ANATHEMA—THÁNA—ATHAMÉ

      Sly fox of a kid, Burakh laughed to himself as he made his way back, walking behind Sticky to make sure he didn’t lose him. Carrying the heavy toolkit while Sticky filled his arms with a mask, twyrine and sewing supplies, he hurried the two of them home to have the brewery repaired by full-morning.

By the door, a twitchy little silhouette lingered. Burakh halted. He was sure it was the something small and bipedal they had spotted the night before, the child Lara said roamed by the tracks.
It was Murky. She toed an invisible border around the Lair, pinning her little grey eyes on his face with a mean, bitter look.

      “It’s the first time I see you this close,” Burakh said.
      “I wouldn’t let you approach, anyways,” Murky mumbled.
      “… Why so?”
      “You drag evil everywhere you go.” She nodded to herself. She frowned. “Yes. Evil, wickedness.”
      “You know some big words, little one...”
      “I see you around. You roam. I see you more than the crows — and the crows are bad news enough already.”
      “Are you saying I am bad news?”
      “Worse.” She crunched her nose in something hurt and angry. “ Worse. You have opened the door to evil, yes, but you also have shut it to love.” Her head twitched. She looked at him sideways — Burakh thought he could decipher shyness in the rising of her bushy brows. Did all of you have a meeting to decide to tell me I’m unlovable? I would have loved an invitation… “You can’t even pick herbs right. You hurt everything you touch, just like your dad before you.”

Burakh winced. Murky saw it, and winced too. Her entire face shed its anger and she brought two wide, eager eyes on him.

      “… Then you could teach me how to pick herbs right, couldn’t you?”
      “… Yes. Yes, I could.”
      " Very well. I’ll take you at your word.”
      “Yes. You better. It is worth more than yours.”

I do not doubt it.

      “Is there any reason you came here, Murky?”
      For a moment, she didn’t speak. Her peering marble-eyes — with her frown, she looked sullen; she breathed deeply like it took a lot from her to stare. “… We wanted to see you up close.”
      “Well… Know you’re always welcome inside if you need a place to stay.”
      “I won’t.” Softness struck her even as she tried to hold it back: “Thank you.”

She walked away. She dragged the dirt with her like she could make the whole riverbank follow her. Burakh only registered she had said “we” as the bell tolled. He’d have to go. Damn it. He’d have to go.

       The Theater had been decreed hospital. At the Town Hall, where they had met, the Bachelor had let out a sibilant sigh, a hiss between his gritted teeth. He had cursed under his breath, saying it was better than nothing. It would do. It would have to do. Burakh had stayed a few steps back, let Dankovsky do the talking — not moving when he had sighed again about needing people to listen to him, and mumbled something about no one having common sense in this town.

Seeing the building empty was peculiar, and drew a long shiver from Burakh’s skin. All tables and chairs had been removed and the place was instead divided into rows of makeshift beds — deathbeds, for the unluckier ones. Rags and sheets and lace curtains had been hung from metal frames to create the illusion of privacy — not that it mattered; not that it was going to matter. Pestilence roamed with heavy, loud hooves — the ticking of a clock somewhere, Burakh eventually realized. The air was stuffy, hot like a sick breath, hung low like a creeping fog. The whines and moans of the sick had no room to grow in the deleterious atmosphere, and they pushed against the shape of the illness itself, finding themselves crushed under its heel.
Burakh put on a mask, gloves, and walked, head low as this could shield him from the eyes of the noxious miasma, to Dankovsky.

       “Burakh. I’m glad to see you’ve come to your senses and accepted to be my aide.”
       “Hey, I’m doing that for myself too, you kn—”
       “Your colleague has also accepted to come — he works with me.” Burakh’s eyes widened, and he sought Rubin in the Theater. “We will not be too much of three to tackle this damn disease — we wouldn't be too much of thirty,” he insisted dryly. He marked a pause — “Well, we will not be too much of four, but…”
       Burakh jumped. “The girl’s here? Helping?”
       “She’s here,” the Bachelor tempered with a gesture of the hand. “Helping, we’ll have to see...”
       “I can hear you, you know!” Clara called from across the room, and the two men grimaced — yeah, they could hear her too. She trotted to their side. She wasn’t wearing protective equipment, and her pale blue eyes twinkled with something that, in the circumstances, appeared to Burakh downright sinister.
       “Where are your gloves?” Dankovsky asked dryly.
       “I won’t wear any. I must never wear any. You two are foolish for covering your hands.”
       “Spoken like someone who really likes diseases and bacteria,” Burakh scoffed.
       “The townsfolk have hunted down innocent girls thinking they were death-bringers,” Dankovsky told her. “Mind your words, and mind your acts even more, or they might think you’re a plague-carrier.”
       “They already do,” the girl pouted, and her eyes fell grey with a genuine sadness. The two men watched her, quite embarrassed — Burakh especially: with his list of kids to care for, that one didn’t feel too far from the others.
       “How come?” he asked.
      The girl hesitated. “I was sent from below,” she began. “Not hell,” she immediately corrected herself, “not the realm of the dead, but… life, and light, and all the beautiful hyphae under the soil… Pale, white, crystalline like silk thread.” Burakh slipped a sideway glance at the Bachelor, who was looking at the girl with squinting, skeptical eyes. “I come from a world of bonds and touch… I am a vessel for it, I am a conductor. My touch comes from it. And sometimes...” She opened her hands — the two men involuntarily flinched. She closed her hands. They were long, her fingers making up most of their length — those were tapered and crooked. Her nails were long, oval, brittle past the skin. Ligaments ribbed the backs of them like spiderwebs. “… The beautiful below-world chooses for me… through me.”
       “… Have you killed anyone, girl?”
       “I never would! I never did!”

Silence cut her voice in her throat. She shifted on her small feet, and Burakh saw Dankovsky’s eyes widen.

       “I never meant to.” the girl said. Her voice croaked.

Burakh felt his jaw jut, and a shiver bit at his neck. (He remembered the Bride who screamed as the fire tore through her, how the skin of her legs melted, and the onlookers realized she was flesh and muscle too.)

       “And do you not fear the stake?” he asked then, this voice aghast with a piercing him of anger.
       “They wouldn’t put me there,” Clara spat pointedly. “They won’t. I know how to heal. I heal. My hands can do so much more than yours. Especially yours,” she hissed at Dankovsky. “I can do miracles.”
       “Then do them fast, girl,” Dankovsky hissed back (and he was way better at hissing than she was), “for if you go too long without showing people you can heal, they will see through you, and you will get their ire and their hounds.”
       “You don’t believe me either, do you?”
       “I’m a scientist, not a faith healer.”

Clara’s face distorted with anger as her pale eyes shot bitter, enraged stare-arrows through the Bachelor’s face. For a moment, Burakh was really fucking scared of her.
She stomped her feet then, and it struck him that she was just a girl.

       “I’ll show you. I’ll show both of you.”
       “Show us fast. People are dying.”
       “I’ll comfort them.”
       “They don’t need comfort, they need healing!”
       “And is healing only violence to you? I’ve heard them calling you butcher. Maybe you do carry that name well.”

Before Burakh had time to protest, she scurried away like mice, and her silhouette blended with the curtains-rags.

       “Wicked girl,” the Bachelor said under his breath.
       “Do you think she’s dangerous?”
       “Do you?”

Burakh didn’t answer.

       Rubin was hard at work. His shoulders were slumped with a sensible weight. Burakh walked to his side and cleaned the bed of rags.

       “Still surprised you’d accept to work for the guy,” Burakh spoke. “To work here.”
       “It’s not about him. It’s not about you, either. This is my town too, and I’m a doctor. Did you think I’d leave it to die because I’m mad at you?”
       “I didn’t, Stakh, come o—”
       “I was to be your father’s heir,” he said. His voice was slow, evident. Hard. Granitic. “The least I can do now is not disappoint him. It’s the least you can do, too,” he sneered. “They’ve left us painkillers in the safe, use them. This disease tears through people like a butcher knife.”
       “I’m going to work,” he protested, “I just… wanted to thank you for coming, is all.”

Then, Rubin didn’t speak for a while. He moved on to another patient, and Burakh didn’t follow. He stood by a bed and did what he was told.
Sickness seemed to seep through the gloves with each touch — it was hot like a stove plate. He gave a sidelong glance to Clara across the room; with her hands hovering over the faces of the ill, she surely couldn’t feel the burn of the skin. If your “miracles” work… Lucky, lucky girl.

Just past ten, Rubin walked to him — Burakh almost jumped seeing him approach, surprised.

       “Say, even with how I have treated you since you came back, do you think you would ever cover for me?”
       “I would,” Burakh replied without hesitation. “Do you mean working in your place here, or… lying for you?”
       “If I tell you mostly the latter, will you do it still?”

Burakh pondered it. Rubin was growing anxious in the silence he left; he replied: “I still would. What do you need hidden? What do you need… hiding from?”

       “I need you to trust me.”
       “Not good enough, buddy,” Burakh joked. When he saw that Stanislav was not picking up on the humor one bit, he continued: “I would. I will. And I need you to trust me that I can cover for you.”
       “I’m sorry to tell you, but your reputation might take a nasty hit. I need you to be ready. I know you worked so hard to gain it back...”
       Burakh shrugged. “You get used to it. I didn’t die then, I think I would live later.”
       “I might do something unspeakable,” Rubin said.

His voice had been so flat, composed, devoid of solemnity, of guilt or fear, that Burakh froze in place.

       “See?” Rubin said, with a mocking hint in the voice. “You’re not ready.”
       “No, it’s — listen, I will do my best if you need me. Can you tell me what you’re doing?”
       “No way in hell, Cub.” The voice was curt and unwavering.
       “It’s starting to look like it,” Burakh mumbled,
       “Keep your poetics for someone else. So, would you? Will you?”
       “I will lie and kill for you like you are my own brother. Fine?”
       “Better.”

Burakh hesitated then.

       “Can I tell you what I’m doing?”
       “Are you going to ask me to cover for you too?”
       “No.” (He paused.) “Not yet, and I’ll get back to you if I do.”
       “Go on, then.”
       “I’m going to try to make a serum.”
       Rubin lent him a sidelong glance. “… You are?”
       “Yes.” He snapped a painkiller pill in half to distribute it between two patients. “I’ll… figure something you. I’ll have to.”
       “Me too,” Rubin said, and he dipped his head low. Burakh wouldn’t pry anything else from him today.

They worked side by side in silence.
A girl’s—the girl’s voice could be heard over the chiming of vials and syringes, the opening and closing of pill boxes.

       “… What the hell is she doing?”
       “Administrating last rites, it seems,” Burakh replied dryly.

She could very much have been.

_____________

       He still hadn’t found the meaning of the… sigil. It taunted him from the bottom of his pocket every time he rummaged through it. His fingers itching with the blank he was pulling on it, on that nameless Eighth, that taunting crooked shape, he used the little time he had between strides across the Town to get to Aspity.

By her shack, the Bride he had met was dancing. She was not alone; three others, entranced in their dance, pranced, stilled, stomped the ground with light feet. Their arms swayed and flailed, their heads tipped back as the curve of their backs accentuated; they grazed the tallest blades of grass with fingertips going over their heads. The Bride spotted him. She stilled. She straightened. She walked to him with her head high, her long pale arms like sails in the wind.

       “Are things taking shape, yarchagin?”

Burakh swallowed. They were. What kind of shapes was more the question, now.

       “Why do you care, Earth-betrothed? Since when do you worry about the matters of men?”
       “I worry not about the matters of men, kheerkhen, I worry about the matters of the Earth — and so do you.”
       “What matters of the Earth are you talking about?”
       “Have you remembered me?” she didn’t reply and asked instead.
       “I haven’t. And the pointers of my friends haven’t helped either.”
       “What were they?”
       “Cousin,” Burakh recollected. “Girlfriend I would have forgotten, but that couldn’t have happened.”

The Bride looked at him, drinking the meaning off his face. She laughed then, softly at first, then very loud — Burakh caught crows and larks taking flight at the sound.

       “No,” she eventually said, “It couldn’t have happened.” She stared at him; her clove-brown eyes were infused with something enigmatic and secretive. A smile toyed with the corners of her lips. “No, not you. It couldn’t have happened.”      
       “Are you calling me unlovable?” Burakh asked, feigning offense. “Basaghan, you hurt me.”
       “Do you consider yourself unlovable?” she said.

(And then, Burakh couldn’t say he didn’t.)

       “You shouldn’t worry, then,” she said after a silence, “about remembering me. You must, but you must let things take their course. You’ll come to me. You’ll come back to me. Until then...”

She didn’t speak more. She rejoined the other Brides. One began to sing — a litany of winded sounds, of broken breaths. The chant was cadenced by the clacking note of their palms against their exposed chests, against their thighs and knees, before they threw themselves on the ground; rolled upon it embraced by the tall feather-grasses, and jumped on their feet again. When Burakh walked away and into Aspity’s shelter, he heard their voices rise emphatically, finally free of his intrusive eyes.
(From the red-rags sister, he learned udurgh meant “a body that contains the world” — well, could mean. From Rubin, he was told something else. From Vlad the Younger, something else entirely — and that he was shit out of luck: the one person who could have answered this precisely was locked in the Termitary, or so the Olgimsky son thought. Burakh didn’t know if he believed his word that the place could be free of disease; all he had was some hope, and the gnawing resolution that he needed to get inside.)

       Burakh hoped the Termitary was free of disease.       
He fucking hoped so.
The thing spread into the water. The thing spread into the air. The thing spread through droplets; as the sickness bit the insides of a person, their wails of pain would be wet with thick spit as if they were rabid, and all the moisture would slowly drain from their skin. The thing didn’t spread to Worms, he discovered. That helped, and that didn’t — men were no Worms (and vice-versa). Their heavy steps, as they left, lifted sandy dirt off the ground, and Burakh almost recoiled at its miasmatic shape(s).

_____________

       The pestilence made men into animals — the men lucky enough not to be made into meat (or unlucky enough? Burakh wasn’t sure). They were muggers, looters, thieves, and Burakh thought to himself he was only barely better. A thief of thieves, a looter of looters, mugger of muggers. Whether or not they deserved to live (or to die) was of little care to him. Whether or not he did was of a bit more; not much still. He had legal immunity. (And also, he wanted to eat.)      
Cover of night helping, they were easily slain. He fished every single coin out of their pockets. Lord knows he would need them to eat.
(He wondered if, in those he killed and wounded, was the Bachelor’s attacker from the night before. He wondered if he’d try to get him too. One more reason for them to not get up. )
He disliked how easy he found it, after a while; his rusty blade went through the bones like threads through the reed on a loom.

      A silhouette detached itself from the fog, the pollen-sweet dirty mist. Its steps swung, devoured ground under their strides; slithered above earth, fast, animal. Burakh brought a hand to his hip and his sheathed knife, the blade of which he pulled just enough. He didn’t care if that made whoever was coming believe he was ready to strike first, or for no reason — he wasn’t risking it.
The silhouette parted arms — didn’t raise them like it was threatened; rather opened them in an inverted V, the branches of which were open palms. A voice rose from it, bouncing off the walls:

      “Ripper, hey, Ripper…”

Sonovabitch. Stamatin.

      “You couldn’t be more creepy if you tried, could you? You’re lucky I’m not quick on the draw.” This made Andrey laugh frankly — a single, loud bark that echoed longly. (A “oh, yeah, sure, you’re not”.) “If you keep approaching people like that, someone’s going to stick a blade between your ribs.”
      “Doubt it.” He smiled widely, unnaturally. “Follow me. You’re picking up your colleague and you’re walking him home.”
     “I’m what my what and doing what?”

Stamatin gestured at him to hide his blade — but not to put it away, Burakh noted.

They walked to Peter’s without a hitch (strange, Burakh thought. Then he thought about the shadows he believed he saw avoiding him — him, the Ripper, the patricide maybe still; and Stamatin, who bled a dangerous tenebrosity slowly, steadily, inexorably).       
In the night, the Loft seemed to expand, to sprawl; taller as its scaffolding disappeared into the black of the sky — its metal arms looked like pillars holding up the dark belly of the night. 
With the district smelling potently of ashes and smoke, the effluvia of twyrine and turpentine had grown threefold.
Andrey picked up the pace to hold the door open for Burakh.

      “Mind the lintel. It is low.”

And as he said that, Burakh smacked his forehead into it. 

      Christ, was the damn place cold — much colder than Burakh had found it to be in the morning the day before. Upstairs was… animated. Not loud, but lively enough that even Andrey raised an eyebrow. He climbed the claustrophobic stairs first with the ease of someone who could have built them. When Burakh followed suit, they both stumbled into a room whose dim lights bore witness to unfathomably complex discussions — or so he guessed, seeing papers upon papers pulled from god-knows-where and laid flat, or folded, or shaped into abstract geometric demonstrations, scattered across the Loft like a storm had galloped through.
In the middle of that mess, Peter and the Bachelor had entrenched themselves into the empty tub, the edge of which was covered with more goddamn papers that Peter was deep in the process of telling his guest all about.
Peter had kept his coat, which overflowed the tub like ink, and the Bachelor had discarded his. The cravat and tie still held, one of his sleeves was rolled and revealed ink stains. When the both of them spotted the newcomers, they audibly groaned — Burakh couldn’t contain enough the snort that escaped him when he heard in the Bachelor’s voice that he was drunk, well drunk. Andrey leaned towards to him: 

      “You’re helping me get him out of the tub and you’re walking him back to the Stillwater.”
      “Why am I doing that?”
     “Because I am not.”

It was clear in his tone he wasn’t giving Burakh a choice.

      “Afraid he couldn’t defend himself in the big scary world outside?” Burakh asked dryly, mockingly. 
     “Oh, he could defend himself just fine,” Andrey shook his head. “I’ve seen him shoot a guy in the face.”

Burakh felt his face fall from him in complete stupefaction. His jaw unlocked itself to hang from it as he stared, discomfited, at Andrey, expecting him to elaborate at least a bit. He didn’t.

      “Coming to rob me of my company?” Peter asked, watching Andrey approach the tub like he would a wild animal.
     “Coming to discharge you of him would be more precise. The Ripper is walking him home.”
     “Garde rapprochée, eh?” Peter said, his eyes on the bubbling discomfort on Burakh’s face.
     “Hey,” he objected, feeling like his intrusion was making the place itself uneasy — cold drafts following the line of its inhabitant’s sight, candlelights waning and shirking his silhouette — “I don’t even know why I’m here. I just came because he brought me.”
      “Can’t a man enjoy some repose in this forsaken town, Andrey?” the Bachelor, who had so far stayed silent, eyes following the back-and-forth, eventually interjected.
      “The wicked need their rest, Bachelor—”
      “Oh, don’t you call me that,” he gritted.
      “ — I’m just putting your friend in charge of making sure you do not stumble into the eternal kind when walking back.”
     “My friend?”
      “His friend?”

Three pairs of eyes turned to Andrey, then three to Burakh.

      “Everybody here who doesn’t want to knife me wants to befriend me,” the Bachelor snickered, then sobered like a passing cloud rolled over his face.
      “Didn’t take you for the partying type, oynon,” Burakh attempted to diffuse the cold that crept. 
      “You call that a party?” Dankovsky raised an eyebrow high, and Burakh could see the liquor-pink in his sclerae. 
      “This is a discourse,” Peter objected, visibly vexed, and Dankovsky nodded mindfully. 

Andrey pulled out what was apparently his chair in the Loft, having been strategically placed to help pull someone out of the bathtub. When he sat down and snatched the thread of conversation Burakh had thrown in the web of discussion like he wanted nothing more but to tell their new guest all about it, Burakh realized that oh, I’m going to be here for hours, aren’t I…

      “When he was in uni, he was such a stuck-up… Wouldn’t smoke, wouldn’t drink, wouldn’t enjoy others' company.”
      “I’ve started smoking in my first year,” Dankovsky objected, irritation piercing through his slurred — which Burakh found amusing — voice, “and I kept the habit. I stopped drinking with crowds but I still do, see?”

In an attempt to convince no-one but himself, he swirled around his mostly-empty glass. Andrey carried on, unbothered, taking only Burakh as interlocutor as if the other two were too drunk to matter (or maybe he really wanted to annoy the Bachelor. Burakh didn’t really know which was funnier).

      “He was so austere,” Andrey continued playfully, voice heavy with nostalgia, “uninterested in earthy pleasures. Stuck out like a sore thumb amongst our… revelrous company. You would have thought he was a vampyr!”

Burakh pinched his lips, nodded, smiled tensely as he was starting to wonder what in the hell he was doing here. (The thought of the Bachelor as a vampyr was droll, he still thought — and kept that to himself.) Was this before or after he “shot a guy in the face”?

      “He acts like he hasn’t seen me drunk,” Dankovsky objected still, again, “like he hasn't gotten me drunk. He knows damn well I wasn’t always austere.”
     “Such a Platonic vision of the world, isn’t it?” Andrey persisted, unperturbed by Dankovsky’s protests, gesturing in Burakh’s direction to keep his attention. “So sober, ascetic, disengaged from the excesses of wine, parties and sex. Venerating the search for transcendence, longing for the fortitude to stay unwavered in the face of urges and desire, for the purity of Life and Love in their most refined, detached, intellectual—marble-like, almost—nature…”
      “Will you stop?” That was Peter who, until then silent, slumped against the Bachelor, voiced his discomfort in his place.
      “Plato said that?” That was Burakh, who saw that discomfort as well, but didn’t feel like telling Andrey to shut up — he doubted it would end well.
      “Among other things.”
      “Do you agree?”

Andrey eventually stopped, then pondered, a smirk blooming on him as he thought.

      “Even if I did,” he began, “it would be hypocritical of me to position myself on it.”
     “So I’ve heard…”
      “What about you, Daniil?” he persisted, question pulling on its hook an audible groan out of the two men tucked in the tub, who had been until he walked in apparently blissfully unbothered. “Holding back the earthy, carnal matters for the intellectual pursuit of self-mastery and eminence of the Platonic soul? Still?"
      “Not now. Cease.” (That was Peter again, louder this time.)
      “... I have no opinion on the matter."

The Bachelor had spoken at last; it threw a cloak of silence on all four of them, smothering the discussion suddenly, as if Andrey had wanted to get a reaction out of him and, now that he had gotten it, he had lost his drive to declaim on. Peter threw Dankovsky a sort of insectoid side-glance to monitor his uneasiness in case he needed to interrupt Andrey again.

      “Celibate?” Burakh asked — three pairs of eyes turned to him, Andrey’s gleaming with a sort of pride that he’d managed to instigate nosiness.
      “... You could call it that.”
     “Mmh… The married-to-my-work type?” Burakh asked again — he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t taunting him at least a little bit, meeting none of the resistance he usually did from the Bachelor, he felt quite compelled.
     “Maybe. Are you going to give me grief about it?”
      “I couldn’t. I don’t fare particularly better.”

Ah, he probably fared worse: he had no job to blame his loneliness on.

Eventually, apparently bored of toying with Dankovsky’s drunken irritation, Andrey got up and gestured at him to do the same. When he answered him with a long groan, Peter nudged him on the flank like one would a horse. The Bachelor got up on two unsteady legs, swaying precariously. Andrey offered a hand that he promptly waved away.

      “Go fetch him his coat, Burakh,” Andrey ordered. “Can’t be catching a cold in these times of plagues, not enough medicine to go around,” he added with a stifled laugh. 
      “I’m not your dog, buddy,” Burakh barked, and went to fetch the coat anyway. (It had been meticulously folded and laid on a bergère armchair, the dent in the seat of which told Burakh it had been occupied before they came.)

Getting a closer look at it, Burakh was not less baffled than the first time he had seen it. The leather was thick, hemmed with folded leather strips. The shape was an incomprehensible, both genius and maddening, asymmetry; but the construction was solid and proper. The snakeskin — Burakh hadn’t seen anything like it, hadn’t met anyone… peculiar enough to want to wear snakeskin — was ostentatious, taste-full, as in full-of-taste, a taste Burakh was, frankly, appalled by.

      “Gaudy, eh?” asked the Bachelor from across the room.
      “I wouldn't put it that way.” (He very much would put it that way.)

Andrey nudged Dankovsky towards Burakh, his touch constantly batted away by the Bachelor who, seemingly outraged, insisted he didn’t need pushing. 

      “Alright, give him your arm, Bachelor,” Andrey said, “so he can slip on your sleeve.”
      “I can dress myself!” Dankovsky scoffed. 
      “He can dress himself!” Burakh scoffed too. 

He did slip the sleeve on Dankovsky’s arm, then the other as well. Dankovsky kept in the tautness of his neck a sort of inflexible pride even as he struggled to fit his hand through the cuff. Burakh witnessed, absolutely baffled, how even the cape on his back was asymmetrical. He felt sick. He mouthed a “what the hell is that?” at Andrey who shrugged and stepped aside. 
Dankovsky adjusted his cravat — a tic, in all likelihood, as it hadn’t budged from its usual place — and flattened the front of his vest, which had crumpled where he had leaned against the tub. He was ushered to the top of the stairs and took his first step down. 
In the laborious silence, Peter suddenly got up, stumbling drunkenly out of the tub. Agitated and pale, he dashed through the room to a painted canvas, promptly turning it around so it faced the wall. He frantically pulled a curtain over it then, and stepped back as if trying to avoid a spreading fire. Burakh gave the scene an interrogating rise of the brow. 

      “Damned thing was moving,” Peter muttered, his stiff throat red with labored pants. 

Burakh watched him try to compose himself, shaking — he wasn’t sure everything was to blame on the drinks.

      “Damned place wants souls,” Peter said when he caught his puzzled gaze; heavy, hammering, as if trying to justify with the strength he had the spectacle he was unwillingly offering, “and when it bleeds one out, it tries to bring another in.”
      “Don’t worry about it,” Andrey told Burakh with a wide, animal smile on his teeth when he didn’t look any more reassured. 

Burakh very much worried about it. 

As Dankovsky made his perilous way down the stairs, Burakh threw a glance back at the Loft. Peter stood in the background, burrowing himself in shadow, thorax tense and arms limp, eyes wild; just in front, as if to hide him (and the painting) from Burakh’s prying eyes, Andrey stretched himself tall and looming. He ushered Burakh down with the back of a hand and followed him to the front door. 

      The Bachelor seemed shockingly sober as all three made their way down the perilous stairs — maybe too proud to let himself be helped, or worse, carried. (The thought made Burakh smile — internally, of course — he remembered with a bitter fondness his days of pushing back home university classmates in wheelbarrows. They used to do it here, too; more often, actually: there just were more wheelbarrows.)

      “Out you go,” Andrey sent them out with. “He better make it back unharmed. I’ll check in with Eva.”
      “Shouldn’t she be asleep at this time?”
      “She should, just like you and I. We’re not the only night owls in this town.” He pointed at Dankovsky. “Or vultures, for that matters. Hence…”
      “Hence why the Bachelor needs a chauffeur,” interrupted Burakh, to which Dankovsky snorted in response. “I got it the first two times.”

Andrey’s gaze hardened, grew sharp and chiseled; granitic.

      “I mean it.” He repeated himself, cool, icy. “He better make it unharmed.”
     “Relax,” Burakh said, low, placating. “I’ll walk your brother’s new friend home.”

Andrey eclipsed himself in the entryway, taken over by the pitch-black downstairs until barely his eyes and the tip of his nose could be guessed against the stuffy, dense ink-darkness.
Burakh sent Dankovsky forward with a pat on the shoulder — he winced and groaned at the too-firm touch and started walking. 
He walked straight enough. Sometimes, he’d hold the side of his head, as if trying to push the oncoming hangover back in. (Burakh found it funny, he did, he found it kind of funny.)

      “Where do you know Andrey from?” he asked, seeing the streets were calm enough to warrant small talk. When he got side-eyed by a black, pink-cradled bead, he added: “If that’s not too indiscreet…”
      “University,” the Bachelor replied — plain, frank, earnest in a way that had Burakh taken aback just a little bit. “He approached me one day.”
      “Just like that?”
      “Indeed.”
      “Must have taken a liking to you.”
      “God, I hope not,” the Bachelor slurred. He marked a pause, as if rummaging through his memories. “Nothing wrong with it if he did; I meant I just wasn't very likable as a nineteen-year-old.”

Burakh held his lips pinched and himself back from telling the Bachelor he wasn’t very likeable as of four days ago either. 

      “I had imagined you were… childhood friends, or something. Neighbors who grew up together.”
      “We aren’t. But that’s the type of relationship you know best, isn’t it?"

Burakh stopped, and Dankovsky imitated him, swaying a little on his unsteady legs. 

      “Did anybody tell you about that?”
      “I have discussed it with miss Ravel… and doctor Rubin.”

Burakh looked at him. Walked forward then, as if to shirk his words.

      “They were vague. Vague enough that none of your secrets were revealed, if that worries you."

Burakh snickered nervously. 

      “Our relationships have been… tense… since I’ve been back.”
      “You haven’t been back for long.”
      “No. I still feel… like some uncrossable fault has torn the ground open between us. No bridge can lay on it.”

The Bachelor stopped in his tracks in his turn, swayed on his feet like the mild breeze made him rock like an ear of wheat. Burakh saw Dankovsky looked—was looking at him. The little black beads of his eyes were strung along an intoxicated, yes, but inquisitive still, stare. 

      “Why are you telling me all of this?” (A pause.) “Why am I telling you all of this?”
      “You’re drunk,” Burakh shrugged (quickly, answering only the second half of this question — the only half he thought he had an answer for), “and alcohol lowers your inhibitions.”
      “I’m not even drunk,” the Bachelor protested, drunkenly. “I am tipsy at most.”
      “A powerful tipsy then,” Burakh laughed. “Well then, you’re tipsy and it lowers your inhibitions.” The Bachelor tried to roll his eyes and groan, only for the alcohol to pound a little too hard behind his eyelids and make him huff. “Or maybe it just makes you chatty.”
      “It does. One of its biggest downsides.”
      “You don’t like to talk?”

Dankovsky stopped again, harder this time, like a stubborn horse. 

      “I barely know you, Burakh.”
      “Hey, that’s fair. I won’t push.” (That was a little bit of a lie — he quite wanted to push… get just a few more words out of him now that they seemed to flow out more freely.)

Dankovsky walked forward, stumbled, walked backward as Burakh tried to catch him with a hand the Bachelor swiftly refused. 

      “Haven’t drank that much since university,” he mumbled. 
      “The sober kind?” Burakh asked — teased, really, but the situation was enough in his favor that he dared. He had already guessed it from Andrey’s words.
      “I try to be. It was hard with Andrey for company, but… Eventually, he’d do all the drinking I wouldn’t.” He clicked his tongue thoughtfully. “Well, the drinking and the…” He gestured at absolutely nothing.
      “Oh, wild years, huh?” Burakh almost-laughed again. He was thoroughly enjoying getting to be this nosy. 
      “Not wild to me,” the Bachelor hammered. “I very much tried to keep them not wild. There were… (He gestured again, closer to the chest this time.) … Instances.”

He let the word hang between them. Burakh was left to ponder on its shape, its peculiar weight, its ambiguous secrecy. Andrey’s shameless divulgence came to him again, and he assumed it was the chance to ask: 

      “Is it true you shot a man’s face off?” His voice was low; fitting for what he’d felt was a brash confession.
      “Oh for Heaven’s sake,” the Bachelor grimaced and grunted, “did Andrey tell you that?”
      “No, you just looked the type,” Burakh joked. When Dankovsky glared at him with a fuddled, fiercely incredulous eye, he added, lower: “I’m… kidding. Of course he told me.”

Dankovsky’s shoulders slumped, as if relieved.

      “It must have been ten years now… A…” He pressed his gloved palms to his eyes, as if to keep the migraine in the back of his skull so the memories could come to the front in its place. “... student revolt broke out in the Capital, I do not even remember why it started.” He blinked a wave of headache away. “Don’t even remember who started it… It began as a riot in the bar. I remember hopping on tables. They must’ve sent the Gendarmes on us. Someone handed me a weapon…  He’s just a casualty now. A footnote in the newspaper.”

There hung a… heavy, lukewarm silence, stunned on Burakh’s shoulders and light on Dankovsky’s — as if the story escaping him was a relief.

      “Were you drunk?” Burakh eventually asked.
      “I was stone-cold sober. Not sure if Andrey was.”
      “He seems like the kind not to be.”
      “His brother does the drinking he does not. And he does the… whatever else his brother doesn’t. He mostly just isn’t the kind to pass up an opportunity to fight people.”
      “I noticed,” Burakh whispered.”
      “Has he tried to fight you?”
      “Not… physically. Every word that comes out of him just kind of… drips with a desire of escalation. Like his very voice wants me to attack him so he has an excuse to retaliate.”
      “Seems like him.”

They weaved through the streets in quietude, Burakh enjoying the confidences he’d been made, and the implicit reassurance that the Stamatin was as quick on the draw as he’d felt he was. He appreciated the Bachelor being this little reserved, even if he needed the push from the bottle… Burakh preferred that to the high-headed haughtiness of when they first met, to the pinched, strained disdain he had shown to be capable of.
Burakh was nodding to himself, reflecting on Dankovsky’s confidences, when the man he was ushering back to the Stillwater stopped to hold a lamppost. Before he had time to ask, Burakh heard him grumble: 

      “The earth is moving.”
      “Well, it spins around the sun, oynon.”
      “Not like that, Burakh,” he slurred. “You know what I mean.”

Burakh did. He very professionally offered his hand, which Dankovsky waved away. 

      “I’m so painfully sober,” he groused, and resolutely he was not, “my thoughts are unfathomably clear and it is unbearably frustrating to slur my speech and stumble my steps.” That sounded incredibly plastered. “Burakh, humor me. If anyone comes, pretend I am utterly wasted. It would be less embarrassing to have them believe I am completely inebriated than for them to not trust anything I say later because I sound the same sober and drunk.”

That was the drunkest idea Burakh had ever heard in his life. He held back a croaky chortle, restrained firmly by the pitch-black-serious stare Dankovsky drilled his face with.

      ”Nobody’s around, oynon, and I doubt the muggers will care.”
      “Humor me,” he repeated insistently.

Burakh raised his hands in compliance.

      He was becoming less and less sure of Dankovsky’s “painful soberness” as, this time, he grabbed the arm Burakh offered — on the outer side, like one would hold onto a rocky outcropping. 

      “Hope you enjoyed the company, at least,” Burakh inquired in the silence — small-talk, again, as to not let the cold, eerie night make itself too loud.
      “Yours?” Dankovsky chuckled.
      “I meant Peter’s.”
      “Ah… I did. He is a… fascinating individual. Do you know him at all?”

Burakh stumbled, stride stuttering, memories of faded dreams shifting in front of his eyes like flickering candlelights.

      “I… know his brother just a bit more, which is to say he is a stranger to me.”
      “ He is so thoroughly dedicated to the pursuit of greatness. Of a transcendence … even I am not sure I understand yet. Or will ever…”

The Bachelor let out a wistful sigh that made Burakh jump at its uncharacteristicness — not that he knew much about the Bachelor’s character… but he had a vague idea. He sounded… somber, too, almost; wishful in a hurt, disappointed way.

      “He’s also,” the Bachelor interrupted his train of thought, “unfortunately, thoroughly, deeply nuts.”
      “Is that your professional opinion?” Burakh joked. “Your diagnosis?”
      “In my medical opinion,” Dankovsky replied in the same light-hearted tone, making Burakh huff out a minuscule sigh of relief, “he is clinically a basket case.”

They laughed, and Burakh recalled their uncomfortable, confrontational first meeting. He vastly preferred Dankovsky now than then, or when he refused his help for obviously debilitating stitches, or brushed off the potential of folk—his folk—medicine, or…
The Bachelor sobered in a blink:

      “And regrettably, I’m not sure the liquor he claims helps him does anything but drive him madder.”

They walked wordlessly — crossing the bridge across the Guzzle into the Atrium, the Bachelor leaned to the water and grimaced at his reflection.

      “Burakh, I have a bad feeling about Peter.”

Burakh had too — for different, crawling, invasive reasons. He doubted the man of science that the Bachelor was believed in veil-crossing dreams, so he kept his mouth shut — and hoped that if the twin crossed into his, too, he could at least shake them off at dawn. 

      At the Stillwater, Eva was asleep, hiding, or gone. Burakh pushed Dankovsky up the stairs like a stiff scarecrow as he opposed full-body resistance and groaned that he could walk fine — he could walk, he just had to take the stairs sideways. In the attic, Dankovsky unceremoniously threw himself on the bed, face first into the pillow, arms comically straight at his sides. Made it, Burakh sighed.
Dankovsky, otherwise completely still on the blanket, fiddled with his shoes as he tried to kick them off. 

      “Stop,” said Burakh, “stop that. You’re going to mess them up.” He felt emboldened enough: he walked to the side of the bed, barely out of range of a potential uncontrolled Bachelor kick. “Don’t move. I’m right behind you.” He undid, with one swift pull each, the Bachelor’s shoelaces. He stepped back carefully, sights on Dankovsky’s comically rigid half-asleep dent-in-the-covers silhouette. 

Dankovsky then kicked his shoes off. They fell on the floorboards and, with the toe of his boots, Burakh flipped them downside-up before pushing them close to the bed. 

      “Goodnight, oynon. Glad you made it back safely.”
      “Goodnight, Burakh. Sorry Andrey forced your hand.”
      “I don’t mind.” (He didn’t, really.)
      “You should get some sleep too. Don’t get gutted on your way there.”
      “I won’t. Seems more like your thing.”

He heard the Bachelor’s drunk chuckle, muffled almost entirely by the pillow. Burakh threw one last glance back before exiting the room, catching Dankovsky extirpating himself out of his long coat, letting slide down the side of the bed. In the stairs, Burakh heard him mumble something about his shirt being stuck in his pants as he was trying to take it off, and he picked up the pace: not his problem, not his business. Burakh was out without seeing miss Yan.

_____________

      Ink-black night reigned tall and mighty. The ceiling of the sky was high, with no clouds to pull it down. 

Against its dark cloak, Burakh spotted Murky, crouching, carding through the grass with her dirty fingers. He walked to her.

(He left. He wondered how such a little body could bear so much grief. His felt tacky and wispy in comparison. His moved around in his body like an eel between rocks and reefs; how was hers like? All bundled in her small lungs until her voice was strangled.)

A single streak of pale moonlight slithered into the lair before Burakh shut the door behind him. As soon as its unwieldy rust closed on him, he was overwhelmed by the scents of herbs, of flowers and of blood. He shook off the smell of twyrine off his shoulders and thighs, took off his smock to fold it on the back of a chair, took the time to unlace his boots, the memory of the Bachelor wriggling to kick off his shoes pulling a vague smirk from his mouth, and tucked himself into bed.

_____________

      The damn dream walked on immediately — or rather, he walked immediately in. He ducked his head to avoid what he thought was a low wall, but was actually a curtain draped and pulled over a wide entryway. He felt the brush of it — velvety — he tensed — it was a rusty, soft red, embroidered of orange and gold. Before him stretched a wide room, the lacquered floorboards of which reflected Burakh as he walked — he saw himself and found he was five years younger. Against wallpapered walls were flush settees and divans, a few filled by foreign faces of young men who glanced at him when he strode in. Some were drinking, talking; Burakh realized he, too, had a glass in his hand, and took a sip he wanted nonchalant. The low-lit room opened on a small balcony, flanked by two ornate glass doors. 
Burakh stopped in his tracks when he recognized the silhouettes leaning against the rail; Architect, Bachelor, Architect. The twins spotted him; Andrey turned his head, and Peter threw him a sidelong, insectoid eye. They were speaking; their mouths were moving, at least. Elbows to the rail, Dankovsky didn’t turn to him — he didn’t even seem to see him at all. He was deep in discussion with them.
He pulled a cigarette out of a shirt pocket and brought it to his lips; Andrey pulled a lighter that he offered him the flame of; and Dankovsky watched it pensively. He took the cigarette out of his mouth; brought it to the flame; and back to his mouth again. He smoked, and Burakh could see how the smoke swirled unnaturally. Slithering. Serpentine. Burakh let out a chuckle in poor taste.

Two fingers of a hand tapped his shoulder — well, didn’t, really; he turned to the silhouette behind him and almost sighed with relief when it wasn’t anyone’s he could recognize. He could, lucidly, see that it was barely a face, and more an amalgamation of shapes into something that vaguely looked like a young man; he could, within the dream, understand it was a person.

      “Do you dance…?” the young man asked.
      Burakh found himself dumbfounded, having expected many (most) things but that. “Oh,” he stuttered, “I don’t, sorry… I’m here to see a friend, actually.” (The word had slipped out of his mouth and the lucid Burakh that was set between his lungs blinked two consecutive times in sheer shock.)
      “Aren’t we all,” the young man smiled. “Well, thank you regardless.”
      “You’re, uh, welcome. Hope you find someone.”
      “You too.”

(The lucid Burakh blinked three times then.)

He turned to the balcony and his friend had vanished; only the two damn weirdos remained. They had their eyes set on him like silver spires. Easy now, Burakh thought to himself like they were feral horses.
They smiled. Wicked thing. Their cuspids were long and sharpened — it knocked the wind out of him. He blinked, and they threw themselves out of view through the sides like curtains that would have been ripped open. Burakh ran to the balcony and found nothing. He heard — a lively waltz: it was coming from below. He leaned over the railing — he held onto it strongly. It didn’t shake, but he wasn’t sure it would hold still. The level below also had its own balcony, onto which one would enter through a similar set of doors. Burakh couldn’t see the people dancing; he could guess the shapes of reflections on the varnished floorboards.
Peter’s head poked at the window. His long white neck twisted so his eyes pinned themselves to Burakh’s face. Andrey’s veiny, wiry arms touched the balcony next to him.

“You know damn well what you’re doing,” Burakh cursed under his breath. “You know damn well how you’re doing it.”

Peter’s head disappeared again and Burakh heard footsteps — two sets of them — cloaked by the instruments of the waltz, then muffled by the tapestries on the walls; Burakh barged out of the room and dashed up the stairs. He was tailing Peter’s shiny shoes, close enough to see he was following him and yet too far to try to grab him.
They rushed up the stairs and Burakh started to get dizzy. As he panted, he realized: the damn stairs were a spiral, not unlike the one at Peter’s, not unlike the one that coiled around the Tower. Soon, they were not white marble under his shoes, but a grey, harsh rock. Soon, they were not in a building, but cutting through a pitch-blackness, with nothing but their own gazes as light. Soon, all the music waned, and all that was left was a cutthroat, unwieldy, unyielding silence.
The stairs were cut off. Burakh watched Peter disappear into the black velvet that lined the bottom of every dream — disappear, as if swallowed, as if pulled into water and drowned. Burakh called his name and his voice didn’t carry for more than a centimeter past his mouth. Peter disappeared and the last thing Burakh saw were his two spectral eyes on him.
Burakh wasn’t pushed, didn’t trip, nothing collapsed under him. His knees hit the dark floors of a scene.
For a long, long time, there was nothing but silence. Still, he couldn’t leave.

(THE HARUSPEX sits downstage left. Three columns stand before him at stage center, holding two arches. The middle column is actually the JANUSIAN PILLAR GOD(S), CARVER(S) OF PASSAGEWAYS. THE HARUSPEX hasn’t noticed its nature yet.)

THE HARUSPEX:
Ah, what then? You offer me a fork in the road? You offer me cleaving of paths? I don’t think I shall make one more step. For all I know, they both will lead me to the grave.

CRIMSON FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
Well, what path wouldn’t?

THE HARUSPEX
(startled) Oh f—. … How did you get here?

EMERALD FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
I made the columns.

THE HARUSPEX
You're here too?

CRIMSON FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
I shoveled dirt from the path.

EMERALD FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
I drew the arches.

CRIMSON FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
I dug holes for their piers...

BOTH FACES OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
… and I laid the first stone down.

THE HARUSPEX
(bitter) That’s very nice. And I bet you’ve drawn the roads, too. So you can tell me where they lead.

EMERALD FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
I’m not a civil engineer.

CRIMSON FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
Yeah, me neither.

EMERALD FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
I don’t quite like the flat limbs of snaking roads, I don’t quite like how they sprawl, how they expose themselves to the sky, thorax ready to be carved open by the fingers of the sky. I think that’s too intimate. I don’t want to be the one to carve them open: I feel like they would burst in my hands like a too-ripe fruit. I’m not good at peeling the skin off of plums.

CRIMSON FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
I don’t quite feel the same, I wouldn’t mind slicing the soft skin of the soil down the line of the sternum if that meant I could bridge heart to mind. I wouldn’t mind… but it wouldn’t feel right. (after a hesitation) Few things I do feel right, but this thing would feel even more wrong.

THE HARUSPEX
… Why are you telling me all of this.

CRIMSON FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
Because you asked.

EMERALD FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
Because you’re here to listen.

(Whispers backstage. Shiver in the curtains. The light slowly dims.)

THE HARUSPEX
… Before I leave, may I have one more thing answered?

BOTH FACES OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
Speak, then.

CRIMSON FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
(with a snicker) — or forever hold your tongue!

THE HARUSPEX
Will you tell me why you’re here? … Can you tell me why you’re here? I know why I am — at least I think I do. And if I don’t… I’ll figure it out. But I do not know why I keep running into you . 

EMERALD FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
Things were simple before you came back. Well… simpler.

CRIMSON FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
We knew this town in ways others didn’t. Others couldn’t. We explored it in ways others didn’t; couldn’t.

EMERALD FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
It’s not just about networks of streets and paths. (growing impassioned) It’s about… lines of sight. Of sights. Lines of vision(s). Curves of perspectives, hollows of domes and cavities. Hyphae of thoughts. Mycelium of faith(s). The bark of reality as it stands, and how easy it is to peel off the trunk, to peel off the skin. The bite of intricacies of bonds and beliefs, and how it needs to be fundamentally, transcendentally, irremediably changed.

CRIMSON FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
Of course we’d be there. This is what needs to be dug. This is what needs to be dug into… and here we are. And here you are.

EMERALD FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
And here you came…

THE HARUSPEX
And you’re telling me all of this now? You’re giving yourself away fast. Isn’t it a little early?

EMERALD FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
We are not. We are… let’s say, leveling the field.

(THE HARUSPEX remembers Andrey’s words: You seem like a worthy fighter. Like you like it, too. He swallows thickly, nervously. The audience doesn’t know that. The audience doesn’t see that.)

CRIMSON FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
We can’t tell it later. The town is… becoming stuffed with soot and bone.

EMERALD FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
Becoming harder and harder to tread… and lighter and lighter to carry.

CRIMSON FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
Soon, there will be no more cracks in the ceiling to fit dreams like those… 

EMERALD FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
… No more tears in the fabric.

THE HARUSPEX
You see it too?

EMERALD FACE OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
(not answering) Things will fundamentally, transcendentally, irremediably change. You need to be told this now. There is no other choice.

THE HARUSPEX
Why?

BOTH FACES OF THE PILLAR GOD(S)
Because you are going to fundamentally, transcendentally, irremediably change.