Some small part of Beckett’s mind was lucid somehow, despite the shock and the staggering amount of drugs he had imbibed. It was sure that he had gone quite permanently mad, that the rest of his mind was damaged beyond repair and would never be quite the same again. And it wondered how even the least among the daemonomaniacs could withstand even the barest touch of the infinite mind of the Daemon, the omniscient but unthinking mind that knew every speck of dust, every atomie of the universe. Sublimation into the aethyr would be a mercy.
Gorgon and Demogorgon stepped aside as Beckett approached, or else the road widened as he came near the palace and forced them apart, or else they had never truly been there in the first place. Beckett walked or stumbled, he could not say which—perhaps he floated, buoyed along by the strangeness that burned in his veins—through the main square which now was crowded with open faces that looked upon him with concern. Was it now? He was not sure but supposed it must have been. Hundreds of faces looked at him, and scattered among them were those hideously flesh-colored spots of blankness that were Anonymous John.
Beckett ignored them and no man made a move to stop him. He wondered at this only briefly, until the lucid flash in the back of his mind pointed out that he still carried his gun in one hand, and had somehow regain his coroner’s shield, which he now waved about. Men fell away like water before the prow of a ship and Beckett wandered as in a dream up the stairs and into the galleries that surrounded the square. These were meant for diplomats and advisors, ministers and members of parliament, the wealthy scions of Esteemed Families, but no one tried to eject him from these honored rooms. He ignored the moustached men in their clean suits, cavorting with their wives and mistresses. Ignored the Crabtree-Daiors and the Rowan-Czarneckis and the Wyndam-Crabtrees, the Daior-Vies and the Ennering-Vies and the Rowan-Vies. Sadness may have touched his face as he passed by the Vie-Gorgons, a sympathy for their mutual loss; even through his delirium, Beckett felt the bitter sting in his heart still when he thought of Valentine, saw Raithower House a frozen eruption in the midst of the city, but the old man was consumed now.
Consumed with the desire to see the source of that strange hand, consumed by the need to follow the sound of turning gears, the gears of the great royal Clock that thundered beneath him, the gears that turned in the heads of men and women, the gears that grew louder and faster and more frenetic, more dangerously swift, the deadly high-pitched whine of a machine on the brink of self-destruction. Beckett staggered, bereft of any more personal will, carried instead by the aggregate power of his visions, into a private gallery with no chairs, only a low table on which sat singed folders filled with clippings from the broadsheets. A gallery that looked out upon the podium where the Emperor, against all tradition, would offer his Invocation three days after the first day of summer. A gallery where Beckett found the mind made of turning gears that was behind it all, behind every movement of the cities innumerable tiny cogs.
The source of the horrors he had seen, men murdered, destroyed by heresy and science, all designed and directed by a cold, dead hand. The monster that had seized the Empire by the throat. The thing that owned the name, the last name signed in the Black Library’s book.
Mr. Stitch.
Some five hundred years before the present day, during the first Gorgon-Vie dynasty, Owen II Gorgon-Vie officially broke from the Goetic Church at Canth, and established himself as the First Voice of the Church Royal. This new church was identical to the old church in virtually all respects, save two fairly significant ones: the first was that Owen II had the final say on all matters of theological discussion within the Trowth Empire; the second was that the many tithes that had previously been sent to the Holy Convocus of Canth would now be sent directly to the royal treasury. It was a very controversial arrangement, and the only person that could be said to be thoroughly pleased with the situation was Owen II himself, who was now both temporal and spiritual Emperor, and required to answer to no higher authority but the divine Word itself.
This arrangement was scandalous, outrageous, and completely unacceptable to the many Esteemed Families, yet, peculiarly, none of them saw fit to change the policy when their own scions had control of the Imperial Throne. So, the Emperor’s position as head of both church and state persisted well into the present day, where it formed the basis of the Coroners’ authority to pursue and execute heretics—ever since that venerable branch of the royal guard was established by Adelwulf Vie-Gorgon and Mr. Stitch a hundred years prior.
The Emperor had very few specific duties in his position as de facto Convocus, leaving most questions of grammar and the Word to the Subvocum of Vie Abbey. He did, however, appear once every year on the first of summer (or later, in the case of repeated assassination attempts—a situation that occurred, perhaps, more often than might be thought healthy), to deliver the Invocation to the people of Trowth.
By tradition, any free citizen was permitted to attend the Invocation, and hear the Emperor bless the city and the Empire, calling for the favor of Divine Providence on himself and therefore, by extension, his people. Though some emperors were more public figures than others, all emperors must, at some time, present themselves for the Invocation.
Even William II Gorgon-Vie, outrageous tyrant that he was, did not dare risk Divine Disharmony by banning the public from this most sacred of events. He permitted the citizenry—men and women dressed in their finest clothes (some clothes, obviously, were finer than others), indige and trolljrmen, even a scattering of therians filled the square, blessed themselves, looked up to the balcony from which the emperor would appear. As was custom, even the beggars were permitted inside the palace walls for this, which was how a sickly old man, dressed in rags and with a matted, disgusting beard—a man who smelled very much like he’d spent time rolling in an open sewer—was permitted into the crowd that gathered before the Emperor.
William II Gorgon-Vie’s one break from tradition was a concession to security—twenty-five Lobstermen, on guard, encircling the square and looking down on it from the galleys above. They each carried a long-pin rifle, and eyed the crowd with ichor-envigorated eyes, fully prepared to gun down anyone that behaved suspiciously. It was generally felt, among the Emperor’s advisors, that this concession should be sufficient.
Elijah Beckett, Detective-Inspector of the Royal Coroners, was having trouble understanding very much of anything that was happening anymore. He heard gears, spinning so fast that he was sure they must soon fly apart. And he saw Mr. Stitch, the grotesque, undead giant, standing as devoid of expression as a statue. But he somehow saw Mr. Stitch outside of time now—Mr. Stitch at once here, the architect of the murder and mayhem that had dogged the city for a year, and Mr. Stitch in the past. The Mr. Stitch that had founded the Coroners, the one that had engineered the Dragon Isles expedition, why? At this weird remove, divorced from his own present senses, the long arc of Stitch’s planning became, if not obvious, more clear.
If a man needs an army to fight heresy, he starts by finding men who have been hurt by it. And if he cannot find men who have been hurt by heretic science, he makes them. A simple solution, almost elegant, if morally repugnant. A kind of point A to point C solution only possible by a mind essentially unencumbered with pity or concern.
Many things still didn’t quite make sense, and Beckett wasn’t sure if they ever would, wasn’t sure if the plan he was looking at was simply too big, too long, too intricate to reveal itself to him. Why? Why all of this? He realized a moment later that he’d asked it aloud.
Stitch turned to him, dead muscles creaking, brass eyes fixed. “I must. Defend. The Empire.”
“From what?” Beckett held up his gun. “From
what
? You did this! You were the one…the one spreading heresy. The one that told Anonymous John where to get the oneiric weapons, the one that…you’re defending Trowth from yourself?”
“No.” Stitch replied, simply. The anguish that sounded in his throat seemed more of an affectation, a byproduct of his dead lungs, than moved by real human concern. “There is. Something. Worse.” The hulking reanimate gestured out at the assembled throng, distant voices like the waves of the ocean, all unaware of the sinister mind that looked on them. “They must. Be. Ruled.”
Beckett staggered back against the wall and sank down to the floor; his strength ebbing from his body. He wanted to spit his denial in Stitch’s teeth but he was afraid that maybe it was true. He remembered Anonymous John, telling him about the Clock that secretly governed the soul of Trowth. He thought about the byzantine bickering, the intricate waste of confusion and bureaucracy that mired him down. About the Emperor, who for all the honor of his office was little more than a clown in fancy dress, preoccupied with his mistresses, squeezing every cent, every iota of goodwill, every dram of happiness from the city. He had become a tyrant; a man that confused the expression of his power with his own ego.
The Feathersmith pistol in Beckett’s hands was ice cold. He wondered if he were really feeling it at all, because the pain of that cold stabbed right through the numb tips of his fingers. He imagined that the gun was not cold at all, but that it had become cold to his mind, which insisted on its coldness no matter how he held it. He wondered if…the men he’d hurt…all this time, and it was never for the city, for the Empire, only some microscopic part of Stitch’s catastrophic plan. He saw the girl, Agnes Cooper, saying her prayers and weeping because of the harm her mind had suffered. Alan Charterhouse, banished from his own home because of Beckett’s swerving devotion to his duty. Dozens of heretic scientists gunned down, and for what?
All this misery, for nothing. Lives lost and wasted, it was all obscene. It was too much, Beckett knew. Every second the fades ate away at him from the outside, and every second the drugs burned him up from the inside, a black acid on his soul. And now this.
“What about me?” He whispered staring at the barrel of his gun.
“You,” said Mr. Stitch. “Are. No longer. Necessary.”
Something lurched in him, and he saw himself at a distance, saw himself taking other paths into the gallery, taking a wrong turn here, hesitating a fraction of a second there. He saw himself on the gallery across the way, overlooking the gathered crowd. He saw the Emperor beginning his Invocation, saw a filthy beggar drawing his guns, saw the Lobstermen gunning him down before he had a chance to fire.
Beckett’s mind was trying to flee, into the past, into the future, into alternate possibilities; anything to escape this one inevitable moment. But there was nowhere else. Beckett wanted to weep, but he knew he didn’t have that in him anymore. He cocked his gun instead.
The filthy beggar man stood alone in a small circle in the square. The pressure of the crowd was not quite sufficient to overcome the olfactory counter-pressure of his stench, and this gave him some elbow room. He grinned green scraver-teeth and gabbled in what could only have been the incomprehensible gibberish of the mad or senile. He ignored the finer-dressed men and women who, through some peculiar effect of the dynamics of crowds, managed to gradually shift as far from him as possible, creating a spectrum or stratification of the people gathered for the Invocation.
The Emperor appeared on the balcony, dressed in a black suit, resplendent with medals commemorating wars he’d never fought in and honors he was only vaguely aware of. He wore his thick, black-tinted glasses, which was somewhat gauche, but hardly without precedent. He seemed to have paradoxically gained weight since his harrowing experience on the train, and seemed a little sallow, but besides that, hardly the worse for wear. He raised his arms, somewhat stiffly, and called out to the gathered mass.
“Hail, men of Trowth! We stand in harmony with the Word!”
As the speech began, the filthy man reached beneath his ragged costume and began to draw two beautiful, silver-plated revolvers. The Lobstermen saw him at once, but in the precise moment before they fired,
another
gunshot rang out from a gallery above the square.
The Lobstermen all turned to face it, moved to protect the Emperor, to engage the assailant, confusion setting in as they drew a bead on their new target, only to hear more gunshots, dozens of strange echoes. A man in ragged shirt-tails, with a morbid visage, a face so ravaged by disease that it looked like a skull—a man with a black iron revolver firing wildly into the crowd. He appeared in a half a dozen places simultaneously, unrestricted by the laws of physics.
The Royal Guard fired back instantly, as they attempted to ascertain the nature of this new threat. Their bullets struck the strange phantoms, which dissolved into jagged, fractured lines of causality.