Mr. Stitch (5 page)

Two dark green shoots sprung from Harry’s nostrils, tendrils with sharp thorns, springing from the soft places of his body, curling back to scratch at his own eyes.

“What…” Beckett asked, his voice hardly above a whisper. “Garrett? Garrett, your dead,” the old man declared, as the twin green vines blossomed into blood-red flowers.

“It’s me, sir,” Sergeant Garret said, more thorny vines pouring from his mouth, “it’s me, it’s Harry, sir. Can you hear me? Are you all right? Do you know me sir?”

No,
Beckett told himself.
It’s Harry, it’s just Harry. Garret died.
They were still inside the coach. Beckett was wedged against the seat; his ribs were still sore. “What happened? What was that?”

“There’s something up ahead of us, some kind of explosion,” Harry told him, the vines gone, his face his own again. “Shook the whole place up. I came to see if you was all right, and then…”

“You fell,” Gorud picked up. “When the shock came. Your eye did this,” he rolled his eyes up in his head, so that only the whites were visible. “And then you coughed and choked, and then Mr. Harry came in to help.”

Beckett coughed wetly, wiped his mouth, and pulled himself upright. “Explosion?”

“Something up ahead, sir.”

Beckett scrambled from the coach, a sinking feeling in his stomach. He barely noticed the bitter cold outside, as it struck out at his already-senseless extremities. His good eye raced over the narrow, high-peaked and gabled Ennering-Crabtree buildings; houses, offices and shops that had been converted from old abattoirs. People were timidly peeking out from their doors and windows, a few braver souls actually taking to the streets, consternation on their tongues.

At the end of Augre Street was the smoking husk of a building, a great slaughterhouse that had been repurposed, as the city expanded, into some other professional edifice. Its pointed roofs, now crooked and tumbled, would have looked out of place even if they’d remained intact. Smoke poured from its windows, and a hysterical gibbering rose from the inside.

Beckett limped down the hill, Harry and Gorud at his heels. He drew his revolver, swiveling his head from side-to-side, struggling to reconstruct what had happened. A man in a blue coat stumbled from the building; he was covered in soot, and his eyes were wild and white-rimmed.

“…the overwhelming way of winter’s seven towers,” the man was screaming. A dark, thick fluid dribbled from his mouth and nose. “I saw the red gold walls and the ivory-towered teeth.” He charged at Beckett, grabbed his wrists, tried to bear him to the ground. “There are men in the dark,” he said, weeping that same black fluid from his eyes. “There are stone sounds..”

“Get off!” Beckett shouted, twisted his body, trying to let the man’s momentum throw him away. Harry managed to get hold of him and pull him off the coroner, but the strange man continued to lash and struggle and wail, blubbering nonsense as the foul ooze began to poor from his eyes and mouth and nose.

Beckett struck the man across the face with the butt of his revolver, and the stranger went limp. It seemed merciful; the twisted rictus on the man’s face relaxed away.

“Tommy,” said a soft voice nearby. Beckett turned to see a young man, very pale, staring at the smoking building with a strange absorption. His left sleeve was empty, and pinned up to the shoulder.

“Tommy?” Beckett asked him. “Is that his name? What happened here?”

“It’s Tommy, innit?” The young pale man said. “They dropped them bombs on us.”

Beckett clutched at his revolver, ready to knock this man senseless as well. “Tommy
who
?”

“Vinegar Tom,” the man said, still not looking at the coroner. “The Ettercap.”

The Ettercap. The Ettercap used oneiric munitions—bombs that had a psychic component as well as an explosive. The damage caused by concussion and shrapnel was trivial compared to the disorder, chaos, and damage that could be caused by turning the survivors of an attack into raving madmen. The air around the bombed-out former slaughterhouse was growing thick and syrupy. Weird colors and puissance began to flicker in the smoky windows. Beckett could smell saltwater.
Dream poison
, he thought. More mad gibbering rattled around inside the building.

“Look,” he said to the young man. “Hey, boy, listen.” He seized the man’s arm and forcibly turned him. “Look at me. I need you to go and get the local gendarmes, all right? Go to the gendarmerie, bring me back some men…”

“The gendarmerie?” The young man said, his eyes dreamy, unfocused. “That
is
the gendarmerie.”

Skinner heard the explosion fifteen seconds before it happened. The sound began as a peculiar ringing over her guitar strings, an echo overlaid across the tune she’d been playing. Her hands paused at once, and the ringing remained, a high-pitched whine, followed by a strange, reverse echo—a rumbling that grew exponentially louder as it led up to the event itself, and then stopped.

Light from the munition reverberated off of the obscured architecture of the city and filtered past her silver eye-plate to tease her peculiar senses. It was pale white, with a faint rainbow hue at its edges; all of this was clearly visible in her mind’s eye, though no product of her own imagination. She could tell its distance, its location—just inside Red Lanes, she knew—and she recognized it as an oneiric weapon immediately. The dream-precipitates used in such charges were largely inconsiderate of local laws regarding space and time, and their effects could be felt by sensitives in a way out of joint with ordinary reckoning.

When Skinner had joined the Coroners, her first assignment had been outside the city—to a town near the seaside called Seagirt. It had been a small place, a population less than a thousand. A man, a former scientist at the Royal Academy of Science and a near-cousin of the Rowan-Czarneckis, had retired to Seagirt after certain improprieties in his research had come to light. His connections and the Estimation of the Crown had kept him from further investigation, and probably execution, but, perhaps not surprisingly, the threat of the Coroners had not been enough to keep him from more experiments. It hardly ever was.

The man had attempted to build an oneiric reactor, a machine that could seize on the repressed psychosexual energy of sidereal consciousness and turn it directly into power. He had failed to take any reasonable precautions, and in a real way, this had not been his fault: because oneiristry was a Forbidden Science, there was little information as to exactly what reasonable precautions would be. The results of Eiger Feathersmith’s experiments on oneiristry, a hundred years prior, had been suppressed by the Church Royal, so this Rowan-Czarnecki scientist could not have known what would happen when his reactor went critical.

In instances of catastrophic oneiric events, the Coroners’ mission is simple. Locate damaged minds, and kill them. A man exposed to an excess of oneiric radiation would suffer dream poisoning; he would no longer be lucid, his mind would be unrecoverable, and his condition could become contagious. By the time the coroners had reached Seagirt, the entire population was infected—a whole city of raving madmen, the conscious-subconscious membrane dissolved by corrosive dream radiation—they tore at their flesh, struck out at each other, murdered, raped, burned, engaged in every foul and heinous desire that they had secretly feared to indulge.

Isolated as it was, the extermination of the infected at Seagirt had been a simple, if arduous process. An oneiric event in the middle of the densely-packed city—even a small event like the one she’d just heard—could be infinitely more dangerous.

She was on her feet at once, and had pulled on her heavy coat and gloves before she recalled that she had no professional interest in the matter. She was an ordinary citizen, now—in fact, according to the Empire, somewhat less than an ordinary citizen. She was now prohibited from involvement both by her dismissal from the Coroners, and the purported delicacy of her natural condition.

Screw it
, she thought, defiantly. “Roger!”

“Yes, mum?” The boy responded from nearby. He must have been in the kitchen.

“Roger, come with me, I need you to help me hail a coach.”

“Yes, mum. Only, ladies aren’t s’posed to be alone.”

“That’s why I’ve got you.”

They called a coach, and then Skinner found herself having a startlingly similar conversation with the coachman:

“Can’t let you ride with just the boy—”

“The boy’s not coming.”

“Well, I can’t let you ride alone, neither.”

“I won’t be alone,
you’ll be driving me
.”

“Well…”

“Do you know what the word ‘emergency’ means?”

Skinner finally promised to pay him double his usual fare if he could get her to Red Lanes at once, and the coach began clattering and creaking through the streets, while the driver shouted out people to clear the way, furiously threatening them with all manner of bodily and psychological harm in order to secure his passage. The heater inside the coach was on the fritz, and an icy breeze squirming into the cab and playing across Skinner’s face.

She ignored it, and projected her hearing to its greatest distance. It was not extensive—certainly, she couldn’t project across the city. But it did give her some early warning about what was happening before they arrived. Red Lanes had become noisy; men were shouting, screaming at each other, running back and forth with heavy boot-steps and rustling coats. Below it all was an eerie ululation, a strange gabbling that seemed almost a kind of harmony—the symptom of shatterbrain.

Skinner cast her ears around until she found a familiar voice, gruff but calm, shouting orders insistently but not hysterically.
Beckett
. He was trying to establish some kind of perimeter, to keep something contained—the mad voices at the epicenter of the event. Each one had become its own weapon, a ticking bomb ready to escape into the city and bring devastation in its wake. She rapped on the ground at his feet in a clean, precise way that the old coroner recognized at once.

“Skinner?” He said. “Where are you?”

Hundred yards. Approaching.

“Word and fuck. Good. Can you hear them, in there? It’s the gendarmerie headquarters in Red Lanes.”

Yes
.

“I’m going to have to go in—”

No.

“I have to, Skinner. They’re poisoned. If I don’t take them down now, they could get out, and start infecting others.”

Wait
.

“No time. How far—wait, is that you? There’s a cab coming down Augre Street.” There was a sudden knocking on the door at her side; it startled Skinner’s senses back to her. “Skinner?” Beckett said, opening the door.

“Beckett, you can’t go in there by yourself,” she said, climbing out of the cab and accepting the hand that she knew he’d offered. “You don’t know—”

“I’m not going by myself. I’ve got men.”

Skinner paused.

“Who?”

“Men. Never mind, come up to the line, I need you to keep track—”

“
Who?
”

“Gorud. He’s a therian. Attached to the coroners. Skinner, we haven’t got time for this. Whatever happens to me in there, it’s going to be worse if we let the men in there get out. Now. Start listening.”

She pursed her lips, irritation giving way to the particular satisfaction to be had by returning to old routines. Skinner pressed her hearing outwards, tracking down the street and into the hollowed-out gendarmerie, setting her shoulders and steeling herself against the eerie wail of gibbering shatterbrained men, using her preternaturally refined senses to extract voices from each other, following echoes down ruined halls, up and down stairways, sorting out the shape of the building, prying the collage of noise apart until it became a map in her mind.