Mr. Stitch

by Chris Braak

  James Ennering, formerly communications officer for the 16thQuartermasters, formerly reconnaissance partner for Elijah Beckett, now found himself the de facto head of the remains of the Coroners. Most of the men and trolljrmen, and all but one of the therians, had abandoned the division after Beckett’s disappearance. James and Gorud sat at what had been Beckett’s desk in the old pressgang office. Thut Akh Dun, one of the three remaining trolljrmen, was helping them attend to the handful of arrest reports that were still coming in. It was humid in the office-spring was like that, as it seemed one could not go anywhere without tracking in a small river’s worth of moisture-and James found it difficult to pay attention, perpetually distracted by the syncopated dripping of water from the eaves. Thun Akh Dun remained steadfast, though, in his determination to read every single report submitted by every single gendarmerie in Trowth.

  With Becket gone, most of the gendarmes had stopped bothering to write reports at all; most of what came in now were notices from the more well-to-do districts, which had long been governed like police-states, anyway. Though even these notices were largely useless.

  “Item: two men, miscreants. Arrested, administered corporal punishment, discharged,” Thut Akh Dun said. “Item-”

  “Wait. It doesn’t say what they did? Their names?”

  “No,” Thut Akh Dun replied. “Item: one woman, prostitution. Arrested, incarcerated. Item: two women-”

  The trolljrman was interrupted by a commotion at the door. James projected his hearing toward it immediately, rapping lightly across the intruders who were barging into the office. Knocker etiquette prohibited such a gross intrusion using the telerhythmia, but James Ennering was exhausted beyond measure, and no longer interested in knocker etiquette.

  There were two men, large men with thick chests, dragging a third between them, a man to whom they shouted repeated unsavory epithets.

  “Gorud…” James whispered. “Who are they?”

  “One is Beckwith Harker, he was a gendarme captain. One is a man, I do not recognize him, but he wears gendarmerie apparel. The man they have prisoner is badly beaten, I do not know him. Ho, there!” Gorud raised his voice, using the remarkable capacity for mimicry in his species to do a serviceable evocation of Beckett’s gravelly growl. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  The sound stopped the men in their tracks, but when they spoke, they spoke to James Ennering. “We picked this one up doing…uh. Loitering, I guess you’d call it.”

  “Loitering?” James asked.

  “It is standing in a public place with an intent to commit mischief,” Gorud provided helpfully.

  “All right, Captain Harker,” James said. “How did you know he intended…mischief? Thank you, Gorud.”

  “Uhm. Well, I mean look at him. Sorry, beg your pardon there. What I mean is, he looks pretty much like a miscreant. He was skulking, if you take my meaning, looked like he was up to something. Officer’s discretion, anyway, sir.”

  “Fine,” James shook his head. He couldn’t afford compensation for the man if he’d been arrested wrongly, but at least he could speed up his release. “So, let’s call him sufficiently punished, and now you can let him go.”

  “Beg your pardon, sir, but it’s not the arrest that brings us here. It’s what he confessed to.”

  “What he confessed to under duress, you mean? You’re talking about the confession that you beat out of him?”

  “Well, sir,” Captain Harker said, not sounding particularly contrite. “Ordinarily I’d be in agreement with you about the unreliability of coerced confession. But this one might be worth listening to you. Here,” Captain Harker seized the man by the hair and held his head up. “Tell him, then, what you told me.”

  The man coughed wetly; James couldn’t see what he was coughing up, precisely, but he had his suspicions.

  “I don’t…” the man said, his voice thick. “I wasn’t…”

  “Tell him,” Harker ordered.

  “…I was supposed to. Scout. The palace. For routes in.”

  The office was at once dead silent.

  “Why?” James asked quietly.

  “I don’t…know. For sure.” The man coughed again. “A man hired me to do it.”

  “Tell him the rest,” Harker spat. “Tell him your deadline.”

  The man swallowed heavily, hesitating, but knowing that he had little in the way of options. “He told me I had to be done. Before the first of summer.”

  The first. Shit, oh shit, James thought, a deadly anxiety churning in his stomach. The Emperor’s Invocation. The only guaranteed, scheduled public appearance of the supreme head of the Empire. “Gorud. I need you to go and find Mr. Stitch. Now.”

  Thirty-Three

  Beckett’s lungs ached as he gulped in air, choking on the black brine of Cross the Water. He crashed in a bone-rattling heap on the fiery golden metal ground of the City of Brass, and somehow moved through it, melted brass towers swirling up around him, a cascade of color, accelerating rapidly as he fell, or rose, or moved, or else the world moved around him and he was the only place that was standing still. Eyes peered at him from crevices, but were gone in an instant. Black boneless fingers writhed and clutched at him, but had passed on before he could react. Long jaws and snaggle-teeth snapped in the dark. A circle of leprous green light lay beneath the City of Brass, and in an instant the towers were gone, high above him, shimmering clouds as he fell through clean, cold air to that glimmering green ground. Black stones gleamed under pervasive, sourceless light.

  Beckett looked around him to see new towers made of black stone, windowless, crooked black fingers reaching up from the poisoned earth, clutching at the sky, stretching up and up. At the base of those towers moved things, incomprehensible things, things that were not so much shapeless as they partook of all shapes, all at once, agglomerations of limb and eye and mouth, utterly alien in construction. Beckett blinked, and in the fraction of a second that his eyes were closed, he saw long jaws again, and sharp teeth, he saw hands reaching out for him.

  Blink. The basalt towers loomed again. Green lights like fireflies the size of fists floated in the dark, the eerie luminescence at the source of those mad figures, swirling around each other in an unfathomable dance.

  Blink. Jaws and teeth, claws, closer, grabbing for him…

  Blink. The towers were close now, close enough that he could reach out and touch them, touch the smooth stone foundations, the vast and seamless architecture. How could there be no seams? No individual stones? Were they carved from some single, vast source? A fallen meteor, the size of a city, etched over countless eons…

  Blink. They had him, the hands took hold of him, sharp nails dug into his arms.

  Blink. The city was all around him, dwarfing him to insignificance. The black forms of the City of Brass were here too, snuffling around in the dark, their boneless fingers, writhing like…Leeches, their fingers are leeches, Beckett thought, as behind them floated those incomprehensible forms with their green glowing, firefly-lights. The Leech-fingered Men. Hobgoblins from children’s stories, now I know I must be dreaming, the men snuffled at the ground with faces that were just nests of hooked barbs, pulsing and quivering according to some invisible stimuli. The basalt towers shivered, and at once Beckett felt himself the object of their scrutiny, as though the featureless black surface housed innumerable imperceptible windows, through which glared millions of malevolent eyes. The leech-fingered men halted their aimless sniffing, and, as though they were all appendages guided by a single mind, turned their faces towards him. The firefly lights continued to bob in the dark, causing a strange and tangled mass of shadows.

  Beckett tried to flee; he could not move so much as he could will the city to move around him. And yet all places appeared to be same place, all routes the same route. Black towers raced by, all leaning together above his head, reaching to some point in the infinite distance, and still he was surrounded by these buildings the height of mountains, by the swarms of leech-finge
red men and their gnashing barbed faces.

  Blink. The gnashing barbs were sharp teeth again, the green light turned black and cold…

  Blink. Surrounded, he was surrounded by these things, as the green lights danced around him, inconsiderate of his presence, engaged in some inscrutable ritual, the invocation of some grand and alien intelligence. The leech-fingered men took hold of his arms, the slimy tendrils digging their sucking mouths into the skin, a thousand tiny pinpricks of pain, and he was sure that they would drain the life from him. They stretched him back, and he could see the tower tops above him, still endlessly reaching with geological slowness toward the shapes above…a circle like the moon, but fat and heavy in the sky and colored with swirls of blue and white.

  Blink. Hands squeezing tight, tearing him apart, pulling, his heart felt like it was broken in half…

  Blink. The lights floated above him, the shadowy mess of form that supported them writhed in silent confusion all around the edge of his vision, and though no limbs materialized from that sprawling chaos, still he felt something reach out to him, reach past the barrier of his skull and brain, place its toxic fingers inside his mind, a greasy stream of substance that coiled up inside his head, piling upon itself, growing and throbbing in his ears and he screamed, screamed then…

  …and saw gnashing teeth, each the size of his hand, black eyes and blue light casting the shadows of monstrous faces everywhere…

  …felt brass inside his mind, cold metal gears that were stacked up and meshed together, turning and grinding his thoughts away, icy axles of metal thrust deep into his dreams, a machine built in his thoughts and it lurched to shuddering, limping life…

  …and he was pulled from the icy water in an explosion of coughing and hacking, cold and pain falling on him like an landslide. His head throbbed like it was trapped in a vise, and there was a mortal agony screaming in his side. His hands and feet were completely numb, and his joints felt full of broken glass and shrapnel, shrieking with blinding pain whenever he tried to move. He lay on his back on a cold stone ledge, beside a river in a vast tunnel. A few fitful phlogiston lamps burned at regular intervals, providing a wash of eerie, flickering light around the people that surrounded him-men with long jaws and huge teeth, black eyes and grey pebbled skin.

  Sharpsies, Beckett thought, barely able to form the word as he coughed up dirty river water and struggled mightily to get air into his lungs, How can there still be sharpsies here? He closed his eyes then, and it was dark. When he reopened them, he was somewhere else, next to a roaring red fire, stripped of his coat and jacket, listening to more sharpsies argue in their guttural, choking language. Beneath their arguments, faintly as though at some great distance, he thought he could hear gears whirling. One of the sharpsies turned its black eyes on Beckett; the old man tried to move, but found that his body had been weighted down with a hundred tons of lead. The sharpsie pressed a bowl to Beckett’s lips, and he felt some hot liquid in his mouth. He tried to spit it back, but his body-desperately hungry and thirsty-betrayed him, swallowing the bitter broth down almost instantly. There was a faint, familiar aftertaste, the metallic tang of veneine…

  He opened his eyes again, and the fire had burned down to warm coals, though the room was still stifling hot. Where is this? Beckett wondered, as he tried to move again, and still found his body impossibly heavy. Two sharpsies paced restlessly about the room with their springing strides and, briefly, Beckett thought he saw the hunched silhouette of a leech-fingered man. It was gone before he could work any saliva into his painfully dry mouth. He wanted to speak, to call out to his captors, but closed his eyes instead.

  He awoke again, for a bare instant, just long enough to read his surroundings. Cold and dark, but aboveground now, it was night-time. Raining. More blue lamps, with no red fire to set off their eerie light. He was hunched painfully in a wooden wheelbarrow, his neck craned at an uncomfortable angle, his arm hanging over the side and quite devoid of circulation. A sharpsie in a long coat and a deep hood that was meant to obscure his enormous predator’s teeth pushed the wheelbarrow, creaking along in the dark. The veneine kept him suspended, up and free from the cramped confines of his body. He was aware of the discomfort, of wanting to speak, of his nagging worry, but all of these things were true only at a distance. The only thing that was close to him now was a sudden nearness of the sound of turning gears, as though he were a few steps closer to the imaginary clock. He thought he should try to speak again, but the veneine sapped the urge, and he was content to float, as the light dimmed and he found himself in the dark, again.

  “Beckett? Detective Beckett?”

  There was a ringing in his ears, and his vision was blurred and muddled. Beckett cough and rasped. “What. What is…?”

  “It is professor Helmetag, sir. Ernst.”

  Beckett bolted upright; his head spun and throbbed, but his vision cleared. He was laying on an operating table, in the warmly-lit corner of Wolfram Hall that had been staked about by professor Helmetag. The sound of spinning gears was gone, but still plucked at the corners of his awareness, now by virtue of its absence-a phantom of missing sound. The veneine high had faded, so now Beckett felt the traditional symptoms of a hangover: throbbing pain in his head, boiling nausea in his stomach, a disinterest in Ernst Helmetag’s loud voice.

  “Sharpsies,” Beckett gasped. “Where…how did they…?”

  Helmetag looked befuddled. “There are no sharpsies, here, no. There are no sharpsies in the city at all, I think.”

  “I saw…how did I get here?”

  “You were crumpled up,” Helmetag said. “On the doorstep. I thought you were a vagrant at first, I am sorry to say, and was going to report you to the gendarmerie. But I recognized…you have a, ah, a distinctive face…”

  “What,” Beckett said again. “What happened?”

  “You were d-injured, badly. Nearly dead. I have certain…ah.” Ernst scratched at his massive moustache. “Certain means. There was some vitality left in your cells that can be re-envigorated…”

  Did I hallucinate the sharpsies? And the towers? Why would there be sharpsies in the city? “What do you mean, re-envigorated?”

  “Envigorated, anyway. You must understand, it is a delicate thing, the line between the living and the dead, but you were certainly alive.”

  The old coroner put his face in his hands and sighed. I would like for one year to go by, he thought to himself, without being nearly killed. “It’s fine. Thank. Thank you.” His head hurt abominably. “I need…ah.” He coughed phlegm from his throat. “Medicine. Veneine.”

  “Yes, that,” Ernst nodded enthusiastically. “I hope you’ll understand. You were in withdrawal, you see? This is a very stressful condition for the body, so it was necessary to administer…well, you understand, your veins, many of them were badly damaged, so I needed to take steps…”

  Beckett looked up at him. “What steps?” Ernst said nothing. “What steps?” He looked down at his forearms. Affixed to the inside of his right arm, buried directly in the pale flesh and surrounded by livid blood vessels, was a round brass plug.

  “It is sealed,” Helmetag said quietly, “with ichor, much the way a knocker’s eyeplate is. I have attached it directly to your radial artery.” He fumbled in a pocket in his apron, and withdrew a few brass modules that looked like rifle shells. “Each one has a pre-measured amount of pharmacy-a combination of veneine, djang extract, and salt water. You plug it in, let me show you…” He set the shell again the plug in Beckett’s arm and twisted it.

  Beckett gasped as he felt a sting like a needle prick, and then a sensation of spreading cold that rapidly vanished. Immediately, his headache and nausea subsided, the metallic taste in the back of his mouth disappeared.

  “You must be careful,” Helmetag said. “These are smaller than what I think you must have been dosing yourself with. You must not increase the dosage, do you understand? Your body will acclimate, it will become very dangerous.”

  “How man
y do you have?” Beckett asked.

  “You do understand, yes? You cannot let your craving for the drug determine how much you take…”

  “How many?”

  Ernst went to his desk and drew out a dark, walnut-colored box. “We use these for testing on animals. I can give you a hundred now, you cannot take more than five a day. You are still sick, yes? Your life is hanging on by a thread…”

  If Ernst Helmetag had any further enjoinders to caution, Beckett was not inclined to listen to them. He took the box, gathered up his clothes, and set off into the cold rain. He did not notice the faint, distant sound of spinning gears had begun again.

  Thirty-One

  Have solved Chretien’s problem with the eyes. The matter was trivial. Have simply built artificial eyes using lenses and a tympanum that is sensitive to light, attached to optical ganglions from a man picked from the gallows. Work on the thinking-engine continues.

  — from the journal of Harcourt Wolfram, 1785

  Skinner had, much to her surprise, fallen into a quite natural rhythm with the Akori-and, for their part, Karine’s family were so burdened by numbers anyway that one more couldn’t possible harm them. The men spent their days working or looking for work, and brought back what little money they earned. The women spent the days at home, attending to the responsibilities of the household, and kept the money close. With so many to provide for, it was necessary to see every penny spent to maximum effect.

  Of course, Skinner brought a skill-set to this arrangement that was unlikely, to say the very least, and fairly impractical to be perfectly honest. It was a fairly unusual event that any member of Karine’s extensive family required a secret passage found, a field agent communicated with, something listened to at an extreme distance, or a critically-acclaimed play written. Skinner was determined, however, not to become a useless appendage-and the Akori matriarchs were pleased with Skinner’s efforts, even if she did not possess most of the skills necessary for governing a household.