Mr. Stitch

by Chris Braak

  “Will, shit,” Egg knelt down and groped for the body of his partner. He felt the man who was now very still, and very limp. “Now you’ve done it,” Egg said. “Now-agh!” White-hot pain lanced through his shoulder as something sharp broke his skin, and something horribly foreign entered into his body. “Fuck!” He screamed and twisted, taking the blade with him, slapping at it with his free hand.

  It was definitely a sword, a slender sword jammed nearly to its hilt in the muscle underneath his armpit. He swung his good arm out and, by what could have only been blind luck, struck human flesh. “Got you!” He shouted grabbing the thrashing body and finally getting a hold of a wrist. It was the woman, he was sure of it. “Got you, you fucking cunt bitch. I’m going to break your god-damn-” sharp pain in his cheek; Egg let go instinctively and clapped his hand to his face. He tasted blood, trickling into his mouth. “Fuck, did you just fucking bite me?”

  Another wave of knocking echoes obscured the sound of her movements. Egg, blinded by rage now as well as darkness, stumbled to his feet and took off down the alley, where he imagined his quarry must have fled. He ignored the pain in his face, ignored even the distractingly-uncanny sense of the sword embedded under his arm. His calm unflappability gone, Egg barreled into the dark, towards that blue light, surrounded by the haze of knocking.

  Egg skidded to a halt beneath the blue phlogiston lantern, which illuminated only a frustratingly small circle in the otherwise pitch black Arcadium. “Where the shit are you?” He shouted.

  “Here, idiot,” a woman’s voice called from some distance way. He could just distinguish her silhouette. “Are you coming, then? Or did you prefer to stay here and bleed?”

  The wounded man roared again and charged towards her like an angry bull, his imagination momentarily flush with images of the tortures that he’d inflict on the stupid, skinny little knocker when he got his hands on her. He was so angry, in fact, that he did not notice that the shape he was charging towards, which did indeed seem to be resolving into the shape of a woman, didn’t seem to be moving in the face of his advance. He also didn’t notice that she seemed to be illuminated not by phlogiston at all, but by the vague, watery yellow light from a full moon half-eclipsed by clouds.

  He didn’t notice any of those things; all he noticed was that the woman was nearly in reach, and that his desire to crush her neck with her bare hands was irresistibly strong. Consequently, he was surprised when, at the very last moment, she spun away from him, and he staggered out into the moonlight. He slipped and nearly fell, caught himself at the last second with a hand on the stone wall.

  Egg looked out to see that he was standing on a ledge, ten feet above the Stark, which roiled cold and swift beneath him. She was leading us back to the river, he thought, just as a heavy weight crashed into his back. He lost his balance and fell, face-first, towards the dark water. Bitch, he thought again, as the cold water hit him and the current dragged him along to knock him senseless among the rocks.

  Elizabeth Skinner stepped back away from the ledge. She was sorry about losing her sword, but there was little for it now, she knew, as she made her way back to retrieve her shoes.

  Thirty-Eight

  If the sun was up, Beckett didn’t know it. His eyes suffered a new time and a new universe; even the blind eye could see in this weird new world, that shimmered beneath a light that seemed to come from somewhere in the depths of his own skull. Past and present had come together in a still picture that showed all moments as one moment. The flow of time had collapsed like a bridge above a river, leaving only a jumble of steel and concrete, sinking into the depths without order or context. Gone was the menace of the desiccated Dragon Princes and in its place a strange pastiche of memory and conjecture. Kaarcag towered to his left, the red brick fortress-city atop a mountain that grew above Trowth and reached out towards the moon and the black shapes that crawled across its surface. The royal palace roiled to the right, a bubbling congeries of towers and arches and buttresses. Beckett seemed to see not just the palace itself, but the palace as it was when it was first built, and simultaneously every version and variation that had existed since then. They displaced each other, fought for prominence in his eyes, and all the while beneath the palace rumbled the Clock, the grand ticking Clock, the inexorable grinding spinning whirling Clock that governed all of Trowth with its immutable predictability.

  Beckett found that he could look back down the Royal Mile and see his childhood there, spread out in crystal-clear relief. His father dying, eyes red and nose bleeding because of the blood fever. His mother wept, her loss eternal. His first day of work in the factory where he breathed in the aerosol fluxion that had poisoned him. The day he first joined the Royal Marines.

  The slaughter that was the Kaarcag Expedition crawled up the imaginary hill that led to that stone city. Muzzle flashes were frozen spots of bright white light; clouds of smoke rose from the men’s guns who, trapped in the amber of Beckett’s memory, had no hope of eluding the brain-dead dummies that fell upon them. Beckett’s ship floated on the mirror stillness of the bay, where Sergeant Garrett was endlessly torn apart from the inside by those chimerstric vines.

  The vines crawled from the water and up to the elevated train tracks, where Beckett could see the shattered coach from the royal train, could see himself paused in the middle of his desperate lunge across the broken tracks above the Soder Pass. Beckett saw himself stabbed above the Stark, saw himself falling into the icy river, saw himself pulled from it by strange figures. He saw Anonymous John and his sickening blank visage everywhere; above the river, on the bay, at the factories. He saw him peering out of windows and looking down from ledges, saw him lurking in back alleys and beneath the streets. Anonymous John moved, but was only the faceless tool of another guiding hand.

  The gendarmerie exploded, a flower of shimmering silvery light, like the northern aurora, a pulse of pure unearthly dream emanating from a muddy, filthy stone cocoon. The daemonomaniac, horribly contorted in the basement of the Raithower House, which was somehow still whole but turned in such a way that both inside and outside were visible at once, and also not whole, but burning blue and red, a fountain of fire frozen in winter. In the city center a column of white light struck out against the sky, the explosion of the Excelsior, a shockwave of irreality preceded from it, turning lungs to glass and causing strange sculptures of still ashes. It was echoed in the distant mountains by light and avalanche, the launch of its twin the Montgomery. Men in boiled-leather breastplates fought with snaggletooth sharpsies, held aloft above Vlytze Plaza by time out of joint; some leaping, some thrown from their feet by the detonation of the translation engine. And always, that same hand was visible.

  The road he walked looped back around itself, took him in circles around the city, or else it took him through his life which circled around itself, manipulated and transformed by that merciless hand. How much of his life was managed in this way? How much of the life of the city was under this invisible sway? How much of the Empire?

  Where the sun rose in the east was an empty square, awash in the sunlight of the First of Summer, devoid of the Emperor and the crowds who would hear his invocation. Above it, or behind it, or before it was that same square, packed with men to hear the Emperor ban the printing presses and cripple the flow of information that was the lifeblood of the city. Only there still was information, pamphlets and documents and quartos everywhere, they fluttered in the sky like snowflakes or flocks of birds, cartwheeling above Beckett’s head, suspended before his eyes. They were papers about heresies, about chimerstry and daemonomania and oneiristry. They were seditious pamphlets about the Emperor’s tyranny and how loyal citizens must raise their hands against him. One was a play about a man who thought he was only doing good but who had himself become a tyrant and a monster, and who was still guided by that omnipotent omnipresent hand.

  At the end of the road the two grand statues of Gorgon and Demogorgon stood, old and new images superimposed atop one another-no
w they were worn beyond recognition, now rendered in exquisite detail, two vast figures decked in armor but they were not men at all, not indige or sharpsie, but something else, something strange, something incomprehensibly alien. They were gone, empty space where statues once stood, and they returned, all points along the timeline existing at once.

  Some small part of Beckett’s mind was lucid somehow, despite the shock and the staggering amount of drugs he had imbibed. It was sure that he had gone quite permanently mad, that the rest of his mind was damaged beyond repair and would never be quite the same again. And it wondered how even the least among the daemonomaniacs could withstand even the barest touch of the infinite mind of the Daemon, the omniscient but unthinking mind that knew every speck of dust, every atomie of the universe. Sublimation into the aethyr would be a mercy.

  Gorgon and Demogorgon stepped aside as Beckett approached, or else the road widened as he came near the palace and forced them apart, or else they had never truly been there in the first place. Beckett walked or stumbled, he could not say which-perhaps he floated, buoyed along by the strangeness that burned in his veins-through the main square which now was crowded with open faces that looked upon him with concern. Was it now? He was not sure but supposed it must have been. Hundreds of faces looked at him, and scattered among them were those hideously flesh-colored spots of blankness that were Anonymous John.

  Beckett ignored them and no man made a move to stop him. He wondered at this only briefly, until the lucid flash in the back of his mind pointed out that he still carried his gun in one hand, and had somehow regain his coroner’s shield, which he now waved about. Men fell away like water before the prow of a ship and Beckett wandered as in a dream up the stairs and into the galleries that surrounded the square. These were meant for diplomats and advisors, ministers and members of parliament, the wealthy scions of Esteemed Families, but no one tried to eject him from these honored rooms. He ignored the moustached men in their clean suits, cavorting with their wives and mistresses. Ignored the Crabtree-Daiors and the Rowan-Czarneckis and the Wyndam-Crabtrees, the Daior-Vies and the Ennering-Vies and the Rowan-Vies. Sadness may have touched his face as he passed by the Vie-Gorgons, a sympathy for their mutual loss; even through his delirium, Beckett felt the bitter sting in his heart still when he thought of Valentine, saw Raithower House a frozen eruption in the midst of the city, but the old man was consumed now.

  Consumed with the desire to see the source of that strange hand, consumed by the need to follow the sound of turning gears, the gears of the great royal Clock that thundered beneath him, the gears that turned in the heads of men and women, the gears that grew louder and faster and more frenetic, more dangerously swift, the deadly high-pitched whine of a machine on the brink of self-destruction. Beckett staggered, bereft of any more personal will, carried instead by the aggregate power of his visions, into a private gallery with no chairs, only a low table on which sat singed folders filled with clippings from the broadsheets. A gallery that looked out upon the podium where the Emperor, against all tradition, would offer his Invocation three days after the first day of summer. A gallery where Beckett found the mind made of turning gears that was behind it all, behind every movement of the cities innumerable tiny cogs.

  The source of the horrors he had seen, men murdered, destroyed by heresy and science, all designed and directed by a cold, dead hand. The monster that had seized the Empire by the throat. The thing that owned the name, the last name signed in the Black Library’s book.

  Mr. Stitch.

  Thirty-Nine

  Some five hundred years before the present day, during the first Gorgon-Vie dynasty, Owen II Gorgon-Vie officially broke from the Goetic Church at Canth, and established himself as the First Voice of the Church Royal. This new church was identical to the old church in virtually all respects, save two fairly significant ones: the first was that Owen II had the final say on all matters of theological discussion within the Trowth Empire; the second was that the many tithes that had previously been sent to the Holy Convocus of Canth would now be sent directly to the royal treasury. It was a very controversial arrangement, and the only person that could be said to be thoroughly pleased with the situation was Owen II himself, who was now both temporal and spiritual Emperor, and required to answer to no higher authority but the divine Word itself.

  This arrangement was scandalous, outrageous, and completely unacceptable to the many Esteemed Families, yet, peculiarly, none of them saw fit to change the policy when their own scions had control of the Imperial Throne. So, the Emperor’s position as head of both church and state persisted well into the present day, where it formed the basis of the Coroners’ authority to pursue and execute heretics-ever since that venerable branch of the royal guard was established by Adelwulf Vie-Gorgon and Mr. Stitch a hundred years prior.

  The Emperor had very few specific duties in his position as de facto Convocus, leaving most questions of grammar and the Word to the Subvocum of Vie Abbey. He did, however, appear once every year on the first of summer (or later, in the case of repeated assassination attempts-a situation that occurred, perhaps, more often than might be thought healthy), to deliver the Invocation to the people of Trowth.

  By tradition, any free citizen was permitted to attend the Invocation, and hear the Emperor bless the city and the Empire, calling for the favor of Divine Providence on himself and therefore, by extension, his people. Though some emperors were more public figures than others, all emperors must, at some time, present themselves for the Invocation.

  Even William II Gorgon-Vie, outrageous tyrant that he was, did not dare risk Divine Disharmony by banning the public from this most sacred of events. He permitted the citizenry-men and women dressed in their finest clothes (some clothes, obviously, were finer than others), indige and trolljrmen, even a scattering of therians filled the square, blessed themselves, looked up to the balcony from which the emperor would appear. As was custom, even the beggars were permitted inside the palace walls for this, which was how a sickly old man, dressed in rags and with a matted, disgusting beard-a man who smelled very much like he’d spent time rolling in an open sewer-was permitted into the crowd that gathered before the Emperor.

  William II Gorgon-Vie’s one break from tradition was a concession to security-twenty-five Lobstermen, on guard, encircling the square and looking down on it from the galleys above. They each carried a long-pin rifle, and eyed the crowd with ichor-envigorated eyes, fully prepared to gun down anyone that behaved suspiciously. It was generally felt, among the Emperor’s advisors, that this concession should be sufficient.

  Elijah Beckett, Detective-Inspector of the Royal Coroners, was having trouble understanding very much of anything that was happening anymore. He heard gears, spinning so fast that he was sure they must soon fly apart. And he saw Mr. Stitch, the grotesque, undead giant, standing as devoid of expression as a statue. But he somehow saw Mr. Stitch outside of time now-Mr. Stitch at once here, the architect of the murder and mayhem that had dogged the city for a year, and Mr. Stitch in the past. The Mr. Stitch that had founded the Coroners, the one that had engineered the Dragon Isles expedition, why? At this weird remove, divorced from his own present senses, the long arc of Stitch’s planning became, if not obvious, more clear.

  If a man needs an army to fight heresy, he starts by finding men who have been hurt by it. And if he cannot find men who have been hurt by heretic science, he makes them. A simple solution, almost elegant, if morally repugnant. A kind of point A to point C solution only possible by a mind essentially unencumbered with pity or concern.

  Many things still didn’t quite make sense, and Beckett wasn’t sure if they ever would, wasn’t sure if the plan he was looking at was simply too big, too long, too intricate to reveal itself to him. Why? Why all of this? He realized a moment later that he’d asked it aloud.

  Stitch turned to him, dead muscles creaking, brass eyes fixed. “I must. Defend. The Empire.”

  “From what?” Beckett held up hi
s gun. “From what? You did this! You were the one…the one spreading heresy. The one that told Anonymous John where to get the oneiric weapons, the one that…you’re defending Trowth from yourself?”

  “No.” Stitch replied, simply. The anguish that sounded in his throat seemed more of an affectation, a byproduct of his dead lungs, than moved by real human concern. “There is. Something. Worse.” The hulking reanimate gestured out at the assembled throng, distant voices like the waves of the ocean, all unaware of the sinister mind that looked on them. “They must. Be. Ruled.”

  Beckett staggered back against the wall and sank down to the floor; his strength ebbing from his body. He wanted to spit his denial in Stitch’s teeth but he was afraid that maybe it was true. He remembered Anonymous John, telling him about the Clock that secretly governed the soul of Trowth. He thought about the byzantine bickering, the intricate waste of confusion and bureaucracy that mired him down. About the Emperor, who for all the honor of his office was little more than a clown in fancy dress, preoccupied with his mistresses, squeezing every cent, every iota of goodwill, every dram of happiness from the city. He had become a tyrant; a man that confused the expression of his power with his own ego.

  The Feathersmith pistol in Beckett’s hands was ice cold. He wondered if he were really feeling it at all, because the pain of that cold stabbed right through the numb tips of his fingers. He imagined that the gun was not cold at all, but that it had become cold to his mind, which insisted on its coldness no matter how he held it. He wondered if…the men he’d hurt…all this time, and it was never for the city, for the Empire, only some microscopic part of Stitch’s catastrophic plan. He saw the girl, Agnes Cooper, saying her prayers and weeping because of the harm her mind had suffered. Alan Charterhouse, banished from his own home because of Beckett’s swerving devotion to his duty. Dozens of heretic scientists gunned down, and for what?