Chapter Text

[1] NUMERATOR

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(𝑥)

Inquisitor Karminsky’s new case finds him mid-afternoon at the fencing hall.

He watches the other gentlemen file out for tea, leaving behind nothing but a pall of quiet, strange light quartering space, cutting at the over-waxed herringbone parquetry. A lot of shine to it, as if it’s not the dead of autumn but afterworks of summer come late through the windows. He wipes sweat off his brow with one hand, the other still firm about the grip of his sabre, and he wonders at the tall man in a coat, near as rendered faceless by shadows, hanging at a corner in the obvious posture of the waiting. A slight slant to his shoulders and a cane mark him as familiar. Nothing of a threat equal no hurry. Karminsky’s own tension snaps all at once and he rolls back into his ease, his looseness of limb, his morphinomane’s tricks: all false laziness and eyelids gone heavy.

Walking by a bench he drops his blade, tugs at the collar of his jacket. Ignores the stale craving for a cigarette that came bothering him all through the last duel. Something residual-electric in the muscles keeps his step feline.

“Kurin”, he offers flat for a greeting, “it’s been a long time.”

The tall man counters with a martial nod.

“A year or so. Ours is a lonely business.”

Karminsky leans himself back beside a window and considers Inquisitor Tomas Kurin, face carved hard as a knife and marred by a longslim scar on the left side, slicing right through an eyebrow down to the jawline. It reddens angrily when the sun is bright, seeming fresh as the day the bayonet broke his skin. He hasn’t lost anything of his military poise, neat-cut hair going grey and thin moustache at the ready, the sure set of his chin, that way his paleblue eyes have of drilling bullet holes into foreheads. Even now with a limp he could kill a man, easy as that, with bare fingers or knife or revolver; a scarf or a necktie if he feels like it. For an emissary of Law, he’s always been rather hands-on.

“You’re almost as good as I was”, he says offhand, tapping at his leg gone stiff from all the standing still. “One of your clerks said I might catch you here.”

“You didn’t come to discuss fencing.”

“As a matter of fact I didn’t.”

They know each other by slivers and increments, by cracks and fissures; by similarities in their teaching and differences in their methods.

Kurin has dragged himself through forty-five years of mire and been many things, caught quite a lot of wounds for his trouble. Before the Inquisition he’d been an army doctor, surgeon-major by rank, and from his time in the trenches has kept almost all: greatcoat, service pistol and limp alike. Before the army he might have been anything. A man of science staking all on new discoveries, a wealthy practitioner with a townhouse and a wife. These days he tends to say that he’s nothing, which suits him well enough. He wears his face very tight, and etched in it the glare of a dead man swallowed by bruise-black sleeplessness.

Karminsky by contrast is all grace and swordspoint intelligence, a lot of talk and paperwork to very little action. He knows Kurin would despise him if it weren’t for his impeccable track record, perhaps the sum of his vices too. The man has a lot of respect for chemicals.

“Suppose you’ll want a change of clothes”, he grumbles. “I’ll wait for you across the street.”

A quarter of an hour later and they sit outside a café, the chill enough to have pushed most patrons back inside its warm rampart. Karminsky tugs the collar of his coat higher over his nape and leans back in his chair, feigning unconcern. It’s rare enough that an Inquisitor seeks a colleague out in person. The house of Law has wired them for letters and redtape, messages passed from one clerk to another, conversations scarcer than annotations on a file. Very impersonal, cold, modern, efficient. They work themselves to the bone and the bone is of steel, of marble, of concrete. They carry the city in their bodies, veins made railtracks and organs palaces of industry. Become machines so that the smallfolk can turn them to canned superstitions; they were born without hearts, hence why they pin them on their coats, cast of nightmares and burnt silver.

He trails the waiter coming to serve them black coffees, and back through the door. A motorcar passes by with filthy breath and the raucous laughter of students on their way to a party on the other side of the river, or down it. Overblue sky up there, not a trace of cloud, and still the summer’s long gone and the birds with it. Sometimes the breeze whistles in his ear. Kurin doesn’t enjoy being stared at, so he’ll wait for him to sip at his drink and start talking. It will take a while. The lighting and savouring of a cigarette dulls his morphine thirst a fraction.

“I would have written”, Kurin says after a second cup. “Only it’s all rather sudden.”

“What is?”

“I’m forced to leave the city for a case. Urgent affair in the south. The thing is, I had another one on my plate and I need someone to take over.” He shrugs. “I didn’t much fancy asking Orff.”

A mouthful of smoke and Karminsky ponders. Kurin is a solitary man, born or reborn in the mud and amongst the guts of his brothers, and it’s his usual way to keep his work close to his chest, go at it until a case is closed or kills him. Last year he’d kept busy for months dismantling a ring of bodysnatchers, a veritable spiderweb of an operation threading from dockside warrens all the way to the top of the industrial food chain. Nobody would have bet on his survival, least so his success. What he uncovered was a black market of sorts, generously patronised by bored aristocrats who played at being collectors of bones, organs, blood. Of course such things never made the news.

“Medical cases are not my purview.”

“You’re free to refuse.”

A brief smile; a tap at the cigarette’s buildup of ash, crumbling down the tray. Another car rattles itself up and down the paved road with much cries of delight. A horse carriage follows at slow pace and the animals snort, breathing in fumes of the future.

“You may as well rouse my curiosity first.”

On the back burner he runs probabilities as to the subject of Kurin’s latest hunt. Another ripper on the loose seems likelier than a pitched battle between two rival hospitals and their personnel, although such things are known to happen— a saying goes that one couldn’t find more susceptible to critique than a Capital surgeon. Ever since speed of cut has ceased being a chief matter of pride in the profession, a lot have taken to trading blows by way of incendiary articles in one journal or the other, oftentimes at opposite ends of the political spectrum: a lot of careers have been destroyed for less.

Tilting his head back he allows for cigarette smoke on the way out to layer itself over the sky in lieu of clouds, and from the corner of his eye gauges his peer’s willingness to talk as filmed over with wariness, mistrust and more than a few licks of frustration. Kurin barks at the door for a refill, waits, drinks it in one gulp, slams his cup down the tabletop. The saucer rattles with pent-up anger.

Finally he folds both hands in his lap and tames the twitch of a jaw muscle. His voice all rock, all rasp.

“Dankovsky, Daniil Dmitrievich. Ever heard of him?”

“I don’t know. Should I?”

“Suppose not. Something of a small fry. Young and arrogant. Nearly snagged himself a post at the Academy of Sciences, mind.”

Him and dozens of hungry young men spat out by the mouths of their universities. Bureaucracy is the nouveau régime grown from within the long shadow of the military, and its sons will be the drafters of the future if it ever comes to pass. Karminsky himself is made of files, ink, rows of numbers and come-easy calculations. He understands the mechanics of this youth wanting for pens over guns better than Kurin ever could.

“So a scholar.”

“Bachelor of medicine. He didn’t want to be a paper-pusher, so he opened a laboratory of sorts. Calls it Thanatica. God knows where he got the funds. No family fortune that we know of. His father was a major in the army, and he’s been dead a while.”

A cutlass of a smile twists his mouth and the scar on his left side.

“Speaking of, here’s the thick of it: this boy fancies he can cure it.”

“Cure death?”

“That’s what he says. I’ve one of his articles in the case file— sound argumentation, I’ll give him that, but he should know what happens when one builds a house out of cards. He’s on thin ice. The Committee for Ethics on his back. Most academics think he’s a crackpot. The Authorities are worried he might be a genius, and if so a threat. I was to keep an eye on him.”

Cure death, he says, as though it’s easy.

The odd thing is, perhaps it’s easy. Everything that has ever been achieved has needed going through the state of not-being-achieved, meaning before a thing can happen it ought to not-happen. This is one basic principle of chronology. This is Law. Karminsky mulls it over. The meat of impossibility, the flesh of unachievement hugging at the bone of trial and error, it stirs the minds of men to new desires. If one has mastered the art of the suture, the wound-tending, the pill and the vaccine, then what remains but the capital-D mother of all woes, Death-done and Death-doing? Cure death, he says. Why not.

It is becoming on a scientist to dream, say some who are incapable of dreaming. Himself sleeping on blueblackness and tides of morphine, solving problems by intravenous operations, at times envies such dreamers their buoyancy. He decides that it must take strength of character to suffer the poison of scepticism head-on. That he is amenable to talking; that he wants to see what lives in Dankovsky’s eye and what goes there to die.

He buries his cigarette into the tray, gaze pinned to the stone of Kurin’s face and scraping-at.

“Have you met the man?”

“Not me.” He takes Karminsky’s raised eyebrow for a question. “Lilich has. Informally.”

“Informally.”

“I mean she used a false name and a pretext to speak with him, not that it matters. What’s interesting is the show he gave. It starts innocently enough, as these things go. You’ve got a dead woman on a slab and a theatre packed with curious onlookers, mostly the well-to-do, for it’s summer and the opera season’s done. He spins them a little yarn, drops a few promises down their pockets. A little stage magic. Then he works at his apparatus— on that front Lilich’s descriptions were lacking, I’m sorry to say— and the dead woman comes back to life. If I understand correctly, it has to do with electricity. Galvanism. A brutal jumpstart of the heart, as if he’s working on a motorcar.”

Lofty ideals carried on the back of machinery: here goes the modern age in its system-shocking splendour, as much medicine as it is a trick of the light. He can but picture it, layer it against a century of science and literature and mockeries of both. Theatre is the right word for it. Once the doctor has pantomimed himself to parody, then the dead are the next best thing. One could have them do anything. Dance. Debate. Dream, in time.

“He allegedly raises the dead. How come the papers aren’t all over the story?”

To that Kurin twists his mouth in a wide grin, half of his face struggling not to grimace, and he allows his body a leanback, his bad leg a minute of respite. Always the blunt simplicity of the cane close enough to reach, taken for a weapon. His eyes narrow, cold and clever-some.

“Curious, isn’t it? You’d think that stuff would sell. I did ask around. Turns out it only happened once, and once is easy enough to cover up or to laugh at. Even today medical hoaxes are a dime a dozen. Besides, there’s his reputation. I told you his peers think he’s mad.”

“Don’t you?”

“Well, yes.” He shrugs and fishes a packet of cheap cigarettes out of his greatcoat. The smell is near as foul as motorcar fumes. “Call it personal curiosity. I’d very much like to know whether or not he’ll win his bet against death.”

“If it happens to be true, I’ll have to arrest him. Possibly see him hanged.”

Kurin coughs around his smoke, then turns it to a raspy laugh.

“I take it to mean you’re getting the case off my hands.”

“I am.”

They shake hands on it.

(𝑦)

Death has never smelled better, never worse. Death has a hangover. It would be good on her to croak on the bathroom floor.

One too many sunbeams come spilling between slats in the shutters to grasp at Daniil’s eyes, at over-thin lids crusted with rheum and last night’s dregs: a drink or two, half a million cigarettes, bare skin and a headache as would make the Titans of old shake in their stonebodies. He washes in a hurry, dresses quicker still and foregoes the razor lest he slit his throat, wrists or both in a moment of weakness. His living room stops spinning once he dulls lingering vodka taste with a cup of coffee, all-black no sugar and scalding hot, burns his finger, hell, burns his tongue, but Death hasn’t won him over quite yet. What was it the great Ovid said about pain? Perfer et obdura; dolor hic tibi proderit olim.

Autumn has come knocking and yet it’s a warm day for it, so that halfway through his ride on the tramway line he must remove his coat and fold it over his arm without losing purchase on his satchel, and he sweats beneath his gloves, and squeezed between taller men brute-forces a path out when the bell announces his stop. Nine by morning, the sun high, bluesky above and an awful lot of noise funneled down his ears. He stops by a teahouse, buys himself a pastry. Wonders how long he’s lasted, again, without eating. He’ll make sure to devour the thing in front of Serafima, see if she finds anything to scold him about today.

Nine by morning— the clocktower has just struck— and already the university’s courtyard is swarmed with such a throng of students, professors and idlers quartering their day into a hundred ten-minute conversations around a cup or a cigarette or both. He hurries past, nursing at the beginning of a new migraine. Shoes and bootheels clicking about. Watchcases snapping shut. Shouts and cries of ‘good day!’ and peals of laughter gone skyhigh, life cutting across in the swift manner of a surgeon’s blade, and his eyes, saints, do they hurt. Cura te ipsum and whatnot. Once upstairs he’ll drop himself down and swallow a treasure trove of pills. Here’s an idea.

The walk up sobers him, though, and with it the decrease in sounds. Boisterous greetings give way to whispers and hushed secrets. One thing about these corridors is that there’s always someone murmuring behind someone else’s back. Academics, when they don’t care for fisticuffs, love a good tongue-lashing. Take that fellow Telmann, for instance, who wags his viper’s tongue every which way, whose leaking pen misspells Dankovsky’s name on purpose; too much a coward to jab at him face-to-face, and still he’s gathered a tight circle of followers, boys and girls none too mindful about intellectual honesty and the rigours of scientific work. Daniil could, if he wanted, give him a good thrashing in his journal of choice. Only his own circle of followers is no more than three heads wide.

For all his efforts, Thanatica hasn’t grown past a suite of rooms in a building well out of the way. Another thing Serafima would have cause to reproach him, but she hasn’t. At times he wonders if she shouldn’t take his place at the helm. Platon wouldn’t mind. Alyosha might, but only because he and Daniil sleep together when they’re bored and, well, he could pass for a romantic in the right light. He stifles a laugh. A pair of girl students gawk at his slight-scruffy jaw, rank pallor and sheen of sweat. Yesterday they might’ve fawned over him as he passed, but then he hadn’t smelled of liquor nor spat-out misery.

“Ladies.”

They stare some more until Serafima appears to grab him by the elbow, and doesn’t she look a little worse for wear herself, glasses fogged and loose-blonde hair fallen out of its pins. Her tight grip seems enough to chase away bad dreams.

“Did you even change out of yesterday’s clothes?”

“I did.”

“Well, come in. If I have to hear anymore of this gossip I’ll go mad.”

He follows her and shuts the lab door behind him. Drops his coat on the sofa and himself beside, crossing his legs and hanging his head backwards to peer at the ceiling. The wet stain there has grown larger. He tells himself this every day, like a bad joke: you dream of beating Death at chess but you can’t win against a set of pipes. Without real hunger he eats his breakfast. Feels better for it, although the taste of last night hasn’t quite washed off. Serafima watches him from behind her lenses. He was right about that. She worries too much, perhaps not without reason.

Daniil feigns nonchalance and a smile.

“What are all those whispers about, anyway?”

“Same old.”

“These Inquisition rumours again? I don’t know. Sounds like a story to make us rip at each other’s throats. Not that we need a helping hand on that matter. The faculty of medicine has always been a snakepit.”

“You’re quite right.” She bites her lip. “An hour ago some boys were caught painting insults on Dr. Lukovna’s door. ‘Red witch’, I think one said. Possibly it was ‘bitch’.”

“Not the vice-chancellor’s sister? Just down the hall?”

“Yes. I suppose they’ll be expelled.”

“Still, there’s a leap between a rabble-rouser and an Inquisitor’s pet gone off his leash…”

“Those girls you just saw beg to differ.”

That’s the problem with students. A lot of them think their ideas are clever. A lot more of them are bored or have too much money to care.

“Please. If anyone here is on the house of Law’s payroll it must be Telmann.”

“Not this again.”

“He’s a weasel. Tell me I’m wrong!”

“You’re wrong”, chimes a cheery voice from the next room, and with it Platon’s portly frame and goodtime grin. “He’s too bloody stupid, for one.”

“And self-centred.”

Alyosha comes after him with a tray of teacups, all blonde indolence, wide eyes and dazzling smiles. He raises both eyebrows in mock surprise, as if he hadn’t crawled out of Daniil’s own bed at half-past six to get here by eight looking as prim as a picture from a movie magazine.

“Hi, chief. Haven’t slept much?”

“No. Don’t tell me you believe this Inquisition nonsense too.”

He has the audacity to laugh.

“Suppose I’ll know when one of us gets hanged—”

“I suggest you don’t joke with that, Alexei”, Platon warns him from behind the rim of his cup. “Bad luck has a way of finding whoever tests it. Trust me on that.”

“Why would Inquisitors come here of all places?”

The question is naïve, but of course he is a naïve young man who cares nothing for the mudpaths of politics. Daniil retreats into his own cup of tea and only half-listens to Serafima’s speech about civil war and unrest and the need for the State to keep ideas on a tight leash, and where are ideas born but in schools, laboratories and newspapers; rumours are fickle things that come and go, usually, but this one is here to last and sow mistrust. It’s easy to catch a side glance. To slip a letter in a box, a name in the right ear. At first you think it’s a game and then the old doctor who’s got his office next door disappears, his lectures are cancelled and he’s not heard about again but in whispers and speculations.

Platon, because he has a cousin rumoured close to the Reds, frowns sagely at what she says, trying to decipher her sympathies, trying to determine his own, now forced out of his innately apolitical chrysalis. Alyosha is altogether disinterested, though in a way that has him ask more questions if only to rattle the both of them and enjoy the privilege of being youngest among the bright.

“Don’t you think we’re all making a fuss of it for nothing?”

“I don’t know, and I hope never to find out.”

“That’s the thing with Inquisitors. You don’t see them coming. One day one of them is at your door, and that’s that. I’m not even sure they knock.”

“Naturally they do. They like to pretend they are civilised.”

“Have any of you even seen one of them?” One could hear the grin splitting Alyosha’s face. “I bet they wear black hoods and their faces are skulls.”

The faintest of touches at the nape of his neck forces Daniil to look upwards and into the young man’s face, light and mischievous as it’d been last night when he’d, ah, plucked at the buttons of his shirt one by one and caressed the skin beneath, lingered long enough to pinch at a nipple and steal from him a blush, and then, well, things had happened as things tend to. He smiles in turn, lazy-some and at last content, tongue clinging to that sugary taste in his mouth.

“You’re confusing the Law for Death.”

“Aren’t they the same thing?”

One glare, Serafima’s, slices through the air to slap him at the cheek; Platon’s is meeker, but beneath that meekness sharp.

“Perhaps they are. We’ll find out when we knock Death off her high horse.” He picks at his pocket watch. Nine-thirty, which means checking on the butterflies. “Speaking of, get to work.”

Both men file out to the workroom eager enough, leaving him alone with Serafima, whose attentiveness never vacates a space. She watches him change into his lab coat, smooth the disarray out of his hair.

“You should be careful what you say”, she tells him. “Don’t go and make enemies.”

Daniil shrugs, but his attention gets snatched by a few sheets of paper left haphazard on the coffee table, shot through with red pen like little knife wounds. Telmann’s latest article and a good reason, on top of overdue bills and the usual sneers, for a night of intemperance. His mouth grows a bitter smile. Sometimes it’s almost funny.

“I’ve a feeling it’s a little late for that.”

(𝑥)

Night rain has come and gone to rinse the sun off the Capital’s face, leaving walls darkened with knockoff wet. You can feel its passage in the absence of birdsong, the splash a dog leaps at when it meets a puddle. The sort of semi-dark it casts over an interior even with the windows wide as mouths. It’s a grey, sinister pall, the lowvoice announcement of winter, which in three months will coat the world all white.

Two days of thinking and poring over case files haven’t given Karminsky much in the way of insight: (raw data + hearsay) x Dankovsky’s reputation = what, an elaborate swindle? Here is a summary in Kurin’s neat, very soldierly shorthand. Here a scrap of newspaper recounting funding cuts at the university. There an article penned by one Dr. Telmann, all scientific value outweighed by incendiary slashes at “Dankovski’s” (sic) own work ethic. The folder is fat with inane second-hand reports and tries at espionage. Kurin, thorough that he is, has even made note of an attempt at conversation with one of Thanatica’s researchers, ended on a lot of anecdotes and very little material.

Atop the pile lay the hinge upon which the whole affair rests, a tidy sum-up of Inquisitor Lilich’s account. Were he an officer, he’d call it the casus belli. Know why you must go to war before you rein in your horse. Still, there’s scant in it to teach him anything new but the rank taste of unfinished business.

He places a call, is told by a switchboard operator to please wait, we’ll connect you soon as the line is clear.

From the ajar window a scent of petrichor wafts in. He keeps his office in some uptight suite of rooms, quite drab when the shutters are only halfway up, from which he can hear the great murmur of the city as though it runs the course of his veins all riverlike, and it pleases him to listen while he waits for the telephone to ring back. Next door his clerks are exercising their fingers at the typewriter all for the Inquisition’s love of record-keeping. Outside there is factory smoke come to cover the sky on top of clouds and the selfsame tide of workers carrying tools and long faces, ideas tinged with redness. Some mornings the patter of their bootsoles grows to a clash, their mindless shuffle shifts to deliberate marching, not military but spiced with invectives and hollers and the new hymns celebrating the advent of the labouring man who’s manufactured himself a sense of class-consciousness; a fake, blustering pride in his callused hands, his bruised knuckles.

From up here one learns to care little for their passing, for it’s a busy artery and down it is carried so much lifeblood that needs not be trampled by horseback militia: the wealthy in their sleek motorcars, the wealthier in their carriages, all come down from their country estates for the opening of the cultural season. Theatre and opera liven nights anew. Afternoons are for teas and salons and poetry readings, and the war is left to billiards rooms where men in uniform rub shoulders and trade field anecdotes. All of this the Inquisition has a ready eye on, making for countless reports oftentimes lengthy and lacking interest.

He lights a cigarette, leans himself against his desk. He smokes half of it, but leisurely slow, before the shrill cry of the telephone snatches his gaze off the glass.

“Inquisitor Lilich speaking.”

Lilich is a clever machine in a handsome casing, all hard-hazel eyes and mouth thinned around a sharp retort. She ticks with the regularity and precision of a clock. Even through telephone wires her voice has this eerie coldness, polite but never pleasant, as if only just interrupted in the middle of a courthouse argument. Karminsky can guess at a scowl, an upset twist of the lip.

“It’s Karminsky.”

“Yes.”

“Listen, there’s a matter I need to discuss. You met a Dr. Daniil Dankovsky sometime this summer. I’d like you to tell me about it.”

More than her tone, the pause she leaves is long enough to hint at annoyance.

“So you’re the one taking over the case. I already told Kurin last month.”

“I know. I would hear it from you.”

She spins him the very same tale, albeit with different flourishes; lacklustre descriptions in some respects, overcharged accusations in others, and it does little to portraiture the man who would seize Death by the throat and strangle her. Not until he asks her for it.

She tells him Dankovsky looks like he could have been anyone and decided against it on a whim— “young and soft and pliable, you’d think, and then you’ll meet his eye and realise he isn’t at all a lunatic”. She tells him that he wears a garish snakeskin coat as if he needs the disguise, leather gloves and a red ascot, a slash of blood about his neck. That he speaks nicely, cleverly, that his tongue curls well around his Latin, that he has a certain sense of humour, falsely self-deprecating. That he could have been a splendid instrument if only he wasn’t flirting with the wrong side of the Law.

That’s enough to sketch the outline of an obstinate Icarus not yet grown into his wax wings. A boyish godling filling his pockets with tricks. The makings of an exponential function seeking to cross the borders of its graph. Many things, in fact, borne from excess pride and death-terror. He has to agree with her: these aren’t the works of folly but a certain rationalisation of fear taken to the extreme, and for ages fear has been known to guide man’s hand, playing the middle sibling caught in the wedge between Death and her sister War.

The problem is that the Law is the Law is inviolable. So goes the theory.

“Kurin tells me you spoke to him under a false pretense.”

“Yes.” Lilich’s voice snaps taut, stringtight. “I was curious.”

“On that account you don’t have to justify yourself.”

Her laugh is worse, a band of tense violence kept in check or the whistle of a knife just thrown past one’s ear, whip-sudden and very brief. It might be the first he hears of it.

“Don’t I?”

“Not to me.”

“You or anyone, it’s all the same. Inquisitors are warned against having sympathies.”

“I hardly think it qualifies. I’m curious myself.”

“You’d like it to be real, wouldn’t you? His arrogance pleases you.”

Karminsky considers the fact at a slant, nudging the receiver between ear and shoulder to look for paper and a pen. Numbers scribble themselves, bleedblack upon white, sense and spiral and mental shorthand gone to the dogs; the drone of the line at the side of his head; her breath magnified by distance; Dankovsky’s name, Daniil Dmitrievich, D. D. D. Death defier, defiant, damning or damned. He writes a two and a seven. Here’s a young age for worry, but then he must have seen many of his peers march themselves off to the front— and wasn’t his father an officer— so it’s the story of a boy grown up in a house full of guns who told himself he wouldn’t suffer bullets. So be it, I’ll be a doctor. I’ll cure the world of its notions.

And Lilich catches up with his thoughts,

“Here’s what he told me: that Death has done her time and has no place in the modern age.”

He smiles on that, for how many before have thought the same; anyone can trace wishes for the elongating of man’s life back to the furthest reaches of history, to the very idea of gods falling asleep on clouds, yawning stars, winking at the moon all sweet and mercurial. Dr. Dankovsky might only be the latest product rolled off a factoryline of thinkers long since gone old or, ironically, quite dead. If there is one saving grace for him, leastwise in Karminsky’s eye, it must be that his conceit dips its fingers down the well of science rather than religiosity, and not without some pride. In the case file one of his articles reads

that it must be the purview of the medical practitioner or theoretician to vanquish she who has long reigned over us; terrorised us by way of her name Death—θάνατος, said the Greeks— and by way of her works. It is my aim in the present paper to expose how thickheaded our credence in the immutability of these works, and how flimsy our prior attempts at deciphering their inner mechanisms the better to elevate ourselves above them. Thus the first and perhaps foremost mission Thanatica has set itself to is a knowing of Death come to cross the frontiers of the general, the obtuse and the superstitious alike and into the realm of the intimate. In the words of a military man, one needs to know his enemy before he is to run her through.^[1]

There is something amusingly juvenile in the arrogance displayed, and perhaps Lilich is right to infer it pleases him. Still the Law is the Law (is inviolable), and as its sworn upholder he ought to keep his own keenness on a leash.

“This trick he pulled with the dead woman… Well, do you think it was a trick at all?”

“Why ask me this?”

“You were there. You are entitled to an opinion.”

She scoffs, but then pauses, as though thinking it over. She lights herself a cigarette, caught by the crack of a match.

“I couldn’t say. That’s why I went and played ignoramus, counting on his ego to make him talk. All in all he was rather evasive.” He can hear the crackle of the cigarette being pulled on too close to the speaker; her exhale, long and slow-some. “He does have the education to back up his claims, and we’ve both witnessed our share of… let us call them interesting phenomena. So I cannot rule it out entirely, but I’m inclined to err on the side of cautious scepticism. Take him for a fraudster until he proves you he is not.”

“Sensible.”

Now she’s bitten at his hook he must reel her in, but gently. Though long-removed from the orbit of academics both Lawful and not, she isn’t at all immune to the things that make their gears tick, be it flattery or a deft stroke under the chin of her intelligence. It is known fact that she used to scrape at the heels of a mathematician who could only limp, and still the woman outran her and fled eastwards and was never seen again, and thus came Lilich to paste over the cracks in her heart with a thick layer of black paint, the black paint of (t)reason, the black paste of mind-over-matter hardened to iron, hence why she doesn’t wear her own pin anymore; she is all brains and chessmoves, daughter of a field map and a step ahead.

She must however, he is almost certain, be quite impervious to the aesthetics of transgression, to the masterpiecing it takes a man to make himself a conduit for impossibility to torrent through. So he asks her,

“How do you advise I go about it?”

and she says, perhaps bending the very edge of her lip into a smile, that he should invite Dankovsky over for tea, smokes and a round of unpleasant questions. Then with nothing for a goodbye lets the line die down, and leaves him to stare his near-nothing image reflected in the windowpane, his own face overlapped with the face of a man hanged by a sturdy length of red rope; by the neck until dead, so the saying goes.

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