by Claire North
That night, I broke into the truth station. I was not a very effective burglar, but had at least taken time to learn the patterns and habits of my enemies, when they rose and when they slept. With my shoes tied together around my neck, I slithered in socks across the warm wooden floors, tasting the last traces of a late supper on the air, heard the snoring of the keepers upstairs, the slow, gentle muttering of the woman chained in her chair as she dreamt the dreams of the city sleeping. In a study where my picture hung in full glory on the wall with a command to apprehend and sedate, I rummaged through files and folders by the half-light of a hurricane lamp. A man slept in the same room as the woman. The man was deaf, infection having taken all sound from him when he was twelve. He did not mind that the woman screamed out the truth of his heart for all the world to hear; he did not know what she said, and so slumbered on his cot in peaceful quiet. I crept softly by, shutter down on the lamp, moving by moonlight through the high latticed windows. Patigul dreamt in her own tongue, but as I drew near, her eyes opened and she stared right at me, and her voice began to rise, babbling out the truth of who I was, of what I intended, of my murderous heart.
I would like to say that there was some acknowledgement of what I did, when I put the needle into the scarred crook of her arm. I would like to say that she said thank you, or yes, or no, or showed any sign of human response to her murder. She did not. She burbled the truth of all things at me in a language I did not speak until the drugs began to take her, loud enough that I thought the house would wake. It did not. The shadow of a young man darted in and out of her like a wild, starting thing, faster and faster as the poison took. A few hours behind me, Langa came, and through his knowing I looked into her eyes and saw only myself reflected back in them, and was glad that even that truth was growing faint.
She was already dying by the time I reached the door, the first muscle contraction seizing her against her bonds. She was dead by the time I climbed out of the window into the street below, startling a pair of stray cats that hissed and snarled and skittered away.
In all, I murdered five people chained to the stations of the Nineteen.
Rather, Albert murdered them first. I killed them, he killed them, I killed them, he… You see, the truth is never so simple; all these things are true all at once. He cut out who they were, turned them into automata, gibbering shadows pinned to the floor. He sliced out their souls and left just enough behind that they could live in perpetual, blathering torment, the shadow breaking across their lips without end. As a scientist, I suppose I could admire what he did. His mastery of the butcher’s art was supreme. I have no qualms about what I did. I travelled the world, put an end to Albert’s cruelty, and my nearest and dearest companion for all that time was Langa.
I still looked for Margot, of course. I scoured the news for any sign of her. For the longest time, I found nothing. I knew in my heart that she was alive, that she and Coman had escaped from New York; I had seen as much in the truth of Albert’s heart. But what more did that mean? The People’s Society was dead, gunned down as surely as the men who marched on the Winter Palace in 1905, as surely as the ever-growing list of kings and prime ministers dead by their own people’s hands – Carlos I of Portugal, Ito Hirobumi, George I of Greece, Mahmud Sevket Pasha. It may have been the killing of Franz Ferdinand that tipped us into this bloody war, but it has been coming such a long time, such a long, bloody road.
I couldn’t find her. By 1909 I was almost coming to terms with this, telling myself, as the widows did, that to love someone was the greatest cruelty a truth-speaker could commit.
Yet even though she was gone, there were different stories beginning to filter into the press, which set my nerves on edge. In America, a great cotton man who had for forty years simply ignored the abolition of slavery, beaten and chained the black men and women on his land, kept their children as chattels, and not a word murmured against it. He died without a sigh, and then his wife, and then his youngest son, and then his daughter, all without cause, all within a few days of each other. Only one child was left alive, and that child insane.
In Russia, a duke, his wife, their two children, dropping like flies; the sole survivor a girl of seven who blabbered and blathered words that the alienists dubbed the sign of a disturbed mind. That duke, they said, loved to visit the prisons where the women who had marched for bread were waiting for their Siberian exile, and pick the prettiest of the lot, and when he had his way, he would send them to the taiga with a flower in their hair and no boots on their feet, as befitted revolutionaries.
It was familiar, a pattern that I felt I knew and could name. But I was a coward, and full of fire, so I ignored it, and kept about my murderous course.
Chapter 65
I killed my last victim in 1909, in Hong Kong. An infant boy was emperor of China, the Guangxu emperor rumoured poisoned by his own adopted mother. The winds were blowing from Beijing towards the sea, and had blown this truth-speaker straight into the hands of the British. The truth-speaker’s shadow was his mother, murdered in a fit of fury. She had spoken the truth at the Daoist temples, stabbing herself with needles and sitting on thrones of spikes so that the demons might possess her; sometimes shrieking lies to make a bit of money, sometimes speaking truth when the shadow came. Her son had been far less savvy in his practices.
Hong Kong had been beset with plagues in the past, from which the British had created the illusory need for the city to be fragmented into racial quarters. On their high hills, the Europeans escaped the worst of the disease and crime that riddled the lower slopes of the island, while from the mainland trickled an ever-growing number of migrants fleeing the inevitable, imminent collapse of a dynasty of nearly three hundred years’ imperial rule.
The truth station was guarded round the clock, pictures of my face nailed up behind every door. I would not get inside. Instead, I dumped the body of a young man stolen from the morgue by the foot of the Nineteen’s house, to be discovered in horror at dawn. When that merely provoked outrage and suspicion, I added a strategically spilt pool of pig’s blood the following day, turning the gutters crimson, as well as a whispered note to a journalist of the seedier sort that the authorities were covering up a recent surge in cases of bubonic plague. The neighbours did the rest, reporting that they had seen inauspicious signs, heard strange noises and terrible screams from the truth station. I was prepared to tell people that I too had witnessed men, weeping and broken, being led from the premises, but thankfully more than enough locals were ready to resent the stamp of authority and suspect great evil that I didn’t need to get involved.
A small crowd gathered on a Tuesday, demanding to be let in and see the house. By the Wednesday, an armed guard of British soldiers in white pith helmets were guarding the door, uneasy against the mob that only grew in the face of this provocation. By the Thursday, one British soldier, with the coloniser’s usual fear of overdue retribution, pulled his pistol and fired into the crowd, wounding a girl, who would never walk again. He was beaten to death when the mob broke in. What they found inside confirmed their greatest fears – torture, experimentation, barbarism – and they carried aloft the still-blathering body of the man with a hollow in his skull, paraded him through the streets as a sign of British perfidy, until they were faced with a line of troopers, rifles raised. A stand-off ensued, broken only when a few people began to realise that some of the truth the shattered man was howling struck a little too close to the realities of their hearts. He was lowered to the ground. The crowd began to shuffle a little away from him; then, at a command from the British captain to fix bayonets, as one they turned and ran, scattering like earth from a meteor strike, leaving the truth-speaker babbling on the street as the soldiers charged.
I was prepared to step in and slip him enough curare to kill a tiger, but a British soldier saved me the trouble. Finally given the command to charge, he let go of all his terror of the roaring crowd by launching himself like a rocket down the street, shooting at anything t
hat moved, whimpered or sneezed, and stabbed my man in the chest as he passed without even noticing what he did. So died the last living of Albert’s experiments, proclaiming as the life went from him that his murderer knew not what he did, lost in a cloud of blood and fear.
There things might have ended. There it might all have come to rest, except that there was one face in the crowd of spinning, terrified people that showed no fear, and that watched not the murder of the man in the street, but me.
Langa was four days away, walking patiently across the sea, so it took me a while to recognise the truth in his heart. When I finally met my follower’s eye, it was on the Peak Tram. He stood out as one of the few white men queuing for third class – reserved for “others and animals” – rather than the first- or second-class seats for British civil servants, soldiers and residents of Victoria Peak. He was taller than almost everyone around him, though hunched in a beige cape buttoned tight across his goose throat. He wore a wide, low hat and short trousers that stopped just below his knees and one inch above his high white socks. He had button shoes and carried a parasol with a bamboo handle, and his hair was white-blond, his beard growing tatty at the edges where it bumped his collarbone, and he was Josef Ritte, thousands of miles from home, looking for me.
As the tram cracked and clattered up the hill, my immediate tug of terror evolved to curiosity. The Austrian watched me from above the head of a Chinese woman sent shopping by her British masters, the weight of goods under her arms and balanced on her back nearly twice as wide and twice as broad as she was. At the front of the tram were two seats reserved for the governor and now surrounded by men with fob watches and striped trousers; ladies dressed in white and taffeta, as far from the blood of the streets below as angels from hell. Beneath us, the city folded in steaming green, wild animals scattering and scrambling into the undergrowth as we ascended towards the white manors, cooler breezes and colonial estates of Victoria Peak. A kite circled overhead on a high, hot thermal, while below, a thousand tiny boats bumped and pressed against the fat sides of the iron ships and grumbling clippers come fresh to port. Ritte watched me, and when I got out in a flood of human heat and moisture to the chittering summit of the hill, he followed.
He followed as I walked, heading not further up, but a little down again, finding the winding paths that had until very recently been the only means of access for the wealthy to this temperate paradise. The sedan chairs no longer beat a path up this route, but still came the delivery men, with grand pianos, wicker chairs, boxes of eggs, barrels of beer and news of the finer things of life.
Beneath the rustling, whispering leaves of the acacia tree I paused to check the time, and Ritte approached, leaning against the trunk beside me as if he were catching his breath. For a while we stood there, he looking up towards the peak of the mountain, and I down to the waters below, as I listened to the truth of his heart.
Then he said, “I was waiting.”
“Are you armed?” I asked.
“No,” he replied, and it was the truth.
“Why were you waiting?”
“I was told the British had a truth-speaker here. My source said the truth-speakers have been dying, but there was still one left in Hong Kong. I was sent to kidnap him, so we might study what your professor does to their minds, perhaps replicate it. Then I saw you. So I waited.”
“For what?”
“For whatever you were going to do next.”
“Why?”
He gave a little shrug. “A living truth-speaker is more interesting than a talking corpse.”
I bit my lip, tasted blood. “I am armed,” I growled. “I carry poison and a pistol. Why would I not use them on you?”
He sighed, disappointed; annoyed, even. “Because you haven’t. Your shadow is near, I think. You see that I mean you no harm.”
“I see that now. I can’t help but remember when that was not the case. I remember… most particularly.”
“Dr Abbey,” he tutted, “do you think I would wait all this time in this hellish, stinking place, surrounded by your British and their ways, without good reason? You will hear me out, I think. You are curious enough for that.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No, I don’t. I lack your… unique qualification. I have often regretted that. But we are still talking, and the last truth-speaker is dead, so I don’t see why we can’t celebrate with a nice cup of tea.”
“I’m going to walk away now. I hope you understand that this is for your safety.”
I turned to go, shaking with fury and dread, acid in my throat. He shrugged again, infuriating, and let me walk a few paces before landing his final blow. “I know where your woman is. Halloran. Or rather… I know where she has been. Would you like to know too?”
If Ritte had a shadow, perhaps he would have laughed, because of course, in a single moment, in a few short words, he had me.
Chapter 66
We dined in a hotel overlooking the sea. The menu was roast pork, apple sauce, potatoes and cabbage. The walls were hung with images of family life in Surrey; the newspapers, a few weeks out of date, were the London Times and Gazette.
Ritte drank white wine. I drank nothing, the shuddering of anger and fear now mixed with unstoppable interest, creating such a cocktail of sentiment that I barely knew where one feeling ended and another began.
He said, “There is a pepper grown in these parts, I cannot remember its name; the taste is quite extraordinary, and they say it is an aphrodisiac to boot…”
“Langa is four days away,” I snapped. “Say your piece and be done with it.”
A sigh, a rolling-back in his chair. He smoked thin cigarettes scammed from American sailors, and coughed thick brown phlegm, and hated this city, and hated what his life had come to, and showed not a jot of malice as he spoke.
“I have done,” he mused, “certain despicable things.”
Silence a while. I caught my fingers drumming on the table, clenched them into fists.
“After you and I last met, I was dishonourably discharged. My methods had always been considered controversial. Maybe heretical. People won’t invoke religion until it is useful to them, and it was useful then to have something to get rid of me.”
“I really don’t care.”
A tut, a puffing of cheeks; it is exasperating for him to have to deal with one as irrational as I. “My conversations with you during your brief sojourn at the estate put me in jeopardy. Certainly I had proved the efficacy of a truth-speaker as a valuable tool – but what had the British spy plucked from my soul in the process? Well, everything. I marvel at my recklessness now, but then, when you are a man alone with secrets, there is something invigorating about having the truth of your heart laid out before you. It is an icy bath for one’s self-esteem, an excellent rebuke to ego. It was also, of course, a terrible, vain, self-important error.
“Since being expelled from my position, my life has been remarkably boring. I hunt, acted for a while as magistrate, resolving endless petty squabbles. I took up painting, but found it excessively dull. Finally my vanity was quenched, by monotony and small-minded boredom. Have you ever tried whittling your own spoons? Dear God, how I prayed for a war or rebellion to keep me occupied.”
“I could shoot you; that would be diverting.”
Another tut, another huff of exasperated breath. “The Halloran woman: yes, I am coming to her. Intelligence reached my masters that your Nineteen had started building little prisons in some of their key cities. Safe places into which people were brought full of secrets, and from which a few hours later they departed, their deepest truth suddenly known. At first we assumed this was something to do with you, but no! The Nineteen may keep their secrets close, but the People’s Society, as it was rounded up and burnt to the ground, were persuadable, by one means or another. And what stories they told – of this woman, Halloran, and her secret British lover, of shadows and betrayals and a gunfight in New York! My my, I thought, when my masters came
to me with all of this – my my, but William Abbey has been busy. Of course, I was still the expert in such matters. It is embarrassing for my superiors to admit this fact, but in certain areas I am… invaluable.”
Few words pleased him so much; few things satisfied him as much as rolling this sound round his lips.
“They put me back on an embarrassingly small salary, sent me into the world. Find out what is happening here; learn about the British truth stations. No sooner did I start investigating these little dens of truth and blood than you started destroying them. How many have you killed? Five? Six? You and your masters really do disagree on certain points, do you not?”
“Margot,” I snapped. “Tell me about Margot.”
He leant back in his chair, licked his lips, enjoying the after-taste of sauce, the feel of a wine glass rolling in his hands. “Are you familiar with Margrave Otto von Durlach?”
“No.”
“Your state is the better for it. He is – or rather was – a vile, pompous little man, but wise in investments. He foresaw before many of his type that the middling sort of classes were potentially growing more profitable than families of breeding, so quietly invested in tin, steel and chemicals. He made a great deal of money, and when his workers died in the mines or suffocated in the chemical laboratories, corpses already mummified by the acids in the air, he said it was just business, and what was one to expect?
