Mr. Stitch

by Chris Braak

  Ordinarily. Now, the lightening sky and cheery, amiable atmosphere of the city rang hollow in his ears, a false front of friendship piled up, after so many years of tradition, on top of Trowth’s ever-rotten core. There was not, Beckett had been forced to conclude, anything sacred. This was not a revelation that struck him like a thunderbolt, but rather a slow, seeping realization. After many years of work in the Coroners, he had learned that most people did not hold most things sacred, and that those things that above all demanded respect for their sacredness were the ones most likely to be ignored. But he had hoped, or else imagined, or at the very least considered that there were in his world one or two things that everyone chose to respect.

  “Should have known better,” he muttered to himself. He looked at his desk, cluttered with paperwork for cases that he would never, could never solve. He felt the ugly weight of the gun in his hand. His mind drifted back to his last conversation with Mr. Stitch.

  “You perceive. A. Connection?” The hulking reanimate, still as a corpse behind its desk, had wheezed at him.

  “There’s no question,” Beckett had replied. “The pamphlets that are being circulated, they’re all made at the same press. We don’t know where it is, but we’re going to find it. I want to move on these men, now.”

  “Impossible.” Stitch replied. “We. Cannot. Find them.”

  “You didn’t find anything?” Beckett asked. “Anything at all at the gendarmerie bombing site?”

  “Nothing.” Stitch’s voice betrayed no emotion except the constant pain of having to be used at all. “The site. Was entirely. Devoid.”

  “We can’t…” Beckett had begun. He felt his voice grow hoarse, and worried that it would crack. He wondered how he could be so desperate about something, after so much time spent in the regular, dispassionate slog of his work. “We can’t let this go. We have to do something.”

  “So. Find. Something.”

  That was it, and it was depressing. If Stitch and its miraculous engine of a mind couldn’t find anything to connect the bombing and the daemonomaniac and the mysterious pamphleteer, then there was little hope that Beckett would be able to. No leads, no anything, like so many of his cases these days. The number of crimes that could be connected to one of the heretical sciences seemed to grow exponentially, but the tools he needed to prosecute his investigations remained stubbornly old-fashioned. Ask people if they’d seen anything. Question notorious career criminals-this was a tradition, and a fairly useless one; since heretics were executed on the spot, there were generally very few people who could rightly have been said to have made a career of them. One advocate in the Royal Academy of Sciences insisted that it was possible to determine a heretic by precisely measuring the shape of his head, but he wanted funding for his experiments before he could produce any worthwhile results, so that was fairly a bust.

  Nothing. Beckett looked down at his gun again, felt the black iron call to a black spot in his heart, numb and raw and cold. He stared at the barrel, watched it grow, stretching out to encompass him, its dark, empty core drawing him down, down into it with an inexorable gravity. The principle seemed remarkably easy. The barest twitch of his finger would be enough, the gun would do all the work. Wasn’t it quite extraordinary that so much pain, so much weariness, could abolished with such a small, simple step?

  “Mr. Beckett?” The boy’s voice was soft; he had crept into Beckett’s office without the old coroner hearing.

  “Alan?” Beckett shook his head and looked up. Of course it wasn’t Alan, Alan had disappeared, escaped to Corsay probably. It was James, the new knocker. His face was pale and pinched, his jaw always clenched as though he were perpetually fighting back nausea. Ruddy light from the windows reflected off of his silver eyeplate. The plate had been set improperly, and now a string of syrupy black ichor dribbled down his cheek. “James. What?”

  “I…”

  “What is it, boy? Speak up,” Beckett snapped at him, as he set his revolver back on his desk.

  James sighed, but said nothing for a long moment. Then, “I was in Gorcia, did you know that, Mr. Beckett?”

  Beckett allowed, privately, that he had indeed known that, though he hadn’t given it much thought. To the knocker he simply said, “Yes. So?”

  “I was at the Proc Offensive. Got…a lot of men had trouble, after that. Going into the caves, I mean. Do you know about it?”

  “No,” Beckett said, simply.

  “It was bad. They moved me off of that, afterward. To Quartermasters.” The knocker was silent again.

  Beckett grunted. “Get to the point, boy. What is it?”

  “I want…I need to be sure. Have you been in the army, Mr. Beckett?”

  The old coroner rolled his eye but was, in spite of himself, intrigued. “Third dragoons. One battle, in the Dragon Isles.”

  “Where?”

  “Kaarcag.”

  The knocker perceptibly shivered when he heard that. “You were at…? Kaarcag was a massacre.”

  Beckett closed his eye and experienced a momentary flash of thorny green vines pouring from Fletcher’s mouth. “We knew it going in, that it was an ambush. You couldn’t help but see.”

  “But you went in.”

  “We went in. Took ninety percent casualties. The rest of us were discharged.”

  “Why did you do it? Why didn’t you stop?”

  “You don’t get to stop. The army falls apart if you stop following your orders. Even when you know they’re bad…you still have to do it. Suck it up, hope for the best.”

  James nodded. “I can’t…I can’t tell you how I know about this. But. The Empire…has been producing oneiric munitions.”

  The statement should have landed in Beckett’s mind like a cannonball, and yet he found himself unsurprised. There was very little he was willing to put past the Empire, these days.

  “They were for use in Gorcia,” James went on. “When the war ended, most of them were destroyed. Some were brought back to the country. There’s a depot in the city. In Small Ash Abbey. The man that runs it is…not altogether trustworthy. I have reason to believe he may be selling his stock…”

  “When?”

  James was quiet; he cocked his head to the side, twisting himself as though trying to avoid Beckett’s gaze, though he had no direct experience of it.

  “Tonight.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell Stitch?”

  James grimaced, painfully. His face twitched, he seemed almost about to cry. “Orders, Mr. Beckett. You know how…how it is. Sometimes the men…the men you work with. They aren’t always…but you can’t just…” His voice dropped to a barely-audible whisper. “…you can’t turn on them. I told you because I thought you’d understand. I don’t know what Stitch understands.”

  Eighteen

  We have met with some setbacks. For all I believe that the mind is the key engine, Chretien’s work on the body is still incomplete. There seems to be no effective way to prevent the eyes from decomposing. This has led me to certain other concerns. Perhaps a creature could be built with no eyes at all? But how should such a thing think? How could it learn to live in a world of conscious beings? I know that there are blind men who live fully in the world, and are not harmed by this difference. But a blind man has a wholly human mind otherwise, lacking only the single default. What should a mind be if it lacks all the elements of the human mind, as well as its senses? How should this mind apprehend the world?

  — from the journal of Harcourt Wolfram, 1785

  Beckett tore out of his office, barely taking time to shrug into his heavy coat. “You,” he said to Valentine, who was reclining lazily on one of the couches, “With me. Where’s Harry?”

  Valentine snapped to his feet. “By the coach. The coaches. I think. I assume, I mean. What are we doing?”

  “Intercepting. Get your coat on.”

  Popular opinion had it that the name “Small Ash Abbey” came from the building’s miraculous survival of the
Great Fire of 1719; the truth was substantially less remarkable: it was the smaller of two abbeys built by the Sar-Sarpek emigre Tyador Azsch in the 16thcentury. Small Ash Abbey had been retrofitted, sometime in the last fifty years, in the Daior-Vie style; a style of sleek lines and simple geometries, the Daior-Vies had been convinced that it would be embraced as the modern mold from which all future styles would emerge. As it happened, a certain scandal among the most esteemed Daior-Vies left the whole family in disgrace, and the style became an archipelago of clean-lined strangeness that was gradually invaded, overcome, and replaced by the more aggressive and more reputable contenders in the Architecture War.

  The Abbey was tucked away in Whitehaven, a district so far from central Trowth that it might have been a suburb. There were no trains here, the stone roads were broken and choked with rust-colored, inaptly-named cheerweed. So far outside the city was Whitehaven that it actually constituted only the first or second, or possibly third, level of construction. There was no Arcadium beneath it, just a dense undercroft of basements and sub-basements that periodically collapsed, taking the buildings above them with it. The result of this gradual erosion of its foundation was a ramshackle Whitehaven, a run-down Whitehaven, a crooked, stony nest that served as a home to the indigent only.

  Beckett stopped the coach several blocks from the Abbey. He and Valentine slipped out and approached along the street, sticking close to the buildings where phlogiston-barrel fires had stained the walls black and sooty. There were no streetlights here, and the moon was low behind the city proper, so there were plenty of shadows through which the coroners could pick. Having eventually secured a location that offered a serviceable view of the Abbey’s entrance and was still obscured by dark and architecture, Beckett and Valentine proceeded to wait.

  And wait.

  And wait.

  Waiting patiently is, without question, the most prized and important skill that a detective of any stripe must possess in order to catch criminals in the act. It is a skill at which Beckett was practiced, and which Valentine abhorred. That Valentine managed, in this particular instance, to remain still and silent for the astonishing three or four hours that they waited was lost on Beckett, as he was troubled by something that he did not know how to articulate.

  As he watched the door to the Abbey, he felt his shoulders clench up, as a tension coiled through his body. Sounds, the sounds of men shouting, of rifles discharging. An eerie wail had picked up, just at the edge of his hearing, the sound of an engine whirring faster and faster. His neck and shoulders spasmed and he shook the sounds away. They were soft sounds, not real sounds, sounds that he knew lurked in his mind. They’d been shaken loose by something, by the drugs or the events at the gendarmerie in Red Lanes. Or by the munitions that must now be waiting in the Abbey.

  Beckett closed his good eye and shook his head again, but the sounds only grew louder, the wail raised its pitch, men began to scream, lungs turned to rotten meat by the chimeric gas the Szarkany Rend had unleashed, choking, now, vomiting their hearts up, bleeding from their eyes and the wail, that wail.. Cook stared at him, fallen to the ground. Beckett tugged at his arm. “On your feet,” he shouted, voice muffled by his scarf, “come on, soldier, up!” The green fog crawled from Cook’s nostrils, drawing blood out with it, suspending it in tiny drops in the air. More cannons sounded, and more detonations. The fog rose in pillars, and reached out with crooked tendrils for tender lungs.

  “Beckett! Beckett!”

  “What?” Beckett opened his eyes. The noise was gone. The sun had, slowly, stained the shreds of horizon visible through crooked buildings with a vivid red light. Valentine was clutching at his shoulder. “What?” Beckett snapped, “What is it?”

  “Look.”

  Two men, from two different directions, were approaching the Abbey. They had their collars turned up and their hats pulled down low-a reasonable precaution against prying eyes or the chilly snap of early-morning Armistice. With competent efficiency they approached the Abbey, did not call out to each other, did not say a word; the only sign that they might be there for the same purpose at all-rather than simply two suspiciously-dressed travelers who coincidentally arrived at the same abandoned Abbey at the same unlikely hour of the morning-was the fact that the first man held the heavy wooden door, ever so briefly, for the second.

  “Think that’s them?” Valentine whispered.

  Beckett didn’t bother answering, instead checked his revolver and steeled himself, pressing fear and anxiety and excitement to one side, evoking the cold dispassion that he wore more comfortably than his uniform. “Come on.” With an audacity that was Beckett’s and his alone, the old coroner walked right through the front door of the Abbey, on the heels of his suspects.

  The inside of Small Ash Abbey prioritized space, as most of the old-century religious spaces did. Empty air was at a premium in claustrophobic Trowth, and the only places that could afford, or would afford, to leave a square cubic inch free of brick or mortar were those places that had some interest beyond what they could rent it for. Small Ash consisted of a square of four long halls with tall, round-arched windows facing its wide inner courtyard; there, a hastily-erected construction of salt-worn wooden timbers obscured whatever took place. Inside the Abbey, there was no sign of the two men.

  Beckett laid a finger across his lips for silence, and gestured for Valentine to search the hall to the right, hopefully working his way into the interior courtyard. The two men drew their guns, held them low and ready as they crept through the dark. Once separated from Valentine, Beckett began to notice the hallucinatory sounds again-the faint whine of some eldritch engine, the distant echoes of choked-off screams, a murmuring…

  No. The murmuring was real. Real men were talking to each other, in the structure that occupied most of the Abbey’s courtyard. Beckett thumbed back the hammer of his gun and tried to slip discreetly past the rusty-hinged doors.

  The inside of the structure was not dissimilar to any kind of warehouse: a claustrophobic mountain of plain wooden boxes, towering on either side of a three or four narrow alleys. The place was lit by a few blue phlogiston lamps, hanging high overhead; they were the military-grade lamps, with thick metal shields around the sides to prevent volatile leaks. There was an empty space in the midst of the boxes, where three mean spoke to each other in hushed voices. Beckett took a deep breath to push his fear away, only to find there was no fear or worry-just a raw, empty space.

  “Coroners,” Beckett said, as he approached, startling the three men. “No one moves, put your hands on your heads.” In his many years as a coroner, Elijah Beckett had said precisely these words in precisely this order a countless number of times. In those same years, only four times had the suspects to which he spoke ever complied with the orders.

  These men were no exception; they recovered quickly from their surprise, split up, drew weapons, and fanned out in an attempt to surround him.

  “Who are you?” Spat the man in the middle, not one of the two visitors, so probably the quartermaster who was arranging things. He was handsome enough, though Beckett thought he wore his sideburns too long. He had a new, nickel-plated revolver pointed at the coroner.

  Where is Valentine? Beckett wondered, but the thought had no real traction. No thoughts had any traction, they just floated away from him, along with a whirling line of voices and footsteps and gunshots. Should I be afraid? These men mean to kill me. He thought. The hell with it, I’m not afraid of anything, anymore. Without the hesitation that plagues even the most experienced shootists, Beckett raised his gun towards the man directly to his left, and shot him in the face.

  The sound of his gun, loud and bright like a thunderbolt in his hand, was lost to the soft sounds of gunfire in his mind, and echoed by a return volley of bullets that went mercifully wide, tearing chunks of wood from the empty boxes. The handsome quartermaster was screaming then, not at Beckett, but at the gunman to his right, Beckett couldn’t hear him, or couldn’t be bothered to hear hi
m, just turned and fired. He hit the gunman high in the shoulder, sending the man whirling to the ground.

  “…hit the munitions, you idiot!” The quartermaster was saying. He dropped his weapon. “Look, okay, look! Unarmed. I surrender, all right? I surrender, just stop fucking shooting.” Beckett stepped forward and struck the man across the face, using the full weight of his antique revolver. The man fell, and Beckett kicked him twice in the ribs, hard, before he could stand. “Shit. Shit,” he gasped. “I surrender, for fuck-” Beckett kicked him in the teeth, and he slumped into unconsciousness.

  “What…what…are you…” the gunman moaned. “You’re supposed to arrest…”

  Beckett whirled on him. “Who are you working for?” The man’s face was different, now, there was a deep dent in his skull and his were glazed. Dummies, Beckett thought, how did the dummies get here? How did they find their way from Kaarcag? It would reach out to him, Beckett knew, try and crush him with its stupidly strong hands.

  “You’re supposed to…”

  Here, Beckett told himself. You’re here, in Trowth. He’s a heretic. The old coroner stepped on the man’s wounded shoulder, digging the toe of his shoe into the bullet wound. The gunman screamed. “You were picking something up here. Where were you taking it? Who are you working for?”

  “You can’t-”

  Beckett pressed harder, and the man screamed again. “You don’t tell me, boy. You don’t tell me anything. I have a question, you answer it. That’s how this works. Understand?” Beckett leaned in again, coaxing a ragged gasp from the man’s throat. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” the man stammered. “Yes.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  The man shook his head, sweat streamed down his face, which now was wracked with pain. “I can’t. He’ll kill me.”