Mr. Stitch (19 page)

“What’s your name?”

Nothing but the wet sound of the daemonomaniac chewing. His fingers were red and raw beneath his teeth.

“He doesn’t know,” Gorud said. “He has forgotten his name?”

Beckett nodded. “The ‘daemon,’ the intelligence that they think they’re in touch with, is supposed to expand their minds. It’s a delusion, of course, but their minds don’t know that. They fill up with nonsense, crowd the rest out. If we’re lucky, there’s still something we can use.” He reached out and slammed his hand against the bars. “Hey. What’s your name?”

The man looked up at them with a sudden start, and his eyes, briefly, snapped into focus. He opened his mouth to speak, but instead stretched his jaw wide, so wide that Beckett could hear the joint pop, and his eyes glazed over again. At once, he began to speak in a hoarse, raspy voice. “Huhk. Gurat. Torroketetetet—”

“Glossolalia,” Beckett muttered. “Nonsense.”

“—kaitor get…get…get out. Get out. It’s ours. It’s ours! OURS!” The daemonomaniac began to scream, the words dissolving into guttural croaking shouts as he leapt up from his corner and threw himself crashing against the bars. Gorud hopped back as the hinges and locks creaked, but Beckett remained still. The locks held. The man hammered impotently against the bars of his cell, shrieking and spitting like a mad animal.

“They’re starting from here,” the daemonomaniac’s voice dropped to a frantic whisper. “Here. No! Don’t tell them that.”

“Where did you get the flux?” Beckett demanded.

“They can’t know yet. They don’t know yet. Theyuk, arctorus keret gai phorthent.”

Beckett asked again. “The flux. Who gave it to you?”

“Gorret kora, kirakari ta net!”

“Listen,” the coroner said. “You’re talking nonsense. You think you’re speaking Trowthi, but you’re not. The part of your brain that understands speech—”

“Harep,” Gorud spoke up from the dark. “Kara dettu priata?”

Very slowly, Beckett turned to face the therian, who was huddled behind his lamp, his eyes wide, his canine face impassive. The coroner said nothing, and for a long moment, neither did the daemonomaniac.

“Exhu,” the daemonomaniac said, his voice soft, almost cogent now. “Garrakt for dett. They know.”

“Shingoru dettu parak. Exhu diri otomen.” Gorud shook his head. “Exhu borak.”

The man tried to speak again, but no words emerged. He worked his jaw, his eyes bulged, veins throbbed against his head. He threw himself against the iron bars, again and again, entirely silent except for the labored breathing through his flaring nostrils. Finally, he staggered back against the far wall, his body still wracked with pain, and shrieked. The foreign words exploded in a torrent from his throat.

“Agatta! Exhu agatta! Exhu agatta!” He broke off into a piteous wail and wept and screamed as he arched his back. The atemporal eye began to glow behind his skull, illuminating its morbid contours, humming faintly in sympathy with the metal bars.

“Damn it,” Beckett said. “He’s seizing.” He began fumbling with the keys at his belt, his numb fingers clumsy, his haste paradoxically slowing him down.

The man’s screams grew louder. “Exhu agatta! Exhu agatta!” The light from his skull was enough to see by, and his back had contorted so sharply that it looked as though it meant to crack.

Beckett finally fit key into lock, as the daemonomaniac’s scream built to a fever pitch, was cut off by a strangled choke, and abruptly sound and light and all were gone. The daemonomaniac was still as a bronze statue, frozen at that twisted painful angle, his outline just visible in the dim red light from Gorud’s lamp. Beckett sighed, and let the door of the vault swing slowly open.

“Dead.” He cautiously approached the man to examine him. Seizures of this nature were not uncommon with flux overdoses and, while gruesome, were somewhat less frightening to see than a full sublimation. Whatever daemonic sympathies the man had created in the recesses of his mind had overburdened his system, filling it with the psychoactive radiation of the flux. The mild synaesthesias that the mineral sometimes caused were nothing compared to this: the nerves that should control the heart were diverted to the tongue, eyes to the lungs, muscles in the arms and legs scrambled with internal organs, speech centers, memories. It was as if a giant hand had reached into the daemonomaniac’s nervous system and twisted everything into a deadly tangle of misguided signals.

“Dead,” the coroner said again, as though the idea had become stuck in his mind, and he couldn’t move on from it. “Dead, dead, dead.” With a splintery creak of ruined joints, he bent down to look at the daemonomaniac’s hands. They had been chewed unnaturally thoroughly. The skin wasn’t just red, but broken in many places, bleeding, scraped all the way down to the bone. No mentally-undamaged person was capable of doing such injury to their own body.

“Is this typical,” Gorud asked, as he brought the light around, and removed the red filter. The room was suddenly an order of magnitude brighter. “The chewing?”

“No,” Beckett said. “I’ve never seen it before. But. Daemonomania is idiosyncratic. Not everyone responds the same way.” With a grunt of pain, he stood up. “What was that you did? You were talking to him.” The coroner turned to face the therian, who had now retreated a few steps. It was hard to tell, because the creature’s face did not reflect its emotions the way a human face did, but Gorud seemed pensive.

“It is. Karak. Theri, you call it,” he said. “My language.”

“How did he know theri?”

Gorud shrugged. “I do not know. Perhaps he knew some of my people? There are not many of us here in the city. Perhaps he came from Korasai?”

Beckett looked back down at the man. “Skin’s pretty pale. No tan lines, no sun damage. He’s been in Trowth for a while, anyway. Maybe Corsay when he was younger. What did he say?”

Gorud was quiet for a moment, then shook his head. “Nothing. Nonsense.” Beckett stared, waited to see if the therian’s reserve might be overcome by the pregnant silence. “He said…he said he must kill her. He said that someone was coming.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know how to say it.” Gorud puffed his lips out thoughtfully. “What is the word, for a person that is not from here? That is not like us?”

“Foreign. Strange.”

The therian ducked his had enthusiastically. “Yes. Strange. Exhu, ‘strangers.’ The strangers are coming.” He shuffled uncomfortably under his coat, and fiddled with the controls of his lamp. The sounds were very loud in the now-quiet vault, crisply echoing from the stone walls. It gave Beckett the feeling that he and Gorud had bored deep into the center of the cold earth and were now pounding madly and pointlessly against the walls of a rocky prison, far from anyone that could hear them, far from anyone that could help. After a moment, the ape-man shrugged again. “It is meaningless, as you said. Nonsense. Are we not all strangers in this city?”

For a few seconds, that ominous, dreadful sense of isolation persisted. Then Beckett snorted. “Yeah. I guess we are.” He turned back to the claustrophobic stair that would lead to his office, and supposed he’d have to just cool his heels until something useful came along.

The next day, the broadsheets were full of righteous indignation and hysterical ranting. In fifty, no, a hundred years, no soul had ever thought to violate the good will of Armistice! The shooting at the Royal was a travesty, a tragedy, unheard of, deplorable, disgusting! The writers and critics of each and every paper found new depths of vituperative rhetoric to express an outrage that bordered on the cosmic. While they could not agree of what this unprecedented act of violence was a sign—some thought it was representative of a coarsening of the Trowth culture, others a lack of respect for tradition, still others saw it as the first step towards revolution against a decaying monarchy—no journalist could disagree that it was anything but paramount in importance.

With the exception, of course, of Roger Gorgon-Crabtree. Peculiarly, in his review of
Theocles
, there was absolutely no mention of the daemonomaniac and his gun—though, given that between the flowery praise and ebullient enthusiasm there was hardly room for one additional word, this was perhaps not so peculiar. Roger—whom many readers had long suspected was actually morally incapable of liking
anything
unabashedly—had finally thrown his considerable weight fully behind a new play.

The combination of this uniquely positive notice and Trowth’s prurient interest in the grim and grisly violation of one of its unspoken taboos served to make the second performance of
Theocles
one of the most popular in the history of the Royal. Patrons were turned away in droves—some even refused, and crowded into the lobby during the performance; maybe they hoped to steal a seat when some ticket-holder was overcome by the drama, maybe they thought they could appreciate the play just by virtue of what could be overheard through the auditorium doors, maybe they just wanted to be seen at the most popular event of any season. Whatever the case, there seemed to be no fear at all of a repeat of the preceding night’s incident, so thoroughly was the idea of Armistice imprinted on the minds of the people of Trowth.

Following the performance, Emilia Vie-Gorgon and her brother, Emilio, hosted a small, informal party at the palatial townhome of the Raithower Vie-Gorgons. The actors, of course, were not invited—though they were generously compensated with several bottles of wine and sweet Corsay rum, and it was generally presumed that, wherever actors got off to when they’d finished a performance, they were likely to be enjoying themselves. Skinner
was
invited, though not as the author of
Theocles
—an honor she must necessarily avoid—but as a close friend of Emilia’s.

The party, despite being nominally informal, was actually an opportunity for the young gentlemen and ladies of Trowth’s upper-classes to demonstrate their opulent wealth and often-questionable fashion sense, indulging in the bright colors, ruffled fabrics, ribbons, jewels, and other ornamentation that were usually considered gauche by public fashion standards. They mingled and danced and drank, gossiped about this or that arcane social event, objects so far outside of Skinner’s purview that they may as well have been discussing alchemy. It was hot and noisy, and the only music consisted of a relentlessly cheerful harpsichord and a poor man exhausting himself on a Sarein fiddle.

Skinner wore a high-necked dress in emerald green that, she was assured, suited her admirably, and a diamond broach that Nora Feathersmith had lent her. Skinner found herself disinclined to be social on this particular night—though she had never been a social butterfly by any stretch of the imagination. The young men at the party had lost interest in her when she had refused their invitations to dance; the young ladies had lost interest when she had refused to use her clairaudience to overhear what others were saying about them. Instead, she stood off from the crowd of strangers with their jostling elbows and artificial laughter, lost in thoughtful rumination.

Until: “Ms. Skinner,” asked an infuriatingly familiar voice. “Would you care to dance?”

“I am afraid I am not much of a dancer, Valentine.”

Skinner found her left hand in his right, and his left lightly on the small of her back. “It’s all right,” he said, “These new waltzes are mostly just to give us an opportunity to see each other’s clothes. It’s hardly any more work than walking in a slow circle.”

“And are your clothes worth showing off?”

“It’s a handsome suit,” Valentine admitted with mock reluctance. “And I cut a dashing figure in it. But I really felt like you were the one that people should see.”

“It’s not my dress,” Skinner said. “I haven’t got anything that isn’t coroner-charcoal.”

“I wasn’t talking about the dress.”

Skinner bit back a retort, and smiled in spite of herself. Valentine’s lines might be a little sappy, but she was flattered at least that he was trying.

“Can I admit something?” He asked, after a moment of thoughtful silence.

“If you’re sure your comfortable with such importune honesty.”

“Hm. I spent five minutes watching you, trying to plan out how this conversation should go. The bit about the dress was all I came up with.”

“Well, it was very nice. Thank you.”