When Celia Ste. Marie slept, she dreamt of other worlds. In them, she saw quicksilver glimpses of rust-stained landscapes awash in orange and red. Ravaged bone-white temples and iron towers dominated the rocky terrain; above, a field of stained-glass flowers hanging in the sky, stems swaying in the wind. There, crowded round the stems, were the creatures she called the Strangers. Gangly, long-limbed fuckers, scrapping with each other for a desperate taste of the liquid starlight that dripped from their stems.
Sometimes she spent hours wandering that dreamy landscape, a ghost the Strangers could not see but sometimes sensed. Once, when she was little, Celia joined them for a taste and felt a gold-brass burn spread all through her body. Each evening, when the bells of St. Seb’s church began to chime, echoing amongst the graves and mausoleums of Pensioner’s Rest, Celia Ste. Marie would wake and claw her way from her bed to a makeshift firepot to brew a desperate cup of coffee, living her life on opposite hours from the rest of Volgstadt. Coffee in hand, she took up a spot in her apartment window and considered her dreams whilst watching the graveyard below. Local legend said the bells called spirits back from the veil to the waking world. More than once Celia thought she saw figures moving between rows of tombstones in the evening mist.
I am such a spirit, she thought. Awakened by the bells.
But unlike those spirits, Celia Ste. Marie was still a thing of flesh, blood, and hunger. She needed to eat. Once she finished her coffee, she took up brush, oil, and acrylic, dug out a discarded plank of wood or some canvas stolen from a trash heap, and painted. Because she was poor, she treated every color as something precious–and deployed them with a kind of precision that comes only with practice and obsession.
Some nights she painted for hours. Others, round ten, a light knock would find its way to her door. Rhona. Curves and lips and ginger hair and smelling of sweet tarts and peach crumble pie. Celia Ste. Marie was always starving, and whenever Rhona came round she wanted to devour her. She made do with kisses. A thousand little kisses at the corners of Rhona’s mouth and up and down her arms and all along her neck. Then the two of them would tumble into bed, and Celia’s kisses would find their way up Rhona’s thighs. No matter how much they kissed Celia only ever got hungrier. Kissing meant not painting. Not painting meant not making money. Not making money meant getting hungrier. And when Celia’s money began to run out, Rhona’s kisses began to run out–and then Celia Ste. Marie knew she would have to go to market and sell some of her work.
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All cities possess one character by day, another by night. Having lived in Streissberg and Port Sorrow, Celia Ste. Marie knew this to be particularly true of Volgstadt. Under the sight of the sun, Volgstadt held all the charm of a humorless banker–driven by schedules and agendas–but when the sun dripped from the sky, the gray lady of Volgstadt took down her hair, applied rouge to her cheeks, and bathed her winding cobblestone streets in guttering lamplight. Brass bands played along the Old King’s Road and her public houses shook with the sounds of bawdy songs and raucous laughter.
On the nights Rhona did not knock and Celia Ste. Marie did not lose herself in paint, she gathered up a few of her pieces, wrapped them in wool, bound them with twine, and tossed them over her shoulder like a backpack. Down the stairs and out the door, past her landlord, Old Lumley, and the wild cats that kept him company.
“Off to market?” Lumley asked.
“That’s right.”
“Let me see ’em.”
“I ain’t got time, stalls will all be gone.”
The old man waved her off with a grin. “Sure and sure. No time for Old Lumley.”
Guilt caught at her. She stopped, turned on her heel, and walked back to give the old man a hug. “Come now, don’t read into nothing. One night this week we’ll drink and lay some paint down together. I’ve got two good boards I found near the quarry.”
“Alright,” said Lumley, nodding his head. “Sounds good to me.”
“Wish me luck.”
“Good luck.”
She left the building and cut across St. Seb’s Street, down the winding vein of Old King’s Road, until she came to the vendor’s entrance of the Penny Markets, where an acne-scarred man with bushy eyebrows stopped her.
“Stall or stand, lad?”
“Stall,” Celia answered.
“Three rams.”
“Three? Not two?”
“Price is up.”
“Bunch of shit.”
“Pay or go, I’ve not got time to bargain.”
“Three’s all I’ve got.”
“Lucky you, innit?”
Three rams for the man’s hand. She felt lighter for having lost them. That hungry something in her carved its way a little deeper. Silently, she did her calculations. Three rams, maybe four, for each of the three paintings she’d brought. One to break even, one to keep her roof, and one to keep her belly full.
Not enough for paint.
The stall was red and white number with a pinstripe canopy. A woman to her left sold birds, whilst a tattooed man on her right worked people up with ink and a needle. Pretty kind of canvas, she thought. The markets were quiet early and she chatted up the two of them. Talked pigments with the inker, while the bird lady watched her like a crow bothered by something it couldn’t make sense of.
“You a boy or a girl?” the bird lady asked.
“More or less,” said Celia.
“That’s not an answer.”
“Course it is. Just not the one you wanted.”
“Awful crowd tonight,” the lady muttered. “Not a coin in sight.”
“It’ll pick up. Coins’ll come when the bars close. They’ll come for music and drinks and bad decisions. Why you sellin’ birds at night?”
“Night birds is better.”
“Why?”
“Someone buys a bird during they day, they got a plan for that bird. Bird’s bound for a cage or an oven and a pie and not nothing will keep ’em from that fate. But someone buys a bird at night? It’s either cause they’re drunk and hungry or they’re havin’ a laugh. Either way, my birds’ll give ’em the slip. I got ’em trained so they come back to me.
“They come back to you?”
“Unless they get et, ya.”
“You train ’em?”
The woman shrugged. “Train some. Eat some. Birds is like people. The clever ones make it, the rest get chewed up and shat out.”
Fuckin’ Volgstadt. Celia loved the gray lady and all her mad children. Could meet anyone at any time and anything at all could happen. Not priced for a person to live with anything approaching ease–but her streets and the people on them brimmed with a strange magic that made the cost worth it.
As the night wore on, a motley collection of bohemians, bluecoats, and nobles poured into the Penny Markets. The first bite on Celia’s paintings came from a well-dressed couple out of Five Coins, both high on the green snuff. The lady obsessed over her riverscape, gushing over it at length–talking about serpents dancing in the sky. Celia smiled politely and agreed with everything she said.
When it came time to purchase, her man put up a fight. Fifteen minutes haggling back and forth, but the man held firm at two rams. Even when his lady whined and begged and covered him in kisses, the stingy bastard didn’t budge. At twelve bells from St. Seb’s, Celia reluctantly agreed to the sale. Best to cover costs, she thought. A small loss is better than a large one.
Next hour she got a lot of lookers, but nothing serious. An older gent and his young dandy. The older chap was dressed in outdated fashions and scars from the war, his dandy wearing gaudy makeup and dripping in fake jewels. Next, a stern-faced engineer from Streissberg. She wore a tappertine suit and paisley blazer. Took a minute for Celia to realize that the engineer was more interested in her than her paintings, and she politely moved her along. After the engineer came the barkeep from The Harrowed Hen, looking to hide a crack in the wall of his public house. All made offers, but none wanted to pay full price. Celia could not bear to take another loss, so she held firm.
A mistake. Maybe the worst of her life. Decent hours came and went, and a mangy looking fellow in moth-eaten finery approached her stall. No touch of the green in his eyes, but he looked off all the same. Chalky skin, dried like wax paper, and a peculiar frenzy in his mannerisms.
“You painted this?” the man asked, stabbing a finger towards her painting of the Tenpenny Riots. She’d painted that one as she’d seen it. She and Rhona joined the mobs and marched up the Old King’s Road. Celia with her easel, Rhona carting her paints and canvas. A night of music, violence, and catharsis–if not liberation.
“I did.”
“It’s good. Quite good. What’s your name?”
“Celia Ste. Marie.”
He scoffed. “You’re a woman?”
“I’m an artist.”
“I’m Basil. Basil Reeve.” He gestured again toward the painting. “You were there?”
“I was.”
“Me too,” the strange man said, nodding vigorously. “Me too. Shame we stopped at the cathedral. Should have gone all the way to the assembly, put the piebellies on spits and eaten them like rats.”
“Maybe,” Celia said, trying to seem agreeable. “I think the unions got their point across.” In truth, she did not trust him. Not precisely, at least. Yes, the labor unions had marched, and yes they’d broken windows and defaced some walls, but they’d marched for fair pay, better conditions, and protection from the abuses of the city watch. Not to burn down the city they all loved.
“How much for it?”
“Three rams.”
“I’ll give you one.”
“Get fucked. That’s an insult, sir.”
“One is all you’ll get. Give it to me as a favor to a fellow revolutionary.”
She spat. “You’re not my fellow, and I don’t take favors in trade. They don’t pay the rent or put food in my belly.”
“I’m doing you a service, taking it off your hands.”
Celia prickled. For a moment, she was thirteen and Harlan Bright was lying bloodied at her feet, three teeth short of a full set. “Feels more like you’re wasting my time.”
Reeve would not budge, nor would he leave her be. As they went back and forth, his tone became more unmanaged, and the crowds began avoiding her stall. Some of them had fine coats and lots of rings and heavy purses full of coin.
“I’m not selling to you. Move on, you’re costing me business.”
“It’s a free city, I’ll stand where I want and say what I want.”
As the situation began to boil over, an impressive shadow cut between them. A great bear of a man with sixday of stubble and a wild mane of honey-brown hair stepped up to her stall. Celia thought he might be the biggest man she’d ever seen. He wore a fine doublet, leather breeches, and a pair of worn military boots. Veteran written all over him. Money, too. He gestured towards one of her dreamscapes. “Pardon me, sir, did you paint this?”
Basil wheeled on him. “Wait your turn, sir. We are in negotiations!”
“I’ve been waiting patiently for my turn, but I have a feeling it might never come. The lad said to move on, so it’s time to move on.”
“I’m not leaving without that painting.”
The big man’s hand fell to the hilt of a large hunting knife at his belt. “You sure about that? Care to wager?”
Reeve bared his teeth and snarled. If he was scared, he didn’t show it. Reeve lunged for Wulf and in an eye-blink the big man’s knife was at Reeve’s throat. The two men struggled for a moment, wrestling over the knife–to Celia’s shock, it looked as though the little man might get the better of him.
“Think twice on that,” the tattooed inker called, not bothering to look up from his work. “That’s Aloysius Wulf, the witch’s creature. Best believe she would not like to hear of you marking up her hound. Cross her and you’ll find yourself a frog or something worse, no doubt.”
Mention of the witch gave Reeve pause where the big man’s size did not. The madman drew back, releasing his grip on the other man’s wrist. “You’re Aloysius Wulf?”
“I am.”
“Do your business.”
“Thank you sir. You’re stronger than you look–but careless with your life.” Wulf sheathed the knife he’d used to go for Basil’s throat, and for the first time Celia realized it had a sister–one held right to the little man’s belly and ready to paint the market with his intestines.
Aloysius Wulf turned his attention to Celia. Even so, she noted that he stood so as to keep Reeve at the corner of his sight. He inclined his head toward the dreamscape–one of the ones with the Strangers and their stained-glass flowers. “Your painting–you dreamed this?”
“I did.”
“My mistress would pay good money for this and any others like it. How much?”
Celia sensed opportunity. “Six,” she said, raising her number on the spot. She didn’t know much about the witch beyond her reputation for deep pockets and causing trouble.
The big man rubbed his chin. “Eight, but you give me that one of the riots as well.”
“You can’t–” Basil spat, bewildered by the turn of events.
“Done,” said Celia, unable to hide her grin. Both her hands were trembling as she took them and began to wrap them up. Eight and two made ten. Not as much as she’d hoped for, but more than she needed. Enough for rent and food and a few more pots of paint.
“I have more.”
The big man passed a pouch of rams into her hand. “You know where her house is?”
“Ragsman’s Row, innit?”
Wulf nodded. “Come by tomorrow. She’ll want to talk.” Clasping her arm, he pulled her close and spoke in a whisper. “Be careful getting home, lad. Something off about that fellow.”
“I’ll be fine. All bark, no bite, that sort.”
“I’m not so sure. I think that one has teeth.”
“I got teeth too,” she said, putting her hand to her clasp knife.
Celia packed her things quick as she could and made for the market’s exit. Basil followed. She tried losing him in the crowds along the Old King’s Road, but the little man stayed on her trail like a bloodhound. She was beginning to panic when her luck turned and he bumped into a pair of bluecoats twice his size.
“Out of my way,” Reeve growled, trying to push his way past.
One of the bluecoats–a great bear of a man with a mane of yellow-blonde hair and a thick beard–gave a menacing laugh. “You mad, gutterboy? Putting your hands on me?”
Reeve looked small compared to the two of them. Small maybe, Celia thought, but not the least bit afraid. Perturbed, more like. Before she had time to process the situation, the little man launched himself at the bigger of the two bluecoats, biting and clawing at his face. The bluecoat toppled over, landing hard on the cobblestone. Reeve went with him, clawing and scraping all the while. For a moment, it looked as if Reeve might overpower both men–but a bluecoat always has numbers on Volgstadt’s streets. A sea of union blues crashed into the fray from all around, kicking and stomping savagely. Celia watched unable to look away, until one of the bluecoats emerged, covered in blood and clutching at his face. His mouth was torn open at the cheek, leaving teeth and gums exposed in a grin. Worse, one eye hung loose from its socket.
What happened next, Celia could not say. She turned and fled, eager to put Basil Reeve behind her.
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