by Chris Braak
There was silence, then, broken by James’ sudden, furious spectral knocking. “All right?” Gorud asked him, over the noisy rattling.
“I can’t…can’t let go of the gun,” Beckett grunted, the pain in his arm brought tears to his eyes. “I can’t…” With one last heroic effort, he managed to lever the revolver from his right hand. The freed fingers immediately closed up, thought the pain remained. Panic surfaced too, as the sense that the muscles in his hand had been twisted around each other violated his body’s sense of integrity. “Damn it, James!” Beckett shouted. “I can’t understand you!”
The rapping continued, seeming to take on a panicked, hysterical edge to it. An alarm? A warning?
Gorud heard it, too. “Someone’s coming.”
“No,” Beckett said, a sudden realization dawning. “Someone’s getting out.” He groaned and lurched to his feet. “Shit. Come on.”
Gorud quickly grabbed the lantern, its light swinging nauseatingly across the walls, the hallway seeming to roll back and forth like the deck of a ship. The ground pitched wildly, and Beckett gripped his oar tightly, falling to his knees on the deck of the longboat. Up ahead, far, too far ahead, Fletcher’s cigar pulsed dim and red in the dark. He turned to look at Beckett, thorny green vines crawling from the black holes where his eyes were, and then his whole shape dissolved into a pale nimbus of light, revealing another man. A stranger, stumbling down the stairs at the end of the hall, trailing a thick smear of black blood and an aura of half-formed dream images-smiling faces, women with sultry eyes, spiders with long, snaking tales and hands with fingertips made of ice.
Beckett fired, left-handed, missed. He fired again, and the hammer clicked on an empty chamber. “Damn it!” He ran after the man, outpacing Gorud, whose lantern cast the coroner’s shadow ahead of them. It doesn’t matter, I know where he’s going, Beckett thought has he plunged into the dark, opening his revolver and stuffing it into the crook of his right arm while he fumbled with the bullets in his pocket, trying to reload. The old coroner crashed down the stairs, nearly falling, tumbling into the open receiving area, in time to see the poisoned man flee into the fading afternoon light that had crept in through the building’s devastated entryway.
“No, no,” Beckett muttered, “Come on.” He tried to press a last bullet into its chamber, but dislodged the revolver. It fell to the ground with a clank, and scattered its ammunition across the floor, bullets vanishing into the scattering of shadows. “No!” He dropped to his knees, gasping as he felt the joint in his right leg explode, trying to ignoring the screaming pain as he searched for a bullet, just one bullet to load into the weapon. Something, anything. Gorud appeared beside him, nimble fingers playing across the debris-littered floor.
Driven by the violent, churning engine of fever-dreams that had grown in his heart, exploding outwards as radiation from the oneiric explosion had corroded the delicate partitions of his mind, the raving gendarme ran. The light burned at his eyes, but he pushed himself towards it as new, strange senses that itched about his skin told him of other minds and other pairs of eyes, and the new, blooming, degenerate and venomous lust drew him on, demanded that he vomit his stomach of poison and bile into their minds, to free them from the husks of rotting flesh into which they had suffered the misfortune of being born. He fled into the afternoon light, and looked out upon the looking eyes that saw him.
The thunder of gunfire stopped him short, and he didn’t bother to look down as he felt his dreams bleed free of his wounds. He felt his body dissolve into meat and filth, and the new strange minds inside his mind wondered if the world would still be there when he left it.
Six
Chretien [Crabtree-Daior] has come to me with a new project. He is of a mind with me regarding the nature of true Blasphemy, and is enthusiastic in his work, but misguided in his direction. Certainly, the ichor is a fascinating substance, but simply reinvigorating dead tissue is an insufficient means to create life as life was created. It is not the composition of a thing that makes it live, but the way the thing behaves: autonomously, with sensibility and awareness. That is the new life-not the demands of flesh perfected, but mind unencumbered by the demands of flesh at all.
I will enter into this project with him, but I must think more on the core truth of it.
— from the journal of Harcourt Wolfram, 1785
“All right,” Beckett called, from the dark, bombed-out shell of the slaughterhouse. “It’s me. It’s Beckett. Don’t shoot, all right?” He heard a sound like affirmation, and then limped into the last dregs afternoon sun. The air was bitterly cold now, the icy night threatening to fall on the city like an avalanche.
The last of his veneine high washed away, leaving a thousand little agonies in his limbs. His right leg felt like someone had smashed the knee with a hammer. His right hand felt like it had been tied up in torn, tangled knots. Beckett focused on the bitter thirst for veneine in the back of his throat. Another shot, he thought. Just get to the coach, and take a shot. He lurched past the dead gendarme, brushed past Valentine, who stood just beyond the exit, silver-plated revolvers smoking, an unreadable expression on his face.
Beckett slumped in the coach and if the men outside were talking he couldn’t hear it. The sounds of the world were drowned out by the pounding in his ears, blood throbbing in his head like his veins would burst. He fumbled beneath the seat for his kit, and struggled to use the syringe with just one hand.
He had to hold the needle in his teeth while he pulled his sleeve up, exposing inflamed red veins and a constellation of tiny pink wounds; the shirtsleeve fell back into place the second he let go in order to grab the vial of veneine, and Beckett almost screamed with frustration.
“Here.” It was Gorud. The therian had followed him in to the coach, and Beckett hadn’t even noticed. The simian creature took the vial and syringe in his strong, dexterous fingers. Beckett pulled his right sleeve up, and Gorud shook his head. “No. Other arm.”
The coroner nodded, and scraped his left sleeve up with his crippled hand. The skin was less damaged here; only a few pink pinpricks showed livid on his pale skin, and then blood vessels seemed less damaged. Deftly, the therian gripped Beckett’s wrist, found a vein, and made the injection. He used the syringe precisely; no blood washed back through the needle.
It took a moment for the warmth of the veneine to spread about his body, and the relief was an incalculable joy to him. The pounding in his head receded, the aches faded. His hand began to relax and he flexed his fingers, mercifully, narcotically unconcerned by the cracks and pops he heard. He smelled saltwater then, and imagined rivulets of brackish fluid dribbling down the walls inside the coach, leaking in from the doors, pooling at his feet.
“This is dreamsnake venom,” Gorud said. “This is too much.”
“I-” Beckett began, then broke off. The absence left by the veneine-banished ringing in his ears was filled with a familiar voice.
“-not going in,” Valentine was saying. “If he wanted to talk to you, he’d be talking to you. He doesn’t. Now. Move back, before I move you.”
The veneine was warm and rich and sweet, filling his mind with honey, dragging his eyelids down, soothing his battered body. Beckett wanted to lie down in the back seat and sleep. Instead, he raised his voice.
“It’s all right, Valentine.” The old coroner levered himself to his feet again, while the therian watched, silent. “It’s all right. I’m coming out.” He sighed and shivered in the cold despite the drug. He found Valentine standing, arms crossed, outside the coach. The Moral Responsibility officer was standing cross from him, huffing importantly. “You. Edly. Edder.”
“Edelred.”
“Good. Where’s Skinner?”
“Miss Skinner went home, where she belongs. You are fully-equipped with knocker support,” he gestured towards James, who stood off to the side, eyes covered in a band of silver, mouth twisted in a sour grimace. “There is absolutely no need to contribute to the constant erosion of
our moral bedrock that employing a woman-”
“Can I ask you something?” Beckett asked, his voice suddenly good-natured. He knew he should be angry, should glower and glare and growl, and all that, but just couldn’t find it in himself to do that right now. He was suffused with a sense of well-being, and had no desire to disturb that. “Do you believe all that, that you’re saying? I mean,” he leaned in close to the Gorgon-Ennering-Crabtree, “when they found you. To put you on the Committee, did they just ask around for men who were uncomfortable thinking about women? Or did they look around for sycophant cousins, who’d parrot any line of bullshit they were given if they thought it meant getting some crumbs from the Emperor’s table?”
“I-”
“Never mind!” Beckett grinned, such an unexpected and appalling gesture that even Valentine took a step back. “I don’t really care! Valentine, come with me.”
“Mr. Beckett,” Edelred Gorgon-Ennering-Crabtree spluttered. “I mean. Inspector Beckett. May I remind you that I am a member of an Esteemed Family?”
Beckett turned back to him, no longer grinning. His missing eye, the bleeding black rents on his face where his flesh had faded from sight, the glittering white teeth added up to a particularly gruesome expression nonetheless. “You may.”
“Well,” said Edelred. “I’ve got a job to do, too, Mr. Beckett, and that means sending your woman home. Mr. Ennering is your assigned knocker. You will use him for any future engagements. Do I make myself clear?”
“No,” Beckett said, his voice dangerously quiet. “No, you don’t. Because it sounds like you’re giving me orders. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”
“I have the authority,” whispered Edelred. “To have you removed from your position. Is that clear enough for you?”
His temper had nearly made its way back through the drug, and Beckett found himself on the verge of saying precisely what Edelred could do with his authority, and considering also adding a few comments about what Edelred must have had removed in the first place to take a position with Moral Responsibility. He held his tongue when he saw Mr. Stitch.
The huge reanimate was shambling down Augre Street, and if it was bothered by the cold, or the situation, or anything else, there’d be no way to tell. Its grotesque, patchwork face was just as impassive as ever, the brass-ringed lenses of its eyes giving away nothing more than their constant sense of intense interest. Its limbs moved deliberately and awkwardly, careful with its mismatched joints, but covered ground quickly because of its long legs.
“Beckett.” It said at last, in its tortured whisper of a voice. “Report.”
“There was a high-intensity oneiric event. I established a perimeter and then went in to eliminate the survivors.”
“The woman,” interrupted Edelred, “that was released from the coroners was-”
Stitch wasn’t listening. “And?”
“I succeeded,” Beckett told him. “Valentine took out the last one. There’s no one left alive inside, so the oneiric damage should be minimized.”
Mr. Stitch nodded and looked away, those cold, inhuman eyes delivering data directly to the miraculously complex difference engine it had for a brain. It raked its gaze over every inch of the street and the bombed-out gendarmerie headquarters. Beckett knew that the reanimate would soon go inside and study every piece of wood, every stone, every broken pile of furniture, every corpse. In time, it would wrestle the truth from uncooperative evidence.
“Thoughts?” Stitch asked.
Beckett shrugged. “Oneiric munition, I think. Could be the ettercap, treaty or no. They’ve attacked in the city before. But there was a lot brought back by our own soldiers, a lot misplaced. Anyone could have gotten a hold of something like that.”
“So. Why?”
“It could be the gangs,” Valentine put in. “Anonymous John works in Red Lanes a lot. They’ve been getting bolder, lately.”
The old coroner allowed that this could certainly be possible. “It could be…” Beckett muttered. “It could be sharpsies. I know most of them ran, but…you could hide an army in the Arcadium. It’d just take one with a grudge.” He rubbed his face, over his blind eye, ignored the eerie sensation caused by the numbness. “Hell, it could be anyone. Just carrying a weapon like that around could drive you insane. He might have dropped it on the gendarmes because they’d chased him off from some doorstep, or because he was hallucinating and thought that it was the imperial palace. He might have thought it was his mother’s house.”
Stitch nodded. “I. Will. Investigate.”
“Hm,” Beckett replied. “Fine. Fine.”
The giant reanimate shambled off, its subtle aura of menace seemed to drag James away, causing the knocker to follow after it like a small moon pulled into orbit. Beckett watched them for a few moments, then turned to Valentine. “All right. Did you read that pamphlet?”
“Oh! Yes. Here, hang on, I made notes…”
“Not now,” Beckett said. “Not here. Come with me. Have you met Gorud?”
Seven
While she rode back to her boarding house, Skinner chewed and spat and flexed her fingers, itching for the chance to snare Gorgon-Ennering-Crabtree’s neck and just crush it. The thought was deeply satisfying, though she knew the act would be far more trouble than it was worth. Still, it didn’t hurt to think about it, and so she allowed herself several minutes of purely murderous daydreaming. The fantasy passed, and left her with a slick sickness of shame at her joy. Skinner set it aside.
At the house, she left the coachman behind, who muttered about the fare and seemed nearly courageous enough to demand it from her, involvement with the Coroners be damned, and likewise damned the dishonor implicit in demanding money from a blind girl. If he might have complained, he was stilled by the presence of Mrs. Crewell. Skinner could hear her at the door, great lungs full and ready to lay into the man, whether his request was reasonable or not.
If anything came of it, Skinner never found out. She retreated to her room and sat by her window, pressing her hearing out where she knew it was quiet. Mrs. Crewell’s boarding house had its back to the Daior Chapel necropolis. Skinner listened to the dead, and let them soothe her.
Silence, to a knocker, is a strange phenomenon, and especially strange in a city like Trowth. The city’s sighted inhabitants often ignore it, preoccupied with the desolate loneliness of gray stone and worn, green bronze. Their eyes distract them from the merciless quiet of the city, whose cavernous stone underbelly, thick fogs, and bitter cold seem to muffle the casual sounds of daily living. During Second Winter, there are not even beggars in the street, or ragmen or bone-pickers harvesting their merchandise. There are no rats, or crows, or seagulls to hunt the empty city streets for scraps-all life that has no home to go to retreats deep into the Arcadium, ceding ground to the inevitable icy onslaught.
Despite the ringing, resonant quiet of the city, the eerie underpinning of stillness that quietly draws the life from the most animated conversations, there are very few places that were truly silent to Skinner’s preternatural hearing. Always, above that black gap of quiet was a haze of tiny noises-of hurried breaths and distant echoes, ruffling wool and rattling footsteps. The myriad sounds of humanity drew her clairaudience to them, exerting a nearly-imperceptible pull on her senses.
It was often thought that knockers were capable of communicating with the dead, and this was because of how they often chose to live near graveyards. The misconception stemmed from the average citizen’s inability to understand what it meant for the knockers, that their hearing should be so painfully acute. Knockers listened to the dead not because corpses were noted conversationalists, or because they had eldritch secrets to impart; they listened because the dead were so benignly quiet.
The Vie-Gorgon coach came for Skinner sharp at seven, rolling to a stop just as Chapel bells finished tolling the hour. The echo faded, and dissolved into the sounds of Mrs. Crewell, busying herself about the house with a housekeeper’s native self-import
ance. She would not suffer a spot of dust on the day that the Raithower Vie-Gorgon coach came to her hotel, even if it carried a man of such small importance as the Raithower Vie-Gorgon coachman. Coachmen talk, Mrs. Crewell well knew, and she’d not have any gossip about the state of her house.
The coach was warm, and of a style that Skinner was unfamiliar with-she shared a large compartment with the driver himself, separated from him by a mesh partition, rather than having him sit outside, warmed only by portable heating mechanisms. Skinner could hear him breathing and shuffling about behind the screen, whickering softly to his horses as the need arose. He did not speak to her, though, and Skinner felt strange raising her voice to him. Was it appropriate to speak to a coachman if he was sitting inside with you? It would be rude to say nothing, wouldn’t it? But he was also a Vie-Gorgon coachman, and the Vie-Gorgons took propriety very seriously. Surely he’d be offended if she said something. Or not? Perhaps he hated the stifling conformity demanded by polite society, and was really itching for an ordinary conversation with an ordinary person, and was just waiting for her to say something?
Am I nervous? Skinner thought to herself. Is this why I’m losing my mind? “Do you,” she said, then cleared her throat. “I mean, have you been to the Royal, before?”
There was a moment of considered silence, and Skinner worried again that she’d made the wrong decision. When he spoke, the coachman had a grizzled old working-man’s voice that seemed out of place. “Once. Miss V gave me and the missus floor tickets.”
“What did you see?”