Once upon a time, yet truly not so very long ago, when the world was neither much younger nor wider than it is today, there was a little man who kept his entire life inside a cramped and crowded room that he rented for that purpose.

 

The man was called Kalnivex Zevine, though he had cause to answer more frequently to Kal, and he thought of himself that way often enough for us to comfortably call him that.

 

The room was in the back of a squat, single-floor building made of dried, pulped wood over a metal frame. The building consisted of two mostly square rooms, mostly the same size and shape, arranged one in front of the other.

 

Both rooms were technically meant to have been used as offices, but the backroom had what was technically plumbing connected to what technically was running water — technically running and technically water — in the form of a bare basin sink jutting out from one wall and a flushpot tucked away in a closet so small its door had no room to close properly when the seat was in use, which might have been very inconvenient if Kal ever entertained guests in his room, or if the door were otherwise still capable of closing.

 

Kal did not know this about the flushpot, but it could well have been certified as the oldest functioning example of a modern water commode in the city if only there had been any way to prove its age, or that it functioned.

 

The building was located at Number 287 Gradon's Way, The Nettles, Stability. Gradon's Way was counted as being just barely among the better streets in The Nettles, which didn't count for much in The Nettles. The thing about The Nettles was that it was mostly alleyways, anyways. The streets were too badly outnumbered to matter.

 

The Nettles and Stability were the names used for these places by the people who, like Kal, lived in what was officially known as the 22nd Ward of New Akoropolis.

 

The population of the 22nd Ward had last been very carefully and precisely counted and recorded in the municipal census of New Akoropolis as being exactly 68,473 people.

 

The environs of the 22nd Ward were rated to support and hold long-term residency for some 75,555 souls on the very upper margin of safety and logistical feasibility, and those who ruled over matters of civic planning and safety of Akoropolis observed this limit with deadly seriousness.

 

That limit factored into everything from approval of any demolition or construction, the regulation of housing costs, approval of immigration and residential transfers to and from other wards, and countless other aspects of civic and bureaucratic life, but most importantly, it meant that the census count was conducted with all the care, precision, and accuracy the endeavor warranted.

 

To be specific, the census count warranted an extremely large of amount of care, an exceedingly great amount of precision, and no more ever than exactly the very bare minimum amount of accuracy necessary to avoid causing a scandal that would blow the whole thing up into the sky.

 

Whatever the census for the ward might say, somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 people lived their lives in The Nettles. It was just that some of them counted for a good deal less than others.

 

Kal did not count for much at all to the census. The room into which he had crammed his life was not rated for habitation. It had not been designed for habitation. It was not fit for habitation. Number 287 was rated and recorded as commercial office space, and so its entire existence could be carefully and precisely disregarded when it came time to count and account for the residents of the 22nd ward.

 

Such a very small building was a very small thing in the greater scope of the census counters' problems, and this fact placed Number 287 and all remaining little one-story commercial office buildings like itself under intense scrutiny from the ward planning commissioners, who would have preferred to see them replaced with larger, multi-story office buildings that could boast enough space to accommodate multiple entire families with children.

 

Number 287 had made it through all previous census years unscathed owing to the interest of its deedholder, who it must be said possessed very little direct influence over civic affairs in particular, but could wield more than enough power in other areas to weigh in on them all the same when it mattered.

 

Kal was only distantly aware of the storm that raged over Number 287 Gradon's Way every fourth year. He knew what drove the cycle of construction and demolition in The Nettles. The first year of his tenancy had been a census year, and he had learned then that he should count himself lucky that his new digs were not among the buildings purged in its aftermath.

 

Twice since then, the census came and went and left Number 287 untouched in its wake. The most recent of these had been but the year before this one... making it precisely once upon a time, yet not so long ago, plus one year.

 

Each time, he told himself he was lucky, and then he told himself, "maybe next time." If we could have placed ourselves inside his head to hear these words, we would have had a hard time deciding if these words were ominous or hopeful, and Kal would not have been able to help us make up our minds.

 

If Kal had kept a list in his head of hopes for the future and one of his long-term fears, the possibility that city politics might destroy his room would not be on either one of them.

 

That was because it was already on a list he did keep, which was entitled "ongoing concerns, low priority". This was for things he needed to keep an eye on, in case they happened, or something happened with them. There was nothing else to do or that needed doing for most of them, and for one reason or another, he didn't believe they warranted any planning.

 

He also had a list of ongoing concerns, medium priority. What distinguished this list from the former was that he had plans for each eventuality that made the list.

 

He did not have a list of hopes or a list of fears. He might have hopes or fears about some of his concerns, but he saw no reason to keep track of how he felt about the eventual eventuality of a thing that he thought might one day happen.

 

Kal did not have a list of ongoing concerns, high priority.

 

Or he did, but he kept it mentally filed away under another heading: enemies.

 

He kept that one short, with exacting care and precision that would have made a census taker change color with envy. Number three on Kal's list of rules for not allowing enmity to destroy his life was that he should never have more enemies than fingers on one hand. This was a list he had begun one evening some three years, four months, and eleven days before our once upon a time, and it had begun with item number one: never quarrel with any lover — neither former, current, nor incipient — in a place, manner, or volume that would garner public attention.

 

More generally than the formula of the formalized rule prescribed, his habit was to stay somewhere within the range of three to five enemies.

 

Any fewer and he would assume he had grown too complacent. Any more and he would know he had been too careless.

 

As of this point in his life — that being once upon a time, yet not so long ago — he had rarely reached his strict upper limit of six enemies, and only once had it been exceeded, briefly.

 

Another rule on the list he had begun three years, four months, and eleven days before was to never hate an enemy. No names were ever added to the enemy list out of pique alone, or precipitously. Anyone he thought might be his enemy was first designated an immediate concern, medium priority, which consisted of action items requiring some combination of research and reflection than actual action. He would look into a potential enemy if he didn't trust his grasp of the situation, and regardless of his grasp or what his research turned up, he would always sleep on the matter before moving a name from the mental column labeled "immediate concerns, medium priority" to the one labeled "enemies". He never kept an enemy long enough to grow to hate them, and when anyone he hated became his enemy, then either the enemy or the hatred would have to go at the earliest opportunity possible.

 

Hatred could be a very a powerful distraction. He knew this, and he cherished it. Of all the things that Kal loved about hatred, its power to distract him was what he liked the most about it. Hatred was the hobby that he practiced when there was no demand for action against an enemy and nothing else to take up his attention.

 

The list of people he hated was short and tidy, like his list of enemies. It had five spaces and its contents did not vary, because every person on it was someone against whom any definite action would either be impossible, inappropriate, or unnecessary.

 

Kal hated dealing with almost every person he ever met. He hated the interaction, and whatever had necessitated the interaction. The more often he had to deal with the same person, the more he would come to dread it.

 

But hating an interaction with a person — or even every interaction with a person — is not the same thing as hating a person, and Kal was careful to observe this distinction no matter how much he relished an opportunity to wallow in general misanthropy. There were only four people in all of the world whom Kal would say that he hated, even to himself.

 

The person Kal hated the most in all of the world was whatever blue-blistered devil of a fuckperson it even was who held the deed to the tiny commercial office building at Number 287 Gradon's Way, The Nettles. He did not know the building's deedholder. He knew almost nothing about the invisible fiend who had tormented him so terribly for the term of his tenancy, and hoped to never learn anything more. He wished he could somehow learn less.

 

The person just below the deedholder, the one occupying the second spot on the list of those Kal hated the most, was at this moment putting on his armor for an appointment of sorts with the person in the third spot, the man who called the front room of Number 287 his office, though Kal often observed that there were ample reasons to find that designation dubious.

 

The man who used the front room of Number 287 was a trackhound, at least according to the letters he'd stenciled on the glass pane set in the inner door of the building's cramped and completely unnecessary vestibule, lettering that Kal had to look at every time he went or out of this building.

 

Kal hated that lettering. He hated the pretentious title across the bottom: "Seeker after the Lost". He winced every time he saw it, even more than he winced at the churnsucker's vile, hated name.

 

He hated the lines that came between the name and the title, which spoke of "Discreet Private Inquiries" and "Disputes Resolved Quietly", as though the little rat bastard wouldn't sing like a sweet little songjay twice monthly when the Knights Inquisitor sent a squad around to find out everything he knew, about his clients and their private disputes and everything else going on in The Nettles.

 

Kal desperately wished his room had even so much as a window he could crawl in and out of rather than going through the trackhound's office and seeing the sign on the inner vestibule door, because the thing Kal hated the most about the trackhound — more than the pretensions, the hypocrisy, and the snitching — was how he could never get away from the rat.

 

Kal wouldn't even know if he was looking at the person he hated the most in the world. He did not enjoy looking upon the person he hated the second most, though he sometimes found ways to extract enjoyment from the experience of dealing with him.

 

He positively loathed the sight of the trackhound, and not in any kind of way that he could relish. Not in a way that usefully distracted him. Not in any way that benefited him or that he could make any use of.

 

It must be said that there was nothing overtly offensive about the trackhound's appearance. He was a short man of uncommonly slender frame, who was not only lightly built but lean and spare to the point of always looking hungry.

 

His skin was the last full bright pink of a spectacular sunset before the dark of night creeps into it. He kept his hair close-cropped because it was fairy-brush fine to the point of fragility, and white to the point of being translucent, showing a pinkish tint from his scalp. It had not much receded but had already developed a pronounced peak towards the front.

 

Kal did not like any of these things, but even he would likely admit that was owing to general distaste for the person. There wasn't anything he could actually point to that was wrong with them.

 

The same cannot be said about the man's face, which always had something of a guilty look about it. Even the trackhound's natural resting expression, which was otherwise slack and blank and resolutely neutral, had a haunted air about it, as if it belonged to a soul in need of unburdening some dire and terrible secret sin.

 

Very few people ever saw the trackhound in this state for more than a moment, as he made a point to not reveal it to anyone. Only someone looking at his face in a moment when he thought himself alone would ever get a good look at it, and Kal had seen more than his fill of it and then some.

 

For the rest of the world, the smug bastard had hundreds of carefully curated facial expressions, cunning artistic creations that he devised and refined and practiced in a mirror, sometimes for hours at a time.

 

Kal had watched him do it more often than he would ever want any living soul to know, and he could not deny there was a genuine talent at work in them.

 

But the trackhound could never seem to lose that guilty look, however hard he might try. His best attempts looked to Kal too much like what they actually were: a guilty man desperately trying to appear innocent.

 

Sometimes, when Kal scrutinized the face of the trackhound, he wondered if the man's gift for deliberate expression was not giving him away there. If a person knew in their heart that they were guilty, and that person had the ability to put on whatever kind of face they might put their mind to... might not their face betray them because their mind betrays them?

 

Mostly, though, what Kal thought about when he studied the trackhound's face was how much he would love to just absolutely fucking smash it repeatedly, over and over again, until the mirror cracked and splintered into a thousand bloody pieces, and cut his hated, hateful, haunted face into a thousand bloody pieces in the process.

 

The name on the door that Kal so despised was his own: Kalnivex Zevine.

 

He was a trackhound. He was the trackhound. The person that Kal hated the third most out of all of the people in the world was himself.

 

A woman he had loved — once... or twice... upon a time... or two, yet seemingly so very long ago — had been the one to give him the title he had once found charming but now so despised, "Seeker after the Lost". More than once or twice, she had called him the greatest trackhound in the world, and had said often that if he could not find or find out a thing, that meant it was not there to be found.

 

There was little evidence of any such superlative status in his professional life or generally known public profile, but Kal did sometimes stop and reflect that she might have been right on the balance.

 

He was very good at finding things.

 

No one else in the world could have found anyone in the world he could have hated any more than he hated himself. He had found two, which meant they were the only such people to be found.

 

And at this point in the story (which would be precisely... once upon a time, yet truly not so long ago, less the time it has taken to tell it), he was finishing his preparations to meet with one of them.

 

It was almost time for the songjay to sing.

 

The useless rat bastard.