Mr. Stitch

by Chris Braak

  Emilia Gorgon-Vie arrived sharp at two, while Skinner had spent the intervening time somewhat guiltily enjoying the pleasures of her house. She was sitting in the bedroom, experimenting with a new musical scale that she’d heard at a djang house, recently, when Emilia’s man came knocking.

  Skinner did her best to explain the situation as plainly as she could: that writing a play was not like building a chair, or tallying a ledger. The work was not there, waiting to be done, but it could only be done when the author was of the correct mind to do it. And this was a fickle, slippery condition, not subject to deadlines or motivation, but only through inspiration. Art cannot simply be commanded, or produced to order, it comes only in its own time.

  She managed to deliver the entire explanation with a single, convoluted sentence, avoiding giving Emilia the opportunity to interject a question or a comment. But she was destined to have to stop talking eventually, and when she did, she’d have to suffer the Vie-Gorgon heiress’s response.

  That response, as Skinner had expected, was silence. Emilia Vie-Gorgon’s peculiar absolute, untouchable silence that, if it persisted for too long, was liable to make a blind person believe that the young heiress had actually left the room. They’d nearly passed this threshold, Skinner holding her breath ever so slightly, Emilia dead silent, when the woman finally spoke.

  “Very well, Miss Skinner. If you’d care to come with me?”

  “Ah. Yes? Where?”

  “To my coach, Miss Skinner.” Her voice was icily controlled, perfectly modulated, utterly inexpressive. It was an emotional feat that Skinner felt was quite unprecedented. “I’ve something I think you might be interested in.”

  As ominous as this sounded-and Skinner could not deny that the whole thing sounded very ominous-she could think of no practical reason to refuse. It was not as though she was doing anything else, at the moment. She put on her coat, and joined Miss Vie-Gorgon in the young woman’s coach, where they sat in quiet for several moments.

  “Do you know,” said Emilia at once, giving Skinner a mild start, “Much about my family, and the Emperor’s?”

  The Vie-Gorgons and the Gorgon-Vies-of course Skinner knew of them, and knew as much about them as was published in the broadsheets, or taught in history class. “They…you have been feuding for six centuries. About the legitimacy of Owen Gorgon.” Owen Gorgon was a hero in Trowth. He appeared at the end of the Interregnum, and claimed to be the last descendent of Gorgon himself. He’d married Elthea Vie-whose family could reliably trace their ancestry back to the first cousin of Agon Diethes-to cement himself in the Empire, and had crowned himself ruler.

  The Gorgon-Vies asserted that Owen Gorgon was in a line of legitimate offspring from Gorgon, and so the Gorgon name ought to come first. The Vie-Gorgons insisted that, since there was an interruption in the line of legitimate Gorgon heirs, Owen must be an illegitimate child, and therefore the Vie name should come first. The family had split, with cousins all taking one side or another, and thus was born the defining relationship of the Empire.

  “The feud began,” Emilia said, “over the legitimacy of Owen Gorgon and his name. But while we fought, we were obliged to take positions against each other on principle. If the Gorgon-Vies advocated for a stronger monarchy, the Vie-Gorgons lent their support to a stronger parliament. If the Vie-Gorgons favored an isolationist policy regarding our neighbors, the Gorgon-Vies immediately proposed an aggressive one. If we favored slim towers with narrow windows, they started building square buildings with wide ones.”

  “That all seems,” Skinner said, after a moment, “fairly stupid.”

  Deathly silence. Skinner discovered it was becoming a little easier not to find her heart in her throat when that happened, now that she was more used to it. “Yes,” said Emilia. “It is, generally. Except that the Gorgon-Vies, and this particular Gorgon-Vie, are wrong. I don’t mean that they’re wrong to fight with us, or to disagree with us. And I am not asserting the principle of my family, which is that whatever the Gorgon-Vies do, it must be wrong-though you would be forgiven for thinking that. What I mean is, they are actually wrong. The Emperor has made nothing but poor choices since his coronation.

  “Do you know why he waged the war against the ettercap? Not because they were a threat to us, but because the Gorgon-Vies desired absolute control over the importation of phlogiston, rather than the shared control that had been forced on us. This is implicit in everything the Gorgon-Vies do: they believe in autocracy. That who holds the single most powerful element is the person who controls the most power. The Empire runs on phlogiston; who controls the phlogiston, controls the empire.”

  “That seems a reasonable assumption,” Skinner said, recalling how close the city had come to turning into a mass grave the previous Second Winter.

  “Yes? While the Gorcia pipelines were shut down, how did we get the little phlogiston we had?”

  “Trains, I suppose,” Skinner said. “Indige airships.”

  “Both of which the Vie-Gorgons own a controlling stake in. Shutting down the pipelines tripled our family fortune. We gave most of that money away. To charities, sometimes, or to funding certain public works projects. Do you know why?”

  “I hadn’t known there’d be a test, Emilia. If I had, I suppose I would have studied harder.”

  “Because goodwill is cheaper than armed guards. The Gorgon-Vies spend money to protect themselves against angry peasants; the Vie-Gorgons spend it to ensure that it’s the Gorgon-Vies with whom the common people are angry.”

  “Is that what this play is about? Is that why you’re having me write it? To keep attention on the Gorgon-Vies.”

  “Yes,” Emilia said. “after a fashion. An Emperor should be accountable to his subjects, shouldn’t he?”

  Skinner pondered the implications of this question, and of the fact that it was Emilia Vie-Gorgon asking it. The Vie-Gorgons controlled the Ministry of Information-shutting down broadsheets, arresting and discrediting critics of the Emperor, tightly controlling what was known about him-what could any of that have to do with forcing him to be accountable?

  “Certainly…” she began, “there are times when I wish that the Emperor…realized the consequences of his edicts more thoroughly.” Worrying about how to feed herself with six crowns, about where she would live when her boarding-house was closed. “Though I suppose that he is, in his mind, acting in the interests of the Empire.”

  “You are quite right-in his mind. By his judgment, he is doing what is best for Trowth. But what assurance do we have that his judgment is correct? It was not judgment that sat him on the throne-certainly not his judgment, anyway. Why should we ascribe the characteristic of judgment to a man simply because he has become Emperor?”

  “The Word? Divine provenance?”

  “Miss Skinner, I am surprised. Tell me, in all your years as a coroner, have you ever seen the Word actually affect the world? Anything to suggest that humanity is anything except entirely on its own?”

  “No, I suppose I haven’t.”

  “The Word does not choose our kings. We do. And their judgment is not any better than ours-so, it seems only right that we should attempt to improve on it. Now. We seem to have arrived.”

  “Arrived where?”

  Emilia moved about in her seat. Skinner could hear the rustling of her skirts. “This is a hospital. One of the casualty homes.”

  The casualty homes. There were a hundred of them, all over the city. A few were built from old trolljr hospices-sturdy, roomy, airy. They were great complexes where the sick were meant to be healed. Not all of them were as clean and neat as Dhagu’s hospices, though-the number of injured and wounded men brought back from Gorcia well exceeded the city’s existing capacity. Dirty heated tents, sweaty and diseased, festering with necrosis and illness, they grew like a poisoned fungus in the worst corners of the city-by the Break, and the Little Break, on the burnt remains of Mudside.

  “What…what are we doing here?”

  “We’re
going inside, Miss Skinner.” The door to the carriage opened, bringing in a gust of chilly air. “You said you needed inspiration.”

  “I can hear from the coach. The clairaudience…”

  “You can.” Emilia stepped out into the air. “But I suspect it’s more inspiring if you don’t.”

  “Wait…”

  “No.”

  The hospice was a makeshift building near the old Break. Skinner could hear wood creaking and the peculiar whine of stretched canvas-a low, almost inaudible hum. The inside was hot, oppressively hot and damp. Heat emitters buzzed at regular intervals around the space. Skinner was hesitant to use her telerhythmia here to establish the boundaries of the room, but based on the quality and number of voices she was hearing, it was somewhere fairly large. There was no effective way to regulate heat in a room this size; the hospice workers had no choice but to dump energy into it, or see the men freeze.

  The room stank. It smelled like blood and rotten garbage. It smelled like stale sweat and vomit. It smelled like ichor and iodine. The odors whirled together in a potent cocktail of disgust that coated the inside of the throat at once, and nearly made her sick to her stomach.

  Men are dying in here, she thought to herself. The least I can do is keep my breakfast down.

  It was the sound of the place that was the worst. Above the unnerving structural rattle of its jury-rigged edifice was an orchestra of misery. The place was full to bursting; there were hundreds of men inside. Skinner couldn’t see them, didn’t know how they were arranged, and it felt to her like they must have all been crowded around her at once, whispering in her ears. They moaned, and they whimpered. Some men prayed to the Word-praying for an end to the pain, however it might come. Some men choked and puked and coughed. One man, his voice strangely modulated as though he were moving about the room like a ghost, sometimes far, sometimes painfully near, only sobbed his dry sobs.

  Skinner could hear nurses and trolljrmen moving about the bodies-the former resolutely quiet, the latter with heavy footsteps and taciturn by nature. She could hear whispered entreaties by some of the nurses, and thrumming, bone-rattling responses from the trolljrmen.

  Emilia led her deeper into that sour, foul place, while the voices of suffering men weighed on her shoulders like a mountain, bearing her down, building up a terrible density above her, so that it seemed that every step forward was really a step down, down into a horrific cellar well below the surface of the earth. The anguish of the men was a tunnel around her, a wall at her side, a cave that she had no choice but to descend into.

  “Here,” Emilia said softly. “Joshua. Tell her what you told me.”

  “You’ve been here before?” Skinner whispered, but Emilia hushed her.

  “ I never thought…” a boy spoke, with a voice like an open wound. This must be Joshua. “…we all knew it was bad. But I didn’t…I signed up, though. Towards the end, when they started to give bonuses if you signed up. Since my da were dead, I thought…I thought if I signed up, I could give my ma the bonus to help her. You know?

  “They put me on an ironside ship, and sent us around. Gorcia is this red place. All rocks and mountains and plants with black leaves. They gave me a gun, a long-pin rifle, and a handful of skin-colored bullets that looked like a man’s severed thumb. They sent me down into a cave, then, with a thousand other men. That’s where the ettercap all live, underground in these long tunnels. We walked shoulder to shoulder, packed tight in, men at the edges carried lanterns.

  “We could smell…it smelled like vinegar. Someone said later that the ettercap make it. With their bodies, somehow, they spray it…but you could smell it. It was strong, and it got stronger the deeper we went. The caves got smaller, so only four men could walk side by side. The lanterns didn’t send light far enough ahead. Just a little bit of light at your feet. You could see the man next to you.

  “When they came…there was this…sound. This chewing sound. It…we thought it was at the end of the tunnel, but it wasn’t, it was all around us. They came at us. There were openings in the top of the tunnel. We hadn’t seen them, in the dark. It was a trap. They came at us with this great…they were like claws or teeth or I don’t know…you could see their mouths. They had mouths like human beings. Lips. Little white teeth. Pretty mouths, like a girl’s. And when they come you go a little crazy, and you think, ‘I could kiss a mouth like that.’ They come at you and it’s…you can’t see anything…there’s just men shouting and you shoot your gun off and try and hit whatever you can and…

  “You can’t back up, because there’s men packed in behind you. You can’t go forward, because there’s men ahead of you. You just shoot and shoot, and the men around you get snatched up or bit in half or something long and black stabs them in the heart, and if you’re lucky they’ll go away before too long. Then you start to pull back out of the tunnel and regroup. Then they send you in again. And again.”

  The man was silent for a moment, then he whispered softly. “It’s dark in here. I don’t like it. Do you have any light?”

  There was a faint scratch of the key in a phlogiston lantern, and Emilia said, “Here. More light.” She laid her fingers faintly on Skinner’s arm. “Joshua lost both of his hands after his second battle. His arms had to be amputated at the elbow, because of an infection that accompanies ettercap injuries. There are mechanologists working on replacement parts for him, but there are many injuries, and not much money to build brass hands for them.”

  In the coach, Skinner snapped at her patron. “That was horrific. Why did you do that to me? To him?”

  “Because it was horrific,” Emilia replied, smoothly. “I am given to understand that writers are rarely inspired by the purely quotidian.”

  “I worked for the Coroners for years, Miss Vie-Gorgon. I don’t need an object example from you about how disgusting humanity can be. I don’t…how dare…how dare you. Do you honestly think I’m struggling with this because I don’t understand the horrors that men have had to face? Do you know how many partners I went through before I was paired up with Beckett? Three. The first was taken apart by a Reanimate in the cellar of a mansion in Swindon. Not just killed, not at first-just torn limb from limb, the way a child plucks the wings off a fly. And I had no choice but to sit and listen to it, to keep track of the Reanimate’s position so that we could send someone else in after it. You don’t need to…” Skinner took a deep breath, tried to tamp her anger down. “What exactly did you think I was going to do? That I’d take the misery of these men and find a place for it in the play?”

  Silence as only Emilia Vie-Gorgon could be silent. Was she evaluating what she was about to say? Trying to evaluate Skinner’s state of mind, and how she’d respond? Reconsidering the whole project? Was she amused, angry, offended, or just tired?

  “Well,” said Emilia, eventually. “Will you?”

  “There was no way out, trapped in that box canyon. We could neither advance nor retreat, nor move save to swing our swords to save our lives. We were surrounded and outnumbered, and we would have died there to the last of us, had not Theocles, bedecked in gore like his own armor…this is good.” The actor scratched his nose and looked at his pages again. “I like this. So, I’m going to be, what, like bloody and bandaged up here?”

  “Yes,” the director responded. “We’re going to have you start off the whole thing, just come in all gruesome like that. It should give a nice ambience to the rest of the piece.”

  “Isn’t it weird that I’m praising Theocles, though? Like making him out to be a hero?”

  “Yes, that’s the dichotomy, Charles. We want to set Theocles up as a war-hero in the beginning, so that his descent into cruelty is heightened.”

  Skinner sat in the back of the theater, listening. She was in the dark, and none of the actors would have recognized her as the writer, anyway. They’d been receiving the pages of the script anonymously. While she still felt a twinge of guilt, using the story she’d heard like this, she had to admit it had helped.
The visit to the hospice had given her a broad brush with which to paint the horrors of war across the script, lending both a dark, gritty reality to the story, and helping to generate a depth of sympathy for Theocles’ character.

  Is it all right if I’m doing it for the right reasons? She wondered. If it leads to a more conscientious rule, to less of a willingness to wage war…does that make it worth it?

  Twelve

  True Spring came, with the comfortable regularity of all of Trowth’s seasons, and if there was one time during that city’s long war against its elements that could even remotely be described as comfortable, it was True Spring. Second Winter thawed, snow melted, and the streets ran thick with cold, clear water. Crisp, salty breezes snuck past Trowth’s ancient sea-wall, and came close to dispelling its omnipresent umbra of cloud and pollution. The sun warmed the city’s old stones.

  The end of the season would turn raw and rainy, of course, as heavy, damp air poured in from the sea, but, every year, for two weeks at the beginning of the season, Trowth enjoyed as close to perfect weather as the benighted metropolis was capable of. The Armistice, as these two weeks were commonly called in deference to the unacknowledged campaign that the weather waged against the town, extended to every aspect of Trowthi life. Old enmities were forgotten, debts were-if not forgiven-at least suspended, no harsh words were offered. Two weeks of clear, warm weather after the annual nightmare of Second Winter was enough to cool even the hottest-tempered ruffians; well-to-do citizens and irascible low-lifes alike poured into the street, and no man or woman even considered marring these days with violence or misdemeanor.

  Shutters were thrown back, doors and windows left open, and warm feelings and good cheer filled the vast honeycomb of houses, pouring out into the streets, where men and women promenaded late in the lengthening days. All of the human and indige need for human contact, pent up and repressed for the rest of the icy year, found expression during Armistice, and seemed determined to make up for lost time.