telling me about the third day…”

“Which is largely irrelevant at this point in the story. It’s a lot of loose ends I wasn’t able to tie until much later and, well, even now I’ve some trouble making the pieces fit. Yes, day three’s a bit of a dead end. For now.”

“May I remind you that I am the one asking the questions.”

Which is not a question.

Doctor D. Dankovsky rests an ankle upon a knee and leans back in his chair, the wood hard, uncomfortable at his back, pushing into a knot in one muscle he knows the name of as if he had made it himself. He used to want to be an officer-architect. He used to look at his father’s field maps a lot.

“Every question needs an answer.” He shrugs. “You will have them in my own time. I suspect your watch needs winding, anyway.”

The inspector’s mouth pulls on his cigarette. He has a very full, very plush lower lip, designed by a cruel draughtsman for biting. He too leans back and makes a concession.

“In your own time.”

I

It starts like any old joke: there’s a bull, a half-naked woman and a distracted odongh gathered on a square. The woman is dancing and the bare parts of her body are dancing with her. The bull stares far into space, parsing mathematics foreign to the human eye. The odongh is an odongh, therefore he is a herdsman. He keeps an eye on the bull. The other eye goes a-wandering.

Daniil asks them about the microscope. They don’t know that word, so he asks them about the dance and the bull, whose flank is painted with a strange letter.

“Is this a festival?”

The odongh shakes his head slowly. There is something of the bull’s placidity about him, as if he has been leeching off the animal’s nature for a long time.

“Ime beshe. Not a festive occasion, but it is necessary. A ritual.”

“September is the month of blooms”, says the woman, voice undulating to the rhythm of her body. “All the herbs are growing on the steppe. All the twyres, and bi kheleneb, the ashen swish, and the secret eyelashes of Mother Boddho.”

When he next sleeps, which might be at the end of the next twelve days, Daniil Dankovsky will see a pair of enormous eyes open from where the rarest of herbs grows. One of them will be all the way to Shekhen, or the Ear, where steppefolk have made their main settlement. The other might open in the train yard or on the other side of the river Gorkhon; that future place the Kains call Utopia. Both of these eyes will see everything that has ever happened, and judge nothing.

He bows his head at her solemn tone.

“I see your customs, madam, are well worth the study. A pity that I have so little time— have you seen a group of children? They ran off with something of mine…”

He gestures with his free hand, gloved, leather, black, in every direction at once. Since stepping off the train he has been chasing children’s shadows only to find breadcrumbs in doorways and adults unwilling to meddle in the affairs of their progeny. He should be happy for them who are lords in their elders’ domain; he is annoyed, because death is at his heels and he should be running.

“You must look up”, says the woman.

“Up”, says the worm.

“Up”, says Dankovsky, hoping the trail will take him to the scar in the sky. But it is not yet time.

Instead he is taken to a stairway which could have been a prototype for that miracle he has witnessed as the train rolled itself into town; a stairway that branches out and into nothing, that climbs up and into nothing. A colony for ants, for children removed from parental authority, who have elected a chieftain, a king of ants. One thing about children is that if they see something does not exist in the animal realm, they will invent it for themselves.

He was a child, once. He used to invent for himself a lot of hierarchies that bypassed his father’s attempts at authority. He stored these aberrations in a matchbox with a beetle, a pair of spare buttons, a needle and the smallest bone in the human body; he called that science, and everything he has done since is building on those foundations.

He is here to invent a remedy for death. For that he will need a microscope.

VII

Rumour is, Andrey Stamatin once tried to build a dream factory. When they sent an Inquisitor to shut down the place, they found nothing but a network of pipes filled with opium smoke and calculations, leaning on air. The walls were only half-finished angles, the workers so sky-high they couldn’t answer to their names.

The Broken Heart pub is but a grave dug under these foundations, relocated too far east. Its painted double-door opens to the reek of herbs and the steppe, dust and dirt hugging corners, a clock gone silent by the staircase. The thump of music comes from below, taking the walls in a trance. The stairs are narrow, metallic, folded on themselves in such a way that when you get to the bar, you’re already drunk.

Daniil is drunk, alright. Veins blazing with morphine, nostrils full of tobacco, mouth clogged with rot-gut he’d have done better to toss down the drain. His shoes are made of mortar.

“Dead man ahoy!” whistles the barman, who isn’t a real barkeep but an architect, a cardboard captain sailed across countless seas of paper.

The dead man, such as he is, drops his dead weight on a stool. Andrey Stamatin who once built a dream factory grins like the moon and its audience of howling wolves. His white coat opens to his bare chest, to his litter of scars— children of hunger, these, earned at the tip of a knife and nourished at the breast. He used to be all sinew, when they were young. Younger. He could have passed for his twig of a twin.

“Be careful who you call dead”, the doctor says. “I’m still living enough for a drink, aren’t I?”

“Right you are, boss-man.”

Andrey shoots from the hip, which is to say he grabs at the bottleneck nestled in his coat pocket and pops its cork with a flick of the thumb.

“On the house, eh? Can’t charge a dead man unless he’s got an obol, and it’s plain to see you don’t.”

He slides a glass of pungent stuff Daniil’s way. Black twyre, by the strong herbal stink. In a week’s time it’s easy to pick up on new smells— Burakh the savage synaesthete had said a thing about colours, was it at the hospital— he gnashes scents with his teeth, does Burakh, or he puts them in his pockets.

It’s vile on the tongue and, he guesses before the burn happens, viler on the stomach. He can picture himself in two hours’ time hunched over a basin at the top of the Stillwater while Eva regales him with tales from the future. Eva, who doesn’t deserve his lodger spitting his guts out in her house which is not her house. Simon’s house, Farkhad’s house. It’s the seventh day and he’s heard seven versions. Tonguing at the taste between his teeth, he tries not to look at his friend.

“It’s unhygienic, anyway. Putting coins in the mouths of the dead.”

Andrey snorts. He sounds very young, of a sudden.

“I’m sure it is. Like pulling coins out of your arse.”

“Same thing. It’s a loop, see.”

It’s a loop, see.

Things repeat. Patterns repeat. Tomorrow the Inquisitor will come again on his high horse, and will condemn the same men for the same crimes. Today is the seventh day, tomorrow will be the seventh day again; and so, by necessity, yesterday. Such mathematics make his head spin. Daniil has to wipe the cathedral’s gears off his inner eyelids.

Now Andrey is looking at him, very intently, the focus of a scavenger in the pallid discs of his irises. He is both tense and lying in wait, like a trap.

“Chin up, old boy.”

He tops up Daniil’s glass. Black tar rises up, up, up. Black fingers curl round the glass, lift it to the mouth, the maw, the tunnel below the Earth. Go on. Down the hatch. It burns.

“Isn’t it your brother who got sentenced to death this morning? You’re cheerful, considering.”

The barkeep, captain-architect, crosses arms over chest and leans back, defensive, defiant, magnificent. He might yet disprove his predator’s nature and keep his calm; he might yet pounce, and go for the jugular. There’s no telling.

His voice, when it comes, teeters on a very thin razor’s edge.

“Death is tired of him. Believe you me, I would know.”

Death is tired of Peter Stamatin, the architect-captain, his brother’s cracked mirror. A man with many scars, but below the skin. Those over the skin mean nothing. It’s as knifing at a nutshell. It doesn’t hurt, not really. It’s placeholder pain, meant to rehearse the real thing, the gesture. Pencilwork before brushwork. A sketch, a draft. Daniil shudders in his thick coat: it’s nearly as offensive as calling a living man dead.

The last of his second glass drowns his entrails in liquid fire, very red.

“Still, I was there. That Inquisitor fellow, Karminsky, sent two men to pick me up at the Stillwater. I’ve a feeling they wanted to kill me, but…” He waves a hand; there’s bad ringing in his ears. “Well, by nine thirty I was in the cathedral with a handful of criminals who hadn’t committed crimes.”

“The Gov’nor, as I hear it. Serves him right.”

“And the Olgimskys, father and son. Burakh, too.” He adds, more despondent. “And that changeling girl.”

Andrey whistles. A train departs at the back of Daniil’s head.

“My, but what a lineup. Poor Peter must have looked invisible next to them. He’s got a knack for hanging in big people’s shadows.”

“Speaking of hanging.”

“Oh, no, no, he won’t. You can’t make a feather drop dead by hanging, can you? That’s what he is. Not even a whole bird. One feather, light as anything. Peter’s always going up, don’t you see. He can’t go down. He’s tried.”

“Karminsky isn’t called the Hanging Judge for nothing.”

“No, he likes what he does, all right. He’s a killer man. Takes one to know one.”

A glass plays balancing act on three of his fingertips.

“Don’t think he’ll do away with my brother, though. Not the, ah, auteur of the Polyhedron. From what I hear, the man’s quite taken with it.”

“You wouldn’t think so, listening to him. ‘Impossible object’, he said. I think it irks him.”

Andrey pours himself a generous measure from the seemingly bottomless bottle. Black sap all but overflows, tracing thick, sticky lines on the sides of the glass. He drains it in one go, like a very, very thirsty sink; bottomless, too. He wipes his twyre-black mouth on the back of his hand, grinning.

“Well that’s nothing new. It irks everyone eventually. I mean, well, it irks me, and I practically birthed the thing. Practically being the key word.”

“You’d want to be its author, I take it, its brain-father. Force open the door— well, climb up the stairs, and sit the throne.”

The architect barks when he laughs, perhaps to satisfy a theory of his, which goes like this: if you want to fill up a space, you’ve got to be louder than its blueprints. He’s elevated being the loudest dog in the room to an art, a science. Daniil recalls he was even worse, way back when, in college, in dorm rooms, an opium pipe in lieu of a bone between his teeth. Today he can almost sustain the weight of that laugh without flinching.

“That’s the artist’s problem, you see. He’s just a little man. He gets jealous. He might fuck his brother’s wife on a whim.” Andrey’s jackal grin is an enormous animal thing, a fissure in the world. “My brother’s wife happens to be a tower made out of paper and glass. Aren’t I so lucky! I’m still trying to figure out how to fit her in my bed.”

It startles Daniil to recognise his own laugh coming from the bottom of his glass, bruised black. A throat laugh, fermented in a cask(et). It stinks of the steppe, the too many steps between the bar and the door and the next district and the Stillwater. He can’t count the steps: doesn’t have that many shoes.

“Well, ah— cheers to that, old man.”

Raising his empty glass, just for show, but Andrey, bless the madness in his sharpknife face, takes it for an invitation. He fills it again. New cascade of black bile to warm one’s stomach around and tell tall tales. Between them they have tales tall enough to build a hundred scaffolds. If Peter were there, a liquid thousand. Contrary to immediate impression, it’s the fractured sibling who finds the best stories. Once upon a time, there was a man in a red coat… (but, ah, that one’s for later)

He rests his lip against the mouth of the tumbler, the very edge. Stains it black only a little.

“Don’t you worry for him at all? Your brother.”

“Of course.” Andrey’s tone, dismissive as can be. “He’s my better half. I’m always worried he’ll outgrow me.”

“I mean, the condemnation. Conviction.” Oh the Broken Heart is rotating on its axis, and singing, and dancing. He leans heavily on the countertop. “You’re sure he won’t die?”

Things spark and stutter and blink as if, suddenly, he’s been ejected to outer space. It’s not an unpleasant feeling, to be at the other end of a telescope, floating. He can see his thoughts outside of himself. White letters, white words, hovering. He’s drunker than he thought. Andrey isn’t floating, though, but screwed tight into the factory floor, ready for disassembly. Already flecks of paint fall off his carved cheekbones.

“He won’t die.”

He swears it. Fist-to-heart, or very near, diligent as a martial hero of old. He’s always admired the classics, and for all his lawlessness, enjoys living by their rules. Licking his lips like the lupa capitolina, who has watched a brother kill a brother, he swears he will do the opposite.

“He’s too clever to die. It’d be a shame. He’s like a brighter version of Daedalus.”

“Daedalus.” Daniil takes a sip. “I remember the fellow. You, I mean the two of you, reminded me of him back then, in the Capital. You were such wild dogs… I suppose it’s fitting, comparing Peter to a brilliant man who ended up stuck in his own labyrinth of a mind.”

“He got out of it eventually.”

And lost his son to hubris doing it, Daniil thinks, sinks, down the black depths of his twyrine.

“The thing is, Peter’s labyrinth is vertical, upside-down. If he tries on a pair of wings to get away, he’ll fly up and into the river. Like I said, he can’t go down, even when he does.” Andrey tops up his own glass and knocks it back with a splash, a gurgle. “Bottoms up, and all that.”

Daniil knocks his own drink back. It seems to unscrew his neck from his shoulder, so sharp the pain, so brief. It rattles, like a snake. His mouth is black.

“Cheers.”

VII

They hang Burakh the younger on the Bridge Square at sundown.

Daniil is there because he couldn’t be elsewhere. He’d exhausted his supply of errands for the day and his legs long before that. He breathes in two directions at once to make up for Burakh’s lack of a lungful. Suspended at the end of his rope, Burakh-man looks like a huge ham in a butcher’s smock. He’s covered in blood. He might have killed someone, or tried to stab himself through the gut before the noose got him. Death by hanging can be very slow.

Daniil is looking at the hanged man’s hands because he can’t look anywhere else. Strong hands but gentle. Lots of calluses. Naked hands— he’d worn gloves himself and even then he’d felt the warmth radiating from the skin. Naked hands. That do not wear gloves, that touch the dead directly. That have touched death; that are dead. Dead hands. That will no longer feed street urchins.

It takes long enough to sink in that the sky darkens over the cathedral and the Polyhedron lights up, like a brutal candlestick.

Dead hands mean a dead end. Without Burakh he cannot solve the pest which means he cannot save Thanatica which means he cannot cure death, Q.E.D. Curse you, Simon Kain, deadman immortalman who bet on the wrong horse, curse you twice over and backwards. Some things will have to happen again. Some things will have to never happen again. A man will have to choose before he has a chance to learn the Town’s inner workings.

Get to work, then, Bachelor.

When he turns back the workmen are already dismantling the gallows. Because he has flirted in murder’s shadow, Burakh will hang in apparently impossible accordance with the laws of physics. His rope will be held up by the absence of birdsong.

The Inquisitor’s ledger states— for twelve hours and not one more.

VII

When lamplight strikes his face at just the right angle, a very small cut appears on the side of Inquisitor Karminsky’s jaw, right below the ear.

From this Doctor Dankovsky gathers the thinnest of pleasures as well as several clues: Karminsky is not made of marble; he cuts himself shaving; he is not untouchable; he is a man. Therefore an Inquisitor can be beaten at his own game.

The hanging has already happened. Daniil closes the door on the passing of time and plants himself as still counterweight to Karminsky’s ceaseless pacing. His dress shoes are shining, looking wet, as if he’s used too much boot-black. Daniil knows better: a man of that sort neglects the notion of excess. Perhaps he can walk on water. You can never be sure with an Inquisitor who does magic tricks with numbers and sleeps with men of science to solve them.

“Was it necessary?”

His voice gains in size as it travels upwards. The Inquisitor keeps pace. The lamp’s glow highlights his clean-cut features, the touch of red in his hair.

“I mean the hanging.”

“Of course you mean the hanging.” He paces, still. Like a pendular mechanism, he can never stop ‘til broken. “Singular, I notice. There should have been more. Two more at least, with the same last name and the same face.”

“The Stamatins, yes. They have a knack for slipping out of nooses.”

If it is a smile that creeps on the face of the man of Law, he makes it look as a razorblade, thin, straight, a rapid slash. Some men have smirks that can cut throats.

“I am told”, and Karminsky’s tone shifts to conversational, “that you’ve known them a long time. Isn’t it an odd coincidence. That you who pretend to defy death and them, who pretend to defy reality, have all ended up here at one end of the world.”

This is a thing the Inquisitor does: asking questions without asking them. No need for him to accent the words, to slope them. An Inquisitor’s mouth is an equation that turns a question into an accusation; a what-if or a maybe into a pair of fetters and a one-way ticket to the scaffold. It’s a truth fabricator, a terrible engine. It’s designed so well as to arouse (why, curiosity— the sort to kill a cat).

This is a thing Daniil does: tipping his chin up as to appear taller. It does not work on Karminsky who is taller than him and cares little for the fact. He could look down even on Foreman Oyun and Rubin stacked one upon the other’s shoulders. He might do so tomorrow, or the day after; when there’s no one else left to hang.

“It is a coincidence as far as I’m concerned”, tries Dankovsky. “Simon Kain is who I am, or should I say was, here for. I’d no idea the Stamatins were here.”

“I know that.”

“Why then try and corner me?”

Karminsky’s sharp profile ends on a slice-eye, what colour is it— dark brown, coffeebrown. The smell of Eva’s hair in an Inquisitor’s eye.

“Tell me of Simon Kain, then.”

“Haven’t I already—”

But he isn’t sure he has yet. He rubs his tongue into his gums, gathers spit enough to speak. The caretaker did warn him about the cathedral: it makes a man thirsty.

“I’ve spent a week running in his shadow and I don’t understand Simon any more than when I arrived. They say so many things about him, one half at war with the other— Simon is a sorcerer, a wizard, a wise man, an ignorant; he is two hundred years old and a young boy.”

He does not notice he has started pacing until hearing his own step in perfect mirror-synchrony to Karminsky’s, who goes the other way, like a defiant hand on a clock. One of them is bending time backwards even though here, inside, it freezes for anyone who knows to ask.

“They say he is an immortal man, but the truth is, I don’t know what Simon is.”

“He’s an impossible object.”

The iron heart badge pinned on Karminsky’s coat blinds him for a flash, sears itself into his eyes, so that it remains, as a brand, when he closes them to blink. His hands are balled into fists. He aches all over.

“What?” Daniil laughs. “Like one of these architectural wonders that so aggravate you— and who’s the architect? Who drew his blueprints?”

Who are you hanging next?

“It is my understanding that Simon Kain made himself.”

“I wouldn’t trust everything I hear. You’ll be running in circles.”

Already they are pacing in a circle, playing a pair of lions. There will come a time for the showing of teeth, but not yet. Dankovsky tries another tip of his chin, fiercer, thick black brows drawn tight as to dig a trench between them.

“What use would you have for Simon, anyway? Another miracle worker, another execution? Do you always obey such obviously flawed mathematics? I took you—”, he gestures to the idea of the whole body of Inquisitors, less than twenty men and women, the upholders of Capital and capital-L Law, “for a man of science, in your own right.”

“I am a man of science”, retorts the marble-man, “insofar as I work with methods similar to yours, yes. Our conclusions need not align.”

“Indeed they don’t. I am no killer.”

He has come close to it, days earlier. Three, four. Rubin on the wrong side of the warehouses, dead not dead. Daniil your ears are buzzing, your nose bleeding.

“Your nose is bleeding”, says the Inquisitor.

“I noticed— what were you saying?”

No hiccup has come to upset the perfect balance of their pacing. They are two men and one mechanism. Karminsky’s voice seems lower for it.

“You mistake upholding the Law for bloodthirst.”

“Do I? Your face is sharp as a knife. I’d bet your tongue is sharper.”

A slit of smile without teeth cuts the man’s face in two. It radiates light, and the cathedral’s bones agree with his cheeks.

“On the subject of Simon…”

Dankovsky’s ears perk up, like a hungry dog’s. Curse you Simon Kain who strings him along on a leash from beyond the grave.

“Yes?”

“I would speak to him”, says the Inquisitor.

The lunar look on his face indicates earnestness, his dark eyes undulating with the savant’s desire-need to understand things that defy him and the principles of matter. Simon and his miracles have been walking all over the Law for one year too many. Here’s the result, here’s the tally. The debt collector comes calling in a black coat, smelling of paperwork and shoe polish. Tomorrow he will hang immortality on his gallows.

“It stands to reason that you would not believe me, as my inquisitorial duties disagree with the very nature of the man, and the nature of his town.”

“But as an individual, an intellectual, you can’t help yourself. You’re taken with it.”

“Somewhat like yourself.”

Which Daniil indeed cannot deny. From the hour the sky has split in two and let the Polyhedron fill it from behind the traincar’s window, he has been living in its thrall. When he looks at it from a safe remove he can see that the plague is nothing but a side-effect. A thief of time, his most precious resource against death. He has to beat it in fewer moves.

He shakes his head from side to side.

“Then why place yourself as an obstacle in my path? You are a clever man. Conscious, no doubt, that hanging Burakh is a mistake. I need him if I am to cure this pest.”

“One cannot go against the Law if one is to enforce it”, Karminsky simply says. “Burakh’s goals do not align with mine.”

A chessboard is a flat surface, like a clockface. They are pacing it. They are both skilled players. Dankovsky cuts himself some slack and smiles.

“Then I will trick the mechanism, and align them.”

He has a shard of mirror in his pocket, with liquid time stored in it. He will not tell the Inquisitor this, even on the day of their uneasy alliance. A game of chess must appear to have a winner and a loser, and he won’t stand to lose. He might break the rules a little, bend them ‘til their spine creaks but not enough to snap.

For now he breaks the pattern of their pacing and tries on a salute, neither military nor deferential but a wave of the hand; the way he has imagined Simon Kain would wave at him the moment he steps off the train, seven days ago, or tomorrow, or today. He will catch him in the act if he keeps trying.

And Simon from the top of the Polyhedron says,

we have a deal.

Chapter Text

REHEARSAL, II

in which rain falls upwards

presented by

THE MATHEMATICIAN’S GAZETTE

issue 097, published September 192—

“THE MODERN PROBLEM-SOLVER”

Exclusive interview with Mr. M. KARMINSKY of the Inquisition
who solves complex conundrums in his sleep

⟰

THE PLAYERS (in order of appearance)

KARMINSKY, M.

Two PATROLMEN

A SECRETARY

KAINA, M.

DANKOVSKY, D.

STAMATIN, P.

BURAKH, A.

OLGIMSKY, V. SR.

OLGIMSKY, V. JR.

SABUROV, A.

SABUROVA, C.

HERON

KAIN, V.

Two SHADOWS

VII

On the seventh day a stranger appears at the station, as if conjured up out of thin air. No railcar on the horizon but the white puff of his train of thought running a hundred miles a minute.

He’s got a briefcase and a pocket watch. He is a thin, spare deathbird in a long black coat, an ironheart badge pinned to the right side of his chest, a blue cravat layered over his high-collar shirt. He’s got eyes like dark jewels, or coffee cups, that see everything and reflect nothing. The pair of patrolmen who come to greet him hang limply at the end of their puppeteer’s strings. They give a perfect salute, hand-to-heart; a perfect little bow, which de facto puts them in a position of weakness. He could reach for the pistol strapped under his coat and shoot the both of them, bullseye.

Instead he drops his briefcase and snaps his watch shut.

“To the Crucible, gentlemen. I have an appointment with Mr. Kain.”

0

A man smokes a slim cigar at the window, his back turned to a dozen chessboards; it’s a clock made of erroneous games, with a number of pieces ranging from one to twelve.

He is standing near to the first hour when the door opens.

“A splendid timepiece you have there”, says the fellow who enters.

He defies description, which lets every member of his audience know he is a secretary, a factotum, a messenger. All anyone can tell is he has too much fashionable grease in his hair and too little restraint. Karminsky smiles around his cigar, a razoring of the features come with a guillotine’s violence.

“A colleague’s idea of a joke.” He holds out his hand for a telegram. “Now, be off.”

The nondescript attendant goes out by a door that is not the one he entered from. He will not be seen again. Meanwhile the Inquisitor’s cigar-ash builds up dramatically as he skims through the note, written in code. Here is the gist of it:

THE WORLD WILL END. IN SEVEN DAYS.
TAKE A TRAIN EAST.

An Inquisitor knows when to ask questions and when not to. The paper-piece crumples to nothing, slips itself into a silver cigarette case, and forgets its own existence. Somewhere behind his back a chess piece falls onto its side; a knight, who has been summoned to battle and died for his son, his lordship or his god. A clock is like a telegram. If one letter is off, if one gear smashes into itself, as a slip of paper—

STOP.

X

Someone who might have been a Sign told him a story about a princess who thought she was a queen.

“Because her mother is dead”, said the girl, “then the princess is ushered into her mother’s dress. But it doesn’t work that way. What if the dress doesn’t fit? There’s only one tailor in town and he isn’t any good with dresses. No, she has to grow into it. These things take time, as you know. Sir.”

She’d said sir as though she meant the respect in her voice. Karminsky had paid for her next glass of twyrine and left her there with all her bones to pick.

Today-the-tenth is his first time meeting Maria of the house of Kain, who is the princess, the queen, the thing in between, warming her future throne ‘til she comes of age, or rather of wisdom. She does have the look of the uncertain, the sceptical; a fraction that of the aggrieved, too, but only because he knows where to search for it (in the supple folds of her visage, in the corners of her eyes). They sit at a rustic table in that stray piece of town dubbed the Crude Sprawl, wedged between the factory and the looming mound of the abattoir. His back is very straight; hers too, but in a manner that betrays liquidity rather than the hardness of noble stone.

She nods when it is clear he has no intention of breaching silence first.

“Inquisitor.” Then, lower, a touch of menace to it. “I thank you for coming.”

Speaking lends her the quality of being older than herself. Her voice is as a construct, a mask thrown on, behind which she can hide the lack of lines on her face. He tries not to be cruel in his assessment, for that would serve no purpose.

“I am surprised”, he says, “that you would extend me an invitation. Surely the judgement I had to pass onto your father does not sit well with you.”

Maria is tall, but not as tall as her mother. She has to tip her chin and harden her gaze if she wants to tower over Karminsky, who needs none of these tricks to make a brick house appear as fragile as a hut. Her eyes, made of hard flint, break against his marble cheekbones.

“I have known an Inquisitor before, and considerably closer-tied to our family than you are, sir. I know your methods and I know no sentimentality can come to stand in the way of them. I understand, and accept that as fact.”

Now it is his turn to bow, which he does with all the grace befitting a ruler’s daughter.

“For your sang-froid, my lady, I commend you.” His razorsmile cuts through his face for a second. “It is my understanding that you take a lot after your late mother.”

Is it only him or does her spine stiffen, her fingers tighten? Without hurry he traces the tendons in her neck. The slowness with which she swallows an invisible lump in her throat. Hypothesis and conclusion are one and the same: Maria K. is not a woman who suffers comparison with her betters. She mutters, because decorum would have it,

“I have been told”,

and leaves it at that.

Karminsky is a patient man, a hunting man. Even sat down he is as the lion pacing, waiting for his hour, for the showing of teeth; somehow looming in his thinness, burning in his coldness, offset only and in increments by the bits of sun colouring his hair redder. Many plans are given birth in that sharp head of his. He is a calculator made flesh. Ordinary folk run in circles around him, for they can’t catch him or match his rhythm. He is very curious, which reflects in the coffee-tone of his eyes when he looks Maria right through hers. Dark, too; bottomless pits of drunk vision.

“I am wondering what it is you want from me. One does not”, and he pauses before the shortest of smiles, “summon an Inquisitor without good reason.”

“One does not presume to order an Inquisitor around. Indeed I have not summoned you— should you wish to go, I’ll not hinder your retreat. But for the sake of curiosity, intellectual or otherwise, I would ask something of you.”

Unbothered he sketches the gesture of a leanback, but with nothing to lean against has to let the air seemingly cushion him. He’s been trained in the art of invisible walls. Not a muscle in his body moves.

“By all means. Ask.”

She cranes her long swan’s neck, implicit invitation for him to sink his teeth into that white, that marble-cold flesh. She believes he can chew on stone like a predator animal chews on a lamb’s meat; like an Inquisitor eats at a condemned man’s banquet. Do unto me what you have done unto my father. Have no pity. Everything and more bleeds through spaces between one breath and the text. She is terribly young. A princess who would be queen of her cardboard realm. He is indifferent to the royal scope of her beauty.

Her tongue snakes over her lower lip, reddening it.

“Have you not, really, taken my father for a scapegoat in the name of our house? So that you wouldn’t have to take any one of his brothers instead, whose celebrated intellects interest you more. I believe you have.”

Her choice of words imply that Simon’s death is of no consequence, or indeed that she gives it little credit. He lets it pass.

“Do you expect a candid answer?”

“I expect nothing, sir, but the answer you are willing to give.”

Instead of replying he deflects,

“You think I made a mistake in choosing to preserve Georgiy rather than Victor Kain. An error of sacrifice.” His head tilts lightly to his left side. “A chess player’s poor gambit, as it were.”

But the lady does not play chess, indeed confuses the board for a medium’s circle; she does tricks with her hands, with tarot cards, in her cultivated semi-dark, thick velvet curtains and beads of glass necessary for the telling of fortunes. She is said to do her best dreaming in her sleep, which he sympathises with, being himself a sleep-thinker.

One long fingernail skims the rough wood of the table, as though a cautious birdling trying to land on the surface of a pond. Her blackpearl eyes stay buried into his.

“Many in this town have a slanted view of our family. They perceive us as through a looking glass, larger than we are, and infinitely blurrier. There is that, and perhaps to the average mind uncle Georgiy holds more of Simon than my father does, because he is his impossible twin and a judge besides. Only I think this is a misconception.”

“I would have to ask you why.”

“You’ve heard tales about my mother, no doubt. Tales taller than her but not false for that. They called her Nina the Wild.”

He concedes that he has; not that he would hear some more, and from her own powerful Kain mouth, were she inclined. She shrugs.

“Well, here it is. See who the storm married.”

Karminsky retreads the ground of three days past; a subdued interview in Victor Kain’s study, a place as ordered and quiet as the man himself had seemed, even before the shedding of his self. Though it’s hard picturing him as bulwark between his immense wife and the rest of town, he finds he is ready to believe it, if only for the well-worn wedding ring searing his finger like a brand. Even the portrait of the deceased in the hallway had struck him less, perhaps because the artist had been unable to capture her singular wholeness.

A part of him that is more man than Inquisitor would have enjoyed meeting such a story made flesh.

“An Inquisitor is no more infallible than a judge”, he states.

“I know that very well.”

“Then you understand; if a mistake has been made, I’ll not be able to repair it.”

Again her head bows, this time rather more contrite than polite.

“Someone else might be willing to put in the work. I believe you have met him.”

But before he can ask to whom she refers, she retreats once more into her impossible, inscrutable Kain-ness. She reaches across the table to take his right hand, which is slim but strong, pale and unmarred save for the callus of someone who writes often and for long stretches at a time.

“You’ve the hands of a man who should have been an architect”, she says, turning it over so that his palm faces the sky. “I believe you could have built monuments to yourself and rivaled the brothers Stamatin.”

It amuses him. Someone long ago told him the same thing in a similar amount of words; he recalls very little but the shape of their mouth, the hard-coded certainty of their bones fitting within the grasp of his fingers.

“I was tempted in my youth. I’ve always cultivated a fascination for the properties of marble. But it’s the lot of dreams that they rarely come to pass.”

“You will learn, sir, that in our town dreams come with a higher rate of success.” She smiles, coldly. “For the enlightened, anyhow.”

“I’ve no doubt. Inquisitor I may be, but I am not blind to a miracle when it hangs in the sky for all to see.”

Maria looks towards the Tower. Something automatic about her gesture, reflexive, as if the slightest losing of her bearings brings her to seek the geometrical throne her family has commissioned and her own brother seized for himself and his republic of dogs. Stranger still is the ease with which he has come to do the same thing and find his mind lit up by the mere idea of this here paper-scar ripping the sky in two.

She is still holding his hand. Hers are terribly cold, like a long-dead woman’s; like her mother’s who sometimes talks through her mouth. She measures the texture of his palm and draws conclusions.

“What about music— the violin? No, the cello.”

“For a time. I found I am rather more interested in the mathematics of it.”

“My father said the same thing.” She looks him pointedly in the eye, hoping perhaps to crack the ice there. “He is— was— a keen violinist. He liked picking at strings.”

Karminsky, who prefers pulling them, bows his head in acknowledgement. He has robbed the lady’s father of his music, his mathematics, which is a punishment worse than death. He has seen a pair of eyes; a moment later, circles without a centre, astral bodies without an orbit. He has pressed his fingertip into the hard bone of a man’s forehead and played the thief. Today his pockets are empty.

“I regret that we did not have time to discuss it”, he says courteously.

“Time!”

And Maria Kaina suddenly throws her hands upwards as if burnt by the touch of his, reaching blindly for the threads that bind her to her family’s fate. They should be red, they should be crimson— they are invisible, even for her who presses her ears to walls and listens to Simon there, Simon who knows every mouse skittering within the houses of the dead.

“He spoke a lot about time, too. He could tell it without a clock.” One of her eyelashes has detached itself from its crown. It falls down to her cheek. “It amused my mother so…”

She steels her chin and hides the prickle of wet light in her eyes.

Karminsky, for he has been schooled in his classics and been taught that symmetry is the noblest of man’s aspirations, reaches out to pick the stray eyelash, the black scar that threatens the lady Kaina’s stolid marbleness on one side only. His fingers are very chill. Her skin is colder, but she shivers and cuts the air with the warmth of her breath. Her mouth, it’s a furnace, wherein the tongues of young lovers go to die. Without looking, he drops the long lash in his pocket.

“My apologies”, says he with such studied, inquisitorial indifference.

“Think nothing of it.”

But he can tell she is thinking of it, and very fast, computing possibilities behind the veil of her eyelids, behind her teeth, where women of high standing are said to store lies for when they need them most. He has touched into many ladies’ mouths, mostly figuratively; and learned that lies are like teeth. If left too long neglected, they rot.

“I am sorry, my lady…” comes a voice from nearby.

Karminsky turns his head to the right and finds, standing there very still, statuesque in snakeskin, Doctor Dankovksy made of dreams, who has a laboratory in his head and a fair few miracles in his pockets. Cheeks blotched red with exhaustion and eyes circled purple-dark, he might drop dead in a moment, weighed down by his heavy coat. He is staring Maria’s way, as if a spurned lover come back for a last kiss. He seems infinitely sadder than the few yesterdays before.

He says,

“You’ve an eyelash on your cheek.”

She doesn’t look at him, because her eyes are gone in that country of the dead where she walks looking for Simon every half-hour. Her posture imitates the rigidity of statues not yet finished.

She has an eyelash, the selfsame eyelash, on her cheek.

“That’s quite alright. They fall all the time, like rain, and then come back. Lashes are discreet little hauntings.”

A statement after which the doctor launches himself headfirst into a medical tirade relative to the existence of lashes, and why the act of whipping is named after them.

VII

It’s a cathedral (it’s a clock (it’s a chessboard)).

It’s a calculator for second chances, built around the theory of non-linear time. Inquisitor Karminsky opens the front of his overcoat to pick at his watch-chain, dangling there about his waistcoat; to peek at the face of time and its three hands, all stopped in the middle of their next inhale. When he steps out the massive double doors, he knows, they will resume their rounds, and the world outside might be unchanged, trailing all its possible futures like afterimages, washed-out paperslips.

The indicted parties stand in a neat row while their judge paces up and down, choosing already who will be first up on the gallows, who last.

Number one in this lineup of anomalies, one STAMATIN, Peter, age unspecified and unhelpful— a man, or rather a collection of bones living in a bottle of twyrine. If his absent twin could come with a pair of tweezers he’d make a decent model ship out of him. Karminsky who once dreamed of being an architect has seen all the brothers’ projects, dead, alive, aborted, even the ones said to drive people mad like those upside-down gardens designed for a foreign lord’s private estate. Magnificent follies born of libertines’ minds. Meeting the scrap of man behind the miracles marks the date as a sorry day for art.

Second is an interesting animal who recognises colours by smell, or so he says. BURAKH, Artemy, not yet thirty, quiet as a mouse, quiet as a killer, a trench-raider, who with a knife between his teeth could crawl in the dark and stash a few murders in his pockets. Magic war medic, menkhu-man. He sits astride the thin line between science and superstition, he walks it elegantly, speaking little but well. Few blades strapped to his person, and rather a lot of herbs. A walking apothecary beaten into shape by the steppe.

Next: the Olgimskys act as distorted mirrors of each other, big-bald-heavy versus gangly and awkward, unshaven. Unamusing father-and-son double act that they play at, these two, the young bull hanging-hiding in the older’s shadow, like a child scared of its reflection. His clear eyes look near to wet. The father’s are void of emotion, bovine, almost, butcherman turned cattle, his large hands useless— he knows one more mistake will see him bled and quartered and might well take the noose for mercy.

Last and least the governor is little but a fragile man made of straw, who wears a mantle too heavy for himself; whose spine, straight as it comes, might break before it gets a chance to bend. His rigidity so similar to marble’s own yet so strained, so close to shatter-point, paints him the weakest link in the Town’s trinity of rulers. He rusts. He’s been rusting so long his skin would flake off at the pressure of a fingernail. He rusts like Karminsky’s hair rusts, brown taking to red in the autumnal half light come round from the steppeland, where strange grasses grow; where strange people sing, at night, in that place they call the Ear.

Mr. Saburov who really would prefer an army man’s honorific stands; his lack of tallness, his desperate medium-height a call for help.

“Really.” His voice is hoarse, as if smoked to death; in his house there are no cigars, no cigarettes. “I’m sure this… this exhibit is unnecessary.”

“Quite so!” chimes the cheerful daughter-thing hanging at his back, her own timbre climbing high-up so’s to sit in the rafters and let its bare legs dangle. “We’ve work to do, as it happens. At the hospital. D’you want this pest cured, mister K., aren’t you here for that?”

She has the same eyes as her father, the creature who calls herself a girl; whom half the townsfolk have dubbed the plague’s own twin sister, the shabnak in disguise, the coming of doom; whom the other half think a miracle worker whose laying-of-hands might cure them of all ailments from common cold to consumption by way of sand pest. Very blue eyes. Too blue for a pathogen said to reduce a man made of some sixty-percent water to the dryness of steppe ground. Perhaps she steals all the water inside them. It might be her way of seeing. She could be a modern vampire, an evolved leech, with flatter teeth but a twisted way with words.

The first thing the Inquisitor will learn in the streetveins of this body-town is that an impossible object is not necessarily an object, unless your definition of an object takes into account a person, physical or otherwise. If he were inclined to morbidity he would collect brains rather than ruins, drafts, pet projects left for dead by some roadside.

He is not scared of the girl-fiend. He’s not yet seen her at work.

“I am no healer”, says Karminsky after a beat too many. “Science-minded, certainly, but here for another purpose entirely. It will become clear in a moment. We are waiting for someone.”

“I say, it’s been a moment for, ah…” tries Olgimsky the Younger from within his father’s shadow. He remembers time is uncountable in the cathedral. “Well, for a good long while.”

“It might be a while longer yet.”

The big ba(l)d bull in a fur coat throws his progeny a hard look.

“Don’t hold your breath, son.” His thick-lipped mouth seems to soften; his jowls to hang heavier. “You let me speak.”

“And you, too”, says Saburov to his graveyard foundling.

“On my honour.”

It causes the Inquisitor’s mouth to twitch: the dead have no honour, unless they are brought back from the final frontier. He side-eyes the doors which, near as on cue, open around the snaking silhouette of the last miracle-maker. Two patrolmen flank him tight as bodyguards.

“I apologise for my tardiness”, Dankovsky says, “I was attending my execution.”

VIII

Last strains of a cigar’s taste dwindle to ash on his tongue when a man with a bird’s name knocks at the door.

“Heron, m’lord. Senior administrative personnel of the Bull Enterprise.”

Karminsky’s cold slice-eye doesn’t seem to deter the man, the blonde slip of a secretary thing with a moustache looking as fake and twitchy fingers, tight round his pack of folders. His pockets overflow with pens, notepads. The Inquisitor nods and leans his slim body against the large worktable stood in the centre of the room.

“An Olgimsky man, are you.”

“I am, sir.” He answers with such pride, it’d make an officer weep. Here’s a creature made of numbers, of columns and ledger entries, of dates recorded with painstaking patience. “As well as the, ah— interim governor’s right-hand man for the past few days.”

“By which you mean Doctor Dankovsky.”

“I do, sir.”

Quiet raise of inquisitorial autumn eyebrows.

“Have you a message from him, then?”

He holds out his hand. Heron seems sorry not to have any slip of paper to give him, by the droop of his eyes, shoulders, moustache even.

“No, sir. I’ve, ah, come to terms with the fact that he is not what a governor ought to be. If you would pardon me the disrespect— he has not the strength of character, sir, nor indeed the fastidiousness required of the role.”

“These are stale news. I’ve met the man yesterday.” Karminsky swallows a stretch of smile on one side. “Neither is he a particularly good judge. But I’ll not hold it against him. Now, Mr. Heron, what can I do for you?”

Brittle man on legs made of dust makes for an advance, near as tripping over a flagstone, face-first. He catches himself in time, but mostly his relief pertains to the mount of paperwork cradled in his arms, fat as a thoroughly fed calf. Large blue eyes bulging in their sockets latch onto the man who holds the keys, so to speak, of the cathedral and the passing of time.

“It would be my honour, m’lord, if you might condescend to let me, well, work for you, as it were.”

Sycophancy made flesh, this Heron-man. A blunt instrument, a tool worn-out before the work begins. Still, a tool is a tool; is a use waiting to be found.

“What would your master have to say about that?”

“Nothing much, sir.”

“You’ve not told him.”

“Nor do I need to. He does not hold Bachelor Dankovsky in high regard, and has found my reports lacklustre as of late. Hence…”

Karminsky raises his hand, palm-out, and the man like an obedient train stops dead in his tracks. It’s agreed, then. Heron sits the nearest desk with due diligence, uncaps a pen, opens a folder, and gets to work as if he’d stuck his backside there for the past three, four, five years. He wraps himself so comfortably within infinite lengths of redtape, as does a single cog in a clock’s case. Beggars belief, that a man could be happy there, in that land of the numb.

Impossible objects come in many forms.

VII

A black cigarette with a gold filter burns between Victor Kain’s fingers. The Inquisitor calculates the speed at which the ash builds up at the tip.

He is halfway to perfecting a formula when the man speaks, drawing from his pallor, his mercurial dreamer’s thinness, what little vigour remains.

“You are not who I expected”, is what he opens with.

Karminsky’s head tucks itself into politeness, if a fraction less rigid than is custom. This is a private space and no one judges but the judge himself, at the moment delving so deepdown layer upon layer of artifice he has no attention left to spare his own countenance.

“We are aware, of course, of that tenuous link— or should I say strenuous— between your house and the House of Law. It would not have been seemly to send you a familiar face.”

“No. I can get behind such logic.” Victor draws sullenly on his poison, sucking hellfire into his lungs. The peculiar foulness of a clove cigarette clogs the air. “I suppose I am relieved.”

He turns his steep profile t’wards the window; invites light and shadow to paint over his face and make him sadder than he is, but not by so much that he becomes unrecognisable. He is a man with a lot of weight on his shoulders, which are too narrow for it. He is not a bridge but a staircase to nowhere, and knows it.

“You’ve come to ask something of me, Inquisitor. Ask it.”

Karminsky’s dry lips itch for a cigar. He eyes the open case on the desk, the row of thin tobacco-tubes, black-and-gilt, so neatly arranged. In his mouth the executioner’s tongue crackles, covered in steppe-dirt.

“I would speak with your brother, if he is amenable.”

Only a hum slips with smoke out of Victor’s mouth, for a silent while; its thickness doubles by the second.

“Georgiy lives in the west wing. Of course, you are welcome to pay him a visit. Whether he accepts to speak with you is another matter.”

“I mean your other brother.” Karminsky’s tongue worries at a cracked tooth. “Or will you tell me that I am right to suspect this Simon of yours is a figment of the Town’s collective imagination, a mascot of sorts, to keep children in their beds at night…”

“Simon is dead.”

But the same cutting uncertainty lines the side of his word, as if he isn’t sure; as if he doesn’t believe the laws of physics apply to a variable such as Simon Kain, fabled anti-necrotic sage who raises the dead from their graves and dances with them, white, drunk, nakedly endless.

Karminsky tips his chin.

“Let us consider for the sake of argument that he is not. What then would you tell me— is he a tyrant?”

It almost brings the other man’s mouth to arc in what passes for mirth, but his eyes, his palewater eyes, are stubborn in their mourning. A small strangled sound, only one, shakes his throat. The stilted prototype of a laugh. He hasn’t practiced that drill in a while.

“No. Reigning through fear and awe was my late wife Nina’s purview, and Simon far predates her arrival. Anyone will tell you that.” Victor’s head drops. He is very still, staring holes into the leathertop of his desk, where the golden stub of his cigarette has stopped burning. “You could say Simon is the one who built this town. Before we came here there was only the steppe and its many mouths that speak as one.”

“He acted, effectively, as ambassador between your house and the steppefolk.”

“In a manner of speaking. We have had little dealings with the Kin, truth be told. You would need to ask the Olgimskys. But yes— Simon was a close friend of Isidor. Burakh, that is. Our late physician.” He sighs, heavily. “As you can see, his loss is a tremendous one.”

Karminsky’s shoe finds a bump in the rug and busies itself with flattening it, while his tongue pokes at his next few words before it utters them. His ears are sharp so that he is bound to listen to every floorboard creak beneath.

“Isidor Burakh”, he says, “whose murder happened on the same day as Simon’s.”

Victor nods.

“Yes.”

“Do you believe in coincidences, Mr. Kain?”

“Do you think I, and indeed all of us who have stakes in this town higher than our own lives, haven’t tried to disentangle these two threads? No, we have. Nobody truly believes Burakh’s prodigal son to have done the killing. It would be convenient. Fate is not that.”

A short, almost light laugh brightens Karminsky’s face, makes it younger.

“You don’t believe in coincidences, but you believe in fatum?”

There in the very bright bluespill of wetness within Victor’s eyes, the Inquisitor can almost spy the young man he once was, who courted a tempest and won her over; who consorted with impossibilities because he would not suffer being taken for a fool. He is an arrow about to reach the end of his trajectory, and he is aware of it. Fatum, indeed, must hold his sleeve.

“Please. You are not here for this.”

Curiosity turns the course of blood in Karminsky’s veins to an arctic beat, a strange cello-piece in minor key. His bones are ringing, his teeth aching for another morsel of Kain-ness, but he concedes, weighing on his scales the need for civility over greed. The rug has, in fact, been straightened.

“I hear that you —your family, that is— have many a plan for the future.”

“That is correct.”

“Tell me about them.”

Victor sadly thumbs at the wedding band on his left hand. The metal is smooth, worn with age but cared for better than the rest of his shadow-person. Already he is dwindling, as if he has followed the red thread of his fate and seen precisely where it ends. He knows there is nothing to be done, which allows him the peculiar dignity of acceptance easy to confuse for self-sacrifice. Karminsky, if he was a better man, would perhaps extend a mark of his respect.

As it stands he is a mouthpiece for his office, a task he carries out with a god’s diligence. Folding his arms over his chest, he waits for the hanged man’s final words.

“Simon’s dream— that is, his chief project, his final draft, was what he called Utopia.”

“The same Utopia as theorised by one Sir More, yes? A place that is nowhere, but good by design.”

“Yes, and no. Simon’s Utopia, you see, was very similar to the one we are now stood in. A real town on the other side of the river Gorkhon, made for its people. But more than that a town built around the ever expanding idea of itself. A town that, if represented on a graph, would very much resemble an exponential function. I was to help him in the achievement of that particular aspect.”

Karminsky finds he has, after all, to show the respect he learned to keep on a leash. He offers a short, martial bow of his head.

“Of course, you are something of a mathematician, like myself.”

“More of an engineer”, recognises the dreamer-man with clockwork in his head, “but for all intents and purposes, yes. I was to be the hands writing Simon’s calculations, shifting them from a state of impossibility to a state of possibility. It proved rather beyond my sole capabilities, as it turns out.”

Now Victor’s blue eyes cloud with wariness; his shoulders slope downwards, too, as if weighed with two lifetimes of worries intent on cleaving him in twain. For such a thin man he bears the brunt of his colossal mind and his family’s outlandish ideals admirably. The Inquisitor looks out the window, eastward. It’s an auspicious morning for field work, what with the angle of the sun and the way light bounces off that mirror he can but make out, propped against the estate’s outer wall, polished afterthought…

Again he turns to Victor, and forces his voice to a low, civil hum.

“Enter Dr. Lyuricheva, I presume.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know, she has been quite a conundrum for us, and for a good few years. I met her once at a chess tournament, but we did not speak.”

A sudden slice of light brightens his thin face on one side, deepening shadows on the other. He is a monster made of marble and many questions.

“Do you know how she came by that limp?”

Victor shakes his heavy, crownless head.

“She did not say, and none of us presumed to ask. Maria might have, but, ah… Never mind. The two of them never quite got along as well as I’d hoped.”

“A colleague of mine has it that she suffered an accident at a symposium. None within her coterie of architects and urbanists saw it happen, but something ‘split her reality in two’. My colleague’s words, you understand. He has always been rather sparse in his explanations. The fact remains that during a lengthy exposition of her research, she saw an error, or an error saw her, and the result was that she could not regain her balance. Ever.”

An intellectual who is not understood by her peers attracts folktales like a flame does moths, but it isn’t her fault. There’s a flaw integral to her designs, which is herself and her terrible rationality. Such is what Capital circles have been saying since the dawn of time, which is to say her departure to nowhere east. Many there think she must have died or made a train derail, with that imbalance of hers.

She sits very high on the list of locals and less-locals Karminsky will have to speak to.

“It makes for an interesting story, at least.” Victor sighs the sigh of the resigned. His body gains in painful languor with every word uttered. “I suppose I know why you would inquire about her, roundabout as it is.”

“I’m sure. Please, I would be obliged if you spared me the asking.”

And so it goes like this, a joke that is not a joke, or a very bad one:

“There is one street in the district we call the Atrium, just north of here…”

It is refreshing for an Inquisitor not to ask outright. He sits himself down into listening trance, forgoing for a quarter-hour his physical existence, until he is forced by Law to reclaim it, to stand up and enact judgement. Because one street in town drives people mad; because she who has built it has been asked by he who engineered the idea of it: one KAIN, Victor, his life ever since his wife’s death a countdown to his own inversion. He is the first accused and the first punished.

He ends with a fingertip on his forehead.

As easy as that the sentence is carried; a man is dead, worse than dead. The whole of the study-space sinks into newborn vapidity, which goes deep enough as to chill the bones of Karminsky himself. Quick is he to snatch back his finger from the Kain man’s clammy skin, now inexplicably thinned to near-nothing, so as to render his skull beneath that much starker, every single bony ridge a piece of high-relief.

A pair of shadows masked white hang either side of Victor Kain, striking poses symmetrical to the last digit.

“What a shame”, says the first.

“They could have known each other”, says the second.

“And made beautiful things.”

The Inquisitor, if he sees them, shows not a sign.

Chapter Text

ENSEMBLE, I

in which tomorrow is another day

sponsored by

“LADY LAMARCK’S TALL-TALE-TELLING”

from Sept. 7th through Oct. 12th

Your FORTUNES told like never before!
The Lady will ASTOUND you with her many MAGICKS and SHADOWPLAYS!
Beware her THIRD EYE, for it will see through you!

Photographs of the event are strictly prohibited.

⟰

THE PLAYERS (in order of appearance)

KAIN, S.

DANKOVSKY, D.

LITTLE, Y.

LYURICHEVA, Y.

YAN, E.

RUBIN, S.

BURAKH, A.

KAIN, V.

KARMINSKY, M.

SABUROVA, C.

RAVEL, L.

SABUROV, A.

FILIN, G. also known as BAD GRIEF

0

Simon Kain smokes a cigarette that never ends.

He’s a tall man who with the ease of a long-leg bird folds himself in twos and threes to fit in his chair, at his desk, in his own body. The room out of spacetime he calls a study is a lesson in abstractions, white on white; pieces of wood hang from the ceiling and if you are lucky or a mathematician you’ll decipher them and learn they make a moth. From childhood he’s been feeding a fascination for insects. He catches butterflies in his dreams. He runs after them when awake only to let them go.

He betrays himself on the daily, beating his flesh into obedience. He gets up, he sits down, he lies on a bed of lies. He smiles at his brother who looks like a mirror. He runs a hand in his other brother’s hair, his little brother who is sad, both alone and split in two. He worships the future of his niece and stakes nothing on his nephew’s.

He climbs a tower all the time, all the time, he never goes down, he drinks the sky and the idea of gravity; he jumps. Blink and you miss it, he jumps, he rewinds, he goes always up even when he goes down. Crazy old bird. You’ll break your neck.

He smokes a cigarette that never ends. In a few days’ time another will find it there, unfinished, gone halfway to ash in its tray but no further. Bent at the neck and made of wood, terribly old, but so young, he pens a letter, which is more of a note, really, in red ink and full capitals. Can’t help it, his brain is hard-coded in uppercase.

ISIDOR,

DO YOU KNOW WHAT MAKES A SAINT? I KNOW: IT’S THE QUALITY OF HIS BONES. IF YOU ARE A WORSHIPPER YOU SHOULD HEAR YOUR SAINTS’ BONES SING.

MEET ME AT THE CEMETERY SO THAT WE CAN TEST OURS.

TOMORROW.

Do you know what makes a saint?

He never signs his letters.

V

Theatre lights go dimming fast in that hinterland between day and night.

Daynight, Daniil calls it. Daniil Daynight Dankovsky’s been living on that slim edge too long, so that he doesn’t remember where his body ends and his needs begin. He needs a cigarette, a drink, morphine in a tin and a hundred medicines. He needs a doctor, i.e. he needs anyone whose face isn’t too much of a mirror.

“I’m not a doctor”, he tells his reflection aloud in the wings. “Just a stray happening, a displacement of the air. When a man dies I appear and try to invert it. Shame I’m not any good.”

Now that his nerves reach breaking point he balls his hand into a fist. One punch might land, snap, deadcentre, bruise his knuckles and his pride. Glass will hold. No harm done. Two punches will do the trick. Turn one into a handful and blood-blood-blood down the drain. He readies his muscles and his bones for inevitable impact when another voice, disembodied in its familiarity, catches his momentum; he stumbles backwards a notch in an attempt to turn around, embarrasses himself more than his good name. Shame clings to his leg the way of a beaten dog.

It’s Yakov calling him, of course, Yakov who’s done more in a day than he has. An assistant without a degree, a one-man hospital. He would have laughed yesterday. He laughed yesterday. Took the man for a lackey and asked him to heat the samovar, quick-like, I don’t have all day. With how things are going, before long he’ll snap at his own shadow and invite the plague on a dinner date. He’s half a feeling she’d say yes and foot the bill.

“The orderly went ahead with the results— to your house. The Stillwater, I mean. Thought you’d want to know.”

“Yes. I’ll be gone in a moment.”

His head threatens to break, like glass. He tarries. Puts his coat on, one arm, the other arm; drinks in the other man’s presence as palliative to his chronic loneliness, that of the heavy-thinker, the time-traveler. Going forwards and backwards at such great speeds transforms simple nausea into divine afflictions, or curses, whichever word rolls easier off the tongue.

They both sit at the front of the stage, with its microscope, its tables sagging from the weight of countless files, countless lives. Their legs hang under them. From here the beds and the patients lying there seem harmless enough.

Dankovsky w(h)ets his tongue.

“I confess, I thought you wouldn’t last a day.”

The underlying meaning is: I shouldn’t have, either. He studies the man’s eyes behind the lens of his glasses; they are very clear, sort-of green but diluted, near to the colour of an odongh’s skin. Latent brilliance simmers through.

“You’ve lived in this town all your life. I am, honestly, surprised I can make sense of you.”

Yakov’s little laugh is like a gentle spell of rain in the height of summer. It touches Daniil’s cheek unexpectedly.

“And I of you. The Capital, to me— to a lot of us, really— is almost a place of myth. We hear about such things as the moving pictures because we have the loudest of cosmopolitans living among us. The Stamatin brothers, Mr. Immortell, and even that strange foreign architect who died… They’re not really of the town, you understand.”

“Yes, I think I do. It’s a case of foreign bodies. Maybe the place has to spit them out to save itself.”

“I don’t know that we would benefit. What could we replace the theatre with?”

What an odd question. Daniil laughs in the face of it, baring his throat, his teeth; glueing both eyes on the rafters, up-there.

“A hospital would be a start.” A hospital, echoes the ceiling. “A real one, I mean. Not this kingdom of cardboard. Even our morphine looks fake in this light. Maybe it is. Maybe I fill their veins with water and mine with lead.”

Eva told him the night before, as they were holding hands and reading each other’s palms, that the Town is a bull: when it is cornered it rears on its hind legs, ready to bash its hooves into skulls, into dust. She told him something else. About Simon being the antithesis of a bull. Whatever she meant he hasn’t been able to parse yet, neither in waking nor in dreams. Perhaps if he faces the problem at a slant.

He pronounces Yakov’s name, softly, then,

“Did you know Simon Kain?”

Which is also an odd question. This one doesn’t make him laugh.

“Everyone knew Simon, doctor.”

“Which is to say no one did.”

“No, we all knew him, but differently. I imagine his brothers knew him best, of course. His niece, his nephew. But sometimes I wonder… Burakh might have been his only friend, his only true point of contact with the Town’s physical body. Burakh the older, I mean. A sad thing he’s dead, sir. He understood things. He could have helped you.”

Dankovsky nods, heavy with despondency. His jaw so tight it hurts his teeth to the root; his fingerbones reduced to knots and aches. The hospital, the idea of the hospital, seems suddenly no more than a joke, a rotten play for the benefit of the dead who are watching, from beneath their dirty linens, their cheap cerements, the lead actor fumble his lines upon the stage.

“I’ve a feeling he could have helped us all.”

A thin smile colours his face, but faintly.

“I’ve also another feeling, deeper down— that he could have done nothing. That he’d have set fire to the town, as he did five years ago, and let it burn ‘til nothing but ashes remained. He was only a man, Mr. Little.”

“Well, so are you, and look at us. We’re waiting on your commands. You could become God in a few days.”

Daniil chokes on a laugh, fishing down his pockets for his silver case. He tucks a cigarette between his teeth; his hands are shaking round his lighter.

“For all our sakes, I hope not.”

He throws Yakov a pointed little look, eyes dark as to imitate black holes.

“Besides, did no one teach you? To be God you need to be loved, or feared. I’m neither of those things. I don’t wish to be.” The tip of his cigarette crackles. Red-pungent radio static blooms in the circle of his eyes. “Suppose I am just a man. It’s not that bad.”

“But you’ll beat her at her game, won’t you?”

By which Yakov means the pest and Daniil chooses it to mean Death. His nemesis, his forlorn bride in her cloak of tar. She walks through walls dragging her feet but when it’s time to eat, oh, she’s quick as an alley-cat. Her table’s laid in the theatre. She will come, she will come, heralding tomorrow’s arc blotting across the sky.

He leaves his smoke to hang by a corner of his mouth, where ash accumulates; where the weight of his worries pulls his sad smile downwards, his lower lip into a boy’s pout. Twists his fingers into the knot of his cravat ‘neath the stickpin snake.

“You’ll have to stick around and see for yourself, won’t you? A magician doesn’t reveal his tricks.”

Especially when his bag of cheap thrills is full of holes.

I

She always puts a bit of strong twyrine in her tea, as though she’s afraid of an unclouded mind. That’s Eva’s way: she’s a mathematically impossible intoxicant.

Yulia doesn’t fancy steppe herbs so much. She’s got a flask of whisky in her pocket at all times. There, that’s better— a spill of amber in one’s brew to silence an aching leg, like a soldier might need. Sometimes a scholar and an officer are the same thing. She knows where to stash pitying looks when walking by on her two legs and a cane, still young and already broken in half. Only she’s not broken, just a touch crooked. Eva, she loves that. Her unevenness, her small imbalances. They make the bedsprings sing.

Femme fatalist that she is, she does nurse a death wish or two in her cup. They come at her vapourised, in thin-white streaks; warm, for all that they chill her to the bone. Her wrist tightens at a stray thought.

“This chap who’s coming from the Capital…”

“Doctor Dankovsky.”

“Yes. What do you know about him?”

Eva plays at a thinking posture, tilts her head to one side with a fingertip teasing her chin; her smooth porcelain chill, stronger than a goddess’s.

“Nothing, really.” She grins. “Only what Simon told me. He’s clever and ambitious and has no idea what he’s doing, so he might benefit from a guide. ‘Our Town is strange to Capital-eyes’, he said. Suppose I wouldn’t know.”

“A guide”, says Yulia, knocking the word round her mouth, catching it between tired teeth. “And that would be you.”

“I’m afraid so.”

She shrugs and tosses the dregs of her tea out the window and she doesn’t care, about anything, ever. For all the years they’ve known, circled, touched, held each other, they’re different as two species of witch who can’t understand spells in any other language than their own. Math and unapologetic eroticism, what a strange duet. Simon often laughs at them for it. He doesn’t respect physics and has no use for sex.

“Of course, I’ve no idea what I’m doing either. Perhaps that’s the point. You know Simon.”

Yulia crushes the butt of her smoke-joke on her saucer, nose spitting like a godsdamned locomotive, and tries on a wry smile that doesn’t suit the gravity at work on her face.

“I have that pleasure, yes”, the word accented, sense inverted. “He’s playing one of his games again. If anything I’ll have to pity that poor devil Dankovsky. He’s in for a string of surprises.”

“A dog on a leash isn’t necessarily unhappy.”

“No, but a man of that sort… Look, he’s an intellectual. I know his type.” She gestures at herself. “He’ll have a fit once he’s told Simon is dead, or playing at it.”

“It’s alright. I’ll be there to cushion his fall.” Eva smiles. “But I always forget how you dislike the Kains.”

“Didn’t I tell you— they want me gone, and will not tell me why.”

“It’s alright”, Eva repeats. Then she lowers her voice and her eyelids. “Let’s not think about it.”

They start to make love in bright morning light. On the floor, on the rug, with windows and mouths wide open.

Yulia’s ankle screams bloody murder. Kill me. Kill me, wound that is not a wound. The scent of an overripe fruit stems from where the bone’s more fragile, broken-unbroken. A statue’s limb glued back. Eva’s forever fingers skim at it, gently. It hurts as though it’s breaking a second time. After that, maybe she’ll need two canes to walk, or she won’t need to walk at all. She’ll stay home and wait on Eva’s pleasure and make new streets and slap her lover’s sunny name on them. Flowers will grow from her wooden legs.

“You’re so young. You’ll shatter me.”

Eva’s laugh rings crystalline above their heads, dancing some upside-down tarantella on the ceiling.

“Then I’ll piece you back together, you’ll see. Maybe not today, but tomorrow.”

“Don’t let Dr. Dankovsky see me like this. I don’t want him to think ill of you.”

“He won’t.” Eva’s mouth, it’s a cave of wonders with jewels for teeth. “I know him a little already. If he hates me I’ll let you scare him, once I’ve mended your broken body. But no, I won’t need to. I won’t break anything. I promise.”

Yulia doesn’t wipe at her wet eyes, her lovelorn lashes. She closes them.

Her cracked savant’s tongue meets Eva’s own, soft as anything, velvet bliss and twyre all rolled into one. Yulia’s cig-stink becomes powerless against it. She absorbs Eva’s taste in such strange photosynthesis, like she’s a sunflower gone sad and miss Yan the only thing worth orbiting about.

“Put your pain in a box and close the lid, love.”

She kisses at Yulia’s mouth so lightly it barely happens at all. If dying is like that, maybe she can go about it more serene. But of course death isn’t real, otherwise the Capital-man, this fashionable knight errant, would not come and provoke her to a duel lost in advance.

“I wonder if he’s got a sword”, says the mathematician, skin of her fingers itching for a cigarette. Instead they dig at Eva’s warm, real flesh, pulsing between the thighs.

“I think so, ah. A very big syringe.”

“And a horse?”

They both snort.

“No, I’m sure he’s too modern for that. Besides a horse would be sad here. All those bulls… An odongh wouldn’t know what to do with a horse.”

“No”, says Yulia. “Neither would I.”

Her leg tries to detach itself from her body; perhaps it’s the other way around.

III

What do you mean, you’ve never choked on a hand-grenade?

That’s what happens when others die. A slow colourless choking. A constriction of all the things (bone-feast blood cartilage ligaments et al.) that make a throat a throat, which is to say a tunnel. A mouth, a cave. Both exit and entryway, in that order. He tries dipping a finger in it, pursuing the shape of his teeth. Correct amount, wrong pressure. He dimly recalls splitting a tooth on a piece of hardtack earlier; either in a trench or the field hospital or the town hospital slash theatre. Because there’s too little meat to butcher, he eats very sparsely.

Artemy casts his eyes down. Rubin the surgeon-boilerman, dead, bullseye. The hole in the centre of his forehead is so neat, like a dollop of paint. A hungry dog, and he is that, would glue his tongue to it. He can smell many things on Stakh’s face, first of all the sweet announce of rot yet to come, then his deadbreath, his shaving soap, his chemicals and medicines and last but not least the residual familiar scent of his father’s house. That unoccupied greenness. The house of Burakh whose great maw spat out a son to swallow another.

The scene unfolds: a brother-come-back standing over a brother-gone.

No room for weeping, but his breaking voice turns on, makes sound as would a strangled dog or a man sifting through one half of his sleep wishing away such things as dreams, itches, midnight erections. Maybe for bulls this is the sound of grief. A singular strangler-vine moan. He suffocates around the ball of loss in his throat. This was his oldest friend laid there last-supper-style on the table. This is the table upon which his friend performed autopsies. Past tense, because his friend is dead. Present tense because he isn’t.

“You were always ugly, weren’t you.”

His large hand with its war-beaten fingers splays at the centre of Rubin’s chest, brushing cold skin and rough hair there, catching on a scar turned invisible by time. He can’t remember when it happened because Stakh bruised, cut, damaged himself all the time, clumsily, a big bull stuck in a big man’s body. He was only ever sure of himself with a surgeon’s knife in his hand and death knocking on his door. Must have been when it happened— gave those fuckers a good fight, no doubt, before the bullet got him right between the eyes.

Amen to that, as would say the chain-smoking chaplain from the field hospital, way back when. T’was but a few months ago and he can’t recall the chap’s name. Artemy’s timeliness slinks away from him, scared animal thing on brittle legs. Every-thing-one’s been backing away since his coming off the train. Should have stayed and died in its coal-belching mouth.

Maybe.

His bad-cut thumbnail digs into cold dead skin. He talks to a sternum.

“We made fun of you when you started shaving your head. Looked like a soldier-man at eighteen just because you could. Grief sold all your hair to buy himself a hunting knife, but he never hunted anything— he’s the fox running from the hounds, all the time.”

He is talking to the photograph of a dead man. Rubin so black and white. Greyscale without movement, worse than the movies. He has seen only one and hated it.

“I’ll have to tell him you’re dead.”

Hated it. Wanted to slice through the screen with a pocket knife. Not what soldiers should die for, this— this shadowplaying, this sitting in the dark, this opening of wounds through the mechanism of laughter. Rubin would have hated it, too, and not laughed, never laughed. Stakh-stoic as the steppeside equivalent of a Roman emperor, his bare head waiting on a crown of laurels that will not come.

That will not come.

“Damn you, I’ll have to tell Gravel you’re dead. She’ll kill me.”

He laughs. Tar colours his tongue.

“She’ll kill you, too. Just you wait.”

Rubin, Stakh, brother-friend; does not reply. Artemy suppresses the shaking in his legs, carves himself a second heart out of wood, thinking, hoping, to replace the real one. A heart that doesn’t beat is a heart that cannot bleed. He read that in a manual, once, smoking a stolen cheroot in some officer’s tent.

“Right, then. To the bone-house with you.”

The dead man’s face eats at its white shroud. Soon there’ll be a bug infestation. Bury him.

Bury him.

VI

Hark!

cries the deathbird who cuts his way down the murderstairs. This sullen crow who’s fought a black snake to wear his skin, he reeks of gunpowder, he’s unsteady on his feet. In his limp hand a pistol hangs. At a glare sent his way by the Heart’s bartender, he stashes it in a vast pocket, nods his apologies. Spots a sad-looking soul drinking alone and plays adversary.

Victor Kain lifts his head full of lead.

“Doctor.”

Faint stubble peppers his jaw. He’ll shave tomorrow; he’ll die tomorrow. It rasps against the skin of his palm and makes him look drunker than he is, though his eyes already fill with twyre-red at the corners. Streaks of malevolent fatigue burst against his sclera. Of course that’s not right. He’s already dead. A Kain man who can tell time without a clock has to know these things in advance.

Daniil has half a mind to ask: how does it feel for a puppeteer to hang by the other end of the strings? The tastelessness of the thought shocks even him— any reference to a noose ties his overlong guts into knots.

Victor’s hands loosen about his half-glass of twyrine, liquid thick, blood-syrupy, dark brown and reeking. A fire lit up on the exact centrepoint of the steppe by highwind would smell as strong.

“I thought to check on you”, Dankovsky says. He does not say why. Something secret has happened tomorrow. “Pardon me, but you look sick.”

Small bones somewhere in Victor’s neck click, then higher, higher still. Savants have located the smallest bone in the human body within the ear. It works with vibrations, sending them through, and his brothers used to call it a bone-telegraph on which they tapped, sending messages. His ears ever since have been very sensitive. It worsens in water, which is why they are ringing.

“I nearly drowned myself in the bath this morning.”

Silence once severed grows another head, and another, and another. Good thing Doctor Dankovsky’s a deft hand with a blade.

“Did you mean to?”

“No, no.” Victor laughs, gently, but it comes out as another of fate’s sinister jokes. It stings behind the teeth. “I forgot how to sleep, that’s all.”

He’s twisting his fingers down the hem of his untucked shirt, of a blue so washed-out it’s become off-white, the same as his sclera full of strange dreams. He’s a dreamer man. Tonight he’ll sleep his last. Tomorrow he’ll find out dreams come all the more true if you don’t try to run away from them. Victor’s not trying, no. He trains his mind for death, like an army officer. The sound of his voice comes from faraway pale.

“She did warn me, when I married Nina. She told me I would make myself the eye of a terrible storm. A man in love doesn’t listen.”

Murmuring now so that his thoughts reach, gently, the smallest bone in the human body, unwilling to overwhelm it. The doctor strains his own ears, arms folding on themselves to advance over the tabletop, nearly knocking over the twyreglass, which burns his nose.

“Who warned you?” asks Daniil, who knows all his sowing of sandgrains, of liquid time from one townclock to another, won’t reap him an answer.

“Haven’t you heard? The Inquisitor is coming. Tomorrow.”

But how do you know that? You’re a dead man.

“The Inquisitor. A woman, then?”

Perhaps Karminsky has looked into a mirror too hard and conjured up another of himself. A sort of algebraic, refracted false twin, gone through three states of matter and appeared, miracle-like, at the beginning of the sequence.

He thinks of the woman with a wicked face who leaves nothing but half-smoked cigarettes and half-asked questions in her wake. She is acting as tomorrow’s shadow, an actress lost in the wings, or an imposter purposefully snaking between legions of extras and props, one hand in a glove, the other firmly clenched round a piece of decor so that she can anchor herself. Perhaps she’s the plague who plays them all. The shabnak; the clay-woman who walks on legs of bone.

“Yes”, Victor sighs. “If I know her, and I do— she will come. Her hands will destroy everything that has been made. We used to call her Nina’s inverse curve, my brothers and I, because this is what she was. The structure of her own system of reasoning could not coexist with ours.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“Forgive a dying man, doctor. It’s as they told you: I can tell the time always, and the time has come.”

Absently he thumbs at his shirt’s open collar, then reaches beneath so that his palm cushions the drunken beat of his heart. Daniil can see the thin, bony outline of his fingers and the fabric espoused, as a bunch of terrible lovers. Sensual mechanics of the eye and mind at work, he tells himself.

When a man dies I appear and try to invert it.

Here we are.

As Victor prepares for death, so Dankovsky sets himself up for failure. The Kain mind is an impossible conundrum; a labyrinth wide open from which a man refuses to come out, because inside its geometry, so luscious and comical, far outclasses the world’s attempt at rules and boundaries. His wet blue eyes fill with stars.

“I was born with a clock for a heart. Fiddled with it incessantly, as a boy. Isn’t it something? That it took me so long to break it.”

He smiles with a mourner’s exquisite patience.

Daniil, when next he sleeps, will imagine it framed upside-down in a camera’s sight and give it a title both pretentious and stale. Moving Picture, I. In which I was moved by a dead man’s stillness.

X

Karminsky too sets himself up for failure, but is not aware of it.

Behind his back whirs the projector, a machinist’s dream in a box. It produces light and shadow. His own silhouette blackens the screen with its hateful thinness, its carved, beaked profile. Imperial that he is in his curiosity, he still waits on his triumph, which will have to be recorded once, then a second time. Fate cannot afford continuity errors.

He rolls his shirtsleeves with such admirable economy of motion that the girl-thing, when she walks through the doors, does it with a sharp bird’s whistle. It smashes against the walls and dies down; it too like a bird packed with hubris thinking speed might see it fly through glass. Her teeth are bright enough to bite into a cloud. She walks the nave on bony legs and plants herself, hands behind back in her former-father’s governing posture, adding her own shadow to his across the screen.

“What a show! I wonder what they’ll do, those people made of absence. Shake hands?” She holds out hers, which he only scoffs at. “Kill each other, maybe. Which brings me, in fact, to you, m’lord.”

“Indeed?”

He casts his double more sinisterly upon canvas, with a tip of his chin and a loosening of his posture; not the loosening of the lazy, mind, but that of the jackal, lean-cut and fatal, poised for a pounce. You can tell he’s got no weapon on him, so tight the hug of the waistcoat married to his chest.

Clara doesn’t care about such things, of course. She’s the stray variable in any equation, the unknown, dubbed 𝓍. If she is bitten it’s the other mouth that bleeds. Therefore she grins in the face of doom.

“You’re dying on the morrow, mister K.”

Can a marble-man be shaken?

Karminsky, hard as any stone and twice as arrogant, turns round to shuffle at a sheaf of papers, crisp to a fault. Heron’s typewriting has its own character, which is to say lack thereof— the man’s made of trite orthographic conventions and punctuation verging on the archaic, almost elegant in his nothingness. He doesn’t look the girl-fiend’s way.

“Am I?”

He thumbs at the chain of his pocket-watch, as if to test its solidity; if it breaks, then perhaps, yes, he is going to die. It doesn’t.

“I’m afraid so. Tomorrow. Be very wary of razors.”

“You sound like a Roman augur.” He smiles thinly, eyes cold calculators. “I’ll think on it when I shave. Did a rat tell you my fate?”

“Might be.” Clara twists her lunar grin. “Rats are clever, do you know— cleverer than a majority of men, that’s for sure, or those dog-people up the Tower. They’re a bunch of fools.”

“Weren’t it rats, led off a cliff by a piper? Be very wary of flutes.”

She bows, dramatic from the lifting of her hat to the tips of her countless, jingling fishhooks.

“Very clever, sir. I play it myself.”

Sifting through more oblique administrative jargon, he deigns offer a side-eye, cutting smoothly through her greasy theatrics.

“Now you pique my curiosity. What game is it that you think you’re playing?”

“I’ve just come to warn you, that’s all. You can act on it or not. See if I care.”

Jaw muscles hard at work pulse and twitch, ‘til his hand shoots up to rub at some sore spot, then up again to the temple, where he houses his most precious thoughts. An Inquisitor has no use for charades, and him least of all, not when miracles are real in-the-flesh innovations hanging o’er townships moving seemingly backwards along the river Time. A mathematician has no use for coincidences, nor indeed this would-be saint who sows them on a whim.

More than drunk architects and bullmongers ever could, she irks him; scratches at the polished lid of his certainties to find him wanting.

“You’re warning your enemy, plague-sister.”

“I am. I don’t much like playing by the rules. They don’t apply to me. I was born in a grave, I might die in a womb.”

Then, lower, so low he can barely make the words out:

“Poor, poor mother…”

IX

One thing you do when you’ve buried a friend is you don’t bury another.

It’s a rule of nature, of nature’s son. Artemy Burakh goes about each of his self-set tasks with the seriousness of a priest at mass, or a soldier at war. Medicine is one way to save lives. Hanging in a loved one’s shadow to protect her from herself is another. Lara (G)Ravel, because she has known him since the days of childhood, summer riverbaths and mudfights, allows him, but sullen as a princess locked up in a tower of gold. She rubs her fine fingers together, chasing the chill from them. Her father’s old signet ring will always be too large for her.

“Oh, Cub. You shouldn’t be here.”

She watches not him but the clockface, stubborn in its slowness. To him it seems as though she is counting hours by the second, nursing a breed of impatience at odds with her watery placidity. If the river had a sister, they used to say, Grief and Stakh and him in the olden days… But those are gone, dead-gone. Little remains but pestclouds gathered near the door, hungry, so hungry, spreading their villainous selves in a net he will walk right through the moment he steps out.

For Rubin’s death hangs over his head like a sword of Damocles, he stands stern vigil next to the armchair, following the arc of her arm, very white, cleaving in twain the old leather. Already she casts herself into a bed of marble; will be remembered by proud women of the future who’ll grow up with rifles in their hands.

“Something terrible will happen. Tomorrow.”

“Something terrible is happening today”, he replies, not severely. “Think of those who count the dead.”

She nods.

“I think of them.” She corrects her posture and herself. “I think of joining them all day in their bird masks and their feathers. I’d be less scared of myself.”

In her eyes walk the silhouettes of army men, each blood and black, mask on, rifle o’er shoulder; tiny-toy soldiers just got ready for a puppet-play. Tomorrow’s colour, he can smell it on her breath, will be red.

VIII

Worse jokes have been told, but hear this one: the erstwhile governor and his nemesis are having a talk by the rail station, and neither of them carries a weapon.

The vulture, whose middle name is capital-G Grief, hunches in a thickblack coat, fingering the lazily tied ascot at his neck. He plays well the parody of a gentleman, thinks Saburov, who admires his effortless manner more than he should, his hazy liquidity, his way of slipping through bars, inventing escape routes with a smirk and no blueprints. He’s been tossed in jail once or thrice and always escaped. No use trying anymore when the heart’s not in it.

Saburov’s heart, well. It isn’t anywhere but home, beating for two and a half.

“Katerina. She is getting worse.”

The mocker-bird tilts his head this way and that, causing his burning hair to dance with momentum. Always a smile to loosen the thinness of his mouth and laugh at daylight.

“I’m loath to ask a scoundrel like you, Filin…”

“My thanks, gov’nor. You know how to flatter a man.”

Saburov’s pride is one hard pill to swallow. For his wife, he swallows it, with the quickness of a sickman wishing to be cured.

“But you— your supplies— you might be the only thing standing between my wife and Death.”

Grief, who was named thus because he doesn’t know how to be sorry for anything, buries his sticky fingers down the mass graves of his pockets, where countless coins and valuables go to die. Secrets have been lost therein. Innocuous mementoes, notes penned by husbands to mistresses. A lock of Wild Nina’s hair for luck. Snuffboxes full of drugs. In time of plague this would mean sitting on a fortune, which the thief-man, for all his affected shabbiness, is known for all around town.

Instead of spreading his spoils and asking for a price, he frowns. Strange expression on his face. It unsettles the third wheel of the local ruling class, and then some.

“Well, much as I hate being the bearer o’ bad news, the portent of malheur, the deathbird on a pyre— ah, but I’ve no more in the way of supplies, sir, if by supplies you mean sister morphine’s cushy arms.”

Silence begins as it ends. Sharp, cold, spiderbite. Saburov’s fists clench and itch for a fight, for a face to meet.

“What do you mean, no more? Surely—”

“All gone, ‘m’afraid. Would like to say I got swindled by more weasel than me, but that ain’t it.” Grief’s grin loses of its weird, wolfish friendliness, instead shifting to what passes for anger on his sharp cuckoo-clock of a face. “Inquisitor fella seemed to have a problem with how I run things ‘round here. That or he's himself a morphine man.”

The thought seems to delight him. It’s funny, alright. It would be if not for the governor’s wife staking her life on these ampoules full of slow death, fake sleep. Boiling rage creeps up and down his veins. Isn’t he greed personified, the ironheart devil who robs foundlings of their fathers, mothers of their daughters? If he had a noose wide enough he would hang the town by its foundations.

“Karminsky!”

“That’s the one. Tough knife. I’ll say one thing for him, he’s a scary scarecrow. Got a pistol in his coat and he didn’t even need to draw it.” The thief prince licks his lips, nervous-like. “No, sir, I know what he did to ol’ Victor Kain, who for all his faults was straight as a razor. Not walking that road meself if I can help it.”

Saburov who has, indeed, seen his rival-ruler’s eyes voided of self, has to pause, to get a tight lump out of his dry steppeland throat. Rumour has it, it’s taken no more than a finger-to-forehead gesture, and there it was, Victor no more, Victor nothing but his body-shell, his shame, his failures and his house’s name. Victor loser, what irony. It would make anybody sick.

It could have been him. It could have been him.

He has slept all night with Katerina’s naked body in his arms and the splendid realisation that a man can, easy as that, lose his mind to another’s touch. She was so thin, so fragile, her shoulder blades had fit in his palms, her head tucked into his chest. She made love half-asleep without morphine acting as both dullard friend and excitant. He loves her best like this. When she says his name effortlessly, melts into its syllables. It must show on his straining, raining face, because a hand lands on his shoulder and he’s got no will to shake it off.

“I’m sorry, gov’nor, truly I am.” Grief almost sounds to mean it. “You’re a nice enough enemy to have, and I’ve no grudge with you. Well, ‘cept for that one time, of course. One of your hounds shot a man of mine, and badly too. Tried to nurse him a bit ‘fore he croaked. Fucker died with my favourite flask to his mouth. Had to toss the thing. I’d nicked it from old Burakh’s house, don’t you know…”

“Sympathies”, hisses Saburov who has none for the likes of him.

“Now, now, no need for this dog-tone, Alexander-man. Water under the bridge, ain’t it? Lords love to blather about forgiveness. And here I am, lordling-me, extending it!”

The ex-governor’s hackles are raised, his chin tipped defiantly westwards, to nowhere; to Grief who stands in the direction of where the sun goes to sleep.

“I’m no lord”, he mutters. “That much is clear.”

“No, and neither am I. Don’t we make a likely pair, you an’ I.”

Saburov snorts despite himself. Tiny cracks litter his stone-face. He’s going to break soon; tomorrow, tomorrow.

“In a nightmare, yes.”

Grief’s laugh comes louder, larger, an endless track without a train car to roll on. Something soft about it, near to boyish. Thief princes are boys who’ve never grown up, nor needed to. With their hands they can seize anything.

“Seems like we’re living in one, right you are, gov’nor.”

He slips a few fingers in his coat, fishing a flask from some hidden pocket. Smooth metal engraved with initials, I. B., no doubt a gift from Simon to his old friend Isidor, who drank little but when he drank, ah! what a riot. Saburov remembers one such night— they were all still young, after a fashion. No paper-tower in the sky, no Inquisitors. His smile is wry, if leftover sad. He nods to the thing in Grief’s vulture claw.

“You just told me you tossed it. Your favourite flask. Burakh’s flask.”

“I’m a scoundrel, ain’t I? A liar an’ a thief.”

“Right you are.”

The crime lord, the lord who’s not a lord, uncaps the flask and takes a hearty swig. His neck shows clear the path of twyrine burning down his throat, his gut, rotgut for his throat-gut. It stinks something fierce. When he’s done he jabs the moonshine all but in Alexander’s face, grinning so hard his teeth could fall off. Those pointy ones, dogteeth, are greedy with light.

“For the road, gov’nor. It’s gonna be a harsh walk.” 

Saburov’s hand closes round the flask; round Grief’s own fingers, which are human fingers with cracked nails, kept warm by his deep pockets full of tricks. Saburov’s tongue wets the tight seam of his lips; his blue eyes work overtime, looking for a trap. It won’t come. It won’t come, so he nods and steals it from the thief, and he smells blood twyre, and grimaces a smirk.

“Hell, why not.”

A drink!

Tomorrow’s another day.

Chapter Text

STAGELEFT, I

in which rules are agreed upon in advance

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THE PLAYERS (in order of appearance)

OLGIMSKY, V. JR.

DANKOVSKY, D.

OLGIMSKY, V SR.

KARMINSKY, M.

KAIN, K.

Two DOGHEADS

IMMORTELL, M.

LITTLE, Y.

STICKY

KAIN, G.

KAINA, M.

NOTKIN

VII

You can’t hang a man twice.

So you hang another.

Day seven-again on the cathedral square at sunset, sure enough, the rope is tight, the weight dangle-swinging. No smell of the steppe nor butcher’s smock, but this time hints of chimney smoke, manure, blood under the nails. Olgimsky the Younger makes an ugly hanged man, so far as Daniil can judge; he’s not attended a lot of executions, and most of them seemed a slice less cruel than this sham, this puppetshow. A year ago he had seen an electric chair at work and the gallery’d been shock-full of ladies and gents dressed for a night on the town. A year ago he’d had the lightning spark of an idea and reverse-engineered the process, frying someone back to life for the span of one entire, glorious minute.

A year ago time had been a straight arrow. Today a mirror made of mirrors. Simon Kain’s liquid inheritance travels between all clocks in town, and the bachelor, stretched to his limit, follows.

He looks at Olgimsky-hanged, who looks at him in turn with his tongue wedged clumsy between the two halves of his mouth, trying to push out but stuck there, too limp to defy the unbreakable barrage of teeth. Blue eyes streaked with red pierce Dankovsky’s lack of a heart. It hadn’t felt so cold, so stale, when Burakh was the one whose upper vertebrae had cracked, snap, there you go; it had felt as though it mattered, and the Town had begun a very slow revolution around itself, and the Polyhedron, the Tower-shriek, had tilted. A deaf man could have heard the rustle of its paperbones.

Today-seven, today-nothing. There’s but a scatter of men distributing their shadows by the gallows, chief of all the father of bulls, his lordship reigning o’er the house of meat, huge in his huge coat; trembling in his boots, heavy-so-heavy the heels of them dig pits down the cobbles. You’d read plenty of these accounts in the news at wartime. Fathers surviving their sons. Fathers burying their sons. Fathers weeping into their dead sons’ uniforms, re-stitched with red where they’d been torn by a bullet, a knife, a lover’s fangs. Böos doesn’t weep with his face, he cries with the entire architecture of his silhouette.

You don’t stare if you know what’s good for you. So the bachelor avoids the murder-mass of him, instead slinking into observing the rest of the mute crowd— couple of townhall officials, factory workers, the cathedral’s fish-eyed caretaker, always thirsty for time.

Inquisitor Karminsky, too, is in attendance.

He wears on his face a thin, thin mouth, made for passing sentences, spitting images. One can bet a handful of coins on the promise that seas would part for him, rivers would change their course if he asked. Because an Inquisitor is an asking-machine, a receiver of answers; a terrible telephone. You don’t say no to that even if it looks just like a slim gentleman in a dark coat.

It bothers Daniil: the man’s cutting, hawkish sharpness, his face made of angles and spare theories; the negligible nick about his jawline, which was there before, too, when the day had been different, the hanged felon someone else. What bothers him most is the nobility of his posture, such as a decorated colonel’s with a good name, arms at retreat behind back and that sure tilt of the chin.

“This is fine work”, says the bachelor. “A quick snap. I dare say he had no time to choke on that rope.”

Karminsky doesn’t turn, only shifts his side-eye.

“Disapproval does not turn back clocks.”

Of course the fluidity of time does not apply to men who walk the line. Dankovsky smiles. Shuffles the deck of secrets in his pocket.

“Do I disapprove?”

“Don’t you?”

Karminsky’s nothing but a sneer in a long coat, a razor’s edge, paperwork and cigarsmoke. A letter opener in male disguise. Honed to an officer’s killing intent, a captain’s whistle, before he leaps off his muddy trench-step to have at his double on the other side. For a split-moment Daniil does wonder if he could have been there, at war, somewhere along the same line as Burakh the younger who patched up boys for months and talks nothing of it. Gone days of battlefields and soaked dressings; welcome to the theatre of pest, come one come all, no jealousies. You’ll all die here, darlings.

You’ll all die here.

“I don’t know— is it my place?”

“I’ve asked you to judge him”, says the Inquisitor. “You have pronounced him guilty of nothing but incompetence.”

“Which, in my book, isn’t grounds for a hanging.”

The Inquisitor accepts his difference of opinion with a mere nod. Because he is a bottomless box of questions, he asks another.

“Do you always wear gloves?”

It makes the doctor laugh, this; how innocuous. Somewhere down the deepest pits of his stomach he welcomes the distraction, the certainty of being able to answer. Then he considers Olgimsky’s hands, blood-life-less, gloveless, their fingernails turning to black and grasping at nothing. Blinking, he gathers afterimages upon his retina so that he might print them, later. A bunch of sorry photographs. Surely an easy question must beget an easy answer.

He’ll try.

“A precaution. I would not have death catch me unawares.”

“Sensible of you. I notice your colleague Dr. Burakh does not.”

“Calling him a colleague is something of a stretch”, Daniil counters. “He holds no academic merit and certainly no doctoral title. The steppe word for what he is, menkhu, applies to both surgeon and butcher. ‘One who knows the lines and who has the right to cut into the body’, as it goes.”

Karminsky’s mouth thins even further into a short-lived smile.

“Which does not make him immune to the disease, surely.”

Dankovsky smiles in turn, sending the Inquisitor’s own hands a pointed look.

“What of your gloves, sir, or lack thereof?”

“Please. I doubt the plague would find anything of interest about my body. It’s but an empty shell, a cardboard vessel for orders of execution.”

“Certainly you don’t believe that.” He points, just shy of touching it, at the shallow cut near the man’s ear, which rewards him with a visible tightening of jaw muscles. “There, you’ve nicked yourself with a razor. You bleed as well as I do. Perhaps better. Isn’t excellency in all things a pre-requisite for inquisitorial service?”

“Now you are being vexatious, bachelor.”

Once a man who might have been a Stamatin told him that vexation is a way of life: if you become really good at it, then you might get away with anything. Turns out that one half of a brotherhood was wrong. Vexation is a double-edged sword. It works so long as the other party whips itself into following, whether out of spite or out of begrudged admiration. No one had admired Thanatica but a few similar minds-over-matter. Many more had willed it into the ground, and so there it’d been sent; in suspension until he returns and shocks it back to life.

His glovehands bunch into loose fists.

“My apologies. I’ve not been taught to behave properly when in front of a hangman. My father only made me socialise with officers.” His grown-up wryness turns boyish for a spell, when light touches his eyelashes the right way. “Alas, I have proved myself a bad bootlicker as well.”

“You’ve too barbed a tongue, I suspect.”

Dankovsky laughs. This is all he has left.

“You should hear yourself talk. A million shards of broken glass born from the smouldering end of a cigar.” Then, near to whispering, “You could be a magnificent speaker.”

Which brings him to drop his eye down the other man’s, a fathomless coffee-depth. When fading daylight hits him just the right way, accentuating the cliffside of his cheekbone, the cut by his ear, it draws out a ray of honeygold from the very rim of his iris. Some yellowpoint gravitas hanging there, scattered, particulate. He owns many geometrical answers to many non-geometrical questions and stashes them there, where no one dares look.

Daniil dares look. It brings him close to anger, to think a man can be this: only a man and not a man at all, a number forever dividing by itself. A self-repeating, half negation.

Karminsky slowly tips his chin, tongue visibly dragging along the inside of his cheek.

“We ought to play chess, you and I.”

Another question that is not a question that is both innocuous and not. They could act out this joust forever if the world were not designed to end in five days’ time. He acknowledges with a sharp, hasty nod.

“Certainly we should. I’ve not had a worthy opponent in a lifetime or two.”

As the sun slants further into its beginning of slumber, the man with rusting hair offers him his emperor’s profile, his sliced-thin nose which would do well six feet above a pedestal, his upturned coat collar, the terrible bone severity of his face. He is ageless, then. Late-thirty-some yet all the same impervious to the passing of years, the blankness of calendar squares. He only believes in one flat surface, the chessboard, upon which he can write whatever story he fancies.

The bachelor cannot afford to lose track dithering. Clock’s ticking, the hour’s sharp. Soon it’ll be eight. He decides:

“Let us convene for a game in three days’ time— come by the Stillwater.”

They shake hands on it, skin-to-leather, while the young bull swings.

I

Dankovsky learns the name of those architectural offences against gravity when he ascends one at sunset. A child roars it from above. Stairway to heaven, bring our enemies down!

He hesitates in recognising the building hand. It could be any crazed inventor’s brainchild, but something about the non-geometry of it, the delineation of each block of concrete smashed as if by God’s own hand, tickles a part of his mind he’s done well to leave behind before boarding his train east. It smells of strong liquor, the suggestion of opiates, smoke and pills. University days, break-in migraines. He doesn’t yet know the Stamatins are in town.

When his adult carcass reaches the top of the skeleton stairs, his chest meets the single barrel of a shotgun.

From his years lived in the house of a keen-shot career officer, he knows it for what it is: hunting rifle, fine make, caliber .303. Nothing like a toy-gun, though the fellow behind the barrel is at most fifteen. A stubborn-looking boy with clear eyes and a botched, perhaps self-inflicted haircut, short trousers, blue shirt, mismatched socks. He bears an uncanny resemblance to Victor Kain, met just this morning; hence must be the scion of the family, who is said to haunt the Polyhedron and bar its entry to any who is older than himself.

“It’s not a place for men”, says the boy.

He does not introduce himself. Daniil raises both hands in a playact gesture of surrender, which seems to please his adversary. The grip of his young fingers relaxes a fraction and he adjusts the position of the breech against his shoulder.

“State your business.”

“I wanted to have a look at the town from above.”

“Well, have a look while you walk down. We can’t allow adults here, you understand. The Polyhedron’s rules apply to all buildings with more stairs than doors.”

He was this very same boy, once, looking down on anybody taller than him from behind a lens or a rifle’s scope. He wasn’t allowed in the study where his father had his weapons’ cabinet, but by the age of twelve had learned to pick locks so that he could impress other officers’ sons with his intimate knowledge of a gun’s anatomy. It has earned him a beating or two. Khan is above such laws. It is he who governs his father’s character and denies him audiences at the top of his glasstower.

“I’ll walk back down”, Daniil offers, “if you lower your gun. It disagrees rather a lot with my blood pressure.”

Though aggravated, the young tyrant brings down the barrel. Behind his back, two of his masked cronies engage in heated debate about the virtues of tactical retreat.

“There. Let my enemies know I can show mercy.”

“You should wage war on folks your age”, replies Dankovsky. “Aren’t you a Kain? I heard you people were intellectuals, not dog-mouthed warmasters.”

“Dog-faced, sir. Our mouths don’t foam. We’re not rabid.”

Suddenly he sticks his hand behind his ear to bend it, listening for the whistle of wind in the reeds come from below. The river stirs, agitates a little. It says someone drowned recently and then reemerged with a dozen different names and purposes. From his high perch the young general bows to the width of his domain clad in its autumn dress. Dignified in his sullenness, almost regal, prince Khan Kain of the dreaming house.

Turning back to the grownup and his snakeskin otherness, he smiles.

“And we are, don’t you know— at war, I mean. Only we’ve been winning for so long. The Souls are afraid of us, creeping, burrowing, hiding. They’re the foxes to us hounds, always running away.”

“Souls.” Daniil rubs at his chin. “A likely story.”

“Soul-and-a-Halves. Haven’t you heard of them?”

“I've only just arrived. It’s your dog-people who stole my tools, by the way.”

If Khan hears the reproach he ignores it with such aplomb it’s hard to fault him for his peculiar brand of polite insolence. His wide-blue eyes seem less feral, more calculating, merging with the half-smirk stretching the right side of his face. Idly he fingers at the trigger-piece of his rifle.

“Well, here’s the thing. They’re half-animal. Terrible dirty beasts, sir, with such an odd command of language. Don’t fall for their tricks or they’ll eat your dreams.”

“I’ll keep that in mind”, Dankovsky replies,

as he walks back down the stairs, counting them. He imagines himself falling all the way to the first step.

Crazy old bird, say the dogheads. You’ll break your neck.

IX

The dark, like vexation, is a state of mind. It takes a lot out of a man to consider his reflection in the strange half-light of an exhausted bulb suspended overhead.

Doctor Dankovsky cuts into his features with a shadow-made chisel. He drowns every morning in the lucidity of not knowing, and come evening swims up for air, forces his dead lungs into overtime, makes sense of results that tomorrow will be made null and void. Rinse, repeat, skin another cat. Spiders of blood crowd and colour the white of his eyes. In the mirror they dance, they make love to his cornea. From childhood he’s enjoyed observing them scuttling in corners, weaving their webs, their schemes in silk. A smart hunter never goes in pursuit. Having them staring from the cracks in his face, though, it dizzies him, pushes his skin to a crawl.

He is halfway through removing a stray eyelash from inside his lower lid with the end of a teaspoon when a shadow appears behind him in the glass, causing him to jumpstart and nearly stab himself.

“Gods damn it, man, couldn’t you knock!”

“It isn’t the done thing when you’re the one making yourself at home in my house.”

The eyesore Mark Immortell, metteur en scène and tormentor, sketches a bow in shades of irony. His brows, as always, give the peculiar impression of having been painted on, and he wears a healthy dose of kohl on top of his velvet-green coat and colourful striped scarf; a bird’s nest playacts as hair on his head.

Daniil carefully removes the offending lash and wipes at the corner of his eye, gingerly, with the tip of his forefinger. Side-eyeing the intruder is about as far as he can wound him.

“What do you want, then? In case you haven’t noticed, we’re rather busy.”

He cranes his neck to spot Yakov in discussion with a young patient, and Burakh’s sticky-fingered acolyte taking notes for him.

“Are you sick, by any chance?”

“Only sick with curiosity.”

“Oh, here it comes. You’re here with a riddle, are you not— don’t bother.”

Immortell’s smile cracks open over his very white, even teeth.

“A question, if you will.”

Daniil affects to ignore him. He rolls his shirtsleeves down, puts his gloves back on. Tense muscles in his shoulders roll, slowtide, multiply, clench and unclench under the strain of imagined exercise. Locks of disobedient hair colonise his forehead. The soft, frown-wrinkled skin between his brows. Immortell paces, twirling his cane, clacking his tapdancer’s shoes across the boards.

“Rumour has it you’ve been seen conspiring with our visiting Inquisitor, milord Karminsky of the Capital…”

“Conspiring!” He can’t help a snicker. “Your spies are blind.”

“What is your opinion of him?”

Deflection is a mirror’s best defence mechanism. Artless as his person is, the erstwhile director has mastered the technique. Daniil thinks of pushing him into a closet he’ll keep shut with three chains and a dozen padlocks, then toss down the Gorkhon.

“What makes you think I have one?”

“It is my job, my role”, and he grins, “to keep track of who is who. I swear the playbill is getting longer and longer. Names are not as amusing as knowing what’s behind them— but opinions, well. Everyone has them. In this non-economy, it does no harm to share.”

“No, save for whoever’s on the receiving end of a bad review.”

Whistling, splitting his face a-smiling some more, Immortell rests his cane on one shoulder, head tilted at a facetious bird’s angle. Playing interrogator suits him, after a fashion; he has an obvious love for the question and a knack for running all over one’s nerves. He’s also a feverish gossip. Incurable disease.

“Does such fate await the Inquisitor?”

Oh it pleases him. It pleases him. Daniil’s patience unravels one thin thread at a time.

“Nobody likes the man. Ask anyone.”

“Certainly, no. But he is not here for that. You must have some measure of his, ah, his ideas, beliefs, mental mechanisms…”

The man rubs himself salty into the wounds of the doctor’s eyes; into the lacrimal caruncle at his inner canthus, this small shred of pink obscured by the meeting of lids and the overbearing off-white of sclera fit to burst. His eyes bubble with anger. So many knives and even a bonesaw, aligned across a desk nearby, call to his attention. It would be so easy to seize one, knock back a bottle of poison or two, then plunge the thing right between the strawman’s ribs. Surely he can’t be a real man. No one calls himself Immortell if he isn’t a child’s invention.

Dankovsky only smiles. It’s quite grim, and shallow.

“Do you know, Mr. Immortell, this is precisely what I don’t like. I’ve no idea what cogs move him. In that respect he reminds me of you.”

A real man wouldn’t have laughed unless he was made of scrapyard steel, like the Stamatins. This one betrays only cheap wood, cheaper thread.

“Touché.” He bows. “You’ve a terribly pointed tongue. I will have to lick my wounds derrière le rideau.”

“Please, don’t let me keep you.”

With the madman gone, silence creeps back into the wings, just as cheap but twice as welcome. For a moment he cradles it in his arms. Sweetest of lovers, silence, with her words suggested by their own absence. She knows him well. She knows the name of all the spiders pulling strings in the inside of his eyes and plays with them when he sleeps. She’s a good mistress he can’t afford to keep; running a hospital full of the doomed, who’d have thought, requires an awful lot of dialoguing.

He walks back on stage and sits himself down at his desk, eager to peer into the microscope. The boy Sticky looks up from his note-taking, a vaguely worried frown on his face, one eye half disappearing behind a curtain of blond hair and shadow.

“What’d he want, then? He gives me the creeps.”

Daniil scoffs easily, feeling something just settled in his lungs. A generous breath after drowning down a hundredth coffee cup. The familiar, comfortable smell of a replenished pharmacy.

“Make fun of me, I expect. Don’t worry yourself about it.” He forces his face into a grin he hopes wry, if not real. “Now, tell me about these new cases…”

II

The largest sculpture in Georgiy Kain’s workshop is of a man and a woman knotted in intimate dance, both beautiful and half-nude under their carved dressing gowns. Dankovsky politely averts his eyes, staring instead at the area where their hands are gently twined.

“My brother and his late wife”, says the judge. “She commissioned it before she died, but he hasn’t the heart to keep it in his house.”

“Oh. I hadn’t realised…”

He takes another, longer look at the chef d’oeuvre.

Victor, because it is him, has surprisingly fine bones. Under his impossibly silky gown, his ribs are pushing out of him. The goddess he is locked in tender embrace with reminds Daniil of the beauty of the classics, the severity of stone not an obstacle but a cushion for her flesh; indeed she reclines indolently so as to let her hair spill down, liquid and smooth, and offers her ripe breast to her husband’s marble-veined hand. Nothing about the work is licentious despite its subject, perhaps because the sculptor himself is unaware of the stirrings of love, its promises half-voiced, its slow, sensuous stabbings.

The observer doesn’t know, either. Love for him was always at a remove, swallowed by ambition’s long shadow. Another misconception— perhaps it is in the surety of knowing, of being known, that love lays her frightful flowers.

“Isn’t it a strange thing to make”, he asks, not breaking eye-contact with it, “for you?”

“Yes.” Georgiy’s voice seems to fade under the veil of some yet unexposed grief, a harsh wound left to fester and forgotten. “It was stranger still for Victor, who didn’t know Nina had painted them like so for me to sculpt them— yes, this is her work as much as it is mine. I suppose he felt betrayed.”

“He is rather sentimental, for a Kain. Meeting him surprised me.”

The old judge turns his broad back to him, weighing in his hands, callused and strong, a hammer and a chisel, the tools of his trade; punishers of stone untouched, which shall sit and await judgement, which shall be made anew. He is bending before nature as much as he is fighting her.

“We are all builders, one way or another. I build statues and monuments. Simon built ideas; blueprints for new realities upon which the architects, in turn, learned to construct their stairways.”

“Khan— your nephew— seems to fancy himself a destroyer. I talked to him as he held a rifle to my chest.”

“He will come to terms with his purpose when he is of age. Victor was the same as him, once. Dreaming of his own version of heaven.” Georgiy smiles, which tightens every wrinkle sitting at the corner of his eyes and mouth. “He has grown to be a fine man, and a finer builder, both clockmaker and lovemaker.”

“Lovemaker. What do you mean?”

“Well, he was the first Kain to ever fall in love. He might as well have invented it.”

Once more casting his eyes upon the magnificent, stone-serious rendering of capital-L Love, he smothers the urge to chuckle as soon as it buds in his throat, unbidden and, for a moment, soft as anything.

“Really?”

“Yes. All this tinkering with his heart, I expect. He was quite the engineer as a boy. Simon raised him for it.”

Simon, if he raised his brother as he raised his town, did a fine job of neglecting such things as cannot be taught by adulthood. He appears to Daniil, through the medium of tale-telling, as a child who’s never stopped growing; when he became too large for the world around him, he simply kept going, hoping perhaps that he might turn into the vast winds sweeping over the steppe, or a secret third star playing divorce lawyer for sun and moon, or even the river Gorkhon itself, bent by its mysterious whims and countless confluences.

He hesitates. His hands start to suffocate in their leather gloves and his skin burns with the desire to touch such cold, noble marble. He swallows the terrible acidic dread in his mouth.

“Tell me about Nina.”

Georgiy laughs, sagely. With his white beard and beautiful teeth he looks as God, a million years old and counting, before he takes a bite of his own creation. This is how holy wars start, with a grin huge enough to transform a garden into a wasteland.

“I can’t tell you about Nina. It would be like asking her statue for a dance.”

“I could dance with a bust of Pythagoras, if I had to. Please, humour me.”

Slow sugar stirs within the judge’s tea-eyes, always warm even when the rest of him chills your bones. Similar to his statues he presents the profile of a commander made of the sturdiest stone.

“Well, then.”

The old man clogs a pipe with an awful amount of tobacco, which appears intermixed with the slightest bits of twyre. Smoke’s inevitable thickness rises to confirm it. Soon the workshop is made to smell of the steppe, of the great outdoors; of Boddho who nurses her bulls with infinite patience, letting their numerous horns pierce her breast.

“The Town has it that Nina was a goddess, yet subscribes to past tense; then it will tell you she is a queen in present tense. It’s always this back and forth, this stale, overwrought debate. Nobody really cares for an answer. It’s a game, a pendulum. An opinion is only interesting when it has an opposite.”

“Which is it, do you think?” asks Daniil with methodical politeness.

“Oh, that’s an easy one. She always has been the throne, of course. The mounting dread one feels when they are brought before it. More than a woman she was, is, a seat of power. A great tempest who brings both ills and fortunes.”

“She was your ruler, then.”

Georgiy smiles. If he is Simon’s impossible twin, perhaps Simon is smiling too, which discomforts Daniil as much as it discomfits him.

“Yes, and no. She ruled us, the Town, if you consider us as one body. She did not rule the house of Kain. That was Simon’s purview. He was the inverse of a storm, you understand. They had frequent arguments about this, and Victor was always loath to set himself, his strange sensitivity, between the two of them. He loved Simon as a brother loves a brother, but he loves Nina as the riverbed loves the water. Without her, he is terribly parched.”

This must be a form of immortality, this constant, mathematical state of mourning the ruler twice-removed has walled himself behind. This stubborn present verb. Perhaps he walks the steppe at night gathering ghost tales and deposits them at the feet of his marble spouse, up in the Cape, where men of high standing are said to bury their humongous wives and raise monuments to their names. A child told Dankovsky earlier that if you pay your respects between sunset and moonrise, Wild Nina will laugh in your face, loudly. He may try it if he finds a scrap of leftover time in his pocket.

Before he has a chance to mull over an answer, the door opens on Maria, whose thick dark redness shifts all the colours in the room. Instantly the air bruises ‘neath the brute force of her gaze, mirrors within mirrors within mirrors, the potency of reflections; it congeals Daniil’s blood in the cradle of his veins. The heiress as her mother’s square root. The fruit fell from the tree has to find out how to climb back up its branches. Her dress ripples at her feet.

Dankovksy offers a bow.

“My lady.”

“Bachelor.”

She doesn’t return it. Indeed her spine seems locked into place, an arrow facing upwards. She shall reach the heavens or die trying. Saluting her uncle, solemnly, her eyes shift to the uncovered sculpture and she is seized by a sudden spasm. Her long, endless hands reach for the dusty sheet at the foot of the plinth. Swiftly the old man grasps at her slender wrist, without violence but a firmness that twists Daniil’s guts into aches, as if he is finally glimpsing a hint of Simon through the physicality of his lesser double;

an immortal man is only someone both very old and very strong.

Maria averts her hard, flinty eyes. Her parents’ profession of love drives a stake through her freezing heart.

“I can’t bear to look at it, uncle.”

One gentle sculpting hand pushes black hair out of her face, behind the ear, which is the exact shape of her marble-mother's. His thumb reaps an eyelash from the slope of her cheek.

“It’s your inheritance, girl. Stab it in the eye.”

And though she tries there is resentment in the angle her brows tilt at; in the forced looseness of her limbs, the manner of her speech, her stilted inflections. Had she been alone, Daniil thinks, she would have taken a hammer to her family name and smashed it to smithereens.

“They loved each other so much.” A loud whisper holds her voice hostage. “See how tightly their limbs are locked, their faces trying to become one— there was no space in that fierceness for even a small child. Growing up in that house was its own sort of theatre.”

“Are you scared that you will not inherit it— this science of loving?”

Dankovsky asks it very quietly. He is afraid she will wring his neck for it.

“On the contrary. There is so much of it inside of me, it fills me like anger’s more dangerous twin sister. I would sever it from my breast with a piece of broken mirror.”

Freeing herself from her uncle’s grasp, she walks to the pedestal and sits herself at its foot, half in prayer half in penance, dress blooming all round her silhouette, flower-fury the shade of blood. Daniil has to bend very close to hear the sorry lilt of her next words, spoken in a very young girl’s voice.

He keeps them to himself.

V

By day five Khan Kain, prince of riflebolts, still lives in a cage of his own making. He plays chess with his captor when Daniil walks in, a collection of headaches in his gladstone bag. The red-haired, half-animal boy who goes by the name Notkin grins all crooked.

“Khan! Here’s your doctor comin’ about that rabies case.”

Speaking to local children is no easier than dealing with steppefolk. They race you with their eyes closed, their words make twists and turns, devious as snakes. Some adults think they practice magic too. The Kain princeling offers the pale, arrogant arc of his throat.

“I told you, I’m not rabid.”

“Suit yourself.” Notkin turns to Daniil, expectancy plainwrit upon his young face. Dim warehouse hanging lights shine on the dog collar he wears close to his neck. “Hope you ain’t here to take ‘im out of his cage. Hasn’t served his sentence yet.”

The doctor shrugs, pretending not to care about the fate of aimless urchins.

“I happened to be in the area. Thought I’d check on him, if only to reassure his father— I say, what’re you two playing at?”

Pieces are arranged so haphazardly upon the board, some upright, some lying on their sides like dead soldiers, that it’s a while before he understands the arrangement to be intentional. Notkin squats in front of his own side and tickles the crown of his king. In the same breath he spits an impressive ball of phlegm that lands on the other side of the bars, right by Khan’s scuffed boot.

“He’s a chess grandmaster. Means he makes up his own rules, far as I know.”

“You’re only sour because you’re losing, Notkin.”

“Well of course I am. I don’t know them rules, do I? In a minute you’ll tell me a camel is worth less than a colonel, which isn’t true.”

Daniil grabs what length of thread he can, chiming in with the loudness of his adulthood.

“Beg pardon, gentlemen, but these pieces don’t exist.”

“Don’t listen to him”, mumbles Khan. “With enough willpower you can make a horse into a camel. A knight should be able to ride any sort of animal.”

Notkin snorts, rearranging the gameboard once more and bringing its strange solemnity back to square one; its childish snares, its made-up principles.

“No knight could tame a Half if ‘e tried. Us lot, we don’t care for swords. We’ve got teeth in large numbers.”

“Dogs have teeth too, you know.”

“Fake teeth don’t count. ‘Sides you ain’t a dog, only the king of ‘em.”

They pretend to fight for a while. One blow equals a blow returned. It’s a surprisingly fair trade in a town built upon unfair ones; a handful of nuts equals a vial of morphine equals a few shards of colourful, kaleidoscopic broken glass; a match equals a button, an egg equals a straight razor. Mathematics of the absurd run currency. Daniil’s pockets are full of bullets and loose red threads of fate.

When the boys get bored of their metaphysical wrestling, they turn to the next best thing, which is an intruder who looks like he’s got places to be but doesn’t know where those places are. Notkin arcs an awful suspicious eyebrow.

“What’s in your bag, man?”

Daniil lets the redhead boy wrestle it from him, fighting back but half-heartedly, which tells a lot about the limpness of his grasp. His fingers hang like a rope of sausages. The rest of his arm goes numb. Curiosity killing cats is a saying that holds very little weight, nowadays: the kid rifles through the contents with gleeful savagery. He grabs an object at random and holds it in front of his eye, in the mimicry of a jeweller’s expert assessing glance. The vial of morphine hogs all the light.

“Oh. Ain’t that an awful lot o’ drugs.”

“For the hospital. Traded a small fortune in bullets for those.”

“I suppose it was only a matter of time”, Khan says, “before Grief got you in his pocket. You lasted five days. It’s an honourable score.”

Daniil hides embarrassment behind a try at a good-natured smile. Exhaustion is only made starker on his face, in his voice. What is this town, where children know all about forbidden currencies and can tell you anything from the mathematics of the soul and their inner workings to the mechanics of drug deals going on under the bull’s belly?

“Needs must, and all that.”

“Might as well stay a while”, offers Notkin. “You tell me if he cheats.”

Truce ends with the next made-up advance of a non-existent piece across the board. Dankovsky sits himself down to watch and learn, the way he had long ago as a boy, eager for his mind to expand, discover new colours and new sounds. For the span of a breath, he forgets the world is ending.

X

The Stillwater does not have a fixed number of rooms.

It shifts, it evolves, an inscrutable animal, a body that reinvents itself out of its own revolutionary blueprints. When the Inquisitor comes at the appointed time, it grows a suitably polished game parlour smelling of expensive liquor and a hookah pipe just left there to hang as if an afternoon ago. Daniil runs his gloved fingers atop the green felt of a card table on his way to a marvelous, hand-carved set of chess pieces resting upon their board. Karminsky follows suit, touching nothing. Red curtains and red cushions give colour to the otherwise dim-lit space.

They sit face to face and in one smooth move both reach for cigarette cases inside their waistcoats, appraising each other’s choice of smoke. The doctor tucks a sleek, lightweight brand between his teeth, smirking at his adversary’s foreign cigarillo. His nose though not as good as Burakh’s has been trained in Capital vices.

“Turkish?”

Karminsky breathes out thick bluish smoke with his assent.

“I once knew an architect who fancied those. In fact, this room smells just like he did.” He eyes the chessboard, noticing he’s picked blacks without looking. “Your move, bachelor.”

Under soft lamplight his hair ripples as burnished amber, oddly warm against the cold, quiet thinness of his face. It startles Dankovsky to see shadows accentuate tension below his eyes, twin pockets of sleeplessness and the same spidering of blood vessels he’s noticed creeping into his own. Of course, the Inquisitor is a human thing, which is easy to forget and easier still to overlook when his sights are on you. Men such as him are rather formidable weapons; they are men only when that serves their interests.

Daniil advances his first pawn, feeling excessively cautious in his gesture.

The game goes on and it is obvious, only a few moves in, that Karminsky holds the upper hand and has no intention of relinquishing it. When asked about his swiftness of thought and the ease with which he sweeps the board clean of white pieces, he only overlaps a thin smirk with smoke.

“Calculations would be of no use to you. As a medical man, you’ve a necessary experimental approach. But a chesspiece only suffers from one symptom, which is being taken.”

“While you think in theoreticals”, Daniil teases, almost, a wry curl to his lip, “like some mathematician.”

An amused tilt of the head and another inhale. The Inquisitor seems, if possible, to have lowered his defences. The knot of his cravat loosens with the same clipped grace as his limbs.

“I belong to the species, if at a remove. Believe me, my approach is more practical than that of my academic peers.”

“Of course. I don’t imagine professors of geometry have made it a habit to hang wrongdoers by the neck until dead.” He mulls it over. Something about it sours his gums. “Have you ever taught?”

“No. It was not my calling.”

It was not his calling. Daniil has to agree; either he would have been a resplendent conférencier able to see his words soar to the highest heavens, or, and perhaps more likely, would have terrified his students into late nights spent cramming so much equations up their heads that decimals and integers would’ve started spilling from their ears, nose, mouth. He would know, because at least two of his own professors sent him on that same downward spiral. With both horror and strange, misplaced nostalgia, he recalls aches at the nape of his neck and bleeding fingernails, bitten to the quick.

His work had meant something, then, and not yet been doubted or qualified as ‘utter lunacy’ (sic) by heads of departments and laboratories, so detached, ageing and full of themselves it surprised him to hear them discard so readily the idea of a potential cure for death— would they not have wanted it for themselves? He has learned since that cynicism rolls infinitely easier off the tongue than any sort of open, risk-taking discourse.

The game goes on. It ends the way it is supposed to.

The king falls off the board, and off the table, its tumble cushioned by the thickness of a persian rug. Both players coincidentally bend sideways on their chairs, mirrored, to retrieve it; lightly knock at each other’s knuckles by accident. Karminsky, quicker and boasting a longer reach, grabs the white king and turns it in his hands.

“So this is what victory over you looks like.” He sounds pleased, which in turn irritates the bachelor. “Were it so easy for you to defeat the outbreak…”

“You said it yourself”, counters Daniil, scrabbling back to salvage whatever’s left of his arrogance. “A chesspiece only suffers from one symptom. A human body has enough space for many.”

“A fault in our design I find difficult to forgive.”

“Now you speak as an architect.”

Commonly they decide to leave the chessboard behind, without bothering to rearrange the pieces. The house will do it for them. They walk their way to the room’s sole window, high and curtained in blood, from where they can see into another room at the opposite end of the Stillwater— the library, with its charming nooks, its step-ladder piled with heavy volumes, its globe of the world within which sleep a dozen bottles of whiskey, absinthe, local brews.

Karminsky lights himself a second cigarillo. With a slow thumb he teases at the mullion, its white paint peeling effortlessly, in the manner perhaps of some saint’s skin flaking off at the end of their martyrdom. Daniil can but think on the seventh day’s hanged man, be it Burakh or Olgimsky or another, and imagine his hands deliquesce, attacked by cold night air, bugbites, shameless onlookers. It must be hard being dead when you resent being stared at. He should know. It’s one of his greatest fears.

Leaning against the window’s casement, he interrogates the Inquisitor by his scent; breathes in the exquisite, costly sharpness of his smoke, then the thin coat of aftershave layered below, faintly citric, astringent, uninterested by the possibility of being noticed. Below that he smells of nothing at all. He stands there, mathematics in a suit, sleeves tailored to perfection, trouser-legs gently pinstriped. All geometry without warmth, hence these cool tones to balance Dankovsky’s signature burgundies and oxbloods.

He doesn’t look as though he is afraid to die, so the bachelor has to ask. Karminsky returns him a faint, discreet variable of a smile.

“Am I afraid to die?” He ponders it round a mouthful of cigar-smog. “As much as the king of the losing side fears losing its head. We are trained to eschew sensitivity to such things.”

“You can’t abstain from death.”

Not yet, anyway. Re-shuffling those cards is what his existence shall amount to. The man of Law, if he agrees, does not offer more than a low, amelodic hum. The lacquered tint of his coffee-eyes darkens with the room, the faint, lingering scent of the hookah abandoned somewhere behind them by a man long-dead, who favoured the colour red and spun future buildings on their axes all day. Daniil suspects the folds of his coat are collecting this peculiar perfume and upon their exit will carry it for the rest of his days.

Suddenly he finds himself infinitely weary. His leathered knuckles tap at the glass.

“Would you wish to, if you could— trespass in the country of the dead, and come back. Or never go there at all.”

He forgets to give it the cadence of a question, which the professional questioner might find deliberate. Something suspiciously close to honesty simmers in his boiling stare. He untucks the slim cigar from between his teeth. Helixes of smoke flirt with the ceiling.

“I don’t know.”

All the town’s clocks hiccup on a stalemate.

Chapter Text

STAGERIGHT, I

in which razors are sharpened

sponsored by

“THE HANGMAN’S CUT-THROAT”

For the cleanest wet shave

&

cutting through any rope.

⟰

THE PLAYERS (in order of appearance)

KARMINSKY, M.

DANKOVSKY, D.

HERON

SABUROVA, K.

SABUROV, A.

STAMATIN, A.

STAMATIN, P.

An ensemble of REVELLERS

KROY, V.

YAN, E.

LYURICHEVA, Y.

XI

A morning shave at the crack of dawn is an opera for the initiated;

a knife, a throat, a drop of blood.

On this eleventh fateful toll of the dead, the Cathedral fills itself with unbreakable mirrors in which a man can only see his reflection if he looks for it at the right angle. It takes the Inquisitor the better part of a quarter hour to choose the one he’ll use so as to minimise the risk of his bleeding. He is unhurried. He doesn’t know the gestural language of haste. Where he has been schooled to cut out his heart from his chest, such a thing simply didn’t exist. As a young man he has ripped the possibility for panic out of his own body, numbed his nerves, married the toxin of apathy, let her make love to the most convoluted cross-sections of his brain.

He is half-dressed in the certainty of present tense already, shoes neat-polished, hair combed back; he is half-nude beneath crude cathedral light that has no time to spare for miracles nor prayers. The place makes any man thirsty, as per a condition fine-printed in its definitive schematics. Water in a glass evaporates the second you turn your back on it. If he wants to drink he ought to step out. The caretaker always gives him the evil eye.

When he sees his face in the mirror, Karminsky finds himself strangely redder, as if the polished surface had been imbued with a very thin layer of blood. His hair shimmers like a fox’s hide, much brighter than faintbrown stubble dusting his chin.

“My apologies, sir.”

Heron the redtape man, the born secretary, plays valet de chambre this morning. He carries a folded towel, upon it a cut-throat razor, folded as well. Its butcher-glint soon will make each of the cathedral’s clockhands jealous.

“You’ll want to be quick, Excellency. The seventh hour’s toll is always the loudest.”

He nods.

“Please, watch the water.”

The water needs being watched at all times, lest it misbehaves, plays disappearing act. Evaporation needs heat. This sort of spiriting-away doesn’t.

It goes against capital-L Law with such elegance, the Inquisitor himself cannot annul it.

He thinks of a pond once designed by an architect for a grand manor’s garden; it was always dry, unless someone happened to look at it, and then they could see ripples of light on the thinnest surface, barely an inch of wet. He reasons this peculiarity of the cathedral must obey the same rules. He reasons further and decides they might be sister-pieces. On both counts the architect was a terrible man who wore a lot of blood, had silver coins for eyes and tied his oxford shoes with red threads of fate.

Heron does not take his eyes off the basin. His presence surrenders to overbearing vacant space, so that he is near invisible.

Doctor Dankovsky, too, is in attendance.

Skirting round the scene, he takes the table for an execution platform; the razor a pocket-guillotine. His leathers, his snakeskins, under a thousand quiet lights glisten, looking damp. He keeps his terrible tongue in the cave of his mouth. Painting there theories of inane healings, bending Death’s own spine backwards ‘til her skull meets her heels.

Karminsky cannot entirely ignore him, which preys on his careful-concealed vulnerabilities. He knows he looks almost human in his white undershirt, tight at the shoulders and a fraction loose about the waist. His lean arms were once freckled before the sun faded out of his skin. Tendons come harsh, piano-strings over the backs of his hands, as he covers his knife of a face in coldwhite lather, breathing out, fogging up the stark surface of the mirror, unbreakable as he could’ve been, if made of less flesh. Inadequacies often can be summed up as easy mathematical operations failed by a careless mind. Overlooking things is in man’s nature. Not in his.

The vulture-snake circles, circles, plays hand to the cathedral’s many clocks. Looks as though he knows something the Inquisitor doesn’t.

“You have a fencer’s grace”, Dankovsky observes, reptile-tongue at the ready, flattering, flattening.

“It serves to know how to use one’s own body. I learned as a young man.”

“Speaking with you is like being held at swordspoint.”

Karminsky unfolds the straight razor, holds it aloft, so that its edge plays at being a mirror too.

“A thrust bleeds less than a slice.”

“That depends.”

Death’s own nemesis bows his dark head, perhaps to hide the slight curl of a smile blooming noxious at the corner of his endless running mouth. The creak of leather betrays his fingers, flexing.

“Why call me at this hour, then? Are you afraid to nick yourself?” He chuckles, bitterly. “You did on the seventh day, before we met.”

Silent for a moment more, the Inquisitor tests the edge of his blade on the tender flesh of his thumb, only just bending skin unto itself; taking in the first warning sign before it has a chance to bleed. He angles his face in such a manner that it appears in the glass, ghastly white and still, awfully red. Foxred. The hunting man, hunted. The hunting man hunts himself.

“A rat told me my fate; told me to be wary of razors. I am trying to heed her advice. Hence a physician, just in case.”

“I’m sure I can guess at the rat’s name.”

Dankovsky’s gloved hand rectifies the mirror’s angle, slight enough that it doesn’t swallow Karminsky’s reflection but lightens it.

“She’s a hard one to catch”, he adds.

The first pass goes very slow down the side of the jaw, so controlled as to seem artful. A surgeon’s touch in another life. He rinses, repeats. Catches the doctor-double’s eyes.

“I will have her hanged by her fish hooks.”

“Was it not enough for the governor to publicly renounce her— I didn’t take you for needlessly cruel.”

Needless needling, needles. The back of the Inquisitor’s skull itches for dreams, the inside of his eyelids for the sweet intellectual kingdom of sleep where he may solve problems before they occur, upon waking able to present anyone with a solution. He has never been wrong. It’s all in the name: solution of morphine. He runs his tongue behind his teeth, his razor across his cheek. Each tilt of his head asks for the sum-total of his control. Infinite precision in the tightening of a muscle, the shift of a bone in its eternal socket.

Dankovsky, like a man parched after forty days of desert, drinks from the gesture in polished mercury, his dark eyes formidable, perhaps bloodthirsty. One could hear Heron trembling in his boots, if one remembered the existence of a cardboard cutout in a three-dimensional space.

“Such economy of movement would make your fingers quite a prize. Yet you are very tense, as if with each pass bracing yourself for the cut. For a man who does not believe in prophecies, I find you terribly cautious.”

A trail of soapscum, white and sluggish, follows the hangman’s neck.

“Consciousness comes with its constraints. I could do it better in my sleep, but morphine is spare. I hesitate to waste it on half a girl’s counsel.”

“You should try it in the Tower. I hear it’s made of mirrors within mirrors within mirrors.” The doctor smiles, indulgently. “But of course the dogs are at the top of the stairs. They’ll bite your head off.”

“I would rather slit my own throat”, says the Inquisitor, swiping the slice-edge of the razor up the arrogant arc of his apple. Whitefoam glistens now at his collarbone. “These dog-people, are they so dangerous?”

“Quite. Their leader threatened me with a shotgun.”

Karminsky’s eye cuts through the bachelor’s coat of nonchalance.

“You have a knack for teasing the wrong side of a weapon.”

Dankovsky gently tilts his head and smiles, digging thinly at the corner of his mouth. He paces still but with a caged lion’s slowness, counting, measuring.

“I’m not the one whose death was foretold. You’re not done yet— you could yet happen upon a mishap.”

The death that was foretold does not happen. 

Relief is easier to hide than blood. The razor is folded in a snap, quick, clean as a neck’s break on a lucky day at the gallows. The Inquisitor’s double, hard as stone, seems unaware of Dankovsky’s presence. In the glass a centipede curls itself around his ear, black to reddish-brown hair, its half-a-million legs gone twitching. His real hand swats at nothing. The thing’s chitinous carapace glistens, an oilspill stuck within the loop of its forever undulation. It hugs his mirror-thumb. He feels it even outside of his reflection: the shiver of one live thing coming in contact with another.

“Heron”, he calls, “is there still water?”

“Yes, Excellency. I’m looking at it. I scarcely remember how to blink.”

The hangman washes his face while his likeness observes, very still.

And tolls the seventh bell.

VII

A note from one morphine addict to another crosses Town in a neat diagonal.

The Lady Saburova unfolds it, eyes it with cautious calomel eyes. His Excellency the Inquisitor courteously asks a single question, punctuated with the no-nonsense flourish of his signature: who is the Lady's provider? She is to send a porter with her answer to the cathedral before nine o’clock sharp. She pens the grieving vulture’s moniker with her heart at the threshold of her lips. It’s either that or the noose, and she can’t stand to foresee pain, much less breakneck death, at the centre of her own future. As she writes, her other hand rests upon the barren land of her belly, which rats keep gnawing at when they can’t nibble on her dreams.

Alexander comes home from the cathedral with a fistful of headaches and a spot of blood on his collar. He forgot his scarf before heading out, he says, looking at all of her save for that limp hand, so painful white against the dark of her gown. He stares into her sleepless eyes.

“You’ll forgive me, I hope.”

He does not say for what, but of course a mother knows those things— they had a daughter for a week, and then he let her face the drop alone— no, she is not dead, cannot die— he rubs at his neck as if he’d been hanged earlier and walked away from the gallows afterward, very guilty of living on.

“Who were you writing to?”

“The Inquisitor.”

Whose tremendous reflection lives within her shifty eyes, afraid of itself. Rats would have at him. Her own rat, her country prophet in its nest of rags; how it would bare its fangs, its many razor-claws, and slash at the hangman’s throat. Bedroom shadows engulf the lovers in their fruitless marriage, velvets them. Her breath is thick, sick of it, a restless dying wheeze, a knock on the door, on all the doors. Death called once, death called twice, death-revenant, she will come. She will come, in four days’ time, and lay down the morphinomane.

“He wanted to know something”, she adds, absently. Her fingers fumble about her pen.

Noiseless Alexander nods. Wretched be the father who has a daughter to bury.

Where is her body?

X

Andrey Stamatin collects straight razors.

Peter his twin, his artful / artless shadow, his bone-madness, collects empty canvases, candles and stairs. He is holding a funeral in his bathtub for a dead fish. He brought it home in a flash, run-run-running ‘til out of breath out of twyrine, and for what, for only realising that he had no water to let the thing live in. It died quickly. It flopped on its side, threw his side-eye this way and that, seeing nothing but water by its absence. Its gills had imitated breath. Its teeth— its teeth— ah, but they have fallen out, look there, what filth. Scarecrow that he is in his blanket-coat, hunched over, despondent, the architect prays for the departed.

Andrey sharpens his blade for the morrow, ignoring him until he can’t. He sniffs, disdainful animal. He sniffs out steppe-liquor, stale cocaine, soap so black-rotten you could break it on some poor sod’s nose.

“You’re moping, brother.”

“I liked this fish, don’t you know.”

“You’ve had it for less than a day.”

Time passes the way it tends to in the loft: dizzy-drunk, syncopated, a bastard dance. The bathtub fills with Peter’s alcoholic tears, soft and sugary, thick, sap-sticky, honeybrown. The fish drowns in it. Andrey’s left eye narrows.

“It’s not the first time I kill for you.”

“No.” Peter bends his head in the manner of an orderly, as if he wore a beak, as if his face had grown ten times its length and his skin had melted to the bone. “But this time it looks as though I’ll kill for you.”

The murder-brother gets up and rotates about the room, sporting Peter’s hair and Peter’s rags and Peter’s nightmares in the corner of his head, or his pocket, somewhere, nowhere, his reflection spinning with him in the face of the straight razor.

“Well, in a manner of speaking. I’ll still be the one holding the knife.”

“He’ll look into my face when he dies.”

Andrey grins, his moon-jackal teeth filed to terrible points by a strip of light, which makes his lips seem infinitely redder than they are. Street urchins say he tears the throats of dogs and drinks their blood by the gallon, which isn’t that far off from the truth.

“Oh, he’ll see you alright. Maybe he’ll regret it. I hope he’ll regret it.”

“I hope he won’t.”

“Brother, what a contrarian you are.”

“No, really. If he regrets it then the killing will be done in vain. I don’t want that hanging over my head.”

His bit-down nails scratch at his now clean-shaved cheek, Andrey’s cheek, a little horrified. It’s his brother, he stole his stubble, his painted-on layers of neglect. His eyelashes too. They seem longer on his Peter-face.

“Besides, it would vex me.”

“Vex you.” Andrey mimics him, wincing at the rasp of Peter’s beard on his own jaw. “What the hell. He’ll be dead.”

“Yes, but he ought to think it’s worth it. Otherwise our Tower won’t mean a thing. He needs to be its enemy, and I need him to be my enemy. A man is nothing without an antagonist.”

“We’ve got plenty of enemies.”

“That’s just the thing. We need only one, like in the good old days.” His mouth dries to the extreme, tongue crackled as the steppe itself, prisoner of its yearning for the divine dew made of her grasses. Red creeps into his caruncles. “I think about him all the time.”

It’s just the thing to say.

It’s just the thing not to say.

Swirl-anger follies about Andrey’s knife-eyes, his murderteeth murderfingers, his brutish tendons, bones, fistfuls of hate-love, self-loathing self-preservation. Cartloads of memory wrecking on a harsh road. Trains don’t come no more. The Capital is dead. The red king is dead. Thrice-toppled off the board, the table, the Tower-scream. He went down down down one stair at a time and landed, immaculate, at the bottom, not a bruise, not a hair out of place. He wagers the Inquisitor will pose the same challenge: the blade goes in, never comes out. He’ll sharpen it twice, to make sure.

“Fancy that. I don’t think about him at all.”

A kill is a kill is a kill is a kill— once you’ve had your first, well. It’s all the same.

0

Capital-rain always falls acidly and at a slant. It melts pigeons’ corpses rotting in gutters.

The house's game parlour fills with smoke of a thousand brands, with the scent of blood stirred in a pot, meant to excite hounds before the hunt. In the garden couples kiss on cornerstones, men, women, all sorts of in-betweens and asides, throats licked clean, teeth overbrushed as though diamonds reeking of mint. A lordling's hand slips beneath the skirt of a smart heiress in black who's just buried her two brothers and has been found crying under the colossal weight of her inheritance. Drunk artists paint each others’ bodies with teeth. Army men suck on ladies’ cig-holders while the ladies suck on their rigid sabers, and somewhere at a baccarat table, a handsome ambassador and his fiancée fondle each other between long pulls on an opium pipe.

In two days, Inquisitor Karminsky will take a train east to assist with the end of some world.

For a while he plays chess in a dim corner of the salon, sharing a table with a coterie of mathematicians, tucked behind the grand piano where an angelic boy with curls like silk plays a fast ragtime. Late-summer insects come flitting through the French doors, eager to nest in a gentleman’s cuff or a shirt collar. He wins all his games. Then the ones after that. When they shift to low-stakes cards, he excuses himself.

“You could have them eat in the palm of your hand”, says a woman jumping off a settee nearby.

Young and wry, she reminds him of someone; an older colleague of his with a daughter boasting two university degrees in matters of the body. Perhaps a third under her skirt. Already she’s picking at his ascot, breathing in his aftershave.

“Mathematicians”, she scoffs. “They respect only members of their own species who can outsmart them. Oh, I’m sorry— you aren’t one of them?”

“Yes.”

“Terribly rude of me.” She cracks a match under her bootheel, lights a black clove cigarette. “Please don’t take offence. I despise geometry, but algebraists are alright. I can tell you’re no geometrician. You look altogether too rational.”

“Arithmetician.”

“Numbers? Yes, I can see it. You’ve awfully nice cheekbones.”

He can tell she’s halfway to drunk and cares for nothing. She hands him her smoke, which he takes a puff on to be polite, his own cigarillo still half-going in his left hand. It tastes of road tar, chemicals, and the air by the factories and warehouses squatting on the waterfront. It’s like inhaling the underside of a motorcar. He hands it back with his name, which she puts in her cigarette case in lieu of a business card.

“Voronika Kroy.” She briefly grasps at his fingers to kiss them. “I’m terribly bored. Won’t you come upstairs?”

They nest in a room at the very top of the house, right under the attic. Her expertise in matters of the body isn’t exaggerated. Between them they get only half-naked, he from the waist up and her down, long white legs the safe colour of bone against the house’s spare bedsheets. Whoever lives here hasn’t changed them in a while. The room spreads itself, its dust and mothball thickness. From a window left ajar they can still hear the party go on downstairs, the light-hearted sex and parlour games, the piano man increasingly drunk on his own beauty so that his fingers made slippery by absinthe play the songs backwards.

The Inquisitor shoots himself up with an ampoule of morphine, a needle, and reclines in that blissful state, half-sleep half-stupor, which refines his thinking from a sword's guard to the sharp tip of a rapier he points only at his own throat. She links her arm with his, whistles a few phrases from last year’s triumphal operetta. It was the story of a man who ate stars. He died from indigestion at thirty-nine and the actor, who was the same age, died with him on the boards.

“How do we know each other, anyway? I’m sure I’ve heard your name somewhere. Karminsky, Karminsky… it’s got a ring to it.”

“A mutual acquaintance. Your father, as a matter of fact. Inquisitor Kroy.”

She slaps her bare thigh with a highpitched laugh, which could send any flag a-flutter; outside hanging from balconies they’re itching to fly and wrap themselves round her burning, revolutionary body.

“Oh, but of course, you’re that hangman fellow. A colleague of his. I say, is that terribly hard, to hang someone?”

“I don’t do it myself. I’m only the passer of sentences, a Charon of sorts.”

Short strings of delight bubble up from the strong-corded surety of her throat. She is a woman who knows what she wants.

“No, I didn’t mean physically.” She looks him over, his palecold leanness even starker in the semi-dark and yellowed by the halo of a kerosene lamp perched on the dresser. He feels her hundred eyes on every needle-mark on his arm. “You’re all bones. Very tightly wound, but still, a thin man.”

He scratches at his jaw with a sore thumb, looking at the closest wall a hundred kilometres away. She keeps on staring.

“So, you didn’t answer— is it so difficult?”

“I’d say it’s no harder than cutting one’s head off.”

“You think I’m messing with you. Ask the Inquisitor a question, he’s a morphinomane, he won’t kill you.” She grins in that penumbral way, hiding her eyes but none of her teeth. “Well I’m not. I’m very curious, that’s all.”

She stacks some twenty-seven years one upon the other, as if trying to build a tower out of her age. She is still younger than him by a solid ten, which neither of them does mind. She could be a hundred, a thousand, with that knowing smile slapped on both mercurial and oracular. Quicksilver mouth. It spins a lot of yarns.

“My father says you are a cruel man.”

“That is a common opinion.”

“And very intelligent. Cold, cutting. A blade, a razor. Does that mean your throat can’t be slit?”

He hums in slow, sullen chiaroscuro. Something about his voice has teeth, he knows, and he hears it himself when surrendered to his intravenous mistress, and it's hungry, it wants to bite into these platitudes. He's a machine except when he's an animal. The sheen of sweat on his forehead dis(quiets(gusts(tracts))) him. Numerals hang about the ceiling, waltzing, waltzing. It takes him an age to register what she is saying and an age more to reply,

“I don't know. No one has come close.”

“That's what he said. He said, d'you know about this man— everyone wants him dead, but when they draw pistols on him their own bullets hit them in the nape of the neck. Backwards.”

“Who said it?” he asks, sharply.

“Some out-of-touch fellow downstairs. The ambassador.”

Karminsky hums again.

He doesn't tell her that he and the ambassador were once schoolmates and this was sort of a running joke between them. It ran away with him the day the Inquisition swept him off his feet. Thinking of the strange foreign country of boyhood stirs morphine’s cold in his blood. The city back then had seemed less of a Capital punishment and a day of spring could mean anything, from an afternoon’s birdsong to the silvering of a friend’s fair eyelashes. Midnight tolls. Everyone in the salon must be turning into liquid greenfairy or opium smoke; the ambassador’s voice into a shallow moan, his fiancée playing tricks with his veins.

He picks his case open. A new cigarillo appears at the left corner of his lips and soon smoke swallows his face. For a while they don’t speak at all. They haunt the nowhere room, shadows on the wall, horrifically tall. She mouths at the hair on his chest, sparse and coloured as copper wire. He rusts from the outside in. Tastes of metal, too.

“Do Inquisitors know how to love? Of course, I never asked my father. He's a divorcé, which is the most interesting thing about him.”

The hand at the end of his piqued arm numbs, fingertips seized by the coming of sleep, nails absent from light; a place somewhere within the territory of his body asks to be relieved of an itch, but he cannot locate it; his eyelids are anvils.

“We are not, by nature, sentimental.”

“No, I see that.”

Armed with the patience one would expect of a saint, she nudges his mouth open. Her tongue runs strangely hot across his lips. She's a rather terrible pedlar of promises.

“I’m not, either.” She picks at the cigar and breathes prophecies in smoke. “Suppose I was bored. Those parties— they always end with someone’s mouth between someone’s legs, so, well, why not. You must think me crude.”

“Rather.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. You must have countless problems in your head at all times, such as how to win two chess games simultaneously with only two hands.”

“Three games”, he corrects, humourless as stone.

“Three, of course. I say, you wouldn’t happen to have more of this—” She taps one tiny puncture mark, and another, perhaps willing him to flinch. His body weighs more than two of himself. “I feel as though I would kill for a high.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it. It would expand your mind, and then your father might blame me for it.”

For a moment she pretends to think, one dangerous finger poised at the very point of her chin, her feline visage. Dust politely parts about the small of her back, hidden under a striped shirt. It makes her look sinisterly incorporeal.

“He would, at that. Well, then. I’ll stay down, like a dog.”

“I meant the killing.”

Although he quiets his voice to a murmur, it reverberates out of his control, like the disembodied uppercasing of a whisper. Perhaps the creepslow cool of the drug sharpens his ear— it bends to the laws of cause and effect only insofar as it has a cause (constant) and an effect (not). Mathematics of the body often disagree with mathematics of the mind. It dismays him when he feels morose, as he does now, one foot already on the moving platform of some eastbound train.

Ms. Kroy chuckles into his shoulder.

“Oh. Yes, quite.” She eyes him for seriousness, having learned he doesn’t ever joke. “I expect you’d know.”

Then changing expression and subject all in one she turns, baring the uppermost section of her thighs at the crossing of which she might or might not be wearing anything. Her skirt gathers dust on that antique chair in the corner; the sleeves of her striped shirt swallow her hands to the last phalange; the nape of her neck is ripe there.

“You’re thinking of someone who isn’t here.”

He moves too, shrugging on his own shirt, tying the loose ends of his cravat into the open angle of his collar.

Everything sluggish.

Mournful grey and a quarter-solid only, thick in places, too thin in others. The window’s casement cringes. Below the party quiets, each reveller butting headfirst into a dead-end, burning their tongue on the tip of a cigarette or dropping an eye at the bottom of a bourbon. Nobody here drinks of the fruits of the earth unless the bottle costs more than an office clerk’s monthly rent. He tucks his shirt into his waistband, finds all the rest, waistcoat et al., geometrically rebuilds himself into a semblance of costumic equanimity.

“Who is he, then?”

“Who do you mean?”

“The fellow who isn’t there, except in your head.”

Toying with the half-cigar in his mouth, he glances sideways. She’s putting her boots back on before her skirt.

“Someone who hasn’t happened yet.” He thinks deeper on it. “Someone who might never happen. It occurs when I fall asleep. When my vein marries the needle. Time stops being so linear. I can almost see him, slippery, like a snake.”

He’s beautiful. He’s a gorgeous reptile out of time with eyes chemical, turning to smoke, a chimneystack for a mouth and nothing behind the ribs where a heart should beat. A pharmacist of the arcane. He could convince Death herself to buy medicine.

For what ails you, my Lady. I'll drink to your health.

“Never mind that.” She throws him off balance before he's had a chance to stop tumbling down the stairs. “Kiss me on the mouth.”

He does, experimentally. With morphine shutting up his nerve-endings, it doesn't feel like much of anything, save perhaps for the prototype of a taste on the tip of his tongue. She smoked something foul earlier. One of those fashionable brands advertised for ladies of means, except real ladies of means would rather smoke whatever her husbands and lovers are having, which is to say a good cigar. His train of thought derails as she grasps at him so that he is above her, with her fingernails digging into his back, each muscle an overtight mechanism ‘neath the weight of his coat.

She rolls his lower lip between her teeth.

“I think someone will try to kill you, and succeed.”

Perhaps.

Perhaps.

IX

“Tea?”

“Please.”

Eva Yan plays impeccable hostess in her see-through dress, hair piled atop her head, smiling with the surety of a sundial. She fills the Inquisitor’s cup with perfect poise, then Dr. Lyuricheva’s, who sits across, legs apart and cane leaned against the arm of her chair. She doesn’t hide her sullenness.

Today the Stillwater has no game parlour. It receives the intruder within the barebones structure of itself, the main salon, with its parted drapes, its open window, the faintest of breezes toying with dead leaves outside; straining the ear one could imagine children playing or street-vendors peddling their autumn wares, but of course there is only thickset silence that precedes the day’s inevitable death-toll. Even the air anticipates the bell’s coming. Every door cowers back into its frame, every dog bundles itself into a ball, legless, unmoving. Tepid hours slow down or speed up at fate’s whim.

Karminsky does not yet touch his drink. He observes the gentle curve of the urbanist’s mouth tasting hers, that gentleness offsetting the harsh carving of her cheekbones, the harsher still depth of exhaustion below her eyes, like a sad riverbed for all the town’s sorrows.

“Inquisitor”, her voice, cold and seeping, glides off his bones. “Have you walked down my street?”

“Only without the knowledge of its formula.” He bows his head. “An oeuvre, madam, that my office cannot condone.”

“Because it assaults reality, yes. I hear this is your grievance.”

“Because it is a failure.”

Her surprise only slips through her indifferent mask a moment before she stuffs it back behind the scenes, fingertip trembling, as if embarrassment was a sentence just passed in the name of Law. Eva Yan, who hears the conversation but does not partake, lays a brief hand upon her shoulder.

“It’s alright, dear.”

Lyuricheva’s face tightens, but she pats the back of that hand before it leaves behind only dregs of divine warmth. She holds the Inquisitor’s dark-ice eyes with such borrowed aplomb.

“The failure is mine, yet it is Mr. Kain you punished.”

“Would you rather have endured it yourself?”

“I’d rather be dead.”

That makes him smile, if a little, and take a first sip of his tea. He nods Ms. Yan’s way in lieu of praise for her skill at the samovar.

“There. You can be grateful and resent yourself for it.”

“Why then come and talk to me, if I am not next on your list of people to hang?”

Karminsky’s gentlemanliness is a thin coat of varnish, starting to crackle. The day has been long and is getting longer. He swipes a cold thumb over the rim of his cup.

“I find I am intrigued by your apparent imbalance.”

“Imbalance”, she repeats, effectively balancing the word on her scales. They don’t tip in his favour. “That is not an altogether inelegant way of putting it. But then you question for a living, and so language is your sword.”

“Inequality, if you’d prefer.”

“Ah, now you speak a mathematician’s tongue. I thought I had seen your name in a journal a few years back…” Then because she can, and does not care whether she gets away with it, “A pity that you’ve not chosen the scholar’s path. This tea would only taste half as bitter.”

He proffers a polite nod, tonguing at his back teeth; prodding with the eyes for a weakness, another, less obvious imbalance perhaps hidden by the tight collar of her shirt, the blunt edge of her fingernails surrounded by blisters and bitten-off skin, flaking. He finds nervousness, which could be the end result of his presence, or that of the sun goddess hanging about the room in her light dress, shod of nothing but such strange, cosmic légèreté.

Lyuricheva sips on her tea, sparingly. She avoids the Inquisitor’s gaze, as though afraid to be burned.

“I assume you have an expertise.”

“Arithmetic.”

“The manipulation of numbers, of course. I should’ve guessed.”

He has many questions for her, mathematical in nature, but before he can ask his first the front door opens and in comes the bachelor, dripping with rain from the top of his head to the hem of his coat. Puddles gather at his feet, a touch muddy from one too many walks across town. She is not gentle, this ailing body which houses impossible souls. She takes by the dozen and gives nothing back.

Dankovsky greets the ladies but then frowns, freezes, upon noticing the hangman in his chair.

“Inquisitor”, voice absent, dry as bone.

“Bachelor.”

Over silence and malaise ticks the clock, the house’s very heartbeat. The doctor’s eyebrows bunch together in what might pass for anger, were he less worn out, stretched thin, about to snap; he is held aloft by so many strings it’s a wonder he cannot see them.

“A word, if you please.”

A word.

Karminsky rises, nodding to his hostess and her grim paramour, and follows the bachelor to that strange circular room with a shallow pool, a piano and a stool. Bunches of dead twyre float across the body of water, and below that a very living timepiece, like a bull’s eye, stares back at them in something not quite dissimilar to mild horror. The Inquisitor tips his chin at that usual, arrogant angle, gauging the younger man from behind half-lids.

Dankovsky hisses in his ear, like a snake pushed to anger, just short of seizing him by the lapel of his coat.

“What do you want with Eva?”

There’s a stink to his breath, some peculiar sick-mix between local brews and costly tobacco smuggled from the Capital, no doubt courtesy of this Filin man who’s got his hands down so many pockets he might as well have a thousand of them. There’s been reports from patrolmen, more than enough to rule out coincidence. The doctor goes in and out of the Heart twice a day, one says. He knows the Stamatins, adds another. He drinks with them by day and when night falls they go swimming in the Gorkhon like monsters. He poisons himself, his expansive mind. Liquid paralysis must flood his brain.

He’ll never cure the plague, not if he’s dead.

Is he supposed to?

“What do you want with her, then— hang anyone, see if I care— but you’ll not touch her, sir, so long as I live.”

“She is rather remarkable, I concede, but it is not for her that I’m here.”

This seems to tug, hard, on the doctor’s reins. He staggers back, near enough that he almost stumbles into the pool.

“Dr. Lyuricheva, then…” It dawns on him. “Of course, you would speak with her, mathematic-man that you are. Sometimes I forget that you are made entirely of numbers.”

“This isn’t what you told me by the gallows, two days ago.”

“I have said many things, and many times. I lose track. Whose body was it?”

Dankovsky’s shadow multiplies its size, its nose beaked in black, every strand of hair replicated on the curving wall. He breathes very heavily, as if seized himself by illness, lungs at a rattle, rattle, rattle. This colossus birthed by the magnificence of the Latin verb, he is neither tall nor broad but weighs the hospital on his shoulders; with it the living town intent on fighting its dead counterpart, sprinting from district to district on legs of bone. He lay a heavy hand atop the piano, making for the stool where he drops with the inevitability of an anchor. There, he moors himself. Sometimes a man needs to.

His ears are ringing, and the Inquisitor’s too.

“Whatever do you mean, whose body was it?” A drop of sweat rolls down his brow. “You were there.”

Consider a variable that is self-aware and refuses to bend to the whim of an operation. This is the bachelor; a loose value, a bullet on its own impossible trajectory. His dark eyes go straight through Karminsky’s, who holds a flinch. This is not the look of the sane man but of the soldier returned from war only yesterday. He shall have blood under his nails for all time and become a stain on his family name. He is here. He is not here.

He says, very softly,

“I was, and I wasn’t.”

A moment more and he is weeping. He doesn’t ask about the corpse again.

XI

Death knocks at the door wearing his coat of doom, his knifesmile;

Death’s nemesis comes at the toll of the ninth bell and finds himself looking upon his enemy’s paintwork. There’s so much red as to blind him. Redstone redclock redmirror. It seeps in every crack, it follows the Capital-L Lines of the body of Law, which is bleeding on the floor, very lithe, very straight.

The Inquisitor who was always a thin man looks thinner in death, in his waistcoat and shirtsleeves, his golden watch-chain looping like a noose. Peter the architect of evil who erects staircases from the bottom of bottles looms over his deadstill shape, his waxy pallor, red hands going through Karminsky’s pockets. From the threshold, Dankovsky, sickened, lets his tight strings hang him upright. He would kneel if he could. And heave, and vomit. Choke on distant bloodspill dripdown from the belly of the last eviscerated train, the one he came with ten days ago; the one he let die because he didn’t believe the children who told him, well; the train’s dying; don’t you hear its heartbeat;

are you a doctor or not?

Nervous on his animal legs he scrabbles for strength, he pushes on with harsh courage locked in his throat, it burns, oh, morphine going down the drain— he is drunk on himself the moment his gloves grab at Peter’s coat, but it isn’t Peter wearing the Petercoat, it does not smell like him— where are you twyrinesmell that would betray Daedalus in his own labyrinth—

“Andrey. Andrey.” He grabs at the brother’s stubbled face, searching for sense. It could be both of them or none. “It’s you, isn’t it.”

He only sees the straight razor hanging at the end of the murderer’s arm when light catches it as it had this very morning before the seventh bell. Not the same razor, mind, this one a sailorman’s with a bone handle. The Inquisitor’s was mother-of-pearl and he hadn’t cut himself with it. Be very wary of razors, said the rat. The death that was foretold has happened. Andrey if it is him, Andrey smiles with a mouth full of red, teeth dyed from the juice of his godlessness. He is so high on it it would kill him to push him back down. It would crush his skull, his brainpulp would spill on concrete. Messy, that.

The deed itself isn’t sloppy work, no, it’s elegant, professional, perhaps artistic after a fashion. But the house of time reeks with Simon’s silverblood, shifting in every single one of the many mirrors scattered about the place.

(are you a doctor or not?)

Now he does kneel in a pool of stillwet blood, pondering the deep cut at the Capital-man’s throat, yes, very thorough, very clean, quick. Merciless. Andrey in his brother’s guise starts absorbing his mannerisms and sits, hunchback-like, wrapped too tight in his twin’s humongous coat. Daniil takes off a glove and runs his fingertips all over Karminsky’s neck, drinking at his well before it dries; then up the marble face, not yet cold; to close his eyelids and linger a moment about his eyelashes.

He glares back the assassin’s way, who picks at his nails with his sticky blade.

“See what you’ve done! If he can’t have your hide, another will.”

“I’ll kill them all. Don’t you worry.”

It is not for him, nor the Town, nor even the murdered man, but for the going spiral of his hopes;

and ‘ere the Tower was condemned to death by hanging.