Mr. Stitch (26 page)

“No, oh,” moaned Constable Frye as he turned to his companion. “Down! Get dow—”

Constable Coates experienced a strange elation then, as the walls shimmered red and brown and turned to high, arching brass vaults. There was a pressure on his ears, a feeling that something had scooped him out from the inside, and now that empty cavity was trying to suck him inwards, causing him to implode. At the same time, he felt divorced from his body as it twisted away, crumpling to the floor, he felt lifted up, floating, as voices from his childhood reached out to him, his mother’s hands on the side of his face, his father’s voice whispering to him, gently telling him he was worthless, useless, stupid, a liar, lovingly telling him he was dying now, and should take a special joy in suffering the eternal discomfiture of the Divine Disharmony, soft claws gripped his soul, and then he was sliding back, back down to his ruined body, away from the whispering voices that warned him he would be back, he could never escape them, never avoid them, they would wait and wait until the sun burned out for him to return to them…

Constable Godwin Coates blinked up at the ceiling which was charred black and dripping grey ash into his eyes. He tried to turn his face away, but could not. He tried to lift his hand and found his left arm unresponsive. His right arm moved, and he flopped it over his chest. He did not feel any pain, felt instead insulated from pain, as though his mind was packed around with wool, a delicate glass bauble suspended in the center of a splintered crate. He tried to swallow and choked on dust and ash instead.

Voices continued to murmur at him, though he was sure these were not real voices, that his hearing had been destroyed by the weapon. He felt sure he could feel, through the cloud of shock, blood trickling from his ears. The voices murmured anyway, and though Constable Godwin Coates was sure that what they were saying was pertinent, desperately important to his situation, he could not apprehend a single word, as though they were speaking just below the threshold of intelligibility. He strained to listen, but the more he concentrated on the voices, the more they seemed to recede, and the more a frenzied panic and an intolerable, fiery pain encroached on the edges of his senses.

He surrendered, and began a series of dry, hacking coughs, spasms in the lungs and throat that grew more desperate and painful as the ash gripped him and no saliva was forthcoming. He wanted to roll over, at least, to turn away from the gray and black-etched ceiling, but he could not. Constable Godwin Coates had no idea how long he stayed there, prone and helpless on the floor, before he saw the man.

A man in a dark charcoal suit with a long, charcoal coat. He had a red scarf wrapped around his face, and his left eye and the flesh around it seemed to be missing, revealing a black pit into the depths of his skull. His short hair was gray and thinning, and he carried a charcoal-covered tricorn hat in his hand. The man knelt down in front of Constable Coates, perhaps was trying to speak to him, though between the man’s red scarf and an incessant, sourceless ringing sound, Coates could not have said for sure.

Wits scattered by the explosion, it took Godwin Coates several seconds to recognize the man in the red scarf as Elijah Beckett; when he did, Constable Coates did his best to speak. He was not certain if he succeeded, because he couldn’t hear himself, but he knew, somehow, that it was desperately important, that he had a vital message to deliver.

“Beckett,” he croaked, or thought he croaked, or hoped he did, at least. “Beckett. It was.” He coughed again—he was dead certain of that, because it felt like someone had reached down his throat and torn out a handful of lung. He took one last, deep, gasping breath, and prayed that his voice was clear.

“Anonymous John.”

The breath left him, and the dark claimed him, and his fear rose to a roiling pitch as it did so. Constable Godwin Coates knew that the voices were waiting for him in the dark.

Have been studying the minds of my fellow men at length. Am largely disappointed. All men seem to want only to indulge in their creature comforts. Long time and effort spent carving predictable circles in which to spend their lives, just automatons made of meat and bone. What is the point of making another entity such as this?

--from the journal of Harcourt Wolfram, 1785

Wolfram Hall was the official headquarters of the Royal Academy of Sciences—a lush, well-appointed townhouse on the Mile, right where the Daior-Crabtrees front met the entrenched defenses of the Gorgon-Vie architecture. The consequence of this was a very square building with very wide rooms and very low ceilings, and also an astonishing number of floral downspouts, as though the Daior-Crabtrees, frustrated by their inability to burn the building down and start over, were determined to occlude it with baroque gutter-work.

This was where newcomers petitioned for membership in the Academy, where patents were filed, where a substantial library of monographs and recent scientific periodicals could be consulted. It was staffed primarily by clerks, students at the university, and third and fourth cousins of the major Esteemed Families who needed jobs that were well-paid but not particularly taxing.

No serious scientist spent any time at Wolfram Hall, of course. The real work done by the Academy was in the Croft. At the leading edge of Old Bank, miraculously spared by the second activation of the
Excelsior
, was a vast complex of underground vaults, beneath what had once been the Abbey of St. Chretien. This Abbey was several decades older than the much more prominent Vie Abbey, and had been the center of religious life in Trowth for centuries before the church in Canth was disavowed and then replaced by the Church Royal. For years after that, the building served as the largest bank in Old Bank, and was indeed the bank from which that district originally took its name. After the Great Forfeiture, when all of the bank vaults were emptied in order to refill the royal treasury, Chretien’s Abbey stood disused and neglected.

All until Harcourt Wolfram, in dire need of space to accommodate his titanic intellect and increasingly-ambitious experiments, petitioned the crown for a laboratory. The Croft, which subsequently saw the birth of the first difference engines, the first aetheric translators, as well as Mr. Stitch himself, was commandeered by the Royal Academy of Sciences after Wolfram’s death, in a vain hope that the residue of his experiments could lead to even more breakthroughs that the great scientist had not considered.

The vaults in the Croft extended for more than a square mile, deep beneath the city, ancient catacombs whose purpose, undoubtedly clear to the early grammateurs who’d built it, was now thoroughly obscure. They had now become a hotly-contested commodity for the scientific community of Trowth, and were the home of the more audacious, unlikely, and undoubtedly extremely dangerous researches of the Empire.

This was where Beckett found himself on the morning after the death of Constables Coates and Frye: descending a narrow stairway deep into the belly of the Croft, to consult with an expert in necrology that he kept on retainer. Beckett had brought Gorud with him, and the therian took his surroundings in with an unflappable aplomb. Two porters carried a steamer trunk, in which were contained the remains of the black-tongued stranger responsible for the attack.

After what Beckett considered to be an utterly unreasonable number of steps, they came to the small offices of the scientists in the Croft—tiny rooms stocked with notes and notebooks, where men like Ernst Helmetag—professor of Life Sciences and Asphyxiology—could consider the results of their work.

“Ah, yes,” Ernst cried out, “Inspector Beckett, come in, come in. You men, put that there, that’s fine.” Ernst had the broad, ruddy features of the northern Trowthi, and a slight burr in his accent that was unmistakable. He wore a walrus mustache and was entirely bald. Between these features and the leather apron he wore, Ernst more closely resembled a jolly brewer than an expert in the animation of dead tissue. “Yes, now what have we here?” He paused above the trunk, then looked over at Gorud. “Ah. Is it appropriate? For that…I mean, the little fellow is surely out of his element here, perhaps he would care to wait…”

Beckett did not respond to this remark, only patiently waited for Ernst to succumb to the discomfiture that the inspector’s stony silence would produce.

“Yes.” Ernst said at last. “Well.” He opened the trunk and peered at its contents intently. After a moment, he took a pair of heavy leather gloves and a brass loupe from the narrow shelves in his cramped office, and began rummaging through sticky black goop and dismembered body parts..

“We shall take this to my workbench,” Ernst announced, as he summoned two more porters. Or, perhaps they were the same porters; the men traditionally wore linen masks over their mouths and noses, to protect themselves from deadly fumes, and were thus unrecognizable.

Helmetag’s workbench was actually four workbenches, arranged in parallel, occupying a large chunk of one of the modest-sized vaults in the Croft. Bright yellow lamps burned overhead, and a small phlogiston generator powered a large, portable incandescent light. The benches were filled with bits of metal twisted into occult shapes; jars with pickled hands, eyes, organs, tongues, and pig fetuses; long knives with straight blades, serrated blades, curved blades; and a respectable selection of glassware.

“Now,” Ernst said, “Ahm. Please don’t let…eh…the little fellow touch anything. I know you are curious!” He spoke very loudly to Gorud, as though the therian could not understand Trowthi, but an additional helping of volume might clarify things for him. “Yes! Curious! But you must not touch! All right! Now,” he said to Beckett, as he began to draw chunks of black, ichor-smeared meat from the trunk. “Now, of course, I am engaged in the study of prolonging the vitality of living tissue, yes? I do not…I must make it clear…I do
not
attempt to reanimate the dead tissue. Yes?” He looked around, as though to satisfy himself that any invisible eavesdroppers had clearly heard his disclaimer. “I will offer my advice, based on my experience, but of course that is not an admission of knowledge
a priori
, yes?”

“Yes, yes,” Beckett snapped at him. The speech was a standard part of his conversations with any of his consultants, and he was tired of it. “Just tell me what this is.”

Ernst tutted reproachfully, sucked his teeth, and began work on the remains. He laid the largest pieces beside each other, and gently flensed the remaining flesh with his long knives, revealing bits of skeleton made from brass. He exposed the flesh to currents from his phlogiston generator, applied certain tinctures that he’d extracted from his menagerie of beakers, and emitted some knowing grunts at the results. After an hour of what looked, to Beckett, like aimless puttering, Ernst explained.

“This is a quite extraordinary thing,” he said, wiping off his knives and carefully putting them back into arbitrarily chosen positions. “It is a reanimate, yes, that is clear. The flesh has been reactivated with an infusion of ichor, and provided
motis vivendum
by electricity. But look, do you see these bones? The bones are made of metal, and are hollow, you see? Cables run inside. Ordinarily, in a reanimate---er, that is, I am given to understand, at any rate—current is carried along the outside of the body to envigorate the muscle tissues. But these are a design to allow the current to run inside.”

“Why would someone do that?”

Ernst harrumphed, as though speculation on the motivations of necrologists was a pointless exercise. “Who knows? Well, perhaps. I couldn’t say for sure…”

“Guess, then.”

Ernst twisted the end of his mustache for a moment. “Let me ask instead. Where did you find this thing? It was not, I suspect, used in a conventional way.”

“No,” Beckett said, pensively. “No, it wasn’t. It was used to deliver a munition. An explosive…ah.”

“You see? Perhaps.” Ernst shrugged.

“Brackets and cables are notable. An internal electrical system would enable the reanimate to pass for human. At a distance, anyway.”

“It’s unusual. Erm. So I’ve
heard
,” said Ernst. “Necrologists do not usually try to make humans, but to make things that are more than human. It is a strange thing to make a reanimate that is indistinguishable from a man.”

“Yes,” Beckett replied. “Yes it is.” The phantom itching in his eye was suddenly abominable again, and he began to rub at it. “All right. Reanimates that can pass for human. There must be a way to recognize them.”