The Translated Man

by Chris Braak

  “Mother!” Valentine called out as he saw Veronica Vie-Gorgon, sitting with a number of ladies and talking about something that, no doubt, the young coroner would find of little interest. He grinned, showing teeth that were the luminescent green of a man afflicted with the scrave, then leaned over and kissed her cheek. “I’ve been out, as you can see. I shall have a bath, now, I think.”

  At the sight of the young man, covered as he was in what seemed to be a malodorous mixture of dirt, tar, coal dust, and horse manure that made his clothes look like they’d been used to stop up toilets and covered every inch of his face with black, two of the ladies in the room were taken with a sudden case of the vapors. Unaccustomed to the youngest Vie-Gorgon’s antics, they took him to be the worst kind of ruffian, and immediately perceived that the house had been invaded by some kind of disgusting housebreaker.

  Veronica Vie-Gorgon merely sat with a long-suffering look on her face, and permitted her son to kiss her cheek.

  The third lady in the room, a beautiful, delicate-featured young woman with skin as smooth as glass and as black as pitch, rose to her feet. This was Emilia Vie-Gorgon, youngest daughter of the Raithower Vie-Gorgons, and not one to be fooled by the simple disguise of sewage.

  “Cousin,” she greeted Valentine. Her voice was warm and charming, and she had a pristine white dress that contrasted sharply with the color of her skin.

  “Cousin!” The young man replied, taking her hands and kissing her on either cheek.

  “You smell like shit.” She showed him her white teeth. “Moreover, you seem to have covered yourself with sewage.”

  “Ah, cousin,” Valentine smiled his bright green smile, his eyes twinkling maliciously. “I see that your skin is still as black as your heart.”

  It is unclear precisely how seriously Valentine and his cousin insulted each other, but it turned out to be of less-thanvital importance. Valentine took his leave almost immediately and headed straight for the sumptuously appointed bathroom in the Comstock house. A private heater provided running hot water, a luxury to be found in few homes west of Old Bank. Valentine spent over an hour soaking in soap and water in an effort to scald the filth from his skin.

  When he had cleaned himself or, at least, cleaned himself to his satisfaction, Valentine dressed in his neatly-tailored grey suit, belted on his pearl-handled, nickel-plated revolvers, and went out in to the streets of Trowth on an adventurous search for a new coat.

  Valentine arrived at the Coroner’s Office in Raithower plaza around noon. He was wearing a new coat; it was charcoal grey like everything the Coroners were meant to wear, but with two lines of silver buttons and a fancy black braid looped at the right arm. Skinner and Beckett’s secretary, Karine, were the only two people in the main office, which had once been Albrecht Vie-Gorgon’s parlor.

  Karine was in her own office, adjacent to the main. She’d been hired partly at Beckett’s insistence; after years of frustration in his attempts to investigate heresy in Trowth, the old coroner had stumbled on a novel idea: he’d demanded an entire staff of workers whose sole job was to collect and read broadsheets. Stories about murders, which were plentiful, were clipped out and filed away by date. Stories about people were clipped and filed away according to their names. If a story was about more than one person, or in the case of the murders, a tag was placed in the file for the sake of cross-referencing. The secretarial department would also collect reports from the Imperial Guard and all the local gendarmeries about every single arrest they’d made every day. Few of the gendarmeries were consistent about reporting arrests, and hardly ever noted the freelance beatings they administered, but the Guard was fairly reliable.

  Beckett had gone to Mr. Stitch and demanded a secretarial staff. Stitch, in turn, managed to secure enough funding to pay Karine. She was a conscientious and thorough worker, and Beckett had been trying to get her fired since day one. Karine was an indige, and her people had phlogiston in their blood. They were virtually immune to the cold, and they refused to dress properly. Karine wore low-cut blouses, dresses without underskirts or petticoats or bustles, and sometimes with slits in them that went as high as her hip. It was all to the purpose of displaying the silvery tattoos all over her blue-black skin, and was scandalous by modern standards. For Beckett, whose sense of propriety had been established thirty years earlier, seeing Karine come to work “practically naked” was enough to give him apoplexy.

  Stitch had refused to fire her. She was, after all, an excellent worker, and Stitch was interested neither in social mores nor in racial tension. Valentine caught a glimpse of the indige secretary through her open office door. He smiled and winked, but didn’t think she noticed.

  “Valentine?” Skinner snapped, as soon as she heard the young man’s footsteps. “Is that you? Where the hell have you been?” She wrinkled her nose. “Augh, you smell like piss.”

  “I’ve been . . . well, it’s a long story. I need to talk to Beckett right away. He’s in his office?” Valentine opened the door without waiting for a response, only to find the room empty.

  “No. He didn’t come to work today.”

  “Is…”

  “He’s not at home either,” Skinner went on. “We don’t know where he is. I told Stitch, but we’ve got no one to spare right now.”

  “Well, where is he?”

  “I don’t know, Valentine,” Skinner was practically snarling. “In the mean time, where were you? You know Public Safety took the Zindel bodies?”

  “What? They what?”

  “That’s right, Valentine. I’m not sure how. They must have snuck right past you and your cordon. You know, the one that you were supposed to set up to make sure no one got in and disturbed the scene?”

  The young man stuttered. “I. Well, look, it’s . . . the thing of it was…”

  Skinner shook her head. “I don’t want to hear it. Tell it to Beckett when we find him. All I can say is, it’d better be fucking good.”

  Valentine groaned and sank into a chair.

  “Ms. Skinner?” Karine came out of her office, and pointedly refused to look at Valentine. “I think I know where Mr. Beckett is?”

  Skinner cocked her head. “And…?”

  Karine held up a bit of paper. “It’s the report from the Imperial Guard in Old Bank.” She passed it to Valentine, still without looking at him.

  “Aw, no,” Valentine muttered, reading the report.

  “What? What is it?”

  “He’s been arrested. Assault, theft…” Valentine scowled. “Attempted espionage. He’s being held at Montgomery Square.”

  “Montgomery Square…?”

  “It’s the Committee, Skinner. The Committee for Public Safety has him.”

  Fourteen: The Dangers of Heresy

  Alan Charterhouse sat on the bed in his room. Papers were scattered about him; they tumbled in piles on his bed, they were balled up and crumpled on his floor, they were pinned to his walls. He used a book for a desk while he sat in his nightclothes, scratching formula after formula in a mathematical language that he could be executed for even knowing about. There was a copy of The Dangers of Heresy laying open on the bed next to him. In his feverish rush to understand what he’d seen in Herman Zindel’s home, Alan Charterhouse did not notice the irony.

  Dangers of Heresy was given to every young boy or girl the first day they came to Sebet-Day school, to learn about the religion and the Word. It was full of terrifying copperplate etchings of Reanimates, of people that died of dream poisoning, of the hideous creations of chimeratists and ectoplasmatists, followed with page after page of descriptions about how terrible heretical science could be. The last two chapters were devoted to the Excelsior.

  The pictures of the Excelsior were actually cheap kirlitotypes, so they were much more detailed than the copperplates. The first pictures were of the whole Excelsior, looking like nothing so much as a great brass shark with a huge, piston-driven phlogiston engine protruding from its back. There was a copy of the famous kirlio
type of the Excelsior’s launch, with the Lord Mayor of Trowth smashing a bottle of sparkling wine against its brass hull.

  The rest of the pictures . . . it wasn’t always possible to get kirltiotypes. Something was left over in the air after the launch that disrupted the flux-membranes used in the cameras. There were big black spots obstructing the view sometimes, like someone had burned the photographs with a match. Sometimes, the spots looked like they had fingers.

  What could be seen was awful. The area directly around the launch, when the Excelsior had returned to real-space, had been completely annihilated. There was just an empty scoop out of the ground that was covered with ash. The mangled ship sat at its center. All around the central crater were twisted, burned-out buildings. Doorways or chimneys sometimes stood where houses had collapsed. Towers were burned and covered in black soot.

  The people who had been nearest to the Excelsior had died almost instantly; vaporized along with the ground they were standing on. It had happened so fast that they’d left their shadows behind. According to the book, the few people daring enough to live in the Break insisted that they could still see those shadows moving about. Still, those were lucky ones. The people around them were less fortunate. They were sometimes fortunate enough to be burned alive for a few seconds; if they survived that, the Aether would get to them.

  Somehow, the Excelsior had brought a wave of metaphysical space back with it. It erupted out from ground zero, wrenching space and reality out of alignment. People died as their bones sprouted thorns, veins turned to glass, skin shattered like stone. One man was torn apart as his muscles came to life like snakes, and tried to rip themselves free from his body.

  Not everyone died immediately. There were survivors at the very outskirts of the explosion, and others who tried to move into what came to be called the Break shortly afterwards. They did not last long. They choked on extra teeth growing in their throats, or went mad as their limbs slowly began to split in half.

  It was not the lurid photographs of the victims of the Excelsior that Alan was interested in. There were no blueprints or schematics available for the machinery on the Aethership; the kirliotypes in Dangers of Heresy were the closest he could come. He needed more information. The young cartographer felt starved for it.

  There was something unsettling about the equations that Zindel was using, though the idea that someone had gotten access to the Excelsior’s translation engine and had been using it was certainly unsettling enough. Something else, though, nagged at Charterhouse’s mind, and he couldn’t say what it was. So, he plotted through the equations, copying down everything he could remember from Zindel’s walls, reconstructing formulae where he had to, improving on them when he found it necessary.

  “Got yer lunch, boy,” Uncle Malcolm called to him. “Hungry?”

  “No, Uncle Malcolm,” Alan called back automatically. He could hear the panic in his own voice. “Not right now, thanks.”

  There was silence from the old man. Then, “Should eat something. Some soup. I’ll leave some in the kitchen.”

  Alan said nothing. He was staring at the photograph of the Excelsior, with its huge phlogiston-powered engine in the back. There were two short antennae at either end of the protruding pistons; Alan was now able to recognize them as a kind of stabilizer. They’d create a sub-harmonic that would allow the Excelsior to return to normal space.

  Two. He thought. No. Oh, no.

  Fifteen: The Dangers of Veneine

  Beckett tried to keep his breathing normal as nausea welled up in his stomach, crawling up his throat, choking him, trying to drag itself out and into the air…No. Not again. His body screamed at him. Icy nails had been driven through his elbows and knees and into each vertebra in his lower back. There was a wooshing sound in his ears, a ringing that made it almost impossible to hear.

  He coughed a wracking, full-body cough, then rolled over and vomited. His stomach had nothing left to bring up so the waves just wrenched his body into convulsions. His head… something hammered at his head, and he was sure he was bleeding through his eyes.

  Pain was blinding while he retched. It cleared for a moment for Beckett to see the brass beneath his palms, hot under cold moonlight, his knees ached…he closed his eyes and tried to scream at himself to stay calm. Crashing waves broke around his ears and he puked up sea water and spiders that crawled away, skittering on five misshapen legs. The cut on his head had opened again, and there were new cuts on his fingers now. Blood rolled down the skin of his face to the end of his nose, and into the crevices between the stones on the floor, dropping away into space, he could see it falling through and thought it might come out the other side of the world.

  More pain came in waves and clenched bony fingers into his muscles. He curled up on the floor and tried to take the pressure off of his lower back. Shards of glass in his knees and elbows crunched and slashed his tendons to ribbons and he wanted to scream. He tore at his elbows with his fingers; they’d taken the coat he’d bought off of the coachmen, and Beckett had long since turned his sleeves to rags. A red tumor had grown up inside his elbow, and he saw its long red tendrils snaking down his arm, trying to get to his invisible fingertips.

  Teeth bared, he tried to bite it off, but touching it sent sharp needles of pain straight up his arm and through his shoulder; they lanced through his lungs and stabbed at his heart. He choked on bile and tried to vomit again, with a fist clenching in the back of his throat. The fist opened into feathers and he coughed up a black bird whose sharp talons scored the inside of his mouth. The walls of the tower were brass, and he wasn’t alone here, beneath the hot moonlight. Something with wet slimy boneless fingers reached out for him.

  Beckett rolled away against the wall of the cell, screaming. The fingers were biting at his eyes now, tiny, toothy, jawless mouths. He grabbed at them and tried to pull the leeches out of his eyelids but they were stuck. Their bodies came off in his hands, but their mouths stayed fixed to the inside of his eyes, chewing and chewing. He screamed, his hands filled with swarms of black leeches.

  “Beckett! Word and fuck, Beckett!”

  Someone screamed at him, and Beckett was sure it was a voice from the City of Brass whose towers now loomed over his head, shining claws reaching at the pale leprous disc of the moon. The moon called out to him and screamed his name.

  “Beckett! What’s wrong with him? What did you fucking do to him?”

  The moon was wide as wide as the sky and he wasn’t floating up to it but falling towards it, and there were cities of black basalt teeming like termite colonies across its surface and there were things that lived there.

  “Beckett!” There was a hand on his arm, a hard real hand, not soft like the hands in his mind.

  The old coroner grabbed a hold of his mind through nothing more than force of will. “V-valentine…?” He rattled, gasping for breath. “Wh-…”

  “Elijah, it’s all right, we’re getting you out of here…”

  “Why did you…” he gasped and almost choked again on saltwater. “…leave…the cordon…”

  “I’ll explain it to you later. We have to get you out of here.”

  His vision swam and then, for a moment, was mercifully clear. The cold, merciless iron that was the core of Beckett’s being seized control. The pain temporarily took a place backstage, the rushing sound in his head died away, as Beckett grabbed Valentine by his shirt-front. He stared at the young man’s narrow, angular face, at his dark eyes. “No! Stitch will do it.” He coughed, and yanked hard on Valentine’s shirt. “Wyndham… took . . . eighteen. . . .”

  “Wyndham took eighteen what? What are you talking about? Elijah? Elijah!”

  The world was fading the moon swelled up beneath him. “Eighteen twenty.” The choking fist was in the back of his throat again. “Corimander Street.”

  Another wave of agony shook him. Beckett screamed and curled up on the ground, as someone hit him over and over in the face with a hammer, and then: darkness.

 
; Valentine slowly rose to his feet after Beckett had collapsed into unconsciousness. It’s the veneine, flushing from his system, he thought. Or else it’s the fades. Is that what they do to you? Tear you apart from the inside, while they make your outsides transparent? The young coroner turned to where Edgar Wyndham-Vie stood at the end of the hall. They were deep beneath Montgomery Station, where the Committee for Public Safety kept its cells. The ceiling was low, and curved all the way to the ground on either side, leaving little room for a prisoner to even stand.

  “He needs to be released.” Valentine told the other man. “Now.”

  “He assaulted my person,” Edgar Wyndham-Vie said. “He stole my family’s carriage. I found him trying to break into a restricted-access Vault in Old Bank…”

  Valentine bore down on him, and brought his face very close to the other man’s. “He said you took something. Eighteen-twenty Corimander Street.”

  Edgar swallowed. “Perjury. He is the thief. And a liar. He has a vested interest in impugning my character…”

  It took every ounce of willpower Valentine had to not draw his revolver and gun Wyndham-Vie down right then and there. This was quite a feat; Valentine was a man used to indulging his whims. “Right. He had to execute your cousin for heresy, and he’s got the vested interest—”

  “Considering the crimes levied against him,” Wyndham-Vie interrupted, “I’m petitioning for a full inquest into my cousin’s murder—”

  “—execution—“

  “Murder.” Wyndham-Vie sneered at him. “Family name notwithstanding, Valentine, you should be careful. I could have you held as an accessory.”

  This time, Valentine really would have shot the man, despite the red-armored Lobsterman at Wyndham-Vie’s back, had not another voice cut into their conversation.

  “Unacceptable.” The voice was a rasping sound, the kind three voices might make if they’d been crammed together into one big voice and then torn apart a smaller, fourth one.