by Chris Braak
“Here,” Skinner finally said, at the end of an unusually short hall.
Valentine glanced at her. “You’re sure?”
Skinner nodded.
“Try . . . grab the candlestick there,” Beckett told the young man. Valentine did, and nothing happened. “Try pushing against the wall.” Again, nothing. “Hm. Wait. There. Is that a bust of Harcourt Wolfram?” On a small table at the end of the short hall was a small, marble bust of the famous scientist. Valentine attempted to pick the bust up, and found it attached to a small cable. There was a clicking sound in the walls, and the end of the hall became a door, and suddenly swung open.
“Paydirt,” Valentine said, grinning.
In a city like Trowth, whose heart was a maze of back alleys and labyrinthine passages, a city where a man could be arrested and executed for practicing the wrong kinds of science, where a hundred Ministries and royal Families plied their Byzantine politics at all hours, hidden rooms and compartments like the one in Herman Zindel’s house were actually very common. Knockers, while they were useful for relaying information around the city, and keeping track of enemies in the dark, found that the primary need for their employment was locating secret doors.
The tiny room behind the door yielded a wealth of information, though Beckett, for his life, could not have said whether or not it was useful information.
“What is all this?” Beckett asked. The small, cramped room was jammed with large slate chalkboards, and the ground was littered with crumbled sheets of paper. Everything was covered with numbers, diagrams, formulae, all in the same sloppy handwriting.
Valentine pursed his lips and let out a low whistle. “Not like any math that I’ve ever seen.” This was no idle statement of fact; Valentine Vie-Gorgon had the best education money could buy.
Beckett agreed. “I think we know why they called us. This has to be Aetheric Geometry.”
Four: The Sharpsies
From a distance, a sharpsie—whose scientific name was “omphaloskepsis,” and whose name in their own language was something utterly unutterable—looked much like a human being. They were the same height, though generally much thinner, and they always either crouched or loped with a springing jog; never anything in between. Upon closer inspection, however, numerous and deeply unsettling differences became apparent. For starters, sharpsie skin was dark and pebbly, very thick and rough. Their eyes were flat, black, and expressionless. And then, there were the teeth. Sharpsies were carnivores. They had long jaws and mouths filled with sharp teeth: long, curved incisors in the front, molars like huge meat shears in the back. Their thin, leathery lips, which were only barely able to close together in the front, seemed incapable of any expression except curling back to reveal those gnashing jaws.
There had always been a few sharpsies in Trowth. Like their mortal enemies, the trolljrmen, the sharpsies had brought unusual crafts and trade specialties that the Empire found useful. Sharpsies were, for instance, excellent butchers and superb cooks. Never fully integrated into society, the sharpsies had carved a small niche out for themselves on the fringes.
Starting around 1840, a wave of omphaloskepsis immigrants inundated the Empire. They were fleeing their own lands, west of Sar-Sarpek, and had been settling anywhere that would take them. This did not amount to very many places, and the sharpsies soon became a gypsy race, carrying their own possessions on their backs, always trying to drive their herds of horses and reindeer to new pastures, always finding themselves more and more unwelcome. By the time the Emperor offered them amnesty in Trowth, there were no herds left, and the Sharpsies were desperate.
They accepted the amnesty and attempted to settle in the Empire’s capital city. Thousands, male and female, were immediately pressganged into the war with the ettercap. They died beneath the mountains of Gorcia, far from their own homes, from their families, and far from the city that had offered them its feigned sanctuary. Only the old, recognizable by the thick tufts of wiry, yellow hair that they grew on their forearms and shoulders, and the very young were left in Trowth, to eke out a meager existence as best they could, unwanted, untrained, and uncertain.
The young sharpsies that managed to avoid the pressgangs grew into angry young men. No one wanted to hire them. They couldn’t communicate their needs effectively, except to other members of their species: the sharp teeth and thick tongue of a sharpsie made learning Trowthi all but impossible. Their own language sounded to Trowth ears like a man choking on a fishbone, which only served to drive a wedge of ridicule in between the city men and the sharp-toothed strangesr.
While Elijah Beckett and his coroners searched the house on Bynam Street, most of the sharpsies were doing what they did every day: lounging by the docks on the Stark, trying to find work as day-laborers. Some worked unloading ships or laying stone or in the chilly back rooms of the butcher shops carving meat. It was illegal to hire them, and if the pressmen found that a merchant had employed a sharpsie, the worker was at once sent to the front. Despite the danger, sharpsies could still find work as unskilled laborers—so long as they sold their services cheap enough.
The sharpsies that couldn’t find work that day spent it dodging pressgangs or picking fights with trolljrmen. Half past noon, a dozen gendarmes from North Ferry—or, perhaps only six from North Ferry who’d found a few likely fellows on the trip down—appeared in Mudside, the sharpsie shanty town on the Stark. They came with their blue armbands prominent, heavy truncheons ready, riot shields hanging from their wrists. They’d come to find the murderers of the Zindel family, they said, and they’d break the bones of every sharpsie in Mudside if they had to. They screamed and kicked in doors. They threatened to start fires.
If a Trowthi man was able-bodied, it was almost a sure thing that he’d be taken by the pressgangs. The gendarmerie was no protection, but the criminal brand was. Gendarmes were sometimes clever, sometimes old, sometimes lame or sick, but most often they were men with the number three or five branded on their faces. The first indicated that the branded man was a thief, the second that he was a murderer. The gendarmerie was poorly-supervised and badly trained. It was not an organization of honorable men, but of hard angry ones. The gendarmes that showed up in Mudside were very, very angry.
Fifteen young sharpsie men came out to meet them, black eyes always flat, but faces sullen. They growled their unintelligible language, and they looked like they were spoiling for a fight. They threw rocks and old bottles. The gendarmes attacked, and bore the young men to the ground. The brawl lasted only ten minutes before most of the young sharpsies ran, leaving behind only five: four were beaten too badly to move. One was dead.
Beckett read all about the first action against the Sharpsie Threat in the broadsheets the next morning. He and Skinner were in his office in Raithower House. The building had become the headquarters for the coroners ever since the Vie-Gorgon family had abandoned it for a bigger one that didn’t have Edmund Gorgon-Vie’s ugly, lumpy tower looming over it.
“We have nothing,” Skinner was saying. “No witnesses saw anything. Zindel’s friends had seen him the day before and he seemed fine. His children had been in school, his wife had done the shopping. Nothing.”
Beckett tossed the broadsheet onto his small, rickety desk. “Not nothing. Riot in Mudside. Gendarmes.”
“I’d heard about that.” Skinner was very quiet for a moment. “You don’t think…?”
“No.” Beckett’s head was buzzing. There was a pain in the corner of his right eye, like it was trying to roll around inside his head. He rubbed his temples. “Nothing from the witnesses. Nothing…” It was too hot. He’d thrown off his coat and, because Skinner was the only one there and she couldn’t tell the difference, he’d pulled off his scarf, revealing the gap into his face. It was still too hot.
“Elijah? Are you all right?”
She could hear something in his voice. Beckett rubbed his hands over his face, and took a deep breath. “Fine.” Another breath. “No witnesses. Nothing in the house .
. . except for the geometry. Which we don’t understand.” He jerked his head as a thought struck him, then winced at the pain in his neck. “Ow. Co-workers. Who does he work with?”
Skinner shook her head. “He’s independent. A thousand crowns a year. Some old prize from the Academy of Sciences, or something. Everyone we talked to said he spent his free time at the public houses.”
The buzzing in Beckett’s head had grown stronger, and it was now accompanied by a ringing in his ear, and a sickly-sweet taste in his mouth. Shit, he thought. “Excuse me.”
Briskly but carefully, Beckett rolled up his sleeve, and wrapped it tight around his elbow, then opened the leather traveling case for his hypodermic. The veins in his arm began to bulge. Not much. Quarter-ounce. Beckett pulled a small amount of fang into the hypodermic, then quickly jabbed it into his arm and pressed on the plunger.
It was too much. He could tell immediately.
The pain receded; it didn’t leave, it just didn’t bother him any more. The taste in his mouth was suddenly satisfied. But the world jumped alarmingly, and his vision distorted. It looked like a kirliotype that had been heated with a match. The walls of his office bubbled and turned black.
“Elijah?” Skinner’s voice echoed off his inner ear. Six Skinners, scattered around him, spoke softly in his ears.
“Sh!” He blinked rapidly, in an effort to restore his ordinary vision. In the split second that his eyes were closed, he saw water: a vast, churning ocean under a black, stormy sky. Rushing waves filled his ears, saltwater ran up his nose.
His eyes opened, and it was gone.
Blink.
The ocean tossed him back and forth, knocking the air from his chest and filling up his lungs.
Blink.
He was back in his office, panting heavily. He could feel snot on his upper lip, running from his nose. His eyes seemed to have settled down, and the buzzing in his head had vanished.
“Elijah, are you all right?” Skinner’s voice was clear, but sounded like it was coming from very far away.
“I’m fine.” He said. Too much. That was Cross the Water. “Fine.” He took a long, slow ragged breath, and wiped off his mouth.
Her voice heavy with concern, Skinner pointed out, “You’re not fine. You’ve been using more, lately.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Nothing matters. He had a job to do, and he would do it. If that meant shooting his veins up with fang every five minutes, then that’s what he would do.
“But . . .”
“Doesn’t. Matter.” Beckett’s voice was stone. He rubbed his temples and tried to settle his thoughts. “If. Even if someone had hired sharpsies to hide the murder…”
“Or someone else. Anyone with a…” Skinner broke off. “Well, I imagine there are probably tools for…for doing that.”
Beckett nodded. “How did they get in? No broken windows, no broken locks.”
They both sat for a moment, and considered. “Let’s be logical.” Skinner said. “If someone got in, and no locks were broken, then they must have come in somewhere there wasn’t a lock. Either another entrance to the home, which I would have found…”
“Or a door that we know about, but was open.” There was one conclusion readily available; it made sense, in itself, but didn’t help him make sense of anything else. “Our milkman said the door was unlocked when he found it. No one in North Ferry leaves their doors unlocked. So, someone let the murderer in. A maid?”
“No. Maid works every third day. She was off the day before and the day of.”
“One of the Zindels, then.”
Skinner rolled her cane around in her hands while she thought. “Someone they recognized? Someone they were comfortable enough with to take into the sitting room. Who also had reason to murder them all.”
Beckett nodded again. “His collaborator.”
“You think so?”
The coroner shrugged. “Maybe. We don’t know enough. We don’t even know what he was working on in there. Who’s our scientific contact for Aetheric Geometry?”
Skinner snorted. “You’re joking? Only half a dozen people understood it when the church forbid . . . forbade? When they had it forbidden. Even then, I think it was only ever Wolfram that got it. And when he died…we don’t have a contact for Aetheric Geometry, Elijah.”
“Next best thing, then. Charterhouse.”
“He’s a psychometrist.”
Beckett began wrapping his scarf around his face again. “And a cartographer. We can’t have Aetheric Geometry, at least we can get regular geometry. Besides, I want him to check over the scene. We need more information.” Beckett pulled on his coat and hat. “Where’s Valentine?”
“He’s watching the cordon, making sure no one gets in and disturbs something.”
“Good.” Beckett grunted. “Maybe he’ll shoot that damned gendarme.”
Five: Alan Charterhouse
Alan Charterhouse’s hands were moving almost of their own accord. They quickly used the draftsman’s tools on his desk: compass, stylus, t-square, triangle, and his favorite, the intricate brass slide-rule. His pen moved in smooth, steady, straight lines as he copied the map in front of him. He’d divided it into small sections, and his eyes focused intently on each one, making sure he didn’t miss a single line or degree. Despite the amount of concentration it took, Alan found his mind wandering.
He was alone in the drafting room, a room in the basement of his family’s house that would have been quite comfortable if it hadn’t been jammed full of heavy slanted drafting desks, piled up with books, bundles of paper, old broadsheets, and, of course, maps. There were maps everywhere. Rolled up maps lay in bundles on the floor, or were piled up on shelves. Maps of the Rowan-Harshank Corridor, made of folding steel plates, stood in a neat stack by the door. There were copperplate maps, hide maps, and at least one map that his father had made of Corsay on a wide piece of tree-bark.
Alan Charterhouse had woken up that morning with a fantasy about his father coming home; maybe his father would wait until after breakfast, letting Alan think that today wouldn’t be the day, and then surprising him during the meal. When that didn’t happen, Alan had reconsidered; probably, the old man would wait until lunchtime, and surprise him then. The weak afternoon sunlight was beginning to fade now, and Alan fought hard against the hope that his father would surprise him with his return after a hard day’s work in the drafting room.
Alan’s mind struggled to interpret the faint sounds he heard. Was that scratch on the cobblestones a random passerby, or Ian Charterhouse setting his rucksack down by the doorstep? Was the rattle of keys his father’s, or his neighbors? The thumping footsteps upstairs, were they just his great-uncle Malcolm stomping around?
It was a certain fact of his life, Alan knew, that the second he came up with a dream like this one, one in which someone went to the trouble to surprise him, it would almost certainly not ever happen. He recalled vividly the three years between seven and ten in which he desperately wished for a surprise birthday party, only to realize himself disappointed the second he thought of it. How do I know something amazing won’t happen? Alan though, as he tried to get his mind back into the work. Because I want it to.
“Alan!” Uncle Malcolm’s voice startled him, and young Alan Charterhouse nearly spilled his ink. This would have been disastrous; Mapmaker’s Ink contained large amounts of nitric fluxate-23, a compound made from volatile flux, and could be extremely dangerous. “Alan, come up here, boy! There’s someone to see you.”
Alan’s heart skipped a beat. No. Don’t think about it. It isn’t dad. And if it is, you want to be surprised. Don’t think it. Alan forced himself to be calm as he stoppered his ink bottle and neatly stacked up his tools and pen. Be surprised. Don’t think about it.
He tried harder to remain calm as he climbed the steps to the parlor, but found the urge to hurry irresistible, and after a moment he took them three at a time. “Alan!” His uncle shouted again.
Uncle Malcolm was w
aiting for him at the top of the stairs. He was actually Alan’s father’s uncle, and probably at least seventy years old. He had been a big man once, and still had a barrel-chest, though his arms and legs and become spindly. A fringe of white hair grew in tufts around his head, and generally got less attention than the huge moustache that covered most of the lower half of his face. Malcolm had slowly been moving out of touch with reality as the years went by. He wore his dressing gown and slippers all day, every day, and never left the house.
Like most people that worked with Mapmaker’s Ink, Malcolm’s fingers had succumbed to flux-induced necrosis. They’d been removed and replaced with mechanical brass fingers that looked like metal skeleton hands held together with brackets and wire. They clicked and scraped as Malcolm flexed his hands impatiently.
“In the parlor,” Uncle Malcolm said. “Come on.” He put a cold brass hand on Alan’s back and gently shoved him into the sitting room. Alan’s heart was practically in his throat; he was ready to leap up and embrace…
The man waiting for him was not his father. He was a lean man with a heavy, charcoal-covered overcoat and a red scarf wrapped around his face. He held a leather tricorn hat in his hands, and was standing very patiently, the way an oak tree or a boulder might stand if it expected to be waiting for a very long time.
“Tell you he’s too young to be messing with this,” Malcolm muttered to the stranger. “Twelve years old, shouldn’t be touching no dead things.”
“Thirteen,” Alan said. “I’m thirteen Uncle Malcolm, remember?”
Malcolm looked at his nephew with mad blue eyes. “Twelve. Your birthday was last week. Twelve candles, twelve years. Remember? I remember. Your daddy came home from . . . from . . .” He trailed off and began to squint, as though trying to get a better view of his memory.
“That was last year. Dad was in Gorcia. He’s in Corsay, now.”
Malcolm snorted and shuffled out of the room. “Too young, too young,” he mumbled as he left.