by Chris Braak
“Come on, Eddie,” Robert whispered. “Let’s just go back inside.” He turned back to Beckett. “He didn’t mean anything. Really.” Robert dragged his friend back into the booth.
Beckett turned away thoughtfully, and came face-to-face with Skinner. “What the hell was that about?” She asked.
“You heard it?”
“I kept trying to listen from across the way. I could hear once you got outside. What’s going on?”
Beckett took her by the arm and led her back down the stairs. “Did you recognize the man with Wyndham?”
“No. What did he say his name was? Robert something?”
“Rowan-Harshank. I suppose the name doesn’t mean anything to you?”
They emerged into the lobby. “Nothing. Elijah, we need to leave before Eddie calls the authorities.”
“We are the authorities.”
“You know what I mean.”
Beckett nodded, and took her outside into the cold night air. Their coach waited with a long line of carriages by the side of the road. “You’ll have to miss the play,” he told Skinner as he knocked on the coach’s door. Harry, the coachman, was asleep inside.
“It’s all right. I’ll see the whole thing some other time. Beckett, why did you hit him?” Skinner waved off his arm as she climbed into the coach.
“It was extremely satisfying.”
“Elijah . . .”
“Stitch. He didn’t want me to see the play.”
“Right. That’s why he sent you theatre tickets.”
“No. He wanted me to see the booth. The man with Wyndham-Vie.”
“The man that neither of us recognize.” Skinner paused. “Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know, but I mean to find out.”
Skinner heard the certainty in his voice, and nodded. “Tomorrow, though. We’re both tired. Let it wait until tomorrow.”
“Right.” Beckett agreed. “No, wait.”
“What?”
“Do you have any money with you?”
She produced a small roll of bills from a pocket in her skirt. “Some. Why?”
“Lend it to me. Have Stitch pay you back. This is a business expense.” Beckett took the money and closed the door. Skinner could hear his footsteps receding in the distance.
Eleven: The Assassin
The bullet nailed the coachman right through the chest, and his assassin rolled away from the window. He leaned against the wall in a dark room in an abandoned house and began counting. The idea was to stay down for a full minute, in case the coachman’s death caused some kind of ruckus.
The assassin didn’t need to count. He could hear the effects almost immediately. There were pistol-shots, and someone started shouting. The only word the assassin caught was “Coroners.” Shit, he thought. He worked the slide on his rifle, and loaded another round, then slowly leaned over to look out the window.
A filthy man was standing in the middle of the street, a few yards from the coachman’s corpse. He was shouting at someone, the assassin couldn’t see whom, and waving a pair of shiny revolvers around. Doesn’t see me. Just wait it out, the man thought to himself too soon; the filthy man in the street abruptly turned towards the assassin’s window.
He thought Shit to himself again, because his inner monologue did not have an expansive vocabulary. He aimed at the man in the street, fired, and missed. The man jumped as chips of stone flew from the wall behind him, and started shouting again. The assassin started to load another round, when he heard something.
There was a crash in the room next to his. Someone had broken a window. They’re coming in, he thought. The assassin made a break for the door, his stomach fluttering as he realized he’d have to cross in front of the window to get to it. There was nothing for it though, and he was relieved when no hail of gunfire shattered glass and perforated his skin.
He made it out into the hall. There was a room directly across from him, one of the three escape routes he’d planned in case things got tight. A door opened at the end of the hall, and a tall man lurched from behind it. Things had gotten tight. The assassin dove through the door across from him, across the dusty, empty room it led to, and climbed out the window that he’d left open. Slinging the rifle over his shoulder, he quickly shimmied down the rattling drainpipe into a small courtyard.
The courtyard had been built on top of an arch that covered another street below the house; it had maybe once been covered with grass, but the grass was all dead. The assassin sprinted across it to a gap between the next house and the top of the arch, then jumped down into the swirling fog in the Arcadium.
The blue lamps barely cast any light. The assassin could only just see them through the dense fog, but he’d prepared well. Fifteen paces, then right. Keep your hand on the wall, then left. He maneuvered through the twisting streets, practically blind. He ducked into a doorway, and waited, listening intently.
After a moment, he heard footsteps slapping the cobblestone street. “I said, don’t move!” Someone shouted.
The coroner. How the hell did he find me? The assassin put his shoulder against the door and pushed hard. It gave a little, but stayed closed. The footsteps got closer. He tried again, and this time the lock gave way. The assassin practically threw himself inside.
He found himself at the top of an iron balcony, stairs leading down into an enormous factory of some kind. Heavy metal machines hung silent overhead. The floor was filled with people.
The assassin gasped, and almost had a heart-attack. There were hundreds of them staring right at him. He struggled to make out details in the gloom. Why was no one moving? He could hear the coroner practically outside the door. The assassin leapt down the stairs and into the factory.
The figures he’d thought were people on the factory floor were mannequins. Or, at least, they were the heads of mannequins. Row after row of bald, plaster heads stared at him with thoughtful eyes that had been painted on. The assassin moved as far in as he could, then hunkered down to wait. There was a plaster head right by his ear and, after a moment, he turned it around backwards. Its false eyes made him nervous.
“I know you’re in here,” the man shouted. His voice echoed off of the machinery and bounced around in the dark. “It’s no good hiding. Surrender, and I’ll go easy on you.”
Not likely, the assassin thought. The coroner stood in the doorway, framed in silhouette by the blue light seeping in from the street. The assassin, as quietly as he could, loaded a bullet into the breach of his rifle, and slowly closed the slide. Stay there, moron. Just one more second…he lifted the rifle.
A faint, dry rustle reached his ears, and the assassin quickly turned. A tall man in black had somehow got behind him. He fired his rifle into the tall man’s chest. The flash from the muzzle was bright enough to blind him momentarily, and the sound of the gun was like a cannon, resounding over and over in the factory.
The man before him was unmoved. He stood silently for a moment, and then lunged forward, fast. He was too fast, faster than anyone the assassin had ever seen. The rifleman found himself snared by arms that wrapped around his wrists like chains and confronted with…teeth…
Small white teeth, glittering in glistening red, meat . . . the thing had a mouth that stretched and stretched and drew in air with a painful, ragged gasp…
The man felt like he was choking, like someone had reached down his throat and made a fist in his lungs, and was dragging everything up, ripping his life out by his lungs. He kicked out at the thing but its flesh flowed like water. It clamped an iron hand around his jaw and brought its gaping red mouth closer, breathed deeper.
Like someone had flipped a switch, the light abruptly vanished.
Twelve: The House on Corimander Street
Edgar Wyndham-Vie and Robert Rowan-Harshank left the theatre while the actors were still doing encores, in order to beat the rush. They climbed into the coach with the Wyndham-Vie crest, Edgar holding a handkerchief over the bruise on his face.
“The Windmill,”
Edgar called to the coachman. “Then knock off. We’ll get a hansom back home.”
“Sir,” the coachman replied, his voice muffled beneath his red scarf. The scarf was new, but Edgar Wyndham-Vie and his friend didn’t notice it, because rich people very rarely look at their servants. The coachman clicked his tongue at the horses, and drove them towards Sara’s Windmill, the oldest duetti club in Trowth. He guided the carriage out of Red Lanes and along the Royal Mile, which led from the Imperial Palace to the Stark.
Traffic was not heavy, this late at night, but there were still plenty of coaches on the road, still women and old men trying to sell flowers or sausages or coal. Topside, the fog was light: just a swirl of dingy yellow-gray clouds around the ankles. Downside, in the Arcadium, people were probably choking to death and dying, sometimes from the vrylaks that lurked in the mist, sometimes from the simple density of sediment in it.
The coach came to a stop in front of an ordinary-looking building, built in the Ennering-Rowan style: plain walls, square windows. The only sign of the club’s identity was the square bronze sign about the door, with the image of a windmill pressed onto it in enameled red steel. Inside, young gentlemen of the Esteemed Families of Trowth would watch the duette: a slow dance in which two young women would mime at dueling each other with long, slender knives. In Sar-Sarpek, when the duette had been invented a hundred years earlier, it had been a bloodsport. Now, it was an excuse for wealthy bachelors and married men to see women dressed in the skin-tight duetta’s outfit, instead of the heaps of skirts and bustles that Trowth women were expected to wear.
It was not uncommon that a man like Edgar Wyndham-Vie should dismiss his coachman after arriving at a place like the Windmill. He might go on from there to engage in any number of scandalous activities; following one of the dancers home to a cat-house, or going with his new acquaintances to a hotel room, rented for the sole purpose of doing things that young men ought not to be doing in their homes. Edgar and Robert left their carriage and went into the club.
The coachman drove the Wyndham-Vie coach around the corner, just far enough out of sight that no one could see it from the door, then climbed down and headed back to the Windmill. He stopped a half a block from the entrance of the club, arriving just in time to see Edgar and Robert leaving again. They’d either watched an unusually short dance, or they were off to engage in business of their own.
The coachman tipped his tall black hat down and followed after them, trying to keep a discreet distance behind the two men. New Bank, where the Windmill made its home, saw less traffic than the Royal Mile did. There were few people left on the street here, and it would do no good to be spotted, but a man would be surprised at just how much practice this particular coachman had at being discreet.
He followed the two young gentlemen back down the steep streets of New Bank, then back up the not-quite-as-steep streets of Old Bank. They stopped in front of a familiar building, decorated with the sharp, organic-looking Vie-Gorgon merlons and guarded by a pair of red-glistening Lobstermen. The coachman coughed and turned away, leaning against a cold buttress, trying to reproduce the look of an inconspicuous gentlemen, out for a brisk walk, taking a rest for a few moments.
The two men were not inside for very long. The coachman wished he recognized the building, but it was unmarked. He noted down the address, filed it away in his memory as the men emerged. Edgar had something square and bulky under his arm. The coachman was prepared to follow them both again, when Robert Rowan-Harshank saw him.
The young man nudged his friend and pointed towards the coachman; Edgar Wyndham-Vie squinted to get a better look. He can’t see me from across the street, Beckett thought to himself. Just behave naturally. He wrapped his coat tight around his waist, shoved his hands in his pockets, and started to walk away.
“You!”
Aw, no…
“You!” Wyndham-Vie started screaming at the Lobstermen. “The man there, with the red scarf! Arrest him! Now, you idiots!”
The scarf. Right. Stupid. Beckett turned, and contemplated drawing his weapon. He thought better of it almost immediately. One of the Lobstermen had raised a rifle, while the other had sprinted in a long, curving arc to the side, staying out of the first one’s line of sight and still closing on Beckett faster than he could possibly move.
The Marine with his wet-blood armor crashed towards him at speed, nearly as fast as a racehorse. Beckett raised his hands to show that they were empty. Shit. He thought.
“Lie on the ground and put your hands on your head.” The Lobsterman shouted as he thundered to a stop, his own rifle held like a spear.
Shit, shit, shit.
The pressgangs raided Red Lanes even before news about the attack in River Village had hit the broadsheets. Men with boiled-leather breastplates and collars, heavy cudgels, and shriek-grenades bullied their way into the back rooms of every shop and restaurant. They found sharpsies working as butchers’ assistants and cooks, or just engaging in the untrained labor of carting inventory around. The sharpsies were dragged into the street, beaten and chained, and immediately packed off to the ironclad warships bound for Gorcia.
If a shop owner was insistent about protecting his privacy, the pressgangers would through down their shriekgrenades; a special tympanum, treated with ionized flux, would begin to reverberate with a deafeningly loud, high-pitched wail, combined with a deep, stomach-churning moan. The dissonance between the two sounds was enough to bring the average person to his knees, gasping for breath and vomiting on the floor. The pressgangers, with the specially-treated counter-tympanum in their helmets, were immune. While shopkeeps and customers curled up on the ground in agony, the pressgangs kicked in doors and tore up floorboards.
If a man had employed sharpsies illegally in Red Lanes, the pressgangs found him that day. If he had never done so, the pressgangs rarely apologized for destroying his shop and making him and his customers bleed from the ears.
The work crews in New Bank, where the Family architects had been waging a particularly bitter pitched battle about flying buttresses, and which hired numerous sharpsie day-laborers for unskilled positions, were unscathed by the pressgangs.
All told, the pressgangs managed to fill the holds of two ironclads. Sharpsie men and women—pressgangers didn’t know how to tell the difference, and wouldn’t have bothered to if they did—were chained to each other and then to the floor of the ship. The ironclads would leave for Gorcia with new fodder for the Ettercap War that afternoon.
Thirteen: Valentine Returns
The Vie-Gorgons of Comstock Street are not quite the Vie-Gorgons of Raithower Street, though a certain amount of confusion is understandable. The Vie-Gorgons of Raithower Street, the branch of the family headed by the venerable patriarch James Gordon Vie-Gorgon, were the most affluent Family in all of Trowth. James had wisely chosen to secure a monopoly on the internal railroads of the nation, rather than enjoying control over the phlogiston importation that was disrupted by the ettercap war like the unfortunate Gorgon-Vies. The Raithower Vie-Gorgons were astonishingly wealthy, and had the strongest claim to the Imperial throne after William III Gorgon-Vie, who currently held it. They were known to be ruthless business dealers, and severe but sophisticated dressers. The Raithower Vie-Gorgons held parties only occasionally, and attended them even more rarely, preferring to spend their time deeply embroiled in the intricacies of controlling their vast wealth.
The Comstock Street Vie-Gorgons were third-cousins to the Raithower Vie-Gorgons, and stood on the other side of a relatively peaceable schism. Ever since their mutual great great-grandfather, old Raithower himself, after whom house, street, and plaza were all named, determined that his grandson Albrecht Vie-Gorgon, son of the same Emilio Vie-Gorgon that started off the Architecture War, should receive the bulk of the Vie-Gorgon business interests, while Albrecht’s cousin (by coincidence, also named Albrecht) should inherit only an annual stipend. When grandfather Raithower and then father Emilio died, the first Albrecht took his fo
rtune and moved from Raithower Plaza to Rowan Street, which was promptly renamed Raithower Street in honor of the old man.
The second Albrecht took his significantly less-sizable fortune to Comstock Street, which was not renamed in honor of anyone. The second Albrecht was a shrewd businessman, and managed to parlay his small stipend into near total-control of the print industry by the time his first grandchild was born. Roughly sixty percent of the broadsheets printed in Trowth were controlled directly or indirectly by Comstock Street, and, perhaps more importantly, nearly ninety percent of the paper milled in Trowth.
In general, the Comstock Vie-Gorgons were known for being not as rich as the Raithower Vie-Gorgons and, as far as fashion goes, both less severe and less sophisticated. Popular opinion had it that the Comstock Vie-Gorgons made up for their sartorial deficiencies by being friendlier; Allisandre Vie-Gorgon hosted an evening party virtually every week, received visitors every morning, and spent her afternoons calling on a number of well-off acquaintances.
The Comstock Vie-Gorgons were also known for being far more eccentric than their Raithower cousins, but this was due solely to the activities of their youngest member: Valentine Vie-Gorgon.
The young coroner arrived in the Vie-Gorgon house on Comstock Street covered in black filth and smelling like an open sewer. He burst through the main doors just as the midmorning sun began to come out ahead in its struggle to warm the ice streets, and handed a disgusting coat that looked like it had been dipped in sludge to his butler. The poor man had not even had time to ask the name of the foul vagrant that had entered without knocking; it goes without saying that Valentine was virtually unrecognizable.
“Have that cleaned for me, Henry,” Valentine told his butler. The young man strode with a jaunty, athletic gate. “I suppose I’ll need a new one for today. Have I got any other clean ones? Never mind, I shall just buy one!”
“Master Valentine?” Henry the butler managed to croak, his arms filled with the disgusting coat. It was too late. The young man had already gone into the parlor.