Mr. Stitch (29 page)

“How?”

“I need. Everything. The War Ministry still has impressment powers, right? And the new Moral Standards Committee, their files. I want to commandeer everything, every man, every piece of information in the city, shut down every port, search every ship and warehouse.” Anonymous John’s operations had been notoriously difficult to dismantle because they were robustly decentralized—small cells operating under instructions, and barely aware of each other. And the process had been repeatedly hampered by the fact that law enforcement in the city was itself decentralized, and subject to the whims of its neighborhood commanders, to the needs of conflicting bureaucracies, the flailing inconsistency of public opinion. But John’s organization was still, ultimately, parasitic—it required the ordinary functioning of the city to survive, and had been permitted to exist for so long because it was more trouble to destroy it than it was really worth. “I don’t even care if we never find him. I’ll keep all fucking industry in this town tied up until he starves to death. I will dismantle every tiny piece of his operation if it takes me a hundred years.”

“Ambitious.” Stitch replied. As usual, no emotions betrayed its opinion on the subject. Whatever Mr. Stitch believed, it was keeping it to itself.

“This isn’t just heresy anymore, or civil unrest. He’s not just bombing some local gendarmerie. The Coroners is a division of the Imperial Guard. Attacking us is
treason
. He has directly compromised the safety of the Emperor himself, and I want unlimited powers to track him down. Fucking
unlimited
.”

Stitch was silent, just stared at him with those unblinking, brass eyes, then turned away. Its dead, ichor-pickled muscles creaked audibly as it did so. It was not officially reported, but still fairly commonly-known, that Mr. Stitch was routinely consulted by the Emperor’s personal medical staff on a variety of scientific subjects. Ostensibly, as the head of the Coroner’s division, there were specific, proscribed—and often intricate and confusing—channels through which Mr. Stitch had to act in order to so much as change the color of the front door of the office. But the fact was that Mr. Stitch had the ear of the Emperor if he it was required, and what Beckett said was true. The Imperial Guard, for the safety of the Emperor and the Empire, necessarily had to be sacrosanct. There should be no citizen that felt anything but terror at the thought of raising their hand against the Emperor’s appointed servants of law and order. John’s attacks had set a dangerous precedent.

It is possible that these were the thoughts that Mr. Stitch’s incalculably complex difference-engine of a brain was considering in that moment, that and a nest of future possibilities, weighed against past experience, evaluated according to their upcoming likelihoods, a treacherous reef of non-optimal outcomes through which the reanimate needed to sail. Future outcomes were difficult to predict, as even the most fervent daemonomaniacs who pretended to absolute causal knowledge of the universe were forced to admit. And, moreover, Mr. Stitch had to accommodate this new information into whatever vast plans for the city it had itself been making for the last two hundred years. It was a daunting task, but if there was any mind capable of it, it was Stitch’s.

While Mr. Stitch computed, Beckett became conscious of another voice shouting his name. A familiar voice. “Skinner?” He asked. He looked up. The young woman was wrapped in a dressing gown and a heavy coat, hair loose and plastered across her face by the rain, silver-eyeplate glinting red and blue, as though she’d proceeded directly from bed to the patchwork light that now illuminated what remained of Raithower House. Karine was behind her, somewhat less appropriately-attired, as the indige had different customs regarding what constituted acceptable sleepwear than her Trowthi brethren. They were both panic-stricken; Karine led Skinner by one hand, Skinner clutched at her cane with the other.

“Beckett! Where is he? Is he all right? I don’t hear him…” Skinner was saying.

“Who? Is who all right?” Beckett was on his feet at once; too quickly; his head spun.

“Valentine!”

Beckett shook his head. “Valentine’s not here, his shift doesn’t start for another hour—”

“He was staying here. Beckett.” Her voice dropped to an anguished whisper. “Beckett, he let us stay at his family house and he was sleeping at the office.”

Beckett felt a sensation like his stomach had dropped out from inside him, swallowed up by some inexpressibly deep pit at the core of his being. “Shit. Shit! Okay, come with me. Now!” He seized Skinner’s arm and dragged her towards the collapsed building. Rubble still obscured most of the site; volunteers were working tirelessly to clear it. They had made a chain into the pit that had opened into the Arcadium to pass broken stone out of it. Pale, ash-smeared faces and haunted looks made them look like so many horrid ghosts, condemned forever to labor on behalf of a city that would never care for them. “Listen. Skinner, you need to listen there, all right? If he’s trapped inside, I need you to find him.”

“Is he—”

“The people we’ve pulled out so far are dead. But we haven’t found everyone, all right? We haven’t gotten to the bottom. So I
need
you to find him.”

Skinner nodded. Beckett could see the small muscles along her jaw clench, the telltale signs of concentration, as she swept her clairaudience through the rubble. Fear and concern would have made another knocker hasty, likely to make mistakes, but not Skinner. She was methodical, precise, thorough. If anyone could find him…

“There’s nothing…wait. Wait, there’s…I can hear someone…”

“Where? Where is he?”

“Sh! Quiet.” She opened her mouth, stretched her jaw like she was yawning, trying to listen more closely…then snapped it shut. Her face went blank. She slowly sank to the ground, besmirching her nightdress with the muck and ash that had accumulated on the cobblestones around them.

“Miss Skinner?” Karine whispered as she approached. “What is it?”

Beckett already knew the answer, but he shuddered still when Skinner spoke. “Nothing. It’s stopped.”

“Are you sure—”

“I heard his heart stop, Karine. There’s no one else down there.” Skinner put her head in her hands. Beckett leaned heavily against a stone wall that had, by some miracle, avoided collapse. They were silent as Mr. Stitch approached. It said nothing.

At length, Beckett spoke. “Get me an army. Anonymous John wants a war. I need an army.”

Stitch considered the rubble-strewn catastrophe that had one been the coroners’ office. “You. Will have one.”

Though Beckett had demanded an army, what he got was little better than a mob. Men volunteered for his operations by the score—some were gendarmes, some were former soldiers, some were simply shopkeepers and tradesmen incensed beyond reason. Neighbors began gleefully reporting on each other, listing the criminal vices of their fellows in the prurient hope that someone they knew might turn out to be Trowth’s notorious arch-villain. Houses and businesses, warehouses, docks, and ships were raided, and some were burned. Commerce in the city practically ground to a halt, as Trowth’s population laid siege to itself.

It was veneine and djang and iron self-control that enabled Beckett to retain even a shred of command over his army. He no longer had the stomach for more than one meal a day—usually of smoked fish and kale--and slept for no more than three hours a night. He pushed himself beyond the brink of exhaustion, living in an almost trance-like state in which his mind had completely divorced itself from the sensibilities of his body, operating it remotely, fully disregarding its needs, as he rode back and forth across the city, doing his best to supervise the rapidly-deteriorating organization of his raiding parties.

During this time, the middle weeks of True Spring, chilly showers and civil unrest proved a fertile combination for the city’s pamphleteers, who sprung up throughout Trowth like so many radical mushrooms, distributing literature like it was their fungal spore. There were some pamphlets in support of the Emperor, of course, mostly paid for by the emperor himself. By far, however, the pamphleteers were closer to fomenting revolution than they had ever been in the city’s history—free now, while Beckett had seized control of all law enforcement and occupied it with chasing down Anonymous John, to say what perhaps they had always wished to. The Emperor was a tyrant, an oppressive madman, crushing the life from the city with his mad whims. Elijah Beckett was a warlord, trying to seize control of Trowth from its rightful ruler. Anonymous John was a foreign spy, trying to undermine the Empire, or else he was a criminal hero, a freedom-fighter battling the forces of oppression, or else he was a devil, the right hand of the Loogaroo come to visit upon Trowth some divine vengeance.

Somewhere in the core of this swirl of rumor and innuendo, coloring the interpretations and fueling the rebellious tendencies of the city’s most fiery ideologues, was one particular pamphlet. Elijah Beckett never saw it, because he had neither the time nor the interest to concern himself with public opinion. Elizabeth Skinner never knew about it, because the only friends she had left were too preoccupied to draw her attention to it. But it had not escaped the notice of the Emperor, and it was the subject of a public address that would later be known as the End of the Presses.

Word of the impending address had circulated rapidly among the citizens, and a throng of people filled the Royal Square in front of the dense, mismatched architecture of the palace. It loomed above the people, craggy gables and jagged merlons, forests of buttresses and arches, looking like nothing so much as a grim deity, prepared to pass judgment against those foolish enough to worship at its feet. Arrayed along the sides of the Royal Square were the closed carriages of the Esteemed Families: the Vie-Gorgons and the Daior-Crabtrees and the Rowan-Czarneckis, hidden from public view in their shrouded coaches; under mandate to attend, but under no particular obligation to permit the ordinary people to get a good look at them.

Emilia Vie-Gorgon was there, some onlookers claimed. They insisted that they had caught a glimpse of her beautiful, delicate features and her ebon-black skin through the white lace curtains of the Vie-Gorgon coach.

On either side of the square, the twin statues of Gorgon and Demogorgon stood as silent, inscrutable sentries, the last relics of the city of giants upon which Trowth had been built. Here, of all places, the sense of transgression for which Trowth was known, the sense of being a trespasser in a stranger’s garden, was the strongest. It was undoubtedly why the Emperor chose to deliver all of his speeches here. Yet, despite the natural fear that percolated among his audience—the paranoia that they were suddenly subject to as they looked over their shoulders, the abrupt uncertainty that gnawed them—despite all that, the one document that the Emperor had come out expressly to forbid circulated rapidly, passed from chilly hand to chilly hand, stuffed under coats and in shirts to protect it from the rain.

Someone, somewhere, had begun printing copies of
Theocles
, and selling them for pennies on street corners.

The reasons for the sale were, of course, obscure, but it was serendipitous that whatever rabble-rouser had decided to resurrect the blacklisted play had chosen to charge for it, rather than simply distributing it. The people of Trowth were mistrustful of anything
given
, far preferring the tacit assurance of value implied when a thing was
sold
. If it were free, it would have been deemed worthless, but even the few pennies that the printer demanded were enough to convince citizens of its secret value.

William II Gorgon-Vie was, after the fashion of the Gorgon-Vies, a stout man, barrel-chested and apportioned with a generous layer of fat. He was stocky enough to seem short at a distance, but was actually unusually tall. Close-up, William II’s thick-necked frame and slightly rounded shoulders gave the impression, as did most of his family, that he was in fact some kind of bull that had been trained to walk around on its rear hooves. This illusion was supported by his perpetual habit of clearing his throat and snorting.

The affectation of the Esteemed Families was that, the closer the men were to the throne of the Empire, the more plainly they were attired. The Emperor was customarily the most plainly-clothed, in a suit of all black, tailored both to accommodate and to enhance his generous bulk. He wore dark, smoked glasses—a deviation from his traditional uniform that would have been scandalous, had they not been a recommendation from his cadre of doctors as a means to alleviate his constant migraines.