“He beeth no shepherd!” a voice shouted. “Beware those who giveth false witness, their…their sheep are black as their souls, those damned.”

  My foothold on the slope behind me ceased their advance.

  “Maenoch,” sighed the priest. “Forty parthings and reread the blessed scripture: those who giveth false witness for their souls are black and damn those sheep who stay their own vigilance.”

  Maenoch hiked up his rags and began the prescribed calisthenics. Long before the fortieth hop, he gave me a malicious look, one probably later seeing him fit for Ansul’s True, the martial arm of their sprawling church, populated by the militant-chaste whose final initiation was rumored to be self-inflicted castration.

  “Come see us again sometime,” the priest solicited, reaffirming his grip on his accessories and sounding for the first time like a man born in my century. We both turned wearing our own versions of an awkward smile. Their practice recommenced and I climbed back toward Templeton. Before I went over the crest I overheard the gist of the sermon I’d interrupted: the intrinsic good of sharing.

  What a coincidence, for I didn’t mind sharing Somyellia—which may surprise you if you are from Oxghorde or won’t bury a lady because she hung herself. But I found her profession a quaint enterprise that only made me want her more by the hour. I had only found discord with her livelihood on one occasion.

  I’d watched the rotten carriage pull up one evening, expecting the usual gaggle of tarts to file out. To my horror I watched Somyellia exit. I saw her scan to see if I were around, and saw her relief when she perceived that I wasn’t.

  For reasons of sheer mercy my mind has precluded any re-hashing the events from that evening, but I recall being beside myself with the sharpest type of grief. Outside Father’s window I stood, biting down deep into my fists.

  Our favorite meeting place was an abandoned house. It was the last home in a row, all overlooking City Cemetery. While Nilghorde was peppered with quaint little graveyards, privately owned and surrounded by high flinty walls, the city held three major ones. Besides City Cemetery, there was Whisperer’s Plain and the Ansul of Chapwyn Cemetery, that last one not only holding my mother, but a virtual underground hive of the religious, the uppity, and the municipal who’d opted not to spend eternity near those who they’d ruled. City Cemetery, the colossus, stretched the farthest and the fullest. For the nights we’d float over its stones, I would leave alone the stealing of horses and make it on foot. Walking there was no short journey, and my legs after a time started taking the shape of my father’s kind.

  The abandoned house looked like a slight breeze would topple it. Only the cobwebs and rat shit glued the eaten frame together. Good thing those components were in such abundance. A witchy roof was still clad with a few shingles, all deeply warped from years of sun and bombarding rain. Crows made home the exposed rafters, and from a caved-in wall on the second floor, we would sit and view the silent resting place for many of the city’s denizens whose families didn’t possess the money to bury them with class.

  We would stay the night, small fire lit in a bronze urn she’d plucked off a tomb. I loved the sort of mischievous unlife that came to shape below us, in the tiny hours of the morning where the world’s shores seemed to rub against some other place. Holding Somyellia in my arms, fire to my back, I found myself longing for that place.

  —

  I awoke, grabbing for my knife. “Can’t fool you,” Somyellia larked. Years navigating the Bustle does bear fruit. She was on the edge of our mat with a bag on her lap. Her hair always took on a cooked straw effect in the morning, before mirrors and little pink jars and her ritual of locking herself in powder rooms. This game of hers, moving my knife while I slept, brought her more mirth than a seat at the front of a good theatre. She said she loved seeing the “whip and flash” of how I snatched it, and how I never missed, whether moved from our left side to our right, or stuck in the floor behind my head. For me it only brought a jolt to the heart and a lump in my throat, but it also woke me as absolute as Pelat coffee. Convincing myself this was the reason for her dropping loose boards or screaming in my ear helped me fight back a second reflex that sometimes came after I’d wrapped my fingers around the handle.

  Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, the knife was tossed and I fell back into my sheets. “I better return all this leather,” Somyellia said to herself with a yawn. Looking across my chest and between my feet, familiar portions of last night’s ensemble were sticking out from her bag. There was a cool breeze, and angry crows squawked somewhere in the rafters. “Or have my hands dipped in oil.”

  “Would they even notice?” I said.

  “I am so hungry. Do we have anything left?”

  “No,” I said, rolling onto my side.

  “Oh. No bother, I’m going to pick up some things on the way.”

  “See you tonight?”

  “Not tonight. There’s some bachelor party for a Lotgard that starts at dusk and is going to last for three days.”

  “Yeah, I need to go home anyway,” I said, having learned well to mask these mild disappointments.

  “Well,” she exhaled in a patronizing tone she’d come to perfect, “I promise to meet you here as soon as the festivities end,” tickling my exposed side, “my beast.”

  We departed with a kiss. She turned to go back to her nest, as I began the long walk back.

  The sun came out late but made up for its tardiness. By the time I stepped onto the first dirt road, I was sweating in the gleam. I rounded a bend that I had rounded many times before, viewing the red-topped roof of The Great Fuckity House of Oleugsby.

  Now, when I tell you that I felt something was off, I don’t mean that under the perfect reflection of memories retold. I don’t mean to say that looking back I felt something was wrong merely by knowing what happened next. As I met the wooden fence that separated our yard from the road, there was a cold in my gut.

  The cellar? He had found my lab! My first impulse was of him walking past its door. Maybe I had meant to close it, but some arbitrary piece of rubbish kept it open just enough? Maybe he had, for some uncharacteristic reason, developed a brief curiosity about where I spent most of my days? I snuck around the side of the house, constantly examining the windows, thief-like, for any signs of life. As I approached the back, I heard a faint monotonous ring coming from his favorite barn.

  “Shoeing,” I said, relieved. An image I had of him hovering over my cellar door began to dissolve.

  I scurried there anyway. A quick inspection revealed that all was as I’d left it. I decided to go at least take a look at Father. Not for any reason one could readily ascribe, but I couldn’t place a sensation that still lingered, and I now felt wrapped in some lurid investigation.

  The farrier hammer, making the usual tinks and tanks, echoed from the other side of the barn. I approached in a timid walk. Talking to him wasn’t something that happened all that often, and I was already formulating my rebuttal for his most probable, stern request for some laboring assistance.

  Turning the corner, I stopped at the sight before me. In a pool of his own blood lay Celly. His coal black fur was so much darker than the white skull and pinkish brain.

  A wave of emotions pummeled me. He wasn’t dead…and I had enough tools to repair the wound. This creature, my friend, lay in torment unattended. Sickness, yes. Guilt, that too. I felt the world spin, and some chorus of nameless mocking things sang their pale and dead incantations as I tried to breathe.

  Most of all, I felt hatred. A hatred that made the world turn cold.

  I was not a young man who was naïve to the presence and yields of hate. I had dwelled in a sort of darkness my whole life, and wrestled with my disconnected family at an early age and left that hope abandoned, dead in some field. The hate upon the sight this day was a treachery. When I saw that the corral gate was ajar, I put together what happened.

  Celly had managed to break out. With my increased time away, he had most likely made the mistake of wandering up to Father for something as simple as a head rub. Father, busy with his stable duties, turned out to be in no mood for such troublesome interruptions. He killed Celly with one hammer blow to the head.

  Behind a stable wall, sounds of work resumed. I couldn’t see him, but he was close. Tools hung about me.

  I snatched a hefty pick and gripped its handle. I fought the urge to look over at Celly, knowing I’d weep uncontrollably if I did. I crept to the edge of the wall, then I could fight that urge no longer. My spine bent and jerked as I wept, vomiting violent and uncontrollable little meeps.

  I felt again the oaken handle in my hands. I turned toward the hammer noises; face flushed with tears, jowls open and twitching as I squeezed it, wide-eyed and beyond all reason.

  I walked the way a man may right before his own execution—before the concerns of the world have left the crude carriage of flesh and bone that vessels a spirit ready for voyage.

  All it would take was one committed strike. His skull would split like firewood. All I needed was for his back to be turned and his pink brain attending the last shoe it would ever contemplate.

  For all his conquests, he was to be ended at the hands of his son. He deserved this, and he could be buried next to Mother, as I would surely dance in their ashes.

  I turned the corner and gazed upon his back.

  His head was hunkered low. Behind him I, his son, wielded a farm tool like a frontline pikeman. I always picture this through the eyes of some nonexistent spectator. That tiny moment in time haunts me, the image of us.

  Killing had been an obligation of my means of obtaining animals, and some of my more risky ventures into the city bore me witness to many faces of death.

  But for reasons I didn’t understand, my grip loosened. I was slipping from the midnight-garbed avenger to the terrified little boy.

  I found myself filled with fear—worse, indecision. I begged for my rage to return to me, and with it the strength to carry out this monumental deed.

  I wondered for years what my father’s reaction was when he finally turned to see a lone pick laying behind him in the beaten grass.

  Without as much as a sack of grain or change of clothes, I ran away from the barn, the house, the district, my life. I ran until the dirt turned to stones and wheezed as my heart burned from exhaustion. I finally stopped at the base of my and Somyellia’s abandoned house. Molested by the sweat and grime of my flight, I laid myself on its doorstep. At some point I lifted myself and slugged up the stairwell, finally lying on our animal hides. The house creaked and the assorted city clamor carried me off.

  I don’t know how long I’d been out, only that when I awoke I was enshrouded in full darkness. My father still lived, probably having not yet risen a hair’s suspicion over my absence. The mixture of grief and shame prohibited my rise. Sitting on the floor, I must have looked like a man after a fight lost outside a last-stop inn.

  My eyes were adjusting to the black.

  Peeking out from our blankets was a purse Somyellia had left behind.

  An urge prompted that I crawl forward. Much to my hopes, I found inside this purse a small pouch of opium. I had partaken of it with her before. Small inhales here and there were enough to scramble the mind and titillate the senses, putting me in with sprites of the forest and pinprick demons that pranced and danced on and in me.

  This time was to be different, though. On my hands and knees I crawled to a corner. I’d put together a bag in case some calamity required our egress; I had always imagined Somyellia, Celly, and I running off to some distant land, or maybe hacking a life out of a giving thicket somewhere deep in the magic-haunted wilderland. I sifted through loose silver, garments, candles, a corked vial, a loaf of bread which had molded horrendously, until at last I found what I’d been searching for: flint and steel.

  With great care, I was able to burrow a hole in the side of the vial. With some additions found around the house, I built, as best I could, a vessel to billow my lungs.

  A candle lit my back, facing the graves below, I commenced burning the remnants of my mistress’s favored drug.

  Once fully enveloped, I crawled to the edge of the collapsed wall and hovered over all the graves. Looking as if miles below, they glimmered with the glow of nearby street lamps and the few candles that burned in the land of the dead. Here, my soul was at zero.

  I found what it was to possess utter rage. A rage that pulsated slowly and made all the world turn gray. I choked on dust and learned not to lament on the cliffs of lamentation. I remembered not to remember, and then the winds passed me. I ripped at my chest. I sat crouched, eyes staring into a ruined valley that I had never known. I gave myself to the gods of destruction, but they did not take me. I waited for my takers to claim me, but they did not come. No howling wind carrying my raiders from the shores of recallable time. No hordes of flesh and noise.

  In what could have been ages later, Somyellia found me crouched in a damp corner on the bottom floor. The moldy loaf eaten, along with other things strewn about that neither of us could pinpoint by species or origin. I was naked, covered in dirt and parched with a horrible thirst. Even for a black-magic hooker from the Thunder Bustle, my ghoulish appearance stopped Somyellia in her high leather boots. Putting aside her carnal duties, with the care of a seasoned midwife, she nursed me back to health and to sanity. In a volley of screams and cradled flailing, I slowly began to let go of many things.

  —

  The years that followed my running away were so full of chaos and poverty that only a morbid collage of memories remains. For all the swirling turmoil of abuse and neglect, I had been a boy who was well-fed, regularly schooled, and had ample means of washing off the residue of corpses and perspiration. All of that was gone.

  I do recall the first few weeks as a vivid, sick sort of game. The Metropolitan Ward was summoned. Word found a way of trickling back to my ears that during their searches for me, many homes of former tutors and childhood friends whom I hadn’t seen in years were ransacked as frustrations increased. My old laboratory had to eventually be discovered. I could too easily envision the laughing gaggle of mailed Wardsmen pilfering through it all.

  As heavy hooves approached in brutish unison, I would scurry into the sewers or hide behind the wheel of a cart. With a crude sketch of me in hand, orphanages were scoured. I guess they thought a boy from Templeton would frighten after a night or two under the care of the Nilghorde streets. Little did they know me.

  I was resolve, colder than rain on the mountain. I wasn’t going back. Every time I eluded their patrols, it only bolstered my lost but freed heart.

  Finally, after weeks of hide and seek, it all ended. The Prime Marshall had probably told Father in careful terms that I’d most likely been abducted and was already chained inside some galley far out at sea.

  Other than a book I’d stowed and an armful of anatomy works procured from the rear door of an unaware bookstore, my youthful education had met its terminus. But this only, I’d told myself, was good reason to revisit my favorites. I read my third volume of Poems of the Classics so many times that its pages became frail with a sort of rot and rub. Reciting the voyage of Omiel the doomed Mariner and the poetry of Denom Vandahl were regular occurrences in my bleak obscurities.

  For food, I started out by using all of my trapping skills. Hundreds of rats and several pigeons later, I took to joining those who haunted the crooked bricked jungle in search of money. If I wasn’t able to find work—maybe a cheap laborer on some city project or sweeping the rubble left from all the statues being chiseled on Do-Gooder’s Row—I learned through painful trial and error the grim arts of the street.

  IV: The Caress

  Despite the battles with food deprivation that came with having run away, I grew well in frame. Shoulders stretched outward. My chest grew slabs of beef. I had limbs of vein and sinew, and my lower legs were as thick as my upper arms. A boyish face melted away. By the time the Do-Gooder’s Row statues looked like men trying to free their lower halves out of blocks of stone, my summer-field hair had taken to looking like that of my late mother’s, both in its darkness and its length. I fit well with the orgy of maliciousness that populated the haunts of Nilghorde, which I’d come to call home.

  On occasion, I resorted to desperate acts of violence. Eating a plate of cabbage and rabbit with bloody hands was barely a step above the beasts of the forest. I had at first pitied my victims, but soon savored the taste of bursting cooked flesh or boiled mushrooms in spite of the screams necessary to acquire it all.

  One night this led me to a scuffle right next to where Somyellia and I’s abandoned house met the graves.

  The man squirmed, no more than an innkeeper who took the wrong turn. But this was the way of the world.

  “Thirty silver—she just walked, from the mantel to the seating—I—my—” I had long ago picked up on the patterns in such pleas, all silenced with the butt of my knife.

  The night now quiet, graveyard birds soon choired their calls. They seemed as if all around, though no matter how hard I tried, their perches remained hidden. As I gripped the fought-for purse, a hand caressed the back of my neck.

  Every hair on my arms stood. I wheeled around to deliver a hard fate to the innkeeper’s brave friend, the same grizzly fate for so many of the brave and misguided. But when I turned fully, I gazed at a sight even more peculiar: a slender man wrapped in shining black. There was no outstretched hand, for both of this stranger’s were clapped together, no different than one of the many statues ornamenting the graves. The moon broke through the fog to radiate on his silk.

  “Good evening,” the man said.

  By some nighttime trickery, I couldn’t rise. For I surely tried, but all I could muster were a baffling series of slips, falls, and curses while the back of my neck burned and froze all at once.