Mr. Stitch (8 page)

“There was a high-intensity oneiric event. I established a perimeter and then went in to eliminate the survivors.”

“The woman,” interrupted Edelred, “that was
released
from the coroners was—”

Stitch wasn’t listening. “And?”

“I succeeded,” Beckett told him. “Valentine took out the last one. There’s no one left alive inside, so the oneiric damage should be minimized.”

Mr. Stitch nodded and looked away, those cold, inhuman eyes delivering data directly to the miraculously complex difference engine it had for a brain. It raked its gaze over every inch of the street and the bombed-out gendarmerie headquarters. Beckett knew that the reanimate would soon go inside and study every piece of wood, every stone, every broken pile of furniture, every corpse. In time, it would wrestle the truth from uncooperative evidence.

“Thoughts?” Stitch asked.

Beckett shrugged. “Oneiric munition, I think. Could be the ettercap, treaty or no. They’ve attacked in the city before. But there was a lot brought back by our own soldiers, a lot misplaced. Anyone could have gotten a hold of something like that.”

“So. Why?”

“It could be the gangs,” Valentine put in. “Anonymous John works in Red Lanes a lot. They’ve been getting bolder, lately.”

The old coroner allowed that this could certainly be possible. “It could be…” Beckett muttered. “It could be sharpsies. I know most of them ran, but…you could hide an army in the Arcadium. It’d just take one with a grudge.” He rubbed his face, over his blind eye, ignored the eerie sensation caused by the numbness. “Hell, it could be anyone. Just carrying a weapon like that around could drive you insane. He might have dropped it on the gendarmes because they’d chased him off from some doorstep, or because he was hallucinating and thought that it was the imperial palace. He might have thought it was his mother’s house.”

Stitch nodded. “I. Will. Investigate.”

“Hm,” Beckett replied. “Fine. Fine.”

The giant reanimate shambled off, its subtle aura of menace seemed to drag James away, causing the knocker to follow after it like a small moon pulled into orbit. Beckett watched them for a few moments, then turned to Valentine. “All right. Did you read that pamphlet?”

“Oh! Yes. Here, hang on, I made notes…”

“Not now,” Beckett said. “Not here. Come with me. Have you met Gorud?”

While she rode back to her boarding house, Skinner chewed and spat and flexed her fingers, itching for the chance to snare Gorgon-Ennering-Crabtree’s neck and just crush it. The thought was deeply satisfying, though she knew the act would be far more trouble than it was worth. Still, it didn’t hurt to think about it, and so she allowed herself several minutes of purely murderous daydreaming. The fantasy passed, and left her with a slick sickness of shame at her joy. Skinner set it aside.

At the house, she left the coachman behind, who muttered about the fare and seemed nearly courageous enough to demand it from her, involvement with the Coroners be damned, and likewise damned the dishonor implicit in demanding money from a blind girl. If he might have complained, he was stilled by the presence of Mrs. Crewell. Skinner could hear her at the door, great lungs full and ready to lay into the man, whether his request was reasonable or not.

If anything came of it, Skinner never found out. She retreated to her room and sat by her window, pressing her hearing out where she knew it was quiet. Mrs. Crewell’s boarding house had its back to the Daior Chapel necropolis. Skinner listened to the dead, and let them soothe her.

Silence, to a knocker, is a strange phenomenon, and especially strange in a city like Trowth. The city’s sighted inhabitants often ignore it, preoccupied with the desolate loneliness of gray stone and worn, green bronze. Their eyes distract them from the merciless quiet of the city, whose cavernous stone underbelly, thick fogs, and bitter cold seem to muffle the casual sounds of daily living. During Second Winter, there are not even beggars in the street, or ragmen or bone-pickers harvesting their merchandise. There are no rats, or crows, or seagulls to hunt the empty city streets for scraps—all life that has no home to go to retreats deep into the Arcadium, ceding ground to the inevitable icy onslaught.

Despite the ringing, resonant quiet of the city, the eerie underpinning of stillness that quietly draws the life from the most animated conversations, there are very few places that were truly silent to Skinner’s preternatural hearing. Always, above that black gap of quiet was a haze of tiny noises—of hurried breaths and distant echoes, ruffling wool and rattling footsteps. The myriad sounds of humanity drew her clairaudience to them, exerting a nearly-imperceptible pull on her senses.

It was often thought that knockers were capable of communicating with the dead, and this was because of how they often chose to live near graveyards. The misconception stemmed from the average citizen’s inability to understand what it meant for the knockers, that their hearing should be so painfully acute. Knockers listened to the dead not because corpses were noted conversationalists, or because they had eldritch secrets to impart; they listened because the dead were so benignly
quiet
.

The Vie-Gorgon coach came for Skinner sharp at seven, rolling to a stop just as Chapel bells finished tolling the hour. The echo faded, and dissolved into the sounds of Mrs. Crewell, busying herself about the house with a housekeeper’s native self-importance. She would not suffer a spot of dust on the day that the Raithower Vie-Gorgon coach came to her hotel, even if it carried a man of such small importance as the Raithower Vie-Gorgon coachman. Coachmen talk, Mrs. Crewell well knew, and she’d not have any gossip about the state of her house.

The coach was warm, and of a style that Skinner was unfamiliar with—she shared a large compartment with the driver himself, separated from him by a mesh partition, rather than having him sit outside, warmed only by portable heating mechanisms. Skinner could hear him breathing and shuffling about behind the screen, whickering softly to his horses as the need arose. He did not speak to her, though, and Skinner felt strange raising her voice to him. Was it appropriate to speak to a coachman if he was sitting inside with you? It would be rude to say
nothing
, wouldn’t it? But he was also a
Vie-Gorgon
coachman, and the Vie-Gorgons took propriety very seriously. Surely he’d be offended if she said something. Or not? Perhaps he hated the stifling conformity demanded by polite society, and was really itching for an ordinary conversation with an ordinary person, and was just waiting for her to say something?

Am I nervous?
Skinner thought to herself.
Is this why I’m losing my mind?
“Do you,” she said, then cleared her throat. “I mean, have you been to the Royal, before?”

There was a moment of considered silence, and Skinner worried again that she’d made the wrong decision. When he spoke, the coachman had a grizzled old working-man’s voice that seemed out of place. “Once. Miss V gave me and the missus floor tickets.”

“What did you see?”

“Oh. Hm. Conscious…
Conscientious Assignations
, I think it were called. Big fuss about it in the papers, you know? That Eveham fellow was all over it, and he’s a laugh for a read, but I can’t say I’ve ever much cared for anything he’s got behind. Couldn’t find nothing particularly interesting about this one. Closed quick too, didn’t it?”

“Closed quick” might have been an understatement, Skinner thought.
The Conscious Assignation
had played at the Royal for a week, billowed by favorable reviews from Andre Eveham, the drama critic at the
White Star
. If he was actually a poor arbiter of theatrical quality—and, as some suspected, really just a mouthpiece for the Empire’s preferences for the theater—he made up for it with a brutally clever wit. Eveham’s reviews were the most widely read in the city, but seemed to have little bearing on the success of their subjects.

“You didn’t like it?” She asked.

“Well, it didn’t make sense, did it? Fella’s keeping that woman safe, right, because her uncle’s after her? And so he’s got her in that little house, right…did you see it?” He coughed. “Er. Uhm, sorry miss. I mean…did you…had you…uh…”

“I was there opening night, sir,” she told him, a small smile on her face. “I like opening nights.”

“Yeah, well, all right,” the coachman went on. “So he’s got her in that house, right? But there’s never no, you know. Touchin’, or nothing like that. And they’re goin’ to be married at the end of the play, we think they’re in love and all that, right? But he’s been to that little room every night, and not once have they put hands on each other.”

“Well. I think that’d be more than a trifle scandalous, wouldn’t you? Hardly a
conscientious
assignation, then.”

“Yur, well, I know. Can’t do none of that stuff on the stage, can you? Some committee or other would be on you in a minute. Still, how’m I supposed to believe that two young people like that are all hot and bothered for each other, but don’t never do
nothing
about it? They don’t even say something like, ‘Oh, I want to put it to you somethin’ fierce, but we can’t…’ now, nevermind how I says it, I’m not a writer or such, but you know what I mean?”

“You didn’t believe it.”

“That’s it. That’s right, right there. Didn’t believe it. Didn’t believe a word of it. Like the fella—who wrote it, what’s-his-name?”

“Bertram Sitwell.”

“Sitwell, right, he’s just writin’ about how he
thinks
people should be. But they ain’t that way, if you know what I mean, and maybe if he weren’t a writer, and maybe got himself around a little bit, got down to the Riverside once or twice,” he coughed again. “Er. Excuse me, miss. I do go on sometimes. Not a fit subject of conversation for a lady.”

I’ve personally killed six men, and participated in the execution of over a hundred. There’s not a lot you can talk about that’s going to upset me.
“Of course,” she said, but she did not pursue the topic, and the driver had little else to say.

A long silence that sounded to Skinner like a constellation of tiny sounds, and then they had arrived at the Royal. The driver politely lead her inside, past a noisy, chattering crowd, and upstairs to the Family boxes.

Emilia Vie-Gorgon was waiting for her, along with another young lady. Neither said anything until the coachman had left—his departure a bold violation of the ordinance that all women were to be accompanied by chaperones while in public. Skinner gingerly found a seat for herself to occupy, while the other two women sat in silence.

“Miss Skinner,” said Emilia Vie-Gorgon, abruptly. The youth of her voice was surprising, though perhaps it shouldn’t have been; famous as she was, Skinner realized, upon a certain amount of reflection, that Emilia couldn’t have been more than twenty. “I would like you to meet Nora Feathersmith. Nora, Elizabeth Skinner, formerly of the royal coroners.”

This was an event nearly as intriguing as the invitation itself. Nora Feathersmith was the youngest daughter of Ephraim Feathersmith, patriarch of one of the most peculiar families in Trowth. Like all major families in the Empire, the Feathersmiths had their own special area of business—Ephraim continued a long tradition of excellence and control over engineering and manufactury. Feathersmith factories built everything in Trowth that had more than two moving parts—from revolvers to typewriters to train engines. And yet, unlike the Crabtrees or the Daiors or the Ennerings, the Feathersmiths had never received, nor, to anyone’s knowledge, even
sought
Estimation by the crown.

That is, the Feathersmiths were a family, but not a Family. They were highly-esteemed by both the public and their colleagues in industry, but never Esteemed. In many ways, this served as quite an extraordinary advantage against many of their competitors: by never finding favor with an emperor placed on the throne by one Family, they never found themselves in
dis
favor when a new Family secured control of it. This permitted the Feathermiths to remain at the top of their industry since its earliest incarnation as weaponeers during the reign of Agon Diethes, to weather crises of interregnum, revolution, and the exposure of certain of its members as heretics. Peculiarly, by shunning the power that Estimation brought with it, Ephraim Feathersmith’s antecedents had found themselves a broader freedom.