Page 34 of To Clutch a Razor
The weapons room is in the back of the house, separated from the living quarters by a small courtyard. Technically, a hallway connects the front of the house to the back, but it may as well be a covered walkway. It’s neverhad glass in the windows in all the time he’s lived here, and its stone floor makes it cold even in summer.
A chill passes over him as he follows his mother down it, observing the overgrown greenery in the courtyard that no one can be bothered to tend, the statue of an angel holding a horn. Dymitr looked it up once and found out that it was Saint Michael, the leader of the army of heaven, holding the symbol of Swietowit, the Slavic god of war. Someone had even attached a—real, sharp—dagger against the statue’s spine, as if he was a Knight.
Knights of the Holy Order take all symbols as their own, even if it’s blasphemy.
Marzena opens the door to the weapons room, which is all stone and heavy wood, with no windows. Weapons line the walls, and heavy cabinets against the far wall hold the other gear—armor, mostly. His mother ushers him in, and he looks at the bench that Filip sat on to remove his bloody boots, a pew taken from an old church.
The memory catches him in its current, for a moment. He thinks of Filip handing his younger self the bloody boots, as if it was normal to let a child scrub gore from your shoes after you’d returned from a murder.
Every memory he has here is a horror, even the good ones.
He hears his grandmother’s footsteps behind him, recognizable because of their halting rhythm. She’s holding a sword, and that’s not strange, because she’s about togo out hunting, and her spine sword has been too difficult for her to draw for years now.
But then Elza steps into the room, followed by… him.
Dymitr is looking at an exact copy of himself. Black trousers, black shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Scarred lip. Pale cheek. Scuffs on his shoes. It’s like he’s looking into a mirror, only his reflection is moving, and he’s completely still.
The other Dymitr is staring wide-eyed at Joanna like she’s a particularly terrifying beast he’s never encountered before. The smell of him is rich and dark.We can’t read emotions that aren’t fear,Ala told him, in one of their many lessons.But sometimes we can make sense of what the fear is woven together with.
In this case, the fear is bitter with rage.
“So you see,” Joanna says, pointing to the exact replica of Dymitr standing across from him, “why we have a problem.”
Then Marzena is closing the door behind them, and dragging the bolt across it. Locking them all in together.
He doesn’t dare speak. He knows that the person standing across from him must be Ala, with such a strong illusion layered over her that he can’t see behind it. It takes incredible skill and strength to project an illusion so sturdy and so perfect—and so detailed, because even the folds of their sleeves match exactly. He would marvel at it if he wasn’t so terrified by it. Ala came here to help him. Shecame here, and now she’s a zmora locked in the weapons room with three Knights.
She’s going to die if he doesn’t convince them to release her.
“I—” he begins.
“Shut up,” his grandmother says. “I don’t need you to speak to identify which one of you is real and which one isn’t.”
She steps into the circle of light cast by the fixture above his head, the creases in her face even more pronounced because of its harshness. He watches, frozen with horror, as she drags the sword’s edge against the meat of her palm, just enough to draw blood. Her eyes turn deep crimson.
Even if he was capable of producing an illusion to rival Ala’s, he wouldn’t try. The only way to get her out of here safely is to pretend not to be himself. He’s helpless beneath his grandmother’s stare. She looks at him, and then at Ala, and he prays her illusion holds up to a Knight’s scrutiny.
His grandmother turns back to him.
“Did you think I wouldn’t notice a zmora right under my nose?” she demands, and then she swings the sword, striking him in the side of the head with the hilt.
Everything goes dark and hazy for a moment, and he has to put a hand on the floor to steady himself. He tastes dark chocolate in the back of his throat, and lifts his eyes to Ala’s—to his own.
“Now that we’ve resolved that issue,” Ala says coolly, “I should go search for the other one.”
He holds his throbbing head. She sounds just like him, which must be part of the illusion, too. He wonders, though, if this is how she hears him. If he sounds this… hard. Businesslike.
“The other one?” Joanna demands.
“I suspect I was pursued here by the zmora and the strzygon I deceived in Chicago.” Ala looks at Elza using Dymitr’s eyes, Dymitr’s face. “You know who I mean. You’re the one who revealed my true nature to them, after all.”
Elza looks away, her cheeks pink.
“I did,” she says, after a moment. “Which one do you thinkthatis?”
She points at Dymitr. He doesn’t dare speak—doesn’t daremove—until Ala is safely out of this room.
“Hard to say,” Ala replies. “That could be a zmora projecting a strong illusion. Or it could be a strzygon altered by magic. I’ll go search for the other one—it can’t be far, they’ve been moving in a pair.”
