by Chris Braak
Alan turned to the stranger.
“Let me see your hands.” The man said. His voice had a hoarse, raw edge to it, but it was strong and authoritative. Alan held up his hands; he was still wearing his special gloves, made out of cartographic vellum. “Necrotic?”
Alan shook his head. “No. Not yet, anyway. Just hypersensitive, like…like my father’s.”
The man nodded. “Alan Charterhouse. I’m Beckett. I work for the coroners. Do you know what that is?”
I’m thirteen, Alan thought. I’m not stupid. “Yes, sir. You catch people that practice heretical sciences. Like necrologists and oneiricists, and that.”
“Yes. Do you know anything about geometry, boy? Have you ever done psychometry on a crime scene?”
“Uhm. Well, I’ve been an apprentice mapmaker since I was seven, sir, so I know a fair bit about geometry.” He could not hide the indignation in his voice. “I’ve never been…to…to a crime scene, sir. But I can read objects by touch better than my father.” He dropped his hands and held his chin up defiantly.
“Good,” Beckett said. “You’re going to come with me. The coroners have put you on retainer. Go get whatever things you need for psychometry, and a change of clothes in case we have to keep you overnight. Bring something to read, too.”
“Uhm. What?”
Beckett cocked his head to the side. “You. Are. Coming. With. Me. Go get your things.”
Trying to read while the coach bumped along George Street was making Alan Charterhouse nauseous. He looked up from his book—a yellowed, dog-eared copy of Ted East and the Canthi Chanteur—and considered the man and woman sitting across from him. Beckett sat still as stone, looking out the window. Skinner, a pretty young woman with a silver plate fixed across her eyes, was idly tapping her foot. Alan chose to take the foot-tapping as a sign of a friendlier nature than her partner’s.
“Do…” his voice was startlingly loud in the relative quiet of the coach. Alan lowered his voice to practically a whisper. “Do you know Ted East?” Alan held up his book, then lowered it sheepishly when he remembered that Skinner couldn’t see it. “It says…in my book it says he’s a real coroner, that all these stories are true.”
Beckett snorted loudly, and Skinner tried to hide a small smile behind her hand. “Well, Master Charterhouse, you shouldn’t believe everything you read.”
“Oh, I know…I mean, I know it probably never happened like this. Like in the books. I mean, I’m sure it didn’t. There’s a spot in…I think it was in Ted East and the Ectoplasmatists where he shoots eight people without reloading his revolver.” Alan folded the book in his lap. “I just thought that...maybe, you know, maybe it was based on a real person, you know? Like maybe he sold his story, or something.”
Beckett snorted again.
Alan leaned away from him and towards Skinner. “Have you ever seen…I mean…have you ever met a cult of ectoplasmatists?”
“There are no cults,” Beckett cut in. “Of ectoplasmatists. And they can’t do any of that nonsense like in your penny-books, like conjure knives and axes and things out of the air.”
“You’ve read about Ted East?” Alan asked, his voice suddenly brightening.
Skinner struggled to keep her face neutral. “Oh, Elijah,” she said, softly. “I didn’t know you could read.”
Beckett glared at her. “I know about things. All kinds of things.” He turned back to Alan Charterhouse. “Real ectoplasm isn’t hard at all. It’s kind of like thick smoke, or glue. And there’s no such person as Ted East.”
“Oh.” The young cartographer’s voice was glum.
Beckett did not add that the seemingly limitless series of cheap, two-penny books about Ted East, Coroner, which were making a fortune for their author, actually were based on a real person. Beckett also did not add that he’d sold the stories to that same author so that he could buy more fang.
There was a long silence in the coach after that, and Alan Charterhouse spent the rest of the trip looking out the window.
George Street skirted the River Stark for about a mile before it crossed the St. Edmund’s Bridge into North Ferry. The Imperial Palace loomed high on Alan’s left the whole time; it was a great mountain of a building, and the most vicious battleground of the Architecture War. Every Emperor since Agon Diethes considered it his personal responsibility to add a hall or a tower or something to the palace, and so it had become a sprawling mess of a hundred and fifty Emperors’ worth of additions. Merlons and peaked roofs, flying buttresses, gargoyles everywhere, huge towers that rose high into the air and clutched at the dirty sky, the Palace might as well have been a city unto itself. The Bastion, the squat black keep at the center of the Palace, was practically lost in the thicket of sharp towers and stony gray arches. Alan Charterhouse could only see it for a few moments as they crossed the bridge into North Ferry.
The coach pulled down Bynam Lane after that, and the view of the palace was blotted out by the North Ferry front of the Architecture War. A smaller skirmish than the castle, but still just as visible. The coach began to slow almost immediately.
“What’s the problem?” Beckett growled up to the driver.
“The crowd, gov. Can’t go any farther.” Harry’s disembodied voice seemed irritated. “Want me to push through?” Harry had been working as a coachman for the coroners since before Beckett’s time, driving his two horses which he insisted were descended from Saaghyari devil-mares. He always seemed to be looking for an opportunity to show off what they could do.
“No, Harry.” Beckett turned to Skinner. “Crowd?” She shrugged. Beckett grunted and hefted himself out of the coach. Skinner followed directly and Alan, after waiting for an uncertain moment in the empty coach, followed her.
Bynam Lane was filled with people, a hundred at least, all wearing the sober-colored suits and tall hats of well-established businessmen. They were mostly middle-aged men, well-dressed and with well-groomed mustaches and muttonchops. Occasionally, Alan spotted young women, who he assumed were the wives of the men. Around the edges of the crowd lounged disreputable looking gendarmes, some leaned in alleys or against bronze lamp-posts, others squatted in the street and played at dice or cards.
The crowd was not unruly, except for the man standing at its head. He was up on an old wooden crate in front of the Zindel house, and he was shouting lustily at the men and women who surrounded him. Behind the man, and blocking the entrance to 612 Bynam Lane, were half a dozen Lobstermen.
“I can’t hear him from here. What’s he saying, Skinner?”
The Knocker opened her jaw slightly, and her breathing slowed. “That’s Edgar Wyndham-Vie,” she said, after a moment. “Adjunct to the Vice-Minister for the Committee for Public Safety. I heard him speak in Parliament once. He’s talking about sharpsies, now. I’m not sure if he’s trying to quell a riot or start one.”
Beckett took a long look around at the fat, satisfied men in the streets. Some of them were old enough to have avoided the press, but just as many had probably bribed their way out of the war. “I don’t think these are the rioting type. Come on.” The old coroner began to shoulder his way through the crowd.
Skinner put her right hand on Alan’s shoulder, an action which caused a fluttering feeling in his stomach. She smiled at him, then, which caused the fluttering to get worse. Knockers, he knew, had virtually supernatural hearing. Could she hear the butterflies in his stomach? Could she hear what he was thinking now? Alan put his head down and tried to lead Skinner through the path that her partner had made.
“Where the hell is Valentine?” Beckett growled as they approached. “I thought he was watching the cordon.”
“He was supposed to be,” Skinner called over Alan’s shoulder. “He’s not here?”
“No. His carriage-thing is, though, so he must not have gotten far.” Beckett finally pushed his way past the men in the very front of the crowd. They were holding small blue candles. “What the hell is going on here?” Beckett shouted, as he approached Ed
gar Wyndham-Vie and his men. The Adjunct did not look at him, but continued to shout out to the crowd.
“… assure you all that the Imperium is doing everything in its power to ensure the safety of all of its human citizens…”
One of the Lobstermen stepped forward. The insignia on his breastplate marked him as a captain. “No one goes in. Orders.”
Beckett considered the captain. The Lobstermen were the Empire’s elite troops, drawn from the ranks of the Royal Marines. They were fanatically loyal and obedient. Through extensive and costly trolljr surgeries, bone plates had been grafted to the bodies of the men, in a fashion that resembled the old-fashioned, segmented lorica on their chests, saw-edged plates on their arms and legs, and a heavy, crested helmet on the skull. A thin patina of blood continually dribbled down the plates, making them crimson and sticky. Beneath the armor, a network of thin tubes carried ichor-derived chemistry that made the men stronger and faster than even an athletic human. It would also kill them after five years of duty. Fanatically loyal.
“…this foreign threat to our stability, especially now during wartime, can not, and will not be tolerated…”
“Whose orders?” Beckett asked.
“Committee for Public Safety.”
The coroner pulled his credentials from his pocket: a flat square of leather with a shiny brass shield affixed. The shield had the two-headed eagle crest of the Coroners Division. “Coroners. We outrank CPA.”
The Lobsterman shook his head. “Sorry, sir. Orders. No one goes in.”
Edgar Wyndham-Vie had finished his inflammatory sermon to the gathered business men, and climbed down from his box. “Who are you?” He demanded of Beckett. “What the hell are you doing here?” He turned to the Lobsterman. “This area is to be sealed, captain. Take these people out of here.”
“Detective-Inspector Beckett,” Elijah Beckett said. “Coroners Division. And this is my crime scene. Tell the Lobsters to back off.”
Wyndham-Vie looked closely at Beckett; the man had a familiar shock of ginger hair, and familiar taste in facial hair: moustache and mutton-chops. “Beckett. Beckett.” He said the name to himself as though trying to recall its provenance. His eyes suddenly widened. “You. You’re the one.” Edgar Wyndham-Vie leaned in. “You killed my cousin,” he spat through clenched teeth. “I’ll see you hanged for it.”
Beckett was unmoved. “Your cousin was a heretic. He had to die. But I don’t publish my reports.”
“You think that matters?” Edgar sneered. “You think they don’t know? The rumors have started already. In a year, the Wyndham-Vie name won’t be worth spit.”
Beckett’s voice was a deadly whisper. “You misunderstood me. I don’t publish my reports. But I could start.” He leaned in close. “A year? Your name won’t last a fucking week.”
The two men stared long and hard at each other: Edgar Wyndham-Vie’s cheek twitched, and a vein bulged at his temple. His face had turned very red. Beckett stood as cold and still as the gray city around him, never blinking, never turning his eyes from Edgar’s face.
The Adjunct broke first. He turned away, and then waved at the Lobstermen. “Let them in.” He turned back to Beckett and his companions. “You have an hour.” The coroner walked smoothly past the Lobstermen, and Alan hurried to keep up. He distinctly heard, as he passed Wyndham-Vie, “Hanged.”
He also heard Beckett, as they crossed the short bridge over Thurgood Street, mutter under his breath. “Not today, jackass.”
Six: Herman Zindel’s Home
The mathematics that covered the walls and floor of Herman Zindel’s office was, as far as Alan Charterhouse was concerned, extraordinary. As enthusiastic as he was, however, he had to be careful; Aetheric Geometry was a heresy, punishable by death. A scientific heretic didn’t even get the benefit of a trial. If Beckett suspected that Alan had been dabbling in higher-plane geometry, he could simply take out his revolver and shoot him in the head.
“This is…well.” Alan swallowed hard. He was looking at a group-theory proof that went a long way to solving a harmonic symmetry equation he’d been working on for a year. It was just as well his uncle was going mad. He’d have been furious if he’d recognized the mathematics scrawled in Alan’s journals and on the backs of old maps. “Obviously, my father knows…knows a lot more about this sort of thing…”
“We haven’t got your father.” Beckett was nothing if not blunt. “We’ve got you. Tell me what you can.”
What am I supposed to say? Alan thought. That Zindel was coming close to re-creating Wolfram’s translation formula? He had a sudden vision of his brains splattered all over the chalkboard, smearing Zindel’s brilliant proofs. “It’s definitely… definitely Aetheric Geometry. I mean, you don’t . . . don’t see anything like this in . . . in standard cartographic or engineering applications.”
“Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes.” He pointed to a formula. “See that? That’s using…” Too much. Don’t tell them too much. They’ll kill you if they find out. The certainty of that danger clutched at his belly. “Well, uh, I don’t know the word for it, obviously. But in standard cartography we usually use a twin-variable axis. For holographic cartography, a triple variable. My father once built a transformative map that could use a quaternary variable grid, but this . . . if this is right, he’s trying to describe something using a nine-dimensional system.”
The old coroner nodded. Skinner remained silent, but Alan found his eyes unconsciously drawn to her. She had very smooth, pale skin, he thought, and wondered what it would be like to touch her cheek.
Beckett cleared his throat, and Alan practically jumped out of his skin. “Why?”
“Why, sir?”
He gestured at all the formula. “Why all this? What’s it for?”
I don’t even know how to describe it with regular words. I could only explain it with math. Math that I’m not allowed to know about. “What…what is Aetheric Geometry ever used for?” Careful. “He was trying to break the translation barrier.”
Alan swallowed hard, as Beckett gave him a long look, but the coroner abruptly grunted and turned away. “All right. Take off your gloves.”
“Sir?”
“Psychometry, boy. I need you to check the scene.”
“Oh.” Whew. “Right.” Alan pulled off the special vellum gloves. His fingers, stained black with Mapmaker’s Ink, tingled immediately. He could now feel the tiny variations in temperature, miniscule changes in air flow as the three of them drew breath. “Where…I mean, what do you want me to check… for? First?”
Beckett shrugged. “How good are you?”
Alan considered that for a moment, then went out into the hall. Very gently, he touched the bust of Harcourt Wolfram..
Sensory overload came almost immediately. He could feel hundreds of thousands of textures from a hundred years of hands all vying simultaneously for his attention, grease and oil and dead skin and whatever they’d been touching last, all jittering through the nerves in his fingers and up his arms and into his brain…
Focus. Alan closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath. Just the last week. Feel the freshest textures. “Three people have used this door in the last week. One woman. I can feel the residue from her perfume. It’s . . . it stings a little…” A half a dozen other sensations crowded in at that point, what Alan suspected were different varieties of perfume. He blocked them out. “The two men…I can feel the chalk, so I assume at least one was Herman Zindel. The woman . . . her skin is not as dry, less…” Not enough words. There are never enough words for texture. “Young. She’s younger.”
“Probably his wife.”
Alan nodded. “I think I could recognize them again, if I had to.”
“Anything else about them?”
Focus. Find the texture, trace it. What else besides skin did it leave behind? What did it touch last? “Chalk. And not a lot of dirt. Gentlemen, then. One of them . . . the other man, had expensive gloves. Soft tarrasque-hide, I think.” A
lan took his fingers from the doorknob, and the sensations immediately subsided. “That’s all I can get from the door, I think.”
“Downstairs, then.”
Alan followed Beckett down the narrow stairs of the Zindel house, with Skinner’s hand on his shoulder. At the bottom of the stairs was a framed kirliotype of Herman Zindel, his wife, and their children. They were all looking very somber, because it was hard to smile for the five minutes required to effectively expose film.
“Have you ever seen a corpse before, Alan?” Skinner spoke quietly in his ear. Her voice was serious, but her breath was very warm and distracting.
“Uhm. No.”
She squeezed his shoulder gently. “Breathe through your mouth. It helps.”
Alan nodded, his eyes lingering on the photograph, particularly on the little boy. He looked so intense, despite his short pants and neatly-combed hair. There were no photographs like that in the Charterhouse home. Did the little boy have trouble standing still for that long? You’re stalling, Alan told himself.
“Shit.” Beckett called out from the parlor. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“What is it?” Skinner’s voice was faintly tinged with alarm. A sudden rapping—the Knocker’s natural telerhythmia—moved rapidly across the walls in the hallway and into the other room. “What’s wrong?”
“The bodies,” Beckett said as he returned.
“What about them?”
“They’re gone.”
Skinner shoved past Alan and into the room. Alan followed quietly behind her. “What happened?” The Knocker asked.
“Someone moved them. There are streaks of blood on the floor.”
“Do you think it was the Committee?” The two coroners continued to discuss the issue in low tones, while Alan looked around the room. It was an ordinary-looking parlor, furnished brightly but not garishly with red and gold. There were large bloodstains on the floor and couches. It was easier than Alan thought it would be to distance himself from that fact. His hands itched; there was a strange texture to the air, something he’d never felt before. He knelt down, and lightly touched his fingertips to the rug…