“You’ve been using too much of the veneine,” Helmetag had told him. “We don’t know…you understand, we don’t know how it reacts to what else is in your system? This is dangerous.” But he handed the cartridge over, anyway.
Beckett couldn’t recall quite how many doses of veneine he’d had today, and he had some vague notion that he should wait until some of the drug cleared out before he tried the new pharmacy.
Not yet
, he thought,
not yet.
There was an anxiety that had been gnawing at him, displaced by the constant rumbling of those damnable gears, and he was on his way to meet his source.
The death of Dahran the concubine wasn’t an end, he knew that much. She’d been hired, driven by whatever noble purpose or base greed at her core, it was too late to find out now. Someone had planned the attempt and Beckett was determined to find him. The Emperor, convinced now of his safety, had rescheduled his Invocation, and would be delivering it from the palace, as planned. Beckett had less than a day to forestall another assassination attempt. It was troublesome, trying to put pieces together like this, while his head spun and whirled. The ground pitched like the floor of a ship and while Beckett knew that
something
was wrong, he couldn’t gather his thoughts enough to guess as to what it might be. He now did the only thing he could think of; desperately ready to try anything, he now went back to where he imagined this had all began. Just a little more information and he’d be ready.
He clutched tight to this one thought, and it buoyed him through the messy swamp of confusion that mired his mind.
There will be answers here
, he thought as the city around him blurred and stretched.
I will find the answer here
, he insisted, as the sky fell away above him, torn away from the earth by the fall of steady rain and left to float loose and slippery high above the world.
Answers
. Deformed faces looked out at him, strange animals nuzzled garbage in the gutters.
Beckett paused at the intersection of Cartwright and Galley Hill, confused. The buildings were suddenly alien to him, not the grey stone of Trowth at all but the red-brown bricks of Kaarcag—shook loose from his past by the veneine that buzzed in him—dotted with tiny windows that hid inhabitants whose nature and needs could only be guessed at. The coughing, choking sound of guns in the distance made him reach for his pistol; as he turned, he saw black basalt towers, tall and potent with nameless peril. Gears thundered and the towers stretched higher, hoisted by some invisible machine.
We never came to Kaarcag
, Beckett thought to himself as he drew his gun,
We never made it up the hill.
“I’ve never been here!” He shouted aloud. Gears spun, and at the same time the city was silent as the dead of night. The ground thrummed beneath him.
“What is that?” Fletcher asked at Beckett’s side. He turned to see the young man staring blankly, as blood poured from his mouth.
Something scurried among the narrow alleys. The silhouette of a man resolved at a bend in the road and Beckett knew without looking that he would have that hideous red-purple crease in his forehead, that place where mind and will had been removed by the Dragon Princes. “Don’t come any closer!” Beckett fired a shot off; it ricocheted with a white spark from the wall near the man’s head. “Stop!”
More shuffling footsteps echoed from the walls behind him and now something new accompanied them—a kind of wet sucking sound, like a handful of slimy worms writhing against each other. More dummies appeared, brainless automatons, shambling from the dark corners of the world, and on top of the roofs misshapen shadows with hands like nests of leeches watched and reached out.
Above, the constant cover of clouds and pollution had vanished, revealing a fat green moon that hung in the sky like a rotten cancer, surrounded by wicked pinpricks of white stars. Beckett fired his gun again and shoved past the dummies, as the gears in his head built to a crescendo, drowning out the sound of his own feet slapping on the cobblestones and yet not at all drowning out the sound of the footsteps that pursued him, pursued him as he ran through the streets of Kaarcag. Grim windows watched and thorny green vines roiled at his feet, lashing out at him, sharp barbs hungry for blood.
Beckett found stairs—he didn’t know, couldn’t remember if there had been stairs at all in Kaarcag, only the trail that wound up towards the fortress-city. The red-brown stone was everywhere, stone colored by rust and blood, a city made of death and entropy, lit by the gangrenous moon. He slipped and fell, knew that he’d banged his arthritic right knee badly, but found himself so far detached from his body that he could not even feel the pain from it. He skidded down slick rust-colored stones and landed on his back with the wind knocked from him.
He tried to move as a figure appeared before him, but found himself paralyzed. The figure was tall, inhumanly tall and thin. It wore chainmail and black robes and the peaked helmet of the old Saaghyari. Its face was a skull, empty of flesh except for a few withered scraps, dark pits where there should have been eyes, and teeth that belonged to an animal—long and sharp and gleaming white in the dark. It carried a sword in skeletal hands, a sword that it raised above its head.
“Czarneck,” Beckett whispered.
The Dragon Prince dissolved into smoke, taking the strange scene with it. Kaarcag was vanished, and in its place was dim, smoky, dirty Trowth. Soberly-dressed men and women stood on the sidewalks, watching Beckett as he gasped for breath and rolled to his feet. No one raised an alarm; passers-by darted sidelong glances at the fallen man, then coughed and discretely turned away. Beckett just glared at them, holstered his gun and looked up.
Vie Abbey stood before him at the top of its hill, just as the wave of rocky architecture that was the city of Trowth began to peter out. From this distance and in the dark, it looked for all the world like a bundle of black knives, thrusting impotently into the entrenchant air. While Beckett still stumbled through the murk of his own imagination, Vie Abbey remained his one constant certainty. He staggered up the hill towards it, sure the he heard that ticking clockwork echoing in the seams where the Arcadium became the Abbey’s labyrinthine undercroft. He shoved the grammateurs aside as he entered, demanding to be let in to the repository of heretical texts. He waved his bronze coroner’s badge and, when that failed to produce the desired effect, waved his revolver instead. No longer interested in their permission, he pressed on, deep into the belly of the stone beast, kicking doors open when they barred his way, forcing the terrified priests to unlock them if the doors proved too sturdy. He clipped one man behind his ear with the butt of his pistol, but in the moment that he did it, he could not remember why.
The world felt like it was slipping away, shivering on its axis, only a moment from dissolving into water and revealing some occult, terrible but truer world beneath, a septic sewer of viscous real upon which foul, miserable Trowth was a fractionally-thin skein, like an oil slick. What monstrosity lurks beneath us, that our world is but a shadow of its wickedness? Beckett ignored the grammateurs as they demanded that he swear the oath of secrecy, tuned out their shrieks as he seized the log book. The pages were practically decaying in his hands. He saw Valentine’s name at the top and for a moment saw Valentine himself, standing opposite the book, looking at him with imploring eyes.
Imploring what, though? Vengeance? Justice? Compassion? What does a ghost want from the living world at all? The page was yellow and brittle, and Beckett understood why Valentine had never turned it. Perhaps it was the understanding that the ghost sought, for now he was gone, replaced by a bishop in splendid robes, painfully officious and furious at Beckett’s intrusion and violation of protocol. He screamed and roared, and probably threatened to excommunicate the coroner. He called for the guards, who did back away when Beckett threw his badge at them. He grabbed at the coroner’s arm, but thought better of it almost at once. Beckett ignored him, and turned the page.
The name he saw, the last name signed before Valentine’s own, nearly stopped the old coroner’s heart. The world shattered and vanished, time became a twisted knot. Beckett’s life disappeared and he wondered then if he had known anything at all, or if he had always been groping blindly in the dark.
That name.
Beckett fumbled the new cartridge from his pocket, a small glass capsule, filled with a glimmering green fluid. Etherized flux. The reagent of the daemonomaniacs. He pressed it to the socket in his arm, and felt the sparking pain of heresy in his veins.
Egg and his partner, (who was called Six-Fingered Will, despite having the ordinary, requisite allotment of ten digits), were not supposed to actually have to kill the woman. Their principal, who always contacted them anonymously, had assured the two thugs that they were a contingency plan, set in place only in the unlikely event that Elizabeth Skinner seemed like she was going to abandon the house in Bluewater. Whatever plan was in place, it was supposed to occur with a minimum amount of participation from Egg and Will, the go-to strongmen for the Dockside Boys.
Plans change, however, and Egg at least was phlegmatic about unexpected events. He considered himself a kind of philosopher among hooligans, adapting to a new scenario with intellectual aplomb, ready for whatever the world might throw his way. He didn’t expect the universe to change on his behalf, is how he thought of it, and that made it easier for him to deal with the problems that necessarily beset him and his fellows.
Six-Fingered Will was noticeably
less
phlegmatic. He complained bitterly when Egg insisted that Skinner was leaving the Bluewater House for good. He offered that they should give up following her, and just report back that they’d lost her. He asserted that he didn’t like the rain, and it was surely no good for his health to be wandering around in a warm summer shower. Six-Fingered Will was not the man with whom Egg would have preferred to do this job, but he adapted.
They pursued the knocker to the entrance of Backstairs Street, and watched her cock her head to one side, like a cat.
“There,” said Will. “There she is.”
The woman at once disappeared into the dark down the stairs.
“Do you think she heard us?” Will asked.
Egg shrugged.
“Do we really have to kill her? She’s as good as dead down there, anyway. Blind girl down in the Arcade. I heard there’s sharpsies there.”
Egg shrugged again. He was growing less and less tolerant of Will’s complaints. “We’ll do it. Come on, it won’t take long. Hurry, before we lose her.”
The two men jogged towards the doorway and down the stairs. They followed the sound of her footsteps—after a moment of consideration and heated argument about precisely which direction said footsteps were coming from—down one dark, covered alley, and through a curved connecting tunnel, past a bronze statue that vaguely resembled either a man on horseback, or possibly three women dancing.
“Is she heading towards the river?” Will asked, and Egg shushed him. The soft susurrus of the Lesser Stark, one of the many small tributaries of the greater Stark, could be heard below the roads that had been built above it. Egg listened closely for the telltale sound of echoing footsteps, trying to sort them out from the random, quiet cacophony that was the sound of city life. He heard, some distance away, a sharp, precise rapping sound.
“That way,” Egg muttered, taking them deeper into the Arcadium. He had her now, he was sure. The sound of her shoes, the rustling of her skirts, the tapping of that weird clicking noise the knockers made. He could even see her shadow flickering in the messy whorl of blue light from the phlogiston lamps. Egg slipped his hand inside his coat and took a hold of his knife.
It wasn’t that he
liked
killing people, women especially. It’s that it was good money, and from an early age, Egg had realized he was good at not feeling bad about things. And since a man has to earn a living, he needs to take advantage of the assets he has available.
“Here, what’s this?” Will said, as the two men rounded the corner. Will knelt down and drew a skirt out from a puddle of petticoats. “She’s walking around in her bloomers?”