by Chris Braak
Lightning and thunder split the air, illuminating the city with eerie green light and sending Skinner’s clairaudience spinning away from the window. She could briefly make out Valentine in silhouette, staggering back from the shutters, and the shape of a man standing on the windowsill, shutters swinging behind him.
Exposure to the storm had twisted her hearing beyond recognition, the sounds from the room reached her distorted by whirling Doppler effects and synaesthetic scrambling. Was the man in the window screaming a black, oily scream? The strange echo of the thunder tried to blot her thoughts out. Were rattling heavy hard sounds thunder, gunshots, thunder…? Why can’t… the thunder strangely struck her ears…why can’t I think . . . green light and a strange man standing before a city beneath a storm of madness, and that awful thunder pounding at the inside of her mind…
“Skinner?” Valentine’s voice was quiet and close. A brief flicker of red accompanied it, and was gone.
“What…” she gasped. She was lying on her back on the cot, and immediately bolted upright. “The man, we’ve got…he’s trying to get in…”
Valentine’s hands were firm on her shoulders. “He’s gone. It’s all right, he’s gone.”
“What . . . ?”
“You fainted, Skinner. You’ve been unconscious for an hour.”
“Fainted…what happened? The man?”
“He…it. I think it…I shot it, Skinner. Four times. It didn’t even notice. Like I was shooting smoke. I think it would have killed me if…”
“What? Damn it, Valentine, what happened?”
“The psychestorm. It was struck by lightning. I saw it fall three stories to the courtyard, and then run off towards New Bank.”
Skinner shook her head and began to relax. She began shivering, suddenly, and nausea welled up inside of her. “I… what was…” The shivering got worse, as her body finally found the time to be frightened.
She felt Valentine’s arms wrap around her, and she wanted to smack him. But they were warm and comforting, so she let him get away with it. He was shivering, too.
Nineteen: The Hospital
Skinner was in his dream again, and he could see the white, smooth curve of her hip. He reached out to touch her skin with invisible fingertips, but they weren’t transparent; they were missing, and the fades crept along his fingers as he moved so that his hands were disappearing as they approached her body and his arm sank away into nothing up to his elbow at her hip…
Beckett awoke, to find himself surrounded by white. He was in a white bed, with white curtains, and, for some reason, wearing white pajamas. The pain was gone from his limbs, and the cotton that the veneine packed around his head was absent. He got to his feet, and pulled the curtains aside.
Beyond the white curtains, Beckett saw row after row of white-curtained beds. He heard a voice: a low, muttering voice growled behind the white. Beckett approached, and he could begin to make out words. Another few steps, and he could clearly hear a strange glossolalia whispered in a harsh, tormented tone, obscured by the white curtains which were stirred by a gentle, hidden breeze.
The man said, “. . . and if I walked by icy walls of warring wisdom, cracked by the simple discipline of psychic strangeness, all the stone attractors of that ancient emblem of the world, that screaming tower of melted bronze…”
Beckett snatched the curtain away, to see the man whose voice he heard.
There was a terrifying moment of disorientation when Beckett awoke again, as his mind tried to identify his surroundings: not his home, not his cot at the office, not the cell he’d been locked in, where was he? He tried to move his arms, but found he could not, and a kind of strangled panic pushed past the haze of waking. He desperately tried to move, to do something, to find a weapon that he could use, even to lift his arms, to turn his head, but his muscles weren’t responding.
After a moment, his brain accepted the fact that he was in a new place and began, in the meticulous fashion of which Beckett’s mind was eminently capable, to catalogue the details.
There were not many. He was undressed, on a small bed with clean sheets. By his head was a wall with large, square stones and dirty white mortar. At three sides of his bed hung white muslin curtains. Beckett felt very, very heavy, and the pain of his illness had returned. Mercifully, the veneine buzzed warmly in his mind, and kept the sharp, shattered-glass aches in his joints far away.
Slowly, as the last shreds of disorientation were banished, Beckett found that he could move. He began by clenching his hands and fingers, which cracked loudly in the silence, then by flexing his elbows and knees, which also creaked and cracked. There was a stabbing pain in his right knee, but it was brief and vanished quickly.
Beckett’s body shook as he climbed out of bed. He recognized the fatigue in his stomach muscles as being the product of extensive vomiting, and tried to remember when he’d engaged in something like that. Withdrawal had riddled recent memories with holes, but given that, Beckett supposed it fairly likely that he’d been sick repeatedly. The quivering in his arms and legs was familiar, and usually meant he hadn’t had enough to eat.
He managed to find clean clothes—not his—folded up under his bed: a white shirt and a grey suit. Beckett dressed and threw the white curtain aside. He found himself surrounded by beds similarly partitioned to his own, an eerie reflection of his dream. Judging by the silence, the beds were either empty or filled with sleeping men or women. There was a quality, an emptiness, to the silence, though, that suggested the former.
A sound sprang suddenly in the quiet: a low, faint muttering, emanating from one of the beds. Warily, with an unpleasantly strong sense of déjà vu, Beckett approached the mumbling. He had a sudden, irrational fear of being trapped forever in an infinite cycle of white curtains, muttering voices, and sudden jolts into wakefulness.
Beckett pulled the curtain aside, and saw a man sitting on a low, iron-framed bed, his knees pulled up to his chest. The man had a haggard face, with wide, bloodshot eyes. His hair was graying, and some great terror had etched its lines into his face so that fear was stamped perpetually on his brow.
The man was speaking. “. . . did the sun rise over cracked peaks and great glass mountains, far away on the edge of the moon, where black basalt cities crawl slowly in the dark, and red teeth clutch wearily at hollow-eyed men…”
“You’ve seen them?” Beckett asked. His voice was hushed; awe had pressed it to a whisper. “The cities on the moon?”
The man’s strange verbal emission halted. He turned his terrible, red, staring eyes on Beckett, and said nothing.
“Tell me. Tell me if you’ve seen them.” Beckett lunged forward and grabbed the man by his shirt. “The cities on the moon, the towers of brass,” he screamed, “You’ve seen them, haven’t you? Tell me!”
The man worked his jaw, and Beckett could see that his tongue was black. “Are my eyes open?” The man asked. “Is this awake, to see the other side of eyes and dreams, where the world is pulled away by the wild whirling weary ways of wretched infamy…”
Beckett felt a heavy hand on his shoulder, and heard a voice that was impossibly deep, a bass rumble that made his bones shiver. “Dream poisoning.”
The coroner turned, and came to face a great trolljrman, his thin lips curled back over tombstone teeth, black eyes glittering dispassionately. “He is sick,” the trolljrman went on, in that stomach-churning basso. He spoke without moving his lips; the trolljrmen used a complex web of membranes in their throats to mimic human sounds. “He suffers from dream poisoning. Oneiristry.”
Oneiristry was a science forbidden by the Church Royal, and under other circumstances Beckett would have questioned the sick man’s exposure to it. Instead, he found himself preoccupied with what the man was saying. “He told me about towers,” Beckett said. “There’s something familiar about it.”
The trolljrman shook its great, reptilian head. Its feathered crest rose and sank in a gesture of dismissiveness. “There is no sense,” it rumbled. “He speaks w
ords he knows, over and over, without reason.” Because it had no lips, the trolljr had to make “r” sounds with its tongue. The word came out “uhdeason.”
“I had a dream about him,” Beckett said. “Just now. I dreamt I heard him speaking.”
The trolljrman nodded. “His dreams,” this sounded like “duhdeams.” The trolljrman gently but firmly guided Beckett away from the bed and into the room. “His dreams are wounded. Bleeding. We must keep him away from others. But your…” The trolljrman hesitated, and rumbled something in its deep, nearly-subsonic language. “Clutch-father? War-father? Captain.” It seemed satisfied with this word choice. “Your captain wanted you somewhere private.”
That must have been Mr. Stitch. Beckett tried desperately to remember what chain of events had brought him here, but it was all just black. The previous . . . hours? Days? “How long have I been here?”
“You have slept for twelve hours.”
That wasn’t especially long, but Beckett did not relish the idea that he was losing time on his investigation. Flashes of the last day bloomed from the dark. Valentine and Skinner were going to go to the address in Old Bank. Had they found anything? And what was Stitch up to? “I have to go. I have to get to Raithower House. Where am I anyway? What is this place?”
“Ghahat Dhu Hospice. We are in North Ferry, but I cannot let you leave.”
Ghahat Dhu was a tolljr brood-mother, and known throughout the city as a surpassing surgeon, among a species whose capacity for surgery was held to be miraculous. “I’m fine, really.” Beckett’s knees wobbled dangerously. “I just need something to eat. I’m in the middle of an investigation, I have to go.”
“No,” the trolljrman thundered. “It is dangerous—”
“—just give me my gun—”
“There is a psychestorm.” The trolljrman showed Beckett out of the dream-sick man’s room, and into a small parlour. Its walls had tall windows cut in them that were now covered with burnished copper shutters, and it was furnished with a few stuffed chairs and a small table on which rested a covered dish. A sweet, spicy smell wafted to Beckett’s nose, and his stomach growled. He was suddenly conscious of how very hungry he was.
The veneine addict walks a fine line through his sensorium. Too much of the drug shrouds the mind and eyes and skin with thick cotton. It’s warm and it mutes the pain, but it divorces the man from himself and the world, eventually leading the mind away to that strange, other destination that lurked at the extremity of fang. Less veneine enables a man to feel, to keep his mind sharp, to stay in touch with the world, but it also leaves him vulnerable to the constant, intolerable anguish of his life.
This was the line that Beckett vacillated across as he sat down to his meal. There was just enough veneine to keep his joints from aching, but not quite enough to keep him divorced from himself. The terrible enormity of what he faced, of a murder he couldn’t solve, a city gutted of its youth and industry, racial tensions that were threatening to explode, of the rest of his life—a few long years gradually being eaten away by his disease—settled on his shoulders like a mountain. The soft tissue around his eyes shriveled and his breath caught. It was too much. He wanted to sit, to lie down, to weep, to tear his ravaged face from his skull. It was too much.
Beckett imagined just staying at the hospice. He could stay there and find a bed among the other sufferers of the fades—mostly children and young men and women who’d spent too long in the workhouses refining flux—their faces hideous and patched with blood and gristle and bone looking out from the inside, their skins turning transparent even as the broken-glass pain of the sickness ate away their organs from within. They would give him veneine and he would sleep a blissful sleep, troubled only by occasional glimpses of Cross the Water.
Thirty years, he thought. Thirty years of service. No one could say he didn’t deserve it. No one could say that Elijah Beckett had been anything other than absolutely dedicated to the Crown, though he’d never been given a medal, never seen any reward but the simple satisfaction of having a job and doing it well. He had earned the right to spend his last remaining years (how many? Two? Three?) in a quiet, narcotic stupor. If three decades of indefatigable determination didn’t bestow upon a man the right to give up, then what did? How much more could the Crown expect from him?
Beckett’s breath came in ragged gasps and tears, he realized, were streaming from his eyes as he collapsed into the chair. Hours without a drop of fang had left him vulnerable, and now the utter hopelessness, the meaninglessness of his time of service had forced its way into his mind. Despair, now a housebreaker, burgled him of the last bit of energy that had kept him on his feet.
Done. This was the only thought left behind. Done, and an image of himself, warm and safe and full of drugs, gently letting go of those last few ties that kept him connected to his city. Like the corona of a dying star, all that was left of Beckett boiled away, a brief flare, then nothing but cold, dark iron.
This iron was the essential core of Beckett’s being: hard, brittle, unyielding. As the years had passed by, the old coroner had found himself giving up more and more of all of the peculiar idiosyncrasies that delineate a man who lives a life from a man who simply has one. Again and again, in the face of terrible threats to his homeland, it had been only Beckett’s unflagging tenacity that stood between life and death. Even as he realized he didn’t believe in heresy, even as he came to learn that his efforts mattered little to the Empire, he remained tenacious.
So it was out of the habit of personality more than anything else that Beckett clamped down on his despair. He gritted his teeth and took a deep breath, and pushed it all away. No. He clenched and unclenched his fists. No. He closed his eyes and bit his tongue. No. There’s work to do. With an act of will so long habitual that its extraordinary power was forgotten, an act that Beckett had become so accustomed to that he had no real inkling of the strength it took, or what it cost him, the old coroner willfully seized upon his despondency and cast it out from his mind.
He looked up at the trolljrman, who had remained an expressionless spectator to Beckett’s existential crisis. “Do you have paper? A pen?”
The trolljrman flicked its crest in a gesture of assent, and then glided ponderously out of the room. Beckett’s stomach growled, more insistently this time, and so he regarded the covered dish on the table before him. Beneath the cover he found a game hen, cooked in the fashion of Corsay mudlark; it was stuffed with fruit and pepper.
Beckett took the small knife and fork provided for him, and set about devouring his food with a less miraculous but no less vital act of will; in what would surely be an insult to the meal’s cook, Beckett did not at all notice the subtle interplay between mango, Corsay djang fruit, and white pepper.
Twenty: Charterhouse’s Dilemma
While the psychestorm raged across Trowth, Alan Charterhouse sat in his room, on his bed, shuddering while his mind slowed back down to normal speed, after being virtually consumed with the obsessions that mathematics represented to him. It was not an altogether uncommon phenomenon that, as he worked, the essential details, the basic needs of daily life, should fall out of his perceptions until every spark of delicately functioning neurological machinery was devoted solely to theory.
There was a bowl of soup sitting on his nightstand. It was cold, but as Alan looked at it, he realized he was so hungry that he didn’t care. He slurped it down, and considered what he’d found. He was, firstly, sure that he’d inadvertently invented a new kind of dimensional analysis—he’d had to in order to effectively get his head around a tricky couple of equations that he’d seen in Zindel’s notes. He was secondly sure, beyond the barest shadow of the tiniest doubt, that he was dealing with heretical science. He’d been deep into discovering precise mathematical rules for leaving the four walls of nature and leaving the language of the Word behind. It was unquestionably wrong, it was dangerous, it was blasphemous. The horror, formerly displaced by the power of his obsessive intellect, was no
w beginning to seep in.
Alan Charterhouse had, with Herman Zindel’s help, found the cracks in the edges of the world, and they terrified him. There was a whole, second universe, separated from his own by no more than the breadth of an atom, yet so far away it might as well be on the other side of the moon. And the rules that this second universe followed...Alan wasn’t even sure there were any rules to it. It could simply be a place of utter, squalid chaos, where nothing like light, matter, or life could survive.
Worse than all of this was the third thing that he had discovered about Herman Zindel’s equations. They were a schematic, he was sure of it now, for a theoretical translation engine that was manifestly different from the Excelsior’s. But there was something else, something that had been bothering him since he’d first glimpsed the formulae in Zindel’s house.
Thunder rumbled outside and echoed in his mind, echoed. The Charterhouse home had good, solid copper shutters and copper insulation in the walls, but still, the eerie insanity of the psychestorm tended to seep in, thunder echoing strangely. Alan Charterhouse rubbed his eyes. His heart fluttered, and he felt his breath catch in his throat.
I have to tell them, he thought. The consequences, though, of revealing what he knew, were deadly. I can’t help it. It’s not my fault, I can’t just stop thinking about it. Alan was getting hysterical, and tried to keep himself calm. If he told the coroners about what he knew, they’d execute him, without question. He already knew more about Aetheric Geometry than anyone but Wolfram himself, and that made him a terrible threat to the entire Empire. He could try writing a note and delivering it anonymously, but Beckett would have to be pretty stupid not to connect the note about Aetheric Geometry and the young man that he’d called on to discuss it, and the old coroner didn’t seem like a stupid man.
Besides, Alan wasn’t sure he’d be able to explain Zindel’s theory effectively in a letter. That meant that he’d have to go to the coroners directly. That meant that Elijah Beckett could execute him on the spot. Maybe he won’t, Alan thought. I could just tell him…I can show him that I can help him…he remembered all of his Ted East novels. The heretics were always trying to convince Ted East that, yes, their sciences were dangerous, but this time, this time, it was okay. They’d discovered it by accident. They’d never use it. They could help him in his work, tracking down other heretics. It never held up. Ted East was never fooled. He would shoot them on the spot.
