Mr. Stitch

by Chris Braak

  He settled into his chair while the children shrieked and the matriarchs gossiped as they cooked, and began to leaf through the pamphlet the man had left. Pogo saw, with some surprise, that it was the script for a play.

  It was called Theocles.

  Thirty-Six

  The engine is complete. The body that Chretien has built is serviceable, at least. We have envigorated the entity earlier this evening. I can hear a faint buzzing from the engine, which I have installed in its skull. The eyes, of course, are without expression.

  And yet, I feel certain that the creature is looking at me.

  — from the journal of Harcourt Wolfram, 1785

  Beckett stalked along the streets of Trowth through the steady summer rain. Dark crevices looked back at him from beside the street, beneath which lurked the Arcadium and, he knew now, any number of attendant dangers. There were eyes, he was sure, in those dark corners, there were men waiting for him with purple dents in their foreheads, ready to scream their fervent fealty to the Dragon Princes. Crooked streets and crooked buildings loomed over his head, sometimes bedecked with the flowers and birds of the Crabtree-Daior household architecture, sometimes they were squat and square like the Gorgon-Vies’, but the most disconcerting of all were the long narrow arches and peaked roofs that belonged to the Vie-Gorgons. As Beckett walked deeper and deeper into the city, those sharp black gaps looked more and more like teeth or talons, at rest right now, but humming with a need to reach out and commit murder, as though the city were a great beast only resting lightly on its haunches to lure other, less wary cities to their destruction.

  It was too hot for his coat and Beckett had left it at home, wearing his pistol openly on his belt. He had kept the scarf wrapped around his cadaverous mouth and nose, but his empty eye socket still glared with blind menace at anyone that saw his face. He mindlessly fumbled with the empty brass cartridges in his pocket. Among them was a new cartridge, one he’d had specially made by the scientists at the Croft.

  “You’ve been using too much of the veneine,” Helmetag had told him. “We don’t know…you understand, we don’t know how it reacts to what else is in your system? This is dangerous.” But he handed the cartridge over, anyway.

  Beckett couldn’t recall quite how many doses of veneine he’d had today, and he had some vague notion that he should wait until some of the drug cleared out before he tried the new pharmacy. Not yet, he thought, not yet. There was an anxiety that had been gnawing at him, displaced by the constant rumbling of those damnable gears, and he was on his way to meet his source.

  The death of Dahran the concubine wasn’t an end, he knew that much. She’d been hired, driven by whatever noble purpose or base greed at her core, it was too late to find out now. Someone had planned the attempt and Beckett was determined to find him. The Emperor, convinced now of his safety, had rescheduled his Invocation, and would be delivering it from the palace, as planned. Beckett had less than a day to forestall another assassination attempt. It was troublesome, trying to put pieces together like this, while his head spun and whirled. The ground pitched like the floor of a ship and while Beckett knew that something was wrong, he couldn’t gather his thoughts enough to guess as to what it might be. He now did the only thing he could think of; desperately ready to try anything, he now went back to where he imagined this had all began. Just a little more information and he’d be ready.

  He clutched tight to this one thought, and it buoyed him through the messy swamp of confusion that mired his mind. There will be answers here, he thought as the city around him blurred and stretched. I will find the answer here, he insisted, as the sky fell away above him, torn away from the earth by the fall of steady rain and left to float loose and slippery high above the world. Answers. Deformed faces looked out at him, strange animals nuzzled garbage in the gutters.

  Beckett paused at the intersection of Cartwright and Galley Hill, confused. The buildings were suddenly alien to him, not the grey stone of Trowth at all but the red-brown bricks of Kaarcag-shook loose from his past by the veneine that buzzed in him-dotted with tiny windows that hid inhabitants whose nature and needs could only be guessed at. The coughing, choking sound of guns in the distance made him reach for his pistol; as he turned, he saw black basalt towers, tall and potent with nameless peril. Gears thundered and the towers stretched higher, hoisted by some invisible machine.

  We never came to Kaarcag, Beckett thought to himself as he drew his gun, We never made it up the hill. “I’ve never been here!” He shouted aloud. Gears spun, and at the same time the city was silent as the dead of night. The ground thrummed beneath him.

  “What is that?” Fletcher asked at Beckett’s side. He turned to see the young man staring blankly, as blood poured from his mouth.

  Something scurried among the narrow alleys. The silhouette of a man resolved at a bend in the road and Beckett knew without looking that he would have that hideous red-purple crease in his forehead, that place where mind and will had been removed by the Dragon Princes. “Don’t come any closer!” Beckett fired a shot off; it ricocheted with a white spark from the wall near the man’s head. “Stop!”

  More shuffling footsteps echoed from the walls behind him and now something new accompanied them-a kind of wet sucking sound, like a handful of slimy worms writhing against each other. More dummies appeared, brainless automatons, shambling from the dark corners of the world, and on top of the roofs misshapen shadows with hands like nests of leeches watched and reached out.

  Above, the constant cover of clouds and pollution had vanished, revealing a fat green moon that hung in the sky like a rotten cancer, surrounded by wicked pinpricks of white stars. Beckett fired his gun again and shoved past the dummies, as the gears in his head built to a crescendo, drowning out the sound of his own feet slapping on the cobblestones and yet not at all drowning out the sound of the footsteps that pursued him, pursued him as he ran through the streets of Kaarcag. Grim windows watched and thorny green vines roiled at his feet, lashing out at him, sharp barbs hungry for blood.

  Beckett found stairs-he didn’t know, couldn’t remember if there had been stairs at all in Kaarcag, only the trail that wound up towards the fortress-city. The red-brown stone was everywhere, stone colored by rust and blood, a city made of death and entropy, lit by the gangrenous moon. He slipped and fell, knew that he’d banged his arthritic right knee badly, but found himself so far detached from his body that he could not even feel the pain from it. He skidded down slick rust-colored stones and landed on his back with the wind knocked from him.

  He tried to move as a figure appeared before him, but found himself paralyzed. The figure was tall, inhumanly tall and thin. It wore chainmail and black robes and the peaked helmet of the old Saaghyari. Its face was a skull, empty of flesh except for a few withered scraps, dark pits where there should have been eyes, and teeth that belonged to an animal-long and sharp and gleaming white in the dark. It carried a sword in skeletal hands, a sword that it raised above its head.

  “Czarneck,” Beckett whispered.

  The Dragon Prince dissolved into smoke, taking the strange scene with it. Kaarcag was vanished, and in its place was dim, smoky, dirty Trowth. Soberly-dressed men and women stood on the sidewalks, watching Beckett as he gasped for breath and rolled to his feet. No one raised an alarm; passers-by darted sidelong glances at the fallen man, then coughed and discretely turned away. Beckett just glared at them, holstered his gun and looked up.

  Vie Abbey stood before him at the top of its hill, just as the wave of rocky architecture that was the city of Trowth began to peter out. From this distance and in the dark, it looked for all the world like a bundle of black knives, thrusting impotently into the entrenchant air. While Beckett still stumbled through the murk of his own imagination, Vie Abbey remained his one constant certainty. He staggered up the hill towards it, sure the he heard that ticking clockwork echoing in the seams where the Arcadium became the Abbey’s labyrinthine undercroft. He shoved the grammateurs asid
e as he entered, demanding to be let in to the repository of heretical texts. He waved his bronze coroner’s badge and, when that failed to produce the desired effect, waved his revolver instead. No longer interested in their permission, he pressed on, deep into the belly of the stone beast, kicking doors open when they barred his way, forcing the terrified priests to unlock them if the doors proved too sturdy. He clipped one man behind his ear with the butt of his pistol, but in the moment that he did it, he could not remember why.

  The world felt like it was slipping away, shivering on its axis, only a moment from dissolving into water and revealing some occult, terrible but truer world beneath, a septic sewer of viscous real upon which foul, miserable Trowth was a fractionally-thin skein, like an oil slick. What monstrosity lurks beneath us, that our world is but a shadow of its wickedness? Beckett ignored the grammateurs as they demanded that he swear the oath of secrecy, tuned out their shrieks as he seized the log book. The pages were practically decaying in his hands. He saw Valentine’s name at the top and for a moment saw Valentine himself, standing opposite the book, looking at him with imploring eyes.

  Imploring what, though? Vengeance? Justice? Compassion? What does a ghost want from the living world at all? The page was yellow and brittle, and Beckett understood why Valentine had never turned it. Perhaps it was the understanding that the ghost sought, for now he was gone, replaced by a bishop in splendid robes, painfully officious and furious at Beckett’s intrusion and violation of protocol. He screamed and roared, and probably threatened to excommunicate the coroner. He called for the guards, who did back away when Beckett threw his badge at them. He grabbed at the coroner’s arm, but thought better of it almost at once. Beckett ignored him, and turned the page.

  The name he saw, the last name signed before Valentine’s own, nearly stopped the old coroner’s heart. The world shattered and vanished, time became a twisted knot. Beckett’s life disappeared and he wondered then if he had known anything at all, or if he had always been groping blindly in the dark.

  That name.

  Beckett fumbled the new cartridge from his pocket, a small glass capsule, filled with a glimmering green fluid. Etherized flux. The reagent of the daemonomaniacs. He pressed it to the socket in his arm, and felt the sparking pain of heresy in his veins.

  Thirty-Seven

  Egg and his partner, (who was called Six-Fingered Will, despite having the ordinary, requisite allotment of ten digits), were not supposed to actually have to kill the woman. Their principal, who always contacted them anonymously, had assured the two thugs that they were a contingency plan, set in place only in the unlikely event that Elizabeth Skinner seemed like she was going to abandon the house in Bluewater. Whatever plan was in place, it was supposed to occur with a minimum amount of participation from Egg and Will, the go-to strongmen for the Dockside Boys.

  Plans change, however, and Egg at least was phlegmatic about unexpected events. He considered himself a kind of philosopher among hooligans, adapting to a new scenario with intellectual aplomb, ready for whatever the world might throw his way. He didn’t expect the universe to change on his behalf, is how he thought of it, and that made it easier for him to deal with the problems that necessarily beset him and his fellows.

  Six-Fingered Will was noticeably less phlegmatic. He complained bitterly when Egg insisted that Skinner was leaving the Bluewater House for good. He offered that they should give up following her, and just report back that they’d lost her. He asserted that he didn’t like the rain, and it was surely no good for his health to be wandering around in a warm summer shower. Six-Fingered Will was not the man with whom Egg would have preferred to do this job, but he adapted.

  They pursued the knocker to the entrance of Backstairs Street, and watched her cock her head to one side, like a cat.

  “There,” said Will. “There she is.”

  The woman at once disappeared into the dark down the stairs.

  “Do you think she heard us?” Will asked.

  Egg shrugged.

  “Do we really have to kill her? She’s as good as dead down there, anyway. Blind girl down in the Arcade. I heard there’s sharpsies there.”

  Egg shrugged again. He was growing less and less tolerant of Will’s complaints. “We’ll do it. Come on, it won’t take long. Hurry, before we lose her.”

  The two men jogged towards the doorway and down the stairs. They followed the sound of her footsteps-after a moment of consideration and heated argument about precisely which direction said footsteps were coming from-down one dark, covered alley, and through a curved connecting tunnel, past a bronze statue that vaguely resembled either a man on horseback, or possibly three women dancing.

  “Is she heading towards the river?” Will asked, and Egg shushed him. The soft susurrus of the Lesser Stark, one of the many small tributaries of the greater Stark, could be heard below the roads that had been built above it. Egg listened closely for the telltale sound of echoing footsteps, trying to sort them out from the random, quiet cacophony that was the sound of city life. He heard, some distance away, a sharp, precise rapping sound.

  “That way,” Egg muttered, taking them deeper into the Arcadium. He had her now, he was sure. The sound of her shoes, the rustling of her skirts, the tapping of that weird clicking noise the knockers made. He could even see her shadow flickering in the messy whorl of blue light from the phlogiston lamps. Egg slipped his hand inside his coat and took a hold of his knife.

  It wasn’t that he liked killing people, women especially. It’s that it was good money, and from an early age, Egg had realized he was good at not feeling bad about things. And since a man has to earn a living, he needs to take advantage of the assets he has available.

  “Here, what’s this?” Will said, as the two men rounded the corner. Will knelt down and drew a skirt out from a puddle of petticoats. “She’s walking around in her bloomers?”

  Egg’s eyes narrowed and he looked around. They were in a fairly large Close, with side-streets leading off in four more directions. Two of them were pitch dark, their lanterns burned out or broken by vandals.

  “She’s left her shoes, too,” Will snickered. “Maybe this won’t be such a bad time after all.”

  “Shut up,” Egg snapped. A wave of knocking swept through the close, echoing off the walls, compounding on itself until it began to sound like thunder. Will swung around wildly, imagining that the source was nearby. Egg, by coincidence, looked up at the hanging lamp that cast blue light into the Close. Its metal frame was rattling alarmingly fast; the key that controlled the phlogiston flow was shaking in its socket as the knocking grew louder-and then, abruptly, the key fell out.

  Phlogiston poured into the lamp, ignited by the filament, and exploded in a burst of blinding, blue-white light. When their vision cleared, the two men found the close almost impenetrably dark. The knocking continued, softer now, and proceeded down the alley directly ahead of them.

  “Shit,” Will muttered. “Did she do that? I didn’t know they could do that.”

  “Shut up and follow-wait…” There was a second clicking now, from the other alley. It didn’t sound quite the same…was it an echo? “Wait. We’ll split up. I’ll go down this one, you take that one. She can’t be far, not if she’s running without shoes on. She’ll cut her feet on something soon enough, and we can just follow the blood, then.”

  “Yeah,” Will said. “All right.” He muttered something under his breath and took a few steps into the dark, making him practically invisible to Egg.

  Egg set his hand along one of the stone walls and slowly made his way down the alley. He could see, at some remove, another lantern, its light a faint pinprick in the dark. A trick of the shadow and the distance made it seem to throb. “All right, miss. We know you know about us. Come along then. We don’t want to do nothing to you, you know? We’re just sent to talk. You’re going to hurt yourself, stumbling around in the dark like this.” Inwardly, he thought, Shit. He knew they’d catch her eventually-she’d s
tumble into a dead-end, or something. But the Arcadium was huge, and it could easily take all night.

  “Ow, fuck!” Will’s voice echoed off the walls.

  “What? What is it?” Egg shouted.

  Will growled wordlessly, then responded. “She’s. Ow, she fucking stabbed me. She has a knife or something. She’s here.”

  “You have her?” Egg turned around and ran back towards the entrance to the alley, heedless of the pitch darkness.

  “No, idiot. Fuck. Fucking-if I had her, wouldn’t I say I had her? She’s near here-”

  “What-” Egg began, when his ankles struck something hard. He tumbled forward, knife skittering from his hand, cracking his elbows against the stone. He slid a few paces, not quite fast enough to crack his head open on the wall opposite. “Shit! What was…” Footsteps. Bare feet slapped on the stone, just for an instant, back the way he’d come. They were obscured almost at once by another wave of sourceless knocking. “Bitch. Crafty little bitch. Will, are you all right?”

  “Yeah.” Will’s voice was close enough to startle Egg. He squinted, and could just make out the other man’s shape in the dark. “She got me good, though, right in the arm. She’s got a knife-”

  “Never mind,” Egg got to his feet. “Never mind that, we know where she is. Just follow me, all right?”

  “Right,” Will put his hand on Egg’s shoulder as they started down the alley again.

  “Here, now,” Egg called out. “That was clever. That was very clever. You could have hurt someone pretty bad with a trick like that. We aren’t mad though, are we, Will?”

  “No, we aren’t mad,” said Will. “Just come on out and we can talk about how mad we aren’t. No troub-”

  Egg felt Will’s hand disappear from his shoulder. “Will?”

  “Hrrkggk,” Will said, and the sound of a body collapsing onto cobblestones was unmistakable.