Mr. Stitch (20 page)

Another shy, thoughtful pause. “I also wanted,” he continued, in a low voice, “to…to say I’m sorry. About yesterday, and everything…”

“Valentine…”

“No, just listen, okay? I’m sorry about the other day, and I’m sorry about…you having to leave the coroners. I tried…well, never mind that. I didn’t know about your house, anyway. But I just wanted to say…” He took a deep breath. “I know that Emilia is helping you, now, and that’s good. But if…if anything changes, you know? Or if something happens…”

“Valentine.”

“If something happens, if you need anything, you just…I’ll help. I will.”

Skinner sighed. “Valentine, you know I could never ask—”

“I know, you don’t have to ask. Just say it sometime. Like, if you’re walking down the street, and you need lunch, just say, ‘Oh, I could use some lunch.’ And I’ll find out, and get you lunch, okay?” He paused. “No, wait, that sounds weird. I shouldn’t have said that. I regret saying that. Just pretend…what…why are you laughing?”

Skinner found herself giggling helplessly. Valentine was just so relentlessly
earnest
, it was impossible to stay angry with him for any length of time. “All right! All right,” she said at last. “The next time I need lunch, you will be the first person I call. Fair enough?”

“Yes, and—”

“And you’re forgiven for everything you’ve ever done. You didn’t know I was in dire straits; how could you? I never told you. That was positively my fault. All right.”

“All right. You’re good at this, by the way. Dancing.”

“Thank you.”

“You know everyone is looking at us?”

“Well, you do cut a dashing figure. Or so I’m told.”

In fact, a substantial portion of the party was looking at the pair, usually with hastily averted sidelong glances. This was because new additions to the social circle—namely Skinner, who with her silver eyeplate was a particularly unusual addition—were always watched closely for any sign that might resemble weakness. It was also because Valentine was himself notoriously eccentric, and was often watched closely in the hopes that he might do something strange enough to be worth gossiping about. Aside from dancing with the new woman, this particular party seemed likely to prove a disappointment.

When the dance had proved suitably tiring, Skinner begged the chance to rest.

“Of course,” Valentine said, slightly out of breath. “Sure. I…hm. Is that Nora Feathersmith talking to my cousin?”

“Where?” Skinner asked.

“By the door. That’s strange. I thought they hated each other.”

“Really? No, not at all. They’re quite good friends, actually. I sat with them in Emilia’s box at the theater a few weeks ago.”

“You did? But…but this is all very strange. A year ago they had a very public falling out. Well. I suppose I just ought to pay more attention. Do you want something to drink? Wine? They’ve made a hot, spiced punch that’s very good…”

“I’ll have some of that, yes, thanks,” Skinner said, as curiosity slowly compelled her clairaudience towards Emilia and Nora. Snatches of conversation sounded in her ears as she projected past the partygoers, but she ignored them until she found the precise timbre of the voices that she wanted.

“…tomorrow, you think?” Nora was saying.

“Yes, I should hope so. If we haven’t caught their attention by now, I don’t know that we ever shall,” replied Emilia, her voice characteristically devoid of any hint of hidden meaning.

“I suppose our principal will be pleased.”

“I doubt our principal is capable of pleasure.”

There was a pause. Nora hummed softly to the music, while Emilia seemed to vanish from the face of the earth. “Do you really think it will work?” Nora asked, eventually.

“I don’t see why not. Remember Adronus, dear heart,” Emilia replied. “Wars are won with narrative.”

“Here you are!” Valentine’s voice brought Skinner immediately back to herself. He gently placed a cup of steaming punch in her hand. It was warm—almost too warm to hold, and certainly too warm for the stuffy salon. “It’s good, I think they use that djang fruit in it. That’s funny, isn’t it? Five years ago no one had even
heard
of djang, now I’m not sure there’s food or drink in Trowth that doesn’t use it…”

“Who’s Adronus?” Skinner asked him, as she let her punch cool.

“Adronus? I’m sure I don’t know. Is he here at the party?”

“No, he’s…nevermind.” She sipped at the punch. It was still too hot. “Someone that you might have read, maybe?”

“Uhm. Constantine Adronus, do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” Skinner snapped, exasperated. “If I knew who I meant, I wouldn’t be asking about him, would I?”

“Well, all right, I don’t know. Constantine Adronus was a general, uhm. 15
^th
century I think. Or 1500 something, I get those mixed up. Anyway, he’s out of favor, now, since what’s his name, the Sarpeki general from the siege of Canth published his book…that whole thing about legs and arms.”

“Valentine. Focus.”

“Right, sorry. Adronus’ big thing was, ‘A war is over when the opponent thinks he’s lost. A battle is just a pointed argument.’ He used to say that wars were really just stories…”

“War is narrative,” Skinner suggested.

“Yeah, like that. Have you been…why do you know about Adronus?”

“I was…it’s just something I heard, once. I thought you might know.”

“Well, that’s suspicious. Why would you think that
I
knew anything?” His voice held a bold grin.

Skinner snorted. “With all those years at fancy schools, I was sure you were bound to recollect something, particularly if it was useless. At the knocker school they only taught us
skills
.”

“Well, la-di-da. For your information, gentlemen aren’t supposed to need skills. That’s what we have butlers for. And tailors.”

“That’s just like the Families, isn’t it? Sustaining their lifestyles on the backs of their servants.”

Valentine laughed out loud. “Careful. That kind of talk is generally frowned on in places like this.” The music picked up, as the fiddler found his second wind and joined the indefatigable harpsichordist. Skinner and Valentine danced again, and twice more before the night was over.

The idle rich spent late nights, as morning held no particular urgency for them. It was close to dawn when the last, most devoted partygoers finally dispersed, all wavering drunken smiles and over-friendly hands. These were the gentlemen who, now that their late-night’s entertainment had waned, would probably find some other dissolute venue in which to practice their only particular ability: hedonism.

Skinner had waited until the end, hoping for a brief word with Emilia, but, after her enigmatic conversation with Nora Feathersmith, the Vie-Gorgon heiress was nowhere to be found. Her major-domo helped the guests gather shawls and coats, and politely but firmly showed them the door. Valentine found her a coach, and repeated his embarrassingly sincere offer to buy her lunch.

The sun had nearly risen by the time Skinner returned to the house in Lanternbridge. Skinner could not see the sky turning red and angry with the day, the clouds unusually thick for Armistice, the black towers of soot pouring from smokestacks as the factories started up. She could not see the sprawling mass of the royal palace, highlighted against the sun, nor the vast expanse of her city stretched out beneath the meager light. She could not see the empty windows, the darkened doorways that looked like so many unfriendly eyes and mouths, yawning open to disgorge their bleary-eyed occupants.

But she could feel something—a hot breath of air, stirring from the south and whipping through the streets, tinged with the bloody taste of burning phlogiston, the acrid smell of smoke and industry. A humming energy, beneath the city’s ancient streets, a powerful sense of immanence that surged through the drowsy morning like so much summer lightning.

The truth was that knockers often had such feelings—experiences of unnamable dread or imminent danger, that many times had no reliable connection to the world. And Trowth was a city that lent itself well to such strange sensations, even among its less-sensitive inhabitants. Under the best of circumstances, gargantuan, weather-beaten Trowth was a city that felt haunted by the heat and cold, by damp chills and strange agues. So it was reasonable, and perhaps forgivable, that Skinner thought nothing of the feeling, and collapsed into her bed having given it hardly a second thought.

Beckett sat in his office, brooding. He had for the first time that year opened the heavy, green copper-plated shutters on his windows, an indulgence he permitted himself only during the two weeks of Armistice. These were, in fact, the only two weeks when the weather did not bother him in some way; warm enough not to cause his bones to ache, cool enough that he could still wear his suit and scarf without sweating. It would be an exaggeration to say that Armistice is the only time of the year that Beckett actually enjoyed, as “enjoyment” is perhaps too strong a word to describe what Beckett felt about anything, but certainly one could say that Armistice was the two weeks of the year that Beckett found to be the least intolerable.

Ordinarily. Now, the lightening sky and cheery, amiable atmosphere of the city rang hollow in his ears, a false front of friendship piled up, after so many years of tradition, on top of Trowth’s ever-rotten core. There was not, Beckett had been forced to conclude, anything sacred. This was not a revelation that struck him like a thunderbolt, but rather a slow, seeping realization. After many years of work in the Coroners, he had learned that most people did not hold most things sacred, and that those things that above all demanded respect for their sacredness were the ones most likely to be ignored. But he had hoped, or else imagined, or at the very least considered that there were in his world one or two things that everyone chose to respect.

“Should have known better,” he muttered to himself. He looked at his desk, cluttered with paperwork for cases that he would never, could never solve. He felt the ugly weight of the gun in his hand. His mind drifted back to his last conversation with Mr. Stitch.

“You perceive. A. Connection?” The hulking reanimate, still as a corpse behind its desk, had wheezed at him.

“There’s no question,” Beckett had replied. “The pamphlets that are being circulated, they’re all made at the same press. We don’t know where it is, but we’re going to find it. I want to move on these men, now.”

“Impossible.” Stitch replied. “We. Cannot. Find them.”

“You didn’t find anything?” Beckett asked. “Anything at all at the gendarmerie bombing site?”

“Nothing.” Stitch’s voice betrayed no emotion except the constant pain of having to be used at all. “The site. Was entirely. Devoid.”

“We can’t…” Beckett had begun. He felt his voice grow hoarse, and worried that it would crack. He wondered how he could be so desperate about something, after so much time spent in the regular, dispassionate slog of his work. “We can’t let this go. We have to
do
something.”

“So. Find. Something.”

That was it, and it was depressing. If Stitch and its miraculous engine of a mind couldn’t find anything to connect the bombing and the daemonomaniac and the mysterious pamphleteer, then there was little hope that Beckett would be able to. No leads, no anything, like so many of his cases these days. The number of crimes that could be connected to one of the heretical sciences seemed to grow exponentially, but the tools he needed to prosecute his investigations remained stubbornly old-fashioned. Ask people if they’d seen anything. Question notorious career criminals—this was a tradition, and a fairly useless one; since heretics were executed on the spot, there were generally very few people who could rightly have been said to have made a career of them. One advocate in the Royal Academy of Sciences insisted that it was possible to determine a heretic by precisely measuring the shape of his head, but he wanted funding for his experiments
before
he could produce any worthwhile results, so that was fairly a bust.

Nothing. Beckett looked down at his gun again, felt the black iron call to a black spot in his heart, numb and raw and cold. He stared at the barrel, watched it grow, stretching out to encompass him, its dark, empty core drawing him down, down into it with an inexorable gravity. The principle seemed remarkably easy. The barest twitch of his finger would be enough, the gun would do all the work. Wasn’t it quite extraordinary that so much pain, so much weariness, could abolished with such a small, simple step?