As my legs were longer than the nameless master’s, I was soon ahead of the man but halted in front of the courtyard of Mermaid House, waiting for the others to catch up. This house’s courtyard did not contain a statue of wood, bronze, or stone, but a much more realistic figure of a mermaid packed in a glass case. While the figure’s appearance was of considerable interest, I halted for a different reason: There was a transparent barrier that flickered into being and strengthened as I approached, a hazy burnt orange color that somehow I felt that I should associate with the smell of rotting fish.

  I presume it was a feature of the magic of the barrier, which was meant to repulse unauthorized intruders, as shortly demonstrated by Katya when she walked into it as if she didn’t see it at all. A flicker of flux crackled and sparked over her metal arm and then from her leg into the ground; every muscle in her abdomen in between the metal breastplate that supported her and the stump of natural leg plugged into her lower prosthetic flexed at the same time, a painful tension that tore her off-balance and left her lying flat on the ground, stunned. I could tell that she was disoriented because she did not reflexively reach for either her wolf-mark sword or one of the several pistols she had secreted about her person.

  “Ah, ah, ah,” tutted the nameless master as he caught up, the translucent barrier evaporating with a wave of his hand. He glanced at me, my reflection staring back at me in the small circle of silver covering his right eye. “You knocked one of the gems out of your floating sword.”

  The man bent over Katya, kneeling down to grab at her amethyst pendant, which had fallen askew, the necklace splayed across the grass. His knee pressed into Katya’s stomach as he descended; this proved to be the orienting stimulus necessary to inspire the redheaded woman back into action, and her fleshly right hand crossed the man’s cheek with a loud crack. The silver disc flew away with the impact, falling out of the squinted orbit of his right eye as Katya’s other hand, the metal one, clenched into a fist, gears clicking ominously.

  “Hold,” I said, taking the man by his arm and pulling him away from Katya, for his own protection as much as his dignity.

  “What is she doing here? I thought she had shown up at Xarakel for the Laskov twins,” the man said, both eyes focused on Katya as she regained her feet. “Is she masking?”

  “Is she what?” I asked.

  The nameless master turned to look at me. “I can tell even with both eyes open that masking is foreign to you. Why did I even ask you that?”

  “She’s not a mage,” Johann interjected. “She’s here because—”

  “Captain Katarina Borova is this banneret’s commanding officer,” I said, emphasizing her formal rank by stringing out the longest version of her name I could come up with. “And I, in turn, am hers.”

  The nameless master cocked his head to the side. “Wealthy enough to purchase a senior commission, but your parents hid you from testing? Strange.”

  “My background is no concern of yours,” I said, then turned the subject away from myself and toward the subject of the figure enclosed in glass in front of Mermaid House. “You said this used to be Serpent House, but you chose to change it. And this mermaid doesn’t seem to fit the style of the other houses.”

  “You’re not the first to say that,” the nameless master said. “Every house is granted a powerful icon, rare but real, used as a sort of totem for certain purposes. Many think that mermaids are a myth, but I can prove to you right here that they are real.” He pointed at the glass case, or perhaps the door to the house, which lay on the other side of the case from him.

  I raised my eyebrows. The figure was an interesting exercise in taxidermy and transmutation. The skin and skeleton of a headless beluga sturgeon of moderate size, young enough to still show lines of bony scutes, had been stitched to the legless skin and skeleton of half a woman, the sturgeon’s spine fused to the woman’s tailbone. The skins had been alchemically treated and then coated with a translucent layer of beeswax, which had then been further touched up with paint. Some kind of fibrous substance, perhaps cotton or wool, bulged between skin and bones, approximating flesh. A pair of shells perched on the mermaid’s chest, providing a measure of modesty.

  “That is not a mermaid,” I observed. “The stitching is very well done, though; the seam between the woman and the fish is quite even all the way around.”

  “True—merely a close artistic approximation I assembled. Mermaids are real, though,” said the man, a conspiratorial gleam in his eye. “I’ve known this for a decade. Have you heard of Ognyan Spitignov? He captured one at the start of the war and brought it in.”

  “I have met him, unfortunately,” I briefly interjected, though I was immediately unsure of the veracity of my qualifier. My attention turned inward as the man continued speaking. True, he had been a callous mage of fragile sanity hexed by halitosis, but his intervention in my life had, for better or ill, caused me to go from army mechanic to war mage, from a humble private soldier to a self-described colonel in charge of a large and powerful mercenary company. And without his intervention, I would never have met Katya, whom I loved dearly.

  “Did you hear what I said?” The man’s question was, fortunately, followed by what I presumed to be a summary of what I had been too distracted to listen to. “I know that the man has—had, may God allow his warped soul rest—an unusual perspective on reality, but I have the very skin off of the back of the specimen collected by the Butcher of Belz. Now, come, follow me—this door will lead directly to the laboratory.”

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  I glanced at Johann’s wide eyes and back at Katya’s narrowed eyes. “You don’t have to come in if you don’t want to,” I said quietly.

  Katya nodded. “There are probably more wards inside. But you are a wizard and did not trip the first one. Be loud if you need help,” she said, one hand resting on the hilt of her little jeweled wolf-mark sword. “I wish I had my rifle with me.”

  Johann swallowed nervously, but when I turned away, I heard his footsteps follow mine. After entering the doorway, I followed the man past a series of pumps and pipes that led up from the floor and then back down. From the positions of the pipes in relation to the walls, it was readily apparent that it took in water from the cistern on the roof, ran it into a boiler above the room’s cookstove, and condensed the steam in an array of thin chilling tubes, where it would drip down into the basement. This drove a pump, which drew water back out of the basement and out into the gutter in the alley behind the house.

  Alas, while I was very curious about why he would have such an arrangement, my host was focused on convincing me of his expertise on mermaids. He led me upstairs into his study on the second floor, one wall lined with books and the other supporting a collection of alchemical glassware. Most of it was empty, but the exceptions were interesting and neatly labeled in small block letters formed of a dried gelatinous ink, ranging from a tiny stoppered vial filled with familiar-looking red threads of saffron to a large jar containing a stillborn infant steeped in vinegar with dill weed, peppercorns, and cardamom pods.

  The labels raised more questions than they answered. For example, the tiny red threads were labeled “red gold” in spite of clearly not being the nobler metal alloyed with copper per the usual usage of such a compound word, and the pickled infant was labeled “bait.”

  The man ignored both the glassware and the books and went straight for a drawer in a desk, drawing out a roll of waxed paper and unrolling it carefully to reveal a roughly rectangular section of smooth skin, a little more than a foot long and a little less than a foot wide. The upper edge, slightly longer than the lower edge, was ragged, cut with a series of geometric lines resembling a kind of writing, and edged with a layer of long-dried blood, while the sides and lower edges were cut cleanly.

  “I see,” I said, noting the thickness of the skin as I turned it over in my hands and also the subtle variations in texture on the underside where it had been peeled away from a thin layer of blubber, the effects of the harder and denser fat of a marine mammal evident even in its absence. “This section of skin is very clearly from a mermaid and not at all from an unfortunate human woman who had oozing bloody runes carved across her back before being cut to pieces. A very convincing proof, unlike the crude artistic approximation in the courtyard.”

  The man huffed loudly, his face flushing with irritation. “Mock me if you wish, but mermaids are real, and at this moment, I have proof even the most hardened skeptics will accept.” He turned, pushing past Johann and rushing down the stairs.

  “It is true that nothing you have shown me has changed my mind,” I said as I caught up to him, following him down a second flight of stairs into the basement. “But that is because I have seen mermaids before. Although they were rather larger than those ones.”

  Sitting in a large tub—large enough to be a washtub for a ship’s sails—were a pair of sad-looking creatures. Their womanly upper halves were on the petite side relative to a typical human woman. After correcting for the natural optical distortion of the water, I estimated that their tails were barely half again as long as such a petite woman’s legs would have been. Each probably weighed little if any more than an ordinary woman.

  It took at least ten heartbeats before my host finished opening and closing his mouth silently, his face losing its flush as it slowly returned to its usual pallor under gleaming white mage-light shining from gemstones set in the walls of his lower laboratory.

  “You should have told me before I made a fool of myself trying to prove it to you,” my host said resentfully. “As far as the size… these are river creatures. All of the ones I have observed here are significantly smaller than Ognyan’s specimen was. The Tanais River is great as rivers go, but it is still merely a river. I believe that the creatures naturally grow to a size suitable for their environment, although one of my colleagues thinks instead that they continue to grow throughout life, with a life cycle that begins with spawning in mountain streams and springs with substantial concentrations of magic, then migrating to larger and larger bodies of water as their increased size demands. I captured a triad in a trap just two weeks ago, which is a major breakthrough for my research.”

  I checked the tub again, counting carefully and finding again that only two mermaids were present. “Has one escaped already?”

  “No, I dissected it,” the man said. At my dark look, he raised his hands. “I did not want to return it to the others with knowledge of my plans, in case it was really able to communicate with the others in some private dialect. I am not sure of that; while mermaids are often said to be able to speak, these ones don’t speak any human tongue, nor do they understand as much as a single word of Ruthenian, Khazar, Cimmerian, Avar, Latin, or Greek, in spite of a fully functional vocal apparatus capable of considerable volume with sufficient stimulation.”

  Behind him, the two riverine mermaids flinched at the first sentence of his statement, a pained emotional reaction of understanding that gave the lie to his conjecture.

  “My experience with mermaids elsewhere confirms the rumors,” I said. “The ones I have spoken with all understood at least Greek and Venetian. Perhaps they simply don’t want to talk to you.”

  “Your experience with mature mermaids is a point in favor of my colleague’s theory—it may take them time to acquire a human language.” The man shook his head, clearly annoyed at the fact that his colleague had the right of it. “The triad you encountered must have been fully mature.”

  “What would you do with these two? Will you also butcher them?” I asked.

  “The Butcher of Belz harnessed one successfully; it is clearly possible, so I will try again. After I have finished certain auguries—the entrails of the first may yet be useful for such a purpose, though divination is a difficult art. Properly controlled, these creatures could be considerably useful.” The man shook his head. “Ognyan explained his inscription when he brought in his specimen, but his approach will not work for an ordinary man. I will readily admit that I lack the man’s strength of will or body and thus must pursue more creative variations, even with these smaller specimens.”