Fearsome Journeys (The New Solaris Book of Fantasy)

THE GHOST MAKERS

ELIZABETH BEAR

THE FACELESS MAN walked out of the desert at sunset, when the gates of the City of Jackals wound ponderously closed on silent machinery. He was the last admitted. His kind were made by Wizards, and went about on Wizards’ business. No one interrogated him.

His hooded robe and bronze hide smoked with sun-heat when the priest of Iashti threw water from the sacred rivers over him. Whether it washed away any clinging devils of the deep desert, as it was intended, who could have said? But it did rinse the dust from the featureless oval of his visage so all who stood near could see themselves reflected. Distorted.

He paused within and he lowered the hood of his homespun robes to lie upon his shoulders. The gates made the first sound of their closing, a heavy snap as their steel-shod edges overlapped and latched. Their juncture reflected as a curved line up the mirror of the faceless man’s skull. Within the gates, bars as thick as a man glided home. Messaline was sealed, and the date plantations and goats and pomegranates and laborers of the farms and villages beyond her walls were left to their own devices until the lion-sun tinted the horizon again.

Trailing tendrils of steam faded from the faceless man’s robe, leaving the air heavy with petrichor—the smell of water in aridity—and the cloth over his armored hide as dry as before. His eyeless mask trained unwaveringly straight ahead, he raised his voice.

“Priest of Iashti.” Though he had no mouth, his voice tolled clear and sonorous.

The priest left his aspergillum and came around to face the faceless man, though there was no need. He said, “You already have my blessing, O Gage... of...?”

“I’d rather information than blessings, Child of the Morning,” said the Gage. The priest’s implied question—to whom he owed his service—the faceless man left unacknowledged. His motionlessness—as if he were a bronze statue someone had draped in a robe and left inexplicably in the center of the market road—was more distressing than if he’d stalked the priest like a cat.

He continued, “Word is that a poet was murdered under the Blue Stone a sennight since.”

“Gage?”

The Gage waited.

The priest collected himself. He tugged the tangerine-and-gold dawn-colored robe smooth beneath his pectoral. “It is true. Eight days ago, though—no, now gone nine.”

“Which way?”

Wordlessly, the priest pointed to a twisting, smoky arch towering behind dusty tiers of pastel houses. The sunset sprawled across the sky rendered the monument in translucent silhouette, like an enormous, elaborate braid of chalcedony.

The faceless man paused, and finally made a little motion of his featureless head that somehow still gave the impression of ruefully pursed lips and acknowledgement.

“Alms.” He tossed gold to the priest.

The priest, no fool, caught it before it could bloody his nose. He waited to bite it until the Gage was gone.

THE GAGE MADE his way through the Temple District, where great prayer-houses consecrated to the four major Messaline deities dominated handfuls of lesser places of worship: those of less successful sects, or of alien gods. Only the temple to the Uthman Scholar-God, fluted pillars twined about with sacred verses rendered in lapis lazuli and pyrite, competed with those four chief temples for splendor.

Even at dusk, these streets teemed. Foot traffic, litter bearers, and the occasional rider and mount—mostly horses, a few camels, a mule, one terror-bird—bustled through the lanes between the torch bearers. There were soldiers and merchants, priests and scholars, a nobleman or woman in a curtained sedan chair with guards crying out “Make way!” The temples were arranged around a series of squares, and the squares were occupied by row upon row of market stalls from which rose the aromas of turmeric, coriander, roses, sandalwood, dates, meat sizzling, bread baking, and musty old attics—among other things. The sweet scent of stitched leather and wood-pulp-and-rag paper identified a bookseller as surely as did the banner that drifted above his pavilion.

The faceless man passed them all—and more than half of the people he passed either turned to stare or hurried quickly along their way, eyes fixed on the ground by their shoes. The Gage knew better than to assign any quality of guilt or innocence to these reactions.

He did not stay in the Temple District long. A left-hand street bent around the temple of Kaalha, the goddess of death and mercy—who also wore a mirrored mask, though hers was silver and divided down the center line. The temple had multiple doorways, and seemed formed in the shape of a star. Over the nearest one was inscribed: In my house there is an end to pain.

Some distance behind the temple, the stone arch loomed.

At first he walked by stucco houses built cheek to cheek, stained in every shade of orange, red, vermilion. The arches between their entryways spanned the road. But soon the street grew crooked and dark; there were no torch-bearers here. A rat or two was in evidence, scurrying over stones—but rodents went quickly and fearfully here. Once, longer legs and ears flickered like scissors as a slender shadow detached itself from one darkness and glided across the open space to the next: one of the jackals from which Messaline took its epithet. From the darkness where it finished, a crunch and a squeak told of one scurrying at least that ended badly for the scurrier.

In these gutters, garbage reeked, though not too much of it; things that were still useful would be put to use. The people passing along these streets were patch-clothed, dirty-cheeked, lank of unwashed hair. Many wore long knives; a few bore flintlocks. The only unescorted women were those plying a trade, and a few men who loitered in dark doorways or alleys drew back into their lairs as the Gage passed, each footstep ringing dully off the cobbles. He was reminded of tunnel-spiders, and kept walking.

As he drew closer to one base of the Blue Stone, though, he noticed an increase in people walking quickly in the direction opposite his. Though the night sweltered, stored heat radiating back from the stones, they hunched as if cold: heads down and shoulders raised protectively.

Still no-one troubled the faceless man. Messaline knew about Wizards.

Others were not so lucky, or so unmolested.

The Gage came out into the small square that surrounded one foot of the Blue Stone. It rose above him in an interlaced, fractal series of helixes a hundred times the height of a tall man, vanishing into the darkness that drank its color and translucency. The Gage had been walking for long enough that stars now showed through the gaps in the arch’s sinuous strands.

The base of the monument separated into a half-dozen pillars where it plunged to earth. Rather than resting upon a plinth or footing, though, it seemed as if each pillar had thrust up through the street like a tree seeking the light—or possibly as if the cobbles of the road had just been paved around them.

Among the shadows between those pillars, a man wearing a skirted coat and wielding a narrow, curved sword fought silently—desperately—valiantly—for his life.

THE COMBAT HAD every appearance of an ambush—five on one, though that one was the superior swordsman and tactician. These were advantages that did not always affect the eventual result when surrounded and outnumbered, but the man in the skirted coat was making the most of them. His narrow torso twisted like a charmed snake as he dodged blows too numerous to deflect. He might have been an answer to any three of his opponents. But as it was, he was left whirling and weaving, leaping and ducking, parrying for his life. The harsh music of steel rang from the tight walls of surrounding rowhouses. His breathing was a rasp audible from across the square. He used the footings of the monument to good advantage, dodging between them, keeping them at his back, forcing his enemies to coordinate their movements over uneven cobblestones.

The Gage paused to assess.

The lone man’s skirts whirled wide as he caught a narrower, looping strand of the Blue Stone in his off hand and used it as a handle to swing around, parrying one opponent with his sword hand while landing a kick in the chest of another. The kicked man staggered back, arms pinwheeling. One of his allies stepped under his blade and came on, hoping to catch the lone man off-balance.

The footpad—if that’s what he was—huffed in pain as he ran into the Gage’s outstretched arm. His eyes widened; he jerked back and reflexively brought his scimitar down. It glanced off the Gage’s shoulder, parting his much-patched garment and leaving a bright line.

The Gage picked him up by the jaw, one-handed, and bashed his brains out against the Blue Stone.

The man in the skirted coat ran another through between the ribs. The remaining three hesitated, exchanging glances. One snapped a command; they vanished into the night like rain into a fallow field, leaving only the sound of their footsteps. The man in the skirted coat seemed as if he might give chase, but his sword was wedged. He stood on the chest of the man he had killed and twisted his long, slightly curved blade to free it. It had wedged in his victim’s spine. A hiss of air escaping a punctured lung followed as he slid it free.

Warily, he turned to the Gage. The Gage did not face him. The man in the skirted coat did not bother to walk around to face the Gage.

“Thank...”

Above them, the Blue Stone began to glow, with a grey light that faded up from nothingness and illuminated the scene: glints off the Gage’s bronze body, the saturated blood-red of the lone man’s coat, the frayed threads of its embroidery worn almost flat on the lapels.

“What the—?”

“Blood,” the Gage said, prodding the brained body with his toe. “The Blue Stone accepts our sacrifice.” He gestured to the lone man’s prick-your-finger coat. “You’re a Dead Man.”

Dead Men were the sworn, sacred guards of the Caliphs who ruled north and east of Messaline, across the breadth of the sea.

“Not anymore,” the Dead Man said. Fastidiously, he crouched and scrubbed his sword on a corpse’s hem. “Not professionally. And not literally, thanks to you. By which I mean, ‘Thank you.’”

The faceless man shrugged. “It didn’t look like a fair fight.”

“In this world, O my brother, is there such a thing as a fair fight? When one man is bestowed by the gods with superior talent, by station with superior training, by luck with superior experience?”

“I’d call that the opposite of luck,” said the faceless man.

The Dead Man shrugged. “Pardon my forwardness; a true discourtesy, when directed at one who has done me a very great favor solely out of the goodness of his heart—”

“I have no heart.”

“—but you are what they call a Faceless Man?”

“We prefer the term Gage. And while we’re being rude, I had heard your kind don’t leave the Caliph’s service.”

“The Caliph’s service left me. A new Caliph’s posterior warms the dais in Asitaneh. I’ve heard your kind die with the Wizard that made you.”

The Gage shrugged. “I’ve something to do before I lie down and let the scavengers have me.”

“Well, you have come to the City of Jackals now.”

“You talk a lot for a dead man.”

The Dead Man laughed. He sheathed his sword and thrust the scabbard through his sash. More worn embroidery showed that to be its place of custom.

“Why were they trying to kill you?”

The Dead Man had aquiline features and eagle-eyes to go with it, a trim goatee and a sandalwood-skinned face framed by shoulder-length ringlets, expensively oiled. Slowly, he drew a crimson veil across his nose and mouth. “I expected an ambush.”

Neither one of them made any pretense that that was, exactly, an answer.

The Gage reached out curiously and touched the glowing stone. “Then I’m pleased to see that your expectation was rewarded.”

“You discern much.” The Dead Man snorted and stood. “May I know the name of the one who aided me?”

“My kind have no names.”

“Do you propose then that there is no difference between you? You all have the same skills? The same thoughts?”

The Gage turned to him, and the Dead Man saw his own expression reflected, distorted in that curved bronze mirror. It never even shivered when he spoke. “So we are told.”

The Dead Man shrugged. “So also are we. Were we. When I was a part of something bigger. But now I am alone, and my name is Serhan.”

The Gage said, “You can call me Gage.”

He turned away, though he did not need to. He tilted his featureless head back to look up.

“What’s this thing?” The Gage’s gesture followed the whole curve of the Blue Stone, revealed now as the light their murders had engendered rose along it like tendrils of crawling foxfire.

“It is old; it is anyone’s guess what good it once was. There used to be a road under it, before they built the houses. A triumphal arch, maybe?”

“Hell of a place for a war monument.”

The Dead Man’s veil puffed out as he smothered a laugh. “The neighborhood was better once.”

“Surprised they didn’t pull it down for building material.”

“Many have tried,” the Dead Man said. “It does not pull down.”

“Huh,” said the Gage. He prodded the brained man again. “Any idea why they attacked you?”

“Opportunity? Or perhaps to do with the crime I have been investigating. That seems more likely.”

“Crime?”

Reluctantly, the Dead Man answered, “Murder.”

“Oh,” said the Gage. “The poet?”

“I wonder if it might have been related to this.” The Dead Man’s hand described the arc of light across the sky. The glow washed the stars away. “Maybe he was a sacrifice to whatever old power inhabits... this.”

“I doubt it,” said the Gage. “I know something about the killer.”

“You seek justice in this matter too?”

The Gage shrugged. “After a fashion.”

The Dead Man stared. The Gage did not move. “Well,” said the Dead Man at last. “Let us then obtain wine.”

THEY CHOSE A tavern on the other side of the block that faced on the Blue Stone, where its unnerving light did not wash in through the high narrow windows. The floor was gritty with sand spread to sop up spilled wine, and the air was thick with its vinegar sourness. The Dead Man tested the first step carefully, until he determined that what lay under the sand was flagstone. As they settled themselves—the Dead Man with his back to the wall, the Gage with his back to the room—the Gage said, “Did it do that when the poet died?”

“His name was Anah.”

“Did it do that when Anah died?”

The Dead Man raised one hand in summons to the serving girl. “It seems to like blood.”

“And yet we don’t know what they built it for.”

“Or who built it,” the Dead Man said. “But you believe those things do not matter.”

The girl who brought them wine was young, her blue-black hair in a wrist-thick braid of seven strands. The plait hung down her back in a spiral, twisted like the Blue Stone. She took the Dead Man’s copper and withdrew.

The Dead Man said, “I always wondered how your sort sustained yourselves.”

In answer, the Gage cupped his bronze fingers loosely around the stem of the cup and let them lie on the table.

“I was hired by the poet’s... by Anah’s lover.” The Dead Man lifted his cup and swirled it. Fumes rose from the warmed wine. He lifted his veil and touched his mouth to the rim. The wine was raw, rough stuff, more fruit than alcohol.

The Gage said, “We seek the same villain.”

“I am afraid I cannot relinquish my interest in the case. I... need the money.” The Dead Man lifted his veil to drink again. The edge lapped wine and grew stained.

The Gage might have been regarding him. He might have been staring at the wall behind his head. Slowly, he passed a brazen hand over the table. It left behind a scaled track of silver. “I will pay you as well as your other client. And I will help you bring her the Wizard’s head.”

“Wizard!”

The Gage shrugged.

“You think you know who it is that I hunt.”

“Oh yes,” the Gage said. Scratched silver glittered dully on the table. “I can tell you that.”

The Dead Man regarded his cup, and the Gage regarded... whatever it was.

Finally, the Gage broke the impasse to say, “Would you rather go after a Wizard alone, or in company?”

Under his veil, the Dead Man nibbled a thumbnail. “Which Wizard?”

“Attar the Enchanter. Do you know where to find him?”

“Everyone in Messaline knows where to find a Wizard. Or, belike, how to avoid him.” The Dead Man tapped the nearest coin. “Why would he kill a poet? Gut him? In a public square?”

“He’s a ghost-maker,” the Gage said. “He kills for the pleasure it affords him. He kills artists, in particular. He likes to own them. To possess their creativity.”

“Huh,” said the Dead Man. “Anah was not the first, then.”

“Ghost-makers... some people say they’re soulless themselves. That they’re empty, and so they drink the souls of the dead. And they’re always hungry for another.”

“People say a lot of shit,” the Dead Man said.

“When I heard the manner of the poet’s death, and that Attar was in Messaline...” The Gage shrugged. “I came at once. To catch up with him before he moves on again.”

“You have not come about Anah in particular.”

“I’m here for Anah. And the other Anahs. Future and past.”

“I see,” said the Dead Man.

His hand passed across the table. When it vanished, no silver remained. “Is it true that darkness cannot cloud your vision?”

“I can see,” said the faceless man. “In dark or day, whether I turn my head aside or no. What has no eyes cannot be blinded.”

“That must be awful,” the Dead Man said.

The lamplight flickered against the side of the Gage’s mask.

“So,” said the Gage, motionless. “When the Caliph’s service left you, you chose a mercenary life?”

“Not mercenary,” the Dead Man said. “I have had sufficient of soldiering. I’m a hired investigator.”

“An... investigator.”

The corners of the Dead Man’s eyes folded into eagle-tracks. “We have a legacy of detective stories in the Caliphate. Tales of clever men, and of one who is cleverer. They are mostly told by women.”

“Aren’t most of your storytellers women?”

The Dead Man moved to drink and found his cup empty. “They are the living embodiment of the Scholar-God.”

“And you keep them in cages.”

“We keep God in temples. Is that so different?”

After a while, the Dead Man said, “You have some plan for fighting a Wizard? A Wizard who... killed your maker?”

“My maker was Cog the Deviser. That’s not how she died. But I thought perhaps a priest of Kaalha would know what to do about a ghost-maker.”

“Ask the Death God. You are a clever automaton.”

The Gage shrugged.

“If you won’t drink that, I will.”

“Drink it?” the Gage asked. He drew his hands back from where they had embraced the foot of his cup.

The Dead Man reached across the table, eyebrows questioning, and waited until the Gage gestured him in to tilt the cup and peer inside.

If there had been wine within, it was gone.

WHEN THE LION-SUN of Messaline rose, haloed in its mane, the Gage and the Dead Man were waiting below the lintel inscribed, In my house there is an end to pain. The door stood open, admitting the transient chill of a desert morning. No one barred the way. But no one had come to admit them, either.

“We should go in?” the Dead Man said.

“After you,” said the Gage.

The Dead Man huffed, but stepped forward, the Gage following with silent precision. His joints made no more sound than the massive gears of the gates of Messaline. Wizards, when they chose to wreak, wrought well.

Beyond the doorway lay a white marble hall, shadowed and cool. Within the hall, a masked figure enveloped in undyed linen robes stood, hands folded into sleeves. The mask was silver, featureless, divided by a line—a join—down the center. The robe was long enough to puddle on the floor.

Behind the mask, one side of the priest’s face would be pitted, furrowed: acid-burned. And one side would be untouched, in homage—in sacrifice—to the masked goddess they served, whose face was the heavy, half-scarred moon of Messaline. The Gage and the Dead Man drew up, two concealed faces regarding one.

Unless the figure was a statue.

But then the head lifted. Hands emerged from the sleeves—long and dark, elegant, with nails sliced short for labor. The voice that spoke was fluting, feminine.

“Welcome to the House of Mercy,” the priestess said. “All must come to Kaalha of the Ruins in the end. Why do you seek her prematurely?”

They hesitated for a moment, but then the Dead Man stepped forward. “We seek her blessing. And perhaps her aid, Child of the Night.”

By her voice, perhaps her mirrors hid a smile. “A pair of excommunicates. Wolf’s-heads, are you not? Masterless ones?”

The supplicants held their silence, or perhaps neither one of them knew how to answer.

When the priestess turned to the Gage, their visages reflected one another—reflected distorted reflections—endlessly. “What have you to live for?”

“Duty, art, and love.”

“You? A Faceless Man?”

The Gage shrugged. “We prefer the term Gage.”

“So,” she said. She turned to the Dead Man. “What have you to live for?”

“Me? I am dead already.”

“Then you are the Goddess’s already, and need no further blessing of her.”

The Dead Man bit his lip and hid the hand that would have made the Sign of the Pen. “Nevertheless... my friend believes we need her help. Perhaps we can explain to the Eidolon?”

“Walk with me,” said the priestess.

Further along the corridor, the walls were mirrored. The priestess strode beside them, the front of her robe gathered in her hands. The mirrors were faintly distorted, whether by design or flaw, and they reflected the priestess, the Gage, and the Dead Man as warped caricatures—rippled, attenuated, bulged into near-spheres. Especially in conjunction with the mirrored masks, the reflections within reflections were dizzying.

When they left the corridor of mirrors and entered the large open atrium into which it emptied, the priestess was gone. The Dead Man whirled, his hand on the hilt of his sword, his battered red coat swinging wide to display all the stains and shiny patches the folds of its skirts hid.

“Ysmat Her Word,” he swore. “I hate these heathen magics. Did you see her go? You see everything.”

The Gage walked straight ahead and did not stop until he reached the middle of the short side of the atrium. “I did not see that.”

“A heathen magic you seek, Dead Man.” A masked priestess spoke from atop the dais at the other end of the long room.

It was unclear whether this priestess was the same one. Her voice was identical, or nearly so. But she seemed taller and she walked with a limp. Of course, it would be easy to twist an ankle in that trailing raiment, and the click of wooden pattens as she descended the stair said the truth of her height was a subject for conjecture.

She came to them through shafts of sunlight angled from high windows, stray gleams catching on her featureless visage.

“Forgive me.” The Dead Man inclined his head and dropped one knee before her. “I spoke in haste. I meant no disrespect, Child of the Moon.”

“Rise,” said the priestess. “If Kaalha of the Ruins wants you humbled, she will lay you low. The Merciful One has no need of playacted obeisance.”

She offered a hand. It was gloved, silk pulled unevenly over long fingers. She lifted the Dead Man to his feet. She was strong. She squeezed his fingers briefly, like a mother reassuring a child, and let her grip fall. She withdrew a few steps. “Explain to me your problem, masterless ones.”

“Are you the Eidolon?” the Gage asked.

“She will hear what you speak to me.”

The Gage nodded—a movement as calculated and intentional as if he had spoken aloud. He said, “We seek justice for the poet Anah, mutilated and murdered nine—now ten—days past at the Blue Stone. We seek justice also for the wood-sculptor Abbas, similarly mutilated and murdered in his village of Bajishe, and for uncounted other victims of this same murderer.”

The priestess stood motionless, her hands hanging beside her and spread slightly as if to receive a gift. “For vengeance, you wish the blessing of Rakasha,” she said. “For justice, seek Vajhir the warrior. Not the Queen the of Cold Moon.”

“I do not seek vengeance,” said the Gage.

“Really?”

“No.” It was an open question which of them was more immovable. More unmoving. “I seek mercy for all those this murderer, this ghost-maker, may yet torture and kill. I seek Kaalha’s benediction on those who will come to her eventually, one way or another, if their ghosts are freed. As you say: the Goddess of Death does not need to hurry.”

The priestess’s oval mask tilted. On her pattens, she was taller than both supplicants.

The Gage inclined his head.

“A ghost-maker, you say.”

“A soulless killer. A Wizard. One who murders for the joy of it. Young men, men in their prime. Men with great gifts and great... beauty.”

Surely that could not have been a catch of breath, a concealed sob. What has no eyes cannot cry.

The Gage continued, “We cannot face a Wizard without help. Your help. Please tell us, Child of the Moon: what do you do against a killer with no soul?”

Her laughter broke the stillness that followed—but it was sweet laughter, glass bells, not sardonic cruelty. She stepped down from her pattens and now both men topped her by a head. She left them lying on the flagstones, one tipped on its side, and came close. She still limped, though.

“Let me tell you a secret, one mask to another.” She leaned close and whispered. Their mirrored visages reflected one another into infinity, bronze and silver echoing. When she drew back, the Gage’s head swiveled in place and tilted to acknowledge her.

She extended a hand to the Dead Man, something folded in her fist. He offered his palm. She laid an amethyst globe, cloudy with flaws and fracture, in the hollow. “Do you know what that is?”

“I’ve seen it done,” said the Gage. “My mistress used one to create me.”

The priestess nodded. “Go with Kaalha’s blessing. Yours is a mission of mercy, masterless ones.”

She turned to go. Her slippered feet padded on stone. She left the pattens lying. She was nearly to the dais again when the Dead Man called out after her—

“Wait!”

She paused and turned.

“Why would you help us?” the Dead Man asked.

“Masterless ones?” She touched her mask with both hands, fingertips flat to mirrored cheeks. The Dead Man shuddered at the prospect of her face revealed, but she lifted them empty again. She touched two fingers to her mask and brushed away as if blowing a kiss, then let her arms fall. Her sleeves covered her gloved hands.

The priestess said, “She is also the Goddess of Orphans. Masterless Man.”

THE DEAD MAN started to slip the amethyst sphere into his sash opposite the sword as he and the Gage threaded through the crowd back to the Street of Temples. Before he had quite secured it, though, he paused and drew it forth again, holding it up to catch the sunlight along its smoky, icy flaws and planes.

“You know what this is for?”

“Give it here.”

Reluctantly, the Dead Man did so. The Gage made it vanish into his robe.

“If you know how to use that, and it’s important, it might be for the best if you demonstrated for me.”

“You have a point,” the Gage said, and—shielded in the rush of the crowd—he did so. Then he made it vanish again and said, “Well. Lead me to the lair of Attar.”

“This way.”

They walked. The Gage dropped his cowl, improving the speed of their passage. The Dead Man lowered his voice. “Tell me what you know about Messaline Wizards. I am more experienced with the Uthman sort. Who are rather different.”

“Cog used to say that a Wizard was a manifestation of the true desires, the true obsessions of an age. That they were the essence of a time refined, like opium drawn from poppy juice.”

“That’s pretty. Does it mean anything?”

The Gage shrugged. “I took service with Cog because she was Attar’s enemy.”

“Gages have lives before their service. Of course they do.”

“It’s just that you never think of it.”

The Dead Man shrugged.

“And Dead Men don’t have prior lives.”

“None worth speaking of.” Dead Men were raised to their service, orphans who would otherwise beg, whore, starve, and steal. The Caliph gave them everything—home, family, wives. Educated their children. They were said to be the most loyal guards the world knew. “We have no purpose but to guard our Caliph.”

“Huh,” said the Gage. “I guess you’d better find one.”

The Dead Man directed them down a side street in a neighborhood that lined the left bank of the river Dijlè. A narrow paved path separated the facades of houses from the stone-lined canal. In this dry season, the water ran far down in the channel.

The Gage said, “I told you I chose service with Cog because she was Attar’s enemy. Attar took something that was important to me.”

“Something? Or someone?”

The Gage was silent.

The Dead Man said, “You said Attar kills artists. Young men.”

The Gage was silent.

“Your beloved? This Abbas, have I guessed correctly?”

“Are you shocked?”

The Dead Man shrugged. “You would burn for it in Asmaracanda.”

“You can burn for crossing the street incorrectly in Asmaracanda.”

“This is truth.” The Dead Man drew his sword, inspected the faintly nicked, razor-stropped edge. “Were you an artist too?”

“I was.”

“Well,” the Dead Man said. “That’s different, then.”

BEFORE THE HOUSE of Attar the Enchanter, the Dead Man paused and tested the door; it was locked and barred so soundly it didn’t rattle. “This is his den.”

“He owns this?” the Gage said.

“Rents it,” the Dead Man answered. He reached up with his off hand and lowered his veil. His sword slid from its scabbard almost noiselessly. “How much magic are you expecting?”

“He’s a ghost-maker,” the Gage said. “He travels from murder to murder. He might not have a full workshop here. He’ll have mechanicals.”

“Mechanicals?”

“Things like me.”

“Wonderful.” He glanced up at the windows of the second and third stories. “Are we climbing in?”

“I don’t climb.” The Gage took hold of the door knob and effortlessly tore it off the door. “Follow me.”

THE GAGE’S FOOTSTEPS were silent, but that couldn’t stop the boards of the joisted floor from creaking under his armored weight. “I hate houses with cellars,” he said. “Always afraid I’m going to fall through.”

“That will only improve once we achieve the second story,” the Dead Man answered. His head turned ceaselessly, scanning every dark corner of what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary, perfectly pleasant reception room—unlighted brass lamps, inlaid cupboards, embroidered cushions, tapestry chairs, and thick rugs stacked several high over the indigo-patterned interlocking star-and-cross tiles of that creaking floor. Being on the ground floor, it was windowless.

“We’re alone down here,” said the Gage.

The staircase ascended at the back of the room, made of palm wood darkened with perfumed oils and dressed with a scarlet runner. The Gage moved toward it like a stalking tiger, weight and fluidity in perfect tension. The Dead Man paced him.

They ascended side by side. Light from the windows above reflected down. It shone on the sweat on the Dead Man’s bared face, on the length of his bared blade, on the bronze of the Gage’s head and the scratched metal that gleamed through the unpatched rent at his shoulder.

The Gage was taller than the Dead Man. His head cleared the landing first. Immediately, he snapped— “Close your eyes!”

The Dead Man obeyed. He cast his off hand across them as well, for extra protection. Still the light that flared was blinding.

The Gage might walk like a cat, but when he ran, the whole house shook. The creak of the floorboards was replaced by thuds and cracks, rising to a crescendo of jangling metal and shattering glass. The light died; a male voice called out an incantation. The Dead Man opened his eyes.

Trying to focus through swimming, rough-bordered blind spots, the Dead Man saw the Gage surrounded by twisted metal and what might be the remains of a series of lenses. Beyond the faceless man and the wreckage, a second man—broad-shouldered, shirtless above the waist of his pantaloons, of middle years by the salt in his beard but still fit—raised a flared tube in his hands and directed it at the Gage.

Wood splintered as the Gage reared back, struggling to move. The wreckage constrained him, though feebly, and his foot had broken through the floor. He was trapped.

With his off hand, the Dead Man snatched up the nearest object—a shelf laden with bric-a-brac—and hurled it at the Wizard’s head. The tube—some sort of blunderbuss—exploded with a roar that added flash-deafness to the flash-blindness that already afflicted the Dead Man. Gouts of smoke and sparks erupted from the flare—

—the wall beside the Gage exploded outward.

“Well,” he said. “That won’t endear us to the neighbors.”

The Dead Man heard nothing but the ringing in his ears. He leaped onto the seat of a Song-style ox-yoke chair, felt the edge of the back beneath his toe and rode it down. His sword descended with the force of his controlled fall, a blow that should have split the Wizard’s collarbone.

His arm stopped in mid-move, as if he had slammed it into the top of a stone wall. He jerked it back, but the pincers of the steam-bubbling crab-creature that grabbed it only tightened, and it was all he could do to hold onto his sword as his fingers numbed.

Wood shattered and metal rent as the Gage freed his foot and shredded the remains of the contraption that had nearly blinded the Dead Man. He swung a massive fist at the Wizard but the Wizard rolled aside and parried with the blunderbuss. Sparks shimmered. Metal crunched.

The Wizard barked something incomprehensible, and a shadow moved from the corner of the room. The Gage spun to engage it.

The Dead Man planted his feet, caught the elbow of his sword hand in his off hand, and lifted hard against the pain. The crab-thing scrabbled at the rug, hooked feet snagging and lifting, but he’d stolen its leverage. Grunting, he twisted from the hips and swung.

Carpet and all, the crab-thing smashed against the Wizard just as he was regaining his feet. There was a whistle of steam escaping and the Wizard shouted, jerking away. The crab-thing’s pincer ripped free of the Dead Man’s arm, taking cloth and a measure of flesh along with it.

The thing from the corner was obviously half-completed. Bits of bear- and cow-hide had been stitched together patchwork fashion over its armature. Claws as long as the Dead Man’s sword protruded from the shaggy paw on its right side; on the left they gleamed on bare armature. Its head turned, tracking. A hairy foot shuffled forward.

The Gage went to meet it, and there was a sound like mountains taking a sharp dislike to one another. Dust rattled from the walls. More bric-a-brac tumbled from the shelf-lined walls. In the street or in a neighboring house, someone screamed.

The Dead Man stepped over the hissing, clicking remains of the crab-thing and leveled his sword at the throat of the Wizard Attar.

“Stop that thing.”

The Wizard, his face boiled red along one cheek, one eye closed and weeping, laughed out loud. “Because I fear your sword?”

He grabbed the blade right-handed, across the top, and pushed it down as he lunged onto the blade, ramming the sword through his chest. Blood and air bubbled around the blade. The Wizard did not stop laughing, though his laughter took on a... simmering quality.

Recoiling, the Dead Man let go of his sword.

Meanwhile, the wheezing armature lifted the Gage into the air and slammed him against the ceiling. Plaster and stucco-dust reinforced the smoky air.

“You call yourself a Dead Man!” Attar ripped the sword from his breast and hurled it aside. “This is what a dead man looks like.” He thumped his chest, then reached behind himself to an undestroyed rack and lifted another metal object, long and thin.

The Dead Man swung an arc before him, probing carefully for footing amid the rubble on the floor. Attar sidled and sidestepped, giving no advantage. And Attar had his back to the wall.

The Gage and the half-made thing slammed to the floor, rolling in a bear hug. Joists cracked again and the floor settled, canting crazily. Neither the Gage nor the half-made thing made any sound but the thud of metal on metal, like smith’s hammerblows, and the creak of straining gears and springs.

“I have no soul,” said Attar. “I am a ghost-maker. Can your blade hurt me? All the lives I have taken, all the art I have claimed—all reside in me!”

Already, the burns on his face were smoothing. The bubbles of blood no longer rose from the cut in his chest. The Dead Man let his knees bend, his weight ground. Attar’s groping left hand found and raised a mallet. His right hand aimed the slender rod.

“ENOUGH!” boomed the Gage. A fist thudded into his face; he caught the half-made thing’s arm and used its own momentum to slam it to the ground.

The rod detonated; the Dead Man twisted to one side. Razors whisked his face and shaved a nick into his ear. Blood welled hotly as the spear embedded itself in the wall.

With an almighty crunch, the Gage rose from the remains of the half-made thing, its skull dangling from his hand. He was dented and disheveled, his robe torn away so the round machined joints of knees and elbows, the smooth segmented body, were plainly visible.

He tossed the wreckage of the half-made thing’s head at Attar, who laughed and knocked it aside with the hammer. He swung it in lazy loops, one-handed, tossed it to the other. “Come on, faceless man. What one Wizard makes, another can take apart.”

The Gage stopped where he stood. He planted his feet on the sagging floor. He turned his head and looked directly at the Dead Man.

The Dead Man caught the amethyst sphere when the Gage tossed it to him.

“A soul catcher? Did you not hear me say I am soulless? That priest’s bauble can do me no harm.”

“Well,” said the Gage. “Then you won’t object to us trying.”

He stepped forward, walking up the slope of the broken floor. He swung his fist; Attar parried with the hammer as if the blow had no force behind it at all. The Gage shook his fist and blew across it. There was a dent across his knuckles now.

“Try harder,” the Wizard said.

He kept his back to the corner, his hammer dancing between his hands. The Gage reached in, was deflected. Reached again. “It’s not lack of a soul that makes you a monster. That, beast, is your humanity.”

The Wizard laughed. “Poor thing. Have you been chasing me for Cog’s sake all these months?”

“Not for Cog’s sake.” The Gage almost sounded as if he smiled. “And I have been hunting you for years. I was a potter; my lover was a sculptor. Do you even remember him? Or are the lives you take, the worlds of brilliance you destroy, so quickly forgotten?”

The Wizard’s eyes narrowed, his head tipping as if in concentration. “I might recall.”

Again the Gage struck. Again, the Wizard parried. His lips pursed as if to whistle and a shimmer crossed his face. A different visage appeared in its wake: curly-haired, darker-complected. Young and handsome, in an unexceptional sort of way. “This one? What was the name? Does it make you glad to see his face one last time, before I take you too? Though your art was not much, as I recall—but what can you expect of—”

The Gage lunged forward, a sharp blow of the Wizard’s hammer snapping his arm into his head. The force knocked his upper body aside. But he took the blow, and the one that followed, and kept coming. He closed the gap.

He caught Attar’s hammer hand and bent it back until the bones of his arm parted with a wet, wrenching sound.

“His name was Abbas!”

The Wizard gasped and went to his knees. With a hard sidearm swing, the Dead Man stepped in and smashed the amethyst sphere against his head, and pressed it there.

It burst in his opening hand, a shower of violet glitter. Particles swirled in the air, ran in the Wizard’s open mouth, his nostrils and ears, swarmed his eyes until they stared blank and lavender.

When the Dead Man closed his hand again, with a vortex of shimmer the sphere re-coalesced.

Blank-faced, Attar slumped onto his left side, dangling from his shattered arm. The Gage opened his hand and let the body fall. “He’s not dead. Just really soulless now.”

“As soon as I find my sword I’ll repair that oversight,” the Dead Man said. He held out the amethyst. Blood streaked down his cheek, dripped hot from his ear.

“Keep it.” The Gage looked down at his naked armature. “I seem to have left my pockets on the floor.”

While the Dead Man found his blade, the Gage picked his way around the borders of the broken floor. He moved from shelf to shelf, lifting up sculptures, books of poetry, pottery vases—and reverentially, one at a time, crushing them with his dented hands.

Wiping blood from his sword, the Dead Man watched him work. “You want some help with that?”

The Gage shook his head.

“That’s how you knew he didn’t live downstairs.”

“Hmm?”

“No art.”

The Gage shrugged.

“You looking for something in particular?”

“Yes.” The Gage’s big hand enfolded a small object. He held it for a moment, cradled to his breast, and bowed his scratched mirror over it. Then he pressed his hands together and twisted, and when he pulled them apart, a scatter of wood shreds sprinkled the floor. “Go free, love.”

When he looked up again, the Dead Man was still staring out the window. “Help me break the rest of these? So the artists can rest?”

“Also so our friend here doesn’t grow his head back? Soul or no soul?”

“Yeah,” the Gage answered. “That too.”

OUTSIDE, THE DEAD Man fixed his veil and pushed his dangling sleeve up his arm, examining the strained threads and tears.

“Come on,” the Gage said. “I’ll buy you a new coat.”

“But I like this one.”

“Then let’s go to a bar.”

This one had better wine and cleaner clientele. As a result, they and the servers both gave the Dead Man and the Gage a wider berth, and the Dead Man kept having to go up to the bar.

“Well,” said the Dead Man. “Another mystery solved. By a clever man among clever men.”

“And you are no doubt the cleverest.”

The Dead Man shrugged. “I had help. I don’t suppose you’d consider a partnership?”

The Gage interlaced his hands around the foot of his cup. After a while, he said, “Serhan.”

“Yes, Gage?”

“My name was Khatijah.”

Over his veil, the Dead Man’s eyes did not widen. Instead he nodded with satisfaction, as if he had won some bet with himself. “You’re a woman.”

“I was,” said the Gage. “Now I’m a Gage.”

“It’s supposed to be a selling point, isn’t it? Become a Faceless Man and never be uncertain, abandoned, forsaken again.”

“You sound like you’ve given it some thought.”

The Dead Man regarded the Gage. The Gage tilted his featureless head down, giving the impression that he regarded the stem of his cup and the tops of his metal hands.

“And yet here you are,” the Dead Man said.

“And yet here I am.” The Gage shrugged.

“Stop that constant shrugging,” the Dead Man said.

“When you do,” said the Gage.