Mr. Stitch (35 page)

“Sharpsies,” Beckett gasped. “Where…how did they…?”

Helmetag looked befuddled. “There are no sharpsies, here, no. There are no sharpsies in the city at all, I think.”

“I saw…how did I get here?”

“You were crumpled up,” Helmetag said. “On the doorstep. I thought you were a vagrant at first, I am sorry to say, and was going to report you to the gendarmerie. But I recognized…you have a, ah, a distinctive face…”

“What,” Beckett said again. “What happened?”

“You were d—injured, badly. Nearly dead. I have certain…ah.” Ernst scratched at his massive moustache. “Certain means. There was some vitality left in your cells that can be re-envigorated…”

Did I hallucinate the sharpsies? And the towers? Why would there be sharpsies in the city?
“What do you mean, re-envigorated?”

“Envigorated, anyway. You must understand, it is a delicate thing, the line between the living and the dead, but you were certainly alive.”

The old coroner put his face in his hands and sighed.
I would like for one year to go by
, he thought to himself
, without being nearly killed
. “It’s fine. Thank. Thank you.” His head hurt abominably. “I need…ah.” He coughed phlegm from his throat. “Medicine. Veneine.”

“Yes, that,” Ernst nodded enthusiastically. “I hope you’ll understand. You were in withdrawal, you see? This is a very stressful condition for the body, so it was necessary to administer…well, you understand, your veins, many of them were badly damaged, so I needed to take steps…”

Beckett looked up at him. “What steps?” Ernst said nothing. “What steps?” He looked down at his forearms. Affixed to the inside of his right arm, buried directly in the pale flesh and surrounded by livid blood vessels, was a round brass plug.

“It is sealed,” Helmetag said quietly, “with ichor, much the way a knocker’s eyeplate is. I have attached it directly to your radial artery.” He fumbled in a pocket in his apron, and withdrew a few brass modules that looked like rifle shells. “Each one has a pre-measured amount of pharmacy—a combination of veneine, djang extract, and salt water. You plug it in, let me show you…” He set the shell again the plug in Beckett’s arm and twisted it.

Beckett gasped as he felt a sting like a needle prick, and then a sensation of spreading cold that rapidly vanished. Immediately, his headache and nausea subsided, the metallic taste in the back of his mouth disappeared.

“You must be careful,” Helmetag said. “These are smaller than what I think you must have been dosing yourself with. You
must not
increase the dosage, do you understand? Your body will acclimate, it will become very dangerous.”

“How many do you have?” Beckett asked.

“You do understand, yes? You cannot let your craving for the drug determine how much you take…”

“How many?”

Ernst went to his desk and drew out a dark, walnut-colored box. “We use these for testing on animals. I can give you a hundred now, you cannot take more than five a day. You are still sick, yes? Your life is hanging on by a thread...”

If Ernst Helmetag had any further enjoinders to caution, Beckett was not inclined to listen to them. He took the box, gathered up his clothes, and set off into the cold rain. He did not notice the faint, distant sound of spinning gears had begun again.

Have solved Chretien’s problem with the eyes. The matter was trivial. Have simply built artificial eyes using lenses and a tympanum that is sensitive to light, attached to optical ganglions from a man picked from the gallows. Work on the thinking-engine continues.

--from the journal of Harcourt Wolfram, 1785

Skinner had, much to her surprise, fallen into a quite natural rhythm with the Akori—and, for their part, Karine’s family were so burdened by numbers anyway that one more couldn’t possible harm them. The men spent their days working or looking for work, and brought back what little money they earned. The women spent the days at home, attending to the responsibilities of the household, and kept the money close. With so many to provide for, it was necessary to see every penny spent to maximum effect.

Of course, Skinner brought a skill-set to this arrangement that was unlikely, to say the very least, and fairly impractical to be perfectly honest. It was a fairly unusual event that any member of Karine’s extensive family required a secret passage found, a field agent communicated with, something listened to at an extreme distance, or a critically-acclaimed play written. Skinner was determined, however, not to become a useless appendage—and the Akori matriarchs were pleased with Skinner’s efforts, even if she did not possess most of the skills necessary for governing a household.

It was decided on, eventually, that Skinner would be the one to take the daily trips to Market Street to purchase groceries. Her sense of smell and touch were expertly acute, making her ideally suited to sorting ripe fruits and vegetables from their counterparts that had been sitting for too long in the cart, and her bitter anger at the injustices of the world combined with a driving need to be useful for something made her a fearsome haggler. This was how she found herself out and about in the city, two days before the Emperor’s Invocation, squeezing
gogons
.

It was during this expedition that Skinner heard a familiar voice—a sweet voice, a voice that would have been irresistibly charming if that charm had not been calculated to within an inch of its life. A voice that oozed humor and wit in precisely optimal amounts. A voice, in other words, that could belong to no one other than Emilia Vie-Gorgon.

“Ah, Miss Skinner,” she said. “What a pleasure it is to see you.”

“Yes? I wish I could say the same.” She chose one of the
gogons
—a particularly firm one, that did not seem to have any bad spots on its skin, and added it to what had become a considerable collection of the Indige vegetable.

“You are, no doubt surprised to find me here…”

“I should say that ‘surprised’ is actually a bit of an understatement,” Skinner said. “I’m not sure I have the vocabulary to express quite how astonished I am to meet you here.”

“…but I wonder if we could speak privately for a moment?”

Skinner took her burlap sack full of vegetables to the proprietor of the cart. “I don’t think, Miss Vie-Gorgon, that that’s very likely. In fact, I’m sure it’s essentially preposterous. What could we possibly have to speak about? Two crowns,” she said to the grocer, who was accustomed to a forceful parsimony from Skinner, and did not argue.

“I need your help with something.”

This was so unexpected a turn of phrase that Skinner did not quite know how to respond. She considered simply walking away, considered screaming at Emilia Vie-Gorgon, considered throwing vegetables at her, but settled for a kind of spluttering disbelief, accompanied by a few choked-out words. “You…I…you what…?”

“Improbable as it may seem, I need help, and you’re the only one capable of providing it. If we could adjourn somewhere more private, perhaps…”

“I don’t think that I’m going to go anywhere with you, Emilia. And while I admit to being desperately curious as to what problem you could face that was so severe it would imbue you with the audacity to come to me asking for help, I find that I am equally moved to give your request the dispassionate rebuff it richly deserves. Good day.” Skinner slung her bag over her shoulder and pushed into the crowd on Market Street, slashing viciously at feet and ankles with her cane in order to force a path.

She almost dropped her groceries when she heard Emilia’s voice again, right beside her. The woman had a miraculous ability to move with a quietness that would put a cat, or a ghost, or the ghost of a cat, to shame.

“There is a substantial amount of money in it,” Emilia began, but Skinner interrupted.

“If you think I’ve sunk so low that I’d prostitute myself for
you
…” She took a deep breath. “I do not need your money. And if I did need your money, I would starve before I took it.”

“Oh, yes, I suspect you would,” Emilia said. “But would you see someone else starve, to salve your pride? Your new friends have been very welcoming, haven’t they?”

“What…how do you know…?”

“Just a peculiar coincidence, I’m sure,” Emilia said, lightly. “Many of the Akori Indige work for my father, did you know? They’ve a long tradition of work as trainmen and engineers. Something about a resistance to the burns caused by free phlogiston. A lot of indige see employ on Vie-Gorgon trains.”

“What are you saying, exactly?”

“Nothing. Why nothing at all! Except that it’s fortunate that you’ve found so many friends who are lucky enough to find paying work in such bad times as we’re now faced with.” Emilia paused, becoming, yet again, a purely unreadable void. “And, perhaps, wouldn’t you like to be able to give them a little more? Wouldn’t it be worth it to you to contribute more to their livelihoods than doing their grocery shopping for them? I understand the Crabtree-Ennering-Vies have been building spacious new houses down by the waterfront—houses without leaks or mildew. Imagine if…well. Let me just say that I am willing to offer you let’s say..” she lowered her voice. “A thousand crowns.”

“A thousand…?”

“Up front. And another thousand afterwards.”

Skinner hesitated, and hated herself for doing so, but…two thousand crowns… “What, precisely, would you expect me to do?”

“It’s hardly anything at all, really. Just a bit of an errand that I’m afraid my schedule won’t allow for. A cousin of mine is taking the train to Seagirt tomorrow, and, fool of a man that he is, he’s forgotten one of his suitcases. All I would need is for you to take the suitcase to platform eight, and leave it there for him to collect.”

“Aha. Really. And you’re going to pay me two thousand crowns for this. For something that you already pay your porters and valets and such for. What’s in the suitcase?”

“The contents are private, and the suitcase will be locked. I’d love to be able to tell you, of course, but the Vie-Gorgons in general, and my cousin in particular, greatly value their privacy.”

Skinner wanted to be able to tell Emilia to carry her own suitcase around and, perhaps more importantly, where she could stuff her two thousand crowns. But the truth was that Skinner had already begun thinking of ways that she could spend it—of how far a sum like that would go in the hands of the Akori matriarchs. They could provide for their family for years on a sum half that large.

“Why do you need me for this?”

Emilia was dead silent again, the vacuum that she left behind filled immediately with the mélange of Market Street noise. “It seems that the Emperor has been growing increasingly…discomfited, these days. He’s instituted a number of security precautions on rail travel. He’s instructed the Coroners to search the baggage of any suspicious persons.”

“I see. And you think that the Coroners are unlikely to consider me suspicious? And since whatever you’ve got in that little satchel is something you’d prefer the Emperor didn’t see, you’d like me to carry it past the checkpoint for you.”

“In a word: yes.”

“In a word: no. I’m sorry Emilia…no, that’s a lie. I’m actually pleased to tell you that I’m not interested in helping you, no matter how many crowns you dangle in front of me.”

“I am sorry to hear that. Well, good day, Miss Skinner. And, do please offer my condolences to Pogo Akori.”

“For what?”

“Ah, did I not mention that? Yes, I suppose I must have forgotten. I am such a flighty creature sometimes, you see? My father’s been changing over to a new system of engineering on his major rail lines. I’m afraid a good portion of the Akori are going to be out of work by the end of the week.”