Mr. Stitch

by Chris Braak

  “Hello?” He said. “Hello, this is Beckett. There is an emergency…”

  A burst of chattering feedback answered him, then resolved into a voice. “…hand off the button, if you want to listen. What is it?”

  “This is Detective-Inspector Beckett. I have had word from my men that we are in imminent danger. You need to stop the train.”

  “What…” more feedback. “…danger?”

  “I don’t know what it is. I just need you to stop the train.”

  “…stop here.”

  “Yes, stop here,” Beckett said, his voice rising. “Stop the fucking train.”

  “Soder Pass…” the voice came back. “…cking CAN’T stop…”

  “Shit,” Beckett said, inconsiderate as to whether he was speaking to the man at the other end of the horn or just to himself. If they were on the Soder Pass bridge, then the conductor was right-they couldn’t stop, because there’d be nowhere for them to go. Just a train on a bridge, five hundred feet in the air over a rocky gorge. They wouldn’t be safe until they reached the other side.

  He drew his gun and, after a moment, fumbled the brass cartridge of veneine out of his pocket. He tugged his sleeve up to expose the plug on his arm-that strangely alien lump of brass affixed to his weathered skin. Beckett took a deep breath, then set the cartridge against it. Again, the sharp stabbing sensation, the spreading coolness that vanished almost at once. Beckett felt his head lighten and start to drift away, buoyed by the sound of gears and rushing water, and noticed with a vague indifference that this had been too much. He shook his head to clear it; his heart pounded in his ears and he smelt blood.

  “Shit,” Beckett said under his breath. He took hold of the grip of his revolver, squeezed it, made himself focus on the texture. He resisted the urge to close his eyes-he was leery of closing his eyes while on veneine, now-instead stared at the black, dull metal of the gun. “Shit, I don’t have time for this,” he said out loud, forcing his thoughts to dwell on the weight of the pistol, the straight lines of the barrel, the smooth grip in his palm. He tried to take a step and felt his legs wobble uncertainly, then gritted his teeth against the buzzing in his mind and threw open the door between the cars.

  Outside the train cars was a small, iron-railed platform connected by chains and hitches to the platform of the next car. The space between the two was very small, but the drop between them, Beckett could see, was precipitous. The Emperor’s train trundled slowly along Soder Pass-beneath the grate there were stiff iron rails and railroad ties-below that, only the lattice of girders that held the bridge up. There was nothing but those girders for a span of five hundred feet at least, as they crossed high above the otherwise-inaccessible Soder Gorge. Above, the blue vault of the sky, cleared of Trowth’s persistent cover of pollution, stretched away to some infinite height, evoking that agoraphobia that lurked in the heart of all city dwellers.

  The valley was dry and lifeless. Gray scree and stunted trees, barely visible at this height, crawled past below. Beckett noticed a sense of vertigo fluttering up from his stomach, but it contended with and lost to the veneine that had firm control of his mind. He crossed to the next car which, like the first, was stocked primarily with secondary ministers-third-cousins of prominent Family members, scrounging for whatever opportunity might present itself. The Emperor trailed men like this in his wake, like the detritus pulled after a ship. Beckett examined the pasty faces with their confounded and aghast expressions as he barged into their private coach. It was hard to imagine any of them masterminding a plan to assassinate the Emperor, Beckett considered, but easy to imagine any one of them getting involved. A new emperor meant new opportunities for advancement, and if there’s one thing that third-tier Family members knew when they saw it, it was an opportunity for advancement.

  Of course, I don’t even know what I’m looking for. No one could have brought any guns onto the train. There were no oneiric munitions, no phlogiston munitions. Tell me I’m not looking for a madman with a knife in his pocket. There were a lot of pockets on that train to search. Beckett crossed ahead to the next car. What am I even doing? There was a full contingent of Lobstermen in the car before the Emperor’s. The others-he saw as he moved through them-were filled with ministers, second ministers, sub-ministers, ministers-adjunct, secretaries to ministers-adjunct, and the assorted valets, servants, wives and mistresses that must necessarily accompany the members of a court. I don’t even know what I’m looking for, Beckett thought to himself, as he threw about various vicious glares, in the hopes that someone with a guilty conscience, mistakenly believing that he’d been found out, would abruptly reveal himself.

  He’d crossed all the cars but the last two-the one directly before him contained twelve Lobstermen, armed and armored, prepared for any eventuality, and so well-equipped to fend off assassins that they could hardly be helped and couldn’t even be hindered by one old coroner with an out-dated Feathersmith revolver. Beyond that was the Emperor’s personal coach, occupied by the William II Gorgon-Vie himself, a few trusted aids, and probably at least two mistresses. The Gorgon-Vies had fairly notorious sexual appetites, and an equally-notorious willingness to indulge them.

  It was incomprehensible that the Lobstermen had been infiltrated-the Emperor’s personal guard was composed of only the most fervently loyal soldiers, and only those who had already been serving for years. And it was equally incomprehensible that an assassin, intent on the Emperor’s life, could get past one of them, much less a whole traincar full. This left two basic options: either someone in the emperor’s personal retinue was an assassin, or else someone had planned this all out very poorly, and was stuck with a platoon of battle-hardened, blood-and-bone armored, invincible supermen between him and his target.

  On the roof, maybe? Beckett wondered, as the train began to screech to a halt. What…? He flicked aside a curtain by the window and looked out-they were only halfway across the bridge. Why are we stopping? He snatched from the wall the brass horn that let him speak to conductor. “Why are we stopp-” Beckett began, but was interrupted by the tortured shriek of twisting metal. The train lurched-forward, then back, tossing the passengers helter-skelter. The floor buckled, knocking Beckett from his feet, as the front of the car actually raised into the air with the unimaginably loud, screaming, groaning sound of the train car being destroyed, a sound of unavoidable magnitude.

  Like a wave, Beckett’s car rose up and up, slowly coming to a stop and then pausing, for a bare instant, at the peak of its rise, to come crashing forward, hurling Beckett against the door which gave way beneath his weight. He fell out into the open light, and had to scramble to grab hold of the railing, gripping tight to keep from falling from the bridge. He watched his gun spiral away towards the stony valley bottom.

  Ahead-below-the Lobstermen’s car hung suspended, like a fly trapped in a spider web, in a vast, messy gnarl of… Beckett blinked, sure he was hallucinating again. Vines. They were thorny vines, crushing the car like an old tin cup, wrenching steel girders from the bridge, snapping about in the wind like slender whips. The car was fully twenty feet below, affixed to the shattered bridge by thick cords of vegetation. The platform Beckett was grappling with shifted suddenly, and he realized that the front end of his car was leaning perilously off the edge of the rails, dangling above the Soder Valley.

  Fear still at bay from veneine intoxication-and, in a situation such as this, Beckett found himself hard-pressed to say whether fear or intoxication would be worse-the old coroner surveyed the scene. The Lobstermen’s car had suffered the worst of the vines. Beckett could see men struggling, wrapped in thorny green, tiny red flowers blooming where the tendrils had found the gaps in their bone armor. The vines crushed bones and drove out breath and stabbed into veins like hypodermic needles. None of those men would survive; their lives were blooming red along the length of tangled vine.

  Miraculously, the Emperor’s car had managed to survive the…event. It was in place and firmly on the tracks, but ca
ught by the vines and the weight of the Lobstermen’s car. The forward engine shrieked and squealed and pumped blood-smelling phlogiston into the air, but the vines held fast. What happened? The vines…Beckett knew those vines from Kaarcag. They were a chimerstric weapon-a living entity transformed into a vehicle for destruction. The Sarkany Rend bred them, or grew them, or created them, somehow. The Sarkany Rend…are they involved in this? It was tempting to believe, but Beckett wasn’t sure. With the explosion of heretical sciences in the last year, it seemed just as likely that some would-be assassin had gotten their hands on a chimerstry primer.

  I have to…have to do something…his brain felt like it was mired in mud. He couldn’t think straight, couldn’t get his thoughts together. What am I supposed to do? The Emperor was alive, the plan had failed. Unless…

  Beckett stared at the car with mounting horror. What if the plan had been to isolate the Emperor? The chimerstric weapon had been intended to neutralize the guard, while the assassin waited with the Emperor himself? Beckett tried to run down a list of the men and women that might be in the foremost car, while he scrabbled around, looking for a way to cross the gap. There was a girder, a few feet below him, that had been undamaged by the train’s destruction. He tried to lower himself down a hanging railroad tie.

  Gradith Vie-Gorgon the Prime Minister. Minister of the Exchequer, something Rowan-Czarnecki. There’s another Rowan-Czarnecki-under-minister of Health and Safety? The Emperor’s personal physician. The two women…Beckett had, in the past, insisted that all of the William II’s mistresses be subject to background checks. The Emperor had conceded the need for it, and then promptly refused to ever supply the names of anyone he dallied with.

  Beckett succeeded in easing himself out onto the girder-there was fully ten feet of length before he’d be able to reach a vertical handhold on the opposite side. The wind whipped at his coat. He was a very long way up, Beckett knew, and not a healthy man. Crawling across narrow metal girders, hundreds of feet below a stone valley floor was unlikely, to say the least. He had just taken it in his mind to turn back, perhaps find someone that could help him, maybe find someone who knew where there was a rope, when he saw tiny green tendrils wriggling from the steel by his hand. The tendrils flexed and grew, became thicker, blacker, began to extrude sharp thorns. They reached out for him, and he saw Sergeant Garret again, his face hacked together from whorls in the metal, vines climbing from his nose…

  Beckett pushed off from the railroad tie and tried to run along the horizontal girder. He took one step, two-the vines were behind him now, crawling along after him, clutching-three steps-his balance was off, he could feel himself leaning to one side about to go over-four-the vines flexed again, tearing the girder from its place in the bridge, rocking it beneath his feet…

  He fell forward, crashing chest-first into the vertical girder across from him, wrapping his arms around it like a drowning lover, his feet swinging in the open air as the rose-bedecked vines fell with his narrow bridge into the valley. Beckett stayed there for a moment, gasping with breath, squeezing the iron truss so tight that it would have been little surprise if he’d snapped a rib because of it.

  Back across the now-impassable gap, a well-heeled man in a high-quality but disheveled suit leaned out of the car’s rear door and shouted out. Beckett couldn’t hear what the man said; blood was pounding so furiously in his ears, and this, combined with the illusory sound of machinery and the scraping, wrenching, shrieking sound that the malicious vines made as they continued to crush anything they lighted on, would make communication impossible.

  “Get back!” Beckett screamed at him. “Get back! The vines live on blood! Get…get everyone to the end of the train, and get them off! Don’t touch-”

  A thin grin tendril whipped at the man’s hand; he swore and snatched it away. An expression of horror occupied his face as he saw that the thin green vines with their bright red flowers were all around him, pulsing and writhing, and lashing out at him. He nodded to Beckett in curt acknowledgement of the warning, and then slipped back inside the car.

  There was a groan of bending metal and then a series of high-pitched snaps as the vines that held the fallen car finally snapped. The coach swung, crashing into the supporting bridge; the entire structure shuddered, nearly shaking Beckett from his place, then it spiraled off into the gorge, cracking open and spilling forth its bloody, broken contents. It crashed like thunder when it hit, and the sound reverberated throughout the valley.

  Almost at once, the engine and the Emperor’s carriage began to sluggishly roll forward; the dead vines wrapped around their axels, deprived of sustenance, had begun to wither almost immediately, and were being shredded by the force of the train. Beckett spat, and began to climb up the iron rail.

  It was not far, and there were evenly-spaced supporting rails at weird angles to the main one, and so should not have been too difficult. Nonetheless, Beckett could feel his shoulders burning, his hands cramping up, his legs turning to a weak jelly by the time he flopped up onto the railroad ties. The train car was still hindered by the vegetation, and only slowly picking up speed. The old coroner struggled to his feet, gasping at the sharp pains in his knees-pains that he had forgotten about almost entirely in the haze of his intoxication-and staggered towards the Emperor’s coach.

  He paused briefly to grab at a hefty stick of splintered wood-all that remained of a railroad tie that had been destroyed when the center of the bridge was lost. He jogged to keep up with the train, wincing at the persistent pain in his limbs, and trying to imagine the precise scenario that would need to exist inside the car in order for a foot-long splinter to be of much use. He did not succeed.

  Lacking anything that resembled a strategy-and having been well-served by a lifetime of rash behavior-once Beckett had attained the platform on the rear of the coach, he just set his shoulder against the door and burst in. Perhaps he expected the element of surprise to give him some advantage that he lacked, or perhaps he considered it at least remotely plausible that William II’s would-be assassin was standing directly behind the door. Of the many scenarios he considered-including an especially unlikely one that involved him knocking the assailant directly unconscious before he’d had time to harm anyone-none resembled the sight that lay before him.

  The lush interior of the coach was in complete disarray. The heavy satin draperies, all in the deep purples and dark greens of the Gorgon-Vies and ordinarily hung about the windows to keep the car comfortably claustrophobic, were a shambles-torn from their rods and strewn about in mounds of lush fabric, along with paintings shaken loose from their moorings and shredded by their fall, chairs tumbled and broken, and a generous scattering of the razor-sharp remains of the Emperor’s personal dry-bar. Glass crunched beneath Beckett’s feet as he staggered into the room.

  One body was spread out before him, dead. The man had been shot between the eyes, and the moist coil of his being was splattered liberally across the walls. A second man stood to the side; he was deathly pale, well-dressed and wide-eyed at the carnage, and a woman in a blue dress and an elaborate hairstyle had buried her face in his chest and was weeping quietly. The man Beckett recognized as the under-secretary to the Prime Minister; the woman he supposed was a concubine, but his eyes were drawn from them at once, to the center of the car.

  The Emperor’s coach, according to long tradition, was always divided into two sections-a kind of sitting room, where the Emperor might receive visitors and discuss matters of state, and beyond that a private room where, presumably, he indulged his insatiable sexual appetites in all manner of licentious and unspeakable ways. No one was ever permitted in the private room, and Beckett hoped that the man had had sense good enough to flee into it at the first sign of danger.

  William II Gorgon-Vie was not in the car at all. Instead, at the door to his private chamber was another woman, buried beneath a small effusion of petticoats. Her head was turned at an impossible angle to her shoulders; vertebrae pressed out against her
skin, a grotesque jag of bone that made Beckett wince involuntarily. A look of choking horror was frozen on her face. Dahran, Beckett thought, absurdly. That one’s name was Dahran.

  Above the dead woman, looming in all its misshapen, patchwork monstrosity, reeking of ichor and enigma, was Mr. Stitch. It fixed Beckett with its brass, expressionless eyes, and said nothing.

  What the hell do I do now? Beckett wondered. The sound of spinning gears in his mind had trebled and now threatened to overwhelm him. Am I hearing…? Are those the gears in Stitch’s head? For a moment, Beckett was sure it was true-that the psychoactive venom in his veins had dissolved the boundary between his mind and the hulking reanimate, or that the invincible engine of Stitch’s mechanical intellect had finally spilled over its borders and now had begun to leak into the minds of those around it. Self and object were undivided, now only decoration applied to the outermost edges of one incomprehensibly vast and turning mechanism, whose cogs and clockwork guided the destiny of all men.

  “What happened?” Beckett choked, and the sensation vanished. He was Elijah Beckett again, wholly separate from that strange, unliving giant. He gripped his makeshift weapon tightly. “What happened here?”

  “It was her,” the pale man whispered. “She had a gun. Kept it hidden under her dress She ki…she shot Bertram. She wanted the Emperor…”

  “You killed her?” Beckett said Mr. Stitch.

  “She was waving the gun around like a madwoman,” the man interjected. “We were all in danger. It was the only way. I swear…we’re lucky to be alive.”