“Tell me how you know all this,” I say.
The man pauses at the passenger’s-side door, illuminated by the reflection of headlights off trees and wet pavement. Slowly, he removes his hand from his face. The flap of skin falls open and no blood gushes from the wound. There is no wound, exactly. In the smile of sliced flesh, I do not see blood or tendons or muscle.
I see a light golden skull made of plastic-like material.
“What? What are…” I stutter, reeling, unable to get the words out.
Only now do I consider the insane idea tickling the back of my mind. This tall, perfectly symmetrical man is made of clockwork, his body laced with metal and plastic—all of it sculpted into a human form.
“Who are you?” I whisper.
The man allows a small smile to tug at his lip under his mustache.
“I am Peter Alexeyevich,” he says. “Almost a century ago, I fought my way across the snowy battlefields of Stalingrad. On the banks of the Volga, I lost something of immeasurable value. Now, I have found it again.”
“The avenging angel…” I whisper to myself.
“The relic you carry around your neck, June…it has always been mine to protect.”
PART TWO
ISKAT’
(Searching)
Then I lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and behold….His body was like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of lightning, and his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet like in color to polished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude.
—DANIEL 10:5–6
16
HELSINKI, 1725
The little girl who was my first sight very nearly became my last.
As I lie in the damp grass of the empty steppe, a disemboweled carcass, Elena strips the bloodstained armor from the fallen bandits, collects their weapons and their horses, and retraces our steps to gather the scattered pieces of my body that were left behind in yesterday’s battle.
With small hands and smaller fingers, Elena does her best to restore me. Hunched together under the driving wind, concealed in the waving grass, the girl fits me back together like a puzzle. She is surprisingly adept, pinching metal clamps with hard fingers and lacing my wounds tightly closed with strips of leather. By the time Elena is finished, I am able to stand and limp to the strongest horse. Mounted, we abandon the slaughtered bandits and leave their bodies to be consumed by roots of grass.
“You learned much from Favorini,” I say. “Things he did not teach.”
“My eyes are always open,” she says.
Though my limbs are partly repaired, there is little Elena can do about my appearance. The skin of my cheek hangs in my peripheral vision, and the brass planes of my face are battered. For two days, we ride west, into the kingdom of Finland, staying to the icy north and avoiding all contact with human beings.
Finally, we reach a plague-struck port village.
Elena and I make a monstrous pair, riding out of the frozen waste at sunset and into the lamplight of the settlement called Helsinki. We draw our riding cloaks tight around us, faces hidden under dark hoods. Stitched, bolted, and wound back together by leather cord, my features are set into a permanent grimace, brass work exposed beneath yawning tears in my skin. Elena is not much better, fabric and curls of fake hair concealing the chilling sight of her porcelain doll’s face, those pursed red lips painted onto a death mask.
“They’ll kill us, Peter,” says Elena. “Why don’t we hide in the woods?”
“Because we are not beasts. And besides, the elements will kill us, too,” I respond in a low voice. “Protect our secret, and we will pass among the humans. There is no other way to escape the empress.”
Helsinki is a simple fishing village, perched on the gulf shared with Peter’s expanding city of Saint Petersburg. The Oriental plague has decimated the population here, leaving few alive. Those who survived were further devastated by the Great Northern War. The defeated Swedish king wintered his navy here, gutting the city when its usefulness as a staging zone had gone. Now, the village is mostly a burned husk and its main street a muddy trench, the cobblestones harvested for ship’s ballast and the remnants left behind like broken teeth.
On the outskirts, stringy-haired, sickly children gather around us, begging for scraps. The blood on our clothes is ignored, too common a sight to draw notice. The possibility of gold or bread in our pockets is what makes us welcome.
Nothing else matters.
I soon notice the ravages of the plague have left many folk here with scars. The grotesque pockmarks and twists of flesh are often blamed on devils, so many wear masks to hide their deformities. Their shadowed faces lurk in the dim light springing from licks of whale-oil flame, wretched creatures, their shivering bodies wreathed in streams of oily smoke that climb to a ceiling of stars.
I find a traveler selling masks from the island city of Venetia, where covering one’s face is tradition. Flipping a coin to the man from my steed, I lean down and lift a thin bronze mask from his shaking hands. The bright curve of metal is inlaid with elaborate carvings of winged horses. Holding it to my face and peering through its empty eyes, I turn to Elena on her steed.
“How do I look?” I ask.
She takes a long moment to consider.
“Horrible, Brother,” she says.
I try and fail to make a smile, nudging my horse to a canter. Together, we move straight through the town until we reach the docks. Here, we find men of the sea, drinking at a tavern that lies a stone’s throw from the ice-cold water of the bay.
Our faces hidden, it is our voices that save us this night.
The clear piping trill of youth comes from under Elena’s cloak, and the commanding gravel of my own voice rumbles from a towering vantage atop my steed. Speaking from behind the mask, I am able to rent a room above the tavern. And hailing a ship’s captain who is deep in his rum, I trade away the horses, saddles, and our remaining money for a terrible price, barely securing the purchase of two large chests and their passage to London.
As I shake hands with the captain, I notice his steward standing nearby, a corpulent man with high, round cheeks peeking over reddish-blond muttonchops. The man is pretending very hard not to listen. I flash a glare at him on my way out, my ruined face sinister behind the sculpted contours of the bronze mask.
The man hurries away. It will have to be enough.
Delivered to our room above the tavern, we find the chests waiting for us, squat and sturdy.
“Do you think it will work?” Elena asks me, running her fingers lightly across a rough iron band.
“The imperial guard is searching for a man and a girl fleeing from the mainland,” I say, resting my hand over hers. “They are not looking for two sealed chests, however heavy they might be.”