“Hey. Sit down for a minute,” he said, patting the space beside him. With an hour until noon, the park surrounding Hallandrette’s fountain was empty.
“I am not sitting on those stones,” Florian groused. “This coat cost three hundred marks.”
“You are a delicate bauble.” Johann snickered. He paused artfully before adding, “A delicate bauble capable of fucking around with a man’s head.”
Florian choked on his next breath. “E-excuse me?” he stuttered, his face caught halfway between indignant and horrified, as if he thought Johann were making a pass at him.
“You control people,” said Johann, conversationally. “With your sorcery, right? Get your creepy little fingers all inside their heads?”
Florian’s vision flitted around the court nervously and he looked for a moment as if he might lie. Instead, he took a deep breath and brushed the light dusting of snow from his shoulders. “Yes,” he said, but did not elaborate.
“Can you do it to anyone?”
“Well, I’ve not tried it on every individual in Elendhaven, Johann, so I could not give you a comprehensive answer.”
“But most people, right?”
Florian hesitated, looked away. “… Yes.”
“You did it to the guy with the weird nose?”
“The slightest tweak.” Florian flipped his hair. “The mildest of cloudings.”
“Okay, so why don’t you do it to”—Johann swirled one of his fingers about in the air—“the Ambassador’s lady friend, hmm? Make her your lady friend, for a night?”
Florian’s vision snapped up. “Absolutely not.”
“Why not?”
He shook his head. “I … I do not use magic carelessly, or as a jest. Especially not magic as dangerous as—”
Johann kicked out a leg to bump Florian lightly in the shin. “You only use it to, what, smooth over rocky business relations?”
“That is completely different.”
“Or so that you don’t have to pay for coffee?”
“You!” Florian’s cheeks puffed out in an expression of charming indignation, but they deflated before he could get properly shrill. Instead, he rubbed the center of his forehead and swayed on his feet, making muffled noises at the back of his throat that might have been grunting or laughter. “Oh, Johann. You did quite a job of stalking me, but you haven’t the faintest idea what I’m about, do you?”
Johann liked this look on Florian: playful and cruel. He eased back on his palms and gazed at him. “So tell me about it.”
Florian bent forward, hands on his knees. “This coat,” he whispered, “cost three hundred marks. How could a man of my circumstances afford such a thing?”
“You’re old money, Leickenbloom. Is this a trick question?”
Florian tapped Johann’s nose. “The Old Houses have been broke for centuries, their money dispersed into land or robbed by the trading companies. The nobles in Mittengelt and the southern colonies rot in their perfumed manors, too proud to beg for charity, but in the North they simply died. I am the last Leickenbloom. The coffers were empty before my mother’s grandfather was even conceived.”
“What’s your point?”
“Ansley—that man’s parents leveraged the debt from my father’s factory. That was the first brick laid in their fortune. Were I not so good at what I do, it would have become the keystone. He could have owned me, and the better part of Elendhaven as well. Instead, he wants to re-open the silver mines. Look around you, Johann.” Florian swept his arm across the skyline. “This city is drowning. All Elendhaven was ever meant to be was a factory the length and breadth of a city, and now it cannot even do that. The fur trade, fisheries, textiles, and lumber … even the oil refinery is suffocating.”
“I know, I know,” Johann said. “Spare the lecture, sweetheart. Even a gutter-shit like me reads the papers.”
Florian’s smile made the shape of a boy telling a precious secret joke for the first time ever. He put his mouth next to Johann’s ear and whispered, “What would you say if I told you that I was the architect of all of this?”
“All of it?” Johann echoed, skeptical.
“Yes, ye— Well, no, I didn’t cause the failure, if we’re going to be pedantic—”
“Of course, you just fucking hate being pedantic.”
Florian flicked Johann between the eyes. “You asked the question, Johann; do me the favour of listening to at least part of the explanation.”
Johann rubbed the sore spot and gazed up at Florian, his eyes hooded beneath his bangs: alert, fascinated, and fond. “Okay, Herr Leickenbloom. How does one boy—a bauble in a glass jar—destroy the economy of an entire city?”
“It’s easy enough to keep a wound bleeding once it’s been made. So I”—Florian tapped one of his temples, his body language mischievous but his voice trembling at the border of fury—“put my creepy fingers into the robber barons’ heads, and I convince them to use their own fingers to peel off the scab before it forms. It’s subtle work, but for the past six years these industry men and conceited governors have come to rely on me, and I point them in the wrong direction every time. That is what I use my magic for: funnelling their money into my own pocket and never spending a lick of it on their foul coffee and cake.” He spit the last words onto the ground between them.
Johann looked at him for a long time. Florian was the colour and temper of a white flame, his skin and hair porcelain bright against the coal-stained edifices and the dark grey sky. Slowly and with great deliberation, Johann stood up. He towered over Florian and asked in a low voice, “Cinnamon-sugar, duckling-sweet, my little honey-flower … what is it, exactly, that you want?”
Florian craned back his neck and smiled serenely. He held out his hand and asked, “May I have a knife?”
Johann handed him his favourite boning knife. He didn’t move as Florian lifted one of his hands and began to peel away the glove.
He sliced Johann’s hand along the path of his Heart line. He cut so deep that the blade drew up the dark blood, the deep blood. “Johann, you might not believe it, but I am a philanthropist”—he laughed to himself—“and I am going to bleed you for the same reason that I have bled Elendhaven.”
“And why is that?”
Florian dipped his forefinger into the pool of blood in Johann’s palm and licked it, smiling with bloodstained teeth. “This city has some very hefty debts to settle.”
* * *
That night, Johann passed by the shrouded portrait on his way down from the study. He stopped in front of it and flexed his fingers.
The sheet came away easily. The fabric was old and fragile from moths and the long winter’s humidity. The painting beneath was of Florian as a child. He was perhaps eight years old and already possessed of a profound misery. Beside him was a young girl in a plaid frock. Her posture was the opposite of Florian’s dreary, practised elegance: there was defiance in her sloppy slouch and a quirk to her lip that suggested she had been bribed a great deal to sit still. Otherwise, she was Florian’s perfect mirror.
“Oh,” Johann said out loud. “Well, isn’t that interesting.”
— IV —
THE THING WITH NO NAME
When Johann was still an unnamed thing he came across a corpse that gave him pause. It was caught by the fold of skin above its hip on a serrated outcropping of rock, leaking a thread of bile the colour and texture of breakfast custard into the tide that spit it up. The body was bloated and milky from a week’s exposure to the ocean, but the waxy sheen of fat coating the skin did not hide the damage it had suffered before passing. Beneath the skin there were blackened colonies of tumorous growth: on either side of the neck, beneath the arms, up the insides of the thighs, cushioning its curdled genitals. Some of the growths had popped like seed bulbs, making crags and ruin of the corpse’s skin. The thing knelt beside it for minutes, maybe hours—it had been difficult to tell the difference between the two before he had a name—and tried to imagine the circumstances t
hat had caused its body to stop working.
The nameless child was familiar with slit throats and cracked skulls—the things that humans could do to one another, the counterbalance of violence and power—but the weight of disease was inconceivable. A body betraying itself.
At the time, Florian—only twelve years old—was sat among corpses, sewing a stone into the lining of his mother’s favourite coat. A week earlier he’d hoped for nothing more dearly than to be the next one struck dead.
“Would you like to see what I’ve been working on?” Florian asked Johann, fifteen years later.
“More facts and sums? I need something tastier to whet my appetite, Herr Leickenbloom.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that.” Florian tapped him on the wrist comfortingly. “You’ll like this. You’ve done your tricks, Johann. Now let me perform mine.”
* * *
For his tricks, Florian required materials.
“Bring me something. Preferably alive.”
Some “thing.” Florian had emphasized the second half of the word with a punctuated press of the tongue to the teeth. Not a person, then. Most of the animals native to the Norden craters were long extinct for the usual reasons: arcane corruption, pollution, the invention of the musket. Some, however, survived. Deer-legged wolves haunted the borders of the city and often lined the space between skin and ribs with man flesh during particularly nasty winters. Johann had empathy for the wolves so he decided to fetch Florian a seal, for which he held no regard. The waters surrounding the city were overfished recently, but the seals were as fat as ever. Probably they feasted on whatever seabed feature made the water bubble and stink in the springtime. There was a metaphor in that, Johann thought, about a city consuming itself, Florian knocking back coins like a shot of whiskey, the ink from his equations bleeding into the soil, what there was of it. If only Florian were the type of man who appreciated poetry, Johann could have flattered him to blushing.
Johann had no idea how to fish, and he spent an awful hour thrashing about the shore tossing knives at fat shadows and getting sand down the backs of his boots. He at last bought a net for two and a half marks and sat on the dock eating a loaf of salted beef haunch. The tide came in so deep that he was soaked up to the knees and he got the tails of Florian’s lovely gift-coat crusted in salt.
At high moon, a drunken sailor wandered by and began jostling him. “Ah, what’s this now? That coat must be worth more than my wife! A dandy fancies himself a fisherman?”
Johann didn’t like sailors much, so when the drunkard attempted to correct the spread of his net he tipped the man into the harbour and set his foot on his back until he stopped struggling. He hummed and licked meat salt off the fingers of his gloves before remembering the cadence of Florian’s voice as he’d said, And please, try not to make me an accessory to murder.
Magnanimously, he flipped the sailor over with the toe of his boot and let him dead-float towards the shore. A fifty-fifty chance, he told himself, that he’d wake up before the water settled in his lungs.
When he finally took a seal home to Herr Leickenbloom, Florian crinkled his nose in disgust and muttered, “I said alive, preferably.”
Still, he had Johann slice the animal open.
“So magic can bring the dead back to life?” Johann asked, watching Florian press a hand to the seal’s lung and fill it with air.
“Not true life,” Florian said. “You can make the respiratory system react, pump the ventricles. But there is nothing going on inside.”
Johann hitched himself up on Florian’s worktable and grinned. “So like me then?”
“Well.” Florian sniffed. “You are a creature of base instincts. I suppose I could believe it. Would you hand me the syringe, please?”
If only Florian knew how base. Johann’s gloved fingers brushed against Florian’s as he handed him the brass needle.
“The plague that swept through Elendhaven fifteen years ago was the result of a pernicious germ, carried on the backs of southern sparrows. The Mittengelt transplants were so certain it was a local illness that their methods for combating it were entirely ineffective.”
“And you’re all steamed up about that, so now you’re trying to re-create it?”
Florian glowered at him from beneath the wisps of his bangs. “Would you let me finish?”
“Sorry, darling, I’m just trying to grease the machinery of the conversation.”
“I am not trying to re-create it. I’ve already done so. I’ve been incubating a strain for some time, but even with magic it’s difficult to replicate the effect I am aiming for.”
“And what effect is that?”
Florian smiled—bright and blade sharp—and said, “Let me show you.”
He splayed and tip-tapped his fingers across the breadth of the carcass like it was a piano. Where the pads of his fingers touched, the flesh bubbled and bulged into horrible shapes, as if Florian were sewing rocks beneath the surface of the membrane. He had his sleeves rolled up to the elbows so that Johann could watch the magic flow through his blood. His veins emitted a faint light between the scab-crust of their wounding, and the light made his arms unnervingly translucent. His skin looked like the flesh of an insect beneath the exoskeleton; the arcane bioluminescence highlighted the dark sleepless ditches under his eyes, making him hollow, unnatural, insubstantial. Johann had to clutch a hand to his throat to keep the flash of affection that rocked through him caged in his esophagus where it belonged. Oh, Florian was a pretty little thing. Too pretty, too aware of the length of his eyelashes and the feminine tilt of his jawline. No one would expect that boyish half smile, that nervous wringing of the wrist, to conceal a monster.
Monster, Monster, Monster, Johann said to himself, the first half a kiss, the second a hiss.
* * *
The shoreline down beneath the black cliffs was the warmest place in Elendhaven. There was a narrow stretch of grey and blue sand between the cliffs and the water, speckled with rocks and shells and the soft residue of jellyfish. This was where Johann and Florian went walking on a church-day morning.
The wind whipped their jackets around their knees and the salt in the air raked their cheeks raw, but this far beneath the tidemark the humidity sucked the frost from the air. Florian knelt at the water’s edge and scooped up a handful of frigid water between his palms. It was the colour of coal.
“You’ve never been outside Elendhaven, have you?” Florian asked. Johann shook his head. Florian let the water flow from the gaps between his fingers. “Then you don’t know this, but everywhere else in the world, water is clear. If you pour it into a glass, you can see straight through it.”
Johann couldn’t picture it. He helped Florian to his feet. “So, what? You wanna see what’s at the bottom of the ocean?”
The edges of Florian’s mouth piqued unevenly. He shook out of Johann’s grasp and resumed walking.
“Do you know what a hallankind is?”
“Sure.” Johann kicked at a speckled red shell that peered out through the sand. It crumbled to dust under his boot. “It’s dock slang for lad-whores. For little boy prostitutes.”
“An ancient term transformed into crude modern vernacular. Here.” Florian dipped gingerly, right at the sodden border cut by the tide, and plucked out a stone: perfectly round, an inch in diameter and opalescent in sheen. He held it aloft for Johann’s benefit. “The oldest stories of the North called these rocks Hallandrette’s Roe. She lays her clutch along the beach, and protects them from the destructive hands of mortal beings.” Florian turned on his heel and pitched the stone at the cliff-wall as hard as he could. It bounced off the slate harmlessly. “See? Hard stone. Unbreakable.”
Johann frowned. “How do you crack one open, then?”
Florian smiled, secretive. “A privilege reserved for Hallandrette’s chosen. When a wretched child, one wronged or wounded deep in the soul, throws what they love most in the ocean they may cast a roe against the stone and a hallankind will be born. K
eep the stone in their pocket and the Queen sends to them one of her children.”
“A friend for the lonely soul.”
“A companion,” Florian affirmed, “made from the same dark matter that coats the bottom of the Nord Sea. A hallankind will love that wretched child as a brother or sister. They will drag whoever wronged their brother-sister-friend into the sea and wring them through the spines of their mother’s baleen until they are foam and sea particle, forgotten in the cradle of her belly.”
Florian was breathing heavily from the effort of his speech. His eyes were wet and lucid, fixed on some distant point beyond the horizon. He trembled, unnoticed, in the chill. Johann reached out to brush a lock of hair from his face and Florian met his eyes, sudden and fierce.
“Your eyes are black as the sea,” Florian told him. The words were almost an accusation. Johann breathed a few cautious beats before responding.
“That’s sweet, peach. You’re saying that I was made for you?”
Florian let out a snort. “Of course not. My hallankind never hatched, and she would hardly have been a thing like you. No, Johann … you belonged to someone far more wretched than I. More deserving of Hallandrette’s pity.”
“More wretched is right. Poor bastard never got the chance to use me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Florian snapped, suddenly serious. “It’s a story, Johann, a myth. But I will be needing the stones. They contain traces of an extremely rare metal. Sixteen should be enough.”
Johann clicked his tongue in quiet irritation. “Whatever you say, Boss.” He lifted the edge of his jacket to make a sling for the stones. After a moment, he added, “But nevertheless, you know, here I am.”
“I know.” Florian dropped a polished roe into Johann’s coat. “What a perfect and unexpected gift for the child that never grew old.” He rapped a finger against Johann’s chest. “A toy that cannot be broken.”
The Monster of Elendhaven Page 3
