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I – The Young
Anton Sokolov was twenty years old; a prodigy and a genius. But then, they all were. You had to be to get into the Academy; it wasn’t a school so much as a body of advanced thought and broken boundaries. There were so many wings which the Abbey of the Everyman could never enter here. The most exceptional of students were fast growing unholy.
Anton Sokolov was not one of them.
The heater in his room sang songs like a diseased whale through the winter months; groaning and hissing and rattling thoughts out of the Tyvian’s skull before they could take proper form. Dunwall’s winters freeze the Wrenhaven solid: the heater can never turn off. He told maintenance three times before they listened (they said they couldn’t make sense of his words, that his A’s sounded E’s and his TH’s like Z’s. The first time he’d asked, they forgot to make a note of it but remembered each to perfect an impression.)
Anton had been writing an essay on the use of electrodes resulting in light when the technician came up. Greatness had been tantalisingly close, but the knock at the door batted it away. So he snapped at the worker, more so when her gender was realised. It was an insult that they sent a woman to fix his pipes; she was probably the weakest of the unit and all they’d bother to dispatch to the destitute lodges. He asked her what her father thought of her taking this job, and she replied her father thought nothing at all of her. Father had two sons and two daughters and she was not the pretty one. (“Where do you suppose the poor, clever women of this isle go to when they wish to know the world? This is as close as I get. There'll be no scholarship for me; only a lifetime of peeking over men’s shoulder as they write papers full of mistakes I can never point out.” “And this?” He had waved his own work; “Do you see mistakes here?” “A great many, and they are breeding like flies.”)
The heater got fixed very quickly after that; she told him he would hear no more song. He never once looked at her; his mind too preoccupied with the tormenting itch of a solution close at hand, disregarding her rudeness as he had been rude first and he didn’t want to be known as the student female workers snapped back at. He can feel the conclusion of the paper humming in his mind, and it will be great. He will be great. They will see his brilliance and not mock his name when they speak it.
Anton Sokolov should have looked properly when he thanked her.
He would have seen that her eyes were black.
II – the Painting
When Sokolov grew a little older, a little bolder and surer of himself in the society of the bone-built city, he took up painting. That was in his fourth year of study at the Academy; a time when his peers were very much acquainted with the genius that was Anton Sokolov, but the world at large was less convinced. He had been at his most brilliant then, but he’d not known that. He’d thought he was only just beginning.
The painting came about after an aristocrat called Arthur Blane saw Anton Sokolov’s diagram portraying the inner workings of a Pandyssian Snow Hare. You see colours very clearly, don’t you? He’d clapped him on the back as he spoke, as though he had permission to touch. Now, see, I’ll give you good money if you paint my wife. Come to the manor this weekend, we’ll do a sitting.
Anton Sokolov may have been known and great and known by then, but he was still poor and Tyvian and poor, so he painted the woman. Then he painted her daughters; spoiled little sharp-tongued brats named Alyse and Ella. He hadn’t even bothered to try and make them look pretty, but Blane liked the scowl he’d captured on their dark brows: he’d said it made them seem austere. Distant. Aristocrats loved to look untouchable, Sokolov was learning that. He also was learning to appreciate the touch of coin in hand, learning to appreciate warmed rooms and food enough to sate a stomach; learning to appreciate that where coin ran short, celebrity could be of help.
So he painted more pictures and the world knew him twice over.
One: Sokolov of Science.
Two: Sokolov of Art.
(Your reputation precedes you, they’d say, trying very hard to ignore the dark stains on his shirt, and then they’d ask how he thought they looked in this light. Like cold gruel, usually, but when he was hungry he said something a little more prudent than that.)
One day, when Anton Sokolov was on Slaughterhouse Row recording the sighing of dying whales, he was recognised by a child. The boy was a wader: one of the small sorts who rummaged through the thick, bloody run off pools searching for shards of bone to boil up into whale glue. The child had had teeth broken up like all the white bits he sought, and hair matted thick from congealing blood. He’d looked like some sort of Devil Spawn, or would have had he not been so clearly nervous.
“Excuse me, are you Mr Anton Sokolov?” there was a Pandyssian lilt to his speech, and pleasant as that quality was, it was still not what he’d come to record. Sokolov had punched the audio-graph off from recording, his voice terse as he’d kept his pen held tight.
“I am.”
“I’m – it’s only – I read the Arts in the papers, and saw your painting of Mrs Moray and it was so beautiful, I put the paper up on my wall. I like the way you did her eyes.”
“I’ve always wanted to be an artist,” the boy kicked his heels, looking down in a fit of shyness, worsened perhaps by Anton Sokolov’s lack of response. “I found a crystal in the gutters by my house once, and sold it for fifty to a Hatter. I bought colours with the coin, and did my street… could I – may I show you?”
It took a moment for Sokolov to grasp his point, his mind still on whales and their wailing; “A painting?”
“Yeah-”
He deliberated for only a small moment, before taking pity on the red soul before him, and told him he'd be in the same spot here, with the great gold eye staring down, on Thursday at one. The boy had thanked him with another broken up smile, and bowed down low, then each of them returned to work.
The picture given on that Thursday was of a street called Blue Lane, and the wader had painted his brother, and his sister, and his brother spinning in a ring and singing slum songs. Another boy watched them in the distance; this boy had bruises under his eyes and his fingers in his mouth. At his foot, there was a white rat. It was good. Childish, poor shading, but good lines. The water on the street looked good too. He said he’d put it on his wall, and the boy’s face had lit up like a whale lamp.
(“I’m glad you like it, thank you sir thankyou, treasure it please and thankyou.”)
Anton Sokolov didn’t put it on his wall.
He put it in a drawer when he got home.
He put it in the bottom drawer of his desk, to pin up when he found a frame for it, and there it waited for years, unlooked upon, the canvas softening with the damp which pooled, creeping up from the floor.
Anton Sokolov should have put it up as he had promised.
If he had, he would have seen the boy at street’s end making friends over the month. These friends were black and grey and had long tails and whiskers and red eyes and yellow teeth. He would have seen the boy running with his friends, playing over the cobbles and seen the boy fall to sleep with a white rat sitting on his chest.
He would have seen the boy’s friends eat him alive.
III – the Beggar
When he was rich and known and great and rich, he had a friend called Esmond Roseburrow. Esmond was glorious; it was he who had been responsible for the harnessing of the innate blue brilliance of the whales; he who stole the stars they’d been secreting in souls for a thousand years, he who had bottled Dunwall’s industrial revolution for a price. That price had been fame, coin enough to drown a man, universal respect, the ear of the isles, brains blown out all over a mahogany desk.
Oh, yes. Because Roseburrow killed himself.
He did it with a gun he had designed too. Anton Sokolov had been in town when it had happened, and he’d thought it was the most important event to ever occur to him. But he was wrong. The important thing had happened the day before. It had sat on the floor.
The thing was a beggar child, with eyes hollow as the toll of an Abbey bell, his fingers were wrapped in white bandages about the palm for warmth, yet at the ends gnawed until they wept pink. The boy still had had little milk teeth, so it was difficult to tell if it was the rats or himself who bit his hands up like that. (It wasn’t difficult to tell, Anton, it was the rats.)
Anton Sokolov passed him most days, and would spare a coin when his mind was not pursuing loftier things. The boy never thanked him, so he never got much. Coin of ten, maybe twenty. Anton had a hundred times that squirreled away in material goods: Anton Sokolov was rich. But he was also busy.
“Sir,” the boy had stopped him that important day, getting up off the rags on the floor to beseech the natural philosopher. He put his hands on the man’s coat, clinging like a baby. “Have you change?”
Anton had shaken him off, irritated that the beggar boy had put his ugly pink paws upon the rich cloth of his coat. Upon his person. As though he had permission to touch. And the boy had fallen down, Anton hadn’t stopped, he’d snapped “No change!” and tucked his cold nose into the warm knit of his scarf, then thought no more of it, because there were plans eating up his brain. Plans to wrap Esmond’s white light around a wall in the city; plans to charge the air up with brilliance and fear. Higher plans, wild things. Things that shouldn’t have been more important than the boy on the floor, but if he was being honest to himself, they were. They were great things.
The greatest thing with the dark eyes sat in the grime of the gutter as Anton Sokolov grew smaller in the distance, and in the soul. Anton Sokolov’s brain was electric, but he knew so little of the world that he threw the Outsider in the dirt. The lonely boy shivered, and his black eyes began to ache.
He rubbed them until he saw stars and the darkness leapt out, taking original form to become a young man. The Outsider was dressed like a dock worker, all brown and drab, with bitten fingernails and a coat buttoned with bone. He wore the same smile as the child’s dead father.
“Come,” the Outsider held out a cold hand for the boy to take. “Let us go feed the rats.”