Mr. Stitch (32 page)

“A secret,” John replied, and if he could have smiled, Beckett suspected he would have, “even from me.”

“So, what do you want from me? Want me to switch sides, maybe? Give over to your new man to save the Empire?”

Anonymous John turned to Beckett, fixing that unnerving, faceless gaze on him, then turned back out to the water. “That’s my assignment. To gauge your willingness to switch teams. I’ve been advised that, if you thought the stakes were high enough, there’s a small possibility that you’d be interested.”

“And what are the stakes?”

“High,” John replied. “Very high. The Empire is at risk, yes, but so is our very species. So, perhaps, is all life as we understand it. I can’t tell you how, or why; I can only tell you that the risk is…unfathomable.”

“And I’m just supposed to take your word for it?” Beckett began to reach for his revolver again. “A criminal? A liar and manipulator? A murderer?” He closed his hand on the grip of the weapon, and felt rage boiling up inside him.
Valentine. You killed Valentine.
“Sorry I’m not convinced. What’s plan B?” If there were no men aiming at him, John would be trying to close the distance, so the best choice would be to back away, draw and fire.

“I told him you wouldn’t be.” If there were sharpshooters, John would want to open the distance, so the best choice would be to move forward, strike at his face, then draw the gun. “Plan B is to kill you, ob—”

Beckett leapt forward, swinging at John’s head and pulling the gun from its holster. His clenched fist met the soft, spongy meat of Anonymous John’s face. Too late, Beckett realized that John wasn’t trying to move away at all, but had accepted the blow and moved forward, pinning Beckett’s gun against his body.
No sharpshooters,
Beckett thought, as he felt an icy brand between his ribs, the horrific, alien sensation of a foreign object violating his body.
Wrong guess.

He tried to scream as John wrenched the knife from his side, but the pain was overwhelming; it paralyzed his lungs, and the only sound Beckett could make was a choked gagging. His hand spasmed and fired off a round, that ricocheted harmlessly from the street.

“It’s a dangerous plan,” Anonymous John admitted, as Beckett slumped against the railing. “I have no idea what will happen to your army without you in charge. But you can’t argue that it isn’t worth the risk.” John slipped an arm under Beckett’s and twisted his body.

Beckett felt his hips bang against the stone balustrade, then the sickening sense of weightlessness as he fell. He crashed into the freezing waters of the river. He struggled for a moment, but his clothes were soaked through and impossibly heavy before he could get his face above the water. The cold raced in through his limbs, killing the little sensation that he had left, as he drifted downward, carried by the current, the light closing off above him.

He attempted another half-hearted kick and then surrendered. His sense of being dwindled to a thin slash in the center of his body, a dimensionless presence surrounded by the empty shell of flesh. The pale speck of light above him, dimly blue, perhaps a street lamp, grew smaller and smaller, until all that was left was a hard blue spot, and then only the afterimage of the spot, a trick of his mind, desperate to believe that there was still some light left.

Well
, Beckett thought, as the dark finally overtook him.
At least it doesn’t hurt
. He had a brief glimpse of tall brass towers, melted like sticks of wax, and then, nothing.

For the third time in a year, Skinner found herself evicted from her home. This time, there had not even been any movers to threaten, nor any luggage to collect—all of her belongings were still locked up inside the house on Comstock Street. It was simply cordoned off, guarded by a few Lobstermen who politely but firmly insisted that she was not permitted inside. Where the Comstock Vie-Gorgon’s were was anyone’s guess; popular opinion had it that they’d gotten wind of their upcoming troubles, and made immediate haste for their luxurious country estates. Skinner sat in the rain outside the house, and considered her options. Again. They were sparse. Again. The familiarity of the situation did nothing to alleviate the despair that she felt creeping in around the edges, kept at bay only by a firm optimism that she would think of something.

It was Karine who came to the rescue, this time, and the thought of having to have to be
rescued
once again set Skinner’s teeth on edge. Two years ago she’d had steady work apprehending criminal scientists. Six months ago she’d written the most popular play in the history of the Empire. Now, she couldn’t even afford the train ticket she’d need to return to the countryside and live with her ailing father. When she thought about it, about William Gorgon-Vie, about
Emperor
William, fat and smug on his throne, making the laws that served no apparent purpose except keeping half of the population out of work and beholden to the other half—pets, essentially, kept around to be looked at and bear children, but nothing more, not even permitted to feed themselves—her stomach turned into a mass of churning bile. She wanted to spit in his eye. She wanted…Skinner wasn’t sure what she wanted, wasn’t sure of anything except that she was ferociously angry at someone, and felt more than a little guilty for snapping at Karine.

“Fine.” Skinner said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s just, I’m sure you’d be welcome. Even if it’s just for a few days. We haven’t much, of course, but…”

Skinner waved her off, flushed a little with shame, but still too angry to apologize. “Fine.”

This was how Elizabeth Skinner found herself in Bluewater, in one of the ramshackle tenements inhabited by Trowth’s indige citizens. Bluewater was a site of frequent skirmishes in the Architecture War, but little strategic value, and the whole thing had, in recent years, fallen into the gauche and modern style of the Ennering-Vies. Or so Skinner was told; she had little personal interest in the architecture of the city beyond which families preferred high ceilings, as this affected her telerhythmia. Valentine had once tried to explain the many different styles and aesthetic philosophies that underpinned Trowth’s most complex and byzantine feud, but he might as well have been describing castles on the moon for all Skinner cared.

The Ennering-Vies preferred low ceilings, which made Karine’s family home cramped and hot, and preferred not to spend very much money on houses in Bluewater, which made them leaky and humid. This discomfort was compounded by the unusual numbers that the Akori presented. This group was how Karine introduced them—though she also took the time to provide a given name for every person present, Skinner had not been able to remember any except for Pogo—and Skinner was not sure if “Akori” was a patronym, or some manner of clan affiliation, or simply a regional appellation. Certainly, the tiny house was filled with far more people than might reasonably be expected in any immediately family. Twenty-two at the least, by Skinner’s count, though the noise and the panoply of voices made it difficult to be sure.

Though she was determined to spend the night sulking, one of Karine’s relatives—possibly an uncle or an older cousin—was determined to cheer her up. This was Pogo, and his constant overtures of good cheer were the reason that Skinner remembered his name. Karine had introduced the man as the
ramo
, which Skinner recalled was some kind of priest. Hardly a minute passed that he wasn’t regaling her with a story about how he had to stab Jorgi once for violating the tabu, or the time he’d found a sixty crown note in the gutter. When he wasn’t telling stories, he was pressing cups of hot mulled wine into Skinner’s hand, or offering her a bowl of starchy fish soup. His charm was aggressive and very nearly contagious, though Skinner struggled hard against it.

In truth, she was happy to just hear someone speaking Trowthi; the family spoke Indt incomprehensibly rapidly, and the only words of that strange tongue that Skinner knew were certain profanities she had hear Karine utter in times of distress. While they found liberal use in conversation, they did not lend any particular clarity to the topic under discussion. Certain words, like
malaka
, which Skinner knew for a fact to be a malign slander regarding the gender and species of a person’s sexual partners, were used with verve and laughter, belying the word’s clear intent; others, like
lobber
, which was the slang term that the Indige used for the Lobstermen and ought to be fairly neutral in its value, was said with the sort of unadulterated venom that one would suppose was ordinarily reserved only for the worst
malakas
.

Only the strongest and most committed of miseries can withstand such a relentless onslaught of charity and hospitality, and Skinner found her resolve weakening. The hatred she felt towards the Emperor was forgotten quickly, of course; her anxiety about her future took longer, but it, too, began to evaporate after the fifth time that Pogo tried to tell his “Fat Trolljrman” jokes. Only an icy pain in her heart when she thought of Valentine remained. The thin layer of ichor beneath the silver plate on her eyes had dissolved her tears before they could reach her cheeks, but she’d shed them, nonetheless, and still sometimes felt more coming. It wasn’t that she had
liked
Valentine, precisely. He had, in fact, been more than a little annoying. It was just that she missed him, as though she’d grown accustomed to his bumbling good nature. For all the petty inconveniences he’d caused (and Skinner couldn’t help but feel guilty recalling them, knowing that he had lost his life seeking to provide her one great convenience) Valentine had been a good man, and the world always suffers when a good man dies.

Skinner coughed, and realized that she hadn’t been listening to Pogo’s joke.

“You see?” He was saying. “Because he wanted
grapes
. Haha!”

“Yes, it’s very funny.”

“I know,” Pogo said. “I try and tell Jorgi”—this was the man that he’d stabbed in the leg two weeks ago—“This is a funny joke, I tell him. He doesn’t listen, though. Stupid, huh!”

“Oh, Miss Skinner!” Karine’s voice sprang up out of the forest of Indt. “Do you know this?” The indige girl passed her a wooden object, which Skinner ascertained to be some kind of stringed instrument; like a small guitar, but with a teardrop-shaped body. “I have seen you play something like it. Aga
bought
it—” she added, not disguising her contempt for Aga’s poor financial decisions.

“—
but he doesn’t know how to play it or even tune it.”

Aga responded with an impassioned defense in Indt.

“Well, it’s because you
are
an idiot, Aga. Miss Skinner, do you know anything about it?”

Skinner lightly touched the instrument, counted the frets, plucked at the strings. “Well, it’s basically like my guitar, but with four strings, instead of six, and a little smaller. These three strings are tuned in fourths, this middle one is tuned to the third of the string below it.” She plucked at the strings again, then fiddled with the tuning keys until they made a proper chord. “Not out of tune at all.” She smiled slyly. “Good choice, Aga.”

“Oh, please don’t get him started, miss, or I’ll never heard the end of it.” The entire room—all twenty-two or so indige cousins held their breath expectantly. “Can…can you play it?”

“Karine, I can’t. I don’t even know…”

Pogo interrupted, saying something softly to Karine in their native language. Karine responded enthusiastically, then said to Skinner. “Please, miss? One song, just to show Aga how to do it, then he’ll play it for the rest of the night.”

Skinner grimaced at the thought of that, but relented. She hadn’t had the chance to play for several days, and it wasn’t all that dissimilar from the guitar. It was practically the same thing, really. “All right. I guess. Let’s see. Something simple, obviously.” She plucked aimlessly for a few seconds, then began to strum the chords for “By Sacred Text Redeemed”—an old rondel that had been one of her favorites. The instrument had a bright, jangling sound, that gave the song a sense of whimsy lacking in most interpretations.