Chapter Three Simran
Chapter Three
Simran
The Elsewhere population on the Isle continues to grow uncontrollably.
My gentle friends, if you ever question whether the Elsewhere-born are a canker on the Isle, I encourage you to visit the slums they populate.
Look at Limehouse, riddled with crime and disease.
Turn your gaze on the industrious hamlets that border our capital, now infested with Elsewhere folk, who take our jobs in the factories and fields alike.
It cannot be borne, friends. I ask you now: What will Parliament do to stem the tide?
Source: Article in The Mail, “A Curse on Our Shores” by David Auden
Archivist’s Ruling: Preserve. Publication permitted. No further action required.
You don’t need a scribe,” Simran said. “You need a doctor.”
She could hear the drip of his blood, a steady thud against the front step.
“A doctor can’t fix me,” he replied.
“You’re bleeding,” Simran said flatly. “That strikes me as a perfect problem for a doctor—not for me.”
“Blood, I can fix myself,” he said. “But I can’t write a story into my own skin. For that, I need you.”
“It might be worth you going to Marylebone—Harley Street’s known for its scribes. I wish you luck, sir.” She began to close the door.
He stumbled forward. There was no intent in the way he moved, even as he lumbered through the door onto his knees, then his back. He moved like the tide had brought him here, a shipwreck washing to shore—or in this case, to Simran’s floorboards.
“Get up,” she said, exasperated.
“I was told a scribe lived in Limehouse,” he said, his face sweaty and tilted up toward her own. “An Elsewhere woman, brown-skinned. Go to her, I was told. She will give you everything you need. Please, I know you’re her. Don’t turn me away.”
He was far enough into the room that Simran was just about able to nudge the front door shut.
He lay with his head on the edge of the rug.
She circled him, aware of her bare legs, the ridiculousness of her fluffy slippers—and conversely, the tangled weight of magic in the pockets of her robes, and the steady, simmering power in her blood.
For all his broadness, he looked pitiful on the floor. She wouldn’t let that knock the wariness out of her.
“And what do you need a scribe for?” she asked.
“Life,” he said simply.
Simran kneeled down beside him, the floor rug cushioning her knees.
“Limni ink isn’t the gift you think it is,” she said.
“It can’t mend your bones, or take the canker out of your liver.
It’s not the kind of magic that heals, you understand?
It just stitches a little bit of a tale into you.
If you want to be a better dancer, or strong as an ox—limni ink can do that for you, for a price. But it can’t fix you, all right?”
Simran had given the same spiel more times than she could count.
She’d seen so very many desperate people in her scriptorium, eyes liquid, hands clenched, begging her for help.
She knew how this went: She was treading familiar boards, spinning familiar words by rote.
So she was ready when he said, voice rough from pain, “What price?”
“The shape of your death,” she replied. “Sometimes you can believe the rumors in the coffeehouse papers. What they say about limni ink magic is true. The gift you get from the ink will decide the way you die. You want the power of flight? You’ll die falling.
Want to be farsighted? Something you can’t see, can’t predict, will come hurtling for you on your death day.
And so on.” She shrugged. “Also, I take payment in cash. No bartering. If you want to come back when you’re not bleeding out, we can discuss cost.”
“And if I want immortality?”
“You won’t find that in limni ink,” she said. “You won’t find that anywhere.”
He rolled onto his stomach, then up onto his elbows.
She heard his harsh breath. He was a strange-looking man, his face angular, his body broad-shouldered and brutish, his skin and hair as pale as limestone.
His eyes were as pale as the rest of him, a silver-gold shot through with pink blood from pain or exhaustion.
“Then I’ll take another gift, if you’ll help me,” he said.
“Go on.”
Slowly, he raised his head.
“Help me, witch,” he said, with liquid-eyed sincerity, “by letting me kill you.”
She went very still.
She hadn’t let her guard down. She’d known there was something amiss before he’d even drifted in through her door, all blood and bulk and damp eyes.
But that didn’t stop her stomach from plummeting, or her body going very cold, then very hot, as fear and anger started to burn up inside her.
Furiously, she realized he was not really hurt at all.
Beneath the blood on his knuckles, his skin was unblemished. He’d tricked her.
“Get out,” she said, voice low.
“Don’t reject me out of hand, witch,” he said.
His voice had changed—the pain in it was gone, leaving nothing but the storm-darkness beneath it.
“You only know the shape of your tale, but not the way it will cut through your tendons, crack the marrow of your bones. You are just meat to be slaughtered to feed this island, but the slaughter itself—it will hurt you in ways you can’t fathom.
Let me kill you now, lay down your life, and I’ll make it gentle. ”
Simran stood up. She stepped back; one step, two. She never took her eyes off him.
“If you know what I am,” she said, low, “then you know what I will do to you if you don’t leave now.”
“Do you dream of your deaths, witch? A knife through the heart, an axe through the belly. All of them wielded by such beloved hands. I pity you. You should pity yourself.” He rose to his knees, then to his feet.
He wasn’t swaying anymore. “Have you ever considered escaping your tale—taking a knife to your own throat, or supping from poison? Perhaps you haven’t.
But your life isn’t your own to take. You can feel it, I’m sure—the tale’s claws in your veins, holding you like a puppet on strings.
If you tried, your hands would turn against your will.
I followed the scent of the story on you.
I know its strength.” His voice made her skin crawl.
The plea in it was blazing. “Let me be the hands you need.”
“I don’t know who you are,” said Simran.
“I don’t know how you know me. But I will drip a curse into your eyes that makes you see waking nightmares.
I will curse your footsteps with knives.
I will set the teeth of imps in your veins, so you never rest. Don’t fuck with a witch, you bastard. Get out.”
“Oh, Isadora,” he said, shaking his head. “So much sharper this time than the last, aren’t you? Close your eyes, I beg you. I’ll free you so swiftly, it will be like sleep.”
She stumbled away from him, and he moved forward, both his feet on the rug. It was enough.
She snapped her fingers and he froze. His breath left his mouth raggedly.
His eyes, unblinking, were cold and wide with fury.
The trap she’d drawn when she first set up her scriptorium—carved from bone-ash and thorns from grave-grown flowers, and hidden neatly beneath her rug—held him fast. At the skin of his throat, she could see the shadow of her magic ripple through his flesh.
“I told you I’d make you pay,” Simran said.
“Can you feel thorns under your skin, stranger? Does it hurt like a thousand knives? It should. And I can do so much more than this, if you’re not honest with me.
Who sent you here? Why do you want me dead?
” She circled him. “Speak,” she commanded, and his mouth was freed from the compulsion that held the rest of him.
“It was Bess who told me where to find you, and what you are, witch. I met her in Gore,” he said. “Beneath the blackthorn tree, where the ghost deer roam and the heathen temple stands.”
A punch of breath left her.
“What have you done to Bess?” she demanded.
His mouth shaped a smile.
“Let me go and I’ll show you,” he said. “No? Then allow me.”
His arms rose up.
Magic required specific tools to be broken.
Magic came from tales, and tales had rules.
Silver to break a fairy ring. Keen eyes to find the shape of an enchantment: the illusory toadstool, or the magic door beneath the veil of an archway or a common wall.
Binding vows with one singular loophole, and magic traps with lines that had to be broken to set the snared prey free.
The stranger tore through the magic trap—and the rules—as if they didn’t matter at all. One sweep of his arms, and the trap was burning, the floorboards russet with embers. Simran was hit with a blast of her own magic, spelled thorns ripping through her veins in a sudden shock of bright-hot pain.
She screamed.
Maleficium skittered out from under the sofa, a many-legged, panicking pancake of fluff.
Simran’s heart plummeted with fear for the silly creature and she scrabbled across the floor, grabbing Mal around her ruffled middle.
The stranger was moving behind her, floorboards creaking, his breath a warning at her back.
But it was a noise from her bedroom that made her jerk her head up.
Hari was standing in the doorway of the bedroom, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, in nothing but his boxers and a half-open shirt.
“Shut the door,” Simran snapped, and flung Maleficium at him.
Maleficium yowled, and Hari screamed, and then man and cat met in a frenzy of fur and claws.
It wasn’t clear if he’d caught her or if Mal had simply latched onto him with every single one of the knives in her feet, but the effect was the same.
By some miracle, Hari managed to pin Maleficium safely against his chest, flail back into the bedroom, and kick the door shut as he did so.