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Daniil lay weary hands to the cold, ivory-plated piano keys before him, the first piano he had chanced upon in the houses held within the Town. Its timeworn maple was polished, its keys lovely beneath his fingers; someone must have recently restrung it. Surely that deadwoman downstairs, her heartbeat burned out by pestilence. Daniil’s eyes stung as he began to play.
Steady footsteps creaked beneath the delicate melody Daniil wrought from the keys. Perhaps Death itself stood poised upon the stair, breathing down Daniil’s neck, a reminder that every branching river ran to its source; Death the source to which every bloody tributary in Daniil’s body led. To which his headwaters would run tomorrow when the Inquisitor would surely sentence him to the gallows between Cathedral and Crucible.
Daniil played to Death’s step upon the stair, exhaustion starving his fear fiercely as fever. He repeated that light leitmotif left forgotten by his mind, recalled only in muscle and sinew, residue from his fleeting childhood fascination with the mathematical contours of music.
“Bachelor Dankovsky?”
Artemy, it was Artemy who stood in the miasma-stained threshold, before thick dust hanging in moonlight. This man to whom Daniil stood opposed, yet was one of few in the Town’s raw rasping lungs for whom Daniil was not an instrument in cruel designs.
“Was that you playing?” Artemy asked.
“Yes. I was looking for the carrier, but I suppose I let myself get distracted,” Daniil said. A final attempt to find that elusive carrier crouched in a shuttered silent house, so that Daniil might face the Inquisitor’s interrogation without a seal having been set upon his death.
“I would keep back,” he added quickly. “I think I have a fever, though I can hardly tell these days. It seems the very air is febrile.”
“I can check,” Artemy said.
Daniil conceded, and Artemy crossed the room curtained in fading infection and lingering melody. He drew off his glove and laid bloodied knuckles to Daniil’s forehead.
“You seem all right,” Artemy said. “May I sit for a moment? I think I’m bleeding.”
When Daniil nodded, Artemy sat beside him and inspected his blood-blackened arm through the gloom. Daniil’s fingers sought from the keys some melody wound-fresh in his memory; what was it?
His hand wound down toward Artemy, lingering on a half step which revealed what his fingers sought: the song Artemy had sung yesterday evening near the cemetery gates. When sunset slanted through the Steppe’s whispering strands and caught the bottles of milk and twyrine he brought for Grace; as doomed September tolled with twyre vapor and burning cloth.
Artemy had been knelt upon the earth, where he gathered strange herbs and sang to distant music deep in the Steppe, his words long and languid, but warm. When Daniil asked what he sang, Artemy said that it was about herding bulls, and about being far away in the Steppe. Was it a sad song? No, it was a hopeful one. One sung to Artemy when he was a child, sung since the Abattoir was young.
Daniil played that long, droning tone, but it seemed only for the voice, only Artemy’s voice. Instead he resumed that familiar childhood melody, a song his mother once sang in Tatar, that tongue which long lay forgotten on his own. Daniil turned his face to the wan waxen moonlight falling through the window as a drowned man to the Gorkhon’s surface, searching for breath which phantom lungs could not draw.
The practiced movement of his fingers along the keys eased whatever false fever burned his brain. Just as the closeness of his unlikely ally, that wandering surgeon whose heartlines were inexorably crossed with Daniil’s for sickness and for health. Lines which entwined Daniil’s fingers; lines which ran further than this town, further than the North-Eastern railway. He could not feel them, see them, heed them as the final note hung suspended beneath the clair of the moon.
“Well? Are you bleeding?” Daniil asked.
“No. It’s not my blood,” Artemy said. “Probably that marauder I offed by the Warehouses. I tried to be clean about it, but…”
“I know your skill. I examined those men you killed at the station. It was…” Daniil inclined his head. “...Impressive work, how you severed their sinews.”
Army glanced at him. “Is that admiration in your voice?”
“Not admiration, per se.” Daniil glanced at Artemy’s hands, resting in his lap. “In any event, I’m happy that you aren’t hurt.”
“How touching,” Artemy said.
Daniil frowned. “I mean it.”
“So do I,” Artemy said. Blush stained Daniil’s cheeks when Artemy met his eyes, as if Daniil’s blood were eager to bare itself for him.
“Oh. I thought you were mocking me.” Again Daniil put his fingers to the keys. “I missed music. I could always hear it from my flat, and it used to drive me mad, but predictably, now I wish I could hear it again.”
“Perhaps in a few days,” Artemy murmured.
“Did you not get my letter?” Daniil asked. “The Inquisitor summoned me tomorrow. I will not live to see evening.”
“Why are you so sure?” Artemy pressed. “It’s unlike you to be a fatalist.” Where was that hope of his? That fervent pursuit of life which Artemy admired, even if fed by Utopian idealism and that ouroboros coiled about his temples.
“I’m not being a fatalist. I’m being rational.” Daniil shook his head. “I won’t believe in fortune or fate, but cruel inevitability… I’ll go to my grave having failed to best it.”
“Oh, enough,” Artemy said. “You are not going to die, oynon. If nothing else, I need you alive, and I’ll go before the Inquisitor and demand you be spared. I’ll wrestle him down myself if need be.”
“Hm. I suppose I feel a little better knowing that the town’s ripper will defend me,” Daniil said.
“Don’t call me that,” Artemy said sharply.
“I’m sorry. I only meant…” Daniil’s eye skimmed along Artemy. “You are a formidable opponent.”
“Is that so?” Artemy almost grinned. “But I will, truly.” He put a hand on Daniil’s shoulder.
“Why, thank you,” Daniil pressed Artemy’s hand with a soft sigh; his dark eyes lay where blood rusted on Artemy’s cracked lips.
If only Daniil had met this heir to Boddho’s heartlines in the Capital, not this place where disease wrought desolation within every artery. Daniil bowed his head as if drawn down by river currents, down to drowning delirium and death. His lips brushed Artemy’s wounded knuckles. Artemy laid his forehead to the crown of Daniil’s head, his exhaustion half bearable when he could rest his aching body to that of this famed fighter of death.
“Do you truly think I’ll live?” Daniil’s breath brushed Artemy’s hand.
“Yes.” Artemy squeezed Daniil’s shoulder. Daniil slowly raised his head, brushing his thumb along Artemy’s knuckles.
“I’m glad we have not become enemies, Artemy,” Daniil whispered. Artemy’s heart ached with an affection he could not indulge, not here, not now.
“There’s still time,” Artemy said.
“Hm. I suppose that should trouble me, but it makes me rather hopeful—there’s still time, if slipping through our fingers.” Daniil almost smiled.
“So it is.” Artemy sighed and let go. “I should be off.”
“I as well.”
But neither heeded the lines of fortune which demanded surgeon and physician fashion themselves after Sebastian and take the arrows of plague into their already bruised and bleeding bodies. Instead Artemy and Daniil obeyed vein and artery; sought refuge from the other’s pulse, that biotic melody tuned upon their heartstrings, beating beneath the distant clanking of beaks.
Daniil lay his fingers to the keys; Artemy closed his eyes, and the wistful melody began anew.