Chapter Text
Long after the party had eaten its fill of canapes and drunk a sparkling river’s worth of champagne, it lingered on, digesting Daniil whole. He tried to smile at the woman who was devouring him with her eyes, to remember...what had she just said? Some glittering repartee or societal insight, and he had skipped the breath where he should have answered. Her smile was starting to lose its lustre, dimming in disappointment, perhaps even offence, but he could hear not a word of what he was supposed to say to her over the way he itched.
Constantly, maddeningly under his best suit, as if his entire body were a scab burning to be peeled away. It had been bearable, just, when he had first dressed for the evening, but now...
“I’m sorry,” he said, tried to say as if he didn’t itch. Clung to his empty glass rather than give in to the urge to attack himself with his fingernails. “I’m afraid I’m not feeling well.”
“You do look very pale,” the woman agreed. He knew her name, he was sure, and why he’d stopped to speak with her, but his brain seemed to have ejected all of that information to make more room for misery. “I hope it wasn’t the food. The sterlet did seem rather-”
“No, I-” His voice stumbled gracelessly over hers, and he grimaced in apology. A jerking puppet-string attempt, it seemed, at piloting his body through the expected words and expressions, binding it tight against the way it wanted to writhe and scratch instead. “I’m sure that’s not it. My apologies, but I think it would be best if I-”
“Then perhaps we should both take our leave,” she suggested, sidling her interruption in much more deftly next to his stumbling voice. Her stare still seemed to be picking his bones, prying deeply enough under his wool suit to miss the layer of torment between it and his marrow completely. “I would love to hear more about your research, perhaps in a more...private venue.”
Even burning from suit to marrow, he couldn’t miss her meaning. The gleam in her eyes, hungry lustre reburnished. Even in good health, he would have found a gracious, flattering way to decline. But the idea, now, of another body pressing and chafing against his...
“I’m afraid I would be very poor company tonight,” he managed to say somehow, with a taut facsimile of a smile. “Perhaps another time.”
Hers had chilled to disappointment after all. To frigid formal reserve, taking back all the warmth she had just hinted at sharing with him. Of course it would be an insult for him to so curtly turn down such an intimate invitation. He knew better, but nothing he knew could overpower the need to escape that place, the crowd, noise, agony of standing there motionless in his sandpaper clothes.
The crowd roiled at him, all stabbing golden glitter and the gnashing cacophony of glass. Panic seemed to turn its claws on his throat, his chest, ready to tear its own way out of there if he couldn’t carry it to safe, dark quiet soon.
He had to be ill. He’d suspected it earlier, but there was no doubt of it now. He had drained only the one glass of champagne, more for something to hold than to drink, but he stumbled against the great flow and contractions of that soiree like a man bottles deep. He should have been able to master it, whatever it was, enough to at least make a dignified exit. His colleagues were counting on him to present Thanatica in a favourable light, to procure the money and goodwill that could make the difference between their dream’s life and death, yet all he could think of was how far away the door still seemed when someone caught him by the arm.
Their grip squeezed even that thought from his mind. The itch scouring his skin shifted grotesquely as they spun him back to a halt, as loose-seeming as his sleeve somehow, and every nerve it covered crackled with renewed outrage. A man’s face blared brightly at him, a man’s frowning concern, but he didn’t care, couldn’t, wrenched his arm away with another crackling, tearing, cool, sudden spot of relief on his forearm. A finger’s width of his flesh that no longer felt dry to igniting, but he had no time, no space to wonder why that might be. He shoved his way between two people who had been just leaning in to shake hands, letting their indignation fall behind him as he half-limped, half-jogged towards the door.
Something in his shoulder, too, seemed to tug and separate as he shoved it open. But the chill October night touched him with more relief, a breath from distant heaven after that crush of hot, cacophonous bodies. He closed his eyes to it just for a moment before it wasn’t comfort enough. The only thing that could be was the privacy of his own apartment, where he could finally tear free of that suit and find out just what sort of sickness it was hiding.
#
It had seemed like just an uncomfortable dryness of the skin when he’d gotten dressed. But by the time he limped through his own door and locked it behind him, his head throbbed for how he’d spent the walk clenching his teeth, trying to hide from anyone nearby how the wool seemed to scrape and bite at his every step. He flung the key in the vague direction of the table where he typically kept it, seizing hold of his coat’s buttons and all the self-control he had left, to unfasten instead of tearing them free.
Layer by damnable layer, tossed in a haphazard heap on the same table. A small, sob-like sound escaped him as he at last stripped his shirt away, baring his arms, at least, to kinder air.
Yet...it almost looked as if he hadn’t. A translucently thin white layer still covered them in folds and peaks, all the way from a delicate crackling around his fingers to the minor tearing and excruciating itch where his undershirt still covered it. Tearing – that must have been what he had felt, that shifting, burning, sudden relief just above his elbow. He tilted it towards the tarnish-pocked mirror above the table for a better look, his mouth near as dry now as his skin seemed, his heart racing as if he’d run there from that godforsaken gala.
Sure enough, that layer had torn cleanly through. Frail as autumn leaves, and underneath, what looked like smooth, healthy skin peeked through.
He would have told any patient or research subject to leave a strange scab or skin condition alone, for god’s sake. Seek medical attention without any scratching in the interim. But his fingers slid easily through the tear, and that skin underneath was the only part of him not itching intensely enough to count as pain.
He gave the layer covering it – skin as well? What else could it be? – an experimental tug, and it tore as easily as it must have before. Faintly, waxily damp underneath, it clung to his fingers in a long, peeling strip, and oh, the sheer heaven of pulling it away. It couldn’t have been medically advisable, but he attacked the loose, torturous skin on his arms, stripping it to the shoulders, and tears pricked the corners of his eyes at how entirely that torment left with it.
He wrestled free of the rest of his clothes, and the rest of him, too, was covered in that puckered, crinkling abnormality. He’d never heard of any condition that would cause such a thing, but he ripped samples aplenty from his chest, in swathes down his back, letting them drift and curl to the floor around his feet. The fresh skin they revealed was almost unnaturally smooth, devoid of any wear and tear or even the dark hair that had dusted his chest and arms before. But by the time he raked his fingernails down his thighs, he was hurtling too headlong towards comfort at last to care about that.
All that mattered, just as before, was being rid of what tormented him. He ripped it down his thighs, his shins, in great, satisfying strips, and stopped.
Still holding those latest agonizing pieces of himself in his fists. Down to the knees, he was all smooth, pale skin, all but glowing with its newness. But below...
Below, the cloudy, rejected skin was peeling away to reveal something else. Not skin, but a lustrous, subtly irregular black that coated his feet and dappled its way up his calves. A replacement, a usurpation of the skin that he had to poke and prod and scratch samples from in every possible way before he could accept it as what it seemed to be.
Scales. Dense, overlapping, black serpentine scales, just as integral and bleeding a part of him as the skin they’d replaced had ever been.
#
Serafima all but shoved his papers into his bag, the bag into his hands, him towards the back door. There was no time left for anything else, for more circumspect preparations, for wondering whether this was the right course of action at all. The siege against Thanatica had abruptly, inevitably become not just a bureaucratic one, but a physical one, and the lock on the front door wouldn’t hold for long.
Find us an immortal, she had already exhorted him. And not to waste any more precious time, but at the back door, she paused a moment longer.
“They have different ways of doing things out there,” she said. “Rustic ways, but...different medicines, different perspectives. Maybe they’ll know something that can help you, too.”
No itch crawled under his clothes at present, but shame burned in its place. They had kept his secret well enough that it almost certainly couldn’t be credited as any part of the reason for this threat against Thanatica. But three years and half a dozen moults later, there was no denying that it had made him steadily more of a liability to any respectable institution. If he so much as removed his gloves outside the safety of his apartment...
“Maybe,” he echoed, with no particular hope. None of his research had come to anything, after all.
“But be careful,” she hastened to urge him. “Don’t tell anyone unless you’re sure they won’t take it badly. Rustic, remember? I’m sure they have some strange ideas out there, too.”
Superstitions, in other words, that might not welcome one such as him. “I won’t jeopardize my mission,” he assured her. “Convincing Simon Kain to aid our cause is my first priority. Once I’ve managed that...perhaps I’ll speak with Isidor. If anyone in that town has the insight I need, I’m sure it will be him.”
Serafima nodded, and there was no time. Not to doubt, not to hope – only to act.
“I’ll be back soon,” he promised her. Promised Thanatica, it seemed, from its like minds to its stone and mortar. He fled from it a step ahead of disgrace now, but he would return in triumph, a step closer to defeating death and, perhaps, understanding what seemed to be just as inevitably overtaking his own body.
#
The mound of Isidor’s grave stood silver in the moonlight; the cord of a simple iron bell disappeared into it, down to where it would be wrapped tight around the corpse’s hand, as if Daniil hadn’t examined and declared it to be only a corpse himself.
The bell’s silence seemed to hang all around him, as if he stood inside a much larger one, waiting for a much larger, buried, only quiescent life to pull its cord. The town slept peacefully behind him, one last time – tomorrow morning, its bell would toll to declare a state of emergency, the return of the dreaded Sand Pest.
Daniil had been far too busy preparing for that declaration to attend the funeral. He would have had nothing to share, stories of the deceased or common ground, with those who had. Death seemed to shine as starkly as the moon, throwing the same things into sharp relief. The graves, the time wasted; he had never told Isidor the truth about his condition.
Why would he have? It was something he had never wanted to be, hadn’t known it was even possible to be until it had started peeling its way layer by layer out of his own skin. It certainly wasn’t something he had ever wanted to be to other people, to have them see when they looked at him. Yet, all the same...
All the same, their friendship seemed so brutally amputated, even beyond death’s usual blunt, ruthless cuts. Here lay a man who had, in the end, known so little about him. Who would never have a chance to learn the whole truth.
Daniil’s tongue flicked restlessly from his lips, reflex escaping him in his distraction. Ever since its tip had begun to bifurcate two moults ago, the instinct to assess his environment that way had grown steadily stronger. To taste what might never have troubled him before in the air, the spice of those potent local herbs, the fresh, bitter turn of grave soil, cold stone and the smoke warding off that cold from the distant town, the ripe scents of cattle and autumn grass and, ever so faintly beneath it all, of blood.
If only he could have blunted it all and his nerves with a cigarette. But as taste and smell had become more intermingled and overpowering, such intense ones had become nearly unbearable. He had been forced to give up the habit through sheer bizarre biological necessity.
Could Isidor have told him why? Or helped him discover the answer, at least? The question was moot – there was no one left in the town who could do so now. No one who would help him coordinate its defence against a disease that dropped all of their voices to dreading whispers or help him understand why his body had decided that no friend should ever be able to both fully know him and see him as human again.
#
Artemy had learned a long time ago to trust intuition – the knowledge, his father would have said, that body and mind just didn’t know how to put into words. But he still hesitated, climbing the Maw towards the Marrow, when a voice somewhere between body and mind seemed to tell him left where he would have turned right.
Turning right would take him to the theatre a minute faster, and every one of those minutes counted now. The town was shedding lives and hours as if from a cut artery – if they didn’t find a way to staunch the flow, its stone veins would soon be empty of both. But his father’s teachings were all Artemy had left of him, all the guidance he had in saving the town. Maybe taking a spare minute to follow them would lead him to some clue he had missed.
Maybe it was nothing, just looking for signs, for hope, where there was none to be found. But he’d already looked in all the obvious places. Starting to the left, back to the quick pace he’d kept before, he kept his head on a swivel. Searching for any sign he might have overlooked, anything that would prove this detour a guided one and not just wishful-
A shout echoed ahead, sharp as a gunshot. Another, close enough that they had to be shouting about the same thing, and his feet dragged to a halt again. The last few days had made it clear that nothing good could come of the town being angry in numbers. If they had decided to rile up another mob, maybe revive the witch hunt they’d ended in fire last time, the only wise move would be for him to backtrack, circle around the way he’d meant to go before.
But that wordless whisper of left had become a drum beating in his chest. He crept towards the shouts, far more than two now, as if tugged by a far more tangible, taut sort of line than the kind he’d tried to intuit since returning to the town.
Seven- no, eight- people stood crowded in the shadow of the theatre, a few steps and another turn away from Spin-a-Yarn Square. By the circle they made, ring of angry voices, and the space between them, someone had to be trapped there. Not standing, or he would have been able to see them, but-
A man stooped forward from the circle to grab hold of whatever, whoever, was in its centre. Between their legs, Artemy caught sight of a kicking boot and a flash of scaled, familiar coat.
He fell into a run before he knew he meant to, raised his voice before he could decide whether he should risk it. There was nothing he could do to break up such a large, furious clot in the town’s veins, but-
“Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Two people on his side of the circle flinched, at least. And when the rest turned to face him, their eyes weren’t all blank, unreasoning rage. At least some guilt shone there, which meant he hadn’t just done something completely, inevitably fatal, at least.
“We figured it out,” one of the least guilty-looking men said. “Shabnak’s always a woman, they say, but you know, what if she’s not? This one could be more clever, better at hiding.”
The way he and at least half of the others looked at Artemy said it could still be fatal, though. As if he should know all about women in disguise.
“So you’ve decided it’s him?” Artemy jerked a nod at that limp glimpse of coat between their legs. The man who had almost hauled Dankovsky up from the street had dropped him at Artemy’s shout, and he didn’t seem to be making much progress at moving on his own. “One of the people working hardest to stop the Pest?”
“What have all his orders come to, really?” a woman on the closer side of the circle protested. Her voice and face ragged with more fear than fury, most of them were, but this couldn’t be the way to fix any of it. “We’ve given up food and medicine, stayed locked in our homes, and for what? A plague creature clever enough to stay hidden would weaken us from the inside, just like the Sand Pest, dooming you before you even know you’re sick.”
“And he’s strange,” the man next to her chimed in. “You must’ve seen it yourself. He never blinks when he’s looking at you. Barely even breathes. Even a clever maneater can only really look like a person. It can’t act like one.”
“Now we’re killing people for breathing wrong?” Artemy asked, letting the absurdity of it – let them see the absurdity of it – ring in the still air. “Did burning that poor girl not teach you anything? Shabnak doesn’t have to walk in the flesh, not if we’re going to turn on each other this way. We do her work well enough for her.”
And there, shared in glances between those who looked guiltiest, was what he had hoped most to see – shame. They could be better than this. They needed to be, or both he and Dankovsky...
“You could check,” the man who had accused Dankovsky of not blinking said. “You’re a Burakh. You’d know the difference between a man and something just trying to look like one.”
Was there the faintest hint of a sneer in his voice? To hell with it, if so. Artemy could weather a few sneers and slights if it meant examining Dankovsky’s injuries instead of his corpse. It wasn’t as if they’d become fast friends over those few days, but no one deserved this, least of all a doctor doing his best to defend the town from it.
“All right,” he agreed. “I’ll examine him.”
And then hope they would take his word for it when the man they’d decided was their shabnak inevitably turned out to be no different from them. They parted around him as if they still didn’t believe it, in a rough, vigilant semi-circle that left him no chance of running from Artemy’s verdict.
By the look of him, they had already been well on their way to carrying out their own harsh verdict. His face was a mess of bruises just starting to bloom, and he had propped himself up on his side with the ginger care of someone who feared turning a fracture into a break if he moved by more than inches at a time. Artemy searched his eyes for the righteous indignation of a wrongly accused man, or even the pain that was keeping him on the ground, but what shone in their darkness was the most hopeless sort of fear, resignation to the horrible inevitable.
Did he really think Artemy was going to rule in that mob’s favour? By how he leaned away on his elbow when Artemy knelt beside him, he would have flinched farther, would have fled if he could have. Blood welled from his split, swollen lip, and he worked his teeth over it as if trying to figure out whether there was a damn thing he could say in his defence that would make a difference.
“Just hold still,” Artemy told him. “Let me take a look at you.”
Dankovsky held his gaze, alight with that strange fear. Resignation seemed to win out as he slumped back on his elbow, nowhere to run from whatever might come next.
Artemy had never seen him at a loss for words before, but the mob must already have proven that none would sway them. Not his, at least. They would both have to hope the pronouncement of a Burakh had more power over them.
He wasn’t about to strip Dankovsky bare in the street for all of them to gawk at, of course. But they had opened at least one point of easy access in those once-fine clothes – a long cut down Dankovsky’s thigh, oozing through his trousers. Artemy frowned up at each of their faces in turn, but no guilty glances gave away which of them had brought a knife to that combined trial and execution.
Never mind, then. He could make a show of his examination while assessing for himself just how bad Dankovsky’s injuries were, how many stitches he might need if they made it out of this. Dankovsky pulled in a breath, tried to pull his leg away as Artemy slipped his fingers through the blood-sodden tear in the fabric-
Some sort of underlayer. Something cool and scale-smooth slipped against Artemy’s knuckles, more snakeskin, slicker and warmer where blood had trickled down Dankovsky’s thigh. He was a damn strange one, Artemy would grant the mob that much, but it went beyond strange to wear something...something like...
The cut gaped through that had-to-be underlayer. Whatever blade had made it, it couldn’t have been very sharp, fraying and dislodging scales along its path. But there was no real looseness between them and the wound, nowhere they lifted away as an artificial layer to reveal ordinary skin underneath.
Artemy glanced up again at the half-circle hungrily watching that examination. They stood on the wrong side of Dankovsky to see what he was seeing, and that was damn lucky, or else they wouldn’t still have been waiting for his judgment.
For him to announce whether Dankovsky was human or not. That fear in his eyes...
Artemy laid the ripped, sodden fabric back over the wound, letting blood soak it together, hold it shut. Moving like a steam engine powered by the hum in his head – he had forgotten to breathe at some point, and tried to start again as if he’d never stopped, calm and steady – he took hold of the arm Dankovsky wasn’t using to prop himself up. Pushed his fingers between the sleeve and glove to take his pulse, and fuck, there, too, they grazed across cool, armoured smoothness.
Dankovsky’s eyes begged him for a verdict that went against everything his hands were telling him. Just how much of him did those scales cover? How different was he from an ordinary human under his clothes, under the skin? What was he, really?
Frightened and hurt. That was what he was. That was what had to matter for now, until Artemy had more time to think. He took his time examining every part of Dankovsky he could without uncovering him any further, ending with a long stare into those earth-dark eyes.
Some inhuman things were supposed to be given away by the shape of the pupils, or by what would reflect in their eyes or not. But that wasn’t what Artemy was searching for. What he wanted to find had no words, but spoke in a whisper anyways.
Dankovsky could be smug, haughty, domineering, but he wasn’t on trial for any of those things. These people wanted to know whether he’d brought plague to the town, and for all the questions he had, Artemy could answer that.
“He’s no shabnak,” he announced, pushing himself back to his feet. Better to wield that Burakh authority while facing them all down from his full height. “The heart, blood, nerves, and eyes are all normal. Look at his leg – a clay or bone one wouldn’t bleed like that.”
Dankovsky seemed to shrink under the scrutiny they all turned on him at that. No, he was no plague-bearer, whatever else he might be.
“Are you sure about the eyes?” the man who had been least sure about them asked. “I told you, he doesn’t blink right.”
Dankovsky seemed to be making a point of blinking at that moment, just to prove him wrong. Ordinary human eyelids, of course – if he hadn’t been able to hide his true nature, whatever that was, under an unsuspicious amount of clothing, the town would have burned him at the stake days ago.
“Should your friends and neighbours turn on you the next time you stare a little too long?” Artemy challenged him. Dared to now, with that mob starting to look more like just a small crowd, starting to look from Dankovsky back to him with so much less righteous certainty in what they’d been about to do. “Go home. If there is a maneater out there, we won’t do her dirty work for her. And if you do find anyone else suspicious, bring them to me first. Gently, in case you’re wrong again.”
It was a risk, still, standing there and chastising them as his father might have. But it seemed like one he would survive – that mob-turned-crowd was starting to break away at the edges, seven, six, with downcast faces or last dark looks cast over their shoulders. The man who lingered longest, the ash-stained factory veteran who’d spoken to Artemy first, did so only to get in the last word as he turned away. Growled under his breath, cunt, as if it should cut, then he, too, was slinking down the street and out of sight.
As if Artemy hadn’t heard worse a hundred times before. He pretended not to this time, turning his back on it, his attention to the man who might have to be his patient for now.
“Can you walk?” he asked.
“I think so,” Dankovsky said, with adrenaline’s breathless skips and gulps in his voice. The pulse had been normal under that scaly skin, as far as the heart rate of a man who thought he was about to die went. He moved like one whose body still didn’t completely believe the danger had passed, splayed and shaky in making it from his side to his knees. Artemy stooped to offer him a hand, and he stared at it as if it were just as much of a surprise as still being alive.
Was the hand under that glove covered with scales as well? It clasped Artemy’s tentatively, with not much more than fingertips at first, then a full, sudden, stumbling grip as Artemy pulled him up and that bleeding leg bowed beneath him. The sound he made in pain wasn’t a hiss of human breath through teeth – it was truer, sharper somehow, a sound that wanted to uncoil instinct from around Artemy’s brain stem, tell him he was holding something dangerous.
But the man barely standing, all blood and bruises and scabbing dust, in front of him wasn’t fit to be a danger to anyone. If Artemy had decided it was more important to save one minute on his way to the theatre...
“Thank you,” Dankovsky said, aiming the words more at his own blood on the ground than Artemy. “I don’t-”
“Inside,” Artemy instructed him. “You need someone to take a look at that wound. And we need to talk.”
#
And Dankovsky might have made it to that dressing room two walls away from the auditorium’s screams and dying moans on his own, but it would have been hard, slow going. He leaned on Artemy’s shoulder whenever those walls weren’t close enough, holding his injured leg stiff and his jaw as if to keep any more inhuman sounds from slipping out.
His weight against Artemy’s shoulder was no different from that of any other man. The grimace as he lowered himself into the chair in front of the bureau, the same, a mask of silent pain. Was the difference only skin deep, only black scales and the sound that pain had forced out of him?
“Tell me I was right out there,” Artemy said once he was settled. “You don’t have anything to do with the Pest, do you?”
Of course any man or creature that wanted to live would tell him what he wanted to hear. But it wasn’t Dankovsky’s words he wanted. It was the look Dankovsky lifted to him, more honest than words, guiltless and almost too weary now for fear.
“Do you really think I might be your shabnak?” he asked.
“No,” Artemy said. “But you’re not completely human, either, are you? Did you really come from the capital?”
Dankovsky’s lips twitched with bleak humour and more blood, trickling down his chin. He seemed to notice it only then, wiping the back of one gloved hand across his mouth and mostly just spreading the mess around.
“It’s amazing to me that a town so small and remote could still seem to think of itself as the centre of the world,” he said. “Is it so hard to believe I could be an imported monster?”
And there it was – the confession that would have cost him his life outside. But, sitting there, he didn’t look like any sort of monster Artemy had heard of in his hometown or abroad. Not a cautionary myth or a tale to keep children from staying out too late. No longer frightened, but still hurt, and that, at least, gave Artemy a clear path forward.
“Take those off,” he said, with a nod to Dankovsky’s ruined trousers. “I can’t see to your wound with them in the way.”
Dankovsky stared at him the way he had at the hand he’d offered outside, at still being alive somehow. Had that fear faded from his eyes because he’d seen the danger passing, or because he’d given up to being caught by it already? Did he think Artemy had just wanted a chance to judge him more harshly in private?
“Why?” he asked.
Behind the armoured scales of that one word, a racing heart of implication. He wouldn’t have asked why Artemy wanted to treat anyone else in the town, after all.
“Because we need you back on your feet,” Artemy said, folding his arms across his chest. Refusing those implications. If Dankovsky had nothing to do with spreading the Sand Pest, this didn’t have to be any more complicated than him being injured and Artemy having the means to treat him.
It didn’t. Even if Artemy’s heart tripped faster in turn as, after long seconds of staring him down, Dankovsky started to loosen his belt. What did an imported monster look like below the waist? He had gotten only that glimpse through ripped fabric, of scales black as Suok’s pit. Dankovsky boosted himself just enough from the chair to tug his trousers down, and a twitch of something trying to be laughter started in Artemy’s chest at the sight of the plain, tidy white boxer shorts he wore. Such a civilized touch for a supposed monster, while below...
Below, aside from the knife’s work, those scales ran unbroken. Down his thighs, at least as far as where he bunched his trousers around his knees. Not a matte, swallowing black, but glossy as the Gorkhon in moonlight, flexing naturally with the muscle and flesh underneath as he settled back to sit again.
Artemy swallowed his own heartbeat, stepping closer the way he would have to something that might strike if startled. That low, tapering coil of instinct was trying to whisper danger again, but his pulse was louder, and seemed to pull him down for a closer look. To one knee in front of Dankovsky, not to focus immediately and professionally on the laceration parting his scales, but to run his fingers up across them, to convince senses more reliable than sight that they were real.
Living and real, faintly rough running upwards, smooth, too, as the Gorkhon’s flow running down. Melded as perfectly as skin, as they had seemed in the street, to the muscle underneath. But not as much muscle as they should have covered. Dankovsky’s legs were slimmer than they had seemed in trousers, too much so for a man of his size, and a doctor’s intuition drove Artemy’s hand back up his scales, sliding under his vest and all the layers it buttoned smartly in place.
The scales tapered there to warm, ordinary human skin, joined as a seamless whole. Dankovsky’s breath retreated from his touch, pulled up to the back of his throat, but sitting up straight and stiff and slimmer still couldn’t hide how the bony jut of his rib cage filled Artemy’s hand.
“It isn’t safe for you to be this thin while the twyre is blooming,” Artemy told him.
It wouldn’t have been safe at any time, couldn’t have been healthy, even for whatever creature he was, for the heel of Artemy’s hand to rest so deep in the hollow of his stomach. He couldn’t have lost nearly that much weight in the last several days – he must have been riding the line between slim and starving even before he’d arrived in the town.
Yet he blinked at Artemy as if he must not have heard him right. “What?”
“The twyre bloom,” Artemy repeated. “It demands too much of your body – it’s a wonder you can pace around the town hall the way you do without fainting dead away.”
Dankovsky flicked his tongue across his lips too quickly for Artemy to be sure of what he’d almost seemed to see. A split and tapered tip; his gaze darted down to where Artemy’s hand was still cupped around his ribs.
Artemy hastily withdrew it from the human warmth there. Medical assessment was one thing, much different and more perfunctory than lingering with his hand under a patient’s shirt that way. Different, too, for that matter, from running his hand over a patient’s scales just to feel how smoothly they joined with muscle.
Yet Dankovsky didn’t exactly look relieved to have that hand gone. He cupped his own over the place where it had rested, smudging blood from his glove into the camouflaging red of his vest.
“I wasn’t born this way,” he said. “The...infection, mutation, whatever you might call it, has advanced in a series of moults over the last several years. Those seem to require a great deal of the body’s resources. The only way I’ve found to significantly delay them is by denying them those resources.”
“By starving yourself, in other words,” Artemy said.
Not a creature carved from bone or moulded from clay, then, or even birthed from some strange egg. Artemy hadn’t ever heard of a condition that would cause a man to start growing scales, but it wasn’t any less believable than the idea that Dankovsky had worn them since birth. Really, with the way he hunched into himself, with that scowl at having his pretty, clinical words stripped down to their true meaning, it made more sense for him to be someone used to being seen as a man, taken seriously as a scientist. Not hunted in the streets as a monster.
“I’ve tried every other remedy,” he said. “Even this only slows its progress. I’m sure you can understand why I would be extremely reluctant to let it spread farther than it already has.”
How much of his body would those scales cover if they had their way? The reminder of them, of that bloody split in them, pulled Artemy back to the task at hand. To rummaging through his pockets, water and gauze to clean it – no, twyrine might be better, cleaner, even if it stung like the devil – and the suture kit he’d been lucky enough to buy not too dearly from the last pharmacy he’d stopped by.
“Can I stitch these up the same as skin?” he asked. The scales didn’t look as though they would heal cleanly in any case. It might take the next moult Dankovsky didn’t manage to stop, still a thought that seemed to slide through Artemy’s mind at a crooked, obstructing angle, to set them right.
“I haven’t had a chance to find out,” Dankovsky said. “The incisions I’ve made for various experiments all healed cleanly on their own. Though those were scalpel cuts, nothing like the local butchery.”
No, there was no question he had come from the capital, either. Its haughty soot too often covered the way he spoke of the town. Under the circumstances, though, Artemy could forgive him a little bitterness towards it.
“Experiments,” he echoed, tipping a healthy measure – if there was such a thing – of twyrine into the gauze. “You really have no idea what this infection of yours is, then?”
Dankovsky shook his head, catching another not-quite-human hiss between his teeth as Artemy touched the gauze to the edge of that butchery.
“I haven’t been able to pinpoint its cause or mechanism,” he said, hands wrapped tight around the chair’s arms, head tilted back and voice held between his teeth, as if talking were the only way he could distract himself enough to stay still. “As far as I can tell, there’s no genetic history. And, as I said, I haven’t been able to devise any effective treatment.”
Only a means of slowing it, at the cost of the rest of his health. An unknown, worsening condition...and there wouldn’t have been any pity from that mob if they’d seen what they had cut open. They would only have taken it as proof that they had been right.
The gauze caught and frayed on scales torn and skewed. Artemy picked out the shreds of it as best he could, and with each mundane little piece of that work, what he touched and scrutinized was less jarring to his senses. Smooth in one direction and rough in the other, cool where it was whole and warm at the edges of the wound. Nothing fearsome – just something else in need of sewing back together.
“Why did you lie to them?” Dankovsky asked.
Artemy raised his frown from the needle he’d been just about to test against those scales. Dankovsky’s eyes were darkly sincere, his question, it seemed, the same.
“They would have killed you,” he pointed out.
And Dankovsky had seemed so ready for it. Not to let them, but to be unable to stop them. Had anyone in the capital known about what was shedding its way through his skin? Even in that hub of enlightenment, would their reaction really have been so different from the local butchery?
“You would have been a hero to them,” Dankovsky said. “Instead, you risked that they would turn on us both.”
“Are you complaining?” Artemy worked the tip of the needle between two of those scales, a tougher hide than he was used to mending. It was no wonder a half-blunt knife had shredded through it rather than leaving a clean, deeper cut.
“No,” Dankovsky said, through his teeth again as Artemy found the angle where that needle would slip most easily through. “Just trying to understand. I had gotten the impression that you weren’t fond of me.”
He had swept into town with that stink of self-importance on him, commandeering their efforts against the Pest as if none of them could figure out how to fight a disease without him. But it was dirty, dangerous work, and it painted a target on him for all the townsfolk’s fear and blame, as they’d just proven. And he hadn’t backed down from it, hadn’t let them or the Pest scare him off.
Besides, it would have been hard for Artemy to hate someone who had looked at him the way Dankovsky had, lying bloody in the street. As if he were too resigned to the inevitable to even hate the person who brought the gavel down on him.
“I don’t have to like you to know that what they were doing was wrong,” Artemy said. “And besides...”
Besides, he knew his share about men who weren’t the way others expected them to be. About what clothes could hide. But if the townsfolk hadn’t told Dankovsky that, did he really want to be the first?
“Besides, things would go to hell here without you,” he finished instead. “So try to eat more, all right? You won’t have a chance to worry about growing more scales if the twyre bloom kills you.”
Dankovsky sat in silence as Artemy learned, loop by loop, the best way of stitching him shut. Not so hard after all, once he got used to how those scales overlapped. Not so different from mending anyone else.
Only as he was tying off the last stitch did his patient speak again. “Thank you. I know this wasn’t without cost for you.”
We unnatural men have to stick together, Artemy could have said. “Don’t mention it,” he settled for instead, and tidied away his tools while Dankovsky redonned the disguise that only might stop the town from turning on him again.