The Translated Man

by Chris Braak

  And if I don’t tell them? The thought was a lead weight in his belly. The danger presented by Zindel’s theories was astronomical. A real, bona fide threat to the Empire. To the world. I have to. I have to tell them.

  Alan Charterhouse lay down on his bed, while the psychestorm buried Trowth in snow and madness. He wanted to cry.

  Twenty-One: Mudside

  The psychestorm cleared up shortly after noon, breaking apart into tattered wisps of iridescent green clouds that disappeared over the top of the great sea-wall in Trowth harbor, while a thicker, blacker cloud cover replaced it. Still, only the most foolish or desperate citizens would dare for several hours to venture into the drifts of icy snow that glowed gently blue beneath the streetlamps.

  Elijah Beckett supposed he was both foolish and desperate. There was no chance that he could find a coach, so he tromped through the snowbanks and hoped his boots would hold out. They were good boots, stiff and lined with wool, so he was optimistic. The fact was, he had little time. As soon as it was safe, Wyndham-Vie and his men would be out and scouring the streets, trying to arrest Beckett and his coroners and trying to eliminate the last remaining leads that remained.

  During his enforced stay at the hospice, Beckett had puzzled out where he had left to go. He suspected that Valentine had found nothing at the house on Corimander Street; whatever Wyndham-Vie had taken, he’d probably gotten away with it. Beckett had missed his chance to find out who Wyndham-Vie was working for. Zindel and his family were dead, and there was no sure way of finding out who killed them.

  That only left one lead: someone had tried to throw him off by making the murders look like they’d been done by sharpsies. As near as Beckett could figure, that meant one of two things: either they’d had some kind of tool that could mimic a sharpsie bite—in which case there wasn’t a lot he could do to find them—or someone had hired actual sharpsies to do it. And if Beckett wanted to find sharpsies, that meant going to Mudside.

  The sharpsie ghetto was south of Red Lanes, and about half an hour’s walk in the bitter cold. Beckett was protected only by his boots, his heavy coat, and the dose of veneine that the trolljrman had given him before he left. The drug was warm in his limbs, and steadfastly kept the cold at bay. It was entirely possible that a man could freeze to death while on veneine, and never notice it.

  Mudside spread out by the south bend of the Stark. The river rolled out of the mountains in which Trowth nestled, and had cut a long channel through the impenetrable bedrock on which the city had been built. By the south bend, thick, oozing mud and sediment were thrown up by the swiftly flowing river, leaving a layer of shifting, unstable soil in a smooth fan by the riverside. This unsteady foundation made the construction of any kind of substantial buildings cost-prohibitive, and so Mudside was routinely overlooked in the Architecture War. It had historically been the habitat of the dirty and destitute; land there was cheap, because no one of any importance wanted it. The neighborhood had been a natural home for sharpsie communities.

  For a moment, as Beckett looked out at the sharpsie shantytown, he was daunted by the task, and the old despair took a moment to rear its ugly head. The population of Mudside numbered in the thousands, and he couldn’t even speak their language. Still, he didn’t have a lot of options. Beckett muttered to himself as he trudged down the snow hill into Mudside. When all this was over, he was going to Stitch and demanding more changes in the way the coroners was run. From now on, they were going to see every murder, every theft, every breaking and entering first, and no one else was going to touch anything until Beckett himself said that he was satisfied.

  Beckett found a trolljrman shoveling snow from in front of his shop at the lower end of Red Lanes. It would be a risk, bringing him into Mudside, but the coroner found himself hard put for choice.

  “You, trolljr,” Beckett called to him. “You speak sharpish?”

  The trolljrman flexed the feathered crest on his head straight up, and rumbled something incomprehensible in trolljr.

  Beckett showed his bronze shield to the trolljrman, and offered him ten crowns if he’d help the coroner in Mudside.

  The trolljrman cocked his head to the side, then rumbled, “Yes. Speaks sharpish.” He pronounced it “shaduhpish.” He set down his shovel and crunched through the snow towards Beckett. “Twenty crowns, and I will help.”

  Beckett agreed, and he and the trolljrman set off into Mudside. The sharpsie hovels, completely ignored by the Trowth Architecture War, were built in a style called “Arkwrights’ Mansion.” It was named for the Arkwrights’ Guild in Sar-Sarpek that, for reasons various and sundry, had found itself bankrupt and criminalized. The guildsmen had been forced to relocate to shanty-towns much like this one, and build their homes out of scraps and driftwood, and the occasional hollowed-out hull of a salvaged ship.

  The sharpsies in Mudside had likewise built their homes out of whatever they could find, in whatever place or order they could, completely unmindful of preserving streets or public squares. The neighborhood was a warren of blackened wood, where thin wisps of smoke rose from peat and dung fires, and unemployed, shiftless sharpsies sat curled up against the wooden walls of their homes. They sat with their knees pulled in, and their long faces resting against their chests, giving the impression that they were staring at their stomachs.

  Beckett realized his mistake almost immediately. Upon sight of the trolljrman, even the most apathetic sharpsie snapped its head up, eyes glittering warily, and then slunk off into the shadows. Beckett and his translator traveled well into the neighborhood, but with every step more sharpsies deserted the public places, and it became a ghost-town. More troublesome was a suspicion that snuck around in the back of Beckett’s mind: that the disappearing sharpsies weren’t running away, but were regrouping somewhere.

  After ten minutes in the eerily empty, snow-covered and filth-smelling Mudside, a brazen-looking sharpsie youth appeared and blocked Beckett’s path. He was not taller than the coroner, but was leanly muscular, and his great, sharp teeth arranged in a nasty-looking grin certainly suggested formidability.

  The sharpsie coughed and growled for a few moments, and the trolljrman translated. “He say we not belong. We should go.”

  Beckett shook his head. “No,” he told the sharpsie, “Not until I find out what I want.” He pulled out his gun and his shield, and showed them to the youth. “Listen to me…” The sharpsie coughed something again, but Beckett kept going. “Listen. I know that, three days ago, at least one of your people was hired to mutilate the bodies of three people in North Ferry.”

  The sharpsie growled and spat indignantly. The trolljrman spoke, “He say he don’t know about it.”

  “I don’t care,” Beckett said. “Someone knows. I am not interested in arresting a sharpsie. At all. I know that the man in North Ferry was not killed by sharpsies. Whoever did it was set up. Your people were set up. Do you know what that means?”

  The sharpsie eyed him, but said nothing.

  “The gendarmes, the pressmen are about to fall on you,” Beckett insisted, his voice low and steady, his manner serious. “They are going to tear you apart, because they think you murdered this man. I can stop them, but only if you help me find the truth.”

  The youthful sharpsie cocked its head to one side, in a gesture that Beckett couldn’t positively translate, but was nonetheless put in mind of a man, weighing his options and leery of deception. For a moment as the sharpsie did nothing, Beckett’s frustration nearly boiled over into frustration, and he came close to knocking those great sharp teeth out with the butt of his pistol.

  Abruptly, the sharpsie nodded.

  “Good. I need to find the sharpsie that was responsible, because I need to find the man that hired him. I need to know who hired him, and I need to be able to prove it, so that I can hang him. You understand?”

  The sharpsie grunted, and then said a few more words in its native language.

  “He wants to take us to his….” The trolljrman pause
d. “I do not know this word. It is ‘head man.’ It is like, a brood-father?”

  “Like a priest?”

  The trolljrman scoffed. “Sharpsies not have priests. They worship bones and sticks. He probably take you to his pet shark.”

  The sharpsie growled and coughed at the trolljrman, and the intent behind the sounds was unmistakable. The trolljrman thrummed something back in its own bone-rattling voice, and it flattened its crest against its head.

  “Enough!” Beckett shouted at them. “Or I will shoot the both of you. You,” he pointed at the sharpsie. “Take us to your headman. You,” he said to the trolljrman, “I paid you to translate, so cut the commentary.”

  The sharpsie spat a gob of yellow spit into the snow at the trolljrman’s feet, but then nodded curtly. It led Beckett and his translator deeper into Mudside.

  The headman’s home was, by far, the largest of the shoddy wooden dwellings in Mudside. It appeared to be the hulk of an old clipper-ship, turned upside down and half buried in mud. The inside was hollowed out to make one, large room, and the walls were covered in sheets of hammered copper; Beckett suspected that his was one of the few places to which sharpsies could retreat in order to shelter from psychestorms.

  There were a dozen sharpsies hunkered up in filthy blankets, barely illuminated by the reddish light of a great fire in the center that poured suffocating black wood smoke into the air. Beckett’s guide slipped into the flickering shadows and leaned close to one of the curled-up sharpsies.

  This one was old; yellow clumps of hair tufted at his elbows and chin, and his skin was a deep, leathery brown. He uncurled himself from his place by the copper-covered wall, and Beckett could see that his chest was wrapped with leather straps, from which hung fetishes of bones, feathers, teeth, claws, and bits of fur. The sharpsie shuffled towards the coroner, his normally-rapid gait slowed to a bare crawl by arthritic age.

  “My name is Elijah Beckett,” the coroner told the ancient sharpsie. “I work for the Emperor. I know that one of your people was hired to do something…something pretty terrible.” The sharpsies, Beckett knew, were not naturally predisposed to cruelty, despite what their vicious grins suggested, but desperation could drive anyone to great lengths. “I am not after you or any of yours. All I want is the man that hired him.”

  The old sharpsie’s black eyes were covered with a bluegray film; Beckett couldn’t tell if it was staring right at him, or completely blind. It stood stock still for several moments before gurgling something in sharpish.

  “He wants to know how he can trust you,” the trolljrman said.

  Beckett shrugged. “You can’t. But I’ll tell you this: the Committee for Public Safety is about to fall on Mudside like a hammer, all because of the murder in North Ferry. If I can find who set you up, there’s a chance we can stop it.”

  The old sharpsie was still and silent for a long time. So long that Beckett, fearing the old creature hadn’t heard him, drew breath to repeat himself. Even as he did, the sharpsie nodded, then coughed a loud chain of glottals to another of his nearby people. This one uncurled himself from its spot by the fire, and practically bounced on its springy legs to where Beckett stood. The old sharpsie and the new one spoke quietly in their choking, growling language for several minutes. Finally, the old headman turned to Beckett’s translator and spoke.

  The trolljrman interpreted. “He says, this one, they keep her nearby when they find out what happens. She tells, say she was on a work-crew in North Ferry, lengthening the archwindows on Sansome Street. She hears a man banging on a door, then finds door unlocked, goes inside. He comes out, come to her, offers her money to bite the bodies up.”

  “Does she know the man’s name?”

  The old sharpsie nodded. “She heard him call out when he banged on the door,” the trolljrman said. “They don’t know how to say it in Sharpish,” he added. “It sounds like Hoh-ooash Uhhaechngung.” The old sharpsie muttered something else. “He says . . . Sun-Man?” The trolljrman asked. “No. Light-Man.”

  “Lightman?” Beckett asked. “Is that his name? Light-man?” His last name. The man’s first name was something that the sharpsies could only pronounce Hoh-ooash. “Do you know anything else about him? What he looked like? Where he was from? What…”

  There was a sudden commotion outside. The sharpsies, even the ones that seemed asleep, immediately sprang to their feet in the dark room, eyes alert. Someone started banging on the door, and the wary sharpsies began growling.

  “Wait!” Beckett shouted at them. He held up his shield and gun. “Wait. Let me handle this. Okay? I’ll take care of it.”

  Beckett immediately threw open the copper-banded door, and was met by a small army of gendarmes with greenglass goggles and blue armbands. Surprised, both at the appearance of a human being and, no doubt, by Beckett’s fades-ravaged face, the men fell away from the door, leaving a relatively large semicircle into which Beckett stepped.

  “Sir,” one of the gendarmes grumbled. “You’d better get out of here. We’ve come to make arrests.”

  “You’re not arresting anyone.” Beckett brandished the bronze emblem of his rank. “I’m with the coroners. I am conducting an investigation here, pertinent to the safety of the Empire. You don’t get in until I’ve finished.”

  The gendarmes looked at each other. None of them seemed to have firearms, but there were plenty of cudgels, short swords, long knives, and bronze knuckle-dusters to make Beckett nervous. “Coroners. You Elijah Beckett?” One of them asked. “We’ve got standing orders to bring you in, too.” He tapped his cudgel on his thigh. “Regardless of condition.”

  “Haha.” Beckett offered by way of reply, grinning meanly. He drew his pistol and fired all six bullets into the man’s chest, a succession of gunfire that sounded almost like a single peal of thunder.

  The Feathersmith revolver that Beckett carried was huge, at least the length of his forearm, with a barrel as thick around as his thumb, and almost ten years out of date. The barrel wasn’t rifled, so the huge bullets that it fired would tumble end over end through the air, shattering bones and punching holes in men. It made a sound like a mortar when it fired. Beckett liked it because the amount of incidental trauma the bullets caused was enough to bring down a Reanimate, and because the gun was big and heavy enough that he could easily beat a man senseless with it.

  The suddenness of Beckett’s attack, which left the gendarme slumped bonelessly in the snow and bleeding from great rents in his chest, caught all of the gendarmes off-guard. They backed away, hesitant and uncertain.

  In the few moments that he had, Beckett slowly opened the revolver and dumped out the shells. His mind knew that it wouldn’t be long before the men realized his weakness and would simply rush him, but he was counting on their fear and confusion to give him enough time to reload. He forced himself to remain calm, slowly taking each bullet out, carefully pressing it into its chamber. His numb fingers were a liability; if he dropped a bullet, or showed even a moment’s hesitation, he’d be dead. So he took his time, and loaded the gun carefully. His nerves thrummed against the clamp he kept them under. They wanted to make him sick. They wanted to make his hands shake with fear and excitement. He didn’t let them.

  One of the men decided that he’d had enough. He rushed Beckett, who managed to close the revolver at the last possible second, allowing him to club the man across the face. The massive weight of the Feathersmith knocked the gendarme senseless, and Beckett had his gun up and aimed at the remaining men.

  The implication was clear: the gendarmes could rush him, but whoever went first would die. Ultimately, because the gendarmerie represented the dregs of Trowth’s citizenry, those too weak or too cruel or too petty to be taken by the pressgangs, Beckett was surrounded by cowards.

  Almost immediately, the men in the back of the group slunk off into the Mudside labyrinth, already looking for easier prey. The rest fled after one vicious, “Fuck off.”

  Beckett turned back into the sharpsie home. H
e could hear, in the distance, more men shouting, sharpsies screaming, and the sound of gunfire. “You need…” he said, but couldn’t think of anything. What were they supposed to do? If Mudside was crawling with armed gendarmes, if the Committee for Public Safety had sent a substantial force in to the sharpsie neighborhood, what could they do? They had nowhere to run to, no armaments to defend themselves with.

  The trolljrman brushed past Beckett. “Leaving,” he said, on his way out. “Will come for my money.”

  The old sharpsie grunted something to the coroner, then began gesturing to a spot on the floor, which was made of wood. He pulled up something that looked like a trapdoor, and Beckett looked down to see a wooden set of stairs leading off into the dark. The old sharpsie was grinning, because that’s all that sharpsies ever did, but it seemed that the old man was pleased to see Beckett’s surprise.

  Of course, Mudside was built on mud. Old buildings sank slowly into it, new buildings were built on top. It would take regular work to maintain the old buildings, replacing rotting wood, building supports and struts. But it could be done; the sharpsies could have built themselves an entire network of tunnels beneath Mudside. Just like the Arcadium, Beckett thought, wryly.

  The sharpsies had begun dropping through the hole in the floor. The old man waited until the last of his people had dropped in, then cocked his head quizzically. Beckett considered the dank, dark, claustrophobic wooden tunnels of Mudside, piled over with tons of mud and ramshackle wooden homes.