Mr. Stitch (23 page)

Skinner began knocking rapidly against the lock’s tumbler, creating a tension on the interior pins. Then, a few telerhythmic bursts inside rattled the pins up and down until they stuck, shears opening, and the lock snapped open. She slipped inside the study quickly, clairaudiently canvassing the hall behind her to ensure that no one was coming.

Fortunately, she wouldn’t need to put on a light, possibly alerting household staff to her presence. Unfortunately, as was always the case, the room served as a new adventure in relational geometry. She couldn’t knock too loudly on the walls to get a sense of the space—not without risking undue attention. Which meant that she’d have to, very slowly and very lightly, feel her way around the room with her cane.

Years of experience building mental pictures of new rooms had given Skinner a good feel for it. Vie-Gorgon studies like this were usually narrow, with the desk directly opposite the door, near the window. There was probably some guest furniture, a low stool or a chair, perhaps, in between…there. She tapped lightly on a wooden chair leg. Reached out, set her hand on it. It was high-backed and plush. She resisted the urge to move quickly; if she had to make a run for it, she needed to be sure where everything was. A few moments of caution now were worth it.

Farther out, more furniture. Then the desk. It was heavy, wide. The desk chair was on the opposite side, between the desk and the window—she knew there was a window, because she could hear the wind whipping against the glass. Around the side, carefully, and she made sure to fix its corners in her mind. Behind the desk, and she lightly bumped into the chair. It was wheeled, and rolled slightly when she touched it. She felt her back brush against heavy draperies.

Now, to find the letter. Slowly, and as quietly as she could, she began opening the drawers. Each one squeaked and scraped against the desk slightly, but also particularly. No two drawers or doors or spots on the floor ever sound quite the same. There, third one down on the left. There was neither time nor means to sort out which letter, precisely, she was looking for; instead, she grabbed the first four and stuffed them into the pocket of her dress.

“…candles for the study.”

Skinner jerked her head up. Someone was coming down the hallway. She suppressed the urge to snap her telerhythmia around the room looking for a hiding place, instead reached out with her hands.
The desk? How high is it off the ground? Would they be able to see me under it?

“I thought Miss Emilia said she didn’t like candles in there.”

“Her mother wants candles in all the rooms, don’t ask me why.” The door handle rattled as someone grabbed it. “Oh, she’ll chew you out for this, it’s supposed to be locked all the time.”

The drapes, move behind the drapes
. Skinner stepped as close to the window as she could and pulled the heavy drapery around herself. Her hiding place would either be effective, or laughably absurd—leaving the hem of her dress exposed at the bottom, or lying across her face so that its shape was clearly visible. The door opened, footsteps brushed softly on the thick carpet.
I left the drawer open. Shit
. The servants chattered aimlessly as they worked, presumably putting new candles in candelabras throughout the room.
No way to get to it. How will I know if they’re looking towards me?

Matches were lit, and the smell of sulfur filled the air.
They’ll see me for sure, now.

“Such a waste,” muttered the first speaker at the front of the desk, not a yard away from Skinner. “Candles...just because she likes to see the windows lit up at night.” Closer now, he’d moved around to the back. “Wish I were rich enough to burn candles at all hours.” There was nothing between him and Skinner except for that thick drape. She could reach out and touch him if she wanted. The drawer’s particular voice resounded as the servant closed it.

The pause that followed brought Skinner’s heart into her throat. It could not have lasted longer than a fraction of the breadth of a breath, but Skinner must have spent a day, a month, a year with her chest pounding, biting her lip and gritting her teeth, waiting for the man to snatch the draperies away and demand an accounting of what she was doing in Emilia Vie-Gorgon’s study.

Such an apocalypse never occurred, and instead the man, after a moment’s hesitation, left the candlelit study and closed the door behind him. Skinner breathed a sigh of relief whose force surprised her, as though she might have inadvertently expelled her soul, then after using her clairaudience to make sure the hall was empty, followed the servant out.

She hadn’t taken more than two steps into the hall when yet another voice addressed her, triggering yet another precipitous drop of her stomach.

“Miss?” The sternly polite and politely suspicious voice asked. Emilia’s major domo. “The guests aren’t supposed to be up here.”

“Yes. No,” Skinner replied, smiling. “I was a little lost, I was trying to find…”

“I fail to see what you could have been looking for that you thought might necessitate you leaving the first floor,” the man said, his voice icy with official indignation.

“Yes, well.” Grimacing inwardly at the straightened circumstances that forced her into such a pass, she adopted a hang-dog expression and morosely tapped at the silver plate that sealed off her eyes. “It’s easy for me to get turned around, you see.”

“Oh,” the major domo said, his voice dropping with the certainty that only knowledge of the most exquisite faux pas can bring. “Oh, oh, yes. Of course, I’m sorry. Do you…can I help you back to the party?”

“If you would,” Skinner said to him. “That would be lovely.”

“
We need to discuss your recent actions,” the Moral Responsibility officer said. Beckett couldn’t remember the man’s name and this, somehow, disturbed him more than the hearing about his fitness for duty. “Some of the reports coming in are disturbing. Your superiors are worried.”

“Stitch is worried?”

“Mr. Stitch is only your direct superior. The people that I work for are superior to him,” the man said with a quiet sneer. He had a sheaf of papers in front of him. Beckett stopped listening. His mind wandered back to the last night’s raid. It was vivid in his imagination, Bluewater in all its rotten, sagging, destitute glory.

Bluewater was where the poor indige lived. The wealthy hetmen of the indige clans had mansions and townhouses lining the streets of Indigae, where imported gullah-trees and glowing phlogishrubs were maintained at great effort and expense. Indigae was a safe, clean neighborhood, well-patrolled by gendarmes, well-tended to by the city’s many civil services, and far from the poison-smoke-spewing factories at the west end of the river Stark. Indigae was so lovely a neighborhood, in fact, that if it were not for the immense social shame incurred by being seen amongst the indige, even the Esteemed Families would have maintained residences there.

Bluewater was not any of those things. The wide boulevards of Indigae were narrow, crowded streets in Bluewater. The little gardens were patches of dead grass or shimmering blue slime-mould on the cobblestones. There were no gendarmes in Bluewater, and if order was kept by the gangs of thugs and criminals that ruled it, it was only by accident. The neighborhood dissolved from warehouses full of cheap imports, warehouses converted to densely-inhabited, multi-family barracks, and warehouses that were too rickety and unsound even to support squatters, into factories that spewed black smoke, blue smoke, green smoke. Factories that dumped brightly-colored heavy metals into the rivers White and Crook, which had long been covered over by Trowth’s incessant development. The two swift and underground tributaries took the bright-colored and psychoactively charged mud into the Stark, where it sank to the bottom and bred strange species of fish and lizard.

Bluewater was a wretched place, a place whose inhabitants had yet to see the runoff of wealth from their more successful cousins in Indigae. The indige there were easy prey for Anonymous John and his men, for Dockside Boys and River Rats, for Starkies and the Old Trows. Bluewater was as thoroughly villainous a neighborhood as Trowth had known, and who could blame the indige for choosing gang life, smuggling, drugs, and robbery over the meager existence that they might be fortunate enough to eke out in this disused corner of the city?

“Your violent behaviors…Mr. Beckett?”

Beckett snapped back to himself, looked around the room, recollected the situation. “What?”

“You’ve always had a reputation for brutality, of course, but recently…some people are concerned that you’ve become a danger to the organization.”

“Which people?”

After Beckett’s hasty report, and eager to distract attention from their heretical experiments, the War Powers Ministry detached a unit of Lobstermen to serve in the coroners’ raid in Bluewater. These marines, nearing the ends of their terms of service, and therefore doomed, in a few short years, to a slow and painful death, were deployed at strategic locations throughout the neighborhood. Beckett’s plan was to take a handful of his own men and a squad of gendarmes directly to the address, and to leave the Lobstermen to cut off any potential escape routes. His fear was that the men in their blood-slick bone armor would frighten the black market dealers into doing something stupid, which the Lobstermen would then respond to with characteristic deadly force.

Dead black market dealers would likely yield up little information, so the Lobstermen were kept in reserve. He and his men approached an unassuming warehouse—fully as unassuming a warehouse as any of the other warehouses in Bluewater, and provoking a hurried conference as to whether or not they were sure that this was the correct address. Beckett glared sullenly until he’d obtained the attention of the gendarmes, and then ordered them into positions surrounding the site. Telerhythmic tapping—in the form of a very specific, very simple signal—indicated that the Lobstermen were all in position, lurking dangerously in the dark.

“Your confederate, Mr. Vie-Gorgon? Claims that you unnecessarily killed, and excessively beat a suspect in order to obtain information.”

Beckett blinked. “Valentine? Valentine said that?” He shook his head, then winced at the pain this provoked. “Why would he say that?”

“Did you beat the man at Small Ash Abbey?”

“He had information. I got the information. I don’t see what the problem is.”

The man shifted in his seat, and shuffled his papers again. “I also have some notes here about the raid that you conducted last night.”

“Go,” Beckett whispered. James heard, and he, presumably, was sending out the tap-tap-tap that would transmit the order. Beckett and his men moved towards the front door. “Coroners!” Beckett shouted. “We’re coming in!” He did not wait for a reply, but let the two gendarmes with him break the rotten wooden door down.

In the dark, inside, there were ten or fifteen indige, glowing faintly blue. They wore tattered clothes, and were huddled together, speaking quietly to themselves. When Beckett and his men crashed through the door, the indige leapt to their feet and began shouting.

“Where are they?” Beckett demanded. “The men, where are Anonymous John’s men?” He was answered with a babble of pidgin Trowth and Indt. One particularly bold indige youth stepped forward and shouted directly in Beckett’s face.

“No more! No more here! No more here!” The indige said, his face glowing brighter as his choler increased. “No more, us! Just us!” The indige swarmed around the gendarmes, repeating this mantra.

“What do you mean, no more? They’re gone?” Beckett asked, his heart sinking.

“Gone, all gone! Just—”

A sudden commotion broke through the shouts. Two Trowthi men in shirtsleeves and worn trousers, burst from a door in the dark. They were being pursued by more gendarmes, who waved cudgels and fiercely blew their whistles. Beckett shoved the indige aside and raised his revolver. “Stop! You two men, stop where you are!”

“No more, gone!” The indige insisted, grabbing at Beckett’s shoulder.

The old coroner shrugged him off. “Stop, I said!” The two men had crossed the interior expanse of the warehouse, and were fumbling in the dark with something. A weapon, a secret door? “Stop!” The indige grabbed at his gun arm. Beckett snatched his hand away and struck the youth across the face. The indige collapsed, bleeding hot blood from his cheek. The coroner fired two bullets into the air. “FUCKING STOP!”

“You struck a young man who had no relationship to the case, is that correct?” The Moral Officer asked.