When Cutter went looking he found himself glancing backward in case Judah was there to see him.

Cutter imagined being an artist or a musician, or a writer or libertine pamphleteer, one whose life was a scandal, a Salacus Fields man, but he was a shopkeeper. A Brock Marsh shopkeeper whose customers were scholars. Brock Marsh was a strange and quiet district; its excitements were not those of the artistic southern bank.

In Brock Marsh, renegade hexes might make doors where there should be no doors. Entities cultured in thaumaturged plasm might escape and make the streets deadly, and debates could go murderous as rival thinkers sent bleakly charged ab-ions at each other. Brock Marsh had history and a sort of glamour, but there were no places for Cutter to find men. When there were familiar Brock Marsh faces in the southside inns he would not acknowledge them nor they him.

Cutter despised the dollyboys in their petticoats and painted faces, the aesthete inverts draped in flowers in the Salacus Fields night. He would scowl and walk the canalsides of Sangwine past the she-men whores to whom he did not speak. He would not go into bawdy houses, would not rent some man’s arse. Not anymore. He only rarely visited the warrens by the docks where those sailors who did not just make do at sea, but preferred it that way, would tout for men.

Instead he might perhaps once in a rare while push past crowds into certain inns with half-hidden entrances, thin rooms, thin bars and lots of smoke, older men watching each newcomer eagerly, men in groups laughing raucous as hell and others sitting alone and not looking up, and what women were there were men, dollyboys, or were Remades who had once been men and whose in-between status was a peccadillo to some.

Cutter was careful. Those he chose would never be too handsome: who knew if they were militiamen on honey-trap duty offering a stint for Gross Depravity to any who approached them, or if their squad outside might indulge in an ad hoc punishment of beating and rape.

Neither ashamed nor indulgent, Cutter would simply wait, hating the place and feeling provincial for that, until someone like him came in.

It was twelve years since Cutter had met Judah Low. He had been twenty-four, angry much of the time. Judah was fifteen years his senior. Cutter had quickly loved him.

They hardly ever touched. No more than a few times each year, Cutter had been with Judah Low, every time because of his insistence, never quite begging. More often in the early days, until Judah had become harder and harder to persuade. It seemed, Cutter thought, less a waning of whatever desire was there in Judah than something more thoughtful, to which Cutter could not give words. Each time they were together Cutter felt very strongly that from Judah it was an indulgence. He hated it.

He knew Judah went with women too, and he supposed perhaps with other men, but from what he imagined and heard it was no more often, with no more or less enthusiasm than Judah had for their own encounters. I will make you cry out, Cutter thought as they sweated together. He went at it with passion bordering violence. I will make you feel this. Not with vindictiveness but a desperation to inspire more than kindness.