The Translated Man

by Chris Braak

  All of which meant very little to Valentine as he watched the gendarmes approach. The only really relevant aspect was this: he had no case, which meant that if Edgar Wyndham-Vie could show that he was a legitimate threat to the safety of the city, Valentine would have to show that Wyndham-Vie was a legitimate threat to the security of the Emperor. Or the Empire. Or something.

  Aw, damn it, Valentine said to himself, as the nine pedestrian and one equestrian gendarmes fanned out around him in the street. If he was lucky, only the man on the horse was carrying a gun. Think, Valentine. What would Beckett do? He’d probably say something mean, and punch someone in the face. And maybe shoot someone. On the other hand, Beckett had gotten himself arrested. Valentine was almost certain he could not beat all ten men in a fist-fight and, despite his posturing with Rowan-Harshank, he suspected he really would be hanged if he shot someone unlawfully.

  “Gentlemen,” Valentine said, as he pulled out his revolver. “I’m sure we’re all eager to resolve this peacefully.” Can’t get arrested. Okay. Pretend you’re Beckett. Beckett was in jail. Pretend you’re Beckett before he was in jail, the Beckett from the old days that was too crazy to be arrested for doing crazy things.

  The men had moved into a reasonably tight circle around him. “Valentine Vie-Gorgon,” the man on horseback said. He had a number five branded on his cheek. “You are under arrest. Drop your weapon, lie down on the ground, and put your hands on your head.”

  “Sorry,” Valentine tried to smile his most charming smile. Beckett would have glowered, or glared, or done something equally sinister, but allowances had to be made. Valentine did not have an especially intimidating glare. “On whose authority am I being arrested?”

  The men shifted uncomfortably. “You’re under arrest…”

  “You said that already. If you’re going to arrest me in the name of the Committee for Public Safety, you’ve got to declare it.” He thumbed the hammer back on his revolver. “That’s how it works. Say, ‘I arrest you in the name of the Committee for Public Safety,’ or something like that.” He shrugged. “Not that it matters. Under the circumstances, I’ve no intention of going with you. My authority supersedes yours.”

  “We’re here in the name of the Committee…”

  “Right, but you’re not actually employed by the Committee, you’ve been conscripted by the Committee,” this, Valentine knew, was almost certainly true, “which technically means that I can lawfully refuse arrest until I’m approached by actual agents of the Committee.” This was almost certainly not true. The gendarmes, however, didn’t seem to know that. “You need to get out of here,” Valentine told them, “before I start shooting you.”

  Trying to make a convincing argument to the men about to arrest him was not a very Beckett-like thing to do. Threatening to shoot them was. Valentine felt the two gestures balanced each other out.

  “Huh.” One of the gendarmes said. He had a long scar under his right eye, and a three branded beneath the left. “You can’t shoot all of us.” Ten men, six shots to a revolver; the man was, mathematically speaking, correct.

  Almost. Valentine drew his second revolver, cocked it. “Sure I can.”

  “Some of us will get to you…”

  “What is this?” Valentine snapped. “A pissing contest? Fine, I can’t shoot all of you. Maybe I can only shoot five of you. Maybe I can only shoot two. Who wants to go first?” Trying to threaten his way out of the situation did not seem to be working. Maybe they knew he wouldn’t really shoot. Maybe the men behind him were planning on rushing him. He needed a new plan.

  Aw, Mr. Horse, I’m sorry. There was no way he could let the man on horseback draw a pistol.

  There was a loud crack, as Valentine fired a shot right between the horse’s hooves. The animal screamed, reared, lost its balance and fell, but Valentine had already turned to charge the men directly behind him. He ran as fast as he could, roaring at the top of his voice, waving his revolvers in the air.

  In the excitement, the gendarmes forgot that Valentine probably wasn’t going to shoot them. They dove out of the way, their instincts to “Avoid the Raving Maniac” overriding their rational desire to “Arrest that Man.” Valentine ran past them and up the hill.

  They were in Old Bank. Raithower Square wasn’t far. If he could get to it, he’d be safe. It was no fun trying to run up hills, but there was some small satisfaction in knowing that the slope would give as much trouble to his pursuers as it gave the young coroner. At least, until the equestrian got his horse back on its feet. Valentine put on speed.

  Seventeen: Valentine’s Story

  Harry the carriage-driver had led Skinner into the Raithower office of the Coroners. He was concerned for her safety, which is why Skinner held back the urge to kick him in the shin and say that she was perfectly capable of finding her way into her own office, thank you very much. Once they’d gotten inside, Harry had breathlessly explained to Karine about the hundred men who’d come to kill Valentine, and how he was facing them down even as they spoke, and surely soon a whole battalion of Lobstermen would be crashing the gates of Raithower House. Karine immediately took charge of Skinner’s protection, and with all concern helped her find a comfortable seat on the couch.

  Skinner growled inwardly, but was pleased to note that she kept the sour expression off of her face. The indige arrived with tea; Skinner heard the silver spoon clink on porcelain as Karine scooped sugar into a mug.

  “Karine,” Skinner asked, gently taking the hot cup. “Would you please look out the window and see if Valentine is coming? I think I can hear his footsteps.”

  “He is, Miss Skinner,” Karine said after a moment. “There’s some men chasing after him. He’s running for the gates now. The guards are opening them…”

  “Does it look like he’s going to make it?”

  “I think so . . . wait. He tripped! No, he’s up again. He’s past the gates now, and the guards have closed them. They are yelling at the other men. Harry’s on top of the coach, waving his rifle around and shouting. I suspect he means to shoot someone.”

  “I can hear them, Karine, I just can’t see them.” She took a sip from her teacup. “What’s Valentine doing? He isn’t saying anything.”

  “He’s lying on his back, miss. On the flagstones.”

  “Oh.” They waited. Skinner drank some more tea. “Is he still there?”

  “Yes.”

  It was several minutes before Valentine burst through the office door, face flushed and still panting. “You…” he said. “...wouldn’t…believe. How far I had…to run.”

  “I would,” Skinner told him. “I came the same way. In the coach.”

  “But I had to run. Fast. The . . . men. They had . . . sticks and things.”

  “I’m sure it was very hard. Do you want tea?”

  Valentine was silent for a long moment. “No.” His voice was sullen.

  After a moment, Skinner heard him sit, and the tell-tale clinking sound of porcelain teacups. She smiled.

  “So,” Valentine asked between gulps of tea. “Do we know anything?”

  “Not unless you found out something spectacularly interesting on the run up here. Or when you disappeared…”

  “Oh!”

  “Yes?”

  “No,” there was a sound of more clinking teacups. “Burned myself.” He paused. “I did find…well, something. I was going to wait until I could tell Beckett, too…” He cleared his throat. “So, I was setting up the cordon around Zindel’s home…”

  “Like you were ordered to.”

  Valentine groaned. “Fine. Right. Like I was ordered to. And after about an hour, I see this coach pull up. The driver looks at the house, looks at the cordon, he seems like he’s confused. Then he goes real pale, and he turns the coach around and drives off. So, naturally, I followed him.”

  “You followed him? Valentine, the cordon was important. Public Safety took the bodies…”

  “He was acting suspicious!”

  “
That’s—” Skinner got a hold of herself. “Never mind. What happened?”

  “Well, I recognized the livery stamp on the coach. Tanner’s, it’s called. We used to send them after my brother when he’d been out debauching himself, so as not to sully the name and that…”

  “Valentine. Focus.”

  “So, I knew where the livery stable was. I took the autocarriage there and parked it in an alley. Then I put on my disguise.” She could practically hear him grinning. “I remembered what Beckett said, about my shoes being too clean, so I found . . . well, there was this filthy gutter. I mean, really filthy. There was all this black sludge, you know? I don’t even know what it was. And I just covered myself in it. Head to foot. I took special care on the shoes.”

  “Is that why you smell like piss?”

  “Probably. So, I’m all covered in filth, I’ve got my scrave tobacco—that’s this custom tobacco I had made. They…I don’t know how they do it, something with flux and gametes, or something, they make the tobacco bright green and luminescent, so it lights up your spit like you’ve got the scrave. There I am, all covered in filth, spitting my green spit, and I follow this man. I think that he was supposed to meet Zindel at the house. Anyway, he doesn’t have any more jobs. Just errands, and things. Buying groceries, right?”

  “That’s it? You left your post and covered yourself in filth so you could follow a coachman while he went to the grocer?”

  “No! I followed him when he went into the Arcadium. He was dropping something off at Printer’s Close. When he came out of Backstairs, there was somebody waiting for him. In the street. I thought it was a man, at first. He looks like he’s about to do something. Then…bang!”

  “He shot the coachman.”

  “No, right, that’s what I thought. No, someone else shoots the coachman. Coachman falls to the ground, and this man in the street, he turns and runs up the wall of a house. I don’t know what’s going on. I pull out my guns, tell everyone to stay still, and someone from the house takes a potshot at me from the window. Misses. But the man from the street…I’m thinking he’s a Reanimate, at this point, crashes through the window. I think…I don’t know what he was going to do. I head around the back, I think maybe he’s going to come out the other side, and I see him dropping down into the Arcadium.

  “So, I followed.”

  Skinner almost choked on her tea. “Naturally. There’s a man with a gun—you don’t know where he is—and a Reanimate that can run up walls. What does Valentine Vie-Gorgon do? He runs after them into the darkest, foggiest place he can find. It makes perfect sense.”

  “Oh, all right. It was stupid. But listen. I chase the Reanimate, I keep yelling at him to stop. Nothing. He ducks into this factory…I don’t know what kind of factory. There were these plaster heads everywhere. The Reanimate is doing something, I yell at it again, it doesn’t listen. So, I shoot. A lot. Nothing.”

  “You missed.”

  “Oh, no. I hit him. Hips, shoulders, base of the spine, just like Beckett says. Nothing. And I don’t mean it didn’t go down. It didn’t even flinch. Like I was shooting air. I get to thinking, ‘Maybe this isn’t a Reanimate.’ Anyway, I can’t hurt it with bullets, so I run. I’m not sure if it chased me, I wasn’t thinking about it. I just ran towards the river, and hid in an open sewer until the sun came up. Then I went back.”

  “You went back? Valentine…”

  “I know, I know! But I had to see what it was doing in the factory. There was a man there, I don’t know who he was, but he had a rifle. I figure he was the one that took the shot at me. And his whole neck and jaw are just one big, purple bruise, and his eyes are all bugged out. There’s blood coming out of his mouth, right, but get this: ectoplasm. Sticky little strands of it, dribbling all over the ground.” Valentine lowered his voice to a dramatic whisper. “The thing had…somehow…ripped the life out of him.”

  “What about the coachman?”

  “Gendarmes had found the body by the time I got back to it. I was in less of a hurry; I knew how he died.”

  Skinner was silent for a long moment. What Valentine had done had been, on many, many levels, astonishingly stupid. Or at least, it would have been astonishingly stupid if it had been someone other than Valentine, whose ridiculously irrational decisions came so regularly that they’d lost all power to astonish. On the other hand, what he said was…well, it was something. “What do you think it was?”

  “I don’t know. Not human, definitely. And not a Reanimate.”

  “Could it have been Khadavri?”

  “I don’t think so. Not a Lich. Maybe one of the Princes. But they . . . they drink blood, don’t they? Or something? They don’t suck the life out of people.”

  Actually, popular wisdom had it that the Dragon Princes had to bathe in hundreds of gallons of blood to preserve their monstrous existence. It was probably not worth running down a lone gunman. “You think this is connected to Zindel.”

  “It’s a weird coincidence if it’s not. Man gets murdered, the next day his coachmen gets murdered by a sniper, who is then murdered by some kind of a monster. Also, I was thinking. The wounds from the sharpsies…on Zindel’s family? All over the throat and jaw? That’s right where this rifleman had his bruises.” Valentine sighed, and Skinner heard the creak of the chair as he leaned back in it. “I really wish Beckett were here.”

  Skinner nodded her quiet assent, and sipped at her tea.

  The raids in Red Lanes had petered out by mid-day, when Valentine found himself running for his life in Old Bank. In fact, the men that had been conscripted to chase him had been serving double-duty: both as pressmen for the War Powers Ministry, and in the gendarmerie in the New Bank district. They had stumbled into Wyndham-Vie’s way while on their way back to their home turf from the shipyards. When they failed to persuade the guards at Raithower House that their borrowed authority gave them the right to enter and arrest Valentine, the gendarmes decided to knock off back to New Bank.

  They had forgotten about, or else were unconcerned by, the fact that they were still wearing the gear that they used for pressganging. This proved to be a most unfortunate oversight on the part of the gendarmes-cum-pressmen. The ten men, one on horseback, slouched down the hills in Old Bank until they came to Hightower Square.

  The edifices on Hightower Square had been in the Crabtree-Daior family for over a hundred years, and were a securely-held beachhead that the Family had long been attempting to use to break into the Vie-Gorgon-controlled New Bank district. However, as part of a piece of legislation served through the Committee for Public Safety, the Wyndham-Vies had managed to get the rights to supplant the intricately-carved floral downspouts characteristic of Crabtree-Daior design with the leering gargoyles that the Wyndham-Vies themselves favored. They had been replacing a great deal of stonework over the last few weeks, and had hired twenty sharpsie day-laborers to do it.

  Word of the pressgangs had preceded Valentine’s pursuers as they stumbled into Hightower Square. The sharpsie workers panicked when they saw the boiled breastplates and greenglass goggles. The sharpsies, frightened, moderately organized, and armed with hammers, chisels, and chunks of stone, determined that they would not be sent to Gorcia that day.

  The ten men thought to put up a fight, but they were exhausted and outnumbered. They didn’t stand a chance. The sharpsie workers pelted them with rocks first, knocking the horseman from his mount—the animal ran off, back towards Old Bank. One of the sharpsies, an angry young male, leapt in and lodged a chisel in one man’s eye. A second sharpsie knocked a gendarme to the ground, then pulverized his knee with a hammer.

  They beat the men to death, then bit off limbs, heads, and genitals, and scattered the bloody pieces throughout the square, in an orgy of unleashed rage at their oppressors. Hightower Square looked like someone had gone at it with buckets of red paint. Women and children screamed. One cool-headed old gentleman thought to call for the gendarmerie, all unaware that the ten men dressed like pressgangers were t
he only gendarmes on duty. By the time additional authorities had shown up, the sharpsie laborers were gone.

  The broadsheets all had their own sensational headlines for the incident. “Massacre at Hightower!” “Gendarmes Murdered!” But the Observer took in the most readers with a single word: “War.”

  Eighteen: The Psychestorm

  Wolfgang Rowan-Czarnecki had once been a great statesman. He’d served in Parliament for twenty years, and had served two memorable terms as Minister of the Exchequer. Never quite as charismatic as his brother Montgomery, who’d become Trowth’s youngest and most celebrated general, Wolfgang had been the quiet, competent, authoritative man that Trowth could turn to in a time of crisis. It had been Wolfgang Rowan-Czarnecki that had stabilized the Empire’s economy when the war with the ettercap threatened to bankrupt it. It had been Wolfgang that stood against the Corsay Trading Company when the financial giant had tried to wrest political control of the nation.

  The erstwhile Minister of the Exchequer was never going to have seen his face printed on the money, but he had done well for his country in his own intelligent, patriotic way. Ministers of the Exchequer were never remembered by anyone but historians, but if a historian that specialized in Not Especially Glamorous But Still Very Important Government Positions ever decided to compile a list of the finest Ministers of the Exchequer that Trowth had ever seen, Wolfgang Rowan-Czarnecki would have definitely been on his way to the top.

  Then, his brother had been killed. This was during the second Riehl Valley Action: Montgomery Rowan-Czarnecki had moved into the valley with his staff, thinking that the occupying ettercap had been eliminated. It had been a trap. Three thousand men had been killed trying to evacuate the command staff, and for nothing. The ettercap had sealed the valley. Suicide troops detonated their poison-sun weapons. Ironically, it had been the marines left behind to secure the retreat that managed to survive.