Mr. Stitch

by Chris Braak

  Beckett scratched at the itch by his eye, and leaned back in his chair. His forearm throbbed a little from where he’d injected himself, but mostly the veneine left him feeling detached, floating. His left eye, despite its blindness, detected no small number of thin, writhing black shapes that wriggled across the walls of his office, but Beckett did not find himself concerned. Nor did he find himself concerned by the damp stains on his walls, or the shallow puddle of water by his feet. The warmth and peace of the veneine high would last only a little longer, and the old coroner was determined to enjoy it wall it lasted.

  Soon enough, the cold and anxiety began to creep back in. Distant aches in his knees and back began to sharpen, the numbness in his face and fingers demanded more of his attention. The water dried up, though the wriggling black eels remained, making it difficult to concentrate on his papers. The Committee on Moral Responsibility had forced him to fire Karine, his indige secretary. The new man they’d found-a timid, shell-shocked young man who’d worked primarily with the quartermasters during the war-was purely incapable of distinguishing useful information from dross, so Beckett found himself obliged to wade through the mess himself.

  The papers seemed unlikely to yield up their secrets any time soon. In the last few months, the sheer amount of information to come across Beckett’s desk had increased exponentially. Heretical science was spreading through the city like a disease, cropping up left and right, everywhere from dingy public houses in the Arcadium to the fancy homes of New Bank. There was no clear point of origin, no source, no connection between any of the heretics. It was all just a tangled, unnavigable mess of half-formed leads, each one turning a half a dozen corners before it dead-ended in a corpse somewhere.

  This had been the story of Beckett’s life for years. Find evidence of a heresy, find the heretic, kill them. As often as not, their own foolishness did the job for him. But it never stopped. No matter how many lunatic scientists Beckett ended, there was always one more. And now, now every time he put a stop to an ectoplasmatist or a necrologist somewhere, a half a dozen more seemed to spring up in the wake. Forty years of work in the coroners, and every day the problem just got worse, and worse, and worse.

  A hysterical frustration rattled around in Beckett’s mind, as he rubbed his hands over his face. The veneine, he was sure, was shaking him loose. It was harder and harder for him to maintain that cold detachment, that sense of duty that let him just tackle one job at a time, and not think about the rest, not think about the implications, not think about the never-ending chain of more death and more misery that waited for him every day, and would wait every day until he finally gave up. He slapped at a report at random and picked it up.

  Brass bones? Everything was making less sense to him, lately, and Beckett started to worry that it was the disease, eating away at his mind. Would this have made sense a year ago? Someone had found a chunk of brass in the shape of a shoulder-blade in a pile of offal in Red Lanes. The gendarmes, pleased to finally have a lap into which they could dump all of their weird crap, had gleefully passed it on to Beckett. Who…why would you even do that? He looked back at some of the other reports, accompanied by kirliotypes of men who’d starved themselves to death by vomiting ectoplasm, or whose hearts had given out trying to support extra limbs. Dead-ends, all of them. Well, he thought. I’d better check.

  The officer from the Committee on Moral Responsibility was, as usual, taking tea in the sitting room. One of the privileges of being cousins to the Emperor-even eighth-cousins like the Gorgon-Ennering-Crabtrees-was the possibility of getting a job in which your primary responsibility was taking tea in places. He wore a dark blue suit, with bulls embroidered in a delicate green around his sleeves. Edmund? Edelred? Ed-something, Beckett thought. Whatever.

  “Going out, Mr. Beckett?”

  Beckett turned his gruesome, death’s head stare on the man, but said nothing.

  “Ah. Hm. Inspector Beckett.”

  The coroner said nothing still, and began the laborious process of shrugging into his winter coat. It was heavy, and his sore joints had begun to impede his mobility. Should have shot up before I left, he thought to himself. Too late, now. He had no desire to let Ed-whatever Gorgon-Ennering-Crabtree see him use the needles.

  “Where are you going, Inspector?” The political officer asked again. He had a little notebook with him, presumably to help him keep track of Beckett’s moral failings. When the coroner failed to respond yet again, the officer raised his voice. “Mr…Inspector Beckett, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep me apprised of your activities.” Beckett wrapped his red scarf around his face; it hid his mangled-looking nose, at least, even if it left his empty eye socket staring at hapless passers-by. “Mr. Beckett. Excuse me. Excuse me!”

  As he turned to leave, Beckett found the hallway obstructed by the huge, misshapen form of Mr. Stitch. The reanimate, built over a century ago from spare, dead parts, watched impassively from the brass lenses in its eye sockets. It still wore its huge, heavy coat, but had removed the three-cornered hat that it usually wore.

  “Beckett.” Stitch said, with its terrible, sepulchral voice. It took a deep breath from the billows that had replaced his lungs. “Where?” Stitch had been about its enigmatic business. Beckett thought it had been consulting with the Emperor’s doctors.

  “A lead,” he said. “One of the Red Lanes cases.” He grimaced as he heard the political officer scratching something in his notebook.

  “Valentine?”

  “He’s…working on something else for me.” More scratching from Gorgon-Ennering-Vie and his notebook. Beckett gritted his teeth, resentful of having to have to explain himself, resentful of the political officer and his incessant inquiries, resentful of the whole situation.

  “Take. Gorud.” Stitch rasped, then shambled off towards its office, the metal braces on its legs clanking. Mr. Stitch had a difference engine for a brain-an engine of miraculous complexity. It was capable of perfect memory, of limitless calculations, of astonishing insight. Mr. Stitch was almost never wrong, and its advice invariably turned out to be not just useful, but the best possible advice that anyone under a particular set of circumstances could give. Beckett hated it.

  He hated this particular advice as well. Gorud was a therian, a kind of ape-man native to Corsay. Small numbers had been brought to Trowth; because of their linguistic dexterity, they were used often as translators or interpreters. Since the end of the war, the numbers of therians in the city had increased. They were generally a pleasant, good-natured people, though unused to the frigid temperatures of the imperial capital. Gorud wore a bulky coat that fitted him poorly, despite the fact that it had a hole cut out for his tail.

  If Beckett didn’t like Gorud, it was certainly nothing personal, as the therian was as good-natured an example of a member of his species had could be desired. It was not even a particular specism on Beckett’s part, though he did tend to lean towards the human-centric. In fact, Beckett just didn’t like it when things changed. He spent all his time trying to get on top of things, trying to manhandle the elements of life and work in to place, to make everything just so-and then, invariably, he was saddled with something new. Just when he’d gotten everything figured out, gotten everything sorted, the therians came along, or the sharpsies went mad, or something equally frustrating and inconvenient happened.

  “You,” Beckett told the therian, who sat on his heels on the couch. “Come with me.”

  Gorud, sensitive to Beckett’s disdain, said nothing, and padded after the old coroner on four legs. They found the Coroners’ regular coachman, Harry, in the guardhouse outside, and set off for Red Lanes.

  Beckett and the therian rode in relative silence, as the coach creaked and clattered along. Outside, Harry had been outfitted with his best winter gear, and a variety of small heating elements-small bands he could wrap around his hands, an emitter that sat next to him. It was a waste of energy that would have been unthinkable a year ago, but since the end of the war, fuel wa
s cheap and plentiful.

  Inside, Beckett watched the therian. Gorud had a strangely long, leathery face, that seemed largely impassive, except for a pair of quick, roving eyes. He sat on his heels, his arms wrapped around his knees, as usual. “Do you know Red Lanes?” Beckett asked him.

  Gorud twitched and puffed out his cheeks. “Live there,” he said. “With some cousins.” Gorud had a warm tenor of a voice which always surprised Beckett with its clarity and timbre.

  “Know any of the gendarmes?”

  The therian looked up at him with an unreadable expression, and shifted in his seat. “One,” he said, finally. “Nasty thing, with a mark on his face, like this.” He drew a number five in the air with one long, agile finger. Therians were predisposed to illiteracy, Beckett knew, but at least they could recognize symbols. “He kept trying to move us from the eyrie, but we didn’t like it.”

  “And?”

  The therian yawned, abruptly, displaying a huge mouth and four canine teeth each as long as Beckett’s thumb. “Haven’t seen him in a while,” Gorud said, and made a popping sound with his lips.

  “Hnf.” Beckett replied, and silence predominated for a while. As they clattered down the hill, Gorud abruptly perked up. “What?” Beckett asked him. “What-” A faint rumbling reached his ears growing in intensity, the sound of a massive wave rolling towards them. “What is that? Do you hear…?”

  The rumbling turned into a ringing sound in his ears, and suddenly black water crashed through the windows of the coach, washing over him, tearing him from his seat and out, out into the dark riptide of salty ocean that choked him, strangled him, struggled down this throat and threw him hard against smooth rocks. Beckett’s head banged against metal; he felt a rib give way.

  The water retreated then, leaving Beckett on a smooth brass beach that sloped steeply downward, and he fell, sliding along its length, still coughing up seawater; he saw the moon beneath him, green and leprous, luminous with its own baleful light, black cities crawling across its surface, as hands reached out from the hot, red-gold brass and clutched at him, hands that were made of tangles of fat, black, boneless leeches, that sought out bare skin with their tiny, puckered mouths. The hands gripped him, and something like a mouth appeared, a nest of teeth with no lips or throat, just independently shuddering dentition that stretched and jittered and longed to puncture…

  And then it was gone. All gone, the vision disappearing with the same sudden completeness as ectoplasm gone up in flame. The hands on his arms were Harry’s hands-ordinary, rough coachman’s hands. The face made of curved teeth was only Harry’s face, his ordinary, ugly old face.

  The ringing began to fade from Beckett’s ears. “-eckett!” Harry was shouting. “Mr. Beckett! Are you all right?” Gorud had retreated to a corner of the coach, watching, his eyes wide.

  Two dark green shoots sprung from Harry’s nostrils, tendrils with sharp thorns, springing from the soft places of his body, curling back to scratch at his own eyes.

  “What…” Beckett asked, his voice hardly above a whisper. “Garrett? Garrett, your dead,” the old man declared, as the twin green vines blossomed into blood-red flowers.

  “It’s me, sir,” Sergeant Garret said, more thorny vines pouring from his mouth, “it’s me, it’s Harry, sir. Can you hear me? Are you all right? Do you know me sir?”

  No, Beckett told himself. It’s Harry, it’s just Harry. Garret died. They were still inside the coach. Beckett was wedged against the seat; his ribs were still sore. “What happened? What was that?”

  “There’s something up ahead of us, some kind of explosion,” Harry told him, the vines gone, his face his own again. “Shook the whole place up. I came to see if you was all right, and then…”

  “You fell,” Gorud picked up. “When the shock came. Your eye did this,” he rolled his eyes up in his head, so that only the whites were visible. “And then you coughed and choked, and then Mr. Harry came in to help.”

  Beckett coughed wetly, wiped his mouth, and pulled himself upright. “Explosion?”

  “Something up ahead, sir.”

  Beckett scrambled from the coach, a sinking feeling in his stomach. He barely noticed the bitter cold outside, as it struck out at his already-senseless extremities. His good eye raced over the narrow, high-peaked and gabled Ennering-Crabtree buildings; houses, offices and shops that had been converted from old abattoirs. People were timidly peeking out from their doors and windows, a few braver souls actually taking to the streets, consternation on their tongues.

  At the end of Augre Street was the smoking husk of a building, a great slaughterhouse that had been repurposed, as the city expanded, into some other professional edifice. Its pointed roofs, now crooked and tumbled, would have looked out of place even if they’d remained intact. Smoke poured from its windows, and a hysterical gibbering rose from the inside.

  Beckett limped down the hill, Harry and Gorud at his heels. He drew his revolver, swiveling his head from side-to-side, struggling to reconstruct what had happened. A man in a blue coat stumbled from the building; he was covered in soot, and his eyes were wild and white-rimmed.

  “…the overwhelming way of winter’s seven towers,” the man was screaming. A dark, thick fluid dribbled from his mouth and nose. “I saw the red gold walls and the ivory-towered teeth.” He charged at Beckett, grabbed his wrists, tried to bear him to the ground. “There are men in the dark,” he said, weeping that same black fluid from his eyes. “There are stone sounds..”

  “Get off!” Beckett shouted, twisted his body, trying to let the man’s momentum throw him away. Harry managed to get hold of him and pull him off the coroner, but the strange man continued to lash and struggle and wail, blubbering nonsense as the foul ooze began to poor from his eyes and mouth and nose.

  Beckett struck the man across the face with the butt of his revolver, and the stranger went limp. It seemed merciful; the twisted rictus on the man’s face relaxed away.

  “Tommy,” said a soft voice nearby. Beckett turned to see a young man, very pale, staring at the smoking building with a strange absorption. His left sleeve was empty, and pinned up to the shoulder.

  “Tommy?” Beckett asked him. “Is that his name? What happened here?”

  “It’s Tommy, innit?” The young pale man said. “They dropped them bombs on us.”

  Beckett clutched at his revolver, ready to knock this man senseless as well. “Tommy who?”

  “Vinegar Tom,” the man said, still not looking at the coroner. “The Ettercap.”

  The Ettercap. The Ettercap used oneiric munitions-bombs that had a psychic component as well as an explosive. The damage caused by concussion and shrapnel was trivial compared to the disorder, chaos, and damage that could be caused by turning the survivors of an attack into raving madmen. The air around the bombed-out former slaughterhouse was growing thick and syrupy. Weird colors and puissance began to flicker in the smoky windows. Beckett could smell saltwater. Dream poison, he thought. More mad gibbering rattled around inside the building.

  “Look,” he said to the young man. “Hey, boy, listen.” He seized the man’s arm and forcibly turned him. “Look at me. I need you to go and get the local gendarmes, all right? Go to the gendarmerie, bring me back some men…”

  “The gendarmerie?” The young man said, his eyes dreamy, unfocused. “That is the gendarmerie.”

  Four

  Skinner heard the explosion fifteen seconds before it happened. The sound began as a peculiar ringing over her guitar strings, an echo overlaid across the tune she’d been playing. Her hands paused at once, and the ringing remained, a high-pitched whine, followed by a strange, reverse echo-a rumbling that grew exponentially louder as it led up to the event itself, and then stopped.

  Light from the munition reverberated off of the obscured architecture of the city and filtered past her silver eye-plate to tease her peculiar senses. It was pale white, with a faint rainbow hue at its edges; all of this was clearly visible in her mind’s eye, though
no product of her own imagination. She could tell its distance, its location-just inside Red Lanes, she knew-and she recognized it as an oneiric weapon immediately. The dream-precipitates used in such charges were largely inconsiderate of local laws regarding space and time, and their effects could be felt by sensitives in a way out of joint with ordinary reckoning.

  When Skinner had joined the Coroners, her first assignment had been outside the city-to a town near the seaside called Seagirt. It had been a small place, a population less than a thousand. A man, a former scientist at the Royal Academy of Science and a near-cousin of the Rowan-Czarneckis, had retired to Seagirt after certain improprieties in his research had come to light. His connections and the Estimation of the Crown had kept him from further investigation, and probably execution, but, perhaps not surprisingly, the threat of the Coroners had not been enough to keep him from more experiments. It hardly ever was.

  The man had attempted to build an oneiric reactor, a machine that could seize on the repressed psychosexual energy of sidereal consciousness and turn it directly into power. He had failed to take any reasonable precautions, and in a real way, this had not been his fault: because oneiristry was a Forbidden Science, there was little information as to exactly what reasonable precautions would be. The results of Eiger Feathersmith’s experiments on oneiristry, a hundred years prior, had been suppressed by the Church Royal, so this Rowan-Czarnecki scientist could not have known what would happen when his reactor went critical.

  In instances of catastrophic oneiric events, the Coroners’ mission is simple. Locate damaged minds, and kill them. A man exposed to an excess of oneiric radiation would suffer dream poisoning; he would no longer be lucid, his mind would be unrecoverable, and his condition could become contagious. By the time the coroners had reached Seagirt, the entire population was infected-a whole city of raving madmen, the conscious-subconscious membrane dissolved by corrosive dream radiation-they tore at their flesh, struck out at each other, murdered, raped, burned, engaged in every foul and heinous desire that they had secretly feared to indulge.