Chapter Text

NIGHT ONE

men make do without faces

I

Midnight is clever at this;

that nestling between the year-done and the year-coming, that nesting down streets and up rooftops, that one discreet breath before time stops. Already revellers pour out of tenements and taphouses, office buildings, baths, brothels. The whole town dumped down the drain. Come morning, City Watch boys in blue will pluck the unlucky: an arm or a leg stuck in a sewer grate, a face in the muck, a bullet hole through the heart. It’s the Fugue, day-one, and when the law’s asleep anything goes.

There are killers in the making mixed-up in the throng. Some wear swords at their belts, or pistols. Some hide knives, blowpipes, crossbows in their coats. Some know to weaponise their smiles and poison their fingernails. Scores to settle walk the streets.

There is a killer long beaten into shape, lean length of red leather coat and whaler mask on the prowl; he is disguised in his assassin’s wear, and they call to him, fresh-faced partyboys and girls, sailormen halfway to drunk, whores waiting for the cat’s call, and so on. He spares each a passing glance and not a nod, not a wave, not a word. Behind the lenses his eyes cut glass.

A drink and a coin for Master Daud, rumour says, like he’s a figure of myth. The ferryman of this adolescent industrial age, wearing plain the face of it. They grin to themselves, to him, they know what he is and isn’t, they know what he does. They don’t, because they speculate and make shit up. Reality’s always a touch more glum.

He’ll off anyone, only you’ve got to sell him your mother first. Maybe he’ll eat her heart.

A drunkard comes over, bottle at a slant for all oblation. Then his hand’s a-shaking, and he spills his whiskey, by smell easy to recognise as watered down back-alley slop. At low lamplight it yellows as a puddle of piss. Daud has to sidestep so’s he doesn’t wet his boot.

“Aw, come on and ‘ave a sip, sir! To your good health!”

“Well that’s no use”, crows the whore at his back, “you see Mister Whaler can’t drink with that ugly snout on, can he?”

She sketches a gesture, a grabbing-for-it, but it’s half-hearted. She’s old for a bodyseller, old enough that she knows he won’t want her sharp fingernails anywhere near his face, or down his trousers. Why, maybe he prefers the Cat— certainly he’s got the coin for it.

The whiskey man, he keeps on hawking, shaking his bottle.

“Sure he can, just you watch, ah—”

But already the killer is gone, snaking past tailored suits and shabby coats, his boot a touch too careful on the cobbles. Master Daud, now, he is not ordinarily a gambling man. Walking the streets is not for him. Walking the streets makes too much noise, too little sense.

Still, there’s a night or two a month where he finds he misses it, and so he goes and walks the streets— only his own streets, mind, this once-a-maze of high façades and back alleys they’ve taken to calling Rudshore in the first days of the oil boom. He was still down south, Serkonos, cheeks peeling from the sun, when it happened: buildings rising as from thin air, a rail station, a chamber of commerce, a refinery, so on so forth. His young thumb had caressed etchings on the newspaper. Brickwork, metalwork. Marble on the side for a spell o’ luxury. The foundations of the new age, mixing with the old ‘til it be proper buried. He’d dreamed of it back then. When older boys called him a bad omen and his mother a witch, he’d conjure himself spying on faraway factories and imagined Dunwall’s hardcold rain on his hot skin, and that had felt a bit like living.

Now he knows better. He doesn’t walk the streets except on such nights where near everyone is too hammered to have a care. Give them all an hour and they won’t recognise his whaler’s getup nor what it stands for, and he’ll be allowed five to fifteen minutes of feeling as though he is a man, not a knife’s edge.

But Fugue, it’s a time for monsters.

Fugue is the only time he may conduct his business in the open, or close-to, skirting at the periphery of evil— men, women, even children wear knives on their sleeves, drunk on foul deeds fantasised and finally coming to life. Tomorrow the river will ferry its slew of corpses. Tonight: the dead will feast, before they are murdered.

He snakes past many more samples of the city’s best and worst, heedless of their calls and their jabs. Those who know him for who he is spin bows and salutes; those who take him for a prankster in tasteless costume, well: joke’s on them. Dunwall seems to bend at the waist for him, her streets and side-alleys a hundred welcome arms, a bit stale with sweat but not unkind. From slumgrounds and workshops he makes his way up in the world, darting about Clavering Boulevard ‘til he reaches a comely house shoulder-to-shoulder with Dr. Galvani’s own.

It’s business brings him here, he tells the burly doorman, who bids him climb the stairs to the second floor. There he is ushered by a valet in a dim-lit suite, women’s voices floating in from a door left ajar. His host, mercifully, knows better than to shake his hand and give his name out loud.

The nobleman’s suit is darkblue velvet to Daud’s red leather, his mask of bronze and polish, with horns. Hints of a blonde head cower beneath. Whale-light caresses and silvers it, so that at a glance it appears to ripple, like water on a mirror. Echoes of it glint at the lordling’s fingers, one-two-three rings and counting. A Gristolian country heir, at a guess; a look at his countenance and fine cavalry boots tells of long afternoons spent riding rather than idling. Still, there are things a highborn gent will not sully his hands with.

Murder, what a nasty business. Best leave it to gutter-crawlers.

“We agreed on half upfront, yes? That should cover it”, says his lordship, sliding one of his rings off the left hand.

It is pure Serkonan silver, delicately engraved and set with a bright blue stone. No family heirloom, but it will do: a sensible man always vaults his coin before the Fugue, so that thieves know never to bother forcing doors and home-bound safes. It glints in the killer’s gloved hand the way of a treasure in a magpie’s nest, fine-on-filth, brilliant promise of a future that is not coming. For him and his ragtag band of assassins there are only holes in the walls, leaking pipes, muck-perfume hanging everywhere.

“You may come back on the morrow, when it is done. Then I’ll hand over the rest.”

The whalerface keeps still. He weighs the ring in his hand, still hesitant to close his killing fingers around it lest the silver be soiled.

“In coin, I trust?”

“Rest assured.” The young gentleman’s voice goes airy, as if unconcerned with what it is he has just bought for himself. His reasons matter not. “I have counted it myself.”

Milord pours himself a drink from a bottle of Bastilian figswine. Its colour was a staple of Daud’s childhood, and he studies it a while, trying to summon its taste on the tip of his tongue. Years ago he’d replaced it by local whiskey, stronger, cheaper, fouler.

“Do you want a taste?” his bronze-masked client offers. “I’m told it’s an exceptional vintage.”

“I’ve to keep my wits about me.”

“My, aren’t you a serious fellow— not a drop?”

“Thank you, no.”

His thoughts drift to the drunkard met before, bottle at a slant, bad whiskey spill-down, brown then yellowed by streetlight. Perhaps he smiles, behind the mask. He thumbs at its thick leather with careful, handcrafted idleness.

“Can’t very well drink with that snout on.”

II

There’s a man in an alley, shoulder lean-to the wall, easy like the start of a joke.

He casts no shadow. Streetlight can’t reach that far down the lane, though gutter smells do, and without half-measure; piss, booze, fishguts and cigarsmoke. Even with a mask on it’s hard not to get the city shoved up your nose.

That stranger, he wears a theatre mask in the antique style, an oval white and very smooth, features barely sketched on. A blank slate, waiting for a hand to paint on it. The killer in the snout imagines it must be cool to the touch, such as marble or porcelain. And if it falls, then it will break with the same sort of a clink, large hard chunks and smaller crumbs.

“Well met, Master Knife.”

He is wrapped tight in a woollen coat, fine-make and near to black, hands buried deep in its pockets. A tinge of the Morleyan seeps between the cracks in his counterfeit accent, but subtle, here and there lurking in the arc of his vowels. Daud can’t say he cares much for this play at friendliness. It’s always easier dealing with open scorn.

“You’ve got me at a disadvantage.”

The stranger turns, showing a bit of his profile. Behind the edge of the mask shines the well-made angle of a jawline, pale, clean-shaven; wolfish and promising. A small ear sticks out against short dark hair, combed back sleek as an oil spill. Handsome man, maybe. At the least sure of himself. Though the slight looseness in his posture rings false, studied and advertised, much more of a disguise than the mask and his apparent ease of manner.

“I doubt it. You're wound terribly tight, as if ready to draw your blade.” Slow, in well-meaning demonstration, he raises both hands from the pit of his pockets. “But surely that won't be necessary.”

Daud stares at the skin of his palms, terribly white. Not a workman’s, but none too smooth either.

It dawns on him then, because the Fugue is fickle parent to both violence and debauchery, that this display is perhaps no more than flirtation, head-on and somewhat gauche but no worse than a rent boy’s catcall. He forces his tongue to form the words at an even pace, lest he trips over his own annoyance.

“I’ve not come down here for an alley fuck.”

“No indeed?”

There’s the suggestion of an eyebrow being raised behind the mask; of a smirk peeling at the side of a mouth.

“Murder, then. How mundane.”

The word, it rolls, mocking, skirting at Morley’s distant shores. Brings a chill come down from the northern isle. Daud knows to be wary, but against his better judgement finds himself willing to take the bait. The weight of that ring in his pocket, made from homeland silver, is nothing so simple.

“Not what I’d call it”, he rasps.

“Well, it’s your everyday trade. One would think a man entitled to, ah, a break on a Fugue night. A change of scenery. Then again”, the stranger fingers a cigarette case open, click-tap, “I suppose there’s no better time for business. What with the masks, and so on. Must feel nice, not having the law breathing down your neck.”

“Can’t say it’s making much of a difference. A Watchman wouldn’t find his own arse-end without a map, let alone mine.”

It drags a hearty chuckle from the other fellow’s mouth. Not from the City Watch, that much is clear— these boys aren’t half that good at taking a joke, even in disguise.

Then he takes off the mask, casual as it comes, so’s he can tuck a cigarette between his teeth. Nice ones, too. Off-white, nothing crooked. Gentleman’s teeth or very like. The cracksnap of the match tears the thought in half, violently, as in the same breath smoke starts to rise, to smell and dig at Daud’s cravings. The bright red head of the cigarette produces his lean face in a splash of colour; high cheekbones, angular jaw, narrow nose and thin mouth to match. Everything about his features seems spare, ascetic, except for what sits in the middle with the cocksure arrogance of a foil.

A pair of eyes, with too much silver in ‘em.

“Bit foolish, that”, says the Knife.

You don’t show your face on a Fugue night. If not a rule, this is a solid guideline. Even noble folk bow their stiff backs to it— t’was their idea in the first place, but still, he knows a gent or two who’d rather stab a rival with a proud, open smile; hiding, it’s for children and cutpurses.

The stranger grins, which serves his countenance well, and happily puffs on his cigarette. More smoke gathers, obscures his pearl-teeth.

“Look around, Master Whaler.”

No one and nothing but the afterimage of the partygoers: the flicker of a lamp gone swaying at the end of a drunkard’s arm, the patter of shoes ‘cross cobblestone, laughs distant and distorted. They are quite alone. Ground rain-slicked from early evening. Walls closing in, gutters a-spitting. An alleyway’s a good place for a murder. Happens in stageplays all the time.

“So, what— you after my head?”

It’s as if he’s pulled a string, and all of a sudden the stranger coughs up a laugh and cloud of smoke. Loosens, unravels. A bit o’ thread crafted in the shape of a man, that’s what he seems.

“Void, no!”

But he is economical in his outrage: neither overplayed nor feigned, rather tone-down, in control. He grins golden as a passerby’s light illuminates his face for a spell: handsome, sharpface wolf in sheep’s clothes. No offence taken. He is a flirt, a playactor. A sham, from his voice to the tip of his boots. Perhaps a little over-amicable— does he have a dagger stowed away in that big coat of his, or a pistol, is he waiting for an opportunity to pounce?

Daud decides it is unlikely, and the Morley-man hastens to agree.

“Didn’t mean to alarm you. The thing is I’m bored, and you happened to walk by— forgive a man who hunts for his fun in dark places.”

“Hunting’s the word, alright”, the killer mutters. “You been waiting long?”

“Only since I saw you enter there and recognised you”, with a tip of the chin indicating the main street, the building where he’d just been. Conducting business, and not the pleasant sort.

A low scoff makes it past the mask’s filter, tinged with strange static.

“Aren’t you nosy.”

“I am, at that. Think on it: you’re quite the celebrity, whether you care for the fact or not.”

Yes; notoriety’s quite the heavy double-edged sword.

Hints of a close encounter echo from the neighbouring alleyway, skin-slap and then a laugh, the wet promise of a good time, no strings attached. A low moan bitten back down a male throat, trained girlish sighs and silks at a rustle. Sex or a murder waiting to happen, or why not both. An amused eyebrow shoots up the stranger’s high forehead.

“Well? You don’t look thrilled, for a man out on a Fugue.”

Thrilled. How mundane.

“Can’t say that I am.” He considers the golden flash of the cigarette case protruding from a coat pocket. “I might be more amenable after a smoke.”

“So sorry”, says the Morley-man, not apologetic in the least, “all this running about in masks makes me forget my manners. Please”, and he extends his open case, where half a dozen sticks lay orderly.

Daud pockets one, still unwilling to part with his leather-and-glass face in the open. It would be too easy then, to take a knifepoint in the eye because he’s dared lower his guard.

“Somewhere else”, he utters, low, for the stranger’s benefit.

The idea of keeping a killer company does not seem to rattle him, on the contrary. He is beaming, an incongruous ray of light in a dark coat, before he squishes the butt of his cigarette under a heel and locks his antique mask into place. It’s odd, it’s funny. How easy for a man to make himself inscrutable in a second. How easy, to miss the clever tilt of a mouth once it’s gone hiding.

Yet the voice is the same, if partway muffled.

“There’s a little flat, not too far. If you’ve got an hour to kill.” He rolls the last word on his tongue, teasing.

By an act of easy legerdemain he conjures up a key, dull and brass, and yet another smile unseen but implied. He has done this before. This lazycat act at the mouth of an alley, baiting for a gent, a rogue, an assassin. It has worked before, and it will work again— because Daud is weary, and not so far removed from curious.

He makes a deal with the street, the cobbles and the lights; he follows. The thing that lives in his hand is going hungry.

III

Turns out the flat is a clean, impersonal two-room affair a few streets off Holger Square.

Not Daud’s preferred neighbourhood, always overcrowded with these damned Overseers at all hours. But then it’s the Fugue, so they must be cooped up at home or trading their masks for a different kind. T’would be stupid and no mistake, getting caught out there leashed in a cleric’s collar.

The main room works as kitchen and living quarters both, boasting a stove in one corner, a bed opposite. No smell, no souvenirs framed up the walls save for the cheap print copy of a lacklustre Sokolov. Before the old fool came into his harsh-angular portrait style, he cut his teeth on the city’s skyline; and so there it is, Drapers’ Ward of ten years past, rendered in oily sunset hues. From behind his lenses the colours blur, as if smudged by a child’s thumb.

“It’s not the Cat, I know, but for what it’s worth it’s clean.”

Daud huffs in agreement. When you spend so long holed up in Rudshore, you learn to notice rot by its absence.

In better, cleaner light, there is still something of the wolfhound about that stranger, if only wolfhounds were known for their cunning. A fox, rather. A limber-slim thing trailing in its wake grace and arrogance. He has the teeth for it. His canines, a notch too pointy, promise split lips and loving bites.

“Well. Do make yourself at home.”

At last the mask has to come off. After fingering at straps and buckles, Daud rubs at his own face, chafed a little red-raw. He’s got that bad habit, shaving too close too often, and then the leather of his mask turns his jaw into an itch.

The alley-cat is only too happy to stare, neither lecher nor painter but a third thing hanging between: interested, and not shy about it.

“I must say the City Watch’s rather villainous depictions of your face don't do you justice.” He laughs, oddly subdued. “You must hear that often.”

“Not so much.”

A good killer has to keep a close watch on who knows what he looks like. Why else wear a mask, why bother with the whole cloak-and-dagger charade? This is the way the world works. It chews before it swallows, and you’ve got to swim between its sharkteeth lest you drown.

“They’ve got that scar of yours right, though. I assume there’s a story, eh?”

There is a story, or there was. But you know what they say about dead men telling no tales— a Whaler, he’s halfway to a dead man. No storyteller.

The living-man Daud, though, under the leather-black and the leather-red, he remembers. He is sixteen, son of Karnaca to the bone, bleached white— he is sixteen, and an older boy calls his father a formless aberration devoid of a heart, who could not love him. It’s a cheerful insult (a crooked grin, full of canines). Grown men would call a duel for less, so they fight over it with knives. The older boy, he wins, and he thinks, I’ll carve ‘im up like some roast, why not— the older boy, he does, and it hurts. Sixteen-year-old Daud tells himself it’s due to the sea air, the salt. Same as the salt in his tears. But he bites his tongue and a hundred whimpers. An hour later a street-surgeon teaches him how to bandage a head wound and takes no coin for the privilege. It will scar, and maybe then people will know he’s not to be trifled with (he might kill that older boy and leave on the first ship).

There’s no point recounting any of this, so he keeps quiet, he takes off his coat, folds it, lets it hang on the back of a chair. Waits for the other to imitate him, which he does and gladly too, eager fingers working at his outer layers with a thief’s deftness. Under the wool there comes the same-colour of a waistcoat, with no loop of a chain to hang his watch on, no gold buttons, no baubles. Only the severe crisp of a garment often starched, and well cared for.

Daud hunts, silent, for the contour lines of his body beneath, looking for knives that aren’t there. Perhaps a small blade lodged in his boot. He’ll keep watch for it.

“D’you have a name?” he asks instead. “Unless you’re someone of consequence and can’t afford to tell.”

The idea seems to amuse him. A calculating slant to his stare makes it plain he wouldn’t mind if it were the case. Daud recognises it, because he’s seen the same etched in countless noblemen and ladies’ faces. But this man relents, good-humoured sigh at the ready.

“Oh, you wouldn’t know me. Small fry, I’m afraid.”

“That so. You don’t strike me as a man wanting for ambition.”

He gestures to himself, wearily, as if to hint at what he cannot say: look what a big fish you’ve caught, with your shameless baiting. The stranger’s head cocks like a dog’s. He lets a sideways smile hang there a moment.

“Call me Martin, if you like.”

Daud doesn’t bother raising a doubtful eyebrow.

A fake name, or not: Martins are a dime a dozen in the city. They multiply on both sides of the Wrenhaven and crawl out of the mire to rot and die too young. He’s known Martins half his life, killed some, liked some, yet none near as arresting. Martin’s a name for a plain man, in the main. That fellow is nothing plain, and not only because he wears a costly coat.

When Daud peels off his thick gloves, it’s only then he recalls the bandage wrapped round his left hand, serving to conceal the mark. It’s grown a tad sticky with sweat. It itches. Because Martin’s eye is proper snared, and one of his brows raised; amused, and tolerant.

“Cut yourself shaving?”

“Ha.” It is hard on a killer to smile. Twists his mouth into knots, and his stomach with it. “Something like that.”

Martin loosens his shirt collar, one-two buttons open to breathe easier and not a drop of sweat.

“The rumours are true, then. You are, ah— marked.” He grins, because a lot of his questions answer themselves that way; and the grinning, it suits him well. “Suppose it’s no use asking if I may have a look.”

“Don’t push your luck.”

But he’s been pushing his luck ever since the alley-meet, and perhaps this is what Daud looks for when he tells him with a nudge of his chin to sit down and shut his mouth.

He finds it’s easier to go for clinical efficiency, taking turns (easier is only another word for less revolting).

Martin is surprisingly easy to handle. Once you’ve got your hand down his trousers, he goes on babbling, mumbling, deep down in conversation with his own flesh; as if your hand isn’t yours but his, and he is alone, hunting for relief. At first this pliancy discomfits the killer-man, who is not used to the skin of others, much less the trust of a stranger. He could slip a knife out of a pocket and cut off his balls, it’d be that easy— only he hasn’t the heart, and well, why would he— it’s not half bad, trying to solve his mechanics with a tug of his hand, a clever swipe of the thumb over that glossy pink. A shiver that could be studied, or not, when he slows his up-and-down to look him in the face.

He squirms rather nicely, Martin, keeping his silver-eyes wide open like a pair of coins. For him, Daud the ferryman, who will lug him along the Wren in a smallboat. Rowing, rowing. Its stench rising up. The water, it’s been fouled by oil and chemicals for twenty years and counting. If he falls he won’t breathe. He doesn’t breathe much, for that matter. Holds it in, too busy bothered at one-way sex.

It ends on an airy sigh, a sticky hand, and the knowledge that now one seed has been sown it’s time for the other. Uneasiness bites at Daud’s heels. He wipes his fingers on a ‘kerchief; the motion familiar, the substance not.

And the other stares, mild leer at the ready, proposition just so hanging off the tip of his tongue. He is about to decline, but already Martin is kneeling, and he is good at it. The way his legs fold, supple and sure, remind of the prayer-posture; and then again the wolfhound, looking up and waiting for assent. Might be he was a pious man, once. Might be he wasn’t and came out o’ the Void instead, to torment the Outsider’s favourite toy-soldier and his sharpened geometry.

“Well”, the stranger’s drawl is thick, unctuous, rubbing nicely at Daud’s inner workings as he slides a slim but heavy-veined hand from the knee, up the thigh, and stays it, lazily, about the inseam of his trousers. “I did not take you for shy.”

It’s a risky thing to mock a killer.

Not to mention daft, though the man is anything but. He taunts, this foxlike amalgam of smiles and silver-blinks, because this is what foxes do, and isn’t he apt at this game— isn’t he handsome, there in the manner of a penitent, clean light delineating his face in crags and toothy shapes— his hand a-waiting, eager for a sign that it may trail upwards again and snatch the breath from an assassin’s mouth.

“Mind your tongue”, but he says it half-hearted, and it only broadens the other’s grin.

“You’ll find it’s made of silver”, Martin retorts, “and well able to please you.”

It’s a risky thing to presume on a killer’s wantings, but he lets it slide: because he is curious, and the thread offered asks of him that he follows.

And so it goes: a man’s head reclines in breathlessness, skull to the wall, as another man plies his magic in the open angle of his knees. A left hand (intentional, says the Whaler’s haze-for-a-brain) keeps firm grip on a thigh while another messes about with a row of buttons. If he tries to look down, Daud will notice the undone collar of the stranger’s shirt; the thin suggestion of hair growing in swirls across his chest; dark, and fatal.

Then he will notice nothing at all. Eyes-a-shutting will focus on a slime-tongue, a row of teeth. Things happen in quick succession so’s he can’t stick a name on them, only it feels warm, perhaps good, and in rhythm and time the mark on the back of his hand flares to attention. Like a dog’s tail, wagging; a darkeye looking in from outside the window. But when he glances there, nothing. Even the jumbled assemblage of street-fear and revelry has become a touch noiseless.

Sweat on its way to cooling runs down the side of his face, jaw, neck. For all the throb and thrum of his flesh he feels rather numb. Only when Martin’s left hand, unmarked but vicious, digs its nails into the meat of his thigh does he wake up to gutpunch clarity. Mercifully this all ends before he’s a chance to shove the Morley-man off him; less mercifully he produces a low ragged sound, cousin to a moan and a snarl. He slumps, limp, a fraction sideways. Hurries to hide back in his trousers before shame and ridicule run to catch up.

A single drop of whitespill hangs from Martin’s lower lip, its nacreous sheen such as a river krust’s pearl. His foxtongue darts to it, and he smiles, wider, baring too many teeth.

Bitten by shifting shadow, his silver-eyes might pass for black.

IV

After, when he washes his hands and catches his reflection unawares in the slight-cracked bathroom mirror, Daud will feel a pang in his chest.

The sort that rarely follows a kill but always a fuck: because a Whaler is halfway to a dead man, and dead men, they don’t heed the whims of the flesh. He will study this face that was once a living man’s— that is now the ferryman’s only, and find it wanting. These eyes, he cannot quite fathom their colour, sort of a murky grey not so far from riverwater, with touches o’ green under strong light. He knows more about the milkwhite tone of his sclera, streaked red with blood filaments, come to remind him day-in day-out that he ought to sleep, that he is forty; that he’ll not live to kill forever.

His black hair is slick with grease, tamed back a way his composure is not. This neatness, it reassures him. He runs a useless finger from forehead to nape, checking for wayward strands. The other man, the stranger-man, he too combs his hair thus. When Daud’s eyes close he sees it: Martin’s oil-spill of a head tucked ‘tween his legs, running his clever tongue. Makes bile rise up the throat, this. For all he knows, this trickster cocksucker could be a mirror-image, another assassin. The strength of his hand lingers, barely there, clamped round the thigh, knucklebone white and part gleaming from cheap whale light.

He coaxes unsteady drips from the tap. Cold water sobers him up a little, though he’s not had a single drink despite the urge and won’t until the morrow. Never on duty, a Watchman would say, hiding a flask behind his back. Good thing he has twice their wits and cartloads of discipline, present transgression be damned.

He’s not yet heard the two o’clock bell, which means he can still go about the job at leisure. All the same he’s eager to slip out the door and never see this Martin fellow again. He was wrong about the fox, before. The man’s an eel. With any chance he’ll drown down the Wren and be jellied, and wouldn’t that be a sight.

It takes him more than a while to gather himself, and he resents his flesh for it. Leftover throbbing climbs up his body to roost in his head, bright-hot, sowing afterimages as he blinks.

Past a moment’s reflection he will tear the bandage off his left hand and peer at the mark, angular inkblack, near innocuous. But then when he stares too long it goes a-flaring again, loud red-orange, s(t)inging like a nest of bloodflies. His teeth clench, hard; the hinge of his jaw comes cracking.

You enjoy the show, black-eye bastard, ‘cause it won’t last.

He’s almost startled not to find the boy-God’s face on the other side of the mirror. It happens, sometimes, when he forgoes sleep to pore over his files, his contracts, the pictures of people who don’t yet know they are dead. When the youth coated in leather and deadwhale stink manifests, it’s always with a sort of sadness, mix-up of the childish and the dishonest. It is disappointed and yet hungers for more. It revels in a man’s smallest unpredictabilities, the way a newborn animal would, but never quite reaches for the bite. It is content looking. And the looking, it’s what’s come to unnerve Daud each time he crosses polished glass.

The left hand which houses bone-bits of God balls into a fist, feeding on the temptation of violence. He could smash the glass. Not the first time he’d hurt himself and get a scar for his trouble. Only the night goes on, stretching its endless party-songs to exhaustion, dragging, pulling, tearing at the city’s seams.

The night goes on, and he’s got a man to kill.