The second man’s footsteps cluttered like thunder towards her, and she quickly pivoted and swung her weapon towards him, eliciting another shout and the sound of a heavy body stumbling hard onto damp cobblestones. Karine was running too, but Skinner couldn’t devote the attention to keep track of her, as she switched back to the first man, and struggled to keep him at bay with her sword.
“Now,” said the man, “let’s not be hasty. I—”
He was interrupted by a gunshot, and the sound of a ricochet off of stone.
“Stop!
Ito hak haht!
Stop, right now!” Karine. She’d grabbed the loose revolver.
Oh, good girl,
Skinner smiled to herself.
“You take these things inside. Right now!” Karine said, presumably waving the pistol around to emphasize her point. The men were silent, perhaps sullenly, though it was hard to know without seeing their faces. They began the noisy process of transporting Karine and Skinner’s belongings back inside.
“Wait.” Skinner said. There was no reason to put anything back in the house. It was Emilia’s house after all, she could, and would, eventually have them removed legitimately. They needed a new plan. “Wait. Don’t put them back inside. One of you call a coach.”
“Miss?” Karine asked.
“We are going to pay our respects to a few friends today, Karine. I suspect we shall have to abandon this house. Lovely as it was, it’s now served its purpose.”
Skinner had initially intended to bring a coach full of luggage and low-quality ne’er-do-wells directly to Emilia Vie-Gorgon’s doorstep; to sort out precisely what Emilia meant by all of this right there in public, and leave a steaming heap of scandal in the Raithower Vie-Gorgon’s portico. She, after all, had substantially less to lose than did Emilia by airing this dirty laundry. Her cooler instincts prevailed, however, and she resolved not to confront the young Miss Vie-Gorgon without taking certain precautions.
The long coach ride was silent—the sullenness had soured now to an outright hostility, held in check only by Karine’s deathgrip on the pistol. Emlia’s hired goons sulked, as the coach rolled down the neatly-cobbled Comstock Street.
Skinner called up to the driver. “I don’t know what the number is—”
“It’s all right, miss, I know it.”
It’s just temporary
, Skinner insisted to herself.
Just a place to keep our luggage while I sort this all out. I am certainly
not
relying on him. He is, after all, thoroughly unreliable.
Henry, long-standing and equally long-suffering butler to the Comstock Vie-Gorgons, was quite prepared to turn Skinner and Karine away at the door, regardless of how wildly Karine waved her newly-acquired revolver about. The two were saved from the local gendarmerie only by the precipitous arrival of Valentine himself, who barreled past his butler and skidded to a halt where Skinner leaned against the cab.
“Well! All right, this is a little peculiar,” Valentine announced. “Have you brought all your clothes with you?”
“Ahem. Yes,” Skinner admitted. “It seems that I’ve…had a bit of a falling out with your cousin. Karine and I…Karine mostly…are in need of a place to store our belongings. Only for a few days, until we make some kind of alternative arrangements. This is…a bit of an awkward situation.”
“Awkward, of course, yes. Listen, why don’t you have your men here bring everything into…Henry!” Valentine shouted over his shoulder. “Henry, have we got, can you make up the guest bedroom? We can put everything in there. We’ll make up the guest rooms, you’ll stay here, obviously. I say, you two,” he called to Emilia’s goons, “just start bringing that in, third floor, back of the hall.” The men glowered, but did not object. “You and Karine will stay here, of course.”
“Just the luggage. We couldn’t impose,” Skinner insisted.
“Well, you’ve got to stay
somewhere
, and it isn’t as though we haven’t got the room.” Indeed, the Vie-Gorgon townhouse on Comstock Street was notoriously spacious.
Henry interrupted this exchange. “Sir, I’m afraid we’ve only the one spare bedroom available, right now--”
“Oh, yes,” Valentine said, dismayed. He had quite forgotten the eight cousins visiting from the Low Provinces in the south.
“It’s all right, Valentine, we don’t need—”
“Of course, well,” Valentine snapped his fingers, immediately taken by the ingenuity of his new plan, “we’ll just make up my room—”
“Valentine—”
“Your room, sir!” Henry spluttered with outrage. “Can you imagine the scandal? It will be in the broadsheets in a day…”
“Well, obviously I won’t be
in
it, Henry, you might as well show me more consideration than that.”
“Valentine—” Skinner attempted to interject again, but the young man was on a tear, and would not be deterred.
“I’ll stay in the guest room at the coroner’s office…I’m hardly at the house anyway. Karine can have the small guest bedroom, Skinner will stay in my room. Now…oh, here,” he drew a five-crown note from his wallet and offered it up to Emilia’s two thugs as a gratuity. The men stared at it, flabbergasted, before Valentine ushered them back into the cab and sent them off. “Now, as I was saying. I’ve some few things to take care of this evening, but I’ll make sure I drop by to ensure that Henry is taking good care of you both, right? We’ll want to talk about my cousin, of course, and don’t think I’ve forgotten about our exploit from the night before. Now. Away!”
And with that, Valentine Vie-Gorgon was gone into the cooling evening. Karine, Skinner, and Henry the butler stood there, at the portico of the house on Comstock Street, and each one found him or herself entirely, unequivocally, and unmistakably at a loss for words. This lasted for several seconds and Valentine, had he stayed behind to time it, would have declared it a new record for puzzled silence precipitated by his eccentricity.
It was Henry who spoke first, conditioned as he was to life with Valentine. “I suppose. I suppose I shall get those rooms ready.”
Constable Harald Increase Frye was bored and pleased to be so. Armistice would be over in two days, and until then Constable Frye was happy to fill out “Not a Significant Incident” reports and send them along to the Coroners at Raithower House. That afternoon, two young men—former servicemen, probably, as at least one limped on an artificial leg—having been taken by the spirit of the season had stumbled into the offices, drunk as skunks in an abbey, and requested that they could sleep the night in the cells. Constable Harald was pleased to oblige them, and doubly pleased to fill out a “Not a Significant Incident” report on the event. When the unmistakable murmur of a gathering crowd outside the office reached his ears, and Constable Harald went outside to discover an impromptu game of dice had broken out in the cobbled streets, Constable Harald was pleased to place a fiver above the line, pleased to accept his loss with dignity, and pleased again to fill out a “Not a Significant Incident” report.
In all, Constable Harald had probably filled out close to a thousand various reports for the Coroners, a task he considered to be usually tedious and wasteful—especially the “Not a Significant Incident” reports. Why, after all, should he be filling out a report on an incident that was, by definition,
not significant
? What could the Coroners possibly want with such information? Usually, he shirked this responsibility a little, and filled out less than a third of those reports. But after an unpleasantly tumultuous Armistice—with suffragists, if not behaving violently, causing rather more trouble than they ought to be, and the Heretic that attacked the theater—Constable Frye was very, very happy to be able to report that no significant incidents were occurring in his district.
Constable Coates arrived, as the first wave of Trowth’s panoply of church bells began thundering the nine o’clock hour. He’d brought a small cask of barley wine with him, and offered to share it with Constable Frye before they changed shifts. Constable Frye was pleased to oblige him though, notably, he did
not
fill out an incident report on the subject. Constables Coates and Frye had a wide-ranging discussion then—fueled by the potency of the barley-wine—that touched on many relevant Subjects of the Day. Among those topics were Women’s Suffrage, which was readily agreed on as a dangerous threat to the stability of the nation, and a product of an increasingly liberal education system; the Ettercap War, which Constable Coates believed a trial while it was occurring, but all for the best, in retrospect—Constable Frye, whose brother had lost a hand and part of his left ear during the Gorcia campaign—politely dissented on that score; and finally, the brief but extraordinary success of the play
Theocles
.
Neither of the two men had seen the play in question, but Constable Frye was fully-prepared with an opinion on the subject, nonetheless.
“’S not that I don’t think we should be makin’ plays about…about anything we like. I think we should be. I think tha’s what plays is for, right? Saying thin’s aloud as maybe you and I are too polite to. And believe me, i’s not like I’m always sure the Emperor—Word bless him and keep him—has always done quite right.” Constable Frye gulped down the last of his barley-wine, and was dismayed to discover that the cask that Constable Coates had brought was nearly empty. “’S just…this is a…’s a challengin’ time is all, and so the…he needs our support.”
“
That’s it,” Constable Coates concurred. “S’a challengin’ time. No time f’r dissent.”
“Challengin’, right,” Constable Frye concurred.
“Wit’ suffragists. ‘N them gangsters everywhere,”
Constable Coates concurred yet again, in an effort to saturate the atmosphere with a sense of mutually-agreed on sensibility. “Still, I heard. I heard them sharpsies is still around, too.”
“No,” Constable Frye responded, spoiling Coates’ ambition for universal consensus. “Can’t be. Where?”
“The Arcadum,” Coates insisted. “They’re. Hidin’.
Regrouping
, I think. Plannin’…you know how they are. Crafty…crafty buggers.”
“There’s no…here, hold on.”
A man, shabbily dressed and with a glazed look in his eye, stumbled through the door of the gendarmerie station.
“Here, sonny,” Constable Frye said, “what’s wrong? You look like death on a plate.”
The man opened his mouth to speak, but produced only a metallic clack-clack-clack sound as his teeth snapped together and open again. He turned his head left and right, up and down at random, as though unable to comprehend his surroundings.
“He’s drunk,” Constable Coates exclaimed—and he was certainly in a position to know.
Constable Frye immediately got up from his chair and attended the man, having some half-conceived notion of escorting him down to the drunk tank, where the stranger could spend the night with his fellow inebriates. He’d managed to get his shoulder under the man’s arm and was guiding him towards the back room, when Constable Coates called out.
“Here. What’s wrong with his tongue?”
The man’s tongue, indeed, the whole inside of his mouth, was black with slimy ichor, as though he’d been drinking it—impossible, of course, as without special treatment, ichor was a fiendish poison to living tissue. “What…what have you been doing, son?” Constable Frye asked, as disused cognitive machinery sought to fight its way through the barley-wine fog. “What’s wrong, then?”
The man opened his mouth again, producing another round of metallic clacking, then the scratchy sound of a bad phonograph. A cultured voice, clearly at odds with the man’s ragged appearance, emerged from his mouth, unaffected by the working of his lips.
“Gentlemen,” said the voice, “I hope you understand that this is nothing personal. If you survive, please give Inspector Beckett my regards.”
The stranger then, awkwardly, as though he barely retained control of his limbs, tore his shirt open. Set into his stomach—edges raggedly stitched into the flesh—was some manner of brass engine, with a large flywheel and a canister of glowing blue phlogiston. Next to it sat a lump of greasy brown material. The wheel began to spin, throwing off tiny blue sparks.