Mr. Stitch (41 page)

Egg’s eyes narrowed and he looked around. They were in a fairly large Close, with side-streets leading off in four more directions. Two of them were pitch dark, their lanterns burned out or broken by vandals.

“She’s left her shoes, too,” Will snickered. “Maybe this won’t be such a bad time after all.”

“Shut up,” Egg snapped. A wave of knocking swept through the close, echoing off the walls, compounding on itself until it began to sound like thunder. Will swung around wildly, imagining that the source was nearby. Egg, by coincidence, looked up at the hanging lamp that cast blue light into the Close. Its metal frame was rattling alarmingly fast; the key that controlled the phlogiston flow was shaking in its socket as the knocking grew louder—and then, abruptly, the key fell out.

Phlogiston poured into the lamp, ignited by the filament, and exploded in a burst of blinding, blue-white light. When their vision cleared, the two men found the close almost impenetrably dark. The knocking continued, softer now, and proceeded down the alley directly ahead of them.

“Shit,” Will muttered. “Did she do that? I didn’t know they could do that.”

“Shut up and follow—wait…” There was a second clicking now, from the other alley. It didn’t sound quite the same…was it an echo? “Wait. We’ll split up. I’ll go down this one, you take that one. She can’t be far, not if she’s running without shoes on. She’ll cut her feet on something soon enough, and we can just follow the blood, then.”

“Yeah,” Will said. “All right.” He muttered something under his breath and took a few steps into the dark, making him practically invisible to Egg.

Egg set his hand along one of the stone walls and slowly made his way down the alley. He could see, at some remove, another lantern, its light a faint pinprick in the dark. A trick of the shadow and the distance made it seem to throb. “All right, miss. We know you know about us. Come along then. We don’t want to do nothing to you, you know? We’re just sent to talk. You’re going to hurt yourself, stumbling around in the dark like this.” Inwardly, he thought,
Shit
. He knew they’d catch her eventually—she’d stumble into a dead-end, or something. But the Arcadium was huge, and it could easily take all night.

“Ow, fuck!” Will’s voice echoed off the walls.

“What? What is it?” Egg shouted.

Will growled wordlessly, then responded. “She’s. Ow, she fucking
stabbed
me. She has a knife or something. She’s here.”

“You have her?” Egg turned around and ran back towards the entrance to the alley, heedless of the pitch darkness.

“No,
idiot.
Fuck. Fucking—if I had her, wouldn’t I say I had her? She’s
near
here—”

“What—” Egg began, when his ankles struck something hard. He tumbled forward, knife skittering from his hand, cracking his elbows against the stone. He slid a few paces, not quite fast enough to crack his head open on the wall opposite. “Shit! What was…” Footsteps. Bare feet slapped on the stone, just for an instant, back the way he’d come. They were obscured almost at once by another wave of sourceless knocking. “Bitch. Crafty little bitch. Will, are you all right?”

“Yeah.” Will’s voice was close enough to startle Egg. He squinted, and could just make out the other man’s shape in the dark. “She got me good, though, right in the arm. She’s got a knife—”

“Never mind,” Egg got to his feet. “Never mind that, we know where she is. Just follow me, all right?”

“Right,” Will put his hand on Egg’s shoulder as they started down the alley again.

“Here, now,” Egg called out. “That was clever. That was very clever. You could have hurt someone pretty bad with a trick like that. We aren’t mad though, are we, Will?”

“No, we aren’t mad,” said Will. “Just come on out and we can talk about how mad we aren’t. No troub—”

Egg felt Will’s hand disappear from his shoulder. “Will?”

“Hrrkggk,” Will said, and the sound of a body collapsing onto cobblestones was unmistakable.

“Will, shit,” Egg knelt down and groped for the body of his partner. He felt the man who was now very still, and very limp. “Now you’ve done it,” Egg said. “Now—agh!” White-hot pain lanced through his shoulder as something sharp broke his skin, and something horribly foreign entered into his body. “Fuck!” He screamed and twisted, taking the blade with him, slapping at it with his free hand.

It was definitely a sword, a slender sword jammed nearly to its hilt in the muscle underneath his armpit. He swung his good arm out and, by what could have only been blind luck, struck human flesh. “Got you!” He shouted grabbing the thrashing body and finally getting a hold of a wrist. It was the woman, he was sure of it. “Got you, you fucking cunt bitch. I’m going to break your god-damn—” sharp pain in his cheek; Egg let go instinctively and clapped his hand to his face. He tasted blood, trickling into his mouth. “Fuck, did you just fucking
bite
me?”

Another wave of knocking echoes obscured the sound of her movements. Egg, blinded by rage now as well as darkness, stumbled to his feet and took off down the alley, where he imagined his quarry must have fled. He ignored the pain in his face, ignored even the distractingly-uncanny sense of the sword embedded under his arm. His calm unflappability gone, Egg barreled into the dark, towards that blue light, surrounded by the haze of knocking.

Egg skidded to a halt beneath the blue phlogiston lantern, which illuminated only a frustratingly small circle in the otherwise pitch black Arcadium. “Where the shit are you?” He shouted.

“Here, idiot,” a woman’s voice called from some distance way. He could just distinguish her silhouette. “Are you coming, then? Or did you prefer to stay here and bleed?”

The wounded man roared again and charged towards her like an angry bull, his imagination momentarily flush with images of the tortures that he’d inflict on the stupid, skinny little knocker when he got his hands on her. He was so angry, in fact, that he did not notice that the shape he was charging towards, which did indeed seem to be resolving into the shape of a woman, didn’t seem to be moving in the face of his advance. He also didn’t notice that she seemed to be illuminated not by phlogiston at all, but by the vague, watery yellow light from a full moon half-eclipsed by clouds.

He didn’t notice any of those things; all he noticed was that the woman was nearly in reach, and that his desire to crush her neck with her bare hands was irresistibly strong. Consequently, he was surprised when, at the very last moment, she spun away from him, and he staggered out into the moonlight. He slipped and nearly fell, caught himself at the last second with a hand on the stone wall.

Egg looked out to see that he was standing on a ledge, ten feet above the Stark, which roiled cold and swift beneath him.
She was leading us back to the river
, he thought, just as a heavy weight crashed into his back. He lost his balance and fell, face-first, towards the dark water.
Bitch
, he thought again, as the cold water hit him and the current dragged him along to knock him senseless among the rocks.

Elizabeth Skinner stepped back away from the ledge. She was sorry about losing her sword, but there was little for it now, she knew, as she made her way back to retrieve her shoes.

If the sun was up, Beckett didn’t know it. His eyes suffered a new time and a new universe; even the blind eye could see in this weird new world, that shimmered beneath a light that seemed to come from somewhere in the depths of his own skull. Past and present had come together in a still picture that showed all moments as one moment. The flow of time had collapsed like a bridge above a river, leaving only a jumble of steel and concrete, sinking into the depths without order or context. Gone was the menace of the desiccated Dragon Princes and in its place a strange pastiche of memory and conjecture. Kaarcag towered to his left, the red brick fortress-city atop a mountain that grew above Trowth and reached out towards the moon and the black shapes that crawled across its surface. The royal palace roiled to the right, a bubbling congeries of towers and arches and buttresses. Beckett seemed to see not just the palace itself, but the palace as it was when it was first built, and simultaneously every version and variation that had existed since then. They displaced each other, fought for prominence in his eyes, and all the while beneath the palace rumbled the Clock, the grand ticking Clock, the inexorable grinding spinning whirling Clock that governed all of Trowth with its immutable predictability.

Beckett found that he could look back down the Royal Mile and see his childhood there, spread out in crystal-clear relief. His father dying, eyes red and nose bleeding because of the blood fever. His mother wept, her loss eternal. His first day of work in the factory where he breathed in the aerosol fluxion that had poisoned him. The day he first joined the Royal Marines.

The slaughter that was the Kaarcag Expedition crawled up the imaginary hill that led to that stone city. Muzzle flashes were frozen spots of bright white light; clouds of smoke rose from the men’s guns who, trapped in the amber of Beckett’s memory, had no hope of eluding the brain-dead dummies that fell upon them. Beckett’s ship floated on the mirror stillness of the bay, where Sergeant Garrett was endlessly torn apart from the inside by those chimerstric vines.

The vines crawled from the water and up to the elevated train tracks, where Beckett could see the shattered coach from the royal train, could see himself paused in the middle of his desperate lunge across the broken tracks above the Soder Pass. Beckett saw himself stabbed above the Stark, saw himself falling into the icy river, saw himself pulled from it by strange figures. He saw Anonymous John and his sickening blank visage everywhere; above the river, on the bay, at the factories. He saw him peering out of windows and looking down from ledges, saw him lurking in back alleys and beneath the streets. Anonymous John moved, but was only the faceless tool of another guiding hand.

The gendarmerie exploded, a flower of shimmering silvery light, like the northern aurora, a pulse of pure unearthly dream emanating from a muddy, filthy stone cocoon. The daemonomaniac, horribly contorted in the basement of the Raithower House, which was somehow still whole but turned in such a way that both inside and outside were visible at once, and also
not
whole, but burning blue and red, a fountain of fire frozen in winter. In the city center a column of white light struck out against the sky, the explosion of the
Excelsior
, a shockwave of irreality preceded from it, turning lungs to glass and causing strange sculptures of still ashes. It was echoed in the distant mountains by light and avalanche, the launch of its twin the
Montgomery
. Men in boiled-leather breastplates fought with snaggletooth sharpsies, held aloft above Vlytze Plaza by time out of joint; some leaping, some thrown from their feet by the detonation of the translation engine. And always, that same hand was visible.

The road he walked looped back around itself, took him in circles around the city, or else it took him through his life which circled around itself, manipulated and transformed by that merciless hand. How much of his life was managed in this way? How much of the life of the city was under this invisible sway? How much of the Empire?

Where the sun rose in the east was an empty square, awash in the sunlight of the First of Summer, devoid of the Emperor and the crowds who would hear his invocation. Above it, or behind it, or before it was that same square, packed with men to hear the Emperor ban the printing presses and cripple the flow of information that was the lifeblood of the city. Only there still was information, pamphlets and documents and quartos everywhere, they fluttered in the sky like snowflakes or flocks of birds, cartwheeling above Beckett’s head, suspended before his eyes. They were papers about heresies, about chimerstry and daemonomania and oneiristry. They were seditious pamphlets about the Emperor’s tyranny and how loyal citizens must raise their hands against him. One was a play about a man who thought he was only doing good but who had himself become a tyrant and a monster, and who was still guided by that omnipotent omnipresent hand.

At the end of the road the two grand statues of Gorgon and Demogorgon stood, old and new images superimposed atop one another—now they were worn beyond recognition, now rendered in exquisite detail, two vast figures decked in armor but they were not men at all, not indige or sharpsie, but something else, something strange, something incomprehensibly alien. They were gone, empty space where statues once stood, and they returned, all points along the timeline existing at once.