The undercroft became an inferno as the ectoplasm that had filled it ignited in a flash of light and heat. Fire washed over the two coroners, stinging at their eyes, singeing hair and clothes, sucking the air from their lungs.
The fire was gone in a less than a second. Beckett took a deep breath, and looked up at Valentine, who was gingerly touching his face and attempting to ascertain whether he’d just burnt off his eyebrows.
“All right?”
“I think so,” Valentine said. “I think it was too fast to cause—”
A ragged shape leapt on him, emerging from the weird cascade of shadows that the heat lamps had made. Valentine grunted and staggered, the black form clinging to him.
“Damn it,” Beckett muttered. “Valentine, stand still!”
Valentine continued to stagger, but managed to take a few drunken steps towards the old coroner, who drew his arm back and struck the ectoplasmatist across the side of the head. The man went limp and slithered to the floor.
“Oh, ugh, have I got any on me?” Valentine asked, checking his coat.
Beckett squatted down next to the unconscious ectoplasmatist. “This one was real.” The man was lying face down on the filthy, damp floor of the tunnel, which was now mercifully clear. Beckett rolled the man onto his back and would have gasped, had not thirty years of horrible sights thoroughly inured him to the deformations of human misery. The man was gaunt and starved, with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, skin as thin as paper and so pale it was nearly transparent. It had a peculiar, waxy quality to it, as though he was really just a skull onto which an oily picture of a face had been hastily painted.
Ectoplasmatists drew on their own substance to create the sticky white gunk called ectoplasm, but Beckett had never seen anything like this—never a heretic able to create a full body, never one that could fill the floor of the tunnel with the stuff. No wonder the man looked starved; he must have torn out and rarefied all his own flesh to create so much.
The man opened his eyes, suddenly, and they rolled in their sockets as though there wasn’t enough muscle left to hold them in place. “The asphyx,” he whispered, “will sustain…” his eyes widened in horror then, and his mouth opened and stretched. He began to make a gagging sound, then all at once vomited a thick fountain of white hands and arms and staring eyes, that boiled from his mouth and grappled with the coroners. The man on the ground went rigid and arched his back, as though the ectoplasm had a life of its own, as though it were wrenching itself free of his body, a spirit made manifest and disdainful of the rotting meat that housed it.
Sticky thick gluey ectoplasm surrounded them, but before it could find purchase, Beckett drew his gun and shot the ectoplasmatist in the head. The ectoplasm continued to slither around his body, trying to crush his lungs, struggling to get control of his arms; fear slivered past Becektt’s veneine haze, as he saw Valentine almost suffocating beneath the cloud of vomited-up emanations. Beckett managed to shoot again, and again, shattering the dead man’s skull, but the weird fluid remained, heavy and congealing on his arms, keeping the red-hot lantern emitters at a distance, closing around his face, struggling to get past his scarf and into his nose and mouth.
Then, at once, the plasm evaporated, leaving behind no trace except for a persistent greasy feeling that Beckett knew would persist for several days. The old coroner permitted himself a small sigh of relief.
“Gah,” Valentine said, as he sagged back against the wall. “That…does it usually do that?”
Beckett looked down at the dead ectoplasmatist. The man’s head was fully destroyed, but little blood or brain matter had splashed from it. There seemed to be little of anything left in the man’s body. “I’ve never seen it last so long after the man died,” Beckett told his companion. “Usually…usually it just disappears.”
“So…what’s different?”
The coroner began rifling through the man’s pockets. He found himself weirdly squeamish about coming into contact with the withered body, but ignored the feeling; the veneine had been shaking loose all sorts of new sensations, lately. There was something dry and ragged in the ectoplasmatist’s inside coat pocket; Beckett got a hold of it and drew out a weathered, folded-up quarto.
“What’s that?” Valentine asked him. He leaned in close to look at it. “Huhm. ‘On the Life Suspire.’ That…what is that?”
“The ‘life suspire’ is what ectoplasmatists call their goop.” Beckett settled down against the far wall of the tunnel. It was cold, and so he held his lantern close, bathing in the dry heat. “They think that, beneath the Word that made the world, there’s a…I guess a whisper. A secret meaning that only some people can understand. They think it lives inside them, and they can draw it out and use it.”
Valentine looked around the tunnel. There was no sign of silvery ectoplasm, but that strange feeling of greasiness remained. “That’s heresy. I mean, real heresy.”
“It’s all real heresy,” Beckett told him, but he understood what the young man meant. Ectoplasmatists were unique among heretical scientists in that they fully embraced the idea that what they were doing
was
heresy. Necrologists, geometers, even the oneiricists usually acted like the Church Royal had banned their sciences in some fit of drunken power. There was nothing in the heirologue or the grammars that prohibited necrology, really; it was just the Church trying to keep control of people.
But the ectoplasmatists—they really thought they were tapped into a secret, true religion that the Abbots were trying to hide. That was why ectoplasmatists loved the undercroft so much. They found some perverse satisfaction in practicing their obscenities right beneath the seat of religion in Trowth.
James was clattering with his telerhythmia on the walls, still garbled nonsense. “It’s all right,” Beckett said loudly, knowing that the knocker’s clairaudience would spirit the words out of the croft to where the man was waiting. “They’re dead. Send down the kirliotypists
first
, this time. Are you listening?” The rattling stopped. “Send them down first. I want pictures of every inch of this place before anyone touches anything. Then send the trolljrmen down. Have them take the bodies to Ghad’s hospital and put them on ice. I don’t want Ennering-Crabtree cutting into them unless I’m there. Understand?” In his bid to end what amounted to three decades of frustration in the Royal Coroners, Beckett had begun ferociously demanding information and documentation. He’d ordered maps commissioned, demanded that local gendarmeries report every murder, theft, and rape that happened in their purviews, insisted that every crime be document, kirliotyped, and filed in the office in Raithower House, whether they were heretical science or not. Since the destruction of Hightower Square, the old coroner had found this information flowing freely. It inundated his office, and threatened to drown the young corporal who’d replaced Beckett’s secretary.
There was a complex triple-rap against the wall, which Beckett took to mean “Yes.”
“You,” he said to Valentine. “Come with me.”
Outside of the undercroft Vie Abbey brooded, dark and substantial, a compact fortress atop a hill, a contrast to the sprawling tangle of buildings, arches, and towers that comprised the Royal Palace at the other end of the city. Trowth spread out between these two illustrious edifices, along the iron-black ribbon of the River Stark. Dry, icy air whipped about Beckett and Valentine, as they made their way past the ten kirliotypists that Beckett had hired, past the two great trolljrmen—largely protected from the cold by their bulk, but their feathered crests still held in close—past James Ennering, the new knocker, as he sat in the coroner’s coach and tried to coordinate everything.
Beckett took Valentine to a nearby djang-house. It was crowded; during Second Winter, the people of Trowth more easily overcame their natural standoffishness, as the desperate need for any sort of heat or warmth drove them to huddle close, to pack into pubs and shops, even to stand a little nearer each other on the street. Second Winter was an enemy that every man shared in common, and led them to great lengths that they should keep it at bay.
Still, the charcoal suits and the grim mandate of the Coroners bought Beckett and Valentine a little space in the dark, hot, suffocating djang-house, and a small table in the corner. Valentine immediately ordered a cup of the stimulating djang; Beckett asked for nothing, and only scratched at a persistent itch by his eye.
“This,” Beckett said, as he placed the quarto on the table, “I don’t know what this is.”
“It’s a pamph—”
“I know it’s a pamphlet, Valentine. I mean, I don’t know where he got it. I’ve never seen anything like this before. It looks like an instruction manual for ectoplasmatics.”
“Well, maybe that’s what it is.”
“Ectoplasmaticists don’t like instruction manuals. They don’t like writing things down at all. So, where did this come from?”
Valentine pursed his lips and held the quarter up to the dim lamp at their table. “Well, this is definitely Southend parchment; that’s the cheapest one you can get,” Valentine Vie-Gorgon’s family was the Vie-Gorgons of Comstock Street. They had, in an effort to distinguish themselves from the more famous branch of the family—the Raithower Vie-Gorgons—succeeded in establishing a near-monopoly on the printing industry of Trowth. “I think you can buy a ream of it for a half a crown. The type’s Flood New Face, which is the kind they use on those new typing-machines. You could make this in your own basement, if you wanted.”
Beckett nodded. He’d suspected as much; even if an ectoplasmatist had managed to conquer his natural reticence over print, there’s no way he’d risk taking heresy to a genuine press—but those new machines were cheap, and widely-available. “Read it,” he told the younger man. “Tell me what you find.”
“Don’t you…” Valentine trailed off, a little awkwardly.
The fades that had been ravaging Beckett’s body had, recently, passed on to his left eye. The whole orb was invisible, leaving yet another dark, bloody red hole in his face and making him look even grim and skull-like. The eye was completely blind, as the creeping transparency caused whatever it touched to fail. Between his vanished eye, transparent nose, and the hole in his cheek that showed off his white teeth, Beckett looked horrifically grim—a man already dead, still lurching through life by nothing more than the sheer force of his obdurate will.
“My eyes,” the old coroner said, “Aren’t what they used to be.”
After nearly a decade of drawn-out conflict, messy skirmishes, costly, bloody occupations, and disastrous engagements, the Ettercap War finally ended.
The White Star
, which broadsheet traditionally served as the voice of the Emperor and his ministries, announced an unconditional victory for the Trowth Empire. The precise details of the victory were lost in the flowery praise, grandiose claims, and the repeated insistence on the glory of the Empire in which the editors of
The White Star
had never lost faith.
In fact, the details of the victory were never fully-established by any of the many broadsheets, though speculation was rampant.
The Observer
insisted that the cost of phlogiston was substantially lower after the end of the war than it had been before the start—so, once a decade of crippling fuel prices had been eliminated, the Ettercap War could be counted a success. Other papers claimed that the war had been nothing but a failure, a pointless waste of lives and time, to satisfy the lust for conquest of William II Gorgon-Vie (Rex Imperator Trowthi, Word Preserve Him and Keep Him). One insisted that William II Gorgon-Vie was not the emperor at all, but some kind of heretical doppelganger fashioned by the remnants of the Corsay Trading Company.
The Ministry of Information, tightly-controlled by the Raithower Vie-Gorgons, quickly and quietly silenced any of the papers that were too critical—though they were perfectly content to allow the propagation of the most outlandish rumors. The presence and persistence of these entirely unbelievable claims at least served the illusion that all points of view were being expressed in the broadsheets. The Vie-Gorgons preferred a light touch when it came to affairs of state, and the more their involvement could be disguised, the better.
With the end of the war, thousands of soldiers, many of whom had been forced into service against their will, were brought home. Many, if not most, were crippled—often with legs, arms, hands, feet, or eyes missing. Some were crippled psychically, irreparably damaged by the oneiric munitions of the Ettercap. The remainder, healthy as they may have seemed, all nursed the trauma of the dragging, dirty war in Gorcia. They were taciturn men with wan faces, who wanted no company but their own. They were uncomfortable around bright lights and enclosed spaces. At night, they gathered in each other’s homes, and sat in tense, silent circles, and if some sense passed between them, it was invisible to the world outside.