by Chris Braak
Just looking at them caused a foul terror to sprout from Beckett’s stomach and crawl up his throat, a terror that not even the veneine could keep at bay. He felt sick, a dark tunnel began to close in at the edges of his vision, and the awfully melted towers of the City of Brass sprang up behind his eyes, clawing frantically at a leprous moon covered with black basalt cities.
“Nng,” Beckett groaned as he staggered from the room and leaned against the wall of ice. The cool radiating from it helped to restore his senses.
“Are you all right?” Valentine asked, his face painfully white. He, too, seemed unsteady on his feet. “There’s…there’s four cots in there, Beckett, but only three bodies…”
Beckett nodded. “One of those things survived.”
“How do you . . . oh, no.” If it were possible, his face grew even paler in the dim light, almost luminescent. “That thing, it’s loose in Trowth.”
“No.” Beckett pushed himself away from the cold wall and composed himself. “I don’t think it is, anymore. I think it’s come back here.”
Twenty-Six: A Visitor
Fatigue held Alan Charterhouse in its ironically tireless grip. He stared out the double-paned window of the coach, while the small phlogiston heater kept the cold mercifully at bay, and Harry the coachman, who had come into the coach to warm himself, spoke in an almost-constant stream of anecdotes about old adventures he’d been on with Beckett.
“. . . of course, that’s the thing about the ectoplasmatists. All kinds of fancy arms and what, but a bullet between the eyes is a bullet, right?” Harry’s storehouse of problems that bullets could solve seemed inexhaustible. Alan blinked and struggled to keep his eyes open. His mind had been wandering far afield over the last…How long have we been here? He thought to himself. Earlier, he’d been sure that he’d seen a tiny, black shape making its way slowly across the field of ice. He’d followed it with his eyes as it moved out of sight, towards Gotheray Castle, and then became convinced that he’d only imagined it.
“Now, I know it was none of Mr. Beckett’s fault,” Harry went on, crooked teeth gleaming beneath the wiry forest of his moustache and mutton-chops, “I’m sure he told that fellow what happened just the way it did, but I think it’s a crying shame that ol’ Harry never made it in to any of those books.”
Alan blinked again. “What books?”
“Why, those . . . oh, what do you call ‘em? Ted East.” The loquacious coachman seemed incredulous. “Don’t tell me, a boy your age, and you never heard of Ted East.”
“No,” Alan said. “I mean, yes. I have heard…I mean, I read them. All of them. What do they have to do with Mr. Beckett?”
“Why, they’re his stories,” Harry replied. “Oh, I mean, they’ve been spiced up a bit, especially the saucy parts with all them foreign ladies. I know he’s sick now, but even when he was young Mr. Beckett weren’t much of a looker. Besides, there never was any time for dilly-dallying like that, if you know what I mean…”
“Beckett is Ted East?” Alan’s voice was soft.
“Well, after a fashion, yes.”
“Harry,” Skinner interrupted suddenly. “Sh.” The coachman was immediately silent and attentive, while Skinner, her face largely inscrutable behind the silver blindfold, pressed her lips together with concentration. “There’s…” She twitched slightly. “An echo. Someone, a coach, coming up from the North . . .”
“Not the North, miss,” Harry whispered. “That’s up the mountain.”
“I know. The South, I mean. The South.” She shook her head. “I can’t seem to…to hear it very clearly…”
“Well, all right,” Harry said cheerfully, pulling on his heavy gloves, hat, and coat. “I’ll have a look, I will.” He grinned at Alan. “Back into the cold again. Make sure the heat stays on, right?”
A blast of frigid air accompanied Harry’s exit, and Alan pulled the door closed as soon as he deemed it polite. After a few moments, the door opened, bringing more cold air with it, and Harry climbed back inside.
“You’re right, miss. A coach is following the trail up from the south. Big one, got the Rowan-Czarnecki crest on it. Should be here in a few minutes, I’d think.”
Skinner nodded. “All right, Harry,” she told him. “You know what to do.” Though she didn’t appear to move her head, Alan was somehow certain that she’d fixed her attention on him. “Well, it is their house, right?”
“Do you think they’re…” Alan began, unsure how to finish. “I mean, it’s their summer home. Are they coming to…?”
“It’s hardly Summer, is it?” Skinner replied. “No. They’re not here for a visit, I think. They’re probably here for us.”
“So, what do we do?”
“Right now, I think we should wait here where it’s warm.”
Alan nodded. “That’s a good idea.” After a moment, he added, “Is Mr. Beckett really Ted East?”
“Yes,” Skinner told him. “He sold his life story to a potboiler novelist so that he could buy his medicine. I wouldn’t say anything to him about it, if I were you.”
“Oh.”
They waited in silence for several minutes, while Alan’s anticipation grew. His young mind, possessed as it was of a fearsome capacity for reason, desperately conjured plans and contingencies. Would they have to fight? How? What weapons were there? What about moving onto the glacier? Could they use it to escape? Were the horses of Harry’s coach faster than the ones coming up? Except for Harry’s sudden silence, which Alan barely noticed, Skinner and the coachman both seemed completely unperturbed.
The sounds of another coach, rumbling up along the stony trail, reached their ears, and Skinner winced. The coach brought a strange echo with it, one that disrupted her ability to accurately identify sounds. She tried to clear her mind. “Well, let’s go and meet our guests, shall we?”
She opened the door and climbed out, while Alan followed behind. The Rowan-Czarnecki coach, a beautiful black vehicle drawn by a team of beautiful, if tired-looking, horses, pulled to a stop, and Skinner’s discomfort intensified. The doors of the coach opened, and three men emerged: one was fairly tall and heavy-set, older, with a paunchy, tired face but with an intensity in his gaze that spoke a fiery certainty. The other two had the bored expression of professional men; they wore dark suits, and each carried a revolver.
Skinner leaned on her cane, and put a hand to her ears.
“Excuse me,” the older man said. He drew a small device from his pocket, a collection of brass rings that whirled rapidly around a nugget of polished, soapy green flux. The man did something to it, and the rings abruptly stopped and folded up. “Something new we developed at the Academy. To stop eager ears from overhearing what they shouldn’t.”
Once the device had been deactivated, Skinner seemed to recover almost immediately. “Thank you, sir, for your consideration. May I ask what you’re doing here?”
“This is the road to my house,” the older man replied. He had a deep, sonorous voice, and Alan felt certain that he’d seen the man somewhere before. “I should ask you the same question.”
“We are here as agents of the crown,” Skinner told him. “Conducting an investigation.” She took a step closer to the three men, and the two guards raised their pistols immediately; there was a moment of tension, but the guards relaxed, a little sheepishly. Skinner was clearly blind, after all.
“I understand that it’s appropriate to inform a party if the coroners intend to investigate their properties. I received no such notice.” The man told them.
Suddenly, something fell into place in Alan’s head. “Wolfgang Rowan-Czarnecki,” he said, and the older man looked startled. “You’re in charge of the Royal Academy of Sciences. My father took me to one of your lectures, about using flux tympanum as an energy source….” He trailed off. “Uhm. Excuse me, sir, I didn’t mean to interrupt. Please, continue.”
“We weren’t saying anything important, Alan,” Skinner smiled. “It’s traditional, under circumstances li
ke this, to be cryptic with each other, and vaguely threatening. There’s really little point to it, if you ask me.”
Wolfgang smiled ruefully. “Agreed. This situation comes down to two essential elements: I do not intend to be hanged, and I will not let you stop my experiments.”
“But…they’re dangerous,” Alan pointed out. “And heresy. The Excelsior…”
“If you’ve come this far,” Wolfgang interrupted, “Then you know that Zindel and Lightman have solved the problems with the Excelsior. Not only can we return effectively from Aetherspace, but the stabilizers can be adjusted so that engine can return to any place in the world. Think about that, before you try and stop me. Near-instant transportation.”
“The war,” Skinner said her voice softening in sudden sympathy. “You want to end the war.”
The pain in the old Rowan-Czarnecki’s voice was clear; it throbbed in his throat, brought tears to his eyes. “Fifteen years. Fifteen years sending our young men, our best and brightest off to die fighting that filth. Why? To preserve the phlogiston pipelines. You take a look around our city, hollowed out by war, nothing left but the crippled, dirty dregs that escaped the pressgangs, and you tell me that this wasn’t worth the risk.”
“A pretty speech, Mr. Rowan-Czarnecki,” Skinner replied, her voice firm again. “You should save it for your trial.”
Another rueful smile. “We both know that this is never going to go to trial. Where are your men? Beckett and that Vie-Gorgon pissant.”
“They’re at the Castle already,” Skinner said. “Gathering evidence.”
Wolfgang glanced over Skinner’s should into the coach. “Well. Why did they take the coachman?”
Skinner only smiled.
Twenty-Seven: The Disaster at Vlytze Square
The weather of First Winter in Trowth often vacillated between damp, raw, chilly days and damp, raw, considerably warmer days, unlike Second Winter, which simply plunged the city into a deep freeze for two months. After the psychestorm’s cold front had broken up in the treacherous air-currents above the Trowth sea-wall, the rain came in from the south.
A heavy, steady downpour fell from black clouds that were mercifully lacking in the terrible psychological effects that came with the green clouds from the north. The rain muted the fires in Mudside, enabling the Committee for Public Safety to look out at the plain of muddy ash and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. The afternoon following the raid, Edgar Wyndham-Vie would announce to a small congregation of umbrella-clutching gentlemen victory over The Sharpsie Threat.
The Committee for Public Safety had, in fact, spoken too soon. Based on the information gathered from the raid at Mudside, they simply presumed that they had vastly overestimated the number of sharpsies living in Trowth. This was not an unreasonable assumption, since sharpsies rarely paid their taxes and humans could neither distinguish one sharpsie from another by sight, nor recognize their guttural native names. Moreover, the fires that the gendarmes had started served to obscure the wooden tunnels that had sunk into the mud by the riverside. Nearly two thousand sharpsies had fled through those tunnels, and it would eventually become clear that those who remained had allowed themselves to be arrested on purpose, to give their fellows time to escape.
After Wyndham-Vie’s speech, which would be lambasted in the broadsheets for months to come, but before night had fully fallen on the city, a massive explosion rocked Old Bank. The method and elements of that explosion would never fully be determined, because immediately following it a wave of sharpsies boiled up from the Arcadium and seized the twelve square city blocks at the top of Old Bank hill.
Some had brought barricades with them, perhaps old pieces of their homes. Others raided offices, shops, and houses on the hill for desks, chairs, tables, bookcases, anything that could be piled up in the streets, choking off the narrow lanes and alleys that made up the neighborhood. They carried weapons; sometimes they used the tools of their trades: hammers occasionally, but usually meat cleavers and long butcher’s knives. Others had improvised weapons: broken chair legs, long coils of rope with iron hooks or pulleys on the ends, sometimes even the stone downspouts that the Crabtree-Daiors used for their gutters.
The barricades were constructed and manned by sharpsies that hurled rocks from their slings and bottles that they’d filled with phlogiston at any authority foolish enough to approach; meanwhile, a smaller but still sizable group of sharpsies staged raids on the three Vaults where their fellows were being held. The few Lobstermen that had been set as guards were caught unawares by the suddenness and size of the attack, and despite their strength and speed, they were rapidly overwhelmed by the sharpsies, who now demonstrated a speed and agility, especially in close-quarters, that seemed to catch everyone unprepared.
It took little more than an hour for the sharpsies to take control of the top of the hill, and murder anyone that even looked like a gendarme or a pressganger. It did not take much longer for them to break out their fellows and arm them.
The gendarmerie in neighboring New Bank and North Ferry responded fairly quickly. They gathered their members together, a few thousand strong all told, and attempted to breach the sharpsie barricades. They staged a simultaneous attack on the barricades at Rampling and Czarnecki Streets, and another at the barricade used to wall off Old Wall Square. The men came on with the greenglass goggles, rarely bothering with their armbands; in fact, many of the members of this rag-tag militia were not gendarmes at all, but the few able-bodied, relatively young men left in the city that had avoided the pressgangs.
A handful of the gendarmes were equipped with rifles or pistols, but their attack was characterized by the single most prominent characteristic of the Trowth gendarmerie: disorganization. Riflemen and pistoleers were spread out randomly throughout the attacking mob, firing at whim, choosing targets almost randomly. They did little damage as they approached, as it was generally assumed that the weight of their numbers would overwhelm the sharpsie blockades with little trouble, and the men could use their swords and clubs once the walls were breached.
Unfortunately for the gendarmes, the narrow alleys in Old Bank made the approach to the barricades difficult; they were forced into a large mass as they were fed into a kind of bottleneck, and then showered with phlogiston bottles that exploded in blue and red flames—a weapon that would eventually be called Sharp Brandies. The sticky phlogiston adhered to the men as it burned; they attempted to run screaming from the walls, but found themselves trapped by the men behind them, and succeeded only in setting more people on fire.
At Rampling Street, the makeshift army managed to attack quickly enough that twenty or thirty men actually reached the walls. They attempted to drive the sharpsies away, but were unequal to the staggering agility the sharpsies displayed with their knives. The attackers were neatly butchered, and a row of brandy-throwers raced to the top of the wooden-furniture barricade to throw their incendiary cocktails at the remaining men.
While the first assault by the gendarmerie was a complete disaster, it did give the militia throughout the rest of the city time to mobilize. Men were called up, armed with short swords from the armories; every fifth man was given a rifle with three bullets. They were brought together under the tactical leadership of Edgar Wyndham-Vie, largely because of his family’s prestige.
Just as Wyndham-Vie prepared his assault on the Old Wall Square barricade, fires appeared in Red Lanes. A handful of socialist radicals, who had consigned their criminal meetings to the duetti clubs of Fleshmarket Close, assumed that the sharpsies were starting a revolution, and so they decided to start one of their own. They set ablaze two government offices and an armory that they’d raided. Wyndham-Vie was obliged to send a third of his men to Red Lanes to put that neighborhood to rights.
As the men reached Red Lanes, they found themselves immediately set upon not by the radicals there, but by a small force of indigeae from Bluewater, armed as well with improvised weapons. They had been on their way to attack the In
diga neighborhood, using the sharpsie riots as cover for their own assault on the “race-traitors” who hoarded the wealth brought by the phlogiston industry. The attack on the gendarmes was an unfortunate accident, but it turned what should have been the rout of a few disgruntled radicals into a protracted, three-way brawl that lasted for hours.
Down a third of his army, Wyndham-Vie attempted a subterfuge. He sent the bulk of his remaining forces towards Old Wall Square, in what he hoped would appear to be overwhelming odds. Meanwhile, he would take a smaller group, well outfitted with rifles, to the barricade at High Street. They would take the smaller barricade, and then take up position on the north side of Old Wall to lay down cover fire.
As his smaller force moved into position, another problem soon became apparent. There was another Vault on his side of the barricade; it had been used to hold the notorious gang leader that the broadsheets called Anonymous John, and his own men had seized the opportunity to attempt a jailbreak. They managed to take control of the entire Vault building, and had set up their own men—all of whom had rifles and plentiful amounts of bullets—in the windows of the upper floors.
While John’s men, largely smugglers know as the Dockside Boys, were both racist and nationalist, the only thing they could be said to hate more than sharpsie foreigners were the gendarmes. Consequently, when an opportunity presented itself to not only interfere with the Committee for Public Safety’s plans and to kill the blue-armed men that so often disrupted their own operations, they leapt upon it. While Wyndham-Vie led his men down the narrow alley, the Dockside Boys immediately opened fire, sniping first at anyone that wore a captain’s hat.
