Mr. Stitch

by Chris Braak

  As Trowth’s distant Corsay colony began to thrive, Thom Ennering-Hardwicke’s grandson-the now-aged Bardo Hardwicke, who was no longer Esteemed due to Thom’s unfortunate decision to marry a Sar-Sarpek woman-began adding the new Corsay cuisine to his menu: peppers, fruit, fish eggs and small fried birds all joined the Sar-Sarpek fare.

  Despite its changes of face and menu, one thing was always consistent about Hardwicke’s: it always thrived. Even during the Ettercap War, when wallets and purses had been strained to their breaking point, the well-to-do scratched together the money for the occasional night at Hardwicke’s.

  How, precisely, Anonymous John could get a reservation there was not something Beckett considered. The reason for this particular restaurant seemed obvious, though: the building was very old, and predated the enclosure of the Arcadium; the first two storeys both had exits into that unnavigable mess of tunnels and alleys. There was no effective way to discreetly police all possible entrances, as any men stationed in the Arcadium would be spotted fairly easily in those narrow passageways.

  And Beckett was certainly not interested in doing anything except policing the entrances. He had no intention, at all, of negotiating a truce with Anonymous John; his thoughts were instead occupied with how he could best secure the restaurant with his men, and seize John when the criminal mastermind finally showed himself. Not that he really expected that; there’s no way John could have really believed Beckett would do anything but try to trap him.

  Still, Beckett would have been embarrassed if, in second-guessing John, he hadn’t brought any men, and then the man had showed up. It would have made for frustratingly smug dinner conversation, anyway. The old coroner had established three tables with pairs of gendarmes at them-he had gone to great lengths to ensure that the men were scrubbed clean and well-dressed, but still felt the effect lacked a certain authenticity. There were patrols of gendarmes taking long circuits through the Arcadium, making the alleys look unusually busy, but hopefully nothing more than that. In a fit of inspiration, Beckett, sent four of the therians employed by the Coroners to take up positions on nearby rooftops. Trowth was such a claustrophobic city, and a city with such an abundance of intricate stonework, that climbing about on its roofs and gables could certainly pose no more difficulty for the ape-men than climbing around whatever jungle environment they’d been bred to. This, at least, was Beckett’s considered opinion.

  Old Bardo Hardwicke had conceded to Beckett’s demands, had displaced his usual customers, and turned his beloved restaurant into a trap for a degenerate criminal, all while glaring furiously beneath his heavy white brows. He had the weathered, sour look, the thin, hunched shoulders and the bony, clutching hands of a man more than a hundred years passed his prime who was simply too irritated with the world to permit himself a graceful exit from it. Bardo Hardwicke would never give Trowth the satisfaction that he had left it willingly.

  The old man had agreed to Beckett’s demands, because the coroner had threatened to simply shut his restaurant down, permanently, as he was able to do under the expanded powers that Stitch had acquired for him. Hardwicke had agreed that one night of bad business was better than unemployment, but he hadn’t been happy about it-though, in Beckett’s defense, it did not seem that Bardo Hardwicke had ever been especially happy about anything during his long and, presumably, very miserable life.

  Beckett arrived early, and chose a table in the middle of the room, with his back to the door, relying on his men to warn him if someone came in. He sat alone at his small table, not far from Bardo himself, who sat against the far wall and glowered at Beckett. Beckett glowered back. For two hours, well-past the agreed upon meeting time, these two men glowered at each other. If furious glares could produce actual friction, the angry sparks generated by such a glowering contest would have easily burnt Hardwicke’s to the ground, and probably caused significant damage to all of Lantern Hill. In fact, despite the generally-accepted insubstantiality of ferocious gazes, a few of the gendarmes in the restaurant that night privately harbored suspicions that, had the evening gone on just a little longer, something actually might have caught fire.

  In the end, the wave of eleven o’clock bells washed over Hardwicke’s, and Beckett accepted as true what he had privately suspected all along: Anonymous John wasn’t coming. He’d either spotted the trap and stayed away, or else he’d intended some other plan that Beckett had successfully foiled. In any case, the evening had turned out to be a dud.

  Hardwicke escorted Beckett to the door-as pleased as he’d ever been-and Beckett’s men escorted him for fifteen blocks back to Queen’s Riot Close. Two more gendarmes were stationed by Beckett’s door, in case Anonymous John or his men had decided to attack him personally. Elijah Beckett nodded curtly to them, then decided that he had no desire to sleep.

  “Going for a walk, boy,” he told them. “Stay here, I won’t be long.”

  The driving rain of the last few days had mercifully dwindled to a faint spritzing, leaving Trowth’s cobbled streets slick and glimmering beneath its blue streetlights. Beckett walked towards the river, following the robust stream in the gutter that carried scraps of paper and horse and dog excrement along with it. The water ran downhill along Eiger street, where the shops’ wooden signs clattered in the chilly wind, and finally across Front Street, where it burbled gently into the Stark. The night was quiet, and Beckett was struck by how empty the teeming city could seem, like an abandoned temple, or a skull hollowed out by time and neglect, black windows like empty eyes, staring lifelessly into empty streets.

  Beckett tasted the sharp, metallic twinge that was his craving for veneine, and a dull throbbing in the bridge of his nose that he’d come to associate with a need for more djang. He resolved to ignore both of these, until he had stared sufficiently into the black waters of the Stark. He would not, he decided, use the drugs at any insistence except his own, regardless of what his body clamored for. He leaned on the granite balustrade that protected the edge of Front Street from the river, and put his addiction and decay from his mind.

  While he watched, the old coroner became conscious of a man shuffling down the street towards him. Beckett pretended he could not see the stranger, though he doubted the stranger believed him. The man wore a heavy, brown wool coat against the rain, and he had tangled, matted hair beneath a floppy hat. His shoulders were hunched, and he dragged one leg as though it had been injured and never healed properly. He was precisely the sort of malformed beggar that most of Trowth’s citizens were accustomed to ignoring-a twisted, bedraggled shape that fit so perfectly into Trowth’s crooked corners as to be practically invisible.

  The man shuffled to a spot along the railing an arm’s reach from Beckett, and he, too, stared out at the water. Close-up, Beckett could see that he was very ugly, with a face that resembled the product of a man attempting to carve a gargoyle from a potato, and then giving up halfway through. For all his lumpen ugliness, though, there were no signs of sores or disease, nothing weeping or bleeding or oozing, as any such signs might attract undue attention.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” Beckett asked, after a few moments, still not looking.

  The man said nothing, at first, then gradually reached up to touch his bulbous nose. He pinched at it, and it came away from his face with a faint sucking sound. The ugly man pulled at his cheekbones then, and they came away as well, followed by two marbles where his eyes and been, and lips that looked like fat leeches. He pulled of his hat and a wig of tangled hair, and stood up straight, discarding his hunched shoulders along with his old coat.

  What remained was a man in a dark suit, or something that might, for a distance, be mistaken for a man. He had no face at all, just smooth flesh from scalp to chin: pale, clammy skin like a corpse’s, stretched taught over the smooth expanse where eyes, nose, and mouth should have been. How he could see, or hear, or speak was a mystery; what had happened to cause such a particular deformity was likewise unknown. Not so his identity.

  “Ano
nymous John,” said Beckett.

  “The very same,” said John, leaning back on the balustrade. His jaw did not move when he spoke, and his voice had a strange vibrato, as though it were produced by a phonograph. “I am pleased to finally meet you.”

  “Are you?” Beckett asked. “You might have shown up when you promised, then. Saved me a long evening.”

  “Yes, that was inconsiderate of me,” John agreed. “Or, who knows? Perhaps I was testing you, to see if you’d really arrest me if I showed up. Of course you would have, not considering at all that I might have made extensive plans to be enacted in my absence, simultaneously acquitting me of wrongdoing and ensuring that troubles would still plague the city while I was in prison.”

  “For a while.” Beckett shrugged. “Your men would run out of orders, eventually. With you gone, the organization would fall apart.”

  “Assuming you could hold me, which you can’t.” Anonymous John chuckled. “Or, perhaps you could? Life is full of surprises. Hah, that’s what I like about you, Detective-Inspector Beckett. You don’t care about plans or consequences. I’ve spent a lot of time watching your coroners, you know. I have compiled profiles on all of your men. You were the only one that ever really concerned me.”

  “Why is that?” Beckett asked, as he slowly let his right hand drift towards his revolver.

  “Because you’re a killer. You’ve decided what’s right, and you know exactly what you’re willing to do in order to get it. Which is: anything. Anything in the name of what’s right. You’re probably thinking about killing me, right now. Of course, it’d be rude to shoot a man in the middle of a conversation, but you don’t care about that, do you?”

  “Tell me it wouldn’t be worth it.”

  “It might be, but it’d be dangerous. After all, what about my men? The sharpshooters I’ve positioned on the roof, waiting for you to make a sudden movement?”

  He could be bluffing, Beckett thought. He probably is; no way to know that I’d come this way tonight. He must have been following me.

  “Of course, I could be bluffing,” John admitted. “But I’ve obviously come here with a purpose in mind. Hear me out, at least, and if you don’t like what I have to say, feel free to test me.”

  Most people who had met Anonymous John knew what Beckett was now realizing: it is virtually impossible to read the truth from a man who has no face. Ordinarily, Beckett would have just shot him, anyway, but the layers of Anonymous John’s planning had made him suspicious. If the man did have a scheme, or was interested in making an offer, it might be useful for Beckett to know about it.

  “All right,” Elijah Beckett agreed, without relaxing his hand. “Tell me.”

  “Hah. All right. Do you know the first thing that the founders of Trowth built, after they discovered the ruins of Gorgon and Demogorgon’s city?”

  “A clock,” Beckett said. Everyone knew that.

  “A clock, yes. It was a very old, primitive thing, with great stone wheels, powered by the river Stark. It’s still in the heart of the Royal Palace, deep beneath the Royal Hill. Do you ever wonder about that? A whole city, a nation, an Empire, with a stone clock as its beating heart. That is the people of Trowth in microcosm: complex, yes, but rigid, predictable, regular. We are a nation in which every man knows his place, and every man is pleased to fulfill it, and for two thousand years, everything in Trowth has happened precisely the way that it’s supposed to.”

  “I don’t know,” Beckett said, thinking of Ettercap spies, of men transfigured by aetheric energies, of dreams poisoned, dead resurrected, and the laws of nature violated, “that I agree with that.”

  “You wouldn’t, of course,” Anonymous John agreed. “You are employed by the crown to ensure that things do happen the way they’re supposed to. You and the coroners, alone, are permitted to encounter those things which violate the precision-engineered society of the Empire. When something violates that natural order, when someone reaches up to scrawl his name across the stone-carved laws of Trowth, it is Elijah Beckett’s responsibility to slap him back down.”

  “And that’s you? The man scrawling his name or what have you? You’re a hero for being a criminal?”

  “In my own, small way, yes. I am a cog that does not know its place. But if you knew, Beckett! My principal, he is the one that is genuinely new, the man rejecting the hide-bound traditions of the Empire. I have made a fortune breaking the law, you see, but he is the one that has seen the outcome: Trowth will collapse beneath the weight of its own history if it does not change. And he is the one who will change it.”

  “And who is your principal?” Beckett had assumed that John was the top dog in this scenario; perhaps the night would turn out not to be a waste, after all.

  “A secret,” John replied, and if he could have smiled, Beckett suspected he would have, “even from me.”

  “So, what do you want from me? Want me to switch sides, maybe? Give over to your new man to save the Empire?”

  Anonymous John turned to Beckett, fixing that unnerving, faceless gaze on him, then turned back out to the water. “That’s my assignment. To gauge your willingness to switch teams. I’ve been advised that, if you thought the stakes were high enough, there’s a small possibility that you’d be interested.”

  “And what are the stakes?”

  “High,” John replied. “Very high. The Empire is at risk, yes, but so is our very species. So, perhaps, is all life as we understand it. I can’t tell you how, or why; I can only tell you that the risk is…unfathomable.”

  “And I’m just supposed to take your word for it?” Beckett began to reach for his revolver again. “A criminal? A liar and manipulator? A murderer?” He closed his hand on the grip of the weapon, and felt rage boiling up inside him. Valentine. You killed Valentine. “Sorry I’m not convinced. What’s plan B?” If there were no men aiming at him, John would be trying to close the distance, so the best choice would be to back away, draw and fire.

  “I told him you wouldn’t be.” If there were sharpshooters, John would want to open the distance, so the best choice would be to move forward, strike at his face, then draw the gun. “Plan B is to kill you, ob-”

  Beckett leapt forward, swinging at John’s head and pulling the gun from its holster. His clenched fist met the soft, spongy meat of Anonymous John’s face. Too late, Beckett realized that John wasn’t trying to move away at all, but had accepted the blow and moved forward, pinning Beckett’s gun against his body. No sharpshooters, Beckett thought, as he felt an icy brand between his ribs, the horrific, alien sensation of a foreign object violating his body. Wrong guess.

  He tried to scream as John wrenched the knife from his side, but the pain was overwhelming; it paralyzed his lungs, and the only sound Beckett could make was a choked gagging. His hand spasmed and fired off a round, that ricocheted harmlessly from the street.

  “It’s a dangerous plan,” Anonymous John admitted, as Beckett slumped against the railing. “I have no idea what will happen to your army without you in charge. But you can’t argue that it isn’t worth the risk.” John slipped an arm under Beckett’s and twisted his body.

  Beckett felt his hips bang against the stone balustrade, then the sickening sense of weightlessness as he fell. He crashed into the freezing waters of the river. He struggled for a moment, but his clothes were soaked through and impossibly heavy before he could get his face above the water. The cold raced in through his limbs, killing the little sensation that he had left, as he drifted downward, carried by the current, the light closing off above him.

  He attempted another half-hearted kick and then surrendered. His sense of being dwindled to a thin slash in the center of his body, a dimensionless presence surrounded by the empty shell of flesh. The pale speck of light above him, dimly blue, perhaps a street lamp, grew smaller and smaller, until all that was left was a hard blue spot, and then only the afterimage of the spot, a trick of his mind, desperate to believe that there was still some light left.

  W
ell, Beckett thought, as the dark finally overtook him. At least it doesn’t hurt. He had a brief glimpse of tall brass towers, melted like sticks of wax, and then, nothing.

  Thirty

  For the third time in a year, Skinner found herself evicted from her home. This time, there had not even been any movers to threaten, nor any luggage to collect-all of her belongings were still locked up inside the house on Comstock Street. It was simply cordoned off, guarded by a few Lobstermen who politely but firmly insisted that she was not permitted inside. Where the Comstock Vie-Gorgon’s were was anyone’s guess; popular opinion had it that they’d gotten wind of their upcoming troubles, and made immediate haste for their luxurious country estates. Skinner sat in the rain outside the house, and considered her options. Again. They were sparse. Again. The familiarity of the situation did nothing to alleviate the despair that she felt creeping in around the edges, kept at bay only by a firm optimism that she would think of something.

  It was Karine who came to the rescue, this time, and the thought of having to have to be rescued once again set Skinner’s teeth on edge. Two years ago she’d had steady work apprehending criminal scientists. Six months ago she’d written the most popular play in the history of the Empire. Now, she couldn’t even afford the train ticket she’d need to return to the countryside and live with her ailing father. When she thought about it, about William Gorgon-Vie, about Emperor William, fat and smug on his throne, making the laws that served no apparent purpose except keeping half of the population out of work and beholden to the other half-pets, essentially, kept around to be looked at and bear children, but nothing more, not even permitted to feed themselves-her stomach turned into a mass of churning bile. She wanted to spit in his eye. She wanted…Skinner wasn’t sure what she wanted, wasn’t sure of anything except that she was ferociously angry at someone, and felt more than a little guilty for snapping at Karine.