Mr. Stitch

by Chris Braak

  Stitch considered the rubble-strewn catastrophe that had one been the coroners’ office. “You. Will have one.”

  Twenty-Seven

  Though Beckett had demanded an army, what he got was little better than a mob. Men volunteered for his operations by the score-some were gendarmes, some were former soldiers, some were simply shopkeepers and tradesmen incensed beyond reason. Neighbors began gleefully reporting on each other, listing the criminal vices of their fellows in the prurient hope that someone they knew might turn out to be Trowth’s notorious arch-villain. Houses and businesses, warehouses, docks, and ships were raided, and some were burned. Commerce in the city practically ground to a halt, as Trowth’s population laid siege to itself.

  It was veneine and djang and iron self-control that enabled Beckett to retain even a shred of command over his army. He no longer had the stomach for more than one meal a day-usually of smoked fish and kale-and slept for no more than three hours a night. He pushed himself beyond the brink of exhaustion, living in an almost trance-like state in which his mind had completely divorced itself from the sensibilities of his body, operating it remotely, fully disregarding its needs, as he rode back and forth across the city, doing his best to supervise the rapidly-deteriorating organization of his raiding parties.

  During this time, the middle weeks of True Spring, chilly showers and civil unrest proved a fertile combination for the city’s pamphleteers, who sprung up throughout Trowth like so many radical mushrooms, distributing literature like it was their fungal spore. There were some pamphlets in support of the Emperor, of course, mostly paid for by the emperor himself. By far, however, the pamphleteers were closer to fomenting revolution than they had ever been in the city’s history-free now, while Beckett had seized control of all law enforcement and occupied it with chasing down Anonymous John, to say what perhaps they had always wished to. The Emperor was a tyrant, an oppressive madman, crushing the life from the city with his mad whims. Elijah Beckett was a warlord, trying to seize control of Trowth from its rightful ruler. Anonymous John was a foreign spy, trying to undermine the Empire, or else he was a criminal hero, a freedom-fighter battling the forces of oppression, or else he was a devil, the right hand of the Loogaroo come to visit upon Trowth some divine vengeance.

  Somewhere in the core of this swirl of rumor and innuendo, coloring the interpretations and fueling the rebellious tendencies of the city’s most fiery ideologues, was one particular pamphlet. Elijah Beckett never saw it, because he had neither the time nor the interest to concern himself with public opinion. Elizabeth Skinner never knew about it, because the only friends she had left were too preoccupied to draw her attention to it. But it had not escaped the notice of the Emperor, and it was the subject of a public address that would later be known as the End of the Presses.

  Word of the impending address had circulated rapidly among the citizens, and a throng of people filled the Royal Square in front of the dense, mismatched architecture of the palace. It loomed above the people, craggy gables and jagged merlons, forests of buttresses and arches, looking like nothing so much as a grim deity, prepared to pass judgment against those foolish enough to worship at its feet. Arrayed along the sides of the Royal Square were the closed carriages of the Esteemed Families: the Vie-Gorgons and the Daior-Crabtrees and the Rowan-Czarneckis, hidden from public view in their shrouded coaches; under mandate to attend, but under no particular obligation to permit the ordinary people to get a good look at them.

  Emilia Vie-Gorgon was there, some onlookers claimed. They insisted that they had caught a glimpse of her beautiful, delicate features and her ebon-black skin through the white lace curtains of the Vie-Gorgon coach.

  On either side of the square, the twin statues of Gorgon and Demogorgon stood as silent, inscrutable sentries, the last relics of the city of giants upon which Trowth had been built. Here, of all places, the sense of transgression for which Trowth was known, the sense of being a trespasser in a stranger’s garden, was the strongest. It was undoubtedly why the Emperor chose to deliver all of his speeches here. Yet, despite the natural fear that percolated among his audience-the paranoia that they were suddenly subject to as they looked over their shoulders, the abrupt uncertainty that gnawed them-despite all that, the one document that the Emperor had come out expressly to forbid circulated rapidly, passed from chilly hand to chilly hand, stuffed under coats and in shirts to protect it from the rain.

  Someone, somewhere, had begun printing copies of Theocles, and selling them for pennies on street corners.

  The reasons for the sale were, of course, obscure, but it was serendipitous that whatever rabble-rouser had decided to resurrect the blacklisted play had chosen to charge for it, rather than simply distributing it. The people of Trowth were mistrustful of anything given, far preferring the tacit assurance of value implied when a thing was sold. If it were free, it would have been deemed worthless, but even the few pennies that the printer demanded were enough to convince citizens of its secret value.

  William II Gorgon-Vie was, after the fashion of the Gorgon-Vies, a stout man, barrel-chested and apportioned with a generous layer of fat. He was stocky enough to seem short at a distance, but was actually unusually tall. Close-up, William II’s thick-necked frame and slightly rounded shoulders gave the impression, as did most of his family, that he was in fact some kind of bull that had been trained to walk around on its rear hooves. This illusion was supported by his perpetual habit of clearing his throat and snorting.

  The affectation of the Esteemed Families was that, the closer the men were to the throne of the Empire, the more plainly they were attired. The Emperor was customarily the most plainly-clothed, in a suit of all black, tailored both to accommodate and to enhance his generous bulk. He wore dark, smoked glasses-a deviation from his traditional uniform that would have been scandalous, had they not been a recommendation from his cadre of doctors as a means to alleviate his constant migraines.

  William II Gorgon-Vie was an excellent speaker, though suffered from his tendency to employ poor speech writers. His rhetoric was convoluted and sometimes contradictory, marred by words slightly misused (a flaw for which he was routinely lampooned in the papers), and some fairly unusual substitutions of meaning. He delivered this tangle of literary confusion with a bold voice and an upright posture, a generous suffusion of emotion, and all the pomp and grandeur that might be expected of an Emperor who weighed in excess of two hundred pounds. He was, despite not being particularly comprehensible, always quite convincing.

  The thrust of his speech was, or at least, appeared to be that, in the face of Becektt’s ongoing war with criminality, pamphleteering had become a serious threat to the stability of the city. It was impossible, the Emperor asserted, for the Coroners Division to achieve any kind of social harmony while indecent and unscrupulous men consistently attempted to undermine him in the opinion of the public. There was even some suspicion, the Emperor revealed, that the most nefarious and seditious pamphlets-the ones calling the Emperor a tyrant and implying that the Empire might be run more effectively if supreme power was held by a democratically-elected parliament-were being printed and distributed by Anonymous John himself, precisely to engender the sort of civil strife in which he and his criminal compatriots thrived.

  Emperor William II Gorgon-Vie did not mention Theocles, and if he thought that this would permit its presence to be overlooked he was mistaken; there was nothing in his speech more conspicuous than that absence.

  Consequent to all of this, when the Emperor reached the climax of his speech-declaring that all printing presses were now the property of the Crown, that all printing activities were, by Imperial Mandate, suspended, and that all the properties of Comstock Street as well as all properties of the Comstock branch of the Family Vie-Gorgon were seized and held in trust until such time as their guilt or innocence in the matter of seditious documenteering could be established-the general consensus was that his primary purpose was to finally quell the distribution of that
particular and notorious play.

  The speech was met with a stunned silence, as the Emperor went on to reveal that a contingent of Royal Marines had already moved to take action on the decree, and would soon be arriving to clear the Royal Square. The audience, moreover, would be searched and all broadsheets, newspapers, and pamphlets would be seized and burned. The Emperor generously added that no one would be prosecuted for such possessions, conveniently leaving out that arresting and trying fifteen hundred people would be fiendishly impractical.

  All of this was largely irrelevant to Beckett, except insofar as it temporarily deprived him of seventy-five blood-and-bone armored Lobstermen, who were the only men he had access to with any kind of discipline. While the Emperor seized the printing presses and shut down the business of the Comstock Vie-Gorgons, Beckett was taking the rest of his men on a rampage along the river Stark.

  Twenty-Eight

  While William II Gorgon-Vie ended the print industry in Trowth, Elijah Beckett stood in Starkton eating smoked fish. The fish were wrapped in the last issue that would ever be printed of the White Star, and had Beckett realized the rarity and potential value in such a document, it is unlikely he would have behaved any differently. He still would have permitted the pages to absorb the salty brine from the herring and saltire fish, still let it soak through with Trowth’s famous brown sauce, which had once been a ubiquitous condiment for smoked fish. Beckett would have still let soggy bits of paper fall to the ground, to be washed away by the driving rain.

  Beckett ate his fish without tasting it, even though he’d tromped six blocks to find a fish vendor that still served smoked fish with brown sauce. In the last few years, nearly every fishmonger had begun dishing up their vittels covered in Corsay pepper sauce or with pickled fruits, leaving the venerable tradition of the brown sauce-a fluid concoction whose recipe was known only to a small handful of men who dealt in the dressing-far by the wayside. Beckett had not given more than a few seconds’ thought to the subject until this day, when he added it to the long list of things that had changed in his city for the worse. This is not to say that he dwelt on the subject with any gravity, but simply that it occupied some small part of his mind that concerned itself with whether or not the next generation of Trowthi citizens would be able to avail themselves of brown sauce.

  The better part of Beckett’s mind was occupied with the ships that his men had seized at the docks in Starkton. The neighborhood-near the very southernmost bend of the Stark, where it finally began to empty out into the icy bay-had long been an occupied territory of the Gorgon-Vies in the Architecture War, and so was dominated by their signature squat, ugly buildings. Hardly anyone ever complained, as the district was comprised predominately of warehouses, shipping agencies, customs houses, and a myriad other government, institutional, and purely functionary buildings for which architecture served no purpose but utility, and which were generally expected to be squat, square, and ugly anyway.

  At the edge of the river, where the mouldering wooden docks jutted out into the dark water, three steam-powered river barges idled. Their engines had been shut down, leaving a mist of spent phlogiston swirling over the swift current of the Stark and smelling like copper and blood. Their crews had all been taken into custody, arrested and held without charge or warrant, while the holds of the ships were searched. They loomed in the gloomy morning light, while gendarmes with flickering blue lamps scoured the ships’ decks and excavated their bowels. Meanwhile, Beckett watched, and ate his fish.

  Stevedores were dragged off by the score and taken to cells beneath Old Bank where they shivered in the damp and cold. The captains and owner of the three barges were being held in Beckett’s de facto headquarters, a former barracks for the War Ministry’s pressgang, disused since the end of the Ettercap War. Beckett would have his own men question the ship’s captains, or would question them himself, but later. At the moment, the veneine and djang buzzing through his system made it difficult for him to focus; he found his mind flitting from subject to subject, utterly disinterested in even the most mild exercises in concentration.

  One of Beckett’s conscripted gendarmes approached him; the man had a large moustache and a crooked nose, and the number four branded onto his face. This man, whose name Beckett could not remember (he’d been referring to the man as “Four”), had become Beckett’s unofficial liaison to the gendarmerie, pretending some past acquaintance with the Inspector that Beckett also could not recall.

  “Well?” Beckett asked, licking brown sauce from the numb tips of his fingers.

  Four shook his head. “A few bits of contraband, but nothing unusual for ships this size. Mostly just hiding wool for the northern principalities from the Imperial excises. Nothing…uh. Nothing like what you’re looking for.”

  Beckett grimaced, and tossed the remains of his breakfast away. His blind eye had begun weeping, recently, shedding tears of vitreous humor tinged bloody and red as the fades began to eat away at his tear ducts. The ruddy tears, shielded from the rain by the prominent overhang of his leather hat, drew a dark channel along his cheek, but he did not notice them. Most of his face was numbed by the disease; the rest was numbed by the drugs in his system. He could still feel a throb in the crook of his left elbow, the site of his last injection. He’d had to switch arms, since there were too many spots on his right forearm that appeared in danger of sepsis.

  “No explosives,” Four went on, while a sound like the buzzing of angry hornets kicked up behind him. It was the sound of musketballs whizzing by, but he did not move for cover, nor did he even appear to notice them. “No oneiric munitions, no anything. Not with these.”

  Beckett heard the shouts of men struck down as they tried to climb the hill below Kaarcag and saw the weaponized, sentient foglets swirling around his feet. These were the first sign that the assault was a trap, that the Dragon Princes were prepared. They would crawl up a soldier’s leg and down his throat, trying to drain his blood out through his lungs.

  Elijah Beckett shook his head. No assault. This was a raid. And the Dragon Princes were gone, he was looking for Anonymous John. This must be a hallucination. “We’ll keep looking,” Beckett said. Two gendarmes had come down the hill (Off of the barge, Beckett told himself), Gorud trailing behind them. The therian seemed, as usual, unmoved by the concerns of the humans around him, content to follow his orders and perhaps secretly marvel at man’s strangeness.

  “What should we do with the boats?” Four asked.

  “Just,” the old coroner began. Men began to file off the barges in twos and fours, brushing past Beckett and the gendarme captain. “Just hold them. For now.”

  “The goods on them, though-”

  “Can fucking wait. I don’t want to have to sort through this crap again when it turns up at the wholesalers down river. Hold the boats until we’re done.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Four, as he turned to shout the order back to his men.

  A gust of wind whipped at Beckett’s long coat, and he shoved his hands into his pockets, where he discovered, much to his surprise, a small scrap of paper. Mindful that this was probably a hallucination as well, Beckett did not at first draw it out, but instead listened to the wind, the gendarmes shouting, the distant sound of rifle and cannon that echoed from his past. When the paper refused to relinquish its solidity, he drew it out and read it, but was still unconvinced that it was real.

  “Gorud,” he called to the therian. The ape-man obediently loped closer. “Gorud. Do you read?”

  The therian shrugged beneath his ill-fitting coat. Rain had plastered his fur to the side of his head. “My people are not adept at this. I have some sufficiency at it.”

  Beckett handed him the paper. “What does this say?”

  “Truce,” Gorud read. “Two days. Hardwicke’s, nine o’clock. John.”

  The old coroner snapped his head around with alarming ferocity. The note, had the note been in his pocket in the morning? Before the raid? He couldn’t remember, but he was sure he
would have noticed. Someone must have slipped it into his coat just now, which meant one of the men, the gendarmes. One of them was a spy for Anonymous John.

  The men that had brushed passed him on the docks had all separated, gone off towards their homes or back to the barracks, and even so, there was nothing remarkable about any of them. Ordinary looking men, with the ordinary compliment of eyes and noses, scars and moustaches, garbed appropriately. How long had the note even been in his pocket? Had there been someone earlier, a stranger on the street? Someone at the fish vendor’s? Had Anonymous John snuck into Beckett’s house and left it in his coat the night before?

  It didn’t matter now; if there had been an opportunity to snag Anonymous John, it was certainly long gone. Beckett turned the paper over in his hand, and smiled grimly. If John wanted a truce, it could only mean one thing: Elijah Beckett was winning.

  Twenty-Nine

  I have discarded the mechanism for now, while I examine its course of principle action. For the imprecision engine to function effectively, the mind must be built according both to intention, that shall motivate its continued action, and restriction, that shall determine both which actions are good, and therefore repeatable, and which actions are sinful, and therefore must not be repeated. I must create a system of interactions that is the human experience in microcosm. I admit that the opportunity has made me feel almost giddy. This is my chance to finally exorcise the animal darkness from the mind, to create a thing of perfect, inerrant reason, a life truly dedicated to the preservation of life, to the advancement of knowledge, to all of man’s noble aspirations that are dragged back into the muck of his primal urges.

  — from the journal of Harcourt Wolfram, 1785

  Old Hardwicke’s restaurant had been a staple of upper-class cuisine for more than a hundred years when it was destroyed by the launch of The Excelsior. The owner, Thom Ennering-Hardwicke-venerable patriarch of a small family that had received Estimation for the preparation of an unusually delicious bowl of smoking bishop for Agon XIII Vie-Gorgon-immediately set about rebuilding his establishment at the edge of Lantern Hill. He quickly and happily discarded years of tradition by refusing to employ old-fashioned Trowthi chefs, and abandoned the customary menu of Trowth’s old businesses-no more meat pies, smoked fish, boiled vegetables, boiled fish, smoked fish pies, or heavy, gravy-smothered roasts. Instead, he began hiring expatriate Sar-Sarpek chefs, indulging in their predilection for cream sauces, meat that had been wrapped in other kinds of meat, and things cooked with wine.