A Thousand and One English Nights (Book Three of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Twenty: Notches

Again, she could have run away. She could have taken the Minister's purse and moved on to the next slop-house. There were three shillings in there, and that could buy her cotton and trimmings for a month.

And Robin was... well, he was Robin. She could never trust him. But he was family. He had once come to help her when no-one else would. He had risked his life to help her deceive Jack in Lucknow. And, while this was probably more because he hated Jack than because he cared for her, she couldn't let him die.

She used the Minister's money to rent a room in one of the nearby lodging-houses, and paid a couple of dock-hands to carry him there. That wasn't cheap, because nobody wanted to touch him. He was raving by this point and, on closer inspection, covered in blood. He looked like some reanimated corpse – limp-limbed, but still possessed with a fury.

Even worse were the things he talked about, in that feverish state of half-sleep. He called out dozens of names – Ellini recognized one or two of them as those of his former victims – and picked over the details of their deaths in broken but horribly suggestive sentences.

"Sarah Brightman. To the throat. Gushing, gushing. Nearly drowned me. One side of her face, all gone. The other side so pretty. You could turn her – watch her change. And laughed – I laughed, laughed, laughed. Oh god."

After she'd paid the dock-hands, she sat alone by his bed, listening to these sad, crazed recollections. She lit a candle, but it had burned down to a stump by the time he finally lay quiet.

And she didn't weep. These were old stories, even if the tone was something new. Was he really feeling remorse? Could he?

When he stopped thrashing about, and his ravings died down to mutters, she blew out the candle and sat still in the pre-dawn light, wondering what to do next. Weak and wounded as he was, it would probably not be a good idea to leave herself unprotected.

She fumbled in the pockets of his long, stinking coat – which the dock-hands had eased him out of, and then thrown on the floor in disgust. As expected, she found his beloved, long-handled knife in there. 

She took it out and laid it on the bedside table, within easy reach. Then she unbuttoned his shirt, to see if he had any wounds that might need attention.

She was utterly unprepared for what she saw. At first, she couldn't even make sense of it. His torso just seemed... stripy. But then she began to realize that there were carved notches in his flesh. Hundreds of them. The more skin she uncovered, the more she found. Up and down his arms, across his chest – as though he'd been trying to recreate the handle of his knife on his entire body.

The cuts were quite deep, but some of them were more healed than others. Clearly, this was a long-term project. She supposed that made sense. How many of those notches could you carve before you passed out? You'd need to refuel, eat something, wait for your body to replace the lost blood before you could try again.

Ellini hovered over him with a cloth and bandage for a moment, and then decided she didn't even know where to begin.

She picked up the knife and counted the notches in its handle. It took a while. Then she counted the notches on his arms and chest. There weren't enough – unless he hadn't finished, or unless...

She was unbuttoning his trousers when he woke up. And it was a mark of his confused mental state that he looked startled first, and then smug. He half-sat up and leaned back on his elbows, smiling.

"Ellie, this is an extraordinary turn-around. It's usually me trying to tear your clothes off."

Ellini snatched up the knife and held it to his throat, forcing him to lean his head back. "What is this?" she demanded.