by Chris Braak
The doctors told him that he’d likely eventually hit a balance. The veneine would make him tired, the djang would pick him up; in the right proportion, he’d soon reach a kind of equilibrium that would put him back to normal, only with no pain. If that was true, the miraculous balance he hoped to achieve was a long way off. Right now, the djang stopped him from sleeping, but the veneine muddled his thoughts enough that he couldn’t think of anything to do but lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.
Sometimes, little snippets of memories would swim up from the murky depths of his mind, fuzzy kirliotypes of past that he thought he’d forgotten. They were never did more than border on the significant. He remembered the Dragon Isles campaign, but the memories that floated up were images of learning to use the bolt-action on his rifle, or Fletcher sitting in the front of the boat, smoking a cigar. Beckett saw images from his childhood, too-the day his father patched a pair of Beckett’s boots. Some Armistice from decades ago, when he walked to school carrying a weathered little primer that had been used by generations of students before him. Listening to a record in his office at Raithower House.
None of these memories meant anything, as far as Beckett could ascertain. They just flickered through his head, as though some trapdoor had been carelessly left open to emit a deluge of trivial incidence. Or as though, now that Beckett was at the end of his life, his granite-hard personality was slowly coming undone. The long years of building filters to sort the meaningful from the irrelevant were unspooling, the filters were breaking down, one day he’d be drowned in a flood of his own pointless experiences.
Not for the first time, Beckett considered an early leave from the mess. The spectre of an old age dominated by senility and physical anguish was not appealing. Nor was the prospect of a retirement spent drugged into oblivion, letting the fades gobble him up inch by unrelenting inch while he let his mind drift among hallucinogenic fantasies of black water and brass cities. Surely there was no shame in punctuating a life such as his-one with accomplishments that any reasonable human being could be proud of, one in which a difference was made, however small-with a clean and honorable exit, to forgo the inevitable humiliation of decrepitude?
A gentle chill crept into his body, and he could not feel himself shiver. His vision began to slowly contract, the plaster details of the ceiling blurred. Beckett blinked something from his eye and turned his head. His red scarf hung over the sill of the window, which was buttoned up tightly against the raw spring air. For a moment, Beckett was seized with a desire to snatch the scarf up and rip it to pieces, or toss it into the fire.
The moment passed. Beckett got up instead, glimpsed briefly at himself in the small mirror above his vanity. Dressed in his shabby smallclothes, body gruesomely marred by the fades, he looked like a man with one foot in the grave. Which Beckett supposed he must be. He dressed in his charcoal-colored suit, wrapped his red scarf around his mouth and nose, and decided it was not too early to go to work, after all.
Because of Trowth’s notoriously inclement weather, its rapid fluctuations in temperature, and its perpetually salty air, it was practically impossible for any large machine to function with any kind of reliability. Discrepancies in function were often small, but could be compounded in an engine that was required to run all the time. Nowhere was this more apparent than the clocks of Trowth.
With every passing second, the massive brass machines sitting atop office buildings and churches and bourses grew ever more slightly away from synchrony. A small army of mechanics, employed by the Committee on Chronography, a sub-division of the Ministry of Civic Well-Being, worked tirelessly throughout the week in order to keep them running smoothly, efficiently, and, most importantly, accurately-but their task was ultimately futile. There were simply too many clocks, and the differences in time were often close to imperceptible.
This was all further compounded by the fact that, according to royal decree, the clock at the top of Vie Abbey should be the clock from which all others took their measurements. The clock at Vie Abbey was primarily an astronomical clock, seated beneath a vast astrolabe. It was very well able to mark the changing of the seasons, the orbits of sun and moon, and the passage of the planets-but it was not accurate for ordinary, civil time beyond an hour. There were no minute or second hands on the clock at Vie Abbey. So the army of mechanics who tuned the clocks, and who lost time as they traveled from church to office to market, were forced to make their best guesses as to precisely what time it was.
All of this yielded a strange wave of clock chimes throughout the city. The four-o’clock-hour, which is the hour that found Beckett on his way back to Raithower House, began with the heavy bronze thunder at Vie Abbey. Shortly after it began, the clocks nearby, with their orchestra of bells, took up the tolling, and passed it along to those clocks that were nearest to them, and so forth. The entire process, including the strange pockets of early chiming, the clocks that were hopelessly delayed, and the clocks that seemed to be under the misapprehension that it was actually eight o’clock in the evening, took well over twenty minutes, even for as modest an hour as four o’clock. During Second Winter, when the clock-tuners were much less able to effectively tend to their charges, the noon bells were sometimes known to toll for the entire hour until they began again at one.
Beckett reached Old Bank just as that neighborhood’s venerable clocks began to take up the clanging of the hour. He passed without delay through one of the many checkpoints he’d insisted on; local gendarmes, accompanied by a therian sniffer, searched passers-by for explosives on the chance that Anonymous John might take it into his mind that he should attempt some kind of reprisal. The therians, peculiarly, were unusually sensitive to the presence of the oneiric regeants used in heretical munitions. They were employed much the same way dogs were-a fact that Beckett found more than a little disgusting, but he was willing to accept it if it meant putting a stop to the attacks.
Old Bank was replete with such checkpoints, all the way into the tangled Arcadium beneath it, and it was beyond consideration that anyone might attack Raithower House with an oneiric weapon. Beckett remained fairly comfortable, then, as he walked towards the Raithower courtyard. A tall, rangy-man in a long dark coat preceded him to the gates-another early-riser, perhaps. Beckett called out to him, but his voice was drowned out by Old Bank’s clocks. The noisiest of these clocks, which had just begun to toll at Beckett’s arrival, was called Goursehead Clock; it rang four brass clangs, of varying pitch and tone, for every one great iron bong that tolled the hour.
The man entered Raithower House. Shortly thereafter, the building exploded.
The sound and force of the blast were muffled by the old stone walls of Raithower House itself, so the wave of pressure and heat presented Beckett with only a moment of pain and confusion. It gave way to the old coroner furiously berating himself as he saw blue-white light boil out of the windows, and turn almost immediately to the red and orange of burning wood.
Fifty men looking for oneiric munitions, Beckett thought, And not one checking for regular, old-fashioned phlogiston bombs. The wave of chiming clocks passed by, to the sound of men shouting for help, the crackling roar of the fire, and the jangling clatter of the fire brigades.
Twenty-Six
Word of the fire spread quickly-so quickly that a throng of citizens had arrived to support the fire brigades before the five o’clock bells began to ring. The citizenry, ever since the devastation of Mudside during the Sharpsie Riots, was extremely sensitive to the possibility of widespread fire. Fortunately, the rain made that unlikely, but the explosion had caused Raithower house and the adjoining property to collapse, and spare hands were needed to clear away the rubble. The bulk of Raithower House actually extended well below the street line and into the Arcadium, and probably remained largely intact-it’s neighboring edifice was not quite so lucky. That house had the misfortune of being built on top of another, smaller house, which too had collapsed from the shock of the explosion, leaving a gaping pit int
o the city’s underside. Stone and brass slid like an avalanche into the hole, but Trowth had seen enough of misery and destruction these last few years, and if there was anyone trapped in there, the people were determined to effect a rescue.
Beckett attempted to coordinate the efforts as best he could, until the djang began to wear off and the veneine lurched forth to drag him into the dark with its oppressive grip. He sat down on a toppled bronze statue of a man wrestling with some manner of lion and watched as the dull flames were finally extinguished, the rocks were cleared away, and charred bodies were pulled from the wreckage. His eyelids were heavy; the sleepless night was catching up with him.
Mr. Stitch arrived some time after that, and Beckett did not notice the hulking reanimate, as it, too, watched the rescue efforts and took stock. Stitch stood very still, taking in every piece of information available, processing it all with its astonishing mechanical brain, breathing its deep, raspy breaths from its artificial lungs.
“What. Happened?” Stitch asked, finally? Not because it hadn’t surmised, obviously, but because Beckett’s opinion was one more datum to be collected, processed, and stored.
“Incendiary bomb,” Beckett replied. “All our security was meant to find oneiric munitions. Should have realized. Firebomb’s just as dangerous, probably easier to get a hold of.”
“Hindsight,” said Mr. Stitch, as it considered the fallen buildings. The upper storeys of Raithower house had collapsed forward into the courtyard, filling the space with jagged spears of stone and splintered wood. Beside it, a crevasse had opened up, cracking the roof of the labyrinth of understreets and vaults that made up Old Bank. This area of the Arcadium had been small flats in use by largely bachelors and students; with luck, most of them had been empty. An outer wall had fallen away from the underground buildings, leaving a honeycomb of disintegrating rooms visible from the surface. Light from the parts of the building that were still burning spattered the scene with a dusky red glow, while the rain washed dirty rivulets of mud and ash across every conceivable surface. “Inside?”
“Don’t know. I’d only just got here when the…when it happened. Don’t know who was there. Third watch, I expect. That’s…uhm.” Beckett put his head in his hands. “Heathcliff. Courton. Shit. The knocker from the low countries. What…” he took a deep breath. “Can’t remember his name.”
“Happes.” Stitch turned away from the rescue operation, and considered Beckett in its dead, passionless manner. A nearby phlogiston streetlight had lost its glass panes in the explosion, and now fountained eldritch blue light into the sky. Muddled with the red light from the fire, the lamp made everything the livid purple color of a new bruise. “Plans?”
“Plans, yeah, plans. I don’t…” This was supposed to be it, Beckett knew. The final proof. Anonymous John was everywhere, he could get to anyone, he could do anything. There was nowhere safe. John had struck right to the heart of the Coroners, and Beckett was supposed to acknowledge a superior force and surrender to it. If this had been Anonymous John’s intention, Beckett resolved at that moment to demonstrate that it represented a serious miscalculation. “All right. He wants a war, we’ll give it to him. I’m going to shut him down.”
“How?”
“I need. Everything. The War Ministry still has impressment powers, right? And the new Moral Standards Committee, their files. I want to commandeer everything, every man, every piece of information in the city, shut down every port, search every ship and warehouse.” Anonymous John’s operations had been notoriously difficult to dismantle because they were robustly decentralized-small cells operating under instructions, and barely aware of each other. And the process had been repeatedly hampered by the fact that law enforcement in the city was itself decentralized, and subject to the whims of its neighborhood commanders, to the needs of conflicting bureaucracies, the flailing inconsistency of public opinion. But John’s organization was still, ultimately, parasitic-it required the ordinary functioning of the city to survive, and had been permitted to exist for so long because it was more trouble to destroy it than it was really worth. “I don’t even care if we never find him. I’ll keep all fucking industry in this town tied up until he starves to death. I will dismantle every tiny piece of his operation if it takes me a hundred years.”
“Ambitious.” Stitch replied. As usual, no emotions betrayed its opinion on the subject. Whatever Mr. Stitch believed, it was keeping it to itself.
“This isn’t just heresy anymore, or civil unrest. He’s not just bombing some local gendarmerie. The Coroners is a division of the Imperial Guard. Attacking us is treason. He has directly compromised the safety of the Emperor himself, and I want unlimited powers to track him down. Fucking unlimited.”
Stitch was silent, just stared at him with those unblinking, brass eyes, then turned away. Its dead, ichor-pickled muscles creaked audibly as it did so. It was not officially reported, but still fairly commonly-known, that Mr. Stitch was routinely consulted by the Emperor’s personal medical staff on a variety of scientific subjects. Ostensibly, as the head of the Coroner’s division, there were specific, proscribed-and often intricate and confusing-channels through which Mr. Stitch had to act in order to so much as change the color of the front door of the office. But the fact was that Mr. Stitch had the ear of the Emperor if he it was required, and what Beckett said was true. The Imperial Guard, for the safety of the Emperor and the Empire, necessarily had to be sacrosanct. There should be no citizen that felt anything but terror at the thought of raising their hand against the Emperor’s appointed servants of law and order. John’s attacks had set a dangerous precedent.
It is possible that these were the thoughts that Mr. Stitch’s incalculably complex difference-engine of a brain was considering in that moment, that and a nest of future possibilities, weighed against past experience, evaluated according to their upcoming likelihoods, a treacherous reef of non-optimal outcomes through which the reanimate needed to sail. Future outcomes were difficult to predict, as even the most fervent daemonomaniacs who pretended to absolute causal knowledge of the universe were forced to admit. And, moreover, Mr. Stitch had to accommodate this new information into whatever vast plans for the city it had itself been making for the last two hundred years. It was a daunting task, but if there was any mind capable of it, it was Stitch’s.
While Mr. Stitch computed, Beckett became conscious of another voice shouting his name. A familiar voice. “Skinner?” He asked. He looked up. The young woman was wrapped in a dressing gown and a heavy coat, hair loose and plastered across her face by the rain, silver-eyeplate glinting red and blue, as though she’d proceeded directly from bed to the patchwork light that now illuminated what remained of Raithower House. Karine was behind her, somewhat less appropriately-attired, as the indige had different customs regarding what constituted acceptable sleepwear than her Trowthi brethren. They were both panic-stricken; Karine led Skinner by one hand, Skinner clutched at her cane with the other.
“Beckett! Where is he? Is he all right? I don’t hear him…” Skinner was saying.
“Who? Is who all right?” Beckett was on his feet at once; too quickly; his head spun.
“Valentine!”
Beckett shook his head. “Valentine’s not here, his shift doesn’t start for another hour-”
“He was staying here. Beckett.” Her voice dropped to an anguished whisper. “Beckett, he let us stay at his family house and he was sleeping at the office.”
Beckett felt a sensation like his stomach had dropped out from inside him, swallowed up by some inexpressibly deep pit at the core of his being. “Shit. Shit! Okay, come with me. Now!” He seized Skinner’s arm and dragged her towards the collapsed building. Rubble still obscured most of the site; volunteers were working tirelessly to clear it. They had made a chain into the pit that had opened into the Arcadium to pass broken stone out of it. Pale, ash-smeared faces and haunted looks made them look like so many horrid ghosts, condemned forever to labor on behalf of a city that w
ould never care for them. “Listen. Skinner, you need to listen there, all right? If he’s trapped inside, I need you to find him.”
“Is he-”
“The people we’ve pulled out so far are dead. But we haven’t found everyone, all right? We haven’t gotten to the bottom. So I need you to find him.”
Skinner nodded. Beckett could see the small muscles along her jaw clench, the telltale signs of concentration, as she swept her clairaudience through the rubble. Fear and concern would have made another knocker hasty, likely to make mistakes, but not Skinner. She was methodical, precise, thorough. If anyone could find him…
“There’s nothing…wait. Wait, there’s…I can hear someone…”
“Where? Where is he?”
“Sh! Quiet.” She opened her mouth, stretched her jaw like she was yawning, trying to listen more closely…then snapped it shut. Her face went blank. She slowly sank to the ground, besmirching her nightdress with the muck and ash that had accumulated on the cobblestones around them.
“Miss Skinner?” Karine whispered as she approached. “What is it?”
Beckett already knew the answer, but he shuddered still when Skinner spoke. “Nothing. It’s stopped.”
“Are you sure-”
“I heard his heart stop, Karine. There’s no one else down there.” Skinner put her head in her hands. Beckett leaned heavily against a stone wall that had, by some miracle, avoided collapse. They were silent as Mr. Stitch approached. It said nothing.
At length, Beckett spoke. “Get me an army. Anonymous John wants a war. I need an army.”