The Translated Man

by Chris Braak

  “Not this one. It was huge.”

  “Sure it was.”

  Beckett gave his Knocker a hard look.

  “You know your scary looks are wasted on a blind girl, Beckett.” Skinner was grinning from ear to ear.

  “It’s the thought that counts.” Beckett jerked his thumb towards the old man who was slumped in the gutter, still coughing furiously. “Do you want to tell Valentine he can stop playing ‘old Scraver’?”

  “Is that what he’s doing over there?” Skinner shouted across the courtyard. Her voice rang out on the cobblestones. “Valentine! Valentine Vie-Gorgon! Come over here right now!”

  The old man stopped coughing, but otherwise didn’t move.

  “We know it’s you, Valentine,” Beckett growled.

  After a moment, the old man stood up and crossed the courtyard to Skinner’s carriage. He had a resigned air to his walk, which was decidedly not the walk of a sick old man. Once he got closer, Beckett could see the lines where the young Valentine Vie-Gorgon had glued the beard onto his face.

  Valentine was crestfallen. “How could you tell?”

  “Shoes,” Beckett replied. “Regulation spit and polish. Sick old beggars don’t have clean shoes.”

  “’Sword,” Valentine smacked himself in the head, then began pulling off his beard. It came away in chunks, still connected to his face by long, sticky strands of glue. “I knew I was forgetting something. I just got very excited. I’d been walking down High Street the other day and I thought to myself, ‘you know, Valentine, have you ever really looked at a beggar? I mean looked at them?’ And I started looking around and I realized that hardly anyone ever looked closely at the beggars, especially the ones coughing like they had the Scrave, so, you know, I just thought…” he trailed off, and idly picked at the glue still on his face. “I fooled Skinner, anyway.”

  “You didn’t,” Skinner shot back. “I recognized your footsteps right away. I didn’t even know you were in disguise. Thought you were just being distant.”

  “Fah, you never did,” said Valentine, as he tossed off the filthy blanket that had covered his regulation, charcoal-grey Coroner’s suit. “Miss ‘I can tell the color of someone’s hair by the sound of their combing.’”

  “Enough!” Beckett rubbed his temples. The veneine high was wearing off, and the dull ache of his illness had begun to creep in around the edges. “Valentine, I need you to conscript a couple of gendarmes and burn the Reanimate before some kid finds it. Get the trolljrmen to drag Wyndham’s corpse out of there.”

  “Sir!” Valetine snapped off a salute, and then led the two trolljrmen down into the Arcadium.

  “Wind your watch!” Skinner called after him. Valetine waved his gold pocket-watch back at her. When the young coroner had left, Skinner spoke to her partner in a quiet voice. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” said Beckett. “Why should something be wrong?”

  “I can hear it in your voice. You sound…ragged.”

  Beckett shook his head and snorted. He’d only been with Skinner a few months, but had been partnered with one Knocker after another for years, and had gotten into the habit of accompanying his gestures with small sounds. A mounting pain at the base of his skull demanded more veneine. “Head hurts.” He absently rubbed his right forearm, over the veins that he used for his injections.

  “And?”

  The Coroner sighed. “What is this, the third necrologist in six weeks? He was taking limbs from live people, Skinner. They never used to do that. It was always raided mausoleums and the dead beggars in Rittenhouse field. They were heretics, but they didn’t mutilate people.”

  Skinner shrugged. “Times are changing.”

  “Yeah, and I don’t like it.”

  “That’s because you’re an old fart. Now get in the coach, it’s cold out.”

  Beckett climbed into the coach, but had to catch himself as a wave of dizziness swept over him. He threw his lean frame which now suddenly felt so heavy into the coach, and hoped that Skinner hadn’t noticed.

  “Shall we to dinner, Detective-Inspector Beckett?”

  “No,” Beckett was shaking his head. “Home.”

  “Home?”

  The Coroner tapped his wrist. “Home.”

  Two: Beckett’s Home

  To understand the city of Trowth, capital of the Trowth Imperium, one must first understand the Architecture War. Like virtually every aspect of Trowthi society, the Architecture War was the general product of the bitter internecine conflict between the Esteemed Families of the Imperium, and the particular product of the legendary feud between the Family Vie-Gorgon and the Family Gorgon-Vie.

  Not long into the reign of Edmund II Gorgon-Vie, about two hundred years before Elijah Beckett’s time, Emilio Vie-Gorgon (second cousin to the reigning Emperor) commissioned a tower built in Raithower Plaza. The tower was ostensibly commissioned to celebrate Edmund’s coronation, and it was built in a new style extremely popular at the time: tall and thin, covered with jagged merlons and sharp parapets, it looked like a huge crooked finger pointing accusingly at the filthy sky.

  Of course, Raithower Plaza stands directly between the great windows of the Imperial throne room and said windows’ view of the River Stark, arguably the only good view in the city. The Emperor was not amused. In retaliation, Edmund had a second tower built in the center of Vie Square, directly in front of the Vie-Gorgon mansions. This one was built in a style meant to offend the Vie-Gorgons’ penchant for tall, slender, sharp things: it was short, squat, black, and ugly.

  This is how the War began. It got out of hand almost immediately. Architecture became one of the weapons that the Families used to lord their status and their wealth over each other. It was not long before the six wealthiest families had developed distinct architectural styles, to make it clear who had claimed which piece of the skyline; Families had their own personal architects, who had their own schools. The schools themselves were violent affairs. Conflicts of design often were resolved with duels, sabotage, or (as in the case of the Crabtree-Daior and Feathersmith-Czarnecki family architects) a one hundred and twenty man street brawl that lasted for three hours and killed six people.

  Trowth was a city defined by crowded, complex architectural schemes. Sharp-edged Vie-Gorgon merlons battled blocky Gorgon-Vie crenulations battled leering Wyndham-Vie gargoyles for every available inch of skyline. Houses and towers were built, demolished, and built taller, each one scrabbling for a higher place in the sky.

  About a hundred years before Beckett’s time, and a hundred years into the Architecture War, an architect from Sar-Sarpek named Irwin Arkady began buying up property on either side of St. Dunsinay’s Street, with the intention of walling off either end and expanding his houses into the middle of it. Because St. Dunsinay’s Street was a major thoroughfare, the Lord Mayor of Trowth flatly refused this plan; undeterred, Arkday simply built low, beautiful covered bridges between his properties, arching two storeys above the street. St. Dunsinay’s came to be called the Arcade instead, and a new front in the Architecture War was opened. Within a few years, every street for blocks around the Arcade found itself closed off from the sky with covered bridges, upon which more houses and towers were built. The city itself was ponderously sinking beneath its own weight, so new roads and walkways had to be built on top of the bridges and above the old streets, condemning five or six square miles of streets, squares, and alleys into darkness beneath the mass of the petrified battle of the Architects.

  This was the Arcadium, and because the poor, weak sunlight that managed to break through the omnipresent cloud cover above the city always seemed to lack the strength to battle the rest of the way into the Arcadium, there was no way to tell what time it was. A wise gentleman always made sure to wind his watch, lest he lose track of time and inadvertently spend long hours lost beneath the stone mountain of the city of Trowth.

  Skinner was in his dream, and she’d left behind the Coroner’s charcoal-colored dress and corset, left b
ehind all her clothes, so that she was just pale skin and young, smooth limbs, and she’d wrapped her legs around his waist and her slender hands rested on his cheeks, and Beckett could see his face reflected in the shiny silver band that covered her eyes and framed by the waves of her dark, dark hair, and his face, his face was rotten, full of rotten holes where his cheeks and nose and lips should be, and Skinner opened her mouth and closed it and opened and closed it, so that her teeth made a clack-clack-clacking sound…

  …which was really the sound of his old wind-up clock, insistently reminding him that half-past five in the morning was when he should be getting out of bed. A nauseating pain struck him behind the eyes and temples. The withdrawal headache had waited a fraction of a second after Beckett had fully gained consciousness, presumably to hit him with the full effect. The pain often did that; it would lurk somewhere out of the way for a while, only to jump back at him when he turned his head, or stood up suddenly, or when he really needed to be paying attention.

  Long, deep, ragged breaths made Beckett feel more like he could resist the urge to take a shot of veneine immediately. He stumbled from bed, moving a little faster than his joints were ready for, in the hopes of encouraging his adrenaline to stimulate his mind awake. The pain in the sides of his knees made him wince, but it worked just as well. Beckett stood and staggered to his washbasin. He looked at his reflection and sighed with dismay.

  Elijah Beckett examined in his mirror the bright red hole in his face that gaped between his eyes. He pressed the end of it with his fingers, the tips of which had suffered a similar fate, and was mildly pleased to discover that his nose was still in place. His nose had become completely transparent and, though the purpling skin on his cheeks, the bloody, gaping hole where his nose should have been and which now revealed red muscle and bits of bone all served to dishearten him immensely, at least the nose was still there. The end of his nose was numb, as were his almost-invisible fingertips, but he could still feel the pressure of their contact. It was possible to see just the outline of his nose where light diffused around its curve, giving it a kind of soft colorless edge.

  Beckett stretched. His joints cracked alarmingly, and the dull ache that had settled perpetually in them spiked to excruciating levels in his left shoulder and lower back. His body was being ravaged by a disease known as the fades. It was the cause of both the transparent patches and the terrible pains in his joints. He had contracted it in his youth, probably as a boy, trying to earn a little money by scraping ichor-fat from the gutters in the Arcadium that he could sell back to the factories. The disease was mercilessly slow and inexorable. He’d had it since he’d first joined the coroners, barely out of his teenage years. It had manifested then as a numbness in the backs of his hands, and had actually helped him become a bare-knuckle boxing champion. The disease had begun to eat away at him in his thirties, sapping a little bit of the heady pleasure of his glory days. It hadn’t started to disfigure him, covering his face and chest with raw bloody patches and cracking his joints and nerves until he turned forty. Everything had gone down-hill from there.

  Beckett opened the small chest by his washbasin and removed a little bottle of seven percent Veneine solution, made from the venom of the Corsay dreamsnake, the elixir that the hoodlums called Fang. Small doses would ease the pain; large doses made you see things. Beckett didn’t like to hallucinate, but he’d been building up a tolerance to the painkiller, so overdoses had begun to happen more frequently.

  When a man first began to taking Fang, he would feel warm and heavy. Pain and fear and anger all vanished, leaving a warm lassitude in its place. Once a man began to take large doses of the drug, he began to see strange things. Every minor thought or feeling suddenly leapt out through the eyes and into the world; life became a menagerie of dueling forks and winged cats and people bleeding from their eyes. If a man took too much he’d feel numb and heavy and he’d want to lie down. If he took far too much Fang, his mind would go places. The first place it went was Cross the Water, which Beckett had seen six times. He had been past it into the City of Brass only once, and it had almost killed him.

  Because Beckett’s joints hurt him, and because he didn’t want to see Cross the Water ever again, he sucked half of his regular dosage into his hypodermic. Beckett grimaced at the small scars on his forearm. It really did look like he’d be savaged by a viper. With a wince, he thrust the needle into a vein and pressed on the plunger. A warm numbness spread from the wound immediately, and began to press the aches away. After a moment’s consideration, Beckett packed the hypodermic and the bottle into their leather travel case.

  Leaving the rusty washbasin, which stood in a small, dark corner of his small, dark sitting room, Beckett prepared the morning routine of a man who suffered from the Fades. First, check the fingertips to make sure they were not cut. It was tricky because of their transparency, but if he’d been cut he’d be able to see drops of blood, floating strangely on invisible digits. Because the fingers were numb, a small cut might go untreated and lead to infection. Beckett checked his fingers, then his toes. He looked at the three clear patches of skin on his chest, invisible spots the size of his fist that revealed bloody muscle beneath. In one place, the virulent transparency had progressed so far that he could see his ribs. There was a new patch of dark purple like a bruise on his hip. Beckett prodded it and was dismayed to discover it was numb, too. Transparency would probably overtake it in a few days.

  Secondly, once the inspection is over, wash everything carefully, and rub the faded places with fluxion salts. The little green and gold-flecked granules were grievously expensive, but the Imperium, as a reward for years of loyal service, partially subsidized them. The salts are meant to slow the progression of the fades; Beckett had never noticed them helping very much.

  Finally, get dressed. Beckett put on his sober-cut charcoal suit, his heavy leather boots, his heavy leather gloves. He put on his belt with his old revolver, and the heavy wool overcoat. Because his clothes were standard issue for the Coroners, everything was charcoal grey; because they were standard issue for people living in Trowth, everything was made of wool. Simple cuts, dark colors, and a gun that had been out of date for ten years. All of which were better than the three-cornered leather hat that topped off the uniform, which had been out of date for closer to fifty years. In the defense of the Coroners, no one had to wear the hat anymore, and Beckett was probably the only one who did. As a gesture of goodwill to anyone that had to look at the raw hole in his face, Beckett wrapped an old red scarf around his nose and mouth.

  Beckett took a long look around his room, his eyes glancing off the dusty outlines on his walls and floor where he’d had to sell his things—furniture, kirliotypes, awards, anything that he could—to scrape enough money together for more veneine. There was very little left. It was not comfort, but a cold, wry cynicism that told him at least he wouldn’t leave behind a lot of bric-a-brac for someone to sort through when the fades finally got to him.

  Long-standing city ordinance in Trowth demanded that all statues, plaques, sculptures and public metalwork in the city be made of bronze. An apocryphal story claimed that this was at the behest of the Emperor Agon VII Czarnecki, whose hatred of all things having to do with the neighboring nation of Sar-Sarpek had caused him to forbid any artwork made from marble. Since bronze was the only other reasonable material with which to make public sculpture, and since Imperial decrees are notoriously difficult to rescind, bronze became the official accent of Trowth.

  Unfortunately, the city’s harsh winters and salty sea-air turned bronze black and green almost immediately. Not one statue ever survived a Trowth winter without becoming almost completely unidentifiable. And there were plenty of statues. The statues that adorned the squares and courtyards, that stood in front of the towers in Ministry, or in front of the fancy homes in Beacon Hill had become an expanded front for the Architecture War.

  The Families of Trowth had great enthusiasm for honoring their heroes, but much
less enthusiasm when it came to preserving the memories of those heroes. They had been erecting statues for hundreds of years, in honor of this general or that scientist, sometimes more than once. Poor record-keeping on behalf of the Daior-Crabtrees had caused them to commission no fewer than fifteen statues in honor of Chretien Daior-Crabtree’s discovery of the fluxion salt, and over twenty statues in honor of Janusz Vlytze’s victory at the Siege of Canth, despite Vlytze’s dubious status as a hero of the Sar-Sarpek nobility. This was not altogether uncommon, as most of the Families of Trowth had been at least second-cousins with the massacred aristocracy of Sar-Sarpek, and to be cousins with Janusz Vlytze, who had led the immortal Last Ride of the Saaghyari, was an enviable privilege.

  Being cast in bronze was by no means a ticket to immortality in Trowth. The constant feuding between the Families meant that the creation of new statues always received priority over the maintenance of old ones. Trowth was a city full of worn, green memorials, hundreds of thousands of faceless sentinels, standing guard over forgotten honors.

  One such statue stood in the center of Queen’s Riot Close, which was a small courtyard off of Westbridge Street. Queen’s Riot was bordered by small town houses which were generally let out to reliable but poorly-paid civil servants like Beckett. The tall green-bronze figure in the center of the Close was pointing off to the east, its face and clothing eaten away by years of salty winter weather. It stood on a pedestal upon which someone had thoughtfully mounted a plaque, explaining who the eastward-pointing hero was and, perhaps, why he was pointing. Sadly, the plaque had also been eaten away by time and was completely illegible. Beckett called the statue Cuthbert, because it suited him to do so.

  “Another ole’ morning, Cuthbert,” Beckett said, as he stepped into the cold gray winter air. Snow had fallen overnight, and the Close was covered with a layer of pristine white. “Enjoy the snow now. It’ll be black with filth come evening,” he added. This was most certainly true: as Beckett stepped out of the Close and onto Westbridge Street, he saw that the snow there was already filthy and disgusting.