— V —
ELENDHAVEN
“It’s not so bad,” said Ansley, of the railroad.
And certainly, it ran just fine from the outskirts of town down the eastern coast. The problem was the length stretching from the city center to the base of the mountain. Fifteen years of disuse saw the track weather warped and salt eaten. The wooden slats stank of rot, and the space between them was coated in snails and barnacles.
“The problem,” Florian mulled, standing on his tiptoes so that he could gesture over the edge of the cliff, “is that seawater washes over the track if it storms during high tide. I remember once, when I was a child, a freight derailed and took the locomotive with it out to sea. The driver escaped, but they lost six men trying to drag the payload back to shore.”
“A wider gauge means a steadier train,” said the Ambassador, adjusting the lapels of his cotton suit. He was wearing a peculiar shade of green—yellow tinged and gold lined. On a sunny day it would have shimmered with layered dimensions like a pearl. Beneath Elendhaven’s grey skies it was the colour of puke.
“Even better, monsieur.” Herr Charpentier slung an arm around Florian’s shoulders. “We could blast a path through the mountain.”
Johann stood with his toes lined up to the edge of the cliff. He tossed a look over his shoulder to catch Florian bristling under Charpentier’s advance like a hermit crab skittering back into its shell. Florian often leapt away from casual touch like he was coming into contact with hot iron. Johann tugged at the tip of his glove with his teeth—didn’t pull it off the whole way, but savoured the sensation of the leather rolling over the thick artery in his wrist. Johann didn’t like to leave fingerprints, or to touch things that were alive, or to be touched back. Still, he wondered what Florian’s skin felt like once the greasepaint was smudged off.
“Johann,” Florian called him to attention. His “boss” was standing with crossed arms and raised hackles, puffed up and exasperated and trying very hard to look grown-up. Oh, his theatre of civility was well practised, but Johann could see the cracks, so deep they were the colour of the ocean.
“Sorry, Boss.” Johann shoved his hands in his pockets and strolled towards the track. “Got distracted by the view.”
Herr Charpentier was dangling a set of metal calipers from one palm. “Before I make any decisions, I need to know how the iron has bent.”
Johann took the calipers, turned them about in his hand. He shot Florian a puzzled look: What am I supposed to do with these? Florian’s smile showed teeth. Play along.
So Johann tried to look busy, making studious gestures, exaggerated pretensions at being a capable manservant. He knelt in the sludge and pried the calipers open. They looked like a pair of legs, spread-eagle. Johann eased them apart salaciously, stroking his thumb down the long curve of the upper thigh. Florian caught his little jest—Johann made sure of it. When he winked, a flash of lucid pique lit Florian’s face up like a bolt of lightning. It lasted about that long, too. Florian took a wide step across the track so that he could—subtly—kick Johann with the heel of his boot as he passed.
“I-is it really possible to cut through a mountain?” he asked Charpentier, masking his vexation beneath breathy wonder. “These cliffs are a th-thousand … a thousand thousand years old. It’s thought that the harbour was once a massive, primeval volcano that spewed so much smoke from just one blast that it could shadow the entire earth. That’s how this mountain was formed—from an eon of unbroken eruption.”
“Herr Leickenbloom, I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you are terribly provincial. With modern explosives, anything is possible,” Charpentier chirped, unconcerned for and uninterested in Florian’s natural-history lecture. “If one can build a mine, surely one can shear the mountain in half.”
“Besides, the slate is brittle.” Ansley bent down to snatch a rock off the ground. He snapped it in half between thumb and forefinger, then crumbled it to dust in his palm. “Or are you that concerned for the conservation of our history, Florian?”
Florian fiddled with the tips of his hair and gazed at the mountain. “It is rather lovely in its own way, don’t you think?”
Johann, scraping the calipers against the iron, followed the tilt of Florian’s chin with his eyes. He’d never given much thought to the mountain. It was pale at the bottom and dark at the top, flat headed and jagged where it met the sea, cut through with bands of black and silver, blue ribbons of silt that glimmered in the starlight. Maybe it was unique; Johann had no way of knowing what else a mountain should look like.
“You can see the passage of time in the layers of sediment. The rigours and transformations of the land, the strength of the sea, the suffering and joy of the people who’ve lived here.”
“But it casts a dark shadow over the city, does it not?” the Ambassador muttered, pulling a handkerchief from his front pocket. “You know, I only live here three months of the year, but the feeling the city gives me … Elendhaven drags behind me like I’ve got shackles on both ankles. Silver is a bright metal, hearty too. It’s an ideal conductor and does not corrode easily. Polish it and it can be used as a mirror. I think that this city needs a little silver, and far less shadow. Ansley’s proposal would be like pulling the curtains open on a clear morning—it would shine light into the dark corners.”
Florian quirked an eyebrow. “And what do you expect to find in those dark corners?”
“Well—” The Ambassador paused to blow his nose. Upon closer examination, it was clear that his eyes were red ringed and watery; his hands trembled where they clutched the patterned hemline of his napkin. “You’ve heard what they say, Herr Leickenbloom: monsters still sleep beneath the Black Moon.”
“It’s inside,” Florian whispered.
“Hmm?”
“Monsters still sleep inside the Black Moon,” he said, touching a knuckle to his chin. “Not beneath. You had the saying rather confused.”
The words lingered in the air like fog. Johann smiled to himself as he used the calipers to lever a railroad spike free from its mooring.
Finally, the Ambassador let out a deflated chuckle. He clapped a friendly hand on Florian’s shoulder and said, “The distinction is rather immaterial, is it not?”
The Ambassador excused himself, Ansley and Herr Charpentier tracking his footsteps. Florian stared after the men for a very long time, a quizzical expression tugging at his mouth.
Johann pulled himself to his feet. “Herr Charpentier forgot his little metal nether parts,” he said, tossing the calipers over his shoulder and pocketing the rail spike. He liked the weight of it in his coat.
“He forgot about you,” Florian corrected. “That was strange, don’t you think?”
“What was strange about it?”
Florian didn’t answer, or pay Johann any mind. That was an unacceptable state of affairs, so Johann leant an elbow on the crown of Florian’s head. His hair was so light and fine that it required only a bit of mussing to fluff up like a dandelion.
Florian ducked out from under Johann’s arm, batting at him with a mittened hand. “Never mind,” he said testily. “We still have work to do.”
Johann spared one last look towards the ocean, pulled all the way out for low tide so that the entire ragged gash of the shore could be seen. Calm now, a parent with a steady hand who punished only those children who turned their cheek. Whether he understood it or not, Florian had spoken the elemental truth of Elendhaven—the harbour was a womb, not a shroud.
* * *
“The problem is that I’ve been stumbling about in the dark.”
Florian was entertaining Johann in his study. “Entertaining” was the formal term for rich dilettantes letting other rich dilettantes get drunk in their mansions, potentially for several days straight. Johann had slunk himself into a party like that once: a masked soiree on the edge of town, a sitting room stuffed to the brim with foreign fabrics and hashish. He wondered if that had been Ansley’s affair, or an affair hosted by
one of Ansley’s associates. He couldn’t remember seeing Ansley there, but it occurred to him now that he often looked through people the same way they looked through him. He knew the bricks in Elendhaven’s most dilapidated streets better than he knew the faces of the grey crowds who trudged through them. For instance, there was a crack that ran from the town square to the gutter behind the whale-oil refinery. It was the width of a thumb, two fingers deep. It took ten minutes to walk the length of that crack leisurely, and in spring it filled up with purple weeds and the bloated carcasses of slugs. Once, Johann had gutted a curious barman at the mouth of the street and followed the blood down the crack until it sank into the ground.
Johann had been sleeping in Leickenbloom Manor for two weeks and Florian had not once offered him pipe or drink. What entertained him was watching Florian hitch himself up on tiptoes to reach the top shelf of his personal library. The motion pulled the cinched fabric at his waist tight, emphasized his ankles. He swayed beneath the weight of the book he retrieved from the shelf, doing a clumsy little dance across the room before setting it on his desk with a heavy thud.
“The foundational myths of our culture suggest that magic can do anything,” Florian said, rapping his fingers along the front of the book. It was wood cased, bound with copper twine and yellowed from age. No inscription. “The great Wizard Barons could control a man from miles away with just a drop of his blood.”
“But not you?”
“No. Not me. It’s a talent that has to be taught, practised, and my family burned almost all our old texts.”
“What can you do?”
“I can”—he chewed his lip in dissatisfaction—“make a suggestion that will most certainly be followed. I can work magic into things that already exist. But carefully. Whenever I use my power I can feel … a great abyss yawning open beneath me. It’s the same feeling I get standing at the edge of the ocean: staring into another world that I can touch but would surely drown in were I to wade out too far.”
“Your parents never taught you how to swim?”
“My parents didn’t teach me much of anything.” Florian opened the book, licked his thumb to pry the pages open. Apropos of nothing, he asked, “Did you know that silver is used by Mage Hunters?”
“Mmm-hmm, what for?” Johann was only halfway listening. Florian loved to ramble about arcane materials and obscure theories and his family history, as if he’d never known a person with whom he could hold a conversation about anything unrelated to sums and equations and the weather. That was not an obscure theory: Johann had plenty evidence to think it true.
“If I knew what for, I’d have no reason to worry.”
“Are you worried?” Johann asked, swinging out of his seat so that he could loom over the desk at Florian’s side. “You think that Ansley has cottoned on to the fact that you’re a wizard? Think he wants to drown the city in silver to flush you out?”
Florian brushed a lock of hair out of his face and smirked. “Nothing that drastic. Besides, Ansley has plenty of silver of his own. The last thing my grandmother did before she died was pawn all our heirlooms to the landed gentry. I’m sure most of the silver ended up in his parents’ cellar.”
“You know, Florian, you hold an awful lot of grudges for such a tiny, tiny man.”
“Oh, Johann.” Florian tittered. “A grudge would suggest that my grievances were unwarranted. But I’m not petty. The scales on which I weigh justice would not be nudged by something so small and petty as a dinnerware set. I…,” He trailed off. His hair fell back in his face.
“You what?” Johann murmured, tucking the lock back behind Florian’s ear where it belonged.
Florian’s tone was as lost as his gaze. “Don’t you feel it, sometimes? As if the world wants to consume itself?” He shook his head. “Cleaving through a mountain that’s stood since the days of the Allfather. What’s the point of thinking such a thing?”
“That big-nosed nobleman was right—you are provincial, Herr Leickenbloom.”
Florian whapped him on the chest. “You—you’ve done nothing today but needle me and ask asinine questions.”
“I thought you enjoyed being given a chance to monologue, sweetling.” Johann poked the tip of his nose in retaliation, and savoured how stupid and childish it looked when wrinkled.
“If you’re going to be like that, then at least ask me better questions.”
“Fine. Where, specifically, do I fit into all of this? What do I owe you for my room and board?”
“Ah, that.” Florian hooked his thumbs beneath Johann’s lapels and began crawling one hand up his chest. Not sensually: he was counting Johann’s ribs. “You must have a guess or two. What’s the one thing you’re good for?”
Johann thought about that for a moment. Then he peeled off a glove—slowly, watching the way Florian watched him with bright, hungry eyes. Not hungry for his flesh, but for what pulsed beneath it. Johann bit into his thumb until it bled. Florian’s eyes tracked the blood as it beaded against the hard edge of Johann’s cuticle before dripping onto the open book.
“You want your plague to … be un-killable,” he said, pressing his wound shut. Spoken aloud, it was obvious.
“Old Magic is transference,” Florian said softly. He smeared the blood down the center of the page. The paper drank it up. “Not addition. Not alteration. That’s the knowledge we lost when my family burned the old library. If I could figure out how to transfer your essence … well…”
Something about the plan scratched at the back of Johann’s head. Florian’s personality was fastidious, almost compulsive. It seemed odd for him to make a plan with such ambiguous parameters. “That’s a little open-ended, don’t you think? What happens after that?”
Florian huffed. “If you really want to know what it is I need you for, it’s this.” He produced a list from one of his pockets, waved it in Johann’s face. “I’ve been in dire need of a servant to fetch my groceries for years.”
* * *
Florian’s grocery list included: a fleam for bloodletting, a brass-screw tourniquet, a bottle of formaldehyde, forceps, an assortment of glass vials with their cork stoppers intact, one tenaculum—which Florian had to draw Johann an instructive picture of—and a bag of candied dates from the general store.
Elendhaven’s hospital was a featureless redbrick building three storeys high. Johann entered through the morgue, using the same waste chute he’d used as an exit the few times he’d accidentally ended up the coroner’s guest. The fleam and the fluid were easy enough to nick from the morgue cabinet. For the rest of it, he had to slip into the second-floor surgery suite. It was early morning and the chilly halls were dark and empty. There was one doctor present, sitting in an open-door office tapping away at his counting machine, dipping his thumb under his spectacles to dig the mucus out of his tear ducts. Johann slipped past him between clicks of the abacus, twirling his recently acquired forceps around one finger. On his way back to the morgue, he heard a familiar voice drifting up the staircase.
“… teas … ey’ve not done anyth … orestall the fever.”
Johann stopped in his tracks—forceps jolting to a stop against his wrist—and listened.
“… umping to conclusions, Herr Ambassador.”
“I’m certain of it. The fever is arcane in nature. The last two aides I brought north with me have succumbed to it.”
Johann slid up flat against the wall to listen. The Ambassador’s voice was wet, like the noise a drain makes when clogged with gristle.
“You understand what you’re saying, don’t you? The accusation you’re leveling at this ci—”
“I’ve leveled no accusations, Doctor. It is well known that Elendhaven’s harbour was magic tainted for centuries before the founding of the town. If something’s been pulled up from the depths—”
“—this city’s economy depends on whale-oil exports, Herr Ambassador. If … were true…”
“… by … der of the Cro…”
The voices passe
d from the stairwell. Johann had to lean his ear around the wall to catch the last strains of the conversation: Humours. Consultation. Sorcerer. He didn’t hear the sound of footsteps approaching.
“Excuse me?”
Johann leapt to attention, spun on his heel to greet the interloper. It was the Ambassador’s female companion, Eleanor, wearing a green tea gown and clutching a bundle of towels to her chest.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” her voice fluttered. “I mistook you for an orderly.”
Is that all? Johann thought. She caught him eavesdropping and yet her first assumption was that he—and his salt-stained coat—belonged here? He looked her over, intrigued by the way she shrank against her full height. She was practically quailing like a sparrow. And she was tall, even with her dark hair worn down around her shoulders.
Johann set his hands on his hips so that he could hide the stolen forceps behind the drape of his coat. The rail spike was still sitting in his pocket. “Really? Are hospital orderlies often known to wear sealskin?”
“I do not think so,” she answered, utterly and tragically earnest. “But I am new to Elendhaven. Chopping up bodies is ugly enough work without the particular maladies that plague the North.”
Johann hummed, running a thumb down the outline of the spike. “And what maladies would those be?”
“Frostbite. Marine parasites. I’ve heard there was a plague here not so many years ago.” She set a finger to her bottom lip. “Have we met before?”
Up close, beneath the wash of yellow light, Johann noticed that her hands were much darker than her face. She wore greasepaint to disguise the hue of her skin. He swaggered a step forward and into a shallow mockery of a bow.
“We saw each other last week, near the town square. I’m Herr Leickenbloom’s manservant.”
Something surged through her expression, but it looked far more like confusion than recognition. “Of course,” she said. “Herr Leickenbloom. He’s peculiar, is he not? I met him for only a moment, but his manner seemed rather contradictory. Oh—” She shook her head, as if she had just walked through a sheet of cobweb. “I must apologize once again. I’m being terribly rude about your master.”
The Monster of Elendhaven Page 4
