“Don’t worry about it.” Johann laughed. “You don’t know the half of how peculiar he is. He’s also extremely particular, about time especially, so—” He swept past her, hands in his pockets, brushing the hard metal edges of his makeshift weapons. “I should be on my way.”
He felt her eyes following him down the hallway. He was tempted to turn back to see what face she made when unexamined, but that would look suspicious.
“I’ll see you again at Herr Leickenbloom’s dinner?” she called after him.
Johann waved at her over his shoulder. “Oh,” he called back, grinning at the adroitness of his own joke. “I sincerely doubt it.”
— VI —
THE BLACK MOON
The restaurant Florian chose for his annual dinner was called Perle, and it served authentic Norden cuisine. Sticky oysters, purple-shelled crabs, black-water soup. Seal eyeballs in rendered whale fat, the only parts of them fit for eating. These parts were flash-fried, and sautéed with caramelized onions and red spice. The wine was so tart and dry that it left an aftertaste of hangover vomit.
Before the dinner, Florian had dressed Johann with calculation. “Have you ever noticed,” Florian asked him, “that when you walk down the street, people do not pay you much mind?”
Johann moved uncomfortably beneath Florian’s deft fingers on his coat buttons. His arm was still sore from where Florian had put to use the fruits of his little shopping trip earlier. The gouge from the fleam had sealed over, but his veins were throbbing where the tourniquet had squeezed them taut. Nothing to show for it, but he imagined the damage it might have done to Florian’s skinny little arm: bruises that would last for days. The leather of his gloves creaked when he flexed his hands. “It’s something I work hard at,” he replied. “I hide in the shadows. I am a shadow.”
Florian lifted one pale eyebrow. “You are a sore thumb of a man. Tall as a signpost, thin, and conspicuously unnatural. And yet you are practically translucent.”
Johann said nothing. He had never given it much mind except to congratulate himself on his powers of obfuscation. Florian knotted Johann’s bow tie for him and then set to work on his face. He darkened Johann’s pallid skin with rouge, painted his lips with rose dye, highlighted the contours of his eyes with earth-toned powders. “Eyes slide over you,” Florian whispered, dabbing a damp cloth at the curve of Johann’s throat. “Until you put your knife to their jugular. Let’s make you tangible.”
Tonight, Florian was wearing a river-blue justaucorps embroidered with delicate rust-gold filigree. His tricorn was set with orange jewels and a bouquet of blue-hawk feathers at the back. He was almost comically small under the bell flare of the coat. Florian often dressed as if to cocoon himself; he burrowed beneath layers of frill and finery. As far as Johann knew he’d been in that cocoon for fifteen years, waiting to emerge as something terrible and lovely.
He’d dressed Johann in burgundy and black—waistcoat, gentleman’s vest, a smart silver chain looped through the top buttonhole and pinned with a ruby brooch at the shoulder. Johann was seated to Florian’s left, a place that he was informed was both an honour and a sign of servitude. It usually sat empty at Leickenbloom affairs. Many of the guests were Norden elite: powdered men in grey suits and white-feathered caps who wore young women on their arms like accessories, the last profiteers of the oil trade. In contrast, the Suden- and Mittengelt ambassadorial staff wore bold colours—magenta and lime silks, diaphanous scarves with intricate flowers stitched against the grain of the fabric. “To demonstrate their mastery of the trade routes,” Florian explained in a whisper as the guests poured in. “You couldn’t get pink or pale green dyes in the North if you sold your children for them.”
Florian introduced Johann as his bodyguard.
“Fascinating!” The Ambassador leant forward on his thick elbow and looked Johann up and down from waist to nose and back again. He swirled the wine in his glass with such delicate fervour that little pearl bubbles foamed around the circumference. “And how did you come to be hired?”
Beneath the Ambassador’s analysis, Johann faltered. He wasn’t used to speaking to anyone without the comforting weight of a knife in his sleeve. He glanced at Florian for assistance, but his “master” was engaged in demonstrating the proper evisceration of a crab to some narrow-boned foreign woman in a dark green floral gown.
“Well”—Johann rubbed the pads of his thumb and forefinger together—“I attempted to rob him in a back alley one night.”
The Ambassador’s eyelids fluttered in shock. He looked to his right—to his companion, Eleanor—and back again, making a real show of confusion. “I’m sorry, I’m not certain that I heard you correctly.”
Eleanor laughed and tapped the Ambassador’s arm playfully. “He is joking, surely. What a delightful sense of humour!”
“I don’t joke,” Johann said flatly. “I jumped him on his way home and threatened to slit his pretty neck if he didn’t empty his purse for me. Instead, he offered me a salary!”
“Well, that is certainly—” The Ambassador paused and took a long sip of his frothed wine. “—an interesting hiring strategy.”
“I’d heard much of the barbarism of the North,” Eleanor agreed, “but I never imagined myself breaking bread with a genuine brigand!”
“I’m nothing so organized as a brigand.” Johann laughed. “Brigands work in gangs. They have laws and rules. I’m more of a mons—”
Florian interrupted him smoothly. “Johann, what are you telling these poor people?” He swirled his fork in the air and pointed it at Johann, a rubbery piece of crab flesh trembling on its tines.
“They wanted to know how we met”—Johann smiled, broad and toothy—“and how I came to be in your employ.”
“I cannot see why. It’s not a very interesting story.” Florian sighed dramatically and popped the crab into his mouth.
“That’s not what Johann was telling us.” Eleanor clasped her hands together. “He said that he tried to rob you.”
“Well, yes, but as you can see, he did not make a very efficient enterprise of it.”
“And what, Herr Leickenbloom, is your side of the story?” The Ambassador poured himself another cup of wine.
“Hardly as engaging as you seem to be imagining it. Johann was an uneducated cobbler who had recently lost his job. He made a desperate jab at my purse strings and I decided to take him on as charity.” Florian’s lips quirked at the edge of his glass and he gestured to Johann’s shoulders, cutting a line across them through the air. “He has no formal martial training, but you will agree that he boasts an imposing build.”
Johann bristled under his expensive clothes and twitched his fingers instinctively around the hilt of a butter knife. Florian seemed to have dragged him to dinner purely for his own amusement, a blatant exercise in debasement.
“How generous,” Eleanor remarked, trailing a finger along the rim of her glass. The squeak her skin made against the gold trim rose above the murmur of conversation. “Ansley was correct in naming you the last true gentleman in Elendhaven.”
“Where is Ansley?” Florian wondered with the expected dose of concern.
The Ambassador frowned. “He’s entertaining one of Herr Charpentier’s foreign investors tonight.”
“Truly?” Florian replied in a toneless drawl. “They’re attempting to secure a construction company without even knowing if the railroad can be fixed.”
Johann rolled his eyes and began to flip the butter knife between two fingers. This sort of empty-headed conciliatory babble had bored him to begin with and only tortured him further the more he was exposed to it. It was, however, quite amusing to watch Florian pretend to give a shit while the Ambassador made an overplayed attempt at sympathetic piety.
“Why, that is quite the snub on Ansley’s part, is it not?” he warbled. “How dire. I should have urged him to come.”
Before Florian could respond, the waiter swept past to whisper something in his ear. His expression chang
ed subtly—almost imperceptibly—at whatever he was told. The smile moved a breadth from “polite” to “pleased.” The waiter closed the doors to the private dining room and Florian rose to his feet and tapped his teaspoon against a glass, signaling that the champagne for the toast had been poured. The noise was a clear, cool ringing that hushed the heated and drunken conversation in the room immediately. All eyes went to their host.
Florian, wreathed luminous in orange light, raised his glass above his head, leading the table in a toast. The filigree of his coat burned the colour of an inferno. “It is good,” he said, “to see equal numbers of familiar and unfamiliar faces tonight. As I am the last son of one of Elendhaven’s great founding houses, it is important for me to take the lead when it comes to hosting dignitaries from our sister nations. In that light, it is my pleasure to treat all of you to this authentic Norden feast.”
The guests clapped politely by rattling their jewelry.
“As many of you know, Elendhaven has a checkered history that is subject to wild and dark speculation among southerners. We struggle to disabuse our fellows of these myths. Thank you for joining me in this annual dinner in the spirit of cultural exchange. Especially tonight—the anniversary of our greatest and most … personal tragedy.”
Johann’s ears perked up at the dip Florian’s honeyed voice took on the word “personal.” He dangled the knife between thumb and forefinger and watched Florian through veiled eyes. Across the table, Eleanor from the South was leaning forward in her chair, lips pursed with sympathetic curiosity. The Ambassador had gone sombre.
“Those who lived through the troubles will remember—fifteen years ago, the people of Elendhaven suffered through a terrible plague. The illness swept first through our gutters, then through the factory districts. Its maw was so ravenous that its teeth were at the throats of even our most privileged, sheltered citizens. My own family fell victim to the nameless plague. My parents, both my uncles, their wives, and all of their children. My…” He paused a moment before continuing, his gaze floating towards the ceiling.
“If even the Leickenblooms—who have stood in this city since time immemorial—could fall victim to this disease, they said, what hope had the rest of the city to stand against it? Indeed, all of Elendhaven would have fallen into the Nord Sea and our rotted flesh been consumed by the crustaceans, had it not been for aid from the Great Kingdoms of Mittengelt. Your people rode to our aid like the knights of old, wielding your gold and doctors. And for that, I toast you.”
He raised his cup, a brilliant and altogether fake smile lighting his features. The pink wine glimmered jewel bright, but Florian did not put the glass to his lips. He held his pose—a prince triumphant painted in classical oils, rich and aqueous and just the slightest bit smudged around the edges—and he watched every single puffed-up noble at the table down their drinks. As soon as the champagne passed their lips, Florian’s polite mask fell away.
“Of course,” he sneered, “your aid came only when our gates were barred with corpses. Your aid came only when you feared that we would no longer be fit to deliver whale oil for your lamps or oysters for your feasts. Your aid came only when our silver mines closed because the miners were too sick to work. You came to save us only when you thought you might own us in return. And now you come running back, when it looks as if the mines may flourish once again.”
Johann eased back in his chair and watched the faces around him twitch first in confusion, then in outrage. The silk-drenched man to Johann’s left sputtered into his ascot, but no words formed on his lips. His eyes rolled back and he fainted face-first into his soup, splattering Johann’s coat. The Sudengelt Ambassador was panicking, eyes darting wildly as his compatriots began to flinch and vomit. Eleanor swayed in her seat and slumped onto his shoulder. Florian fished out his napkin and leant forward to wipe the foamy spittle from the Ambassador’s mouth with a kindness that might have been sincere.
“I am a brother who loved,” Florian said, “and I can attest that there is no brotherly love between Elendhaven and the South, or the Old Kingdoms. For the true sons and daughters of Elendhaven, our mother is the sea and our sister is the winter. We stand alone at the edge of the world, as I stood alone atop the corpses of my family. When you go forth from this city, you will bring the same ruin to your people that you allowed to befall mine. I am Hallandrette’s favourite son and I will devour your bones as surely as she does when her unloved children are cast into the ocean.”
When the last man fell unconscious, Johann stood and clapped. “Encore!” he shouted. Florian shot him a flat look. “I didn’t know you were a lyricist, Herr Leickenbloom.”
“Don’t start.”
“You don’t expect me to believe that you said all that off the cuff. You’ve been practising that for years, haven’t you? Perhaps in the mirror?”
Florian ignored him. He was unpacking needles and vials and cloth. “Make sure the door is locked. We have work to do.”
While Johann locked the door, Florian swirled about the room and tapped various guests on the top of the head as if he were playing duck-duck-goose.
“Take their blood,” he said.
“Want me to swipe their gold rings while I’m down here? I know a few ways to make a man piss himself while asleep—”
“I told you not to start.”
Johann did as he was told and retrieved the blood from Florian’s chosen subjects. Across the room, Florian was holding a vial of cloudy grey liquid up to a candle, brow furrowed.
“What”—Johann pressed down on an unconscious courtier’s vein to slow the bleeding—“exactly are we doing again?”
“Honestly, Johann, do you listen to a word I say?” Florian sighed. “I am doing what I’ve promised. I’m going to show you what the plague does. I’ve several strains to test, and just as many willing test subjects.”
Into the half-sipped champagne glass of every second guest went a drop of plague. When the work was finished, Florian went back to his seat and held his own glass aloft. “One final toast,” he said, and hit his spoon to the glass rim.
At the sound of the chime, the nobles began to wake, pulling themselves to consciousness like newborn calves stumbling into the morning light. The man who had fallen in his soup shook the oyster meat from his beard as if nothing unusual had happened. The Ambassador groaned into his palm, his eyes scrunched up with all the telltale signs of a hangover.
“—as was the first toast, the last toast is to you, who have so enthusiastically celebrated with me what is usually a dark mark on my calendar. Thank you, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart.”
This time, Florian tipped back his glass and drank the champagne. So did everyone else in the room except for, Johann noticed, the fair Eleanor, who simply twirled the thin spine of her glass between her blunt fingers, a strange expression on her face.
The party wound itself down soon afterwards, the consensus among the courtiers and politicians being that the wine had been so strong as to cloud their senses. “A wild dinner party,” said one, “for such a dour occasion.” “Is this how tragedies are always celebrated in the North?” wondered another.
Florian instructed Johann to show the guests out. Johann unlocked the door and stood straight-backed, doing his very best impression of a footman and trying not to smile.
As she passed by, Eleanor—carrying her high-heeled shoes in one hand, a jewel-studded purse in the other—stopped for a moment. She stared at Johann hard for several seconds as she swayed on her bare feet.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
She blinked and something lit in her dark eyes. She opened her mouth as if to speak but seemed to think better of it. Instead, she shook her head and dipped down to slip back into her shoes. Johann watched the shape of her stumble her way towards the front of the restaurant.
* * *
When the door to Leickenbloom Manor slammed shut, Florian began laughing. “I can’t—” He hiccuped. “I can’t believe that it worked. I waded
neck-deep into the abyss, and I took hold of it! I wielded it like a tool!”
He spun into the drawing room, with his arms flailing wide, and fell into his favourite armchair. He kicked out one slender leg and rubbed his palm over his eyes, failing to stow the tide of his mirth.
Johann leant against the door and watched his “employer” with veiled fascination. Florian radiant was almost a different man from the dour, sharp-tongued businessman who went to and from the manor each day. Unhinged and cackling at his own wit, his hair mussed and his cheeks spotting red, he looked half his age. He looked softer, more breakable. Like a child who had never been kissed, never been smacked with an open palm.
“How long will it take them to die?” Johann asked.
“Oh, who knows. That’s the delightful part, don’t you think? This is only my trial run—who can tell how it will unfold from here?” Florian’s fingers fumbled on the top button of his coat. His hands were shaking and blue at the tips, numb and clumsy from too much sorcery.
Johann crossed the room in three easy strides and knelt at Florian’s feet. “You complain about people treating you like a bauble and you can’t even undress yourself.”
“Shut up, Johann,” Florian said, but he dropped his hands and surrendered his buttons to Johann’s long fingers.
“So. You had … a sibling?”
The muscles in Florian’s shoulders went tense, and Johann felt his heart quicken under his fingers.
“Don’t get worked up, Florian. I’d already snooped around enough to guess at such a thing—her name was Flora, right? Lovely little Norden girl with fluffy yellow hair. Your perfect mirror. A twin?”
“I … yes.” Florian swallowed hard and allowed Johann to help him shrug out of his coat. “You’ve guessed correctly. But I don’t say her name, and neither should you.”
The Monster of Elendhaven Page 5
