“It don’t say,” said Roger, “if you want to accept or not. Shouldn’t it say that?”
Emilia Vie-Gorgon probably didn’t consider that someone might want to turn her down.
“I wouldn’t worry about it, Roger. Tell me, do you know what’s on the playbill at the Royal tonight?”
Beckett sat at his desk and stared. It was piled high with papers—with the reports that he’d been demanding. Arrest reports, biographies, kirliotypes. Pictures of crime scenes, spattered with blood, pulsing with strange auras. Stacks of clippings from the broadsheets, relating tales that ranged from the mundane (“Abundance of Rats in Red Lane Gutters”) to the unpleasant (“Third Severed Hand Found in Mudside”) to the purely outlandish (“Gendarmes Replaced With Ectoplasmic Dopplegangers: Who Can We Trust?”). There were reports of looted crypts, hospitals that had been robbed, men that had been found bleeding dreams into the streets, or wandering about with scaly arms grafted to their bodies. There were lists of men in custody, trolljrmen who’d unwisely practiced their chimerstry away from the secrecy of their hospitals, of indige geometers who’d been brought in for engaging in heretically hyper-spatial mathematics, human men rounded up from the duetti clubs where they’d been purposefully over-dosing on veneine…
Beckett scratched at the itch by his eye, and leaned back in his chair. His forearm throbbed a little from where he’d injected himself, but mostly the veneine left him feeling detached, floating. His left eye, despite its blindness, detected no small number of thin, writhing black shapes that wriggled across the walls of his office, but Beckett did not find himself concerned. Nor did he find himself concerned by the damp stains on his walls, or the shallow puddle of water by his feet. The warmth and peace of the veneine high would last only a little longer, and the old coroner was determined to enjoy it wall it lasted.
Soon enough, the cold and anxiety began to creep back in. Distant aches in his knees and back began to sharpen, the numbness in his face and fingers demanded more of his attention. The water dried up, though the wriggling black eels remained, making it difficult to concentrate on his papers. The Committee on Moral Responsibility had forced him to fire Karine, his indige secretary. The new man they’d found—a timid, shell-shocked young man who’d worked primarily with the quartermasters during the war—was purely incapable of distinguishing useful information from dross, so Beckett found himself obliged to wade through the mess himself.
The papers seemed unlikely to yield up their secrets any time soon. In the last few months, the sheer amount of information to come across Beckett’s desk had increased exponentially. Heretical science was spreading through the city like a disease, cropping up left and right, everywhere from dingy public houses in the Arcadium to the fancy homes of New Bank. There was no clear point of origin, no source, no connection between any of the heretics. It was all just a tangled, unnavigable mess of half-formed leads, each one turning a half a dozen corners before it dead-ended in a corpse somewhere.
This had been the story of Beckett’s life for years. Find evidence of a heresy, find the heretic, kill them. As often as not, their own foolishness did the job for him. But it never stopped. No matter how many lunatic scientists Beckett ended, there was always one more. And now, now every time he put a stop to an ectoplasmatist or a necrologist somewhere, a half a dozen more seemed to spring up in the wake. Forty years of work in the coroners, and every day the problem just got worse, and worse, and worse.
A hysterical frustration rattled around in Beckett’s mind, as he rubbed his hands over his face. The veneine, he was sure, was shaking him loose. It was harder and harder for him to maintain that cold detachment, that sense of duty that let him just tackle one job at a time, and not think about the rest, not think about the implications, not think about the never-ending chain of more death and more misery that waited for him every day, and would wait every day until he finally gave up. He slapped at a report at random and picked it up.
Brass bones?
Everything was making less sense to him, lately, and Beckett started to worry that it was the disease, eating away at his mind. Would this have made sense a year ago? Someone had found a chunk of brass in the shape of a shoulder-blade in a pile of offal in Red Lanes. The gendarmes, pleased to finally have a lap into which they could dump all of their weird crap, had gleefully passed it on to Beckett.
Who…why would you even do that?
He looked back at some of the other reports, accompanied by kirliotypes of men who’d starved themselves to death by vomiting ectoplasm, or whose hearts had given out trying to support extra limbs. Dead-ends, all of them.
Well,
he thought.
I’d better check.
The officer from the Committee on Moral Responsibility was, as usual, taking tea in the sitting room. One of the privileges of being cousins to the Emperor—even eighth-cousins like the Gorgon-Ennering-Crabtrees—was the possibility of getting a job in which your primary responsibility was taking tea in places. He wore a dark blue suit, with bulls embroidered in a delicate green around his sleeves.
Edmund? Edelred? Ed-something
, Beckett thought.
Whatever
.
“Going out, Mr. Beckett?”
Beckett turned his gruesome, death’s head stare on the man, but said nothing.
“Ah. Hm.
Inspector
Beckett.”
The coroner said nothing still, and began the laborious process of shrugging into his winter coat. It was heavy, and his sore joints had begun to impede his mobility.
Should have shot up before I left
, he thought to himself.
Too late, now.
He had no desire to let Ed-whatever Gorgon-Ennering-Crabtree see him use the needles.
“Where are you going, Inspector?” The political officer asked again. He had a little notebook with him, presumably to help him keep track of Beckett’s moral failings. When the coroner failed to respond yet again, the officer raised his voice. “Mr…Inspector Beckett, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep me apprised of your activities.” Beckett wrapped his red scarf around his face; it hid his mangled-looking nose, at least, even if it left his empty eye socket staring at hapless passers-by. “Mr. Beckett. Excuse me. Excuse me!”
As he turned to leave, Beckett found the hallway obstructed by the huge, misshapen form of Mr. Stitch. The reanimate, built over a century ago from spare, dead parts, watched impassively from the brass lenses in its eye sockets. It still wore its huge, heavy coat, but had removed the three-cornered hat that it usually wore.
“Beckett.” Stitch said, with its terrible, sepulchral voice. It took a deep breath from the billows that had replaced his lungs. “Where?” Stitch had been about its enigmatic business. Beckett thought it had been consulting with the Emperor’s doctors.
“A lead,” he said. “One of the Red Lanes cases.” He grimaced as he heard the political officer scratching something in his notebook.
“Valentine?”
“He’s…working on something else for me.” More scratching from Gorgon-Ennering-Vie and his notebook. Beckett gritted his teeth, resentful of having to have to explain himself, resentful of the political officer and his incessant inquiries, resentful of the whole situation.
“Take. Gorud.” Stitch rasped, then shambled off towards its office, the metal braces on its legs clanking. Mr. Stitch had a difference engine for a brain—an engine of miraculous complexity. It was capable of perfect memory, of limitless calculations, of astonishing insight. Mr. Stitch was almost never wrong, and its advice invariably turned out to be not just useful, but the best possible advice that anyone under a particular set of circumstances could give. Beckett hated it.
He hated this particular advice as well. Gorud was a therian, a kind of ape-man native to Corsay. Small numbers had been brought to Trowth; because of their linguistic dexterity, they were used often as translators or interpreters. Since the end of the war, the numbers of therians in the city had increased. They were generally a pleasant, good-natured people, though unused to the frigid temperatures of the imperial capital. Gorud wore a bulky coat that fitted him poorly, despite the fact that it had a hole cut out for his tail.
If Beckett didn’t like Gorud, it was certainly nothing personal, as the therian was as good-natured an example of a member of his species had could be desired. It was not even a particular specism on Beckett’s part, though he did tend to lean towards the human-centric. In fact, Beckett just didn’t like it when things changed. He spent all his time trying to get on top of things, trying to manhandle the elements of life and work in to place, to make everything
just so
—and then, invariably, he was saddled with something new. Just when he’d gotten everything figured out, gotten everything
sorted
, the therians came along, or the sharpsies went mad, or something equally frustrating and inconvenient happened.
“You,” Beckett told the therian, who sat on his heels on the couch. “Come with me.”
Gorud, sensitive to Beckett’s disdain, said nothing, and padded after the old coroner on four legs. They found the Coroners’ regular coachman, Harry, in the guardhouse outside, and set off for Red Lanes.
Beckett and the therian rode in relative silence, as the coach creaked and clattered along. Outside, Harry had been outfitted with his best winter gear, and a variety of small heating elements—small bands he could wrap around his hands, an emitter that sat next to him. It was a waste of energy that would have been unthinkable a year ago, but since the end of the war, fuel was cheap and plentiful.
Inside, Beckett watched the therian. Gorud had a strangely long, leathery face, that seemed largely impassive, except for a pair of quick, roving eyes. He sat on his heels, his arms wrapped around his knees, as usual. “Do you know Red Lanes?” Beckett asked him.
Gorud twitched and puffed out his cheeks. “Live there,” he said. “With some cousins.” Gorud had a warm tenor of a voice which always surprised Beckett with its clarity and timbre.
“Know any of the gendarmes?”
The therian looked up at him with an unreadable expression, and shifted in his seat. “One,” he said, finally. “Nasty thing, with a mark on his face, like this.” He drew a number five in the air with one long, agile finger. Therians were predisposed to illiteracy, Beckett knew, but at least they could recognize symbols. “He kept trying to move us from the eyrie, but we didn’t like it.”
“And?”
The therian yawned, abruptly, displaying a huge mouth and four canine teeth each as long as Beckett’s thumb. “Haven’t seen him in a while,” Gorud said, and made a popping sound with his lips.
“Hnf.” Beckett replied, and silence predominated for a while. As they clattered down the hill, Gorud abruptly perked up. “What?” Beckett asked him. “What—” A faint rumbling reached his ears growing in intensity, the sound of a massive wave rolling towards them. “What is that? Do you hear…?”
The rumbling turned into a ringing sound in his ears, and suddenly black water crashed through the windows of the coach, washing over him, tearing him from his seat and out, out into the dark riptide of salty ocean that choked him, strangled him, struggled down this throat and threw him hard against smooth rocks. Beckett’s head banged against metal; he felt a rib give way.
The water retreated then, leaving Beckett on a smooth brass beach that sloped steeply downward, and he fell, sliding along its length, still coughing up seawater; he saw the moon beneath him, green and leprous, luminous with its own baleful light, black cities crawling across its surface, as hands reached out from the hot, red-gold brass and clutched at him, hands that were made of tangles of fat, black, boneless leeches, that sought out bare skin with their tiny, puckered mouths. The hands gripped him, and something like a mouth appeared, a nest of teeth with no lips or throat, just independently shuddering dentition that stretched and jittered and longed to puncture…
And then it was gone. All gone, the vision disappearing with the same sudden completeness as ectoplasm gone up in flame. The hands on his arms were Harry’s hands—ordinary, rough coachman’s hands. The face made of curved teeth was only Harry’s face, his ordinary, ugly old face.
The ringing began to fade from Beckett’s ears. “—eckett!” Harry was shouting. “Mr. Beckett! Are you all right?” Gorud had retreated to a corner of the coach, watching, his eyes wide.