Mr. Stitch (38 page)

He paused briefly to grab at a hefty stick of splintered wood—all that remained of a railroad tie that had been destroyed when the center of the bridge was lost. He jogged to keep up with the train, wincing at the persistent pain in his limbs, and trying to imagine the precise scenario that would need to exist inside the car in order for a foot-long splinter to be of much use. He did not succeed.

Lacking anything that resembled a strategy—and having been well-served by a lifetime of rash behavior—once Beckett had attained the platform on the rear of the coach, he just set his shoulder against the door and burst in. Perhaps he expected the element of surprise to give him some advantage that he lacked, or perhaps he considered it at least remotely plausible that William II’s would-be assassin was standing directly behind the door. Of the many scenarios he considered—including an especially unlikely one that involved him knocking the assailant directly unconscious before he’d had time to harm anyone—none resembled the sight that lay before him.

The lush interior of the coach was in complete disarray. The heavy satin draperies, all in the deep purples and dark greens of the Gorgon-Vies and ordinarily hung about the windows to keep the car comfortably claustrophobic, were a shambles—torn from their rods and strewn about in mounds of lush fabric, along with paintings shaken loose from their moorings and shredded by their fall, chairs tumbled and broken, and a generous scattering of the razor-sharp remains of the Emperor’s personal dry-bar. Glass crunched beneath Beckett’s feet as he staggered into the room.

One body was spread out before him, dead. The man had been shot between the eyes, and the moist coil of his being was splattered liberally across the walls. A second man stood to the side; he was deathly pale, well-dressed and wide-eyed at the carnage, and a woman in a blue dress and an elaborate hairstyle had buried her face in his chest and was weeping quietly. The man Beckett recognized as the under-secretary to the Prime Minister; the woman he supposed was a concubine, but his eyes were drawn from them at once, to the center of the car.

The Emperor’s coach, according to long tradition, was always divided into two sections—a kind of sitting room, where the Emperor might receive visitors and discuss matters of state, and beyond that a private room where, presumably, he indulged his insatiable sexual appetites in all manner of licentious and unspeakable ways. No one was ever permitted in the private room, and Beckett hoped that the man had had sense good enough to flee into it at the first sign of danger.

William II Gorgon-Vie was not in the car at all. Instead, at the door to his private chamber was another woman, buried beneath a small effusion of petticoats. Her head was turned at an impossible angle to her shoulders; vertebrae pressed out against her skin, a grotesque jag of bone that made Beckett wince involuntarily. A look of choking horror was frozen on her face.
Dahran
, Beckett thought, absurdly.
That one’s name was Dahran.

Above the dead woman, looming in all its misshapen, patchwork monstrosity, reeking of ichor and enigma, was Mr. Stitch. It fixed Beckett with its brass, expressionless eyes, and said nothing.

What the hell do I do now?
Beckett wondered. The sound of spinning gears in his mind had trebled and now threatened to overwhelm him.
Am I hearing…? Are those the gears in Stitch’s head
?
For a moment, Beckett was sure it was true—that the psychoactive venom in his veins had dissolved the boundary between his mind and the hulking reanimate, or that the invincible engine of Stitch’s mechanical intellect had finally spilled over its borders and now had begun to leak into the minds of those around it. Self and object were undivided, now only decoration applied to the outermost edges of one incomprehensibly vast and turning mechanism, whose cogs and clockwork guided the destiny of all men.

“What happened?” Beckett choked, and the sensation vanished. He was Elijah Beckett again, wholly separate from that strange, unliving giant. He gripped his makeshift weapon tightly. “What happened here?”

“It was her,” the pale man whispered. “She had a gun. Kept it hidden under her dress She ki…she shot Bertram. She wanted the Emperor…”

“You killed her?” Beckett said Mr. Stitch.

“She was waving the gun around like a madwoman,” the man interjected. “We were all in danger. It was the only way. I swear…we’re lucky to be alive.”

“Where’s the Emperor?”

Stitch spoke in its rasping, horrifically painful voice. “Safe.” The reanimate took a deep breath, a sound like a crypt opening to the sky for the first time in centuries. “He. Is. Safe.”

Pogo ada Goan was ramo of the Clan Akori. This was a rank that put him somewhere below the headman—who actually still lived in Daeagea, the ancestral homeland of the indige—and, technically, slightly above the matriarchs of the Bluewater Household. This elevation in rank was a double-edged sword, of course; as a ramo, he was freed from the practical responsibilities of running the household, but, as a consequence, he was far less vital to that household’s functioning than the matriarchs were. He filled a position among his fellow Bluewater Akori that was something of a cross between a priest and the captain of a ship. He communed with the ancestral spirits and the Genius of the Household, issued guidelines and directives to the matriarchs, but it was generally the mothers and aunts and sisters of the Bluewater Household that were responsible for the work, and received the accordingly high respect and adoration.

These days, Pogo knew, the ancestors had little to say. Since their demand that the indige migrate en masse from Trowth and return to Daeagea, they were silent almost to a one. This left Pogo with very little to do except engage, along with his brothers, nephews, and uncles, in honest labor. This was slightly embarrassing for a
ramo
, but Pogo had achieved a kind of bemused acceptance of it. Trowth was a mad place, and the needs imposed on his people there were mad ones; surely the Household’s needs were greater than Pogo’s sense of propriety?

He smoked a cigarette as he and his male family members sat strapped in the dark, hot, claustrophobic confines of the airship. This was an Akori clan ship, designed to resemble a gigantic
gava-
fish. Pale Trowthi claimed it smelled like rotten fish, due to the gasses that kept it aloft, but Pogo had never noticed such a thing. Besides that, these same Trowthi never complained about the smell of their chickens or the rotten green plants in their gutters, or when their phlogiston soured and began to turn to vinegar, so undoubtedly their collective sense of smell was suspect.

The airship floated above the Soder Gorge at a leisurely pace, that represented the highest velocity to which it could reasonably attain. The pilot managed to maneuver the vehicle past the broken bridge, and a man from the coroners addressed the indige in less than perfect Indt.

“We am looking at men. To find. Finding. How is it…” the man said, then whispered something to the pilot, who muttered a response. “Identify. We am to identify men. Here.” He gave a thick packet of papers to the man nearest him. “This list, to find the men. Yes? Question?” When no one responded, he returned to the cockpit.

The indige to whom the man had handed the papers immediately passed them to Pogo, who accepted leadership of the group as was his due. Leafing through the pages, he saw that they consisted of a list of Trowthi names and a number of fair sketches of people’s faces.

“All right, cousins,” Pogo sad aloud. “We are here to look for bodies. We are staying until we find everyone on the list, okay?” He tucked the papers into his belt, and prepared to rappel into the valley.

Pogo had grown up in Daeagea, among its mile-high stone towers and impossibly-tall trees. Heights never bothered him, and most of his people were similarly inconsiderate of the danger as they dangled on ropes far above the valley floor. A few who had been born after the Diaspora had never learned the exhilarating glory of the precipices of the homeland, and panicked a little at the descent. The other indige immediately mocked them and called them Trowers—city-boys, practically humans.

What did make Pogo nervous, he realized as he reached the bottom of the gorge, was the sense of the mountains looming up on either side of him. This was a sharper feeling than he suffered in the city; here, in Soder Gorge, there seemed to be nothing holding the gray granite sides of the chasm up. They could fall at any minute, burying all the Akori at the bottom of the pit, and then who would dig the bodies out? Not Trower men, who couldn’t leave their city without mewling like infants at the great expanse of sky. No one would come for them, and the Akori men would all perish beneath the stone. Pogo smoked another cigarette, and nodded at this family that they should get to work.

Sorting through the wreckage of the fallen train car was hot, exhausting work, though at least the murderous thorny vines had died out. The indige were careful around them still, hacking the vines thoroughly before pulling them out of the car. It was unlikely that they could feed on indige blood, anyway—unlike the bright-mites that swarmed in the damp summer heat, which took sips from indige veins and then darted away, burning bright and phosphorescent blue.

Pogo’s brothers dragged body after body before the ramo; the corpses smelled like salt and ocean water to indige noses, which made them fairly easy to find. And the maddening stench of ichor was unmistakable—how the Trower men could tolerate it was one more thing that Pogo would never understand. As the bodies were placed before him, Pogo checked their faces, if they were undamaged, or checked on his list of identifying marks if they were. He then spoke a short invocation to whomever might be the house guardian of these men. It was troubling to try to do this without knowing the spirit’s name, but was better than letting them go into the next life with no chance at all for a family, even if heathen Trower men didn’t know it. Perhaps they would prefer to be buried in a crypt somewhere, or set on fire; Pogo didn’t know how the Trower men cared for their dead, but if he was to supervise, he would do his best to see them safely onwards.

By sunset, the indige were thoroughly exhausted, sweating silver bullets that hissed when they struck the hot rocks and smelled like vinegar. All of the names on Pogo’s list were accounted for. He had insisted that the men keep looking for a while, just to satisfy his sense of completeness. He was about to call them in when a boy of sixteen ran up to him.

The boy had tattoos that indicated he was a Thoron from a Chapel Street Household: stylized seabirds and the double-eagle that the Trowthi-men used to mark their churches. He began speaking at once. “Ramo, ramo! I’ve found another—”

“Hap!” Pogo interrupted. He held up his hand.

The boy bowed his head, ashamed. “Forgiveness, ramo. I am Gad ada Sho, of Clan Thoron, Second Chapel Street Household, third son of Sorine Thoron, second cousin of Aran Akori. My father was Darag Thoron of…I do not know his household. He was born in the homeland, and died before I knew him.”

“You are welcome, cousin. Many of our people have never known the households of Daeagea, there is no shame. What have you found?”

“Another body, sir. In a crevice in the rocks.” He pointed to the south.

Pogo looked at his list, then thought fondly of the meal that would be waiting for him at home.
This man was not on the list, surely the Trowers don’t care about him?
But then he thought of a nameless corpse, whose spirit was trapped in rotting flesh because no one had informed its ancestors of its death, and sighed. “Show me, boy.”

Gad Thoron led Pogo close to the walls of the gorge, far from the shattered traincar, to a black crack in the rocks that was just taller than a man.

“What were you doing in here?” Pogo asked him.

“Ah,” the boy said. “Forgiveness, ramo. It was hot, and I thought I would steal a few moments in the cool shade.” He reached in to the dark, and heaved out a naked and badly-damaged body.

Pogo looked at this corpse. It was covered in black and purple contusions, and suffered from a kind of shapelessness indicating that many of its bones were broken. It was male, certainly, and very, very white. It had been a big man, with a barrel chest, thick legs, and broad shoulders. Its face was gone entirely, chewed off by animals, perhaps, no eyes or teeth apparent. There were livid red blotches on its skin where blood had pooled.