Work Text:
prima materia
Verum sine mendacio, certum, et verissimum.
Quod est inferius, est sicut quod est superius.
Et quod est superius, est sicut quod est inferius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius.
(…).
Sic mundus creatus est.
That which is below is like that which is above and that which is above is like that which is below
to do the miracle of one only thing.
(…)
So was the world created.
Johannes Petreius, 1541, De alchemia
***
[TRANSCRIPT OF THE OFFICIAL TESTIMONY OF [REDACTED], HENCEFORTH “WITNESS X” AS RECORDED ON AN ELECTROMECHANICAL RECORDER ON 19 NOV 1935.]
WITNESS X: [UNINTELLIGIBLE] kept going … wrong. It could not be fixed. I mean, it could not be cured. And by then, almost everybody was … gone.
INTERVIEWER: Can you list the original attendees of the meeting?
WITNESS X: Uh … sure. Alexander and Katerina Saburova, Vlad Olgimsky and his son, Victor Kain. The acting medical professionals, Stanislav Rubin, Bachelor Daniil Dankovsky and Artemy Burakh. On a consultant’s basis, Georgiy Kain, Andrey and Peter Stamatin, Yulia Lyuricheva …. [INTERFERENCE] that Be, Alexander Block and Aglaya Lilich.
INTERVIEWER: Can you confirm who of this list is deceased?
WITNESS X: [INTERFERENCE] They’re all … they’re all dead. All aside from me.
***
Orderly #14, V.S.,
Excerpt From Report 13, on the 2nd week of the 2nd Month of Outbreak in Town-on-Gorkhon.
12th October 1934
[…] Attitudes towards “menkhu/Haruspex”, one Artemy Burakh, have soured after his “panacea” proved ineffective, and his involvement in the death of Stanislav Rubin remains an unresolved matter on top of his alleged act of patricide against Isidor Burkah.
By act of the people, “The Ripper” had been given a vote of no confidence and sentenced with sabotaging the effort to expunge the Town of Plague, and expulsed from the Town Council, and banished to the steppe; instructed not to return on pain of death.
He had been led out to the steppe by a firing squadron.
As of today’s date, Daniil Dankovsky, the Town-on-Gorkhon’s remaining medic, is reportedly working on a vaccine for the surviving population of the town under the jurisdiction of Alexander Block and Aglaya Lilich.
***
26th November, 1934
Half of the seats are empty.
“The recent testing batch?”
“Failed. Contaminated. I tried to salvage what I could but I’m afraid that—”
“What do you need, to continue?” Block talks over him, sharply. His eyes are sunken deeply into his face, like a skull. Three day’s stubble, greyed, covers his squarish face. His shoulders are hunched in where he leans on the table.
Dankovsky tries, and fails, to remember what he used to look like. Before.
“More tissue,” he says, shaking his head. “Live tissue and post mortem both. I went by the ward, today, before coming here. It is, once again, full, though god knows who is even still alive to be sick in the first place—”
“Yes, well. Got your pick of the diseased, here, at any rate,” Block interjects again. He runs a hand down his face. “Fine. Continue. Another batch, another … whatever it takes. And try not to contaminate it this time.”
Nodding his assent, hands linked behind his back, Dankovsky retreats stiffly into the shadow.
“We need a miracle,” Clara’s voice comes, from behind Block’s back. She’s taken to sneaking into the meetings in lieu of the Saburovs. Dearly departed. Nobody has the drive to keep saying you shouldn’t be hereanymore. “We have to—”
“There will be no miracles here,” Block shuts her down, firmly. He does not as much as turn. “That much I’m sure of.”
A stale silence falls, coagulating in the air like miasma.
Led by a strange prickling of his skin—a sense of being watched—Dankovsky raises his head. Across the hollow room, he meets Yulia Lyuricheva’s slightly distant eyes.
“That’s all,” Block meanwhile says. “You’re dismissed.”
***
Outside is sleeting, the town sunk in an amorphous, ubiquitous drizzle. Ever since the Polyhedron fell, the sky has been overcast nearly without pause. Hour by hour, a dusty residue continues to sink downwards upon the town, carried by precipitation from the thing’s crumpled skeleton. Its texture is strange: thick flakes of something like volcanic fall-out. It darkens the town even more, painting it sooty-grey, likening each remaining shape until nothing can be extinguished or told apart anymore.
Pulling up his cloth mask and upturning the collar of his coat, Dankovsky follows Lyuricheva’s arrhythmically dragging gait outside.
He is stopped in place by a wizened hand, falling vice-like upon his shoulder.
Briefly, he expects a gun’s muzzle shoved between his scapulae, or an Orderly’s mask to face, before being walked down to the jail. The jig is up, Bachelor.
But what his eyes meet is a gaunt, hunched figure, aged almost beyond recognition. Georgiy Kain, he thinks, in abject recognition, no longer lurking on his island towering over the Waste-water, but wading through the debris, as the rest of us.
The surviving few, at least.
In a raspy voice—the ash is toxic, Dankovsky has long since diagnosed, hardly needing a second opinion in the face of strange chemical burns marring the skin of the still-upright town-dwellers; and the new cough warring with the ravages of the Sand Pest—the man speaks:
“Andrey …”
Almost unwittingly, Dankovsky shakes his head. He tries to slink out of the old man’s grasp, ostensibly keeping the state-mandated distance. In truth, he’s unable to look at him long. “I told you,” he says, muffled into the cloth-mask. “There’s nothing more I can do for him.”
“Please,” Kain rasps, clinging to the entrance to the Town Hall like a drowning man to flotsam, deprived of the tether of the Bachelor’s shoulder, “just check on him. He’s our last—hope. Our last hope.”
Old fool, Dankovsky almost says out loud. Whatever that had been is long gone to the ground.
Stiffly, cornered by warring revulsion and pity, he nods. “Oh, fine. Fine. I’ll go.”
***
Against all odds, Lyuricheva seems to have waited for him, perched by the emptied cages once occupied by the Stone Yard’s Tragedians; now cobwebbed with the fleecy, charred remains of the Polyhedron and fire. Dankovsky’s eyes drag past the tar-like skeletons as he stifles a wince. Last month’s last ditch effort at purging the toxin, burning it out—
Didn’t work, of course. Much like it couldn’t purge Thanatica of the inciting thought behind it. Fire is only ever useful against living things.
Yulia is mostly immobile, almost skeletal herself, standing with her arms linked behind her and markedly pallid in contrast with the murk surrounding her. Her green coat is stained with ash.
“In the meeting,” Daniil begins, coming to a halt in front of her, “I had the impression that you wanted to talk to me.”
She inclines her head. “I had the same impression about you.”
He forces a smile that’s concealed under his mask and casts a lingering glance at the Town Hall. “Yes, well. I must pay Andrey Stamatin a visit—would you care to accompany me there?”
For a moment, she merely regards him in silence.
Then she says, “He is gone already.”
Involuntarily, Dankovsky’s jaw tightens. “… Last I heard, he was still holding on.”
Without answering, Yulia turns in place, and begins walking, unhurriedly, in the approximate direction of Peter’s loft. After a beat, Dankovsky follows. For a moment, they walk arm in arm, though expressly never in touching-distance.
At length, she says: “He might be. Though I doubt I am wrong.” A pause. “The body often lingers long after the soul has departed.”
Dankovsky measures her with a sideways. “The soul. You sound like Clara.”
Slowly, almost lethargically, Yulia raises her eyes to the sky. Blinks, as though blinded by the pitiful impression of light beyond the clouds. “Grief has a way of making mystics of the most logical of us.”
A flash of recognition, belated. He almost winces at his own idiocy.
Not Clara. Eva.
He says, “You sympathise. With Andrey.”
Her moonlike, grey eyes remain focused upwards, caught on something invisible to him. “I’ve lost something too.”
Someone.
“My condolences.” His own voice sounds stilted and almost false to his ears. He has always been nothing short of inadequate at this; if not at empathising, per se, then at communicating it in a manner translatable to others as anything other than scorn.
To her credit, Yulia has scarcely ever seemed to care; nor does she now.
“And you, Bachelor Dankovsky?” she asks, almost placidly. “What have you lost?”
Somehow, the segue catches him unawares; though he should have been able to predict the trajectory of this exchange. Perhaps he is paranoid, looking for am ulterior motive or any hidden meaning in the perceptiveness of her eyes—perhaps he is too used by now to seeing monsters rise from the ashes of good intentions, to reliably distinguish a friend’s face from a crowd of them.
Still, he sobers. Keeping his face blank, he reaches towards the freshly-buried source, the more innocuous aim of the question. Thanatica in the fire. Once—mere weeks ago, a month or two—a source of grief so mind-numbing it rendered him nearly insensate.
These days, mostly, it seems a cleaner death than—
“… More than I can fathom, most days,” he says aloud. “My life’s work … my life’s sole purpose, it seems. Everybody I shared it with—that life and that purpose. Some days, I almost believe the very opposite: that it had not happened at all. It couldn’t have. I haven’t seen it with my eyes, ergo, it’s not done.”
“A half-state,” Yulia comments, sotto voce.
He cuts her a look. Her face has not changed; at odds with him, she seems never to as much as try and emulate the correct response approximations, mutely observing the world unfold around her instead.
“That being said, is it not an effect … of all this?” he asks harshly, gesturing about them. Something about her idle, value-neutral prying itches at him. Paranoia, again. “I’ve had the strangest relationship with time, since coming here. Orbis terrarum … all the world, all external world, feels unreachable past this … self-wound ropeof events, which I can’t seem to escape. A vicious circle, dwindling as it might be, with each tied knot.”
Tightening the noose.
“Infinite regress,” Yulia muses, again. She is looking downward at last, pale eyelashes cutting strange shadows into her face. “Still, it—us—must be tending towards something, no?”
“Shrinking on itself,” Dankovsky retorts, sharply. “This world, and us with it. Don’t you feel it? We are stuckin time, here, stuck in a garishly extended state of already dying—even if outside, life progresses. As it must.” He swallows. “Whatever lives, it will be there, in the next world. It is no longer possible for us.”
Yulia says nothing.
Dankovsky’s heart has quickened its pace, restless. Trying to calm himself, he resents, once again, his temperamental disposition, his own inaptitude at neutrality.
Stiffly, accusingly, he bites out, “You disagree.”
She looks away. “Time is relative to any concept of normalcy. I am not sure that our aberration is either less or more accommodating to it, than the calmest place on earth.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Which is my point exactly.” Yulia seems to be smiling, as her eyes narrow, lightly. “We don’t follow. Whatever grasp we think we have of time is merely conjectural.”
Slowly, Dankovsky shakes his head. “I disagree,” he says, “if only because mine has changed. And I do—I do think this place, of rash judgements and wild justice, is aberrant enough to skew something about even time.”
I’ve said too much, he thinks even as he speaks, though still nothing changes in Lyuricheva’s calm demeanour. This is why he avoids conversation, these days: the lonely man’s steep price of having a secret left that is still worth keeping.
“Or perhaps it’s just your perspective that has changed,” Yulia points out, calmly. “And revealed something to you about your previous viewpoint’s inadequacy.”
“Yes. It revealed to me the futility of any action,” Dankovsky says, bitingly. “But tell me—how does your normal time factor into that?”
Yulia shakes her head. “A supposition of our agency vis a vis normal time is aberrant regardless of context: an anomaly such as ours can only reveal it.” She pauses. “I’ve read something, once. It went something like: We trust that time is linear. That it proceeds eternally, uniformly. Into infinity. But the distinction between past, present and future is nothing but an illusion. Yesterday, today and tomorrow are not consecutive, they are connected in a never-ending circle. Everything is connected.”
A pause follows her words.
“… Somewhere, then, my Thanatica is still burning,” Daniil says at length. “And somewhere else, she has not burned at all.”
Yulia inclines her head to the side. Her eyes crinkle at the edges again. “Food for thought.”
He manages a grimace in return. “For grief, more like.”
Briefly, he wonders if in place of his unburied Thanatica, she imagines Eva, before jumping. He feel s neither steady nor cruel enough to ask.
They have drawn to a halt in the middle of the pavement, a length from Peter’s loft. “You won’t go in with me?”
She shakes her head. “No, Bachelor. I’ve seen enough of regress—in the mirror.”
***
Orderly #17, V.S.,
Excerpt From Report 13, on the 3rd week of the 2nd Month of Outbreak in Town-on-Gorkhon.
18th November 1934
[…] state that as of today’s date, 1200 hours military time, Bachelor Daniil Dankovsky, Town-on-Gorkhon’s operating medic, has declared Artemy Burakh, haruspex/menkhu, accused of murder and banished in lieu of trial, dead.
Cause of death: gunshot wound.
No follow-up investigation is in order.
***
He finds Clara lurking in the Loft’s corridor.
She looks eerie in the lowlight, outlined with dust against the naked light-bulb like a halo of twitching primordial matter. Her head, wrapped in its customary wool, resembles a naked skull more than ever. Still, her eyes glisten, reflecting the dim light like an owl’s.
Once again, he has to overcome his own revulsion. No use dreading bad omens in a town ran by them.
Instead he asks, passably irate, “How did you get here so fast?”
Clara is watching him, strangely. “I have my ways.”
He scoffs. “Oh, I’m sure.” Crawling underground, perhaps. In the vents and piping, like a rat.
Huddled as they are in the cursed, desolate building, she strikes him as even more haunted than she had seemed in the Town Hall, as though the absence of an audience to posture against aged and soured her. It’s hardly surprising—Dankovsky has grown used to seeing her split in half, by now; alternating between the selves she assumes depending on need and circumstance.
Changeling.
“Did she tell you?” Clara asks, somewhat sharply.
His irritation winning over unease at last, he lowers his collar, before uttering a clipped:
“Try and formulate full sentences, would you? Did who tell me what?”
Clara’s eyes harden. She is not wearing a mask, believing herself—as she had told him, time after time—immune to either plague or toxins.
“Don’t play coy with me, snake,” she hisses. “You haven’t the time.”
A pause.
“I suppose you were eavesdropping on my conversation with Miss Lyuricheva, then,” Dankovsky says with a sigh.
“I didn’t have to.”
“If you know what we discussed,” Dankovsky asks, disregarding her, “why ask and waste my time? Precious as it is.” He is unable to divorce his words entirely of irony, even in the face of her solemn resolve.
He tries to move past her. The Changeling blocks his path, surprisingly steadfast.
Her pale eyes pin his own. A strange hunted look in them, almost feverish. Is she sick, after all? he thinks, trying to assess her for symptoms. His eyes track past her morbidly serious face of a prematurely aged child, half-trapped in her grand delusions of salvation past survival. No, it’s not fever. Something else. Fervour.
Dangerous thing, to believe.
“There is something else,” she says, through clenched teeth.
“What?” he asks, derisively. He has little patience left for her, and he’s in no sort of mood for a preaching. “A miracle?”
In return, Clara gives him a solemn nod, as though wilfully ignorant of the mockery he’s made out of her declaration from the Town Hall.
She says: “An unfinished one. Incomplete.”
Something like a shudder—or a premonition—creeps down his spinal cord at her words. It’s all he can do not to visibly recoil from her.
“Then what need do for have for me?” he asks, at length. “You must know I’m a hopeless case. I’ll die a heretic before being your convert.”
There is a sudden and childish urgency in her answer: “I need you to see.”
Without another word, she turns and disappears in the shadows leading upstairs. Still half-reluctant, but remembering the promise he’d made the wraith of Grigoriy, Dankovsky follows.
***
The sorry sight the Loft yields churns low in Dankovsky’s gut.
A stench of stale, soured twyrine permeates the whole room, seemingly embedded in its every surface. All windows are barred shut from the inside. Even the air seems opaque.
Andrey sits in the tub, in a tangle of limbs, in ragged clothing, made concave somehow by his foetal, inwards hunch. A hollow thing. Inanimate. He is cradling something to himself—some sort of trinket, a clockwork mechanism encased in dark wood, looking half-medicine cabinet and half-gramophone.
Fighting the instinct to secure his mask in place, Daniil moves closer to the tub.
He checks the Andrey’s pulse with two gloved fingers. Steady. His eyes are closed and lined with purple veins, but sweat still beads up on his temples, under the hair which seems newly grey-stained.
Ash? Or grief?
Ey, Drusha, Daniil thinks to himself, crouching down. She was right about you, wasn’t she? Not long for this place. Not now.
“This is it,” Clara speaks out, suddenly, startling him. “The only thing left.”
Dankovsky half-turns to look at her askance. Tenuous and predominantly hostile as the remnants of their friendships have been, it still feels … wrong, somehow, to have her encroach so carelessly on what could well be his last feasible moment of valediction. Desecrating some last shred of civility in a rotten time.
“Are you the one feeding Grigoriy Kain all that messianic bullshit?” he asks. “I should’ve known.”
To his agitation, Clara is not even looking at Andrey; but rather at the contraption cradled to his breast.
“Just look,” she repeats, mulish.
“At this box?” Dankovsky says, taking no pains to disguise the derision in his voice.
Clara’s face hardens. For a moment she looks almost wounded. “You refuse to see what’s under your nose,” she says, clenching her jaw. “He was the same. Doubted.”
Daniil shakes his head. “Who?”
Her eyes glint dangerously.“The Haruspex.”
All at once, Dankovsky goes rigid.
In the following silence, he can hear his own agitated breath.
“What is this?” he spits out, gripping at the edge of the basin. “The Inquisitor’s dying wish, perhaps? Did Block send you here? Are the Powers that Be still questioning my allegiances?” The sharp unease from earlier—paranoia, only is it even still paranoia when warranted?—returns, strengthened threefold. “You can relay to them, in any case, that they need not worry—I shan’t follow in the Ripper’s footsteps and murder the town doctor—especially given that I’m the only one left.”
Not for the lack of trying, a voice in his head whispers.
Clara’s jaw twitches. “You have it all wrong.”
Dankovsky feels a sudden wave of exhaustion. “Oh, believe me,” he says bitterly, “I am well aware of that.” He lifts himself up from his haunches, dusting off his coat. “Well, go on then. Scram. Report back. Bachelor Dankovsky does not believe in miracles. He will continue his work. No need to chase him out into the steppe with a gun to his head; he’d sooner volunteer his own gun, if they provide him with bullets. Make quick work of it.”
Clara does not move an inch.
“If you go on like this,” she says, by now sounding childish again in her sudden and inexplicable frustration. “It’s going to cost you more than you can imagine.”
Daniil actually laughs at that. An ugly sound, in a place like this.
“Hardly,” he says. “If you had been paying attention at all, you’d know I have nothing left to lose.”
A silence lodges itself between them like a stalemate. Clara’s face does not change, locked in her stubborn refusal to accept his … what? Defiance? he thinks, sobering for a moment from his own anger. And what am I even defying, by denying a child her white lie?
It will be fine, I should say. We’ll all be saved at the end.
Inside the bathtub, Andrey twitches.
“Danya,” he mutters, eyes wrenching open on a heaving intake of air. “… Old boy.”
“Yes,” Dankovsky says at length, turning back to him, “we’ve rather aged. And poorly, at that.”
Andrey nods, the movement sinuous and languid with alcohol—seeming, for all intents and purposes, as though he is merely resuming some long-paused conversation. “I’m going back,” he announces. His voice is hoarse, worn. “I’m going back for him.”
Dankovsky takes in the shipwrecked room around them. “Yes, I suppose you are.”
A sudden weariness comes over him. Slowly, he crouches back down and extracts the strange box from Andrey’s oddly pliable arms.
The thing is intricate, well-made. He can almost see the myriad of blueprints sketched on calque, in graphite, which must have led to its physical conception.
“Don’t drop it,” Andrey mumbles, worriedly.
“What is this?” Daniil asks, with a stirring of rare, genuine curiosity. “I didn’t know you dealt with miniature as well. And it doesn’t resemble anything—is it Farkhad’s?”
But Andrey is already asleep.
A strange disappointment comes over Dankovsky. A discovery fit for a failed Thanatologist: death comes for everything. Even for conversation.
Carefully, he sets the box aside and arranges Andrey on his side, dragging an empty bucket to the side of the tub.
“Get your sleep, old boy,” he sighs.
When he straightens again, Clara is hovering close behind him.
“Is this your miracle?” Dankovsky asks, tetchy. The atmosphere in the room is choking to him: funereal and oppressive. He has a dim feeling that if he doesn’t get out of here soon, he never will, buried alive in this strange mausoleum alongside its owner. “That he’s still not succumbed to twyrine poisoning?”
Wordlessly, Clara hands him another object.
It’s a book. Battered, well-used, a shabby sort of paperback. A sheaf of calque papers—blueprints, just as he’d predicted—is tucked behind the back cover.
The title seems to be in German, as is most of the text. Only on the front page, in a slanting cursive, someone wrote out in Cyrillic:
“We trust that time is linear. That it proceeds eternally, uniformly. Into infinity. But the distinction between past, present and future is nothing but an illusion. Yesterday, today and tomorrow are not consecutive, they are connected in a never-ending circle. Everything is connected.”
Despite himself, Dankovsky finds himself frowning. “… I’ve heard this before.”
And recently. He recalls Yulia’s face in the drizzle.
Perhaps Andrey, too, had paid her a visit to talk of infinite regress, and the ghosts waiting for him in the mirror.
“It’s broken,” Andrey speaks out, unexpectedly. Daniil twitches, spooked. He turns: the man is suddenly alert again, eyes red-rimmed but present. His face is tight, reddened from alcohol. “We never got it to work.” He pauses. “It should work, Peter would have said here. But it didn’t. Doesn’t.”
Daniil measures him with a cautious look. “What … is it?”
Andrey’s eyes are half-lidded now, his shoulders hunched in again. In a way, he has never resembled his dead brother more. “It’s a way out.”
“Out of this Town?” Dankovsky asks.
“Out of now. A way out back—or forward.”
And it clicks, finally. Yulia’s idle theorising, Andrey’s fixation, Clara’s burning eyes. Kain, even.
Dankovsky cannot help it; he huffs a disbelieving breath. “You cannot be serious.”
Nobody contradicts him; Andrey has succumbed to his sleep again, and Clara stands grave and solemn.
She asks, “Do you see now?”
Dankovsky pinches the bridge of his nose. “No,” he says curtly. “And even if I did indulge your implication—which was not lost on me, don’t you fret—that in my hands, I may be holding the Polyhedron of time, meant to cheat it … change it … well, you’ve heard him. It doesn’t work.”
Clara does not blink. “Broken things can be mended, Healer.”
“Hasn’t the Pest taught us the opposite?” Even as he speaks, Dankovsky pulls the lid of the wooden box shut, before sliding it into his carpet bag. “The time of miracles is past, Clara. Stop holding out hope.”
There is a tense moment of silence.
“If that’s true,” she says, eventually. “Then why are you taking it with you?”
She deploys the question like her final strike, meant to disarm him. It makes him feel for her, oddly enough—something like pity.
“I’d rather he not bash his skull in with it.”
“And you’ll—what?” Clara asks. “Dissect it?”
“Well, I am running out of people. Perhaps clockwork comes next.” He breathes out through his nose. “This town’s bloody clockmaker is dead, after all.”
With that, he takes his leave, abandoning Clara beside the bathtub, where Grace once was.
Ghosts upon ghosts.
***
Every step of the way, the feeling chases him: eyes on his back. Watching.
He complicates his route, checking a few times if the Changeling isn’t following him.
Goddamned Block, sending spies after him. As if he didn’t know there are no bullets left, for myself or anyone else.
If someone is tailing him, he sees no more of them than shadows.
***
He gets inside the Stillwater in some sort of fugue. As in a trance, he follows his routine of disrobing: removing his mask, coat, boots and changing his gloves for indoor ones. Quarantining the ash-soiled clothes in a basket by the door, he triple checks he’s locked and barred the door—casts one stricken glance at Eva’s empty quarters—and begins climbing upstairs.
A slight sound. Rats. Or faulty piping.
Still, he stiffens mid-stride.
Goddamn Block, he thinks again. Sending his cronies inside now? Does he want to beat me into shape?
He reaches inside the carpet bag and yanks out the Hacksaw-type surgeon's saw, looted from Rubin’s practice after his burial.
No bullets left, but plenty of bite.
***
The Stillwater’s circular attic room is dark: curtains drawn; no light to penetrate its stale, morbid hush. He has a feeling, sometimes, ludicrous and superstitious as it is, that its walls are spongy with blood, sucked out the ground like some toxic vapour, through the house’s root system. They whisper to him: taunting and whining, a persistent chorus of lamentation.
Now, inching inwards, he advances towards his desk, groping for the switch on the kerosene lamp.
The shadows rearrange themselves, assuming shapes: a desk, a chair, a wardrobe, bed.
A body.
Something tightly-coiled inside Dankovsky relents. He lowers the bone-saw. Odd, he can’t help but think, he usually never risks crossing over by day. Such are the rules that govern the fugitives and the nominally dead: they must dwell in shadows and underground, only ever returning to the surface in the absence of light.
The particular fugitive in Daniil’s bed is curled in on himself—as Andrey had been in his bathtub; and what a horrible thought that is—as though to shelter himself from cold.
Something disarming about a man sleeping. Something innocent.
Dankovsky swallows, audibly, gripping the edge of his desk.
He still believes—as he has believed, consistently, throughout the whole grotesque ordeal—that the Haruspex is innocent.
Innocent, that is, at the very least of the dual charge of patri- and fratricide, given how ludicrous and logically-wanting each accusation had been. Still, Rubin’s death had cemented preexisting opinions, and the Ripper’s conduct—driven by self-defence though it may have beeen—did him no favours. In the end, whether Burakh did it or simply let it happen proved to make little difference.
“… Reckless,” Dankovsky mutters, letting the bone-saw slide to his desk. He’s not sure if he is talking to himself or the intruder in his bed. Perhaps both.
Block would, in all likelihood, sooner shoot him out back, as well—should he learn what a darling stowaway Dankovsky was harbouring—than consider they may well have a better shot at survival with two pairs of medically-trained hands primed to force useless medicine down people’s throats.
With a sigh, Daniil lets go of his carpet bag, too.
The Haruspex’s grubby smock is flung, haphazard, over his boots on the floor. Particular about the extent of his own hovel's mess, Dankovsky picks it up and hangs it conscientiously on the back of his only chair, before sitting down heavily.
Artemy’s face is shoved so forcefully into the pillow he seems to be straining against it, bracketed on both sides with his arms. Even in sleep, he looks tightly wound; on high alert. It’s a small wonder he was not roused by Dankovsky’s approach to try and disarm him of the surgeon’s saw.
Yargachin, Daniil thinks idly, the term followed incongruously by an impulse to reach out and stroke his dirty-blonde hair.
And though in response to such a phantom violation, Artemy twitches and stirs.
It’s a moment before he manages to take stock of the situation. His pale, greenish eyes are red-rimmed from exhaustion as they slowly take in the room—and Daniil’s hunched gaunt form at the desk.
“Oynon,” he croaks out at last. Meaningless formality, by now. He runs a hand down his face. “I … fell asleep. Fuck. Sorry.”
“Oh, don’t be,” Dankovsky answers casually, running his own gloved finger past the dull edge of his bone-saw. “You must have been waiting a while. The council meeting overran, and then I went by Andrey’s.”
Artemy’s eyes dim somewhat at the mention of the council. “Any news?”
Dankovsky bites down at the inside of his cheek. His eyes drift idly past his own pitiful array of equipment, stacked upon the desk. “Regurgitating the obvious.”
Still, wanting as it may be, something in the utilitarian—yet intricate—clockwork of his microscope reminds him of Andrey’s device and the miasmatic loft. His eyes almost go to the carpet bag but he holds himself from it, with a feeling like he is resisting something inevitable.
“… But there is something else,” Artemy echoes Clara meanwhile, seeing through him.
He does that, sometimes. Line-reader.
Dankovsky cannot peel his eyes off the juncture between the diopter and ocular lens. “You could say so.”
The silence stretches on.
At last, Burakh huffs a breath. “Fine, don’t tell me.”
Dankovsky cuts him a sideways look, eyebrow twitching. “Oh, don’t be so childish.”
Still, it has snapped him out of his hollow reverie. Reaching at last into his carpet bag, Dankovsky coaxes the box out from where he’s nestled it amid scraps of old, torn-up gauze.
“… There,” he says. “Confiscated from Andrey.”
Artemy frowns, raising himself up on his elbows at last. His hair is greasy, darker than it used to be—no sunlight to brighten it—and ruffled up at an odd angle. He has a jagged pillow print running across the left side of his face.
“What is this?” he grunts.
Dankovsky hesitates. Then, carefully, he unlatches and lifts the ornate lid. Someone has carved letters into the wood, spelling out Ad perpetranda miracula rei unius in lavish cursive.
“A thought experiment. I think.”
Artemy’s eyes narrow. “Explain.”
Daniil does.
And as he does, he half-expects Burakh to become at least as disturbed as he has been thus far by the more outlandish of Daniil’s ideas and priorities, over the course of the past months.
But strangely, what registers most prominently in the Haruspex’s face is a sudden, irrepressible flash of grief.
A longing.
Then he swipes a rough hand down his sleep-stained face again; sits up properly with a low grunt against the headboard. He’s in his wrinkled, blood-green trousers, and his evergreen knitted jumper, by now snagged and worn.
“I see,” he utters at last, heavily.
Dankovsky barely refrains from rolling his eyes. “Oh, all the impatience, and now that’s all you have got to say?”
Burakh quirks an eyebrow at him, either assuming or feigning indifference. “What else would you have me say? To something like this?”
If months of furtive co-operation—co-habitation? At times. Intermittently—taught Daniil anything about the Haruspex, is that Burakh’s hard exterior predominantly conceals an impatient bastard with a penchant for sarcasm to rival his own; and an even deeper-buried penchant for something like deep-sealed, all-consuming shame.
Fascinating, Dankovsky privately thinks; and also, primarily, maddening.
“Indulge my thought experiment, for one,” he now says. “Say you could. Say you had formulae needed to conceive of time as a traversable dimension and the apparatus necessary to make such journey feasible—the means, so to speak, to return sometime, as one would revisit a location.” He pauses for emphasis, but Burakh’s expression remains stony. “Well, where would you go? If such things were, indeed, possible—which point in time?” Stubbornly, he keeps staring. “Rubin? Your father?”
Artemy winces, looking away at last. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“No, you never do,” Dankovsky snaps back. “Unless it’s to try and … and punch your way out of a dead-end, then you’re all for it.” A little sharper than intended.
“You think a conversation would’ve gotten me out of that particular dead-end?” Burakh asks, evenly. “That I didn’t kill Rubin would’ve meant more to them than I didn’t kill my father? What should I have done, drafted a petition?
And how did we get here again? Dankovsky thinks.
He slides his eyes shut. “This isn’t about that.”
Artemy’s eyes continue to bore into him, ruthless. “You’re wrong, Bachelor,” he says. “Everything is about that. Every conversation we can ever have again is going to be about that.”
Something about the entire chronology of the sequence of events—Yulia interrogating him instead of discussing his theories; Andrey falling into his tormented coma mid-conversation; now, Burakh, too, denying him one imaginary detour in order to beat that long-dead horse of trying to fathom a more dignified fate for himself—is beginning to cut into some vulnerable space in him he’d thought long dead.
Allow me this—moment of respite, he thinks, mulishly. But the illusion must collapse, as all illusions do: it is not a home Dankovsky is returning to, nor a partner—in either conversation or scientific pursuit—but a hunted criminal he’d thrown in his lot with, out of loneliness and the foolish idea that anything fair or meaningful can yet persist in an already doomed world.
“… Forgive me,” he says at length, somewhat stiffly. “I didn’t mean—I didn’t mean to bring this up. I didn’t mean to argue.”
And how pathetic but recently characteristic of him, to concede so easily, to shy so quickly from conflict. Once upon a time, he’d have debated Burakh with relish, and proved him wrong via use of sheer semantics, if nothing else. These days, each collision they have frightens him in some deep-sealed way he is too ashamed to even articulate; other than that it threatens him with the vision of Andrey, half-calcified in his husklike bathtub: alone and half-gone.
After a beat, Burakh asks, somewhat mollified, “What’s got you so wound-up about this, anyway?”
“Nothing,” Dankovsky says, making up his mind as he snaps the lid of the box shut. No comfort to find in toys and playthings, anyhow—have I not learned this lesson already? “Forget it.”
The Stillwater’s silence rings hollow around them now. Its concentrated absence rises in whispers, climbing up the walls like water levels, threatening to swallow him down.
“Alright. Have it your way.”
Delivered like sudden concession. Dankovsky casts Burakh a mutinous look.
And damn his piercing, strange eyes—because the Haruspex seems to have read something pitiful enough out of Daniil’s mood to indulge him. Something in the pinch of his severe face has suddenly relented, making him—as always, in those brief, disorienting moments which fool Daniil so—look markedly young, thoughtful, and almost contrite.
“I guess—before the plague,” he says, after a moment of deliberating. Running his roughened knuckles past his upper lip, he frowns and inhales deeply. “Before father and Simon Kain went out into the steppe to dig the damn thing out. And I would dig it out myself, and burn it to hell.”
For a moment, Dankovsky lets himself picture it: Artemy, alone in the steppe, outlined with fire.
Victor.
At length, he nods. “Bravo. Two birds with one stone: noble and pragmatic both.”
Artemy snorts, and cracks a crooked sort of smile. Sluggishly, almost unwittingly, he rubs at one eye: another disarming gesture of concession. He’s taken do allowing himself this, Daniil has noticed, at times, when they’re alone and not fighting: to act unguarded.
“How about you, then?”
Slowly, Daniiil draws in a breath. In a somewhat absent movement of grounding himself, he rubs his thumb past the fine letters engraved in the wood.
… perpetranda miracula …
“Thanatica, I suppose,” he mutters. “Selfishly, of course. If only to … see it burn with my own eyes.”
For what power could he have, really, to stop it from being consigned to the fire? Even his imagination, starved as it is for action, has its limits. He’d gain no agency by any such displacement, but to witness a death rather than persist in her denial, at his cursed, safe distance.
His eyes fall shut again.
“… Are you alright, oynon?”
Damn it. Speaking of acting unguarded: he’s forgotten being witnessed amongst the side-effects of company.
“Yes,” Daniil strains out. “It’s nothing. My head is killing me. The outside is … I swear this ash will do us in before the plague can.”
There’s a pause. Then, somewhat laboriously, Artemy moves.
He swings his legs off the bed and rests his elbows heavily on both knees, body swaying closer to Dankovsky. Up close, he smells thickly of sleep and twyre, and his own scent underneath it—a scent which Daniil has come to associate with its remnants, pressed into his pillow alongside crinkled herb stalks as they pass each others like ships navigating foreign waters.
Who’s childish now? Near-instantly, he wants to lean into it, into Artemy: wrap himself in him and sleep. He grits his jaw.
On his part, Burakh, continues indulging him—either by virtue of being a dedicated contrarian at heart, or perhaps due to sensing something perilous in Daniil’s sullen temper. Regardless of the reason, he nods at the box in his lap.
“How would it even work, anyway?”
Dankovsky worries his cheek once again. “On principle, it would simply take you … elsewhere,” he says at length, sounding clipped. “The only difference being, instead of in space, you’d travel in time.”
“Hm,” Artemy muses. “That simple, eh?”
He’s still hunched forward, eye-to-eye with Daniil’s own slouch. It is a little as though they are conferring about something in private, like the town’s remaining children swapping nuts and secrets. It would strike Daniil as almost funny, if he weren’t so worn-out by now.
“In theory,” Dankovsky says, weakly.
“And can you impact upon that time?”
“In theory, yes,” Daniil says. “At least Andrey seems to believe that.” He pauses. “Claims Peter believed that.”
Artemy nods, frowning. He seems suddenly lost in thought, eyes fixed down on his own hands, clasped in front of him.
Dankovsky finds himself watching him in irrational anticipation.
“There is some allure to it, isn’t there,” he says at length, softer now. “Do it all again, this time … better.”
Sharply—too sharply, for Daniil’s meek sentence—Artemy looks up. Recognition flashes in his eyes alongside something darker.
“It sure aligns with your goal,” he says, the harshness returning to him, as though summoned from earlier animosity. He straightens in his seat, newly rigid. Salvē, Ripper, Dankovsky thinks, disoriented. He straightens in turn.
“Endless life,” Burakh goes on, coldly, “achieved through repetition.”
Ah. Daniil shakes his head, feeling suddenly weary—with the topic, and with conversation in general. Nothing seems to go the way he wishes for it to go, these days, even pure hypotheticals; but neither does it seem willing to be put to rest.
“But it would not prolong life, dear colleague, would it,” he responds anyhow, resigned to let the verbal scuffle run its course. “The body would still age, even as its movements across time become less linear. And who knows how a crossing over would impact upon it. There may well be a cost: radiation, fatigue, perhaps dementia. No way to tell other than through experimentation. It’s a parallel dilemma, yes, to that of a Thanatician—but in some ways, this venue would only compound the possibilities of dying. Compound the selves which are susceptible to it.”
“But also prevent death,” Artemy maintains, unconvinced. “Cheat it.”
“Prevent all manner of things,” Daniil counters, cutting him a glance. His own impatience is rising. “Tell me, would you not prefer to live a different life, rather than go on loitering in Eva Yan’s attic with me like an outlaw? Buried alive, in all ways save for the literal? Hunted by the Powers-that-Be for an imagined crime?”
Something shuts off in Burakh’s face, rendering it into a mask of detachment. His eyes grow distant, impassive.
Fuck, Dankovsky thinks.
At length, Burakh says, in a newly bland tone, “None of this theorising has made me change my mind. It’s not worth the risk. The implications—”
“Ha!” Dankovsky exclaims. Impulsively, he raises a hand, pointing a finger at Artemy’s face as though to hush him.
Burakh frowns, almost cross-eyed, puzzled by the gesture.
Dankovsky smiles a winningly bitter smile. “Ay, there’s the rub,” he says. “The implications! You, dear Haruspex, have arrived at the philosopher’s old paradox: if trying to cheat death drove you to turn back in time to avoid it, then by doing so, would you not undo your own movement’s causality?” He pauses. “What happens then?”
Unthinkingly—on some long buried instinct—he raises his eyebrows at Burakh, still smiling, goading him to join him in the enthusiasm.
Come, let’s play. Let’s have an experiment.
It works the opposite: whatever manic glint the Haruspex finds in the Bachelor’s eyes seems to make him withdraw even further inwards. Something in him dims, visibly. Withers. Sinks.
It almost physically pains Daniil to see it, and identify himself as the cause of it. Fuck, indeed.
“I don’t know,” Burakh grunts, evasive.
Daniil sighs. Looks down.
Enough. You’ve had your fill. Predictably, he feels only worse for it.
“… And we will never know,” he says, crisply, setting the device aside in a somewhat stilted manner. As usually, what follows these sparks of life is only dull shame. “It’s mere … flight of fancy. A drunk, grieving man’s last imaginary hope … It doesn’t work.”
A strange, almost angry shadow, runs through the Haruspex’s face. “You could have led with that.”
Daniil’s eyebrows rise. “Would it have changed your assessment? Really?”
Artemy says nothing.
With another sigh, Daniil gives up entirely on trying to understand his reactions. He rewraps the box in gauze, instead, then slides to his knees to shove it safely under the bed.
He rises, then, and begins to make his customary circles around the room; puts on the kettle for hot water, digs out the tin holding the last of his tea. He unpins the brooch and loosens his ascot, setting both aside. He tries not to think past the soothing ritual of it: a simulacrum of rest, in a simulacrum of shelter.
He can feel Burakh’s eyes lingering on him as he goes, and forces himself to ignore them. Mollifying. Mitigating.
“… I should get going,” the Haruspex says, even so, just as Daniil’s fingers drift to the topmost button of his waistcoat.
Dankovsky clenches his jaw. That irrational hurt, again—raw and childish.
No respite. No pretences; not for him.
“Oh, yes?” he grits out, without looking. “Better places to be, have you?”
Silence, again, drawn out to the point of discomfort.
“You know I shouldn’t stay here this long,” Burakh eventually says, stiffly.
“Well, you already have. So the damage is, also, already done, is it not?” Dankovsky snaps, turning to him. Somewhere behind him, the kettle starts whistling, high-pitched. “It’s been done the moment I decided to go through with this masquerade in the first place and invited you here.”
Burakh says nothing.
Dankovsky’s jaw works. “You’re already here,” he says. “By your own logic, at any given moment, someone might burst in and raze us down where we stand. Must we really live in terror every second until then? Just on the off-chance it buys us more time? Forgive me, but I find myself past caring.”
More silence; thick, sinuous.
“I don’t,” Burakh then says, curtly.
What follows is somewhat bizarre; and disrupts Dankovsky’s predicted trajectory of how this well-worn, many times re-lived argument ought to go.
All at once, without warning, all of Haruspex’s usual hostile resolve gives abrupt way to something quite different; something inward-aimed and tense. Haunted. A new weight seems to sit on his shoulders, pulling him closer to the ground. With something like a ragged, defeated breath, he collapses his face in his hands.
It unbalances Daniil’s irritation.
“… What is it?” he says, uncertainly.
Burakh does not move. His voice comes out oddly small, muffler. “What is what.”
Again that image—that unfortunate connection his mind makes—with the man in the bathtub, curved into a crescent in his slow fading away.
No, Dankovsky thinks, fiercely. Not you, too. Not after all the lengths I’ve gone to, to keep you from it.
Unthinkingly, he takes a step forward, reaching out. “Come on, Artemy. Talk to me. I can see that—”
Burakh flinches from his hand as though burned through mere asymptotic proximity. He leaps to his feet, grabbing his smock and boots, and strides towards the door as he dresses; in a strange, buzzed-up opposition to Dankovsky’s defeated unravelling.
“You can see nothing,” he barks out. “You don’t know me.”
Well, that was short-lived, even as far as fantasies go.
At length, Dankovsky manages, in a monotone voice, “No. I don’t.”
You cannot know what refuses to be known.
There is a terse empty moment during which Burakh finishes dressing. Daniil watches his progress in almost clinical detachment—feeling so numb, all at once, that nothing about the room registers as fully corporeal. There may well be the length of Gorkhon river between them, for how feasible it is to bridge any distance.
In the end, Burakh draws another peculiarly shaky breath.
“I won’t impose on you further,” he says roughly. “And I won’t come back here again. You’ve risked your … good name enough. Thank you for believing me. I had never said that. So thank you. For … everything, really. But Boddho knows, this town can’t afford you dead, too. And I need to get back to work. The panacea …”
Daniil swallows, the remnants of charity leaving him, “... has been nothing but a pipe dream thus far.”
“I won’t give up.”
As opposed to you, goes unsaid.
Silence. Thorny, like barbed wire fencing off the zones of quarantine.
“You’re not being as rational as you seem to think,” Dankovsky tries, one last time, through clenched teeth—despite cringing inwardly as he reveals more of his cards than he cares to; more of his desperation. “Block thinks you dead. Wants you dead. They’ll gun you down in the street if it comes to it.”
Artemy’s eyes catch his, blank and resolute. “As they will you, once they realise you’ve played them for the fool.”
Dankovsky scoffs, disbelieving, “What is this, a contest?”
Artemy’s gaze remains impassive. “Isn’t it, Bachelor?”
Dankovsky pinches the bridge of his nose. “For God’s sake, Burakh,” he snaps, “I can’t let you go out there and—”
Something flashes in Artemy’s eyes, disrupting their cool. “Let me?” he repeats, and a note of danger surfaces in his voice. “You are not my keeper. I am neither your dependant nor your prisoner.”
There. The word falls between them slowly, staining everything—even the light—grey, like the dead ash outside.
“By all means, then,” Dankovsky says at length. He feels rigid with fury and shame. “Go. Don’t return, for all that I care. Find yourself some other fool to take you in. And good luck surviving past the end of the day.”
For a moment—scarcely a blink—Burakh seems to hesitate.
Then: “Same to you.”
And he leaves.
***
Orderly #6, G. R.,
Excerpt From Report 17, on the 3rd week of the 3rd Month of Outbreak in Town-on-Gorkhon.
23rd November 1934
[…] Following a short course of illness, at 1100 hours local time, Bachelor Daniil Dankovsky has succumbed to the Sand Pest, despite repeated courses of attempted treatment.
His body was examined by the remaining Orderlies #14 and #17. Protocol put in place for extended curfew and mandatory quarantine for all within town limits.
Currently the position of town medic remains vacant.
***
He cannot sleep.
Insomnia has followed him all the way here from Moscow, and kept him faithful company: a stalwart lover, suffocating him in her embrace almost nightly since he’s arrived in the Town-on-Gorkhon.
Lying in fitful darkness, Dankovsky thrashes about in his sheets, wishing for Burakh’s ragged breathing to listen for—wishing for any human sound—and chiding himself for it.
Wind howls around the Stillwater, rattling its circular window as though to try and dent it inwards. It’s pitch black outside: moonless, ashen. Horrible night to be out in. Nightmarish.
Prickly little grains of twyre and white whip bite and itch at his skin, leftover on the bedding: his only proof that someone else had been here, rather than only the usual ghosts.
He used to be allergic to the herbs, back in the beginning. Long exposure seemed to mellow their effect—but it itches in his chest, now, with every damn breath.
Maddening.
***
He had found Burakh in an emptied Plague House, after his banishment.
Dirty, hollow-eyed, and visibly sneaking rations stolen from god-knows-where—probably off the corpses of people who’d tried to mug him and got shanked in turn—to the raggedy, wizened children hanging around the abandoned train-car.
Caught in flagrante, he lifted his unshaven, exhausted face at Dankovsky in something like defeat.
“Will you report me, oynon?” he asked, plainly. “I’m not gonna fight you, if you will. I don’t have it in me anymore.”
I doubt that, Daniil remembers thinking. Even as he made such a show of dejection, there was something unyieldingly alive about Burakh, some stubbornly persisting virility which made him appear more solid and enduring than all manner of decay surrounding him.
Hard to imagine him dead. Harder still, to imagine him going willingly.
Admirable. Though perhaps, at this point, solely in Dankovsky’s eyes: others seemed to smell the same blood on Burakh, and take it for a warning.
“No,” the Bachelor said, after a pause. “I won’t.”
Burakh blinked at him. Squinted.
“Come to the Stillwater, after dark,” Dankovsky went on. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Burakh’s brows furrowed. “What you can do—about what?”
Dankovsky cut him another look. “What I can do to help you.”
Surprise stained Artemy’s bright eyes like a stray wisp of light. “You’d help me?”
“Yes.”
I’ve given up, Dankovsky thought, even as he spoke. Don’t you see? I think it’s too late for us. I think it’s been too late for a long time, now.
We’re holding on to a ship already sinking.
Artemy followed him anyway. Punctual, arriving with dusk, he showed at the Stillwater stubbornly alive and stubbornly unaware, as though determined to bear some last miracle, of proving Dankovsky wrong.
Point him in the direction of something neither dead nor dying.
***
Giving in, Dankovsky swings himself off the bed, before going to his knees and dragging out the box hidden beneath it.
Sitting back on his haunches, he lays it out on his lap. He pauses, for a moment, to light a cigarette—one of the last three, damn it all to hell. If there had ever been a reason to end it all—
He lights the cigarette, sticks it between his teeth and opens the device again. He studies them up close: I was right. This isn’t Peter’s handiwork, or Andrey’s—it must have been Farkhad. Another ghost.
Much like all other incomplete things of the town, the thing seems to be missing something. A cylinder of some sort? Filled with—what?
Another futile thought exercise. He does not have as much as a manual; let alone any working idea of what he is looking for.
Belatedly, he remembers Clara’s book. He gropes for it in his bag, and under the bed. It is not there.
Damn it, he thinks. I’ll have to hunt her down.
To what end? a doubtful voice asks, in his head.
What a question.
He tries to picture a different trajectory to the one his life has assumed, and suddenly cannot. He tries to feel something other than the slowly congealing resignation, and comes up with only more frustration.
Cold-hearted.
Perhaps this is it; as far as it gets for him. Only hollow silence: encroaching apathy, and no more.
If Thanatica didn’t kill me, he thinks, nothing else will. Can’t break an empty heart.
Idly, he thinks of Burakh in that foul, gloomy Lair of his; or worse, out in the steppe among all the ash-dark wind. Being dragged, likely, behind one of the tents in the Bridge Square, by masked soldiers, to be shot in the head in the dead of night, for violating his banishment.
I shouldn’t have let him go.
***
The space between that thought and the next is barely notable: I need to go get him.
It doesn’t make sense. Burakh has all but told him to fuck off, clearly harbouring no sentiments regarding Dankovsky’s help beyond whatever sense of obligation it induced in turn. It’s a dead end, Daniil acknowledges, a futile endeavour. I can only ever come out of it worse off.
Another thought: is that even possible?
Is it? He had not lied to Clara. What could he possibly even lose, now, that would deprive him more? His last two cigarettes, perhaps.
He is staring at the box in his lap, motionless and conflicted, when the door downstairs opens with a telltale click of a lock-pick.
Still on his knees, Daniil freezes.
Below him, the door shuts. A pause, then movement again. Heavy, dragging footsteps. Towards the stairs.
As silently as he can, he shoves the box under the bed again; leaps to the desk and picks up Rubin’s bone-saw. His heart is thrashing in his chest like a wild animal might, his breath coming raspy and uncomfortable again. Too loud.
For someone with nothing much left to live for, I’m lousy at agreeing to die, he thinks.
Then he waits.
***
It unfolds like one of those old, choppy moving pictures from the dawn of the century that he’d always enjoyed seeing back the theatres in Moscow: slow, jerky, and mostly silent. As though captured on film, somebody ascends the stairs and draws to a halt in the door.
Pushes it open.
A shape, shadow between shadows. Damn near unrecognisable in darkness.
Dankovsky lowers his saw again, almost nauseous from stress.
“You—” he says, his own voice sounding thick to his own ears. “Christ alive, you gave me a fright.”
Burakh’s voice, drifting out from the void: “Oynon.”
Daniil laughs, the sound somewhat hysterical. He wants him out of the lowlight and back in the room, tangible and accounted for.
“Oh, cut it out. We are past these formalities now—aren’t we? For what it’s worth, I am sorry. You know me, I’m a wretch. I shouldn’t have said—I shouldn’t have brought the damn thing back from Andrey’s. Oh, come in already, for God’s sake.”
Dankovsky staggers up to the desk himself, setting down the bone-saw and fumbling to light the lamp. It flickers, peculiarly, even as a dun glow swathes the room.
His hands are shaking.
Contrary to the end, Burakh still lingers in the ante-room: half-buried in shadows, but unmistakeable through the familiarity of his mere contours brought into light.
“… What brought you back?” Dankovsky asks, unable to stop himself. “You seemed adamant this was the last I’d ever see of you—don’t take it the wrong way; I am glad you came back. I was about to go and look for you myself—”
“You can’t do that.”
Dankovsky stills.
There is something strange in Artemy’s voice. Urgent, but what exactly the urgency points towards is hard to pinpoint.
“And why-ever not?” Dankovsky questions, all the same. For some reason, he finds himself suddenly wary of looking up, even having asked for the Haruspex to show himself. “I am not your keeper, you said—well, quid pro quo: neither are you mine. And anyway, I won’t. You’re here now, I only wanted to—for God’s sake, Burakh, I should never have sent you—”
Artemy crosses the threshold, stepping into the room, and the words die on Daniil’s tongue.
The first thought comes almost beyond voluntary choice: His face is wrong.
Not for the grief-weighed, waxen tinge that the Plague has injected in all their faces, but entirely: a dead man’s face, a living skull. The Haruspex’s skin is grimy with dirt, flaking ash like charred skin. A deep, gnarled scar runs through one side of his face—eyebrow-to-chin, almost symmetrically splitting the face in two—slashing across the left eye. Its iris is paler than its twin, cataract-cloudy where the other seems fevered and blood-red.
His smock is subsumed with ash, to the point losing its original colour. The fingers of his hands are wrapped in something like dirty gauze, the tips charred.
“What the fuck happened to you?” Dankovsky manages, at last. There is a faint ringing in his ears.
What could have happened, in such a short time? What manner of horror—
Futile, his memory strains to reconcile its last retained image of Artemy Burakh, as he had left Daniil’s bed hours prior—grieved and sullen but largely hale and whole—with the revenant in front of him.
The revenant stares at Dankovsky in silence.
He finds himself walking before he can override the impulse. His shaky, wandering hands precede the brain’s input: reaching, they touch Artemy’s chest, face, trying to feel for any obvious damage. All of the textures they stumble into are half-papery, half-mucous in touch; but he recognises it as a build up of the coat of grime the Polyhedron had left in the air.
He is solid, at least. Not a phantom.
A sudden fright grips Dankovsky—a sinking, panicked feeling, not unlike the one that opening the letter condemning Thanatica had evoked, what now feels like lifetimes ago.
“I told you not to leave,” he manages, choked. “I told you to stay here—damn it, what have they done to you?”
“… Daniil.”
He stills, again. His hands halt their compulsive motion. There is something awful in the address; the soft-spoken, quiet name; never used.
Look at me, it seems to ask of him, and Daniil obeys.
The scar across Artemy’s face is old. That’s the first thought, now that he is looking for explanation rather than taking in the shock. It is old, and hardened with time. The blood on his temple, too, is long-dry, crusted deep into ashen hair. The corners of his mouth are downturned, bracketed with lines.
“Do you see?” the Haruspex asks, sounding, strangely, like Clara.
He is seeing—but he cannot accept what he is seeing. Dumbly, he shakes his head. “... No.”
The visitor’s hand comes up, then, intercepting his own. Despite the ragged bindings on his hands, his grip is steady, if cold.
“You asked me, once—on this very day—where I’d return to,” he slowly says.
And the bullet sinks in: Dankovsky can no longer deny the evidence of his eyes.
“… You’re from elsewhere.”
The revenant does not speak again, only watches him.
Dankovsky feels his lips move again, almost beyond his conscious input. “It worked. You made it ... work, somehow. Stamatin’s miracle.”
Artemy’s good eye—a pale blue-green, bloodshot and lined with dark shadows like the imprint of a bruise—is disconcertingly familiar. He says nothing, only looks; lingering and resigned.
“Come in,” Dankovsky repeats, in a hoarse voice, something inside him giving way. “Come in.”
And pulls him—this Other-one, Stranger—inside, before shutting the door behind him.
***
The Stranger keeps watching him.
Eventually, mid-boiling more unnecessary water for more bland, unnecessary tea, Dankovsky cannot stand it anymore. His hands are shaking so much, anyhow, that he almost scalds himself thrice.
“What is it?” he bites out. “Why are you looking at me like this?”
A pause—long and hollow.
“Forgive me, oynon.” For a while, it seems that is all the newcomer is willing to say. Then he adds, “It’s been a while.”
“... I see.”
Does he see? He cannot possibly confront the implication behind the misery and grief etched into this Artemy’s face, when aimed at him.
“I see,” Dankovsky reiterates even so, though he doesn’t. None of it makes sense, unless—
“They’ll gun you down in the street, I said to you,” he says aloud, despite himself, with a laugh that veers on hysterical, “and then you said—”
“I know what I said.”
“I think I am losing my mind,” Dankovsky offers in response, unable to come up with anything else. He laughs. Braces his trembling hands on his thighs, and then braces himself on the desk, looking down.
The floor. The steady, solid floor.
Abruptly, without warning, Artemy stands.
“What, are you leaving again?” Daniil manages to ask, disoriented, before he is being pulled up and embraced, from behind, the force of it cutting him off.
It’s a horrible, bruising grip. The man reeks of ash and that tar-like substance his clothes seem laden with. But what is worse, is that underneath the violence, Artemy’s arms seem to be shaking with strain.
He bows his head, resting it on the topmost knob of Dankovsky’s spine.
Dankovsky feels strangled out of breath: rigid as he is, inhaling the foreign miasma clinging to the Stranger. But some human instinct prevails—instead of resisting, he gropes backwards, hands feeling blindly for the Haruspex’s arms, the back of his head—half-gentling, half-making sure—finding them as expected. An odd, low sound follows; then a spasmodic movement, which jointly tell Dankovsky that Burakh is crying.
Turning in his grasp at last, and untangling them from one another, Dankovsky takes enough incentive to grasp the other by the wrists.
Head still bowed, he is looking down, breathing audibly through his nose.
“Come, now,” Dankovsky says, overcome. Not knowing what else to do, he pulls, leading Artemy backwards to the bed—the one he’d left hours—months—years ago?—in order to sit him down on the edge of it.
“… I’m dead, then,” he says meanwhile, awkwardly. He’d always been shit at consoling people. He reaches and wipes the fresh tears running down the cheek under Artemy’s good eye, smearing the strange sooty dust on his face. Skin, underneath. “That’s odd to think. Oh, don’t, don’t cry, Burakh, I am not worth your tears. I’ve been of half a mind to blow my brains out since showing up here, you know that. Odd as it may be, it’s not a shock to hear that I have.”
Meticulously, as he would prep for an examination, he starts peeling off the cracked layers: the clasps of the Haruspex's smock, the wool and soot-stiffened fabric. Underneath, he finds Artemy hollow and bruised; emaciated. Not nearly as dirty and ashen as expected—it is as though the damage only extends as far as the parts of him exposed to the elements. The man’s heart beats a steady rhythm in his concave ribcage.
His voice comes out as little more than a croak: “It wasn’t like that. You didn’t.”
And he says nothing more.
After watching him for a moment longer—until he can be sure no elaboration is forthcoming—Dankovsky gets up to fetch his shaving basin, cloth and meagre remnants of soap. He fills the basin with boiled water from the kettle, dilutes it with some cold, and goes back to the bed. Sitting himself astride on the chair, gently but methodically, he starts wiping the grime off Artemy’s face, hoping to better assess the damage underneath.
“… If not by my own hand, then how?”
Artemy’s eyes fall shut.
“I killed you.”
Despite his best efforts, Daniil stills; the hand wielding the rag faltering mid-air.
At length, somewhat strenuously, he manages: “Well, I trust you had good reasons.”
Artemy is immobile, staring down and hunched.
Daniil clears his throat. “And—well. You seem at least somewhat regretful.”
He thinks of the Artemy departed now to his Lair, and the animosity stirred between them. He pictures it souring further, until it grows rotten and unsalvageable. That not-yet-hopeless thing inside him turns gnawing in turn; resigned.
His visitor—this Stranger from another time; his self-proclaimed killer—still hasn’t moved. He sits with his head bowed and eyes shut, instead, as though expecting retribution.
Haltingly, Daniil resumes the movement of his cloth, drawing it across the back of Artemy’s neck like the caress of the gallows.
“Ego te absolvo, Haruspex,” he mutters. “Don’t torment yourself over it so.”
In the scant stretch of Artemy’s face that is visible, he can see his eyes press shut. “It’s wasn’t just you. It’s all of them. None of it was meant to happen.”
“All of them?” Daniil echoes, sceptically. “What did you do, burn down the town? You know I’ve been of half a mind to—”
He trails off when faced with the force of Artemy’s new tension; almost locking up his limbs.
“Don’t.”
“… You might be late,” Dankovsky ends up saying, instead. “If your aim here is to prevent something. Most are already gone.”
For a moment, they are both silent.
“Murky,” Artemy finally croaks.
Daniil’s brow furrows. “What?”
Artemy shuts his eyes again. “Right now. Here. Murky. She’s already sick. That’s why he—he—”
That other him.
“Oh.” And suddenly the whole wretched evening makes sense to Dankovsky. “Oh, Artemy—”
The stranger shakes his head. He seems even more weary, now, but less volatile. Some of his tension relents, as though he has resigned himself to it. “Don’t, oynon.”
Strange echo; again, a rebuttal. This time, at least, he did not flinch. Perhaps he’s no strength for it. Dankovsky watches him for a moment, silent.
“I take it our attempt at collaboration didn’t take,” he says, after a while, squeezing out the rag. He watches the dirty water pour out of it, before raising it again to Burakh’s face. “The mixed approach—”
“No. We never managed to …” the other trails off. “It went on. Kept spreading. It’s still spreading, over there. There’s no way to stop it, now. We’d need a vaccine, like you said, and I can’t do it. Not with you gone. I’m sorry.”
He hangs his head again, and weeps.
***
[TRANSCRIPT OF THE OFFICIAL TESTIMONY OF [REDACTED], HENCEFORTH “WITNESS X” AS RECORDED ON AN ELECTROMECHANICAL RECORDER ON 19 NOV 1935.]
WITNESS X: [UNINTELLIGIBLE] … dug the mass graves, trying to prevent further spread. But the soil and water were contaminated.
INTERVIEWER: What kept you from infection?
WITNESS X: I never knew, back then. I thought maybe if you had it once, the earlier strain, and recovered … Later, I isolated … an antibody. I was immune to the second strain, and I managed to replicate my own results in live tissue.
INTERVIEWER: And this did not help with the cure?
WITNESS X: [INTERFERENCE] … too late by then.
***
By the time Artemy calms, Dankovsky has wiped most of the grime off his face, brewed more foul tea, let it go tepid, and still managed to force some down the Haruspex’s throat.
His thoughts are uneasy, buzzing.
“I don’t get it. Why kill me?” he asks, abruptly. He should not be asking. He can’t not ask. “We’ve had our differences but … I thought we were getting somewhere, that we saw eye to eye on the research, at least.” He pauses. “I’m sorry, it’s only that I keep thinking … what sacrilegious idea did I have? Experiments on the dying? The healthy? Did I burn the Town? I had to have done something truly egregious to drive you to—”
Artemy cuts in, “It wasn’t like that.”
Again that phrase.
Daniil sighs. “Alright, I won’t pry.”
Now that his face is clean, ash out of his hair, The Stranger-Burakh looks younger again. More like the version of him that has left hours prior; save for the malnutrition and the damage dealt to his face. Dankovsky had thought that maybe it had been years, for him, but now it looks more like only months. His chest tightens.
I’m sympathising with my murderer, he thinks. A new low, perhaps. Still, he can’t help it. He’d never had the right instincts, evidently, around Artemy Burakh. Yargachin, they all called him, Ripper. And still Daniil was never put off by the blood-scent following him where he went.
Not since the very beginning.
“… Here, eat something,” he says, trying to focus again. “You look about ready to keel over yourself.”
Burakh shakes his head. “I’m fine. You need this more.”
“I,” Dankovsky says, enunciating pointedly, “according to you, am a dead man walking. Little good will a balanced diet do me, where I’m going.”
There is an odd pause.
“… Dead man walking,” Artemy says, at last. “You think I’m not?”
Unthinkingly, Dankovsky parrots: “What is this, a contest?”
Something almost like a smile twitches in the corner of Artemy’s mouth. Then it dies, as abruptly as any emotion he displays.
“I need to ask you something,” he says instead, in the same strange voice he’d greeted Dankovsky with. “I need you to promise me something.”
Daniil would laugh, if not for the sting of sudden terror. “Oh, anything, Fair Executioner. As long as I can manage before the bell tolls.”
Burakh gives no retort.
Instead, stiffly, he reaches into one of the leather pouches secured to his dirty, half-undone smock, and digs out a small bundle wrapped in filthy brown paper.
He thrusts the thing into Daniil’s unsuspecting hands.
Dankovsky hesitates only for a moment before moving to unwrap the fraying wire. Beneath the folds of decrepit paper, there nests a dark-glass bottle, adorned with a faded label. Its contents are thick and cloudy; the liquid’s texture mucous and riddled with flecks of something almost fleshy.
“… What is this?” Daniil asks, a little revolted, and uncomprehending.
“Take it,” Artemy says. “As soon as you start coughing. Drink the whole thing.”
Daniil looks up at him, still failing to understand. “What is this?” he asks again.
Artemy stares back. “You know what it is.”
After it sinks in, it’s a while before Dankovsky composes himself enough to speak.
“… So it was the Sand Pest that did me in,” he says, “not you.”
Artemy says nothing.
Daniil shakes his head, jaw twitching. “I don’t understand you. Why the—? I got the damn plague, and yet you come to me like to a sinner to confession. What was it, then, a mercy killing?” When Artemy keeps stubbornly silent, he goes on: “Or did you mean I died of the Pest and you failed to revive me? Because that’s—”
He cuts himself off. Burakh continues to watch him in silence, maddeningly impassive. Dankovsky realises his own hand wielding the bottle is shaking.
“I’m going to wager a guess that you’re not here to kill me faster, are you?” he grits out. “That this is meant to cure me.”
“Yes,” Artemy says, curtly.
Daniil shuts his eyes. “You went back for—” he grits out. “All this, for—” He opens his eyes again. “No.”
Instantly, Artemy moves, leaning rapidly closer. “You’ll drink it.” Spoken like a threat.
“No, damn you, no—”
“Daniil.”
His name again, deployed like a gunshot. Close-range.
Damn you, Artemy Burakh.
“We talked about this,” Dankovsky hisses, dismayed at his own wavering voice. “I told you, it’s not to be done. A paradox, your own causality … undone.” He cuts off, then gives a bitter laugh. “You’ll cease existing. You, as you are now, will disappear. Disintegrate. Die.”
After a length of time, Artemy speaks, in an eerily steady voice, “I’m hoping for it.”
Daniil’s ears are ringing. He is shaking his head, mechanically, in abject revulsion. “You cannot be serious.”
“I am,” Artemy says. “I hope … that whole future. The way it all happened. I hope it’s already gone. I hope it never happens again. I hope it never has to.”
Ringing silence follows his words.
Until:
“This isn’t you,” Dankovsky whispers. “You—he would not say that, goddamn it. He would not want that.”
Burakh—whatever is left of him—is silent.
***
Dankovsky cannot stand facing him anymore, so he rises from his chair and throws himself back towards the desk.
He needs—
Facts. Timeline to establish.
“When does it happen?”
Artemy remains in his spot at the edge of the bed. “It’s happening right now.”
Dankovsky swallows. A shiver runs through him. “You mean I’m already—”
Burakh sighs.
“I don’t know,” he admits, voice strangely soft. “I tried to figure out when it happened to you. I always get stuck on this day. You get mugged—got mugged, I don’t know—on your way to the Lair, to come get me. I thought, perhaps then … but truth is, it might be in you already. You were at the ward. Your samples were contaminated. And I was too distracted with trying to save Murky to—”
Dankovsky’s hand drifts up idly to his own chest, pressing there. His lungs and throat seem to suddenly recall their earlier trouble, straining against the itch trapped within. Allergies, he’d dismissed. Only allergies.
“What about her?” he asks, on impulse.
“I already gave it to her. Before coming here.”
“I suppose you knew convincing her would be easier.”
“Yes.”
Daniil exhales, shakily.
From the bed, Artemy makes a strange abortive motion, as though to try and reach out before being stopped by some invisible hand. Mere hours ago, Dankovsky would have chased, intercepted it and taken it; greedy for his chance. As it is, he feels unsettled enough in his own skin; can’t stand the thought of being reacted to at all.
“Why now? Why not … earlier.”
Artemy sighs. “This thing … machine. I had to know about it. Andrey had to have given it to you. This possibility had to exist already. Shudkher, if I could go further back—I would.”
His eyes drift back to the ostensibly inoffensive item on his nightstand.
Daniil swallows. “How did you make it? The ... cure.”
Artemy bows his head, as though prepared for the question. “Combination of live and post-mortem tissue. We isolated a mutated pathogen—and what little living blood I had. There wasn’t much left. It was … months and months into the run of it.” He pauses. “Too little, too late.”
“We, plural?”
“Clara and I.”
“Clara,” Dankovsky repeats, disbelieving.
“Nobody else left,” Artemy says, evenly. “And she believed my story, at any rate, when I told her about this—” here, he nods towards the box they both know lies half-hidden under the bed. “That there’s still might be a way. If all else fails.”
“Of course she believed you,” Dankovsky hisses. “She was the one trying to convert me to her bloody cause earlier today! Everything is connected … you’re trying to tell me she hasn’t convinced you, but the other way round?”
For a moment, Artemy fixes him with that faraway gaze—one eye white, as though turned into the past that was future again—as though re-evaluating something about him.
“She didn’t know about it until I told her,” he says at last. “As you did not know until she told you.”
“She—oh.”
A sequence aligns in his head, at last; events hitherto defying explanation.
I had a sister once. I recall another girl like me, when I was little myself.
“Two of her,” he breathes out. “All this time … but this cuts deep. Far back. How much interference—”
“She wanted to be the one to go,” Burakh says, as though it explained or excused anything. “Scouting, she calls it. She’s better at it, anyhow. Quicker. It’s not as … straightforward as it might seem. We’ve made errors. We tried other times. There are points of entry, points which can be changed. Consequences of misjudging them can be dire.”
The damaged side of his face convulses, as though pained by memory.
Dankovsky stares at him. “If what you’re saying is true, then she has convoluted her own path beyond undoing. Made her own presence in her own past … a fact. A fixed point. That’s—”
“What?” Artemy asks, raising an eyebrow. “Impossible?”
“… a paradox,” Dankovsky says. “Which would make everything that happens inevitable—a self-winding loop. It makes interference necessary for the logic to hold.” He pauses. “It also renders it futile: it’s almost certain, now, that I will die regardless of what you do, here, in order to set the both of you in motion.”
A moment of silence comes.
“Well,” Burakh then says. “Might as well do it, then.”
***
Instead of the phial—the panacea, miracle-cure, his mind traitorously supplies, curious despite itself—Daniil yanks a bottle of twyrine out of his desk’s bottom drawer. He’s poached it off Andrey in the first days after Peter’s death, ostensibly to stop him from drowning himself in his sorrows; truthfully, because he must have sensed a day would come when he’d need a sea to drown in himself.
Artemy watches him fill a glass, down it, fill it once anew. Fill one more. Take it between two fingers, carry across the room, thrust it at him.
The light flickers again. I’m running out of kerosene, Dankovsky thinks. Like I’m running out everything else.
Like this world is running out of itself.
Half of Artemy’s face is hidden in darkness, concealing the future’s damage. Glimpsed like this, he could still only be the version of himself in present tense, as he had been hours prior.
Dankovsky lingers in front of him.
Slightly hunched as he is—almost perpetually, horrible posture—the Haruspex’s face is level with his sternum. His wary eyes track the progression of Dankovsky’s hand through the air, as he sets his glass down on the nightstand.
“What can I do for you?” Daniil asks.
Artemy’s eyes remain fixed on the glass he’s let go of.
“Drink the cure,” he says, hoarsely. “Find him. Me. Don’t listen to his bullshit. Convince him to keep going. At least try.”
Pause.
Dankovsky licks his lips, twyrine-sticky now.
“I meant you.” A slight twitch, almost imperceptible—and Burakh turns his head towards him, just so: a flash of pale iris caught in the lamplight. “Can I do something for you?”
All he gets in response is silence.
At length—after it’s clear that Dankovsky will not budge—Burakh shakes his head, almost imperceptibly.
Too little, too late.
Dankovsky steps forward, where the space is shrinking between them. “Damn you,” he says, quietly, and with sudden feeling. “Let me do something.”
Artemy is staring at the floor as though to try and immolate it. “Drink the damn cure,” he says.
But Dankovsky’s patience runs dry; he takes him roughly by the jaw, forcing their eyes to meet. “Tell me.”
The Haruspex’s injured eyes are hunted; and hungry. Still, he says nothing, though his breathing comes out strained through his nose. Tension runs through his whole body, tangible even in the set of his jaw in Dankovsky’s grip.
“What do you want?”
He tries to turn his head again and deflect, but Dankovsky holds on to him. The movement comes out broken: instead of dodging, Artemy sinks in on himself, forehead collapsed into the Bachelor’s sternum. For a moment they’re frozen. Trapped.
Then, slowly, Daniil’s hand moves: drags past the other’s jaw and goes to his hair, fisting there. The other hand joins in, tracing the shape of Artemy’s skull, cradling it closer.
Artemy shivers, palpably. His breathing is loud and strained.
Gently, Dankovsky pushes on: leans Artemy all the way against the wall. Then pushes again, down: laying him out on the bed as for inspection. Moving on from his hair, he strokes his face, then his arms, and flank; studies his mis-matched eyes. One hand fixing itself at the nape of his neck, he lets the other one roam: lower, to the joint of his legs.
Artemy stiffens, turning his face away. “No. Not like this. You don’t have to—”
“I don’t mind,” Daniil says, simply. “I think you need it. Human touch, a willing hand—”
“Don’t fucking pity me.”
“It’s not pity, you foolish man,” Dankovsky says quietly. He can no longer restrain his own emotion; he strokes Artemy’s uninjured cheek, as he had imagined doing—in another world.
Artemy’s eyes seem to chase his own, something desperate in them now. He says, “We never—”
“No,” Dankovsky agrees. “We never.”
Artemy’s breath still comes out shallow, and his face is flushed, the bloom of blood vessels almost startling against the gaunt pallor of him. The hunger in his eyes is almost unbearable.
“You’re maddening,” Dankovsky says, still very quietly, still stroking his face. “Why would you shake me off? What did you think this was, when I offered you my bed, all those months—and you hardly wanted—”
“I did.” Moisture wets Dankovsky’s thumb as it traces his cheekbone. “I wanted. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Ah, Artemy, don’t.”
***
It’s almost dawning; he can tell, with certainty, with an insomniac’s precision, by the minute difference in the brightening monochrome the room is sunk in.
He turns his face back into the pillow, away from the window again, pressing himself back into the other body, against its heartbeat. “I could go with you.”
Silence. Perhaps Artemy is sleeping; perhaps his eyes are closed. Perhaps he is already away, somehow, fading somewhere unreachable. Dankovsky can’t bring himself to turn and look.
“… Go where?”
He huffs out a laugh, half-stifled in the pillow. “I don’t know. You tell me. What is there?”
“Nothing.”
“What happens, then?” Daniil asks. “If you go into—nothing?”
He might be imagining it, but he thinks Artemy noses into his hair, then, inhaling deeply. His breath warm on the nape of his neck.
“Perhaps we’d both disappear.”
***
Orderly #17, V.S.,
Excerpt From Report 13, on the 3rd week of the 2nd Month of Outbreak in Town-on-Gorkhon.
18th November 1934
that as of today’s date, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Bachelor Daniil Dankovsky, Gorkhon’s operating medic, has declared [UNINTELLIGIBLE] accused of murder and banished in lieu of trial, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] .
Cause of death: [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
No follow-up investigation is in
***
He wakes up alone, thoughts cloudy and skin damp with sweat. His head is heavy, warm, and there is a pounding inside his skull, insistent like a pulse. Something constricts his chest like an iron hand grasped about the windpipe; a weakness crawling up his spine and nesting in the neck and the sinuses. Something is scratching down his throat.
A fever dream, Dankovsky thinks. He shivers, uncontrollably, then turns in the bed, in order to face the room.
Dust in the air, caught mid-flight by the rare, greyish sunlight.
On his nightstand, a small, dark-glass bottle.
He coughs.
Slowly, Dankovsky sits up.
His arms are shaking, either from weakness of body or mind. Something is scratching at his eyes, something horrible, sitting in his chest that is neither just infection, nor simply grief. With shaking hands, he reaches for the the bottle, almost dropping it, almost spilling the ruddy contents all over himself.
Carefully, very carefully, he drinks one third. Then he screws it back shut.
Begone, shabnak, he thinks. I won’t risk his bid being futile.
I won’t let it be wasted on me, either.
A scattering of twyre-particles dusts his pillow.
***
He makes it downstairs in a fugue.
Some of the symptoms seem to abate: he feels less dizzy and weak, and the pressure on his head relents. It may be merely placebo, or perhaps the panacea really is that strong. Sure tasted foul. Perhaps he can live off this little, a sip. He doubts it. No time to dwell on it, anyhow.
As he steps outside, he nearly walks into Clara.
The sight of her pale face fills him with almost uncontrollable rage. He is talking before he can stop himself, crowding into her space.
“What are you doing here?” She doesn’t as much as flinch as he goes on, harshly, almost spitting, “If he’s gone—how are you still here—”
“I’m just a probe. A scout.”
He’s breathing harshly. Perhaps the concoction hasn’t been enough after all. “What?”
“He hasn’t gone, yet, where I’m from,” Clara says. Her eyes are wide and hungry in her face: he knows the look. A researcher’s gaze, appraising her experiment. “But I’m glad to hear he’s made it this far. I know the day now.”
He tries to make sense of it, and finds that he cannot stand it. He cannot stand thinking it. Cannot stand looking at her. “Get out of my way.”
He tries to walk past her, but she swivels around, fingers in torn gloves catching at his sleeve.
“You think I don’t understand you?” she asks. “You think I don’t know what it’s like?”
Dankovsky says nothing, trying to keep himself from dry-heaving and wasting his precious dose of panacea.
“Fool,” she says again, with a horrible smile. “He’s still here. He is here.” She swallows. “My memories are a circle. I’ll never have a sister again.”
Dankovsky wrenches his sleeve out of her hand.
***
By the time he reaches the Lair, he’s fully out of breath.
He’s covered the last mile in a run. His lungs are paying the price, now: either that, or the Pest is sinking its claws in him. He feels alive enough, for now: heart beating wildly inside the ribcage, cheeks stinging in the frigid air. He yanks the door open, still panting, and lowers himself into the Lair like a grave.
The light here is murky and dim. Stale. Dead. Dankovsky walks fast, in synchronicity with his own strained breathing.
Finally, the room: a sorry, half-obscured mess. Ingredients, raw and dried, lying in piles around the alembic. That grotesque goddamned tumbler-toy, turned strategically away. A creepy, raggedy doll on the floor.
Something simmering on low heat by the light of a small kerosene lamp. Deposited on a barrel, a familiar heap of buckles and green cloth.
In the ante-room, a thin cloth screen. Without thinking, Dankovsky shoves it aside.
… And he’s there, breathing. Curled in on himself. Asleep.
A Mirror image of the Stillwater.
Dankovsky’s hand tightens on the screen, as though to hold him up.
***
He sits heavily on the edge of the cot.
Artemy twitches awake almost instantly. Eyes bleary, a little frown etched instantly between his brows. There is no scar on his face: no lasting damage. Only exhaustion, and—
“Daniil,” he mumbles, clearly not fully awake. “Did I—”
Dankovsky is peeling off his gloves and stroking Artemy’s jutting cheekbone with the back of his knuckles before the impulse to act even registers to him.“… Ad perpetranda miracula rei unius,” he breathes out.
“… What?”
Confusion clears like fading fog, giving way to that line of worry half-permanently resident between Artemy’s eyes.
He sits up rapidly, forcefully, dislodging Dankovsky’s over-tender hand.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he demands.
Daniil does not so much as flinch at the volume. He raises a hand again, in a mediating gesture. “Calm yourself. And good morning.”
“Dankovsky,” Artemy snaps, looking tense and wary. “This is a bad idea. I told you this was a bad idea. Has anybody seen you going in here?”
Dankovsky sighs. He pulls the gloves back on. “And I told you, I don’t give a damn.”
“What?”
Tension still knits Artemy’s brows together. Hostility seems to be glaring out of every visible line of him, with something wounded and bite-ready underneath it. Daniil sighs again. Something like peace is coming over him, in turn, in accord with Clara’s premonition.
He is here.
“… Are you just going to sit here in silence like a bad fucking omen?” Artemy grits out. Something flashes in his face, then. “Is this it, then? Time’s up?”
Daniil shakes his head. “What are you on about?”
“They’re going to kill me,” Artemy snaps back, “aren’t they? They found you out. That’s why you’re here acting like …” He grits his jaw. “I can take it, erdem. Spare me the mind games: are you here to warn me? Will they shoot me down when I step out of the Warehouse, or are you to lead me to them?”
For a moment, all Dankovsky can do is stare at him in aghast silence. Well; this served to rouse him from his half-serene stupor of a miracle’s aftermath.
He leans abruptly into Burakh’s space, almost pressing his own forehead to his. He can feel Artemy’s responding frown, his enduring tension, even without seeing.
“Nobody is going to kill you, you insufferable man,” Dankovsky says quietly. “I know my word means very little to you, but why the bloody hell would I shelter you all these weeks only to sell you out now? For god’s sake, Artemy Isidorovich, who do you take me for?”
He leans away. The hypothetical thing in his chest itches; he’s scared he will cough.
Artemy’s eyes remain wary, but something almost like guilt mutes their mutinous expression. “If not—then what the hell drove you to—”
Dankovsky sighs, before diving down to reach into his carpet bag. Somewhat roughly, he yanks out the bottle and unwraps it from the rags.
Artemy regards it warily. “What is this?”
Dankovsky holds it out to him. Clipped, he says: “It’s a cure.”
There is a moment of almost jarringly complete silence.
At length, somewhat haltingly, Artemy takes the bottle. He tilts it in his slender fingers. He has large hands, Dankovsky thinks, but strangely delicate—built from fine bone, with well-curved knuckles. Surgeon’s hands. A prime specimen. Daniil has always liked those hands; well before having them on him.
Artemy is not following. “… You made this? Today?”
“No.”
“Then—”
“Just look at it, will you.”
Artemy’s brows furrow. He studies the label.
Dankovsky can see the moment when it registers. You can say many things about Artemy Burakh, he thinks. Brash, impulsive, more than a little violent. Coarse. Stubborn as a mule. But he is far, far from stupid; and he had never claimed the part of doubting Thomas between the two of them.
A new tension winds itself into the line of the Haruspex’s shoulder’s alongside recognition.
“… No.”
Dankovsky hisses in a breath through his teeth. “I’m afraid—yes.”
Burakh shakes his head. “… I don’t believe it.”
Daniil almost laughs. “You don’t believe it?”
The look of Artemy’s eyes, as they find his, is nothing short of incredulous. “You’re telling me you do. Where the fuck did you even find this?”
“I did not find it. And I did not need to believe anything,” Dankovsky retorts. “Goddamn it, you delivered it into my hands yourself.”
Artemy’s mouth shuts.
“Me,” he states, after a length of time. A half-question.
Perhaps this ought not have been revealed. Daniil’s eyes fall closed.
He draws a breath.
“The girl—Murky,” he begins at length. “She’s sick. Isn’t she.”
A sudden look of wild hurt seizes Artemy’s face. “How do you—”
“Give it to her,” Daniil interrupts him. “Not all of it. Some. She is small, already had some dose, it will …. suffice.” Might suffice, more like. “But save the rest.” He pauses. “Replicate it.”
And maybe I’ll have a go at another round.
For a long, drawn out moment, Burakh only stares at him.
Then, “What the hell has he said to you?”
Almost offensively impressive, how quickly he seems to catch on. Dankovsky casts him a slanted look. “So you do believe me now.”
“I struggle to think of anyone less likely to believe this than you, oynon,” Burakh says. Then, “This is my handwriting.”
“So it is,” Daniil says tersely. He has dodged the question of what the Other-Artemy had asked of him, but judging by this Artemy’s expression, his evasion has not gone unnoticed.
The Haruspex looks down at the bottle in his hand. He weighs it in his hand, tosses it in the air. Catches it.
Dankovsky hisses another breath. “Would you be careful with—”
“This has been opened.”
Dankovsky almost smiles; pinched and frustrated as it is. Of course he’d notice, goddamn him. Goddamn you for leaving me to navigate this alone, he thinks, addressing whatever echo of that departed one he still has ringing in his head, somewhere mid the gnawing hollow lingering in his wake. Me and my doomed, plague-ridden hands.
“Had to check it’s not poison, didn’t I?” is what he says aloud. “You know me; I am a sceptic. De omnibus dubitandum, even should your colleague breach the laws of time in front of your very eyes.”
When he opens his eyes, Artemy is studying him, intently. The light in the Lair is dim, pooling wanly from the dirty, old kerosene lamp. It flickers, now, under the Haruspex’s gaze, as it had flickered at the Stillwater.
Mirrors.
“You’re a bad liar,” Artemy says, in the end.
The corner of Dankovsky’s mouth twitches, despite him. “Yes, I know.” He forces himself to say nothing more.
Burakh reaches, then—
(and it’s odd, to see him move now, so differently from yesterday’s echo, so incongruously. It is as though it is him who has regressed in time: back into a version of himself less burdened; less halted; less arrested in misery. For a moment, Daniil feels almost blinded by the idea of reaching further, past even the present hurt: to a young man, a student, before everything that’s happened to him and bent his knee—and a childish wish to restore him to such state; restore himself. To a place before the fire, before any of it was set in motion at all)
—and his hand locks around Daniil’s wrist, taking his pulse. Another pushes into his sternum. Dankovsky swallows. Tries to breathe evenly. So, so evenly.
The thing inside him twitches, scraping past the thorax, past the alveoli.
He keeps quiet, and in that new silence, in that stale air suffused with blood and twyre, he can hear his own breathing, correlated in time with Artemy’s; near-in-sync.
Quietly, Artemy says, “It was for you. You were meant to drink the whole thing.”
His hand falls away from Daniil’s chest.
Dankovsky inhales, tugging his wrist free of the other one—though it lacks either bite or conviction. “You don’t know that,” he stubbornly says. “You were not there.”
“I know enough to tell you this much.” Artemy’s brow is furrowed. “Drink it, for Boddho’s sake. And live.”
“I have,” Daniil says. “It’s enough.”
Artemy shakes his head, incredulous. “Enough?”
And this time Dankovsky cannot help it: his face breaks out into a smile. Such are the pleasures of taking a gamble, he thinks. High-stakes. Such was the early taste of Thanatica, rising. Alea iacta est.
“Enough to buy you time,” he says. Reaching up one more time, he strokes one knuckle past Artemy’s cheek.
Artemy pushes his hand away—such an abrupt, forward motion; so punishing—then yanks him in by the collar and kisses him on the mouth.
A noise escapes Daniil. This is not sanitary, he thinks, though it’s quite hard to find it in himself to care. Perhaps the panacea is really strong enough to make him non-contagious. But then all thought is flown, anyhow, as he is shoved into the wall, Artemy rising up from the bed and canting himself forward onto his knees, fixing Dankovsky in place.
His mouth is warm and chapped, a little rough. The pulse underneath his warm, unmarred skin runs strong. Survivor’s body. He breaks the kiss before Daniil can formulate his riposte, nosing down into the hollow of his neck instead, under the already brutalised ascot.
An unexpected tug of teeth on skin, right where his artery moves. And into that bruised skin of his neck, unbelievably, Artemy mutters:
“Sorry. Sorry.”
It takes Daniil a moment to find his voice inside the voice-box, “No, don’t be.” His own hands have bunched in the wool of Artemy’s jumper, as though to try and anchor him in place as well, save from dissolving again. Going elsewhere. He’s got a tremor in his hands, instilled by the awareness of it happening again—happening for the first time—and the anticipation of the next thing. But he can blame it on—
Oh, given the sodden circumstances, he can blame it on anything.
The scruff of Artemy’s face rubs across Daniil’s face like a grimy cat’s. Belatedly, he realises the light, pressing motion of the Haruspex’s fingertips on him is collecting the particles of twyre where they have caught his clothes, picking them away like lint.
“You’ll have to hold on, then,” Artemy mutters, without letting on whether he recognises the particles’ origin. “Your end of the bargain.”
Dankovsky is trying to think; but his eyes are sliding shut. Oh, he’s sick, that’s for sure. “… Which is?”
“You have to wait. You’re not allowed to—”
Die.
With all his might, he tries not to doubt. This sort of thing is as close to faith as it comes, for the likes of him. An unfinished miracle. It’ll have to be enough to get by.
“I won’t,” Daniil promises, hoping.
***
[TRANSCRIPT OF THE OFFICIAL TESTIMONY OF [REDACTED], HENCEFORTH “WITNESS X” AS RECORDED ON AN ELECTROMECHANICAL RECORDER ON 19 NOV 1935.]
WITNESS X: We’ll have to abandon the base. There is nobody left, here. Nothing left to do. We will walk north; across the steppe. Back to Gorkhon. People said there was something left, in the ruins of the Polyhedron. Something half-dead, half-alive. We’ll go there. We might even find something.