ANATHEMA—THÁNA—ATHAMÉ

      He crossed the bridge into the Spleen and a terrible hunch overcame him. He couldn’t explain it; it was as if a whisper had risen from the ground itself, carrying scurrying, menacing footsteps to his ears. He could follow the thread of it like Ariadne herself had put it in his path — and it brought him to the Warehouses, where members of the Kin, Worms and men alike, had crowded. 
He remembered the morning — the morning of the previous day — (what hour was this? What hour is this?) the unspoken threat. The sibilant way they talked about putrid desecration, about having yet to find him. The whisper grew, Burakh found they had found him. 
He remembered Rubin’s plea — modestly cloaked under the veil of confidence. 
Burakh was cloaked by the veil of night. He was not seen. 

(Is heard, stage right, the sound of hooves. 
A head peeks. It sees the blood on Burakh’s hands,
and it simply nods.

cutting blade into animals-like-me…

Are men beasts? 
Is this man one?
This man’s a blade.
Are the entrails of sheep and poultry not enough for haruspicy?

Burakh cannot read those he spills. Night tightens around its corpses like secrets to keep.)

They hadn’t come with blades; no silver, no steel, not even carved bone or ceramic. 
Well, that wasn’t quite true. They had come with blades in their eyes, and they were all turned on Rubin. (Or was this just what he told himself to make himself feel better?)
He’d made the choice. He’d made the choice to capsize himself if that meant he could pull shipwrecked Rubin from the sharp, piercing ridges. Chances were, they could both drown. (They didn’t, four men and three Worms went in the depths instead.)

Burakh limped back to the lair. He had received a kick to the knee — his bad knee; the bone hadn’t broken again, he could feel that, but even knowing it didn’t make him feel any better. (Knowing most things didn’t make him feel any better — he had gone over that already.) 
He was shaking, his arms agitated with furious shivers as if their humeral heads wanted to pop out of the glenoid hollows; his head spun; he thought he could puke. 
A thought absolutely wretched came over him: they were back to the Earth now. They who had spoken so tenderly of death as her embrace, they had gone back to the Earth now. 
(Burakh felt like he had swallowed darkness, and he checked the door was locked behind him three times. He crawled through the workshop and hid his entire body, still clothed, under the thinning blanket. There were eyes on him. He knew there were eyes on him.)

_____________

      Tippity-tippity-tippity-toes. Burakh walked fast enough — still couldn’t outrun the opening of the curtains. The floor was no black velvet, no theatrical floorboards either.
This was not the usual stage, was it? A grand triptych, tall as the cathedral’s windows, was anchored in the dream, its side panels moving as Burakh did, closing ever-so-slightly around him as he stood in the middle like ink-covered pages, or raven wings. The canvas stretched between the dark wooden frame was that velvety black — Burakh could imagine its lusciousness without even stretching his hand out to touch. Not a face peered into that fabric. He sighed, almost relieved. 
Why was he there, then?
Tippity-tippity-tippity-toes.  
Hey, those are not his footsteps. They’re light, thin, treading hardly, as if bare; muffled and silky. 

             … Well, I haven’t seen you in one of those, yet.
Saintly girl: That’s right. 
             You’re late.
Saintly girl: Not late, I’m right on time. You just didn’t have room for me.

Burakh shrugged. 

             You’re not that tall.
Saintly girl: That’s not how you measure things like that, silly!
             Yeah? And how do you?
Saintly girl: Why would I know? I’m not the one making these dreams. You are. Well…
             Well?
Saintly girl: Forget it. 

She paced around a little. Burakh could see she was skirting a border — he couldn’t see the border itself. 

             Hey, what’s with the name?
Saintly girl: Huh?
             The name. Right there.
Saintly girl: I don’t see what you mean.
             You should be able to. It’s right there. Written.
Saintly girl: Well, I should, but I can’t.
             You chose that for yourself, didn’t you?

She shrugged in turn, and kept roaming around. There must have been a stage; she was walking from one end of the proscenium line to the other. 

Clara: … This is where people go, isn’t it? 

Witch. You could read it well. 

Clara: It’s where you keep people. It’s where… you keep things that have to be said, and that cannot be said elsewhere. Well, that’s where are kept things that cannot be said, or said elsewhere…
             Why do you think they cannot be said elsewhere?
Clara: Because you’re too thick in the skull to hear them, I assume. 

Burakh huffed, but was cut off. 

Clara: Oh, or because they’re too… convoluted.
             Yeah… they are pretty convoluted, aren’t they.

The wandering girl pouted. 

Clara: They are. They’re… written that way. And if you were told them straight-on, you’d explode.
             Oh, would I?
Clara: I’m sure of it. You’d be struck by them like lightning.
             … Anything else about things being… written that way?

She shrugged again. 

Clara: I think you’re leaving room here so people can walk in. You’re leaving room for people. Or people are leaving room for you…
             Poetic…
Clara: It’s all about connections. Ah, it’s about the skin, that is a connection. A border — your border.

She traced, again, the line of the proscenium — the border that stood there.

Clara: That you use to touch…

She gestured at the emptiness that sprawled beyond what Burakh could fathom. What was he touching? (Oh, he knew. Oh, his fingers still felt tacky with the slick feeling of blood.)

The girl didn’t elaborate.

Clara: I’ve always said it.
             Have you? I don’t remember hearing it from your mouth.
Clara: In another story. In another dream.
             … That I didn’t have.
Clara: You sew things together, don’t you? Just sew these two side by side. Along the flank… to let the shared heart seep through.
             Who do you share yours with?
Clara: Mind ya business, thick-head! Who do you yours?

Burakh didn’t answer. 

(Burakh couldn’t answer.) (So, he didn’t, and asked something else in its place.)

             … Shards of you, is that it? What you share, I mean. What you want to share.
Clara: Yes. You don’t really separate yourself in shards, do you?”
             … I don’t think I do, no. (He hesitated.) I feel like I'm already tough enough to handle.
Clara: Mmh. You’re pretty inseparable. Ah… That’s why you’re taking so much space.
             So much…? Sorry?
Clara: Yes.

The girl gestured 

up

then she gestured

down

and Burakh had no idea what she meant. 

Clara: See how you sprawl?
             No. Not really…
Clara: Not really important. As long as you follow.

(He didn’t really either.)

Clara: Well, I won’t bother you much longer. This is just the beginning. I will be on my way now. The clock is ticking.

She had said that last part in a purposeful, comically low voice, with a hint of misplaced solemnity, as if she was quoting someone. Burakh raised an eyebrow — he had no idea whose words she could be repeating. 

She exited stage right — if there was a stage right, if there was a stage at all. The light went out, and the backstage (if there was a backstage) heaved and sighed with mechanical relief. Her footsteps grew muffled, and they weren’t loud to begin with: tippity-tippity-tippity-toes, then silence. 

A buzzing noise was heard, and the light came on — two of them, this time, dim, yellow, dusty: they shone directly on the side panels, creating tight halos. He recognized the faces in — oh, of course. (He sighed.) Don’t make me wish for the girl back. He took a step back and hit something (someone? No, it was something. He breathed a sigh of relief.) — a chunk of chalk? a charcoal shard? he counted sixteen scraps of chalk and sixteen pieces of charcoal.

             What kind of game is it? 

He gestured at the darkness where he could guess the shapes.

They moved—he saw them move. The chalk came together, a creature of pale limestone and salt (humanoid, thank god, Burakh felt like he would have had a heart attack if it had made itself a beast); the charcoal came together in the shape of a Tragedian without her face.

Peter: Strange.
Andrey: Daring.
             I can’t even play chess. This is all it is, isn’t it? Chess, white pawns the bones, black pawns the bile.
Peter: I can’t play either. Not with these hands.

He didn’t quite show them — he didn’t hide them either. He brought them up, slowly, like a drinking cup. Burakh observed how different they were from his; the long, stilt-like fingers, the oblong nails, the pink scar tissue around the cuticles where it had been bitten and healed; how alike they were, too: bloodstained.

Andrey: (to both) You should learn. What a precious, precious skill… See how lives and deaths are moved across the chessboard like a battlefield.
             What makes you think I could be trusted with playing with death?
The Twins: The only winning move is not to play.
             … and yet I live. 

There was then not a word. A long glance, pale, palpable, was exchanged; Burakh could follow it between their faces, he could have jumped on the rope it stretched between their sets of eyes. The lights dipped, ever so slightly — they shone on the twins’ teeth, and Burakh saw how the spit on them made the enamel glisten.

The Twins: And yet you do.
             What now?
The Twins: Take the red of the curtains and cut it into hearts… and diamonds.
             I don’t know how to play cards either.
The Twins: There are many games.
Andrey: What are you betting?
Peter: I’m betting a bullet.
Andrey: I’ll bet three.
Peter: … Butcher? 

What could a ripper have left to lose? Burakh scraped the rust and dried blood under his nails mindlessly. What could a ripper have left to win?

             I’ll bet my hands. 

(Then bet!)

Lights on the center panel, that entre-deux: it’s Dankovsky. (Burakh doesn’t even flinch seeing him here, then.) He is looking for a cigarette in his pockets. No coat. Crossed legs as he bounces a foot, nervous, eager. Burakh can see something silver against his ankle, above his sock — the… buckle he had mentioned? Burakh realizes he’s staring up his pant leg and immediately jumps back.
On the stage right panel, Peter. Burakh knows it is Peter even as his head is gone, as the dream shapes itself around his arms and hands. The light on them shows him cutting a shape along one of its edges like one guts a fish. 
On the stage left panel (there is no stage. There is no stage, why is Burakh here? Where have they brought him? Where has he brought them? Let’s say: on the left—no, from the seats, on the right page — ), Andrey. The dream has shaped itself around his hands, too. (Or has he shaped the dream around them?) With fingers of the right, he is undoing bandaids on his left, around his fingers, where Burakh had guessed he had freshly bitten. 

Dankovsky looks for a lighter, and Andrey’s hand crosses the frame with one. Dankovsky takes the cigarette out of his mouth, brings it to the flame, and to his mouth then again. 

The Bachelor: You have followed. 
             … Yes, you could say I have.
The Bachelor: You know, Burakh, I am thankful. 

Burakh wishes he’d say that to his face. He does… 
He’s found a way. He’s made a way. He’s cut a way through. He’s woven a way in… One of those options, surely. (He has cut a way through. Yes. That seems right…)
Peter cuts along another edge.
Andrey slowly peels the gauze off his fingertip.

The Bachelor: Everything is coming into shape, and you know how to sew. 
             You wouldn’t say that to me… I know you wouldn’t.
The Bachelor: Everything is starting to… fall off the bone. Like stewed meat. 

Peter pins the open shape to the wood. It lies there like a spread moth. 
Andrey slowly peels the gauze off his knuckle.
Stewed meat...
God, Burakh was hungry. 
The bull ate. The bull was eaten. Man eats bull eats Earth. Earth eats man eats bull. 
Does bull eat man? 
Does man eat Earth? 

Peter curses: the precision knife cut a single red line in his wrist; he effuses ink. He stumbles, tumbles, and scurries off-stage (off-page). 
Andrey unravels. The wound dressing is pink. The wound dressing is red. He undoes its coil around his finger and it comes off his wrist, and it comes off his arm, and it comes off his shoulder, and beneath are all the reds of a human body. His face comes off, Burakh catches the glimpse of long canine teeth.
Peter’s appears on his page, ill-defined, hazy, pierced by two blue eyes. (He catches the glimpse again.)

The Bachelor: I do not want any trouble.

He smiles slowly. Burakh swallows thickly. Eyes on him. Do not fret and do not fray. 

             I do not want any either. 

The Bachelor smiles. 

The Bachelor: I’m afraid there will be.
             Likely. 
The Bachelor: I am impressed. A body is hard to cut to pieces. Human or otherwise…
Andrey: Do you know how hard it is to break glass on someone’s skull? Glass is very strong. The cylindrical shape of a bottle doesn’t lend itself to breaking — the skull, almost always, caves in first. 
             … What does this have to do with me?
Andrey: How hard do you strike?
The Bachelor: And how many strikes are needed to down someone for good?
             Don’t ask me that.

Does man eat man? Does Earth eat Earth? 
The smell of blood becomes overbearing. The smell of meat becomes overwhelming. Hunger overflows. Hunger that-is-not-hunger overcomes. Between all three panels of the triptych, there is a big hollow.
And where’s Burakh? 
Right there. 
In the hollow like in an empty stomach.

      Burakh wakes and the lingering taste of meat-falling-of-the-bone makes his mouth water. 
The lingering taste of meat. The lingering image of flesh. The lingering scent of death. 
Burakh is pinned to his bed as he thinks this: they all come from the same bull. They all come from the same body at the Theater. (That’s where he was — or was he?)
The dreams are getting longer and longer. More convoluted — ha! He’s afraid one day he won’t be able to wake up in time. (Or wake up at all.) (He’s afraid the dream will swallow him whole and not spit him back out.)
Burakh shifts around and finds his knife is not where he left it. 

_____________

      Dawn is a wicked, piercing thing, pale and sharpened. It struck him right in the face when he crawled out of the lair like he was a coal-mine horse being brought to the surface. 
The pallor shaped itself around something little and dark: when he almost hit it, he realized it was Murky. Dew clung to the hem of her dress and her dirty feet. 

      “Hello, you,” he greeted her. “Do you want to come in?”
      “My friend accepts to meet you,” she said, with her big prying eyes on him. “Well, she wants to meet you. She wants to play a game.”
      “Oh, really?”

A game of chess of charcoal and chalk…?

      “What kind of game, Murky?”
      “I don’t know. She won’t tell me. But she thinks you’ll be fun to play with.”

A small tic made her shake her head to the side, as if someone had called her from behind.

      “Fun to play against,” she added (or corrected herself…?).
      “Very well. I’d love to meet her.”
      “Mmmh. We’re not too sure about that.”

She swayed on her feet like a blade of grass. Burakh squinted, trying to find meaning on her unreadable face. 

      “When can I meet her?”
      “Tonight.”

Burakh nodded slowly.

      “She wants to meet you by the Crowstone,” Murky continued. “Over there…”
      “I know where it is. I won’t get lost.”
      “You better not,” she says. “Tonight after sundown,” she repeated intently. “At the Crowstone.”
      “I’ll be there, Murky.”

She nodded, briskly hitching her round, messy-haired head. Then, she trotted away, tiny hands gripping the sides of her dress.

      Before walking to the Theater, Burakh made a point to cross the Warehouses. No corpses were left — as if the Earth swallowed them. How lucky. They were not spat back out.  
The ground, again, shook with a murmur. It took Burakh the way to the Marrow to realize the streets were inhabited by that very whisper — a half-voice gossip, a chatter. He didn’t stop to lend an ear. 

      His eyes caught something ink-black and fleeting right before the Theater’s doors; when he stopped in his tracks, he could see a raven, hopping back and forth across the steps. 
Bad omen to ignore a bad omen; Burakh knew that well. One for sorrow, two for mirth…

      “Hey, little buddy,” Burakh called softly.

The bird turned its head to him. 

      “Are you hungry? I have nothing for you… Unless you eat the dead, that is, in which case… You must eat like a king.”

The bird turned its eye on him. 

      “Hello,” it spoke.

Burakh flinched and froze. His heartbeat grew loud against his tongue as panic overtook him.
He remembered how ravens could mimic a human voice, and mimic it well — he forced himself to breathe deeply. It was a special bird, but not that special.

      “Hello,” he repeated after it, humoring it almost. 

It did then the worst thing Burakh could have thought it could do: it spoke again. 

      “Things are not looking too good, eh, Haruspex?”

Burakh felt his throat tighten. 

      “Ah,” it croaked, cavernously, shockingly human, “I shouldn’t linge’ her’ too long, then. I know what haruspices do t’ birds like me… Not that I don’ think many things can’t be fixed wit’ a good cut, but I don’ wanna find out, y’know?”

It hopped, hopped, hopped. 

      “Well, ye’ll find that out soon… Ah, say, say… D’ye think the other big bird knows how t’ make a better cut?”
      “The other big birds…? You mean the orderlies?”
      “Don’ be silleh’, will ye’? I mean the other big bird… The raven-coat…”
      “... Bachelor? He’s a very good scientist, but not a surgeon, if that’s what you’re asking…”
      “... Oh my gullet, there’s this one too… Pest, ‘s place is crawling with beaks like me… No, I don’ mean him either.”
      “Then who?”
      “Ah, pest, ye’ll see.”

It hopped, hopped. 

      “Mind the omen, will ye? Don’ leave us withou’ an eye at leas’. G’day, Haruspex. G’bye, blade. Hope I don’ see ye again.”

It took flight in a loud rustle of feathers, cawing past Burakh’s ear. He yelped — the noise pulled the door open. 
In the opening, the Bachelor’s face appeared — covered with cloth from chin to nose, pale, browbone marked with a deep line of worry. 

      “Burakh,” he called. “Come in, will you? Come in.”

Burakh had every intention to do that, so he did. (He wondered if Dankovsky took any satisfaction in being obeyed, but he decided it was not his problem. There were the sick, the dying, the dead… Another day, another toll.)
Burakh covered his own face, put on gloves, and awaited today’s orders. 

      “I’m very sorry for what I’m about to make you do, Burakh,” Dankovsky said — and he did seem genuinely apologetic. His voice, Burakh found, was… strained. Fraying imperceptibly. “But I know you’ll do it well.”

Burakh heard the Bachelor saying, under his heavy breath, muffled by his mask, “ better than I could” , and he almost fell on his ass in shock.

      “Go on.”
      “I need these organs collected. Well, we need these organs collected. With as little damage as possible, Burakh — this is important. I trust you to do your job well.”
      “I would regardless of your wishes, oynon.”
      “Thank you. Leave them in the icebox up there.”

Dankovsky was unsteady on his feet as he paced the curtained, divided rows of the improvised hospital. Still pale, too pale in the face, too — Burakh saw how his dark eyes felt so much bigger as he kept them wide open, as if he was trying to keep himself awake. Bad night, huh?

      “Place’s emptier than it has been,” Burakh spoke; he was trying to make small talk, he was trying to get a good look at Dankovsky’s face.
      “We’ve already… sorted those who could be saved from those who could not.” He marked a pause. “And, as you’ve guessed, we’ve kept here those who could not.”
      “‘We’? ‘Already’? ”
      “Clara was there earlier. She helped with the sorting.” He marked a pause, and Burakh could tell he wasn’t finished. “Your friend was here, too,” he added as he slowly, slowly snaked a cut down a dead body. Burakh felt his throat tighten. Dankovsky looked at him — his eyes, yes, were nervous and dark, bloodshot in the eggy whites of them; he still carried in them a deep and rooted acknowledgment that Burakh felt brush against his face. He almost flinched. “He told me to thank you for saving his life, by the way.”

Burakh didn’t reply. 

      Dankovsky was leaning against one of the Theater walls, close to the door. His head hung low. His arms were tucked behind him, flush to the wall. Even behind his mask, Burakh could see he had gotten paler. (The pace of his breath had quickened. His black-clad legs looked like burnt matchsticks-stilts that swayed under his own weight. Burakh was starting to get a wicked, nervous hunch.)
Wiping his hands clean of blood, Burakh walked to him. 

      “You don’t seem too well.”
      “I’m worried, Burakh.”

Worried sick?

      “What about?”
      “They have plans of sending the Inquisition. Have you heard that?”

Burakh tensed. The long, low whisper he had heard walking here crept up his spine like a cold spider. 

      “... I think I’ve caught wind of it.”

Quite literally.

      Dankovsky had asked orderlies to bring the organs to the Stillwater. He’d whispered to Burakh he had plans of doing more tests on them, and had thanked him generously. (Burakh didn’t know if he whispered in confidence, or because his voice was so weak. He didn’t know why the Bachelor’s voice was so weak.) 
He had given instructions on how to transport the organs safely, shown how to stabilize the ice box in order to minimize damage, and he had taken his leave. His strides were long and brisk; Burakh saw how he tore off his mask, took hold of a handgun he kept against his side, and tore through the burned district ahead briskly.

Burakh left too. He skirted the Theater carefully — he saw no crow. He didn’t sigh with relief, even as he could have: not seeing the bird again unnerved him more than the alternative. He ran alongside the border of the Backbone and cut, barely-noticed, into the Flank. He didn’t knock on Lara’s door; he let himself in. 

      “You smell like meat,” she said when she spotted him.
      “You’d be surprised what a human body is made of,” he chuckled. 

She grimaced. She exited the room as he took off his smock and folded it on an arm of the couch, and she walked back in with a small basin of water and a cloth. 

      “Water should be clean.”
      “You shouldn’t have, Gravel.”
      “I’d love my home not to smell like death when you come in. It makes me a little sad.”

She did, indeed, have a sad smile on her thin lips. 

      “Thank you for the water,” Burakh said.
      “How are things going?” she asked. 

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t even shrug. 

      “I don’t like it when you don’t talk, Cub.”
      “You don’t like me too much when I do either,” he laughed.

She pursed her lips and shrugged, a “you might be right”.

      “Will you sleep?”
      “Yes.”
      “Do you want me to wake you up?”
      He thought about it. “Yes. Kick me out before sundown.”
      “Got it.”

She slithered out of the room with the steps of a ghost. Tippity-tippity…
Burakh cleaned his face, his hands, his wrists, his fingernails. He set the basin aside and curled up on the couch. 

      Oh, this dream was of the shapely ones. The ones that held themselves together with solid rope instead of thin sewing thread. Burakh was somewhere — a somewhere that lived and breathed and existed at a time and in a place, when and where he, himself, didn't. Members of the Kin, in this self-contained, sand-and-rust room, guarded a child tall like a newborn calf (and a half). As all of his senses slowly dawned back on him, Burakh heard the screams. They made the walls rattle and shake. He approached the girl — he knew she was on his list, and he thought she knew that too. The brown depths of her big almond eyes alternated between playfulness and ennui. She stood very tall as he crouched down to her level — regal, powerful in her tiny size. 

      “Ah, Lost-and-Found, you’ve finally found lost me!” she peeped. “Sayn baina, you’re not who I expected to see.”
      “Sayn baina, my girl. You are Taya, aren’t you?”
      “The One-and-Only! The Only-One. Well, that’s not quite true. Neither is it for you.”

The words made Burakh flinch. He thought he knew the implications — he did know the implications; but he didn’t like to be reminded. He didn’t feel too good knowing he was cleaved in twain — or halves, or… whatever.

       “Who did you expect then, girl?”
      “We’ve been here a while… They’ve resorted to telling me stories… Not that I mind, they are pleasant. Some make me laugh. They told me Bai Uraggha would come by… Be khara, you have no horns, you have hooves.”

Burakh grazed the top of his head with his palm — he could never be sure, not in these times. 

      “Bish, khukheed, I guess I don’t…”
      “Shee yuunde yereebshe, why could you have come?”
     “... Because I had guessed you could help me.”

The girl squeaked with a delighted voice, and clapped.

      “How fun, how fun! Ask me — call me Mother Superior, tegdegh, that is my name!”
      “Say, Your Highness, do you know what an Udurgh is?”

She pouted — deep in thoughts, suddenly. 

      “It’s a place of riddles, or maybe it’s a time of songs.”

Very helpful. Burakh tried to keep his lips pulled in a genuine smile — that made his cheeks hurt — to encourage her. 

      Well, he had had informations — something about an ear, a lent ear, a… wishing-well past the Barrow, in the abandoned village out south. Just gotta, now, huh? He just had to. He thought he could picture the hole in the ground. 
(Oh, like a grave, Burakh?)
He shook his head violently to throw the thought out. Taya looked at him with peering, interrogating eyes. 

      “Thank you, Your Highness,” Burakh eventually thanked her. 
      “Say, khybyyn, will you come back?”
      “Say, will you come back?”
      “I do not know. I do not… control this.”
      “Say, is that true?”

Fuck if I know, Burakh thought — but kept himself from swearing in front of the little girl.

      “Do you need me to?” he asked instead.
      “It is boring here. Don’t you feel it is?”

Burakh didn’t reply — the screams had not waned. He… didn’t think boring was the word he would choose. 

      “Don’t you have company?” He realized who was missing. “Can’t your father keep you company?”
      “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him. Say, will you come back? I would like to get out… Oh, I’d like to go to the village, to see my family among the tall grasses, to whisper in the Ear too…”

The Termitary was closed. It was closed, and guards lined the doors like hounds. 
Unless he could…

      “I’ll do my best.”
      “Will that be enough?”

Burakh could offer nothing but a slow shrug. It would have to.

       He woke up with Lara’s touch on his shoulder. 
The light seeping into the room was bright and yellow still.

      “Gra—” he was ready to admonish her — his words were cut short when he noticed she wasn’t alone.

She wasn’t alone, and her traits were tautly pulled in an apologetic, worried, pale face. 
Burakh jerked up, jolting awake, and nervously tried to sit in a proper manner. 

      “Doctor Burakh?”

The silhouette side-stepped from behind Lara. The shape in the room drew a bright-haired woman, her russet eyes peering at Burakh from behind loose locks like a reptile from between tall grasses. Her strong-bumped nose and low gaze gave her a resolute, adamant look.

      “Yes. Yes, that’s me.”
      “Yulia Lyuricheva sent me. She wants to discuss some matters with you.”
      “Very well. I’ll come see her.”

The woman squinted, her tawny eyes squished by reddened lids.

      “I don’t think you understand,” she spoke slowly. “She wants to discuss these now . I am to bring you to her house. You are to follow me.”

Burakh raised his hands as a gesture of surrendering. Sure. Fuck it, he’d follow the girl. He put his smock back on — when the woman had walked to the door, waiting for him to join her, Lara grabbed his elbow. She mouthed “what’s happening?”. Burakh could only reply “I don’t know”. (He had a suspicion.)

Burakh closed the door behind him, and the woman walked in front. She had long, brisk steps, and kept her arms close to her sides. With her grey knitted sweater, her mittens and her sandy scarf, she was wearing a pair of men’s brown jodhpurs and tall riding boots, the top edge of which had wrinkled behind her knee. Burakh had to jog to keep up with her strides, and they made it to the Trammel like brought in by gusts of wind.

      “Aysa,” said Yulia the second they both walked in, a sustained relief in her voice.
      “Look who I brought,” replied the messenger — her tone was playful, but her voice flat and solemn. 
      “Burakh,” Yulia said as she turned to him.
      “You wanted to see me.”
      “I did. Close the door behind you. Don’t stay too close to the windows. Come here.”

She ushered the two newcomers to a study smelling potently of cinnamon, dust and tea. Even the warmth of the scents swirling in the house couldn’t peel the ghostly, arctic look off her very pale irises and very pale face. The worry on it didn’t help — her almost-translucent skin bore a sustained purple under her eyes, clawing some more at her intense composure.
The messenger — Aysa, was it? — leaned against the glass panels of a closed bookshelf and waited for Yulia to speak. In a corner, almost startling Burakh — AGAIN! — another woman had tucked herself away. Less confident than Aysa, she, too, was pale in the face, her eyes wide and frightened, sickly — sick with worry. She fiddled with her own hands like she didn’t trust them not to escape her. 
Lastly, Burakh spotted, not far from Yulia, sitting in a wide bergère chair — Evan—miss Yan. She looked pensive — not quite fearful in the way the unknown woman was; she didn’t look at Burakh when he came in. She readjusted her legs so her gilded dress fell more modestly — a first — on her thighs, and brought her cheek into the cup of her hand, her elbow dipping into the cushiony chair-arm. On a table by her seat were scattered boxes and adorned bowls, obviously not belonging to the host, from which overspilled delicate jewelry — Burakh realized Eva must have come here often.

      “Do you know the methods of the Inquisition?” Lyuricheva began, sharp, loud, and straightforward. 
      “Can’t say I do,” Burakh replied.
      “Ah, it does not matter regardless. You have no time to familiarize yourself with them left.”

She cracked open a cigarette case and nervously shoved one of them past her thin lips. She offered the case to Burakh.

      “A smoke?”
      “No, thank you. I’m trying to quit,” Burakh lied.
      “Succeeding?”
      “Kind of,” he lied again.
      “Lucky you. And good luck.”

She snapped the case shut — it made the sound of clacking teeth. 

      Here were the cards as they lay: Inquisition was coming tomorrow with daybreak, and Yulia knew from the grey-faced young woman — her name was Voronika, she bore an Inquisitor’s last name, she was daughter of one and… messenger bird, somehow, who had found her way to the Trammel by some miracle. (Yulia was skeptical of miracles; what she knew was that roads come intertwined. That she had made them intertwined.)
As they lay: Inquisition was going to target him, and the Bachelor, and the touchy-feely girl for their own gain, for their own access into the crevices and wounded hollows of the town — Lyuricheva, grave and strained, said she feared for Rubin; when Burakh asked why, she said the roads were chatty. (It wasn’t that Burakh didn’t believe it — he did. He had heard them too. He feared knowing what they knew.)
As they lay: here was what the three women (bar Eva, who did little but worry the inside of her jaw, and listen to Yulia speak longly) said: 

      “They will find hollows in you. Their eyes have the bite of chisels, and their voice the strength of hammers. They will find the knots, and they will judge if they are worth undoing. They’ll find your fault lines. They will make you bend the knee if they benefit from you being closer to the ground.”

And then, too: 

      “They don’t touch you, never with their hands; that’s against the rules. They won’t need to, anyways. They’ll tear words from the depths of their souls and you’ll walk to the gallows on your own, you’ll tie a rope around your own neck. It’s said they wear gloves to not get their hands dirty, but they never do, they never need to.”

Burakh had looked at his own scarred palms, at the lingering red tint on his fingernails. 

As they lay: Yulia came as a warning. As her own kind of omen. (A dove, Burakh had thought. A fidgety dove with an empty crop.)

Burakh learned this all in what felt like one swooping, solid slap. His ears rang; not with the worried, chilling pitch of Lyuricheva’s voice, but with the weight of the announcement. 
He noticed the black leather holster that lined the shoulder openings of Lyuricheva’s sage green waistcoat. He watched her take, then fit a weapon — a Nagant revolver, just like he once had been given to carry — into it, and hide it as she slipped on her long emerald coat. As if to compose herself, she flattened the wide black bat-wings of its lapel and adjusted her cravat, that mauve cloud that clung at her pale, tense neck.

      “Afraid?” he asked.
      “No,” she replied. “Cautious.”
      “Well,” mumbled Voronika, “I am.”

When silence had fallen back and the dust metaphorically settled, the blinding haze of this information dissipating like mist swept by sun rays, Burakh noticed a lingering, languishing tune hanging in the air. He turned to it, he sought it with his whole face like one does a pleasant smell. Unmistakably, cello. He remembered Yulia mentioning she knew how to play the first time they had met. 

      “What is this that I hear?” Burakh asked. 

The women — including Eva, this time — shared a gaze like an unspoken vision. Yulia spoke: 

      “Für Elise, arranged for cello.”
      “I got that. Let me rephrase. Who is this that I hear?”

They didn’t speak. 
Burakh followed the sound — not too dissimilar from following, in dreams, a voice; it was thin and fraying too, ariose and airy nonetheless. There was a mastery to it — it was just slowly unraveling. Burakh pulled on the melody like on Ariadne’s thread, and walked to the next room over. The four women watched him linger by the door, back straight, eyes peering. 
He walked in and the music slapped him across the face like a furious breeze, like a crashing wave, and he almost stumbled. It was buzzing, pained, it had picked up a pace Burakh was sure the original melody didn’t carry. The Bachelor’s hands were these pale, flailing things on the instrument’s neck — as if frantically seeking a pulse, and pulling it out of the pulsating strings. Burakh realized he didn’t have his gloves on. He almost shut the door immediately. 
The music came to an abrupt, animal stop, and Burakh’s mouth twitched with guilt. 

      “Burakh.”

His voice rang somber like death-knell. 

      “Oynon.”
      “You’ve heard her.”
      Burakh pinched his lips as he couldn’t figure out if he meant Lyuricheva, or the melody. “I have,” he still said. “What are you doing here?”
      “I have talked to her. To Voronika.” He clicked his tongue. “This might be my tolling bell.” He shook his head. “I’m at a loss. At last, I am at a loss.”
      “You’re scared, aren’t you? I can see it in your eyes.”

Oh, not just his eyes. His wrists strained with the effort of keeping his composure to play. His brows were partitioned by a worried trench that Burakh found deeper than it was earlier. His neck was taut, ribbed by tendons as he swallowed with difficulty, tried to speak, held back. His dark eyes had darkened some more — not with the organic tint of waning sunlight, but with something overwrought and haunted. 
The Bachelor pulled his hands back — as if suddenly aware of their bareness, he settled them between his chest and the instrument, shielding them with the rust-color wood.  

      “You’ve heard her,” he repeats, voice blanched and bleak. Then, he chuckled bitterly. “They’ve had me in their sights for a while. They’ve tried to meddle in my affairs, in my… research. They’ll point their fingers on me. I can see it already. The accusatory… divine finger.”

Burakh pinched his lips. 

      “You’re being arrogant, oynon,” he said, and Dankovsky hitched his eyes up his face. “You will not be their only target. Lyuricheva and the Inquisitor's daughter have said we would all be damned to try to resist them. They’ll come for you as much as they’ll come for me.”
      “And you’re being self-centered, Burakh,” Dankovsky replied, a pulled smirk on the lips. “Not just me, and not just you. The weird girl will be in their grip too. The Architects, Lyuricheva, Rubin, likely. Think beyond the two of us, will you?”

He had a mocking tone on the tongue, this sibilant, serpentine snicker. It fell from him fast, and his eyes grew hazy with sorrow — and something else that Burakh couldn’t quite decipher. 

      “Have you ever considered angels, Burakh? How do you imagine them?”

Burakh squinted. The line sounded… foreign in Dankovsky's mouth. He felt like he had held it in for long. 

      “I don’t. They’re not really part of my… landscape of mythoi. Why are you asking me this? You didn’t strike me as the… religious type.”
      “I am not, Burakh,” Dankovsky tempered. “This is not about religion. This is about nightmares. This is about unshakeable, inhuman forces. About powers able to twist a pin into a coil spring to make it fit better into the bigger… machine of things. Machination of things.”
      “You’re really scared of the Inquisition, huh?” Dankovsky pinched his lips, didn’t answer. Burakh noticed how he had worried the bottom one with teeth until he had drawn blood, and how they had paled and chapped. “Well,” he asked, “how do you imagine angels?”

Dankovsky put his gloves back on, one after the other, modestly, almost. 

      “Like spears of thunder and light. Like pillars that stand not on ground but on javelin heads. Able to pin you down like a dead butterfly.”

Burakh watched him stand up and lean the cello against a wall — methodical, careful. 

      “Poetic,” Burakh said. 
      “Poetry will be all I have left very soon.”

He took his coat. His arms seemed weak; he struggled to move them and slip on his sleeves. Burakh made a gesture to help him, but Burakh turned away — he wasn’t rejecting him, he was just hurried, harrowed, fidgety; he had eyes for nothing but his own worry. 

      “I need to rest,” he mumbled. His voice sounded parched. “I have a pounding migraine.”
      “You should. Twyre’s in bloom.”
      “Oh, this I know.” 

He gave a small tilt of the head for a goodbye, and exited the Trammel with wide strides. Burakh watched him leave. He watched him, down the road, lean against a wall, head low, legs unsteady. 
Burakh felt his breath hitch.
The Bachelor took his path again, and Burakh watched him disappear in the pollen mist. 
He told himself he needed to visit him later. If he couldn’t today, then tonight, or in the morning — even if that meant just peeking into the attic like some kind of weirdo. He promised himself he would. (He had a hunch. A creeping, crawling feeling. Something nauseating tickled the back of his throat with a cold, sickening apprehension.) (That’s all he had, these days.)

He counted the coins in his pockets and decided to try his luck at getting a piece of bread somewhere. 

_____________

      As sundown approached, Burakh remembered the shapely dream — he hurried to Shekhen. 
It was calm. Silent. (Dead — no, dormant .) A lone Bride saw him approach, but didn’t spare him more than a spinescent glance. She dragged her feet, her wrists and knees against the loose soil below, covering her fawny skin in its umber dust. Agile and brisk as a doe, she didn’t leave. 

In the middle of the forsaken village, surrounded by the sound of wind in the cloth of tents and stretched leatherwork left to wither, the “ear”, a rock—the rock was rooted like an altar centerpiece. Burakh approached it. 
Its twilit, coarse granitic stone was a sandy mauve sprawl in the anchor of the tall grass. In its middle like a snaking wound — blood. (Blood from an ear: torn eardrum, barotrauma, head injury… No, no. None of this.) Blood so dark in the dim evening it almost looked black. Burakh leaned to it, and its vapors rose to his dry face like swirls of incense—sage and ambergris. His heart began to pound. 
It grew so loud, swelling in his chest and throat, that his vision seared. Something akin to the strike of divine grace hit him across the chest. Quick — he rummaged through what he was carrying almost recklessly, dropping dried herbs and pills to pull out bottles. One was empty — he filled it to the neck. There still was more blood — he emptied clear water on growing herbs and filled this one too. 
Then, there was no more. 
Burakh held up the bottles, and they almost escaped his grip with their weight. It strained his wrists. It wasn’t a belligerent weight, it wasn’t fighting him — it was reveling in its importance, it forced him to prove he could hold it up like the torches of victory. 
And he did. 
The warm liquid was flames, the glass bottle the vessel to harvest lightning. 

      He kept the bottles on him like something impish and fast could steal them from him — if it tried, it would have to kill him first. He pressed the vials against his side like a protective animal. 
Dusk had set. The blackcurrant sky was low and thick, the air sweet with the heady smell of twyre, hard to cut through. As he skirted the cemetery to get back to the workshop, a light by the Crowstone caught his eye. In the warmth of a small fire, he spotted, crouched all small and curled up, Murky’s silhouette. He walked to her. He walked to the Stone, to Murky, and to—

You are kidding me.

You have to be kidding me. 

_____________

      This, Burakh hadn’t seen, but someone else must have, but something else did: Dankovsky had walked — well, staggered would be more accurate — back to the Stillwater in mid-afternoon.
He had gotten paler, since this morning; darker in the eyes, blue-er under them, greyer on the cheeks; and the hanging feeling in his throat had started to feel tight. 
He was scared shitless, it would be a shameful lie to say he wasn’t. The news of the Inquisition involving itself in the Town’s matters didn’t come as a surprise, but it came as a shock regardless.

Inquisitors and their Law, their goddamn Law — the Polyhedron would hover above it like a star-headed pin. It wouldn’t yield to them, just like it didn’t to the weight of the sky or the painfully, beautifully mathematical pressures of gravity. The Stamatins’ creation didn’t stand a chance — not with the… how-many-were-there arrest and death warrants on Andrey that he had so far outrun, but couldn’t escape. 
They only liked chimeras when they benefited them — and the Tower, both all- and half-bird, both all- and half-sword, both all- and half-angel, both all- and half-curse, both all- and half-miracle, would send their hard gaze back at them — and they would believe in its unfathomable cruelty.
But it isn’t cruel. It is not kind, either. It is just as the Inquisitors think of themselves: righteous and forward — the Tower went forward-up, and it could so easily appear to be able to evade them. (Chances are, it was.)
They wouldn’t be able to make it bend at the knee — as it has no knee to bend. This wonderful, disgraceful, tenace, taunting thing. This devouring shape that could fit into itself twice an Inquisitor’s arm, no matter its reach, if they were to dare to pry it open — oh, it could fit it three times, four times, five; from his window, Dankovsky counted the planes on its shapes like so many crushing bites. 

(Chimeras. People that devoured. Things that devoured. People that devoured things, things that devoured people… Yes, there was a motif there. A shared motif. Neither of them knew this, especially not Dankovsky: it wasn’t his time to realize it. Not yet. Not now. Not in this play. Not on this page. 

Soon, yes. 

Soon he’d understand devouring. 
He was starting to understand devouring. 
He shed off his coat and went to bed — for a catnap, he thought; he still had a lot to do.

The fever crept on. 
The fever was creeping on. 
Then, the cough started.) 

      He knew he was ailed when sleep brushed its feathered wings against his face, and they were cold. Still, he found himself dreaming: he was by the river, back against the hot, damp bank. Shoeless, vestless, with his gloves still — too bare for his, or anyone’s sake. The shadow of the Polyhedron soared above him like a new-century aeroplane.

As the sun balanced on the Tower’s shoulder, blinding him, he reached out his left hand — opened it wide like lungs pinned down for dissection, strained and swollen all the same.
His fingers grazed the magnetic, magnificent mirror facets of her forbidden-fruit-like, unbearably light body; brushed her formidable crystal skin with a care, a tenderness almost, that Dankovsky hadn’t given anything—anyone else. His fingertips ran down her stairs with a meticulousness reserved to the most precious of things, and he tried to pick her from the ground like a priceless edelweiss flower from the snow. Her stem, sharp, thorny, unruly, escaped him — it pierced him, through his leather glove into his palm. 
The pain—shot through him, violent, burning; it anchored itself in his hand and shot for his heart, overtook his whole body in an all-consuming, christic, cataleptic, Ecstasy. Her stem was the Angel’s spear, her power a firey, soaring Seraphim. He choked. He panted, heaved, gleeful, overcome with Passion and Bliss — he had done it. He had captured lightning. 
As the pain tore through him he held onto it, onto her, The(í)a and theomachist fighting to be the one to grasp — and he was losing. He realized he was losing. He was not mad: he was euphoric. Rapturous. He’d found an Angel on her pin to rival god. He was pulled towards the firmament. He was pinned to the ground as her stem split his palm apart, widening the wound; stuck between her formidable, unthinkable weight and the hard, hot, hollowing earth. He bled onto her and he felt her bleed onto him: an angelic, pink water spilled from her edges as if she was sobbing. And he was too: exhilaration poured from him and he couldn’t contain it. 
He closed his hand to hold her. She dug herself into his palm. His wrist went numb from the pain. His fingers gave out. She stood, still, like a thorn in his flesh. Like a sharp bone in his flank. Like a blade near his heart — not in, near, just next to it. He spoke to praise her, and his lungs filled with a red purl — a grotesque, humiliating, human gurgle: he was bleeding. It struck him, and struck him so hard he jerked awake: she reveled in blood. 

He woke up — and where once pooled blood now pooled something heavier, dense like a clot. He tore himself out of bed and his knees buckled once. He put on his coat. Its weight was unbearable. He fastened his cravat pin and felt something scrape his throat like its sharp end had grazed his skin. 
He walked out. 
The thick, muddy, rusty air opposed resistance. All of its weight — its unwieldy, cruel weight — pressed against him as if to shove him to the ground and crush him. 
He walked into the steppe like it called him; he marched to it like soldier to grave — in another time, another life, another story, he’d have been one, red coat and all. But he wasn’t. 
And his fate was worse. 
As the light dimmed, his vision waned. The fever overtook him like lunar eclipses swallow the sun — not to be given back. 
His knees, again, buckled.

_____________

         Shape-shifting, wicked witch. 
She’d torn his soft palate with her rusty hooks. 
Burakh thought two things before the fever took his body into its maw and ground him into thin bone-paste: first, that the burning wave that bit at him meant Murky was safe — wherever she was, wherever she (or it) had taken her. Second, there was a chance — but maybe he wanted to think that to give Clara a chance, because the poor soul hadn’t gotten much of it — that the shape-shifting witch was no witch at all, but — he remembered Dankovsky’s words — the illness [that] kept shifting shape. He remembered Dankovsky’s voice, and a dreadful, formidable shiver grew inside of him like a peal of thunder before tearing through him like a lightning-blade from the top of his head to his unsteady heels.
He’d be deceived and lied to — if not by the girl-witch, then by the polymorphous sickness.
No.
No, he hadn’t. The terms were clear. 
The terms had been perfectly clear. 
A wave of fortitude made his lungs swell — of maybe that was the blood, or maybe that was the fluid — fine, he thought, we’ll play.
He felt like the weight of the blood in his pockets and bag (and on his hands. And to his ears. And beneath his tongue.) would split the earth in half as he walked it, and make it swallow him whole. 
Wicked girl. 
Wicked thing.