by Chris Braak
“All right,” Beckett growled. “Let’s get on with this.”
Twenty-four: The Road to Mount Hood
It was almost a relief to leave the city that night. The strange feeling to which Valentine had confessed, the electric urgency, the overwhelming sense of immanence was palpable to all and sundry. Sensible men claimed that, with the destruction of Mud-side, the sharpsies had probably simply fled the city, now to find some new nation that might tolerate them, and good riddance. But the sensible men, sensible as they were, were quite unable to deny the sense of danger that walked the streets that night. Alan Charterhouse and the three coroners left in a heavy, closed, weather-beaten coach pulled by a team of strong but docile horses, hired from the same livery company for which James Crowell had worked. Harry had insisted that his own horses were good enough for the climb up Mount Hood, but Beckett had been resolute.
The coach took them out of the city and to the west, away from the huge, looming forest of stone architecture and bronze statues. They passed the Sentinels: two great statues that, according to legend, had been erected by the Trow. The work of the pseudo-mythical giants had been unearthed nearly two thousand years earlier, when the city was first founded. They were each a hundred feet high, devoid of any mark that might have suggested tool-use, and vaguely human in shape. Yet, there was something eerily alien about the cast of their shoulders, the faint details of their features.
The royal family claimed that these statues were Gorgon and Demogorgon, the two giants that were the founders of the imperial line in Trowth. They represented one of the few places in the city exempt from the Architecture War: no family would build anything less than twenty yards from where the statues stood along High Street as it ran straight as an arrow out from the heart of the city. Gorgon and Demogorgon stood on two bare islands of stone on the line between the city and its ever-widening suburbs.
Though legend claimed that the statues had been gradually, slowly, glacially moving over the course of the last twothousand years, they appeared quite still as the coroners’ coach passed by. It took another hour and a half before the coach had left behind the last of the suburbs on the west. The road followed the Stark up into the mountains.
The route of the Stark was one of long, gentle curves. Fed primarily by mountain springs and runoffs, the river Stark was a deep, swift, wide river, ice-cold and treacherous. It never froze, not even during Second Winter, but any poor soul that fell into the black waters would likely die of hypothermia within minutes. The Stark led the road past the farms that managed to scrape a living out of the rocky soil; there was a sea of corn and wheat stubble everywhere, dotted with the occasional low, dark-windowed farmhouse, sullenly leaking woodsmoke into the air.
The harvested fields bespoke a great desolation, somehow more profound than the ordinary sense that First Winter left in the mind. For miles and miles, there was simply nothing but flat, stony plains and the knotted remnants of the year’s harvest. It was late, and cold, so naturally no one would be about, but there was still a terrible loneliness to this place.
Eventually, the thick, smoky fog of pollution that hung over Trowth gave way to a clear sky, with the moon bathing those bleak fields in a harsh, pale blue-green light. As the blue glow from the lights of the city faded behind the coach, the stars became apparent: tens of thousands of baleful white eyes, watching with undisguised malice.
Is it any wonder that the citizenry of Trowth should fill the air with filth, when faced with those glaring stars, with that foul, leprous moon? Is it surprising that they should not raise a hew and cry about preserving their atmosphere, but rather breathe a sigh of relief knowing that the plumes of bruised black-and-blue smoke served as a shield between them and the malicious, terrifying night sky?
The farms gave way to forests that had long since been on the receiving end of the woodsman’s axe: field after field of corn stubble became rolling hills of gnarled tree-stumps, all worn and blackened by the weather, as though the last of the trees had been cut down a hundred years ago. The coach followed a dirt road that pulled away from the river and began to work its way in bumpy, shuddering switchbacks up Mount Hood, all around surrounded by those acres of sundered forest, while moss and black weeds tangled their way up and out of the mountain slopes.
Eventually, after hours in the chilly coach, beneath the malevolent sky, the tree-stumps grew fewer and fewer, the ground harsher and colder, so that the evidence of living things began to disappear. Weeds grew sparse and rougher, mosses vanished completely. The stumps remained, but grew thinner and fewer between. Occasionally, a low shrub or tree had escaped the devastation; invariably, it was twisted and gnarled, a clutching claw rearing up from the ground.
These last signs of life disappeared as well, as the coach crossed the tree-line. The road petered out over the permanently-frosted earth, and eventually had to come to a stop.
Beckett led the way out of the coach, climbing down as quickly as possible to stretch his legs and arms; they cracked and creaked as he did so. While his companions left the coach, the old coroner treated himself to another veneine injection from the traveling case he kept with him.
Valentine took two phlogiston lanterns from the coach and lit them, adding to the light already cast by the lanterns that hung from the coach itself. Alan looked up at the sky, and tried to gain his bearings according to the constellations.
“We’re still about…a mile or two away.” He turned upwards on the gentle slope of the mountain. About a hundred yards away was the very edge of a glacier, a vast plain of ice that stretched to the mountain’s summit. Someone had, some time ago, courteously erected a kind of wooden walkway that left the stony slope of the mountain, and served as a bridge onto the ice. “Up that way.” He squinted in the dark, but couldn’t see anything.
Beckett nodded. He had brought heavy, over-stuffed coats, crammed into the luggage compartment in the coach; now, he’d begun to unpack them and pass them out. “We’ll have to climb. And by we,” he added, as he handed Alan a coat, “I mean me and Valentine. I want you and Skinner to stay here.”
“What?” Skinner and Alan spoke almost simultaneously.
“I won’t be able to hear you from here…” complained the Knocker, while Alan said, “You won’t be able to find it…”
“Enough.” Beckett shrugged into his coat. “Alan will point us in the right direction. If the house is up there, we’ll find it. And, no offense, Skinner, but I can’t trust either of you on the glacier. Stay here with the driver. Besides, if something goes wrong, I want at least one of us alive enough to report back to Stitch.”
“Elijah…” Skinner began.
“No arguments. Understand?”
She nodded.
“Good. Valentine, put your coat on, and give me one of those lanterns. We’re going up.”
Twenty-five: Gotheray Castle
As it turned out, finding their way up the glacier was not going to be as difficult as Alan had suspected. Beyond the little wooden bridge, Beckett and Valentine found a number of iron spikes driven deep into the ice, connected by a long, hempen rope. The rope and spikes led up the glacial plain much like the road had led up the mountain: in long switchbacks. The temperature dropped a full ten degrees as soon as Beckett and Valentine stepped onto the ice, and grabbed hold of the guide line. They trudged slowly, exhaustingly across the waste, while the frigid air clutched at their muscles, draining them of strength, and snatched their breath away until all they were able to breathe in were desperate gasps.
The blue lanterns illuminated only a small circle around them, and they soon felt that the glacier had become a huge wall, rising infinitely high into the darkness, first on their right side, then on the left, as they passed back and forth over the gradually-increasing slope. It was dangerous; Valentine slipped several times, and was spared a frozen trip back down the mountain only because of his death-grip on the robe. Beckett, who was mindful of how age and illness had made him much less agile than his partn
er, took only slow, measured, careful steps, despite the chill that threatened to murder him.
Two miles in a straight line was five miles along the zigzag trail that had been left in the glacier, and the two coroners almost cried with relief when Gotheray Castle appeared out of the darkness; unlit, it was illumined suddenly when they grew close enough to cast the weak light from their lanterns on it. The mountain of ice rose up immeasurably high behind the castle; it looked like the glacier had washed down the side of the mountain and half-buried Gotheray in ice.
There was another, frustrating half an hour of being able to see the castle in the darkness, but being forced along the indirect path across the glacier to reach it. When they finally obtained the castle’s stone landing, Beckett and Valentine found the doors—ponderously heavy but unlocked—which were at the top of a stone stair leading right out up from the glacier. Unlocked doors stood to reason, Beckett supposed, as Gotheray Castle’s location made it an unlikely target for burglars.
Gotheray Castle, hunching on the glacial mountainside like a tired predator, was built during the fifteenth century, long before the Architecture War in Trowth. It reflected the spirit of the times: before the Second Reconciliation of the Continental Powers, Trowth was in a perpetual state of war with its innumerable neighbors like Thranc, Sarein, and Sarpek. Castles, even castles that were meant to be summer palaces, were built first as fortresses, and Gotheray was certainly that. It was squat, with narrow windows that had recently been fixed with glass panes and copper shutters. Its walls were thick granite; the main door led through a tunnel into the house proper, a tunnel that could potentially be defended indefinitely by only a handful of men. Beckett and Valentine walked down the long tunnel, rubbing their hands and chests, trying to work blood back into circulation.
The two coroners found the castle stiflingly hot. Though none of the lamps were lit, a wave of dry heat poured down the entrance tunnel of the castle. By the time they reached the end of the tunnel, Valentine had stripped down to his shirtsleeves, and Beckett had tucked both winter coat and his overcoat under his arm. The two men left the excess outerwear in a pile in the main hall.
“Have they installed a furnace, do you think?” Valentine asked, trying to make out the details of the main hall in the places where the faint blue phlogiston light touched on them.
The heat shimmered across Beckett’s eyes, and for a moment he found himself unaccountably reminded of the gleaming, melted towers in the City of Brass. “No,” he replied, curtly.
Valentine stood in the center of the huge, hollow empty hall, surrounded by the circle of light cast from his lantern. His shadow was thrown long on the floor. “So…what do we do? I don’t think there’s anyone here.”
Beckett nodded. “It doesn’t look like it. So. We start looking. You know anything about castles like this?”
Valentine scratched at his chin. “Well, in the old days, there wasn’t a lot of consistency to design. I’d guess that most of the living spaces are near the center of the building. And there’s probably a basement.”
“Down. Sounds about right. Let’s see if we can find a stair.”
They began to search, hands out and lightly resting on the walls, as they opened doors, and explored down hallways, always in a pair. Even though Gotheray appeared to be empty, Beckett didn’t like the idea of splitting up. Especially because of the buzzing numbness he felt in his hands, the pins-and-needles effect that sometimes accompanied veneine overdose.
It took several minutes, but they eventually succeeded in locating a narrow spiral stair that extended both up and down interminably into the dark. “I’ll go first,” offered Valentine immediately, and enthusiastically. Beckett might have been resentful of the offer if not for two reasons: firstly, Valentine always offered to go first, especially if it meant going somewhere dangerous. Secondly, Beckett noticed a weakness in his knee, and he didn’t want the younger man to see him struggling with the stairs.
The staircase seemed impossibly deep. As they descended deeper, Beckett’s ears began ringing. It was a strange, distracting but not painful sound that grew stronger with every step, and made a journey of what could not have been more than minutes seem like it took hours. The heat grew worse towards the bottom of the stairs, though it was now occasionally interrupted by a strong gust of icy wind. Beckett was finally obliged to take off his suit coat.
The stairs ended abruptly on a stone landing. The phlogiston lanterns showed the two coroners a hall that appeared to be covered with ice, in defiance of the waves of dry heat washing over them. Beckett noticed something along the wall, a brass knife-switch. He groped towards it, and threw it.
Immediately, a string of dim, yellow, electric lights blossomed into view, running off down the long, ice-covered tunnel, above a floor made of heavy flagstones. Runnels along the sides of the tunnel collected water that dripped from the walls and the ceilings, draining it to somewhere out of sight.
“Put out your lantern,” Beckett said.
“Why?” Valentine asked, even as he turned the agitator at the bottom of the phlogiston sphere all the way down.
“Electric lights? These are expensive. Why wouldn’t you use phlogiston?”
Valentine shrugged. “I don’t know. Why not?”
“I don’t know, either,” Beckett replied. “But until I do, I don’t want to chance doing something stupid.” He began to make his way down the icy tunnel; the sound of his boots on the flagstones was very loud, compared to the faint, constant sound of water dripping from the ceiling. “You notice something weird about the tunnel?” Beckett asked.
Valentine hurried after him. “Well, it looks like it’s covered in ice. I’d call that pretty weird.”
“No.” Beckett shook his head. “It’s not covered. I think they dug it through the ice. All this,” he pointed to the slowly-melting ice above them, “all this is glacier.”
“Oh.” Valentine gulped, as waves of dry heat continued to assail them. “What do you think holds it up?”
“I don’t know. A kinetic engine, maybe?” If Beckett was concerned about the prospect of a hundred tons of ice crashing onto their heads, he didn’t show it.
The tunnel ended at the top of a huge, round chamber, that sank even deeper into the glacier. The chamber was ringed with a series of wooden platforms and narrow stairs, and crudely divided with partitions and more platforms throughout its volume, raised on scaffolding made out of the same, dark wood. The sheer scale of the construction was remarkable: the cave was at least two hundred feet across, and descended several stories into the ice, and the wooden constructions seemed to occupy as much space as a whole second castle.
The platforms and partitions obscured whatever rested at the bottom of the chamber, but Beckett was sure he knew what it was. That dry, infernal heat wafted up from the bottom, burning his eyes; he closed them, and dreamed about swimming in a great, stormy black sea…
“What is this?” Valentine called. He’d climbed around the wooden platforms ringing the upper-most level of the cave, and had found a small room. Beckett carefully picked his way around the not-especially-sturdy-looking platforms. “It’s some kind of control center, I think.”
The young coroner was right. The small room—not really a room at all, only an area blocked off on three sides by walls made of the same dark wood as everything else in the vast cave—was full of brass levers and dials, massive gear-boxes, and tangles of fat cables that snaked past the walls and down into the dim expanse of the ice-chamber.
“We should go down,” Beckett said, after studying the controls for a few moments.
Valentine nodded. “I’ll go first.”
Of course you will, thought Beckett. He followed the younger man down the narrow wooden steps. They had no railing; Beckett kept one hand resting on the wet, slippery wall on his left, still mindful that, if he did fall, the ice would afford him no purchase. The dim, electric lights led them deeper and deeper in to the heart of the ice, past more small rooms fi
lled with enigmatic machines, past narrow wooden bridges connecting to more platforms whose use remained obscure. All the time, the heat grew worse, and Beckett’s mind wandered deeper and deeper into the waves and storms of the black sea.
At the bottom, half-eclipsed by the tall wooden walls, was a vessel. It was made all of dull brass, and in the shape of an airship or a submersible. There were no propellers, no visible means of propulsion; from the back of the ship sprouted gears and pistons, tall antennae, and three stubby prongs, glowing white and pouring dry heat into the air. Stenciled in black along its hull was the word Montgomery. The aethership.
“How long as it been since they used it?” Beckett mused aloud. “And it’s still hot. How can it even be that hot?”
“Uhm, Beckett?” Valentine, ever the victim of his erratic attention span, begun exploring the other chambers at the bottom of the cave. “I think you’d better see this.”
The young coroner had found a small room packed to the brim with crushed ice. There, preserved by the cold, were a number of cots, and three bodies. The bodies were, or had once been, human. Something had changed them now, some force outside the stability of the Word had disrupted the essential laws which all matter in nature was bound to follow.
The men’s bodies, though clearly dead, were hideously plastic, shifting beneath the eye, avoiding natural classification. They changed from black to white to red, giving the impression that, at the same time Beckett was seeing their outsides, his eyes were struggling to cope with the fact that he could see their insides as well, continually blossoming out from the deepest recesses of the body to the edges of the skin and back again. Limbs, twisted at angles that seemed impossible not only by the limits of the human body but by the limits of normal space, were strangely manifold: sometimes a corpse would have only one arm, sometimes twenty, sometimes a hundred legs and no arms at all, and somehow all at once. It seemed as if each man was made of a thousand men, some half-faded from view, some horrifyingly clear, and all superimposed upon each other. Throughout that hideous panoply of pain-wracked corpses only the faces of the men remained constant: three rigid screams of agony, all untouched by whatever force had mutated the bodies.
