Perpetually in shade, our flat is a single bare room embedded in a long wooden building, poorly constructed, creaking like the hold of the ship we just left and continually rocked by the arguments, shouting matches, drunken laughter, and screaming children of the gin-soaked wretches who eke out their short lives here.
Elena and I secure rent on our leftover coin, and count ourselves lucky our health is not affected by the skin-numbing cold of the fog or the pinch of hunger that daily afflicts these people. Fleas and parasites swarm over our bodies and eventually leap away, still searching for food. On the first night, I listen as a drunken man is robbed, then loudly and slowly beaten to death in the lane below us.
Without the mandate of my first sovereign, and hunted by his successor, a troubling question is growing in my heart—how shall I serve my Word? An aching pain is seeping into my bones. Abandoned to the world of men, how am I meant to make justice from injustice? Am I beholden to the king of this new land?
I quietly slip outside into the lane. Later, I return, my khanjali wet with blood.
Elena greets me at the top of the narrow stairs. She stands in the doorway to our dark, bare room, thin arms crossed over her chest. The weight of despair rests heavy in the curve of her shoulders.
I believe I understand why.
Under the fairy glow of the city’s skyline, we have found only chaos. In Peter’s empire, Elena and I lived in opulence, the events of each day lined up like a neat row of fence posts. Ensconced in the royal keep, we were protected from harm—given purchase to explore books and tutors and trainers. I would prefer even the half-built bog of Saint Petersburg to this great bleeding wound of a city.
“We cannot stay here,” says Elena, retreating from the stairs into our room. “We need to find others like us, the message writers.”
Following her inside, I keep my back to the window and empty the coin purse I took from the thief into my palm. His stinking body still lies on the stairs below, face twisted in disbelief at his final sight. I am careful to keep the coins from clinking together as I count them—these walls are thin and the people here are poor and desperate, willing to risk everything for nothing.
“You know that is too dangerous,” I say, lighting our only lamp. “Besides, what would you have me do? We have no means. No way to disguise ourselves among the humans.”
Elena stands at the window, taps a finger against her chin, thinking.
“We need finances,” she says. “You’ll have to earn them, as nobody will pay attention to a child. But we’ve got advantages. You are strong, intimidating…nearly impervious to harm, and you’re a fighter.”
“I cannot show my face,” I say, turning to her and removing the ornate mask that covers my eyes and cheeks. The patched leather skin of my face looks strange from a distance, menacing in the feeble flame of a whale-oil lamp, and in broad daylight I would horrify anyone directing half a glance in my direction. “And I will not break pravda.”
“Simple constraints,” she says, thinking. “For now, you must continue to use the mask and speak little. The job I shall find for you will not require daylight…and it will be honorable enough.”
Elena sets to strategizing, and, before dawn, my new career has begun.
The job of debt collector is available to anyone brave or foolish enough to take it. Myriad private banks have sprung up, their notice boards sprouting sheaves of debtor warrants like leaves. Debtor’s prisons are eager to pay for the men and women who have failed in their financial obligations—criminals running from justice, in their view. And so I set my will to the hunt. After scanning the notice boards, I find my eyes can pick out faces in the crowds and my ears ring to the names I have read, spoken in the chatter of the street.
Over the months, I become a regular attendee of the public hangings or pillories. Finding my place the night before, I wait behind hidden windows and watch, never sparing a glance for whatever doomed soul stands on the gallows. Instead, my gaze devours the roaring mass of the audience, the faces of my prey blinking into notice one by one, their features twisted into rage or amusement or curiosity at the suffering of the person gone swinging.
Debtors soon learn to fear the man in the bronze mask—the dark one who comes at night for those who owe, never speaking, with a grip like stone. Because I do not prey on the poor debtors of my neighborhood—only the wealthy from other quarters—my name is often celebrated in the Lanes. And though I overhear many toasts made to me, none are made in my presence. The sweep of my cloak and sheen of my mask inspire only silence and dread.
Declining social invitations is not an issue.
Elena, for her part, spends the early years as a doll, locked away at home where she can draw no attention. Business is good, and I am well suited for it. Soon, I rent the flat next door to use as a holding room for my prisoners. My wealthiest debtors gladly pay any fee I ask to be held outside true debtors’ prison—wisely avoiding exposure to degraded conditions that more often than not lead to disease and death.
And all this while, Elena is trapped with few books and no outside company. She takes to pacing the perimeter of our room like a caged animal, moving day and night with steady tapping footsteps that send shivers of guilt racing through me. Withdrawn and sullen, she speaks less and less, sometimes sitting for hours without moving.
For my part, I find that each guilty person whom I collect and punish according to the law of this new land only satisfies some small, fleeting aspect of pravda. All around me, I witness injustices great and small. But without orders from my tsar I have no direction, reduced to running collection routes and neglecting my true purpose.
My Word becomes a gnawing hunger inside me.
I return one morning to find Elena standing by our drafty window. Her fractured face is lit in the harsh dawn glare, streaked with hard rays of sunlight filtered through coal smoke and river miasma. She holds an ornate hand mirror, looking at her reflection, idly tracing fingers across the curve of her sculpted lips.
“I need to go outside,” she says. “I need to see.”
“But your face—” I say. Interrupting me, she points out the window to a factory along the river. A tannery.
“It is time to fix that,” she says. “For both of us.”
Elena has chosen an artist after months spent researching and corresponding with dozens of leatherworkers. He is a young man, handsome and talented—a doll maker in his spare time. Feigning the role of a plague survivor, I approach him from behind my mask and offer him a vague job. He is wary, but from my reputation, he knows I can pay. And his fear recedes when I place a sizable banknote in his soot-stained hand.
The next day, armed with a sheath of supple calfskin and a satchel of tools, the leatherworker enters our flat. He swallows, standing rigid and ready to flee as he gazes upon Elena’s doll-like body. Dressed in her finest gown, the little girl lies perfectly still on a bed of straw in a small square of light from the only window.