“You…you would do that?”
“I? Miss Skinner, I don’t have any power at all in this situation. You don’t think I have my father’s ear, do you? That I am directly involved in any of this?”
Skinner found her grip on her cane to be painfully tight, and her thumb hovering above the catch that would let her draw her slender sword from it. One quick slash and one quick thrust, and then the world would not have to suffer Emilia Vie-Gorgon. Emilia Vie-Gorgon and her poisonous treachery, her secretive ambitions, her callous, heartless manipulations…surely it would be worth it? Karine’s family unemployed—a temporary hardship, at best. They’d find work again, wouldn’t they? There was always work to be had for people willing to do it, and a few hungry nights were a small price to pay to put an end to Emilia Vie-Gorgon’s diabolical machinery…
Wasn’t it?
“I’ll consider it,” Skinner said, curtly, and took the narrow stairs down Baker’s Close.
That evening, after a warm, spicy stew and a frankly astonishing amount of hot punch, while the Akori chatted about the day’s events and told each other jokes, and demanded that Skinner play strings so they could sing along, a messenger arrived at the house in Bluewater.
He knocked crisply and briefly, but was gone by the time Karine had opened the door he was gone. “Miss Skinner,” Karine called. “Someone left this for you.” There was some muted, hasty discussion in Indt. “I don’t know what it is. It looks like a suitcase? And a train ticket?”
Leaving the suitcase was, in terms of practice, a fairly painless process. The coroners on duty—James Ennering, Gorud, two trolljrmen and three humans that Skinner didn’t know—offered her pleasant courtesies as she walked past the checkpoint unsearched. She handed in her ticket, went up to platform eight, set the suitcase down. Waited for a few moments, then left. All perfectly ordinary and simple activities that she had done many times before—speaking with people, carrying suitcases, offering tickets. Now, of course, these ordinary actions were wracked by paranoia; infusing every nerve-ending of her body with sheer terror and dousing her mind in quivering adrenaline, such that she was sure it must shine on her skin like a red beacon telling all passer-by that she was
involved
somehow, that she was guilty of clandestine activities, that she was
suspicious
. She found herself hoping, every time someone spoke to her, that they would notice her sweating, or her nervousness, and demand to search her bag. Every raised voice on the platform, every hurried footstep, became that of a dutiful coroner’s, double-checking the last of the parcels, about to expose Skinner and her complicity with the Vie-Gorgons. It would be a relief if James had questioned her more thoroughly, and if he only had, she’d have been pleased to give up and put down the suitcase—which had now become an abominable, impossible weight in her hand—so that she could go to prison and finally ease her troubled conscience.
None of these things happened. It was strange to hear the grand concourse devoid of its usual murmuring ambience, but travel was light today, as many were dissuaded by the sudden appearance of the Coroners. Of course, because the papers had all been seized, and publishing had all been suspended, it was impossible for Skinner to know precisely why such draconian restrictions had been imposed. All she could do was listen to the echoes of her footsteps as she approached platform eight, and wish that she were more suspicious.
Skinner stood on the platform listening. A chilly wind had come in from the harbor. This was common for early summer; the oppressive, sweltering heat wouldn’t come for a few more weeks. For now, though, if she hadn’t been maddeningly preoccupied with her own troubles, she might have enjoyed that pleasant balance between the warm sunshine on her face and the brisk, salty wind.
It might have struck her as unusual that there was no one else on the platform. Nor, indeed, did there seem to be any trains running at all today. She could hear one, several lines away, moaning steam and creaking, but nothing else. No passengers chattered, no businessmen shuffled their feet. If Emilia Vie-Gorgon’s cousin was waiting for his suitcase, he certainly didn’t seem to be waiting nearby. Delicately, to avoid attracting the notice of any other knockers, she began to canvass the area with her clairaudience, in a slow, spiral pattern that gradually migrated away from her body.
Rats scuttled on the train tracks. Near the station’s entrance, men muttered and made noise. That one train continued its symphony of weird train-noises. Nothing else. “Something’s wrong,” Skinner said aloud, startled by the volume of her own voice. She set the suitcase down and turned away; with great difficulty, she managed to keep an ear on the suitcase and track of where she was going.
“Everything all right, Miss Skinner?” James’ voice. “Get your errand taken care of?”
“I…yes. What errand?”
James hesitated. “I thought…didn’t Inspector Beckett send you out here? Or is it the kind of thing…” he dropped his voice to a whisper, “I understand if you can’t talk about it.”
“Beckett’s here?”
“No, ma’am. He’s on the train. With the Emperor.”
The Emperor…?
“James, what’s going on?” The worry that had consumed her turned abruptly into a looming sense of catastrophe. Perversely, this seemed to actually calm her nerves; her body was less bothered by the threat of a real, imminent danger than it was by the illusory torments she’d composed for herself.
“You didn’t know? I thought Beckett…there’s been a plot against the emperor. We’re moving him to the summer palace at Dunhill. You’re not here for Mr. Beckett.”
“I…am. Obviously. But Beckett doesn’t tell me everything. Listen. There’s a suitcase on platform eight, I need someone to go and get it. I have reason to believe it may be dangerous.”
“Gorud,” James said. The therian was on his way at once. “How do you know about this?”
“I’ve been moving in unusual circles, lately. I…would like to avoid running the risk of slander, but I think I may know who is involved in the plot against the Emperor.”
“I…hold on.” James extended his clairaudience out; Skinner felt the whisper of it as it brushed by her own sensorium. “It’s Gorud. He says there’s no suitcase.”
“You need to get the Emperor off the train. Now.”
“It’s already left,” James said, panic creeping into his voice. “And the clairaudient baffles are up. I can try and reach Beckett—he’s in the last car.”
“Well, do it, for fuck’s sake,” Skinner snapped at him. “We need to stop that train.”
Beckett was huddled in the last seat of the last car of the emperor’s train. The locomotive was a vast serpent of brass and steel and iron, belching black smoke and phlogiston fumes that smelled like blood and copper. It was decorated on the outside with the winged angels of the Hierologue; androgynous figures bearing swords and chains, blinded by the palm fronds wrapped around their eyes. Inside the train were exquisitely plush over-stuffed chairs, and a mural that extended through all eight cars, depicting the illustrious history of the Gorgon-Vies, all the way back to Demogorgon himself.
The train defied every law governing the sensible construction of a train—it was top-heavy, not at all streamlined, a machine designed for slow tours during which it could be
appreciated
. The Emperor’s train was a train only technically; in reality, it was yet another monument to his power, and to the seemingly bottomless wealth he was permitted to devote to his comforts.
Beckett slumped in his chair, and rolled a brass veneine cartridge in his hand. He’d dosed himself only a half an hour ago, and could still feel the drug buzzing in his mind. It made him feel light, disconnected from his body. The only sensation that seemed to require immediate concern was the metallic bite at the back of his mouth, the part of him that craved more. It was early to inject another module into his system, if he wanted to keep to his five-a-day limit. Somehow, though, that idea didn’t seem to be especially pressing at the moment. So what if he did take an extra one? Why should that really matter? He could take a sixth cartridge today, and start back again at five tomorrow. The damage to his system, between drugs and disease, was already immense—how could one more dose harm him?
The only thing that held him back was the sound of whirling gears he’d been hearing, lately. It was a troubling sound that seemed to grow closer according to how much veneine he was using. It was plainly a hallucination, Beckett didn’t doubt that, but whenever he found his attention distracted by something, the sound caught at his ear as though it were real, making him start and look around suddenly, trying to locate its source. It was always the same sound, and it never quite went away—an endless, ubiquitous buzzing that gradually led him to the fanciful conclusion that he wasn’t hallucinating it at all. He had sometimes begun to entertain the notion that the whirling gears really did underlay everything he saw. He imagined a vast network of gears beneath the streets, in the walls of the buildings, beneath peaked eaves and inside chimney-pots. He started to think of people or trolljrmen as kinds of automatons; skin on the outside, but inside filled with those same incessant mechanisms.
It was only in hours of weakness or extreme intoxication, of course, did Beckett give credence to these fantasies. He had spent a long time ignoring erroneous input that sometimes trickled into his senses, and so was generally unperturbed by the arrival of this new sound. Except that it occasionally grew unmanageably loud if he took too much veneine, making it difficult for him to hear what people were saying. This is why he hesitated, staring at the little brass module, and steadfastly ignoring the second and third-tier ministers with whom he was sharing the car.
Presently, he became aware of a faint tapping by his ear. It had the three long, two short cadence that knockers used for “attention,” and the light hesitancy that Beckett had come to associate with James Ennering.
“Ennering,” said Beckett, tucking the brass cartridge back into his pocket. “What is it?”
What followed was a nearly incomprehensible jumble of raps. Every knocker’s sound was peculiar, and Beckett had just never been able to get the hang of James’—which taps were soft taps and which were strong taps, what empty air was hesitation and what was meant to indicate a purposeful space—and without being on the right track from the beginning, following a knocker’s telerhythmia was heinously difficult.
“What…what? Stop. Just answer yes or no. There’s a problem?”
Yes
. “Serious?”
Yes.
“At your end?”
No.
“On the train?”
Yes.
“Shit. Shit, shit. Do I need to stop the train and get the Emperor off?”
YES.
This was the most assertive Beckett had ever heard. “All right. Crap, hold on.” At the front of the car was a small brass horn that, using a system of tympanums that Beckett had never fully understood, was able to communicate his voice from one end of the train to the other. He snapped to his feet and seized the horn at once, ministers eyeing him strangely. Beckett kept his voice low as he spoke—he didn’t know the danger, precisely, and therefore didn’t know who might be involved in it.
“Hello?” He said. “Hello, this is Beckett. There is an emergency…”
A burst of chattering feedback answered him, then resolved into a voice. “…hand off the button, if you want to listen. What is it?”
“This is Detective-Inspector Beckett. I have had word from my men that we are in imminent danger. You need to stop the train.”
“What…” more feedback. “…danger?”
“I don’t know what it is. I just need you to stop the train.”
“…stop here.”
“Yes, stop here,” Beckett said, his voice rising. “Stop the fucking train.”
“Soder Pass…” the voice came back. “...cking CAN’T stop…”
“Shit,” Beckett said, inconsiderate as to whether he was speaking to the man at the other end of the horn or just to himself. If they were on the Soder Pass bridge, then the conductor was right—they couldn’t stop, because there’d be nowhere for them to go. Just a train on a bridge, five hundred feet in the air over a rocky gorge. They wouldn’t be safe until they reached the other side.