Mr. Stitch (10 page)

The parallels were close enough to the reign of the current emperor that Skinner could have found herself arrested for writing it even if she
weren’t
a woman. The poem itself was on the Empire’s black-list. And these two young ladies, daughters of two of the most rich and respected families in the Empire, wanted…what did they want? To see it onstage? To get themselves arrested?

“No one will do it. There’s not a producer in Trowth that would touch a play like that with a ten foot pole.”

“Oh,” said Emilia, with that enigmatic sound of a smile. “We’ll find someone.”

“They should do it here,” put in Nora, and her grin sounded fearsome. “Right at the Royal.”

“Never,” Skinner replied. “They never will.”

“It’s a wonderful idea, Nora,” Emilia said. “We shall arrange to have it performed right here at the Royal Theater.”

“How do you plan to do that, exactly?” Skinner was still grinning around her wine, not entirely convinced the two girls were serious.

“Didn’t you know, darling?” Emilia Vie-Gorgon asked her. “I own the Royal.”

It was a common misconception among many of the Trowthi people that the strangling bureaucracy of the Emperor and his assorted Ministries was something that had been inflicted on them. No sooner, for instance, had the Committee for Public Safety been dissolved than the Committee on Moral Responsibility had replaced it. The pressgangs had been dismissed, and almost immediately the gendarmeries monopolized law enforcement. In fact, much to the bitter resentment of the opinion-makers, editors, and columnists of the broadsheets, many of the men in the new committees were the very same ones who had been unemployed when the old committees were extinguished.

This misapprehension on the part of the people was based on an error of assessment: because these committees had
names
, it was quite natural to think that they were entities independent of the public itself. A thing with a name is a thing distinct, a unique creature with its own boundaries and habits, its own patterns of behavior, it’s own birth and life and death. When it grows troublesome, it can be killed and, to the mind of the average citizen, that should improve the world by decreasing the amount of bureaucracy that he must suffer, however incrementally.

The noisy mouthpieces of the public complain imagine that they are making a certain progress, or else feel that progress is frustrated: either they have succeeded in murdering a troublesome beast that sees the public as its prey, or else they are rightly frustrated by
yet another
meddlesome creature that’s been foisted upon them.

For any man who took a longer view, their frustrations were obviously misplaced. Bureaucracy was not a thing
imposed
on the population. It was something that grew up
from
the population. The bureaus, the committees, the ministries, the innumerable degrees of rank and office, the impossible tangle of hierarchies and authority were not some alien feature thrust upon the Empire, but a direct product of the psychology of the very men involved. It was the need to dominate that demanded the creation of hierarchy; the need to rank oneself according to one’s peers—to prove himself better, or to plan out whom one must overcome next—that created the ranks. The need to gain more and more from his fellows is what drove a man to make the ranks complex, to carve out his own little bailiwick in a world filled with men struggling to do just the same. Trowth could not rid itself of its addiction to bureaucracy any more than it could rid itself of its addiction to water or fresh air (though black-smoke-belching factories did struggle mightily to break that last habit).

Valentine didn’t know any of this at a conscious level, but he had spent his life deep in the cut-throat politics of the Esteemed Families, and had made the following similar observation: there were two kinds of men in politics. The first kind took everything personally, viciously avenging themselves of insult and offense, cold-bloodedly conniving or scheming, or just outright murdering their way to the top of their fields. The second kind took nothing personally, and found themselves a niche, out of harm’s way, disengaged and uninvolved where they might have a few moments of peace without checking every glass of wine for poison. The first kind of man was often successful and rich, but was never permitted to stop fighting to maintain that success. The second kind of man rarely accomplished anything of note, but was rarely perturbed by this condition.

In his youth, Valentine Vie-Gorgon had graciously bowed out of the fight for dominance among the Comstock Vie-Gorgons, and with the Vie-Gorgons in general, and with every other beady-eyed, raisin-hearted and mercenary-minded member of the Estimation. He found a niche for himself, and decided that he would occupy it come hell or high water, and if his father was disappointed that he’d never be fit to run the family businesses, at least there was never any worry that some lesser cousin might see him as an obstacle to be removed.

All of this was to the point that, when Valentine realized he was being followed by a pair of agents from the Committee on Moral Responsibility, he didn’t take it personally. This, after all, was just how the world worked; he could no more blame the men for following after him than he could blame the sky for raining on him.

It was early morning, and the strained watery light that flickered off the mountain of stormy architecture of Trowth did little to alleviate the cold, though it was actually one of the warmest periods of the day. The early morning--when warm air swept briefly in from the sea—and the late afternoon were the only times during Second Winter that pedestrians were common; a small, muted collection of passers-by and vendors had tentatively come out into the cold streets above St. Dunsany’s. The air was just barely tolerable, and tasted faintly of salt and fish. Even the normally antisocial and solitary citizens of the city would take the time to wander about for a few hours, gamely trying to catch a fleeting glimpse of the sun.

Valentine discovered the two men completely by chance. They were ordinary-enough looking gentlemen; clean-shaven, reasonably well-dressed, though not so ostentatiously as to attract notice. One of them seemed excessively pale, which could mean he was a Family member, or it could mean that he’d spent a long convalescence after the war. Valentine spotted them the first time when he realized he’d forgotten his bill-fold at Raithower House and had turned around to go back inside. He spotted them a second time while, on his way back out to Vie Abbey, he had a sudden whim for a cup of djang. He called to the coachman to stop at the next stall and, when he got out, noticed the very same two men, chatting amiably and seemingly entirely unaware of his presence, passing by in a hansom cab, their faces lit by the red glow of a pair of over-hanging heat emitters.

Valentine nearly dropped his cup when he saw them, then did his best to appear like a man unruffled by surprise.
Maybe they haven’t realized that I’ve made them
. He failed at this endeavor, his own natural enthusiasm and nervous energy immediately overwhelming all attempts to appear calm and collected, but it was to Valentine’s particular fortune that the men in question were unfamiliar enough with his ordinary behaviors to note it.

“Here, now,” Valentine whispered to the driver, a young man whose name Valentine had somewhere misplaced. “Go on ahead without me. I’ll meet you up at the abbey.”

Just because the men had no personal malice against him was no reason to make their job easy, reasoned Valentine. He had been making certain plans for losing tails when they arose—undaunted by the fact that he had to his knowledge never before been tailed in his life—and was eager to try them out. He stood still as his coach rolled away, and sipped at his hot djang, ostensibly pretending to look in the window of a merchant shop—one that sold ladies’ undergarments, a fact which would have made the whole deception quite obvious if either of the two shadows had noticed it—while he surreptitiously watched the men out of the corner of his eye.

Sure enough, they stopped their cab, and made a great show of animated bargaining over the price of a meat pie at a nearby stall. Valentine smiled, and decided to put his plan into action.

It was an act of supreme will that permitted him to walk sedately—rather than sprint—towards Haypenny Street. He took the narrow, crooked lane into the dark of the Arcadium beneath him, ducking beneath a low stone arch. This stretch of Trowth’s undercity was lit by the eerie, cool blue glow of the phlogiston lamps, and occasional drums where oil fires flickered. It created a strangely shifting, purple-hued light, but actually made the whole place quite warm. It was no wonder that the claustrophobic covered streets were littered with human detritus: homeless men and women and children, indigent bodies that huddled against the stone, wrapped in ratty blankets, too cold or sick or tired to even beg, clustered around those warm oil drums.

Valentine slipped along Haypenny Street, quickly making his way a little deeper into the labyrinthine depths. His scheme, which was uncharacteristically well-thought out, had been to memorize a dozen entrances and exits into the vast network of narrow alleys and roads, a handful of passages between them, and a few landmarks so that he could find his way back to a familiar route. He now knew that, wherever he was in the city, he was no more than a half a mile from one of his points of entry—provided he wasn’t all the way out in Mudside or Bluewater, or something. He could chose from a variety of exits at random, and the rapid succession of sharp turns, switchbacks, and stairways that extended both back to the city above, and below to even further-buried streets, meant that unless his followers were literally right on his heels, they had no chance of keeping up.

Even the echoes contrived to his advantage, something that had not even occurred to Valentine when he’d made the plan: should he ever be tailed by a knocker, the plentitude of stone walls and arches, bronze sculptures, and bridges overhead would exponentially multiply the echoes of his footsteps, and make tracking him nearly impossible.

So it was with a sense of elation that Valentine, after a brief jaunt through the dark tunnels in Trowth’s underbelly, emerged near the Royal Mile. That sense persisted as he hailed a cab, and took it to the outskirts of the city, back to Vie Abbey, which had been his goal from the outset.

The elation only faded when he arrived, and saw another small hansom, parked at a short distance from the entrance to the Abbey, where a third gentleman, this one wearing long moustaches, looked very much like a tourist haggling with his driver over the cost of his fare.
Of course they had someone just follow the coach, too. Idiot
, Valentine thought to himself.
Oh, well
. He approached the mustachioed man. “Hallo, chum,” said Valentine in his brightest, cheeriest voice. “Shouldn’t be too long there. An hour or two, maybe, if you want to hop off and get a tipple before we resume.” He handed him the now-empty djang cup. “Oh, and would you mind dropping this for me with Christo, over at Haypenny, if you get around there any time soon? Thanks much.”

He left the astonished man, holding the used cup, and headed up towards the abbey gates, nodding and smiling at the uniformed guards who stood, miserable and frigid in the icy air, eternally at attention.

“
I can’t let you look at any of those things, of course.”

“What do you mean, you can’t?” Valentine asked the bishop’s secretary’s adjunct. “You have to. Look at the little badge, for fuck’s sake.” He waved the copper coroner’s shield in front of the man’s face.

“It’s illegal, for one,” said the man, middle-aged, with graying hair and a sturdy familiarity with his job that he was plainly loathe to forgo. He wore red and purple robes with an ornate white and gold shawl; finery deeply at odds with the man’s stubbornly ordinary features. He looked as though the real secretary’s adjunct had stepped out for tea, and just thrown a cassock over a local shoemaker and had him fill in. “And it’s a heresy for another. Do you want me to get in trouble?”

“You
can’t
get in trouble,”
you fucking idiot,
Valentine said. “I am the Coroners. If someone were going to come here and arrest you and execute you, it would be me, and I’m already not going to do that.”
YOU FUCKING IDIOT
.