The Translated Man

by Chris Braak

  The life had drained out of Wolfgang after he’d lost his brother. He became listless, uninterested in politics, leaving important decisions to Vice-Ministers and Adjuncts. He no longer challenged the party leaders when they proposed ill-considered plans. Wolfgang Rowan-Czarnecki had become completely disaffected with the Empire, his primary political attitude became one of passionate unconcern.

  The Emperor, concerned still about showing favor to the Rowan-Czarneckis, who controlled the production and distribution of that supremely useful panacea called ichor, offered Wolfgang the position of Director of the Royal Academy of Sciences. The position would serve to remove Wolfgang from any position of real influence, without actually removing him from public life.

  At the Royal Academy of Sciences, Wolfgang Rowan-Czarnecki could be allowed to slowly die a quiet death, uninvolved in any decisions where his apathy might directly harm the Empire.

  He sat at his desk, waiting for his guest, and stared up at the ceiling. He felt that he spent more and more time lately with nothing to do but wait. He’d been taking more naps, just letting the quiet weight of his loneliness and loss bear him down into sleep. It gave him something to do while he waited for the next meal. Or visitor.

  Wolfgang took the small brass device on his desk and wound the key. A low, faint humming came from the flux membrane in its center. To his ears, and any ordinary, human ears, the sound was nothing more than that. If, on the other hand, someone attempted to spy by clairaudient means, they would find their hearing scrambled: words all lost in a cascade of reverberating echoes. The device had been the invention of a bored clockmaker who’d thought of it as a clever practical joke to play on Knockers.

  There was a faint rap at the door, and Wolfgang’s secretary put his head in. “Sir…”

  Wolfgang nodded. “Send him in.”

  The secretary nodded. Moments later, Edgar Wyndham-Vie swaggered into the room, slammed the door shut, and flopped into a seat opposite Wolfgang’s desk. He had not waited for an invitation. Wolfgang was willing to chalk that up to the impetuosity of youth. “Well?”

  Wyndham-Vie shrugged. “Stitch got Beckett out. There was nothing I could do. But he’s out bad…” the young man tapped a finger on his temple. “…delirious. I don’t think he’ll be investigating anything for a while.”

  The older man grunted. “And?”

  “And nothing. Beckett’s the only danger. His man is incompetent. I’ve sent a few gendarmes out to take him in.”

  Wolfgang groaned and rubbed his eyes. “You haven’t got the authority to keep arresting people, Edgar.”

  “I had to. He was going after the log at Corimander Street.”

  There was a long silence, then, and Edgar began to fidget nervously.

  “Why was he at Corimander Street?”

  Edgar shrugged, but he still seemed nervous. “I don’t know. I assume…Beckett must have said something to him. He . . . spoke to him. In the cell for a few minutes. I thought Beckett was delirious, but…” Wyndham-Vie tapped his fingers on his knee. “Maybe he told him the address. It doesn’t matter. The log wasn’t there. Robbie didn’t say anything. There’s nothing to connect you…” he trailed off.

  Wolfgang had stood, and for a moment, the shadow of his fire-eyed brother was visible in the old man’s paunchy face. “They are too close to this. The Coroners have been practically breathing down our necks…” he seized Edgar by the front of his shirt. “Do you understand that if we’re exposed, we could all hang? That’s if Beckett doesn’t execute us on the spot. Do you understand that?”

  Trying vainly to slither out of Wolfgang’s grasp, Edgar replied, “I do. I understand. And I’m in this as deep as you are, so don’t think I’m not trying to keep it all under wraps. And it is under wraps. The gendarmes will pick up Valentine for interfering with a Committee Investigation. Beckett’s out of his mind on fang…” Wolfgang let the young man go, straightened his own coat, and went over to his window.

  There was a psychestorm brewing above the forest of stone towers and bronze chimney pots; verdant green lightning played across dark, gray-green clouds that grew black as the hidden sun set. Already, people were closing up their doors and windows as tight as they could, to protect themselves from the dementia-inducing winds.

  Edgar watched the old man, bitterness roiling in the back of his throat. It’s not like he didn’t know the danger they were in. The danger that they were all in, and that Wolfgang Rowan-Czarnecki was responsible for. The Wyndham-Vies, Edgar spat to himself, had been serving the Empire for decades before Wolfgang’s upstart family had risen to prominence. Hadn’t it been Harcourt Wyndham that had advised Owen I Gorgon? Hadn’t it been Dikaios Vie that had served Agon Diethes before the Second Reconciliation? Edgar Wyndham-Vie had half a mind to tell the old fart off once and for all, let him know where the real power in this situation lay.

  Instead, he said, “What about the pilot?”

  Wolfgang shook his head. “Lightman. It’ll go after Lightman, next. Then . . . then everyone it knows will be dead.” Just another bit of nastiness crawling around the city.

  “You’re not going out,” Valentine insisted. “The storm’s almost started. You wouldn’t get farther than Red Lanes.”

  “There’s enough copper in the coach…” Skinner insisted.

  “To protect you, yes. And Harry? Going to give him a copper top-hat, or something?”

  Skinner snorted and sulked in her chair while Karine and Valentine bustled about, closing the copper shields over doors and windows. The psychestorm had essentially trapped her at Raithower House for the entire night. At least there are beds upstairs. Though Mr. Stitch did not require sleep, he had at least been thoughtful enough to provide a row of narrow, uncomfortable cots for his employees in the event of emergency.

  The psychestorms usually blew in out of the mountains far to the north, from the area around the Castle If. They picked up volatile, sublimated flux from the clouds that the great Trowth mining-engines threw up, and then proceeded to rain it all back down on the city. The storms had been extremely dangerous, at first, but the Committee for Public Safety had been instrumental in setting up their “Program of Preparedness” to help citizenry cope with the mind-poisoning weather.

  The storm would roll over the city in a few hours, and then crash to pieces on the enormous sea-wall around the harbor. In the meantime, anyone caught out in the street could be swept up in dangerous whorls of synaesthesia or delirium tremens. In wealthy neighborhoods, like the Banks or North Ferry, heavy copper shutters that had been corroded green with time and salt were fixed over doors and windows. In poorer neighborhoods, people gathered to wait out the storm in pubs that often had better shielding. During a psychestorm, even the poor and degenerate were admitted, if reluctantly, behind the copper barriers. The only poor souls refused entry were the dangerously contagious scravers, who were revealed by their coughing and their virulent green mucous.

  The Brothers of the Mad Wind, who believed that the psychestorms were the purest reverberations of the Word, would choose one among their number to stand out in the streets in Fishtown. They prayed that the wind would deliver divine secrets; usually, it just delivered another madman.

  In places like Mudside and Bluewater, sharpsies and indigeae would huddle under large sheets of copper that the Committee had been passing out for years. It was a compromise between the need to protect even the undesirables from the psychestorms—because a lunatic sharpsie was even more of a threat to public safety than a sane one—and the need to not spend very much money. The sheets worked: the sharpsies had built large, makeshift shelters out of theirs, the indigea had lined their roofs. As a general rule, they were far less susceptible to the dangers of the psychestorm than humans or sharpsies.

  In Lantern Slope, where the Indige Shipping Concern flew in the limited amounts of phlogiston while the major pipelines were disrupted by the ettercap war, indige and trolljrmen stevedores reigned in the huge, copper-hulled airships. The levi
tite at the cores of the airships could not be deactivated, instead slowly decaying over time, so the ships had to be brought to ground by huge iron chains attached to complex block-and-tackle systems. Somewhere in the shimmering, indigo-stone homes of the few wealthy indigea in the city, the headmen of the Shipping Concern gnashed their teeth and clenched their fists as they suffered the unavoidable delay in their business.

  In South End, Philip Crowe sat in his bedroom, with the copper shutters on his windows open just a crack. He could see flashes of green from the flickering lightning spill onto the floor, and thunder rumbled. The wind began to pick up, screaming, bringing the sound of ruptured senses with it. Philip sat patiently, and waited for the madness to come to him.

  When Valentine and Karine had finished with the windows, Valentine returned to his chair. Thunder boomed outside, and echoed strangely in Skinner’s thoughts.

  “Do you want to play a game, or something? Do you…I mean, can you play chess, or anything like that?”

  The thunder was followed by a strange echo in her thoughts. “Not now, Valentine. I’m not in the mood.” The thunder echoed strangely.

  “We could play The Minister’s Cat, or something.”

  “No.” Strangely. “I need to go upstairs.” The upstairs room that Stitch had put the cots in didn’t have any windows, and there was copper piping in the walls. It should be better shielded from the psychic reverberations of the storm.

  “Do you need help…?”

  “No.” Skinner got to her feet and went upstairs, using her knocks to find her way.

  Because Raithower House had first been the home of one of the wealthiest families in Trowth, its construction was exceptionally grand. It featured the traditional Vie-Gorgon design: everything was tall and narrow. Tall, narrow windows. Tall, narrow doors. High ceilings, narrow halls. In an effort to both create a sense of space and to give the viewer a sense of being in the middle of a forest of (tall, narrow) columns, many of the walls were open arches.

  The tendency of the Vie-Gorgons to fill large rooms with tall pillars made navigating by way of telerhythmia tricky; Skinner had to sweep the knocks out in wide arcs in front of her, and listen carefully to screen out the double-echoes. Still, she knew her way around the building, and eventually succeeded in finding the small sleeping chamber that Stitch had set aside for emergencies.

  Green lightning flashed, and Skinner could see it behind her eyes. It was common knowledge that knockers, at least the ones strong enough to be employed by the coroners, were blind, but this was only partially true. In fact, Skinner’s eyes were extraordinarily sensitive: seeing with the unbearable clarity of her eyes was actually excruciatingly painful. She, like most knockers, wore the band of silver over her eyes to make sure that her vision was completely eclipsed.

  It didn’t help during the psychestorms. Despite the silver plate and the copper shielding in the walls and roof of the building, the green lightning was always visible. She could be a hundred miles underground, and still see those eerie pulses of green. More thunder rumbled, but the mental echo that accompanied it was mercifully faint.

  The wind began to pick up, and then the clouds broke. Huge globs of snow fell in the screaming winds; Skinner could hear them hitting the copper-sheathed roof, despite the fact that it was another storey over her head. The sound of fat snowflakes on the copper roof stabbed delicately at her inner-ear, a sharp violent sound that she could never hope to explain to the ordinary-of-hearing.

  She made her way to a cot and sat down on the edge. It creaked and groaned, and threatened to collapse beneath her weight, but held firm. Skinner sighed and set her cane down next to her. She was beginning to regret leaving Valentine downstairs. His conversation might be inane, but at least it was better than sitting quietly by herself while the storm moaned around her, buffeting her throbbing head.

  Lightning flashed again, and in the psychic afterimage in her mind, Skinner could see the city, its merlons and spires and chimney-pots black silhouettes limned with dull green. The snow fell in a horizontal wave of black spots. The image was gone almost immediately, but the thought of it lingered in her mind, a peculiar aspect of the psychestorm. Skinner shivered, and wished she had some music to listen to.

  Beckett has a phonograph in his office, she thought briefly, then discarded the idea. She’d have to leave the room then, and her sensitivity to the strange effects of the psychestorm would make that unpleasant. He probably only has old Corimander symphonies anyway. Like most of the Trowthi, Skinner recognized Edmund Corimander as the greatest Trowthi composer in history, and she’d heard The Siege of Canth enough times that she knew the movements by heart, but that was about as far as her interest in the epic, brassy sounds of Corimander’s orchestra went.

  Another flare of lightning threw the whole city into stark relief again. It was followed swiftly by a sharp clap of thunder whose echo penetrated the copper in the walls. There had been a man on the roof, she thought, climbing over a forest of small bronze chimneys, when the thunder echoed. He’d been on the roof next door. The sound of the thunder rolled in her mind still. The man had been climbing through the storm….

  “Valentine!” There was no response. Skinner tried to project her clairaudience outward, but recoiled as soon as she got past the door. The sound of the maddening snow and wind of the psychestorm had lashed out at her, for a brief instant transforming all the sounds into smells. There was a second of disorientation as she pulled her mind back, reeling with the synaesthasia, listening to the acrid, bitter sound of the storm. “Valentine!” She called out again.

  Another flash of lightning and a deafening thunderclap, and she turned her head straight up and could see the man crawling across the roof now, while the thunder slammed against the inside of her ears. He was slithering down the eaves of Raithower House, head-first. The thunder rang insistently in her ears, the thought of it demanding her full attention.

  “Nnf,” Skinner muttered, as she tried to get to her feet. Her thoughts were distorted, her hearing still disrupted by the synaesthasia from the storm. She sent out a wave of white-sound knocks, which came back all manner of strange red and gold colors, and the man, she’d seen a man on the roof. “Valentine!” She screamed at the top of her lungs, certain now that the man was making his way towards an upper story window.

  She could not risk projecting her clairaudience out to listen, but she was certain she could hear the faint scratching of fingernails against the green-copper shutters. The creaking sound of hinges as he threw them open, the shattering of glass as he crawled inside…

  “Skinner?” Valentine’s voice drifted towards her from the hall, and she could hear his footsteps now, roughly textured like the sound of burlap. The synaesthasia cleared, and the sounds were sounds again, as Valentine entered. “Skinner? What’s wrong?”

  “There’s . . . there’s someone on the roof. Trying to get in.” Skinner heard Valentine draw his pistol.

  “Where?”

  “Third storey. I think, second window in from the right.”

  “All right. I will be right back.” His footsteps rang on the stone floor.

  I’m blind, I’m not a child. I’ll be fine. As a gesture of goodwill, Skinner chose not to snap her acid remarks after the young coroner. She took a deep breath, and tried to project her clairaudience again.

  The disorientation was immediate as the information that reached her ears was scrambled, but not unbearable. She tracked her hearing up to the third floor, into a large room on the east side. Her telerhythmia scattered a wave of white-hot knocks, and the shiny, acrid-colored echoes returned. They gave her a picture of a room only a little larger than the one she was in, with a few cabinets, a desk, and a chair.

  Valentine’s sharp-edged footsteps clattered into range. The wind of the storm eased for a moment, and Skinner’s hearing began to return to normal. “Skinner? Can you hear me?”

  She rapped twice on the floor by his feet.

  “I don’t see anything here,
Skinner. Is this the right room?” The wind blew hard again, making his voice red and blue. The clairaudience shifted suddenly, as though it had been dislodged by the heavy wind, and shook her mind about, threatening to cast the sense out into the street.

  She screwed up her face and tried to concentrate, keeping her clairaudience under control. She rapped twice again. Yes, that’s the right room.

  The icy sound of Valentine lighting a match actually made her chilly. She threw another wave of knocks out against the windows. They burned when they came back, their echoes painful in her ears, but the copper shutters were still closed.

  Hallucination, Skinner told herself. It’s the storm, it’s screwing all of my senses up.

  “Skinner, I’m going to open a shutter.”

  Three raps. No. It was hard enough to keep her mind together behind the copper shutters. If Valentine opened one…

  “I need to see if someone’s outside.”

  Three raps again. No.

  “I think there’s someone there.” No. “Can…can you not hear that sound?”

  Skinner paused, and fear fluttered in her stomach. Instinctively, she responded with the complex double-rap she used to communicate with Beckett. What sound?

  “I don’t understand that, Skinner. There’s a kind of scraping sound, by the window.” No. “You don’t hear it?” No.

  Gently, Skinner pushed her hearing towards the copper shutters. The storm set up a kind of turbulence that kept pushing her thoughts around, robbing her of focus and clarity. She bit her lip and concentrated.

  There. A faint green sound, that glistened in her mind. Now that she’d found it, she didn’t seem to be able to tune it out. It slithered around all the other sounds in the room, moving beneath and behind them, echoing weirdly on the walls.

  “Skinner, I need…shit. Shit, the window, the lock’s opening.” She heard him cock the revolver. “The lock . . . the lock on the window…”