Mr. Stitch

by Chris Braak

  “Where’s the Emperor?”

  Stitch spoke in its rasping, horrifically painful voice. “Safe.” The reanimate took a deep breath, a sound like a crypt opening to the sky for the first time in centuries. “He. Is. Safe.”

  Thirty-Four

  Pogo ada Goan was ramo of the Clan Akori. This was a rank that put him somewhere below the headman-who actually still lived in Daeagea, the ancestral homeland of the indige-and, technically, slightly above the matriarchs of the Bluewater Household. This elevation in rank was a double-edged sword, of course; as a ramo, he was freed from the practical responsibilities of running the household, but, as a consequence, he was far less vital to that household’s functioning than the matriarchs were. He filled a position among his fellow Bluewater Akori that was something of a cross between a priest and the captain of a ship. He communed with the ancestral spirits and the Genius of the Household, issued guidelines and directives to the matriarchs, but it was generally the mothers and aunts and sisters of the Bluewater Household that were responsible for the work, and received the accordingly high respect and adoration.

  These days, Pogo knew, the ancestors had little to say. Since their demand that the indige migrate en masse from Trowth and return to Daeagea, they were silent almost to a one. This left Pogo with very little to do except engage, along with his brothers, nephews, and uncles, in honest labor. This was slightly embarrassing for a ramo, but Pogo had achieved a kind of bemused acceptance of it. Trowth was a mad place, and the needs imposed on his people there were mad ones; surely the Household’s needs were greater than Pogo’s sense of propriety?

  He smoked a cigarette as he and his male family members sat strapped in the dark, hot, claustrophobic confines of the airship. This was an Akori clan ship, designed to resemble a gigantic gava-fish. Pale Trowthi claimed it smelled like rotten fish, due to the gasses that kept it aloft, but Pogo had never noticed such a thing. Besides that, these same Trowthi never complained about the smell of their chickens or the rotten green plants in their gutters, or when their phlogiston soured and began to turn to vinegar, so undoubtedly their collective sense of smell was suspect.

  The airship floated above the Soder Gorge at a leisurely pace, that represented the highest velocity to which it could reasonably attain. The pilot managed to maneuver the vehicle past the broken bridge, and a man from the coroners addressed the indige in less than perfect Indt.

  “We am looking at men. To find. Finding. How is it…” the man said, then whispered something to the pilot, who muttered a response. “Identify. We am to identify men. Here.” He gave a thick packet of papers to the man nearest him. “This list, to find the men. Yes? Question?” When no one responded, he returned to the cockpit.

  The indige to whom the man had handed the papers immediately passed them to Pogo, who accepted leadership of the group as was his due. Leafing through the pages, he saw that they consisted of a list of Trowthi names and a number of fair sketches of people’s faces.

  “All right, cousins,” Pogo sad aloud. “We are here to look for bodies. We are staying until we find everyone on the list, okay?” He tucked the papers into his belt, and prepared to rappel into the valley.

  Pogo had grown up in Daeagea, among its mile-high stone towers and impossibly-tall trees. Heights never bothered him, and most of his people were similarly inconsiderate of the danger as they dangled on ropes far above the valley floor. A few who had been born after the Diaspora had never learned the exhilarating glory of the precipices of the homeland, and panicked a little at the descent. The other indige immediately mocked them and called them Trowers-city-boys, practically humans.

  What did make Pogo nervous, he realized as he reached the bottom of the gorge, was the sense of the mountains looming up on either side of him. This was a sharper feeling than he suffered in the city; here, in Soder Gorge, there seemed to be nothing holding the gray granite sides of the chasm up. They could fall at any minute, burying all the Akori at the bottom of the pit, and then who would dig the bodies out? Not Trower men, who couldn’t leave their city without mewling like infants at the great expanse of sky. No one would come for them, and the Akori men would all perish beneath the stone. Pogo smoked another cigarette, and nodded at this family that they should get to work.

  Sorting through the wreckage of the fallen train car was hot, exhausting work, though at least the murderous thorny vines had died out. The indige were careful around them still, hacking the vines thoroughly before pulling them out of the car. It was unlikely that they could feed on indige blood, anyway-unlike the bright-mites that swarmed in the damp summer heat, which took sips from indige veins and then darted away, burning bright and phosphorescent blue.

  Pogo’s brothers dragged body after body before the ramo; the corpses smelled like salt and ocean water to indige noses, which made them fairly easy to find. And the maddening stench of ichor was unmistakable-how the Trower men could tolerate it was one more thing that Pogo would never understand. As the bodies were placed before him, Pogo checked their faces, if they were undamaged, or checked on his list of identifying marks if they were. He then spoke a short invocation to whomever might be the house guardian of these men. It was troubling to try to do this without knowing the spirit’s name, but was better than letting them go into the next life with no chance at all for a family, even if heathen Trower men didn’t know it. Perhaps they would prefer to be buried in a crypt somewhere, or set on fire; Pogo didn’t know how the Trower men cared for their dead, but if he was to supervise, he would do his best to see them safely onwards.

  By sunset, the indige were thoroughly exhausted, sweating silver bullets that hissed when they struck the hot rocks and smelled like vinegar. All of the names on Pogo’s list were accounted for. He had insisted that the men keep looking for a while, just to satisfy his sense of completeness. He was about to call them in when a boy of sixteen ran up to him.

  The boy had tattoos that indicated he was a Thoron from a Chapel Street Household: stylized seabirds and the double-eagle that the Trowthi-men used to mark their churches. He began speaking at once. “Ramo, ramo! I’ve found another-”

  “Hap!” Pogo interrupted. He held up his hand.

  The boy bowed his head, ashamed. “Forgiveness, ramo. I am Gad ada Sho, of Clan Thoron, Second Chapel Street Household, third son of Sorine Thoron, second cousin of Aran Akori. My father was Darag Thoron of…I do not know his household. He was born in the homeland, and died before I knew him.”

  “You are welcome, cousin. Many of our people have never known the households of Daeagea, there is no shame. What have you found?”

  “Another body, sir. In a crevice in the rocks.” He pointed to the south.

  Pogo looked at his list, then thought fondly of the meal that would be waiting for him at home. This man was not on the list, surely the Trowers don’t care about him? But then he thought of a nameless corpse, whose spirit was trapped in rotting flesh because no one had informed its ancestors of its death, and sighed. “Show me, boy.”

  Gad Thoron led Pogo close to the walls of the gorge, far from the shattered traincar, to a black crack in the rocks that was just taller than a man.

  “What were you doing in here?” Pogo asked him.

  “Ah,” the boy said. “Forgiveness, ramo. It was hot, and I thought I would steal a few moments in the cool shade.” He reached in to the dark, and heaved out a naked and badly-damaged body.

  Pogo looked at this corpse. It was covered in black and purple contusions, and suffered from a kind of shapelessness indicating that many of its bones were broken. It was male, certainly, and very, very white. It had been a big man, with a barrel chest, thick legs, and broad shoulders. Its face was gone entirely, chewed off by animals, perhaps, no eyes or teeth apparent. There were livid red blotches on its skin where blood had pooled.

  “How did he get in here?” Pogo wondered. “Could he have fallen from the train?”

  “He must have been pushed in, ramo,” said the boy. “He was far
inside. There is blood still on the walls, you can smell the salt. It cannot have been long ago.”

  “Someone must have done it, and taken his clothes as well. Hup. Well. I will invoke his ancestors, then you can put him with the others.”

  “Yes, ramo,” the boy said.

  “Ancestors of what was once this man,” Pogo said, not bothering to call out. If the Trower ancestors could not at least hear him this far away from their city, then they were likely to be thoroughly useless. “Sons of Gorgon and Demogorgon. Here is the soul of your child. I do not know if he was good or wicked, but if you have watched him, please reward or punish him accordingly. Set a place for him at your table, or, if he was wicked, find degrading work for him to perform among the many wicked and disloyal children that you likely already have.”

  Pogo nodded to the Thoron boy, who proceeded to drag the new corpse to the pile of corpses already recovered. Pogo decided that the day’s labors were finished, and he called a halt. The men gathered downwind of the bodies, and passed around a jug of brandy and djang while they waited for the airship to return.

  When it did float back into sight-looking at this distance for all the world like a great fish that, unaware of the divide between ocean and sky, had simply swum up towards the clouds-the coroner on board refused to come down. He called down to Pogo to ask if he was sure of the identification-forgetting that he’d actually assigned this task to Pogo’s cousin, or else not being able to effectively distinguish between indige. The ramo couldn’t hold this against him; without thorough description, Pogo had a hard time telling Trower men apart.

  “We’ve found them all, yes,” Pogo called up.

  “Good. Burn it then.”

  “What?” Burn the list? Or burn the bodies?

  The coroner waved at the pile of bodies. “They dead. Burn. Phlogiston.”

  Pogo shrugged; he and his family covered the many corpses with sticky blue phlogiston, and set it alight.

  Thirty-Five

  “Okay, hold this. Hold it tight, okay?” Skinner said. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Mummy,” Jaine Akori said. She was six, and clever, but much more proficient at Indt than she was at Trowthi. “Aikiat da aga da’an?”

  “Mummy what?” Skinner asked, holding Jaine’s hand closed around the stack of hundred-crown notes. She had decided to keep only two hundred from her first payment from Emilia Vie-Gorgon. She suspected that, now that the assassination attempt had failed, and now that Skinner could identify Emilia as being involved, the second payment would not be forthcoming.

  “Bring to mummy,” Jaine said. “Jana agad. Osheed?”

  “Osheed is right, honey,” Skinner replied. Eight hundred crowns would take the Akori a long way, and two hundred might be enough to give Skinner a head start, at least. She had no illusions about what would happen now. “And what do you tell mummy?”

  Jaine obediently recited the message Skinner had given her. “Thank. You. Very. Much. From. Miss. Skinner.”

  “And if she asks where I went?”

  “You had to go. To be safe. You can’t come back.”

  “And?”

  “Uhmmm. Don’t follow!”

  “Good girl.” Skinner patted her on the head. “You wait here for mummy to get home, okay?”

  “Okay! Where are you going?”

  Skinner shrugged. “I don’t know. But even if I did know, I don’t think it would be a good idea to tell you.” The girl said nothing. “Though I guess I could probably tell you, and it wouldn’t matter that much. Never mind. Wait here for mummy, okay? And make sure you give her the money. Okay?”

  “Gan. Okay!”

  Skinner left the house in Bluewater for the last time. It was, as to be expected in Trowth during the summer, raining. Not the razor-sharp jags of calcium that would rattle on the roofs in late summer, fortunately, but a steady, warm rain that, if not for the stifling humidity, would have been quite pleasant. Rain clattered on slate roofs and cobblestones and had soaked her through to her socks in a few moments.

  The truth was that Skinner didn’t know, at all, where she would go. She didn’t have any friends left in the city and now the trains were all closed down, so she couldn’t even go back to her family if she wanted to. As a woman alone, she couldn’t rent lodgings except in the most dismal and dangerous of locales, and she wasn’t sure how to find those anyway. But she absolutely could not stay with the Akori.

  It’s not that she doubted that Emilia Vie-Gorgon could get to her without any collateral damage. Killing an emperor was one thing; killing an unemployed knocker living in a ghetto with a family of immigrants was something altogether different. It’s just that Skinner wasn’t fully certain that Emilia would bother not causing collateral damage. After all, wouldn’t a bomb serve to disguise who the target was? Anonymous bombs obscured even their own intentions. Was it to kill a person? To cripple the gendarmerie? To strike out against the Empire, or against the indige?

  The very thought made Skinner wonder just how much Emilia had been involved in the other attacks. It was hard to say, because what little Skinner knew of it had only come from the broadsheets-and one could fully rely on the papers to exaggerate outrageously whatever scant details they managed to get a hold of-but the thought had accompanied a mounting terror. If Emilia was involved, the extremity of her willingness to do harm was staggering. Commissioning a scandalous play was almost absurdly childish compared to what the Vie-Gorgon girl was capable of.

  And Skinner knew that Emilia was involved in the assassination attempt. There was no way that she would permit Skinner to live.

  Skinner let her telerhythmia rattle along the walls as she found her way towards the heart of Trowth. She knew that people often confused the sound of telerhythmia with the sound of a heavy rain, but no knocker had difficulty sorting them out. The telerhythmia was clearly sharper and crisper, the echoes jumped out at the ear and snagged attention in a way raindrops didn’t. She made her way through mostly deserted streets, guided by her preternatural senses, until she came to the cramped doorway that led to Backstairs Street.

  Backstairs might have actually been a street at one point, a short connecting alley between a courtyard and Watchmaker’s Close perhaps, but once Irwin Arkady had catastrophically changed the topography of Trowth, someone had had the bright idea to build a staircase here. What Backstairs had been called before it was a stairway was a piece of information lost to the abysms of history and apathy. Skinner paused at the top of the stair, stretched her clairaudience down its length. She heard nothing but the labored breathing of a far-off transient and the omnipresent drip of water and leaking pipes.

  The Arcadium wasn’t the best choice, it was just her only choice. The summer meant she had little chance of freezing to death, and the sheltered tunnels would provide some protection from the worst precipitation that Trowth had to offer. All she had to worry about was catching scrave from a plague rat. Or being attacked by a vampiric foglet. Or being stabbed by a beggar. Or, obviously, being found and murdered by Emilia Vie-Gorgon’s assassins.

  But at least she wouldn’t be rained on.

  As she stood at the top of Backstairs Street and prepared to embark on her new life as a vagrant, she checked again for the footsteps that had been following her for the last half-mile. Footsteps, much like telerhythmia, jump out to a knocker’s ear; they were a sound that floated right to the surface of the world’s sea of noise. It was a mistake to try and take a knocker by surprise if you were just going to follow them. Two sets of steps, evenly-spaced. Heavy, purposeful. Booted feet, men’s feet, walking steadily towards her. Skinner reached out with her clairaudience to ascertain what she could about the men. One ground his teeth. One was smoking. Based on a man’s gait and how high above the ground his breathing was, Skinner could estimate his height. Based on the volume of his footsteps, she could guess at his weight. These men were both much bigger than she.

  “There,” one said, softly, not realizing how absurd it wa
s to whisper while Skinner was listening for him. “There she is.”

  At least, Skinner told herself, it’s not a bomb. She fled into the Arcadium.

  Pogo Akori eventually established the story of Skinner’s absence, at no small difficulty, from his sister Trine. Trine, of course, wanted to go after the Trower-woman right away. She called him a heartless monster when he said no, said his soul had turned to black filth like the soul of a Trower, that his grandfather would be ashamed of him, and offered many other colorful and cruel insults. Pogo remained philosophical on the subject. Was the Trower woman in danger? Perhaps. But it was her danger, and she would know best how to solve it. If they pursued her into the night, they would likely do more harm than good. And, after all that, Skinner had been trying not just to preserve herself, but to preserve the Akori, as well. If they followed her and were harmed, would this not make her sacrifice meaningless?

  “We will do what we can when we can,” Pogo insisted, “But we will not follow her, because she asked us not to.” And that was that.

  When a tall, rangy Trower man in a deftly-tailored but somewhat rumpled suit arrived at the Akori household later that day, Pogo was true to his word. While his family glared at the stranger, Pogo insisted in broken Trowthi that no, only indige lived here. No one named Elizabeth Skinner. No Trower women at all. The man believed him, or seemed to, and his face took on a disappointed air as a consequence. He offered his apologies and left them with a pamphlet that he had drawn from a pocket inside his coat.

  Pogo Akori, in order to improve his command of the Trowthi language, spent a great deal of time reading, and this practice had given him a keen hunger for words-a hunger that had only sharpened since the day that the Emperor had shut down all of the presses. Maybe the stranger was a murderer, but Pogo had sent him on his way with no clues as to Skinner’s whereabouts; he considered his obligation discharged, and so there was no point in not enjoying the chance to read.